THE HOUSE OF THE WIND
Bachelard, Walter Anderson and the House of Wind
“Like the house of breath, the house of wind and voice is a value that hovers on the frontier between reality and unreality. " - Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space. – p. 60
Language
The First Father of the Guaranís rose in darkness lit by reflections from his own heart and created flames and thin mist. He created love and had nobody to give it to. He created language and had no one to listen to him.
Then he recommended to the gods that they should construct the world and take charge of fire, mist, rain, and wind. And he turned over to them the music and words of the sacred hymn so that they would give life to women and to men.
So love became communion, language took on life, and the First Father redeemed his solitude. Now he accompanies men and women who sing as they go:
We’re walking this earth,
We’re walking this shining earth.
Eduardo Galeano – Genesis. The Memory of Fire - p. 11
Contemplating Gaston Bachelard’s writing on “house and universe” I found myself gravitating again and again not to a “poem” per se, but to a song and video that I love. It relates to Walter Inglis Anderson an eccentric artist and writer who spent the last 20 years of his life as a recluse, spending time especially on his isolated and beautiful “Horn Island” off the Mississippi coast.
In the beautiful song and video of “Tales of the Islander” by Caroline Herring, the words and melodies speak to Bachelard’s preoccupations with home and wind.
Underneath our experience of home – whether it be the apparently secure home of our apartment or the home of our body or the home of our earth, there is always an understandable awe and fear, because we know that nothing is permanent. Every structure we erect or reside in, whether it be in mind, heart, body, and anything outside of us is subject to and will change, no matter what.
So, the question or task is not to live without fear but to let that natural fear impel us from one moment, one day to the next with the knowledge, with perhaps the exhilaration of knowing we have escaped for one more moment, for one more day or night whatever we fear. Naturally fear is not always in our foreground – but it is always there like the unknown guest at the party that we are not sure about.
Since fear is never totally gone, we are also always to some extent in flight - it is perhaps this constant flight that is both exhausting and exhilarating. The conflict between the need to flee and the need to be at home provides a living contradiction that is the virtue, the tragedy, the strength and the weakness of being human.
Fight or flight? – we more naturally flee – in the animal kingdom we are more like deer than lions. But maybe they are conjoined – we fight fear by flight. Otherwise we’re like Jacob wrestling with the angel – a singularly difficult situation. But we all live on the verge of an insanity. We are Jacob and We are the angel.
Perhaps home is when neither fight or flight are necessary, or, ideally, home-in-flight we move with ease through space, or, at home-in-fight, we manifest the warrior’s steadfastness.
Tales of the Islander - Caroline Herring
Track 1 on Golden Apples of the Sun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxumCBC4jmg&t=40s
Tales of the islander
Tales of you and me
Floating on our raft
Down the Mother Mississippi
Caught myself a fever
Took a hospital stay
Tied some sheets together
Crawled down and was on my way
I was on my way
Let's take to the water
And let our bodies roam free
No more taste or smell
No hear nor see
Then greet the morning star
As we dance along the beach
Embrace this mighty sunrise
As the cranes fly to meet it
Cranes rise to meet it
Birds call to me
They call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
When they call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
We found a paradise
And its own garden gate
Adam in a hat on a rowboat
Phosphorescence in the wake
The squall has passed
And we're tied to the decay
One day may the hurricanes come
And carry us away
Carry us away
Waves call to me
They call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
When they call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
Give me a sunset
Of lilac, gold and green gray skies
I'll give you spirals and zig zag lines
It's the magic hour of a halcyon day
And all of mankind stands there
Barely awake
A full moon rising
On all of nature’s powers
Stars just observers
Of zinnias and moonflowers
We could bathe in the nullah of a gulf stream
Prowl like cats in the night
Then transform like moths
In a chrysalis of light
Chrysalis of light
Moths call to me
They call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
When they call
They call to me
They call so deep
I got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
When they call
When they call
When they call
———————————————————————————————————————————————
Below I’ve a commentary on each stanza of the song.
Tales of the islander
Tales of you and me
Floating on our raft
Down the Mother Mississippi
Caught myself a fever
Took a hospital stay
Tied some sheets together
Crawled down and was on my way
I was on my way.
First the raft is a small home on the river. We float upon it with our hopes and our fantasies. Then the mighty Mississippi is evoked - whose waves and expanse provide a flowing home for travelers.
All of this seen by a fevered mind – confused in an estranged home of thought and feeling. The outer layer of estrangement is the mental “institution” that purports to house or treat madness.
Enough of that! He escapes via the tangible accompaniment of many night dreams – the bedsheets. And soon he takes to the water again. The water is the best example of who we are, since we are mostly water and so most at home when we flow – letting “our bodies roam free” - beyond even our senses – “no hear, no see” – beyond the phenomenal world. We are just other members of the cosmos, a little star dancing under the pinpoints of light that engender the vast light night of sky.
Let's take to the water
And let our bodies roam free
No more taste or smell
No hear nor see
Then greet the morning star
As we dance along the beach
Embrace this mighty sunrise
As the cranes fly to meet it
Cranes rise to meet it
Then embracing the sun - all homes live under the sun, all creatures, with cranes as emissaries, carry the talismans of transcendent animal and human imagination.
Birds call from their homes in the trees and in the sky.
Invitations to come out and live in the larger world outside, where we can be even more so at home. The vaster the home the vaster your range of being.
Birds call to me
They call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
When they call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
We are home to every feeling. There is no sleep, only states of awareness. To go deep what else do we need? No time – time is a construct that breaks down in the face of presence that takes place in the cosmos of eternity that nature embodies.
We found a paradise
And its own garden gate
Adam in a hat on a rowboat
Phosphorescence in the wake
The squall has passed
And we're tied to the decay
One day may the hurricanes come
And carry us away
Carry us away
The best home is paradise, or, as Charles Moore put in in his book, “Chambers for a Memory Palace”, “paradise was a garden and it generally still is.” The gate is the willingness, the eagerness, to find home just where we are. In a rowboat (“life is but a dream”) with the accompaniment of gleaming life, phosphorescence glitters as everything covered by water, is bathed in the new light cast after the storm.
Energy of wind, of breath, dramatized in storms even hurricanes present us with the challenge to see home even as a “structure” made of moving air. Like the sea currents, the directions of the flows we may be in help us identify with the sky and not only the earthly foundations. We need to be carried away.
Give me a sunset
Of lilac, gold and green gray skies
I'll give you spirals and zig zag lines
It's the magic hour of a halcyon day
And all of mankind stands there
Barely awake
As the song proceeds, we find the singer more at home in the multi-colored world, the lines and varying directions that mimic the wind. In contrast, we see dumbstruck humanity entranced by ego, by the illusions of solidity and permanence, transfixed like idols.
A full moon rising
On all of nature’s powers
Stars just observers
Of zinnias and moonflowers
We could bathe in the nullah of a gulf stream
Prowl like cats in the night
Then transform like moths
In a chrysalis of light
Chrysalis of light
“Nulla” is Punjabi for an “arm of the sea.” All of nature is arrayed in her fuller body – the moon an organ, the stars cells, the flowers’ light, the arm of the gulf stream, with prowling creatures and ourselves, amidst the chrysalis of wings and bodies that shimmer as they fly.
Moths call to me
They call
They call to me
They call so deep
Got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
When they call
They call to me
They call so deep
I got to feel it all
No time for sleep
No time at all
All of nature can be heard calling us – to feel at home, to honor the miracle of being alive among all lives on this amazing planet in the giant miracle of space. Can we feel it all?
Just as ego and self-centerness divides us from what is “other”, so a narrow definition of home divides us from the wider world, the planetary and cosmic world. The house as a fixed structure is wonderful for shelter when the weather is inhospitable. Similarly, the retreat into ego is needed when we are facing inhospitable existential conditions. But to reside only there in ego or just in one’s house prevents one from being one in and with the universe.
Anderson roped himself to a tree during a hurricane to experience the full force of nature. He gives us archetypal illustration of the awe that emanated from his life and work. May we all find ways to connect in articulate relationship with the greater winds all around and within us.
