Here and Now
The David Darling release OTHER WORLDS is in the Here and Now wherever you source music.
RJ Lannan recently published a review of the album on his website, Artisan Music Reviews.
I have added his review along with the album credits to our own Curve Blue website.
I hope that if and when you read the credits, you can begin to feel each name as a vibrant being who, in the midst of their own lives, was being asked to listen with their heart to David’s unfinished tracks. We were there to honor what he had begun while giving voice to what could be. We were looking for the Other Worlds that are always right here.
I also want to share the parts of “Assailed” I received from the author David Janes Duncan in response to the album. His words softened my boundaries until this quote by Teilhard de Chardin dissolved them altogether:
By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.
Love,
Mickey
“Assailed”
By David Janes Duncan
Improvisation #1: Stars, Cells, Snow
It is March in Montana and the door between Winter and Spring is swinging violently to and fro. For days a sometimes-gentle, sometimes-brutal southwesterly wind has been breaking over the Bitterroot Range, bringing walls of cloud so nearly black and vast they look world-ending. Each cloud wall dumps a wintry load of snow, the world door swings back open to spring, an impossibly blue sky breaks out, the snow swiftly melts, birds burst into arias, summer feels just round the corner. But then, tied to the balm like an anti-proverbial March lion to its lamb, the next cloud-wall arrives, briefly hurtling our world back an entire season.
Studying this weather after dropping my daughters off at school, I return home, go to my desk to write down what I’ve been seeing, but realize that, after a long winter of writing, my study looks as if similarly schizoid weather has been blasting through indoors. Setting aside the manuscript I’d planned to work on, I set my sights on restoring order.
But an hour into this work I start to recycle two old magazines (a Time, a National Geographic), open the Time to save a nice grouse-feather ‘bookmark,’ and the page the feather marked stops me in my tracks:
It’s a Hubble Space Telescope photo of clouds in the Orion Nebula 1,500 light-years— that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles—from Montana and me. And these clouds are made not of ice crystals, like the snow clouds out the windows, but of superheated hydrogen that lights them up from within. In color they range from orange to gold to rosewood brown, pierced here and there by tiny flares of bright pink. In form they’re flagrantly phallic, and remind me of stalagmites, velvet moose antlers, coral formations, and, begging our pardon, one of the exceedingly odd parts of Everyman. In size, however, the Orion clouds annihilate all earthly analogy: they are six-trillion miles long.
There are projections coming off them. Shaped like animal ears, bean sprouts, the antennae of slugs (some artfully tipped by the pink flares), the protuberances are tiny compared to the masses out of which they grow. Yet even the smallest protrusions, the Hubble astronomers tell us, are as wide as our entire solar system, and even the smallest contain something astounding:
stars.
Those piercingly pink flares? Foetal stars, every one of them, caught by the Hubble in the very process of being born. What’s more, the astronomers say, our sun, solar system, Earth, its hydrogen, oxygen, water, life-forms, you, me, are all the offspring of these same pink flares and their clouds.
For the first time it clearly hits me that Sun, Earth, and I are siblings. Despite our obvious endless differences we’re each the progeny of just such stupendous clouds. Here at my Montana window I’m seated on the lap of an Ancient Sister, enjoying the light of an Ancient Brother, looking as if in a family album at a photo of our Heavenly Father/Mothers, engendering a wave of feeling so paradoxical it makes me dizzy. I’m so tiny and short-lived compared to the Orion parent-clouds! Yet I share a progenitive shape with them, I have conceived offspring as have they, and my offspring shine like stars of a kind, to me.
A hard-to-believe fact from a book I’ve been reading, Sara Maitland’s A Joyful Theology: the number of cells in the human body is almost exactly the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way. Is this meaningless coincidence or a purposeful symmetry devised by our Creator to suggest a relationship between our stars and our cells? I have no idea. I only know that some facts make me happy, and a flurry of such facts are whirling through me right now.
Fact: the spring day has darkened and wind-driven snow is falling heavily again.
Fact: a contradictorily bright feeling is sweeping through me.
Facts: I am sitting amid mountains, pondering a celestial cloud whose “snow” is stars and a terrestrial cloud whose “stars” are snow; my children and I each have a Milky Way’s worth of cells burning in our bodies; and our galaxy has a human-being’s-worth of star-cells shining in its vast swirl.
Improvisation #2: True Wilderness
Recalling now why I saved the dusty National Geographic, I open it, and am sure enough struck dumb by a Hubble Space photo even grander than that of the Orion Nebula.
To capture this image the Hubble was aimed, as the astronomers describe it, at one of the darkest parts of space, focused on an interstellar region “the size of a grain of sand held at arms’s length,” and 276 exposures were taken over ten days “to gather as much distant light as possible.” The result is a photograph not of layers of stars, but layers of galaxies, literally thousands of them in this single image, stretching “as far as the Hubble’s eye can see.”
Feeling my mind bending severely, I circle slowly back through all this. Here is a mere speck of our universe, a sand-sized grain of it, yet when a 276-exposure jury turns in its verdict, this grain is seen to contain a vast field of jeweled galaxies glittering in blankness and blackness. The physical gaze of this photo has penetrated so deep it tells a story too vast for thought or word, yet here it sits on a page, speaking a beyond-language of spheres, swirls, colors, light. Even the tiniest points in this image, astronomers say, are not stars but entire galaxies. The light from some, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, takes 11 billion years to reach Earth.
This what I call a Roadless Area! This is true Wilderness. The number of stars, star-birthing nebula-clouds, solar systems, planets, moons, mineral-forms, life-forms, dead-forms, implied by this single photo stops my mind and leaves me hearing music. If we could look back toward ourselves from some bright point here pictured, our entire Milky Way would be a shining dot, our sun a nothingness lost in the deeps of that dot, our Earth and selves a dream within those depths.
Another fact that strikes and consoles and soothes me here is the realization that Earth is at one not with industrial humanity, but with this fathomless multi-galaxied swirl. Lacking some preposterous sci-fi miracle such as “warp speed” that let us travel millions of times faster than light, not a molecule of this vastness will ever be disturbed, colonized, debated, exploited, degraded, or even touched by our too-often insanely manipulative species. Human folly has knocked many of our own natural systems terribly out of balance, creating extinctions that throw the evolution of forms aeons backward in time. But the birthing of stars, cooling of stars into planets, and creation and evolution of planetary life-forms are inexorable. Earth will swirl on. It’s only a speck of a species known as “terrestrial humanity” that may not. The wilderness in this photograph contains us the way a shoreless ocean contains a drop. Even at our grandiose worst, we are a negligible jot of darkness in a boundlessness filled with symmetries, mysteries, colors, and lights.
Improvisation #3: Assailed
On a five-foot shelf within reach of my desk I keep thirty or so books I’ve read so often that their imaginative flights and insights now bleed into my own. Turning from the Hubble photos to this shelf, my eyes alight on Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. Why? I seem to remember words spoken by Annie’s hero, the French paleontologist, priest and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, that once left me feeling the same silent music as spring snow clouds and Hubble images. I page through the book till the inner music and Teilhard’s words mesh:
By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.
These words somehow reverse the Hubble image, throwing the swirl of galaxies into my interior. I am covered, head to toe, with goosebumps. It seems an unnecessary act of cosmic exhibitionism when, out the window, sunlight bursts forth, the finches, crossbills, grosbeaks and siskins burst into song, and now-blindingly-bright snowflakes keep swirling down. Turning from snow to galaxies to embryonic pink stars to a desk photo of my daughters, I am assailed. My youngest, in the photo, holds a single petal of a living sunflower between her living thumb and index finger. The same flower’s blind eye followed the sun across the sky every day last summer, then in autumn bowed low, and in winter fed its great eye to the birds. The birds repaid the gift by planting black bits of the eye in the snow-softened dirt. Tiny green sprouts now unfurl all over our yard. The sun is burning four million tons of itself per second to enliven this world of birds, sunflowers, and melting snow. Agéd suns explode like old sunflower blossoms, their fragments scattering, falling into orbits, becoming planets. Future suns gestate in fiery phallic clouds.
This sunlit snow is a falling Milky Way. The cells of my body are another. We are born of and fed by an unendless sacrificial burning. We live steeped in its layers. My daughters’ brown eyes burn so serenely—yet they burn. The music of Teilhard’s words rises. Tears rise. I turn from stars to sunlight to sunflowers to snow to my children’s faces. I feel us steeping in the sacrificial layers.