THE APARTMENT I RENTED in graduate school was a third-floor unit with a tiny balcony that looked out directly over the hardware-store parking lot. The view was an objectively undistinguished one: asphalt, stucco, and industrial lights, the big unnecessary beds of Fords, the sloped roofs of the old town square just visible up the hill. There wasn’t much to recommend it. But it was home, and, for the years I lived in Mississippi, I took my coffee out to the rickety wooden bistro table almost every morning, read there in the afternoons, had dinner or a drink as the sun set. I watched the store employees take their smoke breaks, huddling together like penitents or studiously ignoring one another, depending on the social weather; families buying Rubbermaid tubs, swing rope, or Christmas trees; teenagers hauling plywood and chicken wire into their trucks, easy in their bodies. I got familiar with the birds along the power lines, mostly barn swallows and finches, sometimes a kestrel or a group of buzzards pulled into town by a deer dead on the road. I learned the particular way the air took on more and still more water as summer drew closer, making the sky feel like the surface of a swimming pool you were just about to break through with a grateful, desperate breath. When it got dark, the landscape inverted further, the white orbs of the parking lot’s pole lights suspended below me like a raft of floating moons, illuminating tall stray flowers on the edges of the asphalt. Thinking of them now, bright and strange in the humid air, I hear the gorgeous proposition of Lydia Harris’s poem “on competing and balancing,” the ordinary word tilting on its axis:
Say the moon is high in the corner
and swerves as the moss deepens[…]
Say tormentil weaves a network of stem
grasses of parnassus scatters stars.
All this is to say that, over time, that view got beautiful, pointed, and miraculous, the way familiar things do when you live with them long enough to note patterns and departures. To yoke your own life’s rhythms to a landscape’s. To anticipate the way, in June, an occasional wind will blow whole magnolia blossoms down onto the blacktop from somewhere up the hill, absurd in their size. By the time I left Mississippi, I loved the hardware-store parking lot more than any grand vista. We had watched each other steadily through many seasons.
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In his careful essay “Lookers,” about the direct gazes photojournalists don’t mean to capture in their work, photographer and writer KC McGinnis meditates on Iris Murdoch’s assertion that “good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random details of the world.” This summer issue of Image revels in these granular details: the “small container of crystals like Mediterranean waters” in Thea Swanson’s story “Glass Blowers”; the sky “layered with pinks and reds, // an octave of shades, like drawn / blood set aside in a glass tube” in Jennifer Atkinson’s “Unnumbered Psalm”; even the man in a Mustang in M.I. Devine’s essay “Ordinary Time,” sitting “in the sun, with his windows up, car off, no air-conditioning, screaming into a phone and ripping apart his headrest like an animal would.” The textures of sunsets and coarse glass and daily suffering are rendered with devoted precision, made new by the analogical engine of simile: There’s revelation in this thing you think you know. This thing you might overlook, or look away from. Turn your gaze back here for a minute. Maybe another way of saying this is to draw your focus back to Devine’s title and tell you that this is an issue occupied with Ordinary Time, one that instantiates again and again Devine’s Ignatian reminder to his daughter: “Faith is not beyond this world, no. It is this world.”
In Allison Seay’s poem “Divine Nature of Things,” her young son locates the moon, faintly visible in a day-bright sky. He plays a game of pretend, says, I can touch it, then reaches out and pockets it, a piece of the moon stashed in his corduroys. I love the way this image locates the miraculous everywhere in this unremarkable day: the wild surprise of the moon while the sun is up, a boy’s confident invention, the flesh of his little fist, the impossible friction we’re led to imagine between fabric and a sliver of pilfered moonlight. I won’t spoil the poem’s final turn, but the ordinary miracle is present there too.
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The view out my window now is a high-desert gulley, a line of lilac bushes dusted—though it’s nearly June—in a little recent snow. Just across the road stands a row of identical institutional apartment buildings. When the sun is rising or setting, they remind me of the set of an abandoned play, their long low shapes like something propped against Wyoming’s huge sky, the lamplight in their doorways spotlights for absent actors. An old cream-colored Chevy Camino is parked on the hill like a boat run aground, something from another time. It hasn’t moved even once in the three years I’ve lived here. In the summer, I watch rabbits scamper in and out from underneath the body. I wonder what they’re doing under there, in a world invisible to me. The light shifts again; the wind picks up; a rabbit streaks by—no, a tumbleweed—no, a rabbit again, as soon as it’s still.
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At the outset of her essay “An Object Arrived,” Lia Purpura puts her hands around an unnamed thing, at once quotidian and inscrutable. “It might be a tool,” she thinks:
Something to work with. For, maybe, repair. From somewhere near, though I can’t pin the place. It’s not decoration—it’s some kind of meeting of beautiful and spare. From another time? It looks made for the hand. For a purpose I sense but can’t call up. I can’t see how to hold it, what angle, what pressure, though I might come to know. Or know again.
I want to learn.
“I might come to know. Or know again.” Lately, I’ve been repeating Purpura’s lines to myself, the beginning of a prayer. The ordinary fabric of our lives is animated by mystery. And that mystery is—always—an invitation to humble ourselves, to be curious and open. “I want to learn.”
I know the reason I’ve been thinking so much about that hardware-store parking lot in north Mississippi, pausing longer to look at the view outside my window in Wyoming: I’m about to leave this home for yet another one, pack up and head back south in pursuit of more time for poetry and contemplation and intentional service; a closer proximity to many of the people I love most; the mountains that taught me what mountains are, old and blue and ragged, thick with white oaks and hickories. This is a transitional season, of boxes beginning to collect in my hallway, a For Sale sign on the lawn, my old dog watchful and concerned by the subtle changes in our rhythms. Almost twenty years of frequent relocation have taught me that places are never more beautiful or acute than when you’re preparing to leave them, charged with the knowledge of impending loss, the hope for the miracle of home somewhere new, still abstract and undelivered. At this moment of in-betweenness, you are, as Purpura puts it, “both here and in motion.” The late ordinary light between the slats of a neighbor’s busted fence washes the scrub grass fuzzy gold, and you think, Yes, this is the texture of heaven.
In their interview, George Saunders tells Sebastian Langdell that a scene comes alive for him when an “original or specific image comes forth in compressed language,” squeezed like light through a fence line, like attention in the time before change. What Murdoch calls the “minute and absolutely random” details of the world, I’d call the minute and mysterious ones.
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It’s always struck me that Ordinary Time is both the longest season of the liturgical year and a fundamentally interstitial one, occupying the spaces between Easter and Advent, Christmas and Lent. There’s something resonant in the way the calendar compels us to spend most of our time in a posture of transition, of becoming, attuned to the mysterious precision of the world with the attention engendered by periods of change. But if that work is revelatory, it is also difficult. Robert Geraci, in his exploration of Michael Takeo Magruder’s reconstructed landscapes, reminds us that “Grassland regenerates because it burns to the ground.” Becoming necessarily holds destruction in it.
That this summer issue of Image belongs to Ordinary Time means it is full of gardens, and wilderness, and stars. An issue of beloveds, parents and their children, excited dogs tearing holes in screen doors. It also means it features miscarriage and fracture, stray bullets and bombs, drought and displacement and loss. To hold ourselves open to the mystery, open to change, means to attend to all of it.
Tacked to the bulletin board in my study, I keep a quote from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: “He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.’” Art, at its best, reminds us of this promise, helps us lived cracked-open but still standing. In the dark, the little breaks in the fence line mean that moonlight can move through, turning the clover silvered and strange. Cracked open, and watchful, and waiting, each of us is like this: intervening space for mystery to pass through, ruptured to become and re-become what we are called to be.
Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
