Content warning: death; hospice care.
Notepad poems #1
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
“There is a wind that never dies.”
Yoko Ono wrote this in a footnote to a speech she gave at Wesleyan University, and I found the quote in her book Grapefruit, which I’m reading this quarter in grad skool. Ono is an artist few understand and more ridicule; she has Beatles baggage, is known in recent online spaces as the crazy lady screaming in an art museum, and is often characterized by her identity rather than her art. Maybe some other time I’ll try to convince you why I’ve developed a reverence and respect for her work, but for now let’s focus on the wind: it never dies.
Wind blows regardless of us, sometimes because of us, and probably will still be circulating when we’re gone. Idk. I’m not a scientist. I’m a literary artist working hard to extend a metaphor. But there’s something to it: the world around us is as alive as we are, and we forget that.
We have walls and windows to keep the wind out. Can’t have our papers flying away, our hair messed up. I surely don’t understand where wind started, where it goes after it flies past me, but I do understand wind: I know what it is and how it feels.
With all the currents and streams around us, it’s easy to forget that just being is enough to constitute meaning. I think that’s what Ono was saying: you don’t need to “get” the wind to feel it, and you don’t need to “understand” the wind to know its power. Art is the same way: when we focus too much on why or how, we forget what: the wind never dies. It is not dependent on our understanding; rather, art is itself an understanding that we can try to enter, feel, or embody.
Like Ono, I’ve often received the feedback to my writing that it is too dense. Heady. Hard to understand. Not saying anything, not taking a position. Those are solid critiques, and even ones I find agreement with, but they often miss the point: there doesn’t need to be a point. Or the point may be multiple, extending in so many directions.
When we demand sense from art, we remove ourselves from the freedom of senselessness. In a world that makes less sense the more you scrutinize it, I think there’s value to embracing the reactionary and the spontaneous as ways of feeling truth even if that truth is hard to define or locate. We know wind even though we don’t; we can know art even if we don’t know all its dimensions. Art, like wind, never dies.
Can you tell that I’m working on a final paper? It’s almost the end of MFA year one for me. Today’s poems (2 for the price of 1!) is part of a final project—half creative writing, half academic critical response. I’ll tell you more about it next week—I’m still figuring out what I’m trying to say, what my art is. But something’s swirling. I know that at least.
Until next Thursday, more or less, Ricky
Thanks for sharing Ricky - went on a windy walk this morning and now it makes more sense to me. 😁
Wind is like emotions - you don’t have to understand them to feel their force! And you can’t stop them.