What is a question that has stayed with you through time, clung to you like an inhalation?
What is a question that pulls you out from syncope? For me, it follows: what does it feel like to be in the stream? If I were always at peace, my wheel would be made from this stream.
I’ll drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet’s song;
And there I’ll lie and dream
The day along:
Blake wrote that. I read that. I transcribed it, again, here.
*
The stream: my site of welling. The stream: my ideal wheeling.
*
To be in the stream. It means to be, to breathe, to drink a glass of water. To ride a bicycle down the hill, to stop and feel the wind before hitting the lake, to turn home. But I can’t always be fluid, forward. I have to look back. I have to go down. I have to wheel. I have to move through my memory, or it will make itself known. A hand reaching out from the water, bloodied and raw.
I re-turn to an epigraph, to Dante. I say it aloud. “We were climbing through a fissure in the stone / that kept turning from one side to the other / as a wave that flows out and runs in again.” This is how the wheel moves, upside-down.
*
I see myself in these movements. Like you or like I—
*
The wheel turns.
*
The wheel turns.
*
Tarot, once for entertainment and then for esoterism, is how I want my wheel to be. I want to laugh and I want to weep. I want simultaneity-as-resonance. I want this form to be at once playful and grave. Who else draws a card when I do? Who else breathes when I do?
*
Kurt Warren Ringwalt, my ghost of an uncle, lived from February 26, 1968 to October 11, 1969. Blake’s “Cradle Song” is carved on his gravestone, chosen by my grandfather—
Sweet dreams, form a shade o’er my lovely infant’s head.
When he was lucid, my grandfather had memorized most of Blake’s poetry. He won an award for playwriting as an undergraduate at Princeton and wrote his thesis on Yeats’ theater. Throughout my childhood, and into my teenage years and adulthood, he’d recite lines from poems, conjuring verse out of the air. I remember him reciting lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland while I sat on his lap, twelve-years-old:
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
As my grandfather began losing his memory, my family realized he retained his long-term memory while suffering significant short-term loss. He could recount, in full detail, climbing up Mount Fuji when he and his sister Louise lived in Japan. He talked about stopping for rice before the ascent. He talked about accidentally going AWOL while volunteering in Berlin during the Cold War. He asked my grandmother questions about distant friends and family, and he always remembered the essentials of my brothers and cousin, and myself.
During the pre-Rome trip to Corona del Mar, I sat in the living room with my grandfather. The sun shone through the olive tree’s branches and reached through the glass sliding-door to their small front porch. For the first time in my life, I read him Blake. I knew he wouldn’t remember the poem after I recited it, but I felt him nodding along to the rhythm, an echo of recognition. The poem was called “Song”—
Memory, hither come,
And tune your merry notes;
And, while upon the wind,
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.
I’ll drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet’s song;
And there I’ll lie and dream
The day along:
And, when night comes, I’ll go
To places fit for woe,
Walking along the darken’d valley,
With silent Melancholy.
*
On Christmas Eve in California, my grandmother gave my little brother, Kurt, a miniature basket full of miniature seashells. The name ‘Kurt’ was painted onto the side of the basket. Something small for a baby boy. That boy, my brother’s namesake, never grew up. He was my dad’s younger brother and he died within his first two years of life. He hovered above my family as a reminder of innocence, of softness, of tragedy. His portrait, black-and-white, stood on a bookshelf in the foyer of my grandparents’ house, held in a silver frame.
In quiet moments alone with me, my grandmother sometimes talked about the aftermath of Kurt’s death. She said she’d sit in their garage in silence, petting their German Shephard. She said she couldn’t have made it through the loss without the family dog. My grandmother, not one to talk about her feelings in depth, possessed a deep well of being. I could feel it whenever I sat with her. On the surface of this well was an electrical current of anxiety. I could feel that, too. Later, I learned that my grandmother’s therapist told her to move on from the death, to try to forget it. I’m sure there’s more to the story, but the relative silence surrounding Kurt’s death was amplified by anxiety.
When my grandmother told me about holding me as a baby, she said that she felt a special connection with me. She said I was the calmest baby she’d ever held, something I find hard to imagine given my childhood—feverish, wildly imaginative. She always fostered my creativity—and my brothers’, and my cousin’s. I grew up dancing, playing cello, and writing stories and poems. Kurt played the drums. Daniel, our older brother, was a pianist. Heather, our cousin, was a ballerina and an actress. We all possessed degrees of the intensity of our grandmother’s feeling and the strangeness of our grandfather’s humor, their shared love for art.
Marjorie, our grandmother, was one of the first women to study music therapy in the United States. She moved from rural Iowa to Chicago to study at Roosevelt, and eventually moved again to San Francisco, where she met my grandfather. Their first date was at the opening night of the San Francisco Opera. Once they married and settled into their house in Corona del Mar (which they moved to after Kurt’s death in Claremont), she became a private piano instructor. She still receives letters from former students, well into her eighties.
The day I left for Rome I was alone with my grandparents at their house. They were listening to the radio, as always, classical music flooding through the living room along with the sun. I felt painfully aware of their old age. Saying goodbye meant not knowing when I’d see them next. As I got into the taxi to John Wayne Airport, my tears transformed in gratitude as I heard the taxi driver had another classical radio station on. I commented on the music, and he told me he was an opera singer. I talked to him about my grandmother, and how I was a musician, too, and he said something like music elongates life. Music gives age grace.
*
At the Capitoline Museum in Rome, I found myself alone in a room full of paintings of Mary. Upon seeing my favorite painting of her, I smiled to myself. I’d never seen it in person—I didn’t even know which museum housed it. I found this one in a book called Mary, an archive of her being-in-art. I bought the book at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was sixteen. In this moment, I felt time folding over itself. This painting, tongue-pink over wood, depicted Mary with a bookshelf and an angel. What did she need to know?
As I moved further through the room, I saw a painting of Mary surrounded by her symbols: lily of the valley alongside harder-to-decipher images. Mary is suspended in a yellow orb, arms out as if to invoke properties of her symbols to sustain her vigilance. Her feet are cloaked by a crimson red dress, to further her flight—an illusion of hovering. Rather than the hovering of disassociation, of a syncope, Mary looks lucid. In a near-humorous way, I can imagine her asserting: I’m here.
*
I don’t know what the wheel looks like to me, how material it even is. I know what it looks like in my tarot deck—the Tarot of Marseille—and I know what it looks like when it makes vehicles move in Amish country in Indiana, on Coast Highway in California. According to Wikipedia, “the earliest known use of the wheel for transportation is in Mesopotamian chariots about 3200 years ago.” Here, this thing of movement possesses practicality in its material form. But—what else is a force of transportation? How else can one be transported?
I don’t know how religious I am, but I know what compels me: Amazing Grace, In the Garden, I Wonder as I Wander. I don’t know how religious I am, but I know what fills my breath and halts it and brings me to my knees. I’m attending to a turning thing. I’m attending to a moving thing. And what moved me more than Santa Maria in Trastevere?
Reportedly the first church in Rome dedicated to Mary, Santa Maria in Trastevere is also—perhaps, given this trivia, necessarily—one of Rome’s oldest. It dates back to the fourth century. Of all of the churches I wandered to and from in Rome over the course of seventeen days, this one was the most golden. Of all of the churches I wandered to and from in Rome, it evoked a syncope within me. What I really want to note, what I really want to uplift, are the eyes of Santa Maria.
Above one of the chapels in the interior is a painting of disembodied eyes, guarded by a golden frame, a hovering crown. Is the space between the frame and the crown a breath, a suspension, a site for syncope? What I do know is that these eyes are a visual difference within the space of the sanctuary. The strike you from afar, they follow you, they know something you don’t.
When Will and I performed in New Orleans in May of 2018, I got a tattoo on my collarbone an hour before our show. I had re-read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space at Watermill, another reprieve from the arduous gardening, and was struck by his invocation of Rimbaud’s “nacre voit”—mother-of-pearl sees. I emailed one of my favorite contemporary fashion designers, Claire Barrow, asking if she’d handwrite the phrase for me. She replied within a week.
We performed at Saturn Bar in an old fighting ring lit by a red spotlight. A dilapidated balcony, where onlookers once watched bodies beat to bruising, to blood, served as a site for listening. After a year of touring, we’d accidentally developed this performance style of pacing—while Will played guitar and I sang—making unwavering eye contact. Like bulls in a ring.
I find “nacre voit” in the eyes of Santa Maria. The eyes, to me, signal the dissonance designed into early European churches, but this time visual; the eyes beg the question—what aren’t you seeing clearly? This time, however, the eyes suggest a femininity. A mother—a divine mother—is asking, inviting clearer perception.
*
In April, Will and I drove through Nashville listening to Josephine Foster’s newest album, Faithful Fairy Harmony. When we lived together, we’d often drive around to listen to music. Something about listening to music in transit offered us a site of clarity. Whenever we’d finished recording and mixing a song of our own, we’d listen to its resonances and shortcomings from the space of Will’s car. The longer we worked on a song from the comfort of our home, we lost perspective and sank into our subjectivities; we needed to hear it elsewhere. If the song didn’t resonate from the car, it was doing something wrong. How the song interacted with the landscape—and with us in the landscape—would determine its success.
Will had reminded me that I’d been thinking about symbols long before the inception of this project. When we were seventeen, I wrote a song called “Syringe” about my abusive ex, a feverish Tom-Waits-esque piece at once playful and lamenting. In it, I sing: I made my own religious signs. Will and I recorded the songs on an old Wollensak tape machine in the basement of a dormitory at our high school, the static of the tape machine just as symbolic as the images I sang for. The static of the tape machine—my memory—churned, indecipherable, a haunt.
“Syringe,” which I wrote during my ex’s many disappearances and near-overdoses, during the vigilance he forced me to attend to by implicating me before his absence, was one among many attempts at healing. Even though the songs I wrote that fall were mostly about my ex, I named the album after myself: AM. I sang about magnolia trees, blue rosaries, a desert with crystal walls. The symbols were always for healing. Will saw that, affirmed that, and never asked me to explain myself—even as kids.
In the car, we listened to “The Virgin of the Snow.” Josephine Foster opens the song by humming, until humming isn’t enough, and her wordless singing takes on the qualities of vowels, prolongation: somewhere between an ah and an oh. The song, over six minutes long, ends just as it begins, in a hum—as if the song is a mirror, and only by looking into its reflection can a body come forth. Of all of Foster’s music, I was floored by the gentle assuredness of “The Virgin”; she makes no effort to strain her voice, singing as if to lull a baby to sleep. She sings, certainly, of the virgin-as-gatekeeper. She sings about a silver sleigh, and the piano comes in to bolster the image. Cello floats just below her flying voice, doubling it, rendering her voice a force beyond body.
As we drove, Will and I wondered when the magnolia trees would bloom that spring. Nearly a year before, we had driven through Nashville wondering at the site of such blooms—saturated in their fragrance. I felt something fearlessly feminine in the strength and height and stature of the magnolia trees. Parallel to Shelby Park, near-blinding green out the windows, we marveled at the homes tucked behind the trees. We always imagined where we’d want to live—a bungalow, maybe. Some place small.
I felt time slow down as I watched the landscape—perhaps due to the spring-caused bloom, or the song’s transcending movement, or both—and I said to Will quietly and with enough pause to emphasize how un-dramatic I wanted the statement to be, “I know it sounds crazy, but I feel the song un-rape me.” It was a physically impossible utterance, but I felt held and empowered in my once-virginity, my once-safety, as the song unfurled—as the cello and piano paralleled voice and offered flight. Will lifted a hand from his steering wheel, took it to hold my hand. He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it softly. I didn’t need him to say anything. This was, I knew, the closest I’d get to healing.
*
I got my favorite Virgin Mary at a junk store in downtown Missoula with a sign advertising “We Buy Anything” above the front door. She was translucent plastic and covered in dust. Despite all efforts at cleaning her, threads of dust pressed certainly into the creases of her form. I could see where her body had broken before—her head had snapped at the neck and was super-glued back on. I wondered who had repaired her, and what the circumstances of her beheading were. The supposed purity of her clear body, coupled by the dust and the cracks, presented a contradictory kind of virginity. I happily paid $10 and wrapped her in a T-shirt in my suitcase to bring home.
Years later, I heard a crash downstairs as I was changing clothes in my bedroom. When I descended the stairs, I saw that our kitten, Carrot, had knocked a handful of picture frames off the top of a bookshelf, Virgin included. The noise of the crash must have been disturbing enough for her—just a few months old, at that, just over the size of my outstretched palm—that she fled under the blue velvet couch before I could find her. When I crawled on the floor to look under the furniture, I eventually found Carrot out of reach behind the skirt of the couch, gnawing on the Virgin’s head, severed once again.
*
On Christmas Eve in California, I fainted in a church parking lot. I felt, in my veins, thousands of miniature wheels fluttering as they turned. I wasn’t disassociated, but I forgot about my body. My mother and two brothers and I were driving to my grandparents’ church. We’d meet my father and his parents in the parking lot, under the sea of olive trees and string lights, and walk inside together for an evening service.
My brothers and I were laughing about the repetitiveness of a L.A.-based hip hop radio station, and our mother laughed with us mostly out of confusion. While my mother was religious, my brothers and I had our refractions of spirituality and lack, sincerity and irreverence. Once the car was parked, I opened the door and got out and, as I slammed the door shut, caught my entire left thumb in the door.
Everyone was paces ahead of me now, but I was stuck in place. Ironically, it was the first moment I had to rest since Will had moved out. The wheel, my wheel, stuck. I struggled to cry out to my mother. When she turned around and saw my hand, I heard her scream pierce through the Christmas bells, the sounds of tires on cement, my grandmother’s hushed voice.
I opened the car door. I saw the shape the door latch had carved into my thumb, close to the bone. I bled. By the time my brothers were by my side, I looked to my mom and said, “I’m going to faint soon.” I collapsed onto my knees.
When I fell, I heard church bells, only bells. They were prolonged—by fainting, this literal syncope—and I felt myself bouncing around in space, slowly, in the metallic sounds of the bells, like wind. In the breath of space between a bell being struck. When I woke, the first thing I heard was Kurt calling my name. He was close to me, now, crouched to the ground to support me. I was covered in sweat. I was cold.
*
I only want to fill this space with bells, with olive trees.
I only want to fill this space with bells, with olive trees, with stone pines, with white pillows.
I only want to fill this space with two white moths, my body on pillows.
I only want to fill this space with German Shepherds on the seashore, my grandmother combing her hair, my grandfather tending to his garden. I only want to fill this space with bells, with olive trees, with stone pines, white pillows.
I only want to fill this space with—an inhalation—For all—of god’s angels—in heaven to sing.
I only want to fill this space with pink flowers, with blood bloom, with blistered feet.
I only want to fill this space with white rock, clear rock, quartz rock, a clearing.
I only want to fill this space with white rock, clear rock, quartz rock, a clearing.
I only want to fill this space with white rock, clear rock, quartz rock, a clearing.
I only want to fill this space with white rock, clear rock, quartz rock, a clearing.
I only want to fill this space with narrow hallways in Dublin as the slope of the wheel, waterfalls in Vermont as the slope of the wheel, the moment two distant hands touch, skin rough, veins pulsing.
I only want to fill this space—Form of the Tree of Heaven.
I only want to fill this space with well water, lake water, the sound of a voice reverberating on its waves, into its structure.
*
In his foreword to Purgatorio, W. S. Merwin notes that the epic ends with “Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomable loss and exposure, [calling] the poem’s narrator and protagonist by name, ‘Dante’, and the […] sound of his name at that moment is not at all reassuring. Would it ever be? And who would it reassure?” (viii). Naming at this site of loss and exposure…in a banal way, I see my brother’s voice while I was unconscious, and then waking me, as enacting this. Naming at this site of loss and exposure . . . I see my older brother supporting my mother. I see my father driving me to the emergency room, Kurt by my side. I see my grandparents sitting quietly in their sanctuary, candlelight around their faces.
Alice Notley, in Coming After: Essays on Poetry, writes that “a voice itself,” “a woman’s voice with access to the mystery of the dream,” is Epic. This voice, according to Notley, need be “circuitous,” a force of “winding” (180). Perhaps, after Merwin, there is no reassurance in being named. The act of naming necessitates a vigilance to the speaker and the receiver. Kurt called for me, and I came back from my dream of bells.
*
I need you to listen with me.
[Let It Be Me. Nina Simone.
“Stars”; four minutes, thirty-three seconds.]
When Will and I first reconnected, he sent me a video of Nina Simone performing “Stars.” I watched it, hypnotized—in bed, in the dark. She sings: “if you don’t mind being patient with my fumbling around, I’ll come up singing for you.” In the same way John Jacob Niles leans into the prolongation of “you” and “I” in “I Wonder as I Wander,” Simone makes space for being-with. For a moment, I felt the ceaseless turning of my past decade suspended by her voice—coaxed to momentary stillness. This suspension is in every pause between her articulations of the piano, its slow and circuitous rhythm. Her articulations of the piano mimic that of bells—with steady rhythm, minimal chords, and pause rich enough for other resonances. Here, piano makes way for voice.
And, in the video, as she performed live at Montreux Jazz Festival in 1971, she commands her audience to sit down before continuing. The audience laughs, but she repeats: sit down, sit down. The request is grave. As her eyes look intently past the camera and into the audience, it doesn’t look like she’s singing for anyone in her midst. In her eyes, accented by a clay-colored glitter eyeshadow, I see sincere inwardness while exhibiting an ambivalence toward her audience. She doesn’t need to perform her vigilance: I’m trying to tell my story, she sings. But I don’t think this audience is who she’s intending to tell it to. She tells it for herself, trusting its weight.
I can’t remember it anyway, she continues, falling into a larger space for vocal pause. This pause, a suspension, is one I see my body turning to now. This pause, a suspension, carries me through olive trees, stone pines, metal stars pressed into the cobblestone streets of Trastevere. Purgatorioends with stars, too. Purgatorio ends with stars—and, in its celestial ending, opens itself for Nina Simone. Dante couldn’t know.
The piano keeps her going until it swells.The piano swells just as she sings of other musicians: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday.Then she returns to the ‘we’. We always have a story.I recall a video of the pianist Glenn Gould entering a trance as he plays Bach’s Partita #2 at home in his bathrobe. He doubles his piano performance with his voice. Until, midway through, he stands from the piano, turns around, walks to the window, looks out to the birds in his yard. He hums the song in perfect tempo from the moment his fingers leave the keys to the moment he returns. He turns around after some time, returns to the piano, and keeps playing as if no compulsive interruption occurred.
I see myself—I see my memory—in this space of turning, re-turning. I wonder where Gould goes when he rises from the piano. I wonder where Simone goes when she tilts her head back, closes her eyes, inhales before continuing to sing.
That night of reconnection, I watched the video of her performance a dozen times, my phone close to my face. I drifted with Nina Simone’s face next to mine until my phone went dark, until I couldn’t hold my eyes open, until I woke hours later to the sun shining outside and my cat tapping my pillow-turned cheek with her paw. Nina Simone’s voice—perhaps they have a soulthey aren’t afraid to bear. This fearlessness doesn’t pull her out of the song. Instead, she repeats herself. She stutters, she stumbles, it’s what she’s supposed to go out with.
She repeats herself. She repeats herself. Voice becoming symbol.
Credit: Hannah Carpenter
AM Ringwalt is a writer and musician. The recipient of the 2019 Sparks Prize as a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA in Poetry, her words most recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Interim, and the Kenyon Review. Her manuscript What Floods was a finalist for Essay Press’ 2018 book prize and was longlisted for Tarpaulin Sky’s 2019 book prize. She is currently seeking publication of The Wheel, a book-length essay exploring memory and symbolism. annemalinringwalt.com
