Hills, Stairs and A Big Climb

My friend Judy R. is an ace photographer. What I merely glimpse she composes. Stairs at Disney Hall become an abstract of intersecting angles with increments of light and shade. What are stairs but a series of horizontals within a diagonal to reach the vertical? She is a poet without paper capturing creases in the landscape and on faces. Stairs are what humans do to hills and high rises.

Artists have to find their place, their perch. half in, half out of this world. As A.A. Milne put it…….Halfway up the stairs / Isn’t up / and Isn’t down / It isn’t in the nursery  / And it isn’t in town / All sorts of funny thoughts / Run round my head  / It isn’t really anywhere / It’s somewhere else instead.

We step, we climb like Jack and Jill or Bill and Hill to fetch our water. Sometimes we break our crowns but if the land is parched, there is a thirst for justice to be quenched.

Five hundred years ago Incas built a city on top of a hill in the Andes. This was far more than a hill of beans.  It takes 3,000 steps to reach the top. I’d hate to have made the descent and forgotten my car keys.  They might also have prevented invading pseudo-pious Conquistadors. However, by the time Spanish marauders arrived Machu Picchu was buried under dust and rubble. It wasn’t unearthed until 1911. 

High as it is, nothing compares to the figurative mountain we need to climb. Ever since Donald descended on his golden escalator into the netherworld, he has dragged the country through an abyss with the slime of his indecency and delusional apocalyptic fictions. 

The transcendence I look for in the arts has its corollary on the socio-political scene. There is a moral violence in the air and voters need to dispel that miasma with a gust of fresh air. Not to be above the fray but to elevate the fray to civil discourse. Whether we can lift ourselves from his degradation requires a buoyant spirit and new vision that taps into this country's highest potential, releasing the creative and innovative force of our diverse population. Out of the mud, a lotus.

A few years ago, the poet Ann Lauterbach wrote a book called On A Stair which she said could also be read as Honest Air. We need some of that honest air.