Spellbound
Last spring, I was honored to be an artist in residence in the Pullman neighborhood in our beautiful city of Chicago. I initially had made plans to map the many blocks around my space as I considered the ravages of the built environment in the Midwest with a longstanding project on “Utopia/Dystopia.”
Pullman is a historic labor epicenter and the weight of its history was not lost on me. On my very first day in the residency’s lovely rooms, I shifted my focus from utopian concepts to the idea of leisure. What is the significance of leisure for some of us? Every program I lead in my administrator’s life is outward-facing, and now I was inviting myself to look in.
Light streaming in with bits of dust floating in the waves, I sat and read. I rested. I wrote. I made art.
And I sang. I filled the room with my voice, sometimes wobbly, oftentimes stretched, and always joyful. I sang the words on the page of my books, sang while I painted, and sang as I danced. It was beautiful.
At moments, I found myself where we all do: knowing what we want but incapable of grasping it. I knew how a particular song went but sometimes my voice failed me. I would follow Stevie’s voice until I climbed out of my range; it was like running after someone as they sprinted farther out of reach. When my voice hit a false note, I grimaced… or laughed. Ahhhh!
Elusive.
As I constructed offerings/pieces out of blank to-do lists, I sang, recognizing that writing it down doesn’t necessarily make it so. A bitter truth for someone who has written a list every day since learning how to write.
I was reminded recently of this period in my life as I looked at a work, “Spell to Acquire a Beautiful Voice” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Africa & Byzantium.” This work is a 6th-7th century Coptic spell on papyrus and a part of Yale’s Beinecke Library on loan to the show that closed yesterday.
I found it captivating.
The Beinecke Library describes it: “This papyrus records two different spells. The upper text is a spell to obtain a beautiful singing voice. The petitioner is instructed to prepare special ink so as to inscribe a chalice with powerful signs. Next, the petitioner is told to procure a divination bowl and an offering, and recite a prayer to “Harmozel, the great ruler.” The conclusion of the prayer invokes the power of the Holy Trinity: “Yea, yea, for I adjure you by the left hand of the Father, I adjure you by the head of the Son, I adjure you by the hair of the Holy Spirit.” Harmozel is depicted as a winged angel; his trumpet emits strings of Coptic letters as he blows.”
What a thought! A beautiful voice is made manifest by concocting an ink, inscribing signs on a vessel, placing an offering, reciting a spell (in song?) as a prayer to the Holy Trinity, all in service to what? Beauty? Enchantment? Encantation? Love? I don’t know but I like thinking about it.
