You’re sitting there with your muse
and your muse is telling you something
and you’re following it,
and you end up the next day
looking at it
and thinking
“what the hell was the muse saying to me?”
Nathan Oliveira
I rehearse in a room built for someone else’s kestrels, someone else’s vision of transcendence, and the whole time I’m thinking about Joey Oliveira and his baritone sax bleeding through the high school jazz band room. He drove one of those VW Rabbit pickup trucks, you remember those weird little bastards? Half car, half truck, all eighties West Coast practicality. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Last time I saw him was a few years after college. He was launching a catering business. That was cool too. Different cool, adult cool, the kind where you’ve figured out that passion and paying rent can occasionally occupy the same space if you’re willing to work your ass off.
Joey was always doing cool shit. That was his thing. While the rest of us were performing our various anxieties and ambitions, he was just, moving. Doing. Making shit happen. Now I’m in his father’s cathedral of contemplation, trying to make theater happen under the watch of painted birds, and I’m realizing that the Oliveira family’s whole deal was just that: making things, following the muse wherever it led, whether that meant canvases or catering or baritone sax lines that held a high school jazz band together.
His old man painted these birds. Nathan Oliveira. Five massive canvases of raptors hovering over the Stanford hills, and they hung them in this purpose-built temple of contemplation like some kind of spiritual IKEA showroom for the overstressed and underslept. Except here’s the thing, the paintings work. They pin you to the floor with their weight, these ghostly predators frozen mid-hunt, and suddenly your little theatrical exercises feel like what they are: fumbling around in church pretending you belong there.
I knew Nathan, sort of. The way you “know” your friend’s famous father, but really later in college when I’d see him at open studio days where Stanford kids wandered through like lost tourists, trying to seem deep. You didn’t ask stupid questions. You looked at the work and felt inadequate and left.
Now here I am, decades later, moving bodies through the space his paintings made holy. The Windhover Contemplative Center, they call it. Architects won awards for this building. Donors wrote checks. The university needed somewhere to warehouse the emotional wreckage of ambitious children, so they built this pristine box and filled it with Nathan’s birds and called it healing.
And goddamn if it doesn’t feel like something.
You block a scene and these painted kestrels watch. They’ve been watching since before the walls went up, since Nathan stood in those same hills squinting at real birds doing real bird things, hunting, hovering, surviving. Joey probably knew stories about those paintings I’ll never hear. About which one gave his dad the most trouble, which one arrived like grace. That knowledge died with the family intimacy that created it.
So you rehearse anyway. You move through Oliveira’s cathedral of controlled artistic vision with your messy human bodies and your half-formed ideas, knowing you’re not worthy of the space but taking it anyway because someone said you could have it for three hours on Tuesday afternoons. The baritone sax is long gone. Joey’s somewhere else now. Nathan’s been gone since 2010, four years before they finished his monument.
The muse tells you something, he said. You follow it. Next day you look at what you made and think “what the hell was the muse saying?”
Yeah, Nathan Oliveira. Still trying to figure that out. Your birds are still hovering. We’re still stumbling around beneath them, making our small noises, hoping something takes flight.