No One Should Be Alone in Their Old Age

In the 1965 science fiction classic Dune by Frank Herbert there is a description of how to cross a large stretch of sand without attracting the giant, carnivorous worms that swim through the landscape. The key is to walk unevenly and arhythmically. In a random fashion, so to speak. This, the hero Paul Atreides tells us, is strenuous and exhausting. Our bodies and minds want evenness and balance. Consistency. Safety in continuous and predictable repetition.

I think of Dune, now:

I imagine you stumbling through a hot desert, capricious yet at ease. Dancing towards death.

Death and life are not, as I thought before you started dying, expressed in the binary numeral system, with living as the state of 1 and dead as the state of 0. No, dying is a slow unveiling. A nebulous event. It is not the flick of a switch from light to dark, although that does eventually happen. You are dying, and perhaps what that means is that you forget how to do things, one by one. First you forget your restraints and chase us out, my sister and I. Then, in turn, you forget what reality feels like as you see a butler enter the room and offer you a cocktail from a tray of glasses. You politely decline, and probably you know that he isn’t really there and that you are dreaming, but perhaps it doesn’t actually matter anymore. Soon you forget what it’s like to be awake and conscious. The final thing you forget is how to breathe. The last guest to leave the party, reluctant to go. It stops, and I’m certain that you are dead. I feel the shock and disbelief gradually twist my spine into the shape of grief, but then, as if you’ve suddenly remembered that you are alive, you draw air again.

You are dead. You were dead on a warm summer afternoon when school had started up, with autumn as a promise in the air. A tiny, old lady in a white blouse, wrinkled skin stretched across porous bones and immaculate stainless steel, and I thought, you don’t look like that at all.

I have made a net that breathes. It is a heralder of good tidings, of not-death-yet. It is looking at you not looking back. It is you, dancing through the desert on certain, steady feet. It is a last drawing of air, over and over again.

200 x 200 x 200

When I tell people I exercise for my art, as my art, they often react with poorly hidden disgust. It’s as if I’ve immediately become the embodiment of all things body negative, as if doing something that mundane and calling it art makes me a fraud, as if the data I’m collecting isn’t actually important or beautiful or significant. I once read about the person held for the longest amount of time in captivity in Iran, he was blonde and perhaps a journalist or activist of some kind. At the time of the interview he’d recently been released and was asked about his time in captivity. He told the journalist that he’d do a certain amount of set exercises every day, and I think it struck me so because the number was so ridiculously specific and un-round: 427 push-ups or something like that. It made me think that to device an exercise routine for oneself that is meant to be completed within the space of a cell, within the bounds of solitary confinement, is a very special thing to do.

There is very little I understand about the theory of relativity except for the fact that it makes time speed up when you are anxious about something, and that it makes family reunions feel very, very long. A friend once gave me a short novel in which the main character, a young woman, talks about doing something new every day. This, she says, expands our memory and makes it larger. Makes us remember more of the routine things that we do everyday, too. I want to see what my time looks like when I do the same every day, when these twenty minutes or so continuously make new copies of themselves: will I remember more? Less? I do not usually like to measure myself but I need routines and this is the most extreme and yet mild version I could think of.

A scientific study: one constant in a changing environment. When I say I am doing research and people ask for what and I say I just do the same exercises every single day, well, six days a week (to allow for one day of restitution) and they say okay what are you measuring and I say I just film myself and they say oh okay. They aren’t disgusted or opposed to me, just disappointed or blank in the way you are when you receive meaningless information in place of meaningful information and your brain simply stores it away as Unimportant - Uncategorized. I am sorry I have given you nothing although I do tell you, breathlessly because I want to mend things, want to mend what’s broken, that it’s about routines and my own limits and can I do this for the rest of my life? You still look at me sidewaysly.

Some Unglamorous and Selfish Thoughts About Working On a Big Project

I feel I am an entity, not a person. I feel I am a business for art production, my morals have changed and so have my perceptions of decency.

The only thing I still care about sufficiently and urgently is hydration and exercise. All else, social commitments and family and relations and being emotionally available, must suffer. 

I have become a shell and I have realised that working a full day, even with art, even with what you cherish the most and will do anything for, is exhausting. I am vulnerable to criticism and hate being called a nagging, annoying woman by music journalists, although I want to be nagging, I want to be annoying, I want them to have to call me back, to pick up their phones, to write about me and about my art. To give me an answer, a clear answer, and that is why I keep calling, trying to keep my voice concise and professional, and I ask and then wait for them to answer, I don't fill the silence with uncertainty and apologies as I might have done before.

I am not in the business for moods this week: everything feels to urgent and yet slow, like a dead whale sinking towards you and you are right below it at the bottom of the ocean but you cannot move: you know you will get crushed not matter where you go.

I am walking beside myself these days. On the one hand there is me, and on the other hand there is the me who is working on the project, and thinking about the project, and making lists for what to do for the project, and making phone calls to journalists and news desks which always begin with, Hello, this is me and I am calling to follow up on a press release I sent about a week ago...

You are nagging and you are irritating and people have work to do, could you please stop calling me? I get about a thousand e-mails every day, what if everyone called just like you did, can you imagine how that would be? 

And this is me, trying to write about working and what it's like to be an artist since people sometimes ask and I just want to give them a coherent answer. A blogger I like wrote about this summer that it was full of joy and anxiety, and I I can relate. I would like to tell you what this is like, this immense freedom and insecurity, this pushing and pushing away of realistic and pragmatic thoughts like, when will you get a proper job, what will you do after this project, how do you plan to pay for it all, will you make any money from it. I wish I could give you a good answer when you ask me how I am, because I would like to tell you that I am fine but only half, only half a person, half a life.

It is not sustainable, of course it isn't, and I would become unbearable and incredibly, terribly lonely and hateful if every week was like this one. I am not attempting to describe stress, or pressure, or explain how to manage expectations: I am simply trying to say, look, look at this and look at how I am right now. Can you not see that most of me is gone?

there was something like a darkness

this is an essay I wrote for a class on Christianity back in 2015. It has been edited lightly and formatted to fit this blog and to fit me as I am, now. 

Let me begin this essay with the claim that religion is a lot of nonsense, and that Christianity is only good for one thing: to study, dissect and then abandon as we saunter forward. If you believe past the age of fervent, pubescent worship, you’ve already tipped past the point where we can discuss anything. I take a look at you, and have already decided that we’re standing on opposite sides of a vast, gaping hole in the earth, and although one of us might cross over to join the other one, there is no force in this world that can close the bleeding chasm.

This is what I believe, and continued to believe until my heart opened up one day. And no, this essay is not going to be a conversion story. It’s personal rather than academic, granted, but I don’t want to write about my newfound faith in Jesus Christ, because I don’t have it. 

But all I want is to explain to you what it feels like to have someone reach inside of your ribcage with smooth hands and unlock your chest with a dry snap and there is something so intense your spine curves in. You straighten your back and sit up. You’re listening now.

There are so many things that balance on the knife-edge between languagelessness and an immense desire to say something—anything—about it. Writings of this kind are usually bad, often incomprehensible, but once in a thousand year it makes all your razor sharp hairs stand up and whistle against one another. Great poets do this. It is done when Rainer Maria Rilke speaks to us as my lovely darling, you whom the most tempting joys have mutely leapt over. It is done when T.S. Eliot spreads us out against the sky like patients etherised upon a table, and when Bei Dao 

speaks of the arrogance of strangers

that can send down March snow

When something of tremulous importance happens to us, we forget to breathe. Thrown down on the ground, we realize that our shoulders have hiked up our lengths with a lack, a loss, some cycle not completed as according to schedule. I take a look at my wristwatch: it’s time to breathe again. We look around embarrassed. Did anyone notice that our technique wasn’t perfect? That our meeting with the mat not so smooth because a glance was shot at you from across the room and every bone in your body threatened to break?

This year I have fallen deeply in love. My joints loose and muscles sore, I come home every night with bruises on my wrists ankles the lap dog joints in my spine that contract when your hand lingers on my arm, and it’s only a hair too long, but for me never enough.  

This year I have fallen deeply in love, but not only with a person. 

This year I have fallen deeply in love with a concept that will not let me go, that chases me into my dreams and hounds me as I wake and strokes the inside of my knees when I try to go to sleep, and please let me have some rest, will you? 

This year I have fallen deeply in love with a sense of infinite expansion within myself that threatens to bring tears to my eyes and embarrass me in front of everyone. I’m flushed and warm and too uncomfortable but please never stop speaking and I’m enchanting my hand with those words hoping that something, something, something will be left on these pages when I hover over them later in this evening. 

This year I have fallen deeply in love with Christianity, or something like it, or it’s Satanic but seductive twin-brother, or actually I’m just spiritual I think but I don’t know anymore.

This year I have felt tears filling the inside of my smiling face as I thought about a children’s book, and I wondered how something so simple could have such enormous significance and meaning and essence that I’m willing to risk failing a gradeless class with the simplest essay topic ever and also my dignity and also, and most eerily, my sanity.

I could never understand the mystical writings we were assigned in class, except for Saint Teresa of Ávila because it reminds me of other kinds of writing, and I always felt a lack or strange pull downward like sand coming out from under your feet, it was the ocean all along. 

Milan Kundera fittingly enough writes about a young woman named Teresa in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We read about her search for moments when her soul rises to the surface of her body like passengers to the deck of a ship, connected to some holiness she finds in literature and in Tomas, her future husband. This feeling, this soaring, upward movement of the spirit is recognizable to us all in lovers meeting at night, in learning something new, and thus, in union with God. 

(and I didn’t even have to try at all to meet your eyes and then fall on my knees

and give up)

To reinstate the fact, or perhaps whisper it for the first time: I didn’t come to class to be converted, and I am, in fact, not. I lost my faith at 14 when I was going through the education for confirmation. The more questions I had the less the priest seemed to answer, and I can only recall one moment in which anything like a God seemed present. This fallibility in His messengers and human element disgusted me. Nothing made sense, and I let go of the faith that had been mine for borrowing: I felt like a liar and I still am.

one month ago: I’m skyping with my father, and he’s telling me about a tragic incident where a child died in the small town where I’m from. “Five hundred people showed up to the funeral,” he says, “and over a thousand came to the vigil. I think it’s in times like these that people need God.” I didn’t reply; I couldn’t. “Do you find it strange to hear me speaking like this?” he asked. 

I never expected to be moved to tears when Rilke was cited in class; half-remembered and drowsily I shrugged sleep off and looked up with tightness in my tongue 

for beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.

and I never even gave a thought as to whether anybody else were having the same experience as I was. I am not religious and I never plan to be. Mass is ridiculous and hypocritical more often than not, and I laugh at our parish priest every Christmas when I join the mandatory trip to church. This might be cruel, but I might now be moved just a little bit to say that if there can be something as beautiful as this in Christian writings, then I will be there, and I will listen; 

tickle me. amuse me.

and what if the most wonderful people I meet all embody the same thing and I see it everywhere and I cannot write coherently about it for fear of being mocked and driven out of town

What, then, does it feel like when there is no more room inside of you and you are filled up to the top, edge, rim and you don’t know if something is spilling over but it certainly feels like it?

and I’ve been looking for years: could this be it, then?

am I simply returning to naïve infantile gestures from a religiously secular childhood where Jesus was compulsion and there was a layer of dust over everything—rationality? 

do you think that this is just a fling, a sort of one-night-stand with some immature system of thought? am I in raptures because this seems to have the capacity to contain everything that I love and humor and joy and something akin to holding your breath for hours, days, and finally letting go of it all.

does it seem to you that I’m empty? do I have more to say? does this emulate belief? have I been calling it something else all along? 

Finally, my dear, I must speak directly to you, and I must speak through you, so that my words might end up on your dry bones fallen on the ground as the children stopped playing with them, dashing madly inside for sandwiches like it was the second coming

and I, in turn, hurtle after you as you grasp all my puerile fears and sense of loss and desire for

a life in which I am anxious no more: it is in sight

and could I please tell you that I’ve fallen deeply in love with something that’s more than an idea but sits in my flesh, right at the tender spot

between my first and second toe

Seize your fear, I’ll do the same. a hand smites down and my ribs are compressed like bad typeface

So, in turn, I do not know how to answer you any better than this, and it’s all I know. And if you will, then forgive me, I’ll attempt to do the same.

Bibliography

Dao, Bei. Unlock. trans. Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong. New York: New Directions Books, 2000.

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. edited by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988.

My mornings

There are several different kinds of mornings. There is the it is too early to get up yet but I will because I promised myself kind of morning. This morning is both heavy and light: heavy because it still carries some promise of sleep although you woke by yourself and knew it was time: light because the sky is not yet showing morning except in its way of being a little bit lighter than it was in its darkest hours. This morning has stars in it and flashlights to creep down the stairs without waking up ones friend. This morning fumbles and stumbles and has a kind of quiet and frenetic energy to it where you say to yourself, I don’t want to miss any of this. This morning is a chameleon because you still need to turn on the light in the kitchen to make breakfast, it is a chameleon because it almost seems like still night. Tt is tempting to say that all the mornings following this one are derivatives, lesser versions, but that is not true. Tt is just that this is the one most tinged with the fears of the night but which tells us that they are soon to be antiquities, forgotten trinkets of our imaginations, and that makes this morning something unique: it is terrifying but comfortingly, soothingly so. 

The second morning is hopefully just starting as I finish brushing my teeth and walk with soft and clumsy steps on the path to the studio in socks and flip flops: clumsy because this is not a natural combination, clumsy because it is a warm, warm country, yet mornings are still cold and require long trousers two layers of sweaters or shirts. It is the morning where I know I will beat the sun it: it will hit the wall of the living room and I will be gone already. It’s not a victory but a treasure when I turn around and see the orange dust of first light on branches. I always want to make another cup of coffee but I never drink more than the first few sips: it is a ritual, though not merely. I try to work the most difficult work at this time because i am fresh and not worn, because my spine is straighter than it will ever be during the day. I write and I read it back to myself. I do not check my email. I make edits and write completely new paragraphs. I face myself and write down the weak points that I do not yet have a defense for, a reason to include. The holes and the flaws because it is morning and I am good to myself. This kind of morning is one but it is also a million different kinds. Every change is welcome and is also a death. I always mourn my mornings.

Now it is the morning which is nearly gone. It last for a long time but also for a short time because it is the morning in which i decide it is no longer morning. It is the morning in which I let it go and accept that it is the daytime or perhaps even noon in a little while. When i know that what remains of the day is to sort out the imaginations i’ve pulled up through my mind and make them concrete. It is the morning in which I say, alright, the work begins, because mornings are unbearably easy and difficult, but the rest of the day is more so because it carries the memory of what came before. the exertions are different in their natures. One is blank and clear and piercingly white: if it lasted for longer I think I could not have borne it, like an intense conversation with someone who looks you directly in the eyes. I always mourn the mornings but I always know that it is good when it is gone. The afternoon is gentler, more forgiving. Plump and fleshy, it bends to my will and I am good to myself in the way of finishing my coffee. Allowing myself to read a little while eating lunch, even if its not related to my art making. Taking a walk in the sun. Drinking a cup of sweet and milky tea while the afternoon shrinks into the parapets.

My mornings arent cruel but they are self contained. I sometimes think that I am like that, or perhaps I sometimes wish I could be, because I think then one wouldn’t need anything or anyone else. Then the others wake up. Come in with fresh hair and ask in a bright and soft voice if I would like some coffee. Arrive in their car and hang up their laundry, talk about yesterday and about rhythms and about working. Move yawningly through the kitchen and fry up bacon and eggs for a late breakfast.
If it was always morning I would always be alone.