field notes; week of july 16, 2018
greetings, friends. i flew to san francisco on monday and i am flying back to toronto tomorrow, and that is why the field notes are a little late. i was in the bay area for friend reasons and work reasons and music reasons, and after spending the last four days flying through a flurry of all three with every pore open, i can say with confidence that i am all partied out and ready to go home. so these field notes are a reflection on the trip, really. i have been reading a lot of hanif abdurraqib as of late, so he is in this one a lot.
p.s. hello, carolyn/caroline, who said hello to me at the gig on wednesday night! i hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
one hundred and sixty-three.
dearly beloved, when the sky opens up, anywhere, i will think of how prince made a storm bend to his will. how the rain never touches those who it knows were sent into it for a higher purpose. dearly beloved, i will walk into the next storm and leave my umbrella hanging on the door.
-- hanif abdurraqib, the night prince walked on water, 2016
i haven’t often thought of myself as a brave person. not, certainly, as someone who takes risks. i’ve always seen the contours of my personality as cleaving close to the bullet points on the diagnostic sheet for ocpd. my biggest problem, i thought — like, my most fundamental failing as a human being — was that i too often allow anxiety to clip my wings.
what i realized this week is that none of the above is true. i am not not-brave, not not-daring, not not-decisive. i have told myself an untrue story about myself. i believed that if i could only be braver, more daring, i’d be able to fight my way to the other side of fear, where everything i want lives; until i acquired those qualities, i would have to depend on anxiety, on fear, on caution.
but i was already there, is the thing. i was already brave enough. anxiety offered nothing but a hollow, brittle protection; as jenny holzer once wrote, “playing it safe can cause a lot of damage in the long run.” this week, i left my umbrella hanging on the door, and i walked into the storm, and i emerged dry.
one hundred and sixty-four.
but i say: keep bleeding. just write toward something beyond blood.
-- leslie jamison, grand unified theory of female pain, 2014
there is a wilco song that i love, “a shot in the arm,” which reads to me as a dispatch from the nadir of addiction, the song’s title functioning both as a literal description of drug use and a plaintive cry of want for a life beyond drug use. and the song hinges on jeff tweedy howling, repeatedly, that he wants “something in my veins/bloodier than blood!” and here, too, the exact nature of this thing, this substance “bloodier than blood,” is left ambiguous. maybe it’s a drug. maybe it’s something more nebulous, some emotional quality that will make him stronger than his frail humanity.
for me, at least, the essential function of writing, of using language at all, is to make good out of pain. or, at least, to make interesting out of pain. to dive into the hissing, gormless brutality of our everyday and emerge with something substantial and vital. language allows us to imagine something bloodier than blood, something beyond blood. which is not to say that writing must hurry us along, out of negative emotion into something easier and more comfortable. to write beyond blood is not to write past pain, or to ignore pain altogether. it allows us to ask why the hurt exists, how the hurt came to be, and what can be done about it.
one hundred and sixty-five.
i just felt like if i was brave, like, let you hurt me and didn’t wince, then you’d finally love me enough not to hurt me anymore.
-- remy boydell, recovery blogger, 2016
every word of recovery blogger is really vital, but this line? world-changing. wince more. say “ouch” more. wince really hard and say “ouch” really loud! if they hurt you, let them see! let them hear! let them know!
p.s. buy remy’s excellent book
one hundred and sixty-six.
i do want to create art beyond rage. rage is a place to begin, but not end. i’m not as wise as my work, but i know if i take the writing deep enough, something larger and greater than myself will flash forth and illuminate me, heal me. i do want to devour my demons -- despair, grief, shame, fear -- and use them to nourish my art. otherwise they’ll devour me.
-- sandra cisneros, i can live sola and i love to work, 2015
sandra cisneros, like, gave birth to me as a writer; when i was eight or nine years old, i was given a textbook on writing which used eleven as an example, and i was never the same. she’s concise, deliberate, efficient and exacting in everything she says. this is a vastly more elegant expression of the concept of “writing beyond blood” than what i said above.
one hundred and sixty-seven.
i have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness i know and my fear of the darkness i do not.
-- hanif abdurraqib, death becomes you, 2016
think about the darkness you allow: why do you allow it? was there a time when you feared it as much as the darkness you now fear? when did you accept this current darkness as tolerable, unavoidable? when did you decide to pretend you wanted it? to sit down, get comfortable with it? what will it take for you to turn a light on?
one hundred and sixty-eight.
the more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are wearing together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
-- alain de botton, on love, 1993
true of friends, too. i love my friends!
one hundred and sixty-nine.
but i cannot not know that i have just been taken by the hand. for the first time in a long time, i close my eyes with peace in my heart. i no longer have to search for my path. i cannot help but close my eyes if i’m happy -- a bit like the doors or the windows of the barns. they close once they are full. you exist in me as a wonderful protection. of course i will hurt you. of course you will hurt me. of course we will have pain, but that is the condition of existence. to become spring is to accept the risk of winter. to become present is to accept the risk of absence.
-- antoine de saint-exupéry, letter to natalie paley, 1942-1943, translated by me
this is that thing about walking into the storm and leaving your umbrella hanging on the door, but in french, and in a love letter.
one hundred and seventy.
in a 1999 interview, sedgwick put it this way: “it’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition. that it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” sedgwick explains that she eventually learned “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.” indeed, as she puts it in “reality and realization”: “perhaps the most change can happen when that contempt changes to respect, a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”
-- maggie nelson, finishing touches, 2012
i.e., maggie nelson and eve kosofsky sedgwick taking you very gently by the hand and whispering, “hey, we’re all dumbasses. we can’t help it. it’s fine. you’re a dumbass. i’m a dumbass. dumbassery is the human condition. love yourself anyway.”
one hundred and seventy-one.
there are people we need so much that we can’t imagine turning away from them. people we’ve built entire homes inside of ourselves for, that cannot stand empty. people we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.
-- hanif abdurraqib, rumours and the currency of heartbreak, 2017
god just… buy this book, buy hanif’s book.
one hundred and seventy-two.
and into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flashlights and our love, we must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge.
-- bright eyes, at the bottom of everything, 2005
this is also that thing about walking into the storm and leaving your umbrella hanging on the door. and it’s that thing about how becoming spring means accepting the risk of winter. and it’s that thing about refusing to become comfortable with darkness. it might be my favourite line in all of i’m wide awake, it’s morning.