"This Month I'm Forcing Nothing"
the art I loved in January and February
So there I was, crossing the threshold of this new year—walking with direction but not vision, through the fog of January. I read regularly and slowly, wrote what felt like nothing, until I was organizing it at the beginning of this month and saw it was not nothing at all. Now the fog has settled on the ground, I can kick it up and disintegrate it with my feet as I walk.
February is like this: creeping excitement, yearning and reveling in equal measure, bouncing and boundless. Decorating shoeboxes with hearts, remembering who I was as a child, living by her dogma. February is Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins and Full of Life by Christine and the Queens and Only Time by Enya. Nothing is ironic, all of it is earnest. I’m juiced for life in the way I usually feel during high spring and summer, while still being well within the solitude of winter. This February had more poetry and movies.
Here’s what I loved.
Writing
I’m TA’ing an English class that I also TA’d two years ago. This week we read the essay “Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf, which was one of my favorites last time. And it’s wild to see how many threads of that piece have permanently made their way into my psyche! Every time I read Woolf, I can feel my work bloom. I feel a renewed faith that writing really can hold it all. James Wood, who’s the professor for this course, said Woolf is a writer more interested in image than idea.
Sometimes I feel more interested in images than idea, which is maybe why I love poetry and other writing by poets. Wrong Norma by Anne Carson has been helpful this month, in bridging the gap between the poetic (fragmented, highly sensorial) and the prosaic in my current writing project. This is the third book I’ve read by Anne Carson and nothing may ever take the place of Autobiography of Red. That’s okay, I don’t want it to! Wrong Norma is a collection of unrelated short pieces ranging from full blown essay to one-paragraph prose poems and little snippets like this (great advice):
AGUA VIVA by Clarice Lispector has been my constant companion these last two months, and I loved so many passages I fear this section may get unwieldy. But I turned to it constantly; the book benefitted from morning visitations—small pieces, savoring. This book is so visceral but in a way I find difficult to explain. It’s as if thought were visceral. This book is the experience of a mind according to itself.
“Clarice Lispector’s indulgence”—those aren’t my words but it is the phrase that kept coming to mind when I wanted to say what I love about this book. I guess I just mean that I admire how she has no shame in letting herself make a study of her life. I think more people should do it.
Our bodies are vessels bound by time, with a clear beginning and end. A singular collection of experiences and sensations passes through each of us—a record that dies with the body, unless we put together a record outside of ourselves.
Many people will live but not everyone will look clearly at their own existence.
(The space between creating and unveiling yourself…)
((The space between having our hand in the material and surrendering…))
The following passage has been something of a mantra for me.
The following passage (as well as many others) gets at the experience of divine presence so clearly. I think I’ve written about this before here, but no one really talks about the intensely physical aspect of it—to be filled, not literally with light, but the energetic quality of it…to be filled with luminescence.
“it’s as if the angel of life came to announce the world to me”….. is there any better feeling????
And here!!! I love this idea of desire as a portal for creation…
Visual Things
These last couple months gave me new visions of surrender. Like in Sound of Metal—a movie about a heavy metal drummer trying to make it, living on the road, performing with his singer girlfriend. Near the start of the film he experiences rapid onset hearing loss, which is sonically rendered in the film the way he’d be experiencing it. Visceral! You can’t help but experience it in the body. Then we witness the following throes of denial. It is a story about someone who goes to great lengths to try to recover his life, before he realizes he has already been forever changed by loss and he must give in.
Jackie and I also watched Secret Mall Apartment, about a group of local artists who created an apartment in the Providence Place mall, which we laugh about (and visit) all the time. It’s the “Largest Carpeted Mall in America,” by the way. You’d think it would smell. I wonder if they have to go to great lengths to keep it from smelling. When the mall was being built, they tore down affordable housing and artist workspaces; the mall was heavily protested. Michael Townsend, the leading artist, was attending city hall meetings on Providence development and kept hearing this phrase “underutilized space.” So he found some “underutilized space” in the backrooms of the mall and set up shop. Brilliant!! And very impressive how they were able to bypass security with massive furniture. I loved it so much.
I also saw “Wuthering Heights” and my takeaway is: I do not care if it was Wuthering Heights or not. I have not read the book and I have no stake in that game!! I thought it was a visually and sonically arresting Victorian fever dream of obsession and I loved it. And I can’t stop listening to Chains of Love.
Online I saw that These Days, which is a great gallery in downtown LA, put on photography show this month for Siri Kaur. Since I am not in LA anymore, I ordered the photo book. Here are some of my current favorite images, which feel perfectly fitting for this February…
There’s only room for love in February!!!
xoxoxoxoxo
agua viva moving to the top of my list!!