august round-up
june jordan, ralph waldo emerson, and mercury retrograde walk into a bar
Hi friend. Today had the most perfect weather, and I spent 6 hours in the park just looking and noting all of it. Existing with myself does not feel hard, even when I am a bit lonely and sad, as I often am when my birthday is lurking around the corner. I also read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, top to bottom, which contains much about a kind of loneliness, directly and ambiently, so I was, after all, in good company. This letter contains a few non-linear notes and thoughts I gathered over the past week or two and some about my year at large. I am also in part inspired by gaby obando arevalo’s thirty before thirty and motivated by the August round-up that this letter is doubling as.
*
This morning, for the second time in under a week, I stopped at a red light, unclicked my seatbelt, took my shirt off, and quickly slipped it back onto my body so that the tag was no longer itching my chest.
I was born during a Mercury retrograde; I feel (mostly) amused at the little repeated moments and mistakes that occur when the planet is moving backward for a period of time. I guess, in general, I feel kind of fine during Mercury retro, perhaps also in part because the fear-mongering of this time has felt less potent to me over the years. When the planet goes direct and begins to move in the appropriate direction again, though, I know I will feel less accepting of my mercurial behaviors, and the ways that I tend to fluctuate, emotionally and otherwise, will feel punishable again.
“Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”
- from Circles by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dark Habits (1983) dir. Pedro Almodóvar I made tiramisu for Eva’s birthday gathering last week. The process was quite soothing — just Pepper (the dog) and me, alone in the apartment, listening to Clairo and trying something new. It came out very tasty, but I will say I feel like every recipe that warns you to quick-dip the ladyfingers is overexaggerating just a tad. I think I could’ve held them in the liquid ever so slightly longer — I was craving more espresso flavor and moistness throughout.
I watched Personal Shopper (2016) this past month on my laptop, sitting in my car outside of the co-op because I don’t have Wi-Fi where I’m staying right now. It changed me. I found it to be very profound, and I was surprised by my own tears at the end. Grief as an echo chamber, needing to be connected to your dead in any way possible to justify the deep wound left behind in their absence.
While in LA this summer, I was talking with my friend Ray about how distanced I’ve felt from writing poetry in the past year and change. Part of it is that I needed some space to develop my dance practice. A larger part of it is that many of the poems that I wrote, particularly in the first half of my 20s, were avenues through which I could begin to process the death of my older brother. When I look at the poems and chapbook I made while learning from Angel Nafis in 2019-2020, I can feel how close I was to the grief and pain of the accumulating years without him, the fear of approaching the age he was when he died, and the guilt of surpassing him, conflated with my own life and personal mental health. Speaking with Ray was the first time I had admitted out loud how little I’ve written poetry; he remarked that when people no longer identify with the versions of themselves that needed to create art for such specific reasons, it can feel a little like something is lost in the joy (and torture?) of art itself. He also mentioned that he’s felt and heard similar sentiments from other artist friends, which surprisingly brought me great comfort.
re: somewhere between me and the other side
Torso Blanco, Rufino Tamayo I think a lot about this moment last fall, sitting across from a new friend on the lumpy couch in my old house: we’re talking about romance, and I say something like I’ve never really been rejected. It was a joke. But I’m not sure my tone let it off. I think I kind of meant it. I think I believed it was true to some degree. It took me less than 10 seconds after they left to be like, wow, that was a fucking insane thing to say.
This morning, as I ran the scenario through my head for the nth time, I started picturing Marnie from Girls in the season two episode titled Boys. She and Booth Jonathon are standing in his wine cellar; there’s a party happening just outside the doors that Marnie believes she is co-hosting with her new boyfriend. When Booth breaks it to her that he is not, nor did he ever plan to be, her boyfriend, she becomes distressed. When her delusion begins to break, she whines, “It’s just that usually when I think someone’s my boyfriend, they’re my boyfriend!”
What I think I meant to say was that whenever I pursued someone, I often later entered a relationship with them (however many red flags waved in my face), and I felt that I had made something happen. Whenever I feel rejected by someone romantically, I quickly decide that person or situation is not for me, anyway, and back away.
The fact of the matter is that all of my relationships, familial/romantic/platonic, from age zero to 27, have included an abundance of rejections, big and small, real or imagined, that have caused me great distress and pain.
Anna Fusco has two newsletters on her experience of interdependence over codependence, abandoning herself for love, and attending Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (S.L.A.A) meetings that I found really comforting and profound. I think one of them is behind a paywall, but I assure you the $5/month is worth it. A quote from one of the letters:
One underlying theme of these meetings is the suffering caused by an orientation of the self towards others, an orientation that inevitably becomes unmanageable. I can’t afford to live codependently with other people anymore — certainly not with their opinions of me. But I do want to live my life in service to others and their healing. Sharing my story has always been part of that.
I’ve kind of realized that I’ve often deluded myself into being in these relation/situation-ships that I don’t necessarily want but need to make happen to be affirmed in some other belief about my value, beauty, power/control, skill of charm, etc.
To boot, my relationship to these rejections has formed me into a person prone to falling into the dynamics of codependency with others who also tend to abandon themselves. Even when I can actively feel that I don’t want to, it happens like an autopilot setting. I’m grateful I can look at myself with honesty about that. I can name when I feel myself wanting to subtly strong-arm someone into seeing, loving, and respecting me.
Your late 20s are realizing that you’re not above being a Marnie sometimes! There’s time yet still to change.
Vespers (1982), choreographed and performed by Bebe Miller with music arranged and sung by Linda Gibbs. Speaks to my ever-present nun desires.
Pleasure Principle by Madeline Cravens is a debut collection of poems that I really quite loved. The author dedicates the book to Megan Fernandes, whose collection I Do Everything I’m Told was glued to my hands last summer.
Perfect Days (2023) changed me. I am different. The old version of me is still somewhere on the dike in Hadley, where Tyler and I enjoyed a pre-movie stroll. The second time I watched it, alone, I wrote this on letterboxd:
I wonder…so frequently…if the absence of close personal friendships/relationships would allow me to gain some control over my routines and interests in a more concentrated but ambient way aaaannnnnndddddd release me from my own intensity so that I could become some version of myself that is generous and less emotional/reactive that I could hold lighter, a bit closer and be with peacefully.
There is something about Hirayama‘s time with his niece up until she leaves with his sister, the refusal to be in contact with his father & his crying through the end of the film where he’s just back at it another day (!!) that I just find so effective as a reminder of own complex humanity, fills me with compassion and leads me to suspect that I can, in fact, find some peace and satisfying motion and routine to my life and still be a feeling person. maybe!! stay tuned!!!
Perfect Days (2023), dir. Wim Wenders The week that I signed the lease for my new apartment, I kept falling asleep with my legs twisted and flexed around each other. By the time I had arrived in New York that weekend, my calves were extremely sore.
Cinnamon, bay leaf, star anise, Florida Water, Rose of Jericho, epsom salt. Arnell made me a bath that weekend under the first Capricorn full moon after I told her about a dream where I was arguing with a version of myself on the street who entered a street-level apartment and slammed the door in my face.
I asked myself lots of questions while I lay there in the tub until I felt some small semblance of acceptance at not having anyone answer back. I ducked my head under water 3x and unplugged the drain. I read once that you should stay in the tub until all your bath water drains and just envision that all your worries are being drained away in the cloudy swirl.
Cycles (1989), dir. Zeinabu Davis All six minutes of Shirley Clarke’s film A Visual Diary (1980), starring dancer Blondell Cummings, changed me. The night I found it on Criterion, I watched it 4 times in a row. I downloaded Criterion on my phone so I could watch it again when I was away from my computer. I felt as though something had been gifted to me. I thought of Lucille Clifton’s it was a dream. I felt the gift alive in me again when I saw mayfield brooks perform an iteration of their Whale Fall project in May.
At 10:30 pm on August 25th, I finished the book Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. I called Riley, and she answered on the first ring, “Did you just finish it?” I sobbed for 30 minutes, and she laughed because she had the same reaction when she finished reading it a couple of weeks ago. I’m different now. The old version of me is in Tompkins Square Park, lying in the grass, seconds before I opened the book for the first time at the beginning of the month. I think that Evaristo’s clear regard for her characters and their humanness is what made this novel so penetrating for me.
In her newsletter, How to Cure a Ghost, Fariha Roisin shared this article on the fallout between June Jordan and Audre Lorde regarding Lorde’s historic support of the state of Israel. I was nervous about reading it at first, but I’m really, really glad that I did— it’s very well-written and informative. But my goodness, it’s so upsetting. June Jordan’s integrity and unfailing support of oppressed peoples everywhere have long since stuck out to me and kept me with her work, which I reach for often, and I find appears to me often in tenuous times of my own life.
I found this bit below particularly shocking; it traces the events following a letter that Jordan wrote in which she, as an American, accepts the responsibility that she plays in Israel’s creation and harm and expresses not doing enough for the Palestinian people as well as shaming Adrienne Rich for her flimsy politics and failure to take responsibility as a supporter of Zionism and the suggestion that Zionism and feminism could be harmonious.
I took this self-portrait last summer, a month or so before turning 27. There’s hawthorne and peppermint tea from Ell in my tote bag, for some heart protection. The next day, I was driving up to Maine to spend three weeks cooking and dancing. I think the colors are really beautiful and very me. My skin looks excellent, and I’m betting by how shrunken my hair is that it was pretty humid that day. Towards the end of last summer, I entered a moment that, honestly, felt like a deep regression. So much was coming up for me, and it was all arriving in some strange, desperate behaviors.
Recently, a friend of mine who works with children was telling me about a framework she uses in her job called “Touchpoints”.
“Touchpoints” are predictable periods of regression and disorganization that occur before bursts in a child’s development. The example she gave me was that a child who is about to begin walking might suddenly begin waking up every two hours when they had previously started sleeping 5 or 6. In that same week or the next, they take their first steps. It's almost like they need to forget what they know in order to integrate this thing into their brain and body. Once integrated, they can bring back everything they knew before.
It might get a little more problematic once we start looking at adults, but I think this framework feels relevant in all stages of life. So much about these past couple of years has felt disorienting and restless; all the new knowledge requires a cognitive recalibration. After every adult version of my first upright steps (there have been many), repopulating my life and mind with what I knew before has required a bit more discernment before integrating them again. And I find that maybe this process just keeps happening over and over again; whatever is welcomed back or left out begets a whole new process of recalibration.
so, so beautiful magh. such a soothing and special read this morning 🩷