“Theory—the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees—theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.”
                -Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location”

                Last Saturday I went for a walk through nearby Carle Park, a neighborhood green with tall trees. Oaks, dawn redwoods, catalpas, maples, walnuts, ginkgo bilobas, lindens, birches, firs, pines, magnolias, chestnuts, dogwoods, serviceberries (which I’d never met before moving here). The leaves are changing in Illinois, and—and how can I say it? “That color,” my friend said, pointing at one of the trees, “That color is so itself that if I were trying to describe it I wouldn’t use a metaphor.” The yellows, reds, oranges, persistent greens—the browns of the trunk, beautiful in their contrast, and the way these colors moved, shifted, fell and gathered on the ground. There were three trees in particular, tall like bits of cloud come to earth, yellow like themselves. Looking at them my heart felt as open as their branches, as light as their rustling leaves, as easy as the wind that trickled through them. Like a breath of air that went all through me.
                I want to walk, barefoot in the grass. 
                I want the kind of thoughts that settle and gather and wisp away like dew, and return to the earth, here or somewhere else, over and over.
                I love the idea that theory is the seeing of patterns. I want to follow patterns that smell like fallen leaves and deep earth and sometimes like my own body, unshowered so far this morning, and sometimes like the gingko’s fruit (even though it stinks), and sometimes like rain, and sometimes like the bergamot that grows wild here.

                “…and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance”

                “What if, instead, we asked writers to use methodologies that muddle or reposition the argument(s) at hand? In other words, what if composition functioned as a disordering agent (McRuer 2006)?” -Hillery Glasby quoting Robert McRuer in “Making It Queer, Not Clear”

                When I was sixteen or so, Emerson’s thought made so much sense. It seemed a lot like what I thought. I don’t know if I fully realized that it was a way I was being taught to think. Emerson’s saying: say what you believe, abide by your own “spontaneous impression,” or else someone else will come along and say it well and you’ll have to accept “with shame” your own opinion “from another.” I think that’s perspective that weaves through a lot of American individualism. Thinking about it now, I don’t understand why there’s shame in that. Or force.

                This morning, when I was reading Glasby, I was excited from the first sentence. It’s lovely to find someone saying things that make me dance about thinking, “Yes, yes, I thought so too!” Having someone else say it, and say it beautifully, wasn’t like having my thoughts stolen. It was more like coming home. Like finding a friend opening closets and unfolding blankets and making a pillow fort. And then I wasn’t watching them make: I was making with them, and unmaking, and throwing things around in this delightful disorder of make believe and make and believe. I don’t want to put that together. I don’t want to claim that as mine. I want to muddle around, and celebrate the together.

                “Despite these blessings, sometimes Dex could not sleep. In these hours, they frequently asked themselves what it was they were doing. They never truly felt like they got a handle on that. They kept doing it all the same.” -Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

                A few days ago I was looking back and forth between a piece of writing I did about a year ago (nearish when I read A Psalm for the first time) and a piece of writing I did last month, and I noticed, huh. The more recent piece is happier. Lighter. More playful. That might be because last year I really worked to build community. That might be because of the mood I was in when I wrote each piece. That might be because the first piece was trying to prove something, and the second—well, the second’s trying to make something, too, but it’s less worried (though still worried) about what happens if the making doesn’t work. 
                It’s probably some of all three, and some of this, too: I’ve been wondering about doing. Sometimes I run through what I have to do in my head. I think that’s fairly common? For me it’s like a quick mental sprint across ‘have-tos,’ my mind bouncing from wash-dishes to get-sleep to grade-assignments to schedule-meeting. And for a long time I’ve sent my mind sprinting along those pieces pretty regularly. (I wonder how many times a day? It’s hard to guess). I think that’s useful. I mean, there’s a lot to do, and I’d like to keep track of it. But lately, sometimes, instead of running along the list of what I have to do, I’ve been trying to sit with what I’m doing. I’m doing dishes. I’m grading assignments. Doing one thing means I’m not doing another. Sometimes it means another doesn’t get done. Sometimes it means that I don’t understand the overall plan. I suppose this is the kind of thing that could be taken too far, but when I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s hard to fall back asleep—which has been rarer, lately—I get less worried about not sleeping. About what I have to do tomorrow. I try to notice what I’m doing. Laying in bed. Listening to my partner breathe. Feeling the weight of the blanket. At some point sleeping becomes part of the “it” I’m doing, and by that time, I’m not sure I need to have “a handle” on it. I’m not sure I need to understand. I have a cheek, resting against the pillow. A chest rising and falling. Another time I sit at my keyboard and type. Another time I go to the sink and pick up the sponge. This. This is what I’m doing.

“If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.”
                -Ross Gay, “Thank You”

                I love the grounding of the first six lines. That’s how the poem works, at least for me: by opening the time to find itself half naked and barefoot in the frosty grass, by listening to the earth’s moan, whether that’s wind or a mind’s misgivings, to feel the dust. Once it’s done that it can move on to telling us what to do. But before the telling there’s the being. So:
                I’m lying on my floor in my third story apartment, our one big window open at my feet, the night air eddying in. Outside there are—cicadas, I think? A regular, rhythmic touch, like night’s a bristled brush and someone’s twitching their fingers along it. Again. Again. I wonder if I can actually smell the basil on the windowsill. Then, because I was wondering, I got up to touch it. Now I’m back on the floor. Its pale green leaves were like the curled ears of some delicate creature. Listening. My partner shifts on the couch, reading. My fingers play out their staccato rhythm. The comparison reminds me of a jazz pianist I saw last semester, someone who held the little hammers from inside a piano and leaned into a grand piano, playing, not by tapping the keys but by tapping the strings themselves. Playing from inside. That brings me, in turn, to a hay barn at my friend’s farm when I’m nine or so, climbing up between the bales. Crawling and chasing each other, and a moment where I sat, quiet, all these gathered feels gathered around me. Like sitting inside summer. Like sitting inside a piano. I made up that I was nine: I don’t know how old I was. There were so many years when that didn’t seem to matter.
                The basil sits still while a little breeze curls in the window, promising the changing leaves, promising a frost, a winter. The floorboards scrape beneath my hair as I shift my head. Funny how, setting out to be here, I found myself in so many places. Opening the time. Funny how, being in so many places, I find myself here. More balanced in the being.
                And yes. Thank you.

                “[In performance art] I’m using your energy, and with this energy I can go and push my body as far as I can.” -Marina Abramović

                A couple weeks ago I helped perform “Voices on the Land,” and of course, as all sorts of performers know, performing’s different when you’re with an audience. It’s not like rehearsal. There’s a momentum, a connection, an intensity. I’ve been thinking about that, about Abramović’s description of her art, and about playing.
                Sometimes I imagine myself as an individual. I say “I,” and I mean something separate from you, separate from us, separate from all the bacteria that live inside “me.” Sometimes that way of understanding seems to make sense. Other times I feel more like one string on a guitar, and most of the music comes from what we are together. Other times I don’t know what to think. And then I remember playing. I sink my hands into the sand. I feel the heat up top, the coolness underneath. I feel the weight. I bury my arm, or stack sand into a castle until the rising tide rolls over my toes and washes the sand I’ve touched out into the waves. I think playing, for me, can be a kind of interplay between me and not me: a kind of extending I so that it includes the touch of the sand. I can swirl I and swing together as the world lifts and falls. I can wash current and I together as I swim in a river. When I was little, I think, playing was often this kind of experiment: a blurring and enlarging of selves, a mixing of what I mean and what it means to be touched and touching. And then you mix in other people. A conversation exists in us and through us and between us. A dance exists in our shared and separate momentums, and we get to play about what selves we imagine. What selves we connect to. There’s energy there, in the washing together.

                “Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all the morning.” -Rabindranath Tagore, “Playthings”

                I remember when I was eight or nine, and I was getting into the car with my dad for a seven hour trip. I complained I didn’t have anything to play with while we drove. He picked up a piece of bent tar from the road. “What about that?” he said. It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t see any possibility, any play in the twisted shape.
                In a recent conversation about what we’re doing when we’re playing, my friend brought up fishing. The “play” in the line is the way the fishing line can wobble back and forth as you pull on it. My friend said, “I’m not sure that’s related to what we’re talking about,” but I find it really useful. For me playing is often an exploring, a testing side to side, a wobble that goes off from the beaten line of what I meant. When I’m playing my senses glimmer out in directions—movement on the swings, water on my fingers, grass on my toes. When I’m playing the sensations suggest new possibilities: we could swing on the swing together, or swing upside down, or try to walk across the swings, stepping from seat to seat as we hang on the chains. On my desk I still have nine chestnuts I picked up in a field. I roll them around sometimes. Arrange them. Hold them. Play with the patterns they make, the sound they tap against my desk. Playing wobbles out from the thin line of what I meant, ripples across the surface, and as the ripples expand they suggest new directions.
                I think I could have played with the twist of tar. I’m not sure why I didn’t. I’ve written out five or six different explanations, and deleted them, and now instead I’m thinking of the bolt I picked up from the road on a recent walk. I didn’t want some passing car to get a flat tire. But I carried the bolt a little while. Played my thumb across its threads. Shifted it in my hand, feeling its smoothness, its weight. Then I balanced it upside down on a fire hydrant. I didn’t mean to, or at least, I didn’t mean to until I was already doing it. Until I was unfolding that this, yes, was what I was doing. I was playing in the dust.

                “How much do you want to know?” -Professor Kannan “Jagu” Jagannathan

                Way back in 2007—at least, I think it was 2007—my friends and I were playing frisbee on the grass outside Valentine Dining Hall at Amherst College. I wasn’t one of those people who can make the frisbee fly forever. I liked how it floated, though. So we were playing, and I was probably running back and forth fumbling catches, and I saw two things: the frisbee hushing through the air, and my physics professor walking across the quad. I ran over to him.
                “Hey professor,” I said, “how does a frisbee work?”
                Jagu looked at me for a moment, and then a moment longer. His head tilted to the side as though his thoughts were running deeper and deeper. “I’m not sure I understand myself,” he said. After another moment there was a smile in his eyes. “How much do you want to know?”
                There is so much to learn in every direction. I’m working in the Writers Workshop this semester, which means I go from talking with a journalism graduate student about the different ways America and China have covered the pandemic to with an Iranian aerospace engineering student about research opportunities in space programs to a linguistic anthropologist about the different ways we imagine history. Then I have a Kit-Kat and head back for the next three sessions. Sometimes, Jagu’s comment sounds—not quite like a warning, but like a reminder to assess my own intentions. ‘There are lots of paths,’ he seems to be saying, ‘and all of them go a long way. How far do you mean to walk this one?’ There are so many paths to explore, so many questions to ask, and they all lead to more questions. So which ones will I pick up? 
                Other times, Jagu’s comment sounds more like an invitation, like a mischievous magician about to reveal the first step of their trick—which will give you an answer, yes, but will also bring you into a new world of sleight of hand and practice, of hundreds of years of tradition and knowledge. Of course illusions have a lot of reality built into them, propping them up. Sometimes I walk by, asking a question, letting it go after half a minute of idle thought. Sometimes I really want to examine the walls. Everything’s built from something, bricks and mortar or 2x4s and nails or dreams and lies. Every builder has their reasons (some perhaps they knew, and some perhaps they didn’t), and every wall has space inside it and behind it. Usually I skate by. Sometimes I see Jagu out on a field as a frisbee floats by and he says, “How much do you want to know?”

                “[The process of writing] is much richer and far more difficult to articulate because there are, in fact, unspoken pieces of it—the groping and grasping that we all go through…” -Sondra Perl, quoted in Hannah Rule’s Situating Writing Processes

                One of my favorite things that writing does in my life is bring me in touch with silence. Bring me to confusion, to the muddle beyond my meanings. I end up on a cliff beyond which oceans rise and birds call and currents move, except these are steepnesses that are not only cliffs, oceans that are not only water, cries that are not only voices and not only birds. Trying to write often brings me into silence as I stumble past what I thought I understood.
                I suspect this is true for lots of arts, and for many of the ways we try to collect thought and experience into meaning (music, choreographed dance, television; conversation, study, relationship, to name a few). I’m writing about this because I don’t think I’m writing only about writing.
                Take this, now. At several points in the last paragraph, I stopped. I deleted sentences. I tapped my teeth with my fingernail. I stared at the screen, not seeing. I don’t want to try and list all the things I was doing in that stopping, that tapping, that staring. I also don’t want to make those moments somehow mysterious in a way that leaves me to wait for inspiration. Writing, for me, is a kind of work. Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s exciting. But when I’m doing that work, I’m not just typing furiously. I’m also on the swings. At the window. On the floor listening to silences that I don’t understand. I think I forget that when I collapse work into productivity. All that difficult richness—the windows and silences and confusions, the doubts, the stutters, the pauses that stretch on to who knows where—is part of why the work is worth doing. It’s part of why, sometimes, the work manages something wonderful. So I mean, very funny funny, meme, but what do you think someone’s doing when they’re silent on the swings?

                “And one thing you learn as a poet writing a collection of poems is that every poem is a chance to recalibrate language for yourself […] I wanted every scene to have oscillations. So you have New England vernacular, you have essayistic, journalistic writing on butterflies and opioid facts. And I wanted it all. I didn’t want to blend them or have cohesion or evenness. I wanted all of them to be a sort of chorus sitting together.” -Ocean Vuong, discussing his book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

                This semester I’m working in UIUC’s Writers Workshop, which means I help different graduate and undergrad writers, one-on-one, for fifty minutes at a time. We talk about whatever they’re working on—job applications or dissertations or class assignments. We start at whatever stage they’re at: polishing a final draft or brainstorming or trimming back paragraphs. All that is to say, today I worked with a PhD candidate on an economics article, a masters candidate on a computer science article, an undergraduate putting together a story of their life up till now, and my friend, who I think has stumbled onto the first draft of her PhD dissertation. Six hours of meetings in all, and my mind is humming in a delightful and disorientating way.
                I think the disorientation is wonderful. Maybe it’s necessary. Walking out from my meetings, I started thinking about how my own language can insulate. They can help me follow the paths I’ve laid out, help me draw the lines I’m used to drawing on what I see. I’m not saying that’s wrong. Sometimes it’s quite nice. Then someone sits across from me quoting authors I’ve never heard on matters I’ve never considered, or someone spins around their Turkish laptop for me to type, and the comma isn’t where I’m expecting it to be. Today was tiring, as I expected it to be. I didn’t expect to spend so much time laughing with the writers who came in. We laughed while we tried to explain ourselves to each other, laughed as our understandings creased and bumped. And of course, to only think about these different individual’s disciplines would be to miss the point—I talked to people, each trying out the words they’d learned, each adjusting their language to see what was possible and what they wanted to say. I like when the cohesion pulls apart. There are so many melodies that we can’t sing with just one voice, melodies we can sing with a chorus.

                “Once upon a time, there was a man who did not know how to use a sword and was also very afraid of dragons, so he took the L.S.A.T., did pretty well, and ended up getting into a decent law school.” -Charles Yu, “Fable”

                Lately I’ve been imagining a planter pot of rich soil. The kind you might call loam, really, soft and dark, like when I tripped in the forests as a kid and wanted to lick the ground. It looked like chocolate cake. I might actually be remembering Margaret Mahy’s The Girl With The Green Ear, where I might remember someone making cakes for plants. That’s exactly what I want to talk about this week: the way my mind fumbles for stories, for images, for patterns that I’ve seen, and tries to put together what I’m doing now and who I am from those pieces.
                Charles Yu is playing with how our stories can be dislocated from where we actually are. Sometimes the fairytale with the sword and the dragon jostles against the life I’m living. “Hero” just isn’t a useful concept for anything about what I’m doing. I can try to fit the pieces together based on my myths (as the character keeps trying to do in Fable). I can decide that this puzzle isn’t a puzzle, that all the pieces don’t need to fit, and throw some of them out the window, and find other pieces, and make other pieces, and use them all as a garden path for a doll house.
                So lately I’ve been trying to add another piece. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed myself working towards deadline after deadline. I’ve found myself, again and again, feeling like I needed to rest but couldn’t until after the semester ended on December 15, after the performance on March 25, after I finished my novel draft in late April. I’ve noticed that after a deadline I tend to give myself another deadline. To pick up another project. To say, there next. For the most part I’ve really liked the places I’m going, the tasks I’m taking up. I feel lucky to have the chance. But at the same time, the sense of business, of can’t-pause, is something beyond any of the deadlines. It’s a way I have of being in myself. This fall I want to play with other ways. I want more quiet space with ladybugs buzzing by. I want more of the rich openness below trees, and leaves blowing. A space where I’m not hurrying to next. I’ve been imagining that space as a planter pot I’m tending. I’m not trying to grow anything in this earth. I’m trying to be aware of the dirt, the way its color changes when it gets wet and dries out. To feel this loam between my fingers.