Tag: love

548: “Thinking and Seeing” (Nick Sousanis)

                “Perception is not dispensable. It’s not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing, we expand our thinking and concept of what thinking is.” -Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, p. 81

                I’ve been making space to think by looking lately, and in looking, I’ve been finding paths of my thinking. Some thoughts in images:
                The overwhelm of this particular work week in the scatter of the kitchen table where I’m typing, the lunch bowl and rumpled napkin and loose handwritten pages and book stacks and dried mango and fingerless gloves. The overwhelm and the delight, too: these inspiring books, that sweet mango, those delicious noodles now a memory in the bowl.
                The power of warm soft touch: my partner beneath a blanket, stretched on the couch, typing her own overwhelm or inspiration. Seeing her steadies me, and when I snuggle in beside her I’ll make sure to tuck the blanket around our feet. It’s 9 degrees outside.
                Which reminds me: a squirrel’s tracks and mine and a bird’s in the bright snow. A neighbor’s red hands at the bus stop. Our shared smile-grimace-smile. The snowy road, worn to patches of cement, as we look back, waiting for the bus, trusting, trust and community infrastructure a pattern of bare trees with sleeping leaves inside and the road and the bus coming soon.
                I’ve been looking as a practice of thinking. Thinking along the paths and branches and tracks and patterns I see.

by Azlan

546: “Your Grandma Made That Quilt” (R. Kikuo Johnson)

                “Hold on, bud, your grandma made that quilt…” – R. Kikuo Johnson, No One Else, p. 96

                What work did I do today?
                Some emails, yes. There are always more of those. Some writing toward one research project, some reading toward another. A couple phone calls. More emails. Teaching a long seminar, and last preparations before it, and notes afterward on how I might lead it differently next time. Follow up emails from participants’ questions. And washing an apple, cutting it for my beloved on the cutting board they got me, arranging the slices in a wave around some peanut butter. A snack for partway through a busy afternoon.
                The systems around me keep insisting that work is what I do for payment. In the face of that noise, R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else paints with all the hidden, submerged work of families, communities, overlapping lives. At the heart of the book is all the years a woman spends caretaking her elderly father. After the first page, we never see that. Not directly. We feel it: a kind of haunting inside the pages, inside the house’s walls. We hear it mentioned once. We see so little of the grandmother’s and grandfather’s work in shaping the world their family lives in, so little of the kid’s work in trying to care for his mother as she cares for her father. It hurts, all this work that goes unread. And it lifts up lives like sap lifts the leaves of a tree the kid stares into, searching for his lost cat. 
                He finds the cat. It snuggles in his lap. No One Else turns me toward all the work that goes into an ongoing moment, and suggests that seeing might mean opening to what’s outside the frame.

by Azlan

543: “Willful Forgetting” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Of course we all engage in willful forgetting all the time […] If we get a new phone number, for example, the old phone number must be forgotten or else its retention will keep rewriting the new one. Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 83

                Two days ago my love and I were at the coast, listening to the water on the rocks, the murmur and wash of the waves. Long slow dances of gravity, motion, erosion. My love said, “I love the sound,” and we stood waist deep, listening.
                Earlier that day we played Pokémon Go. It’s a game of accumulation: just now my character’s carrying 2,780 pokémon. It’s a game that, like so many of the capitalist productivity narratives I’m enmeshed in, keeps promising more, and better, and hold onto this. One of the reasons Pokémon Go keeps appealing to me is that it promises that you can catch everything, have everything, hold onto everything, level everything up. Though of course, that isn’t really what I want at all. Or rather that’s one way I’ve been taught to want, but it’s not the only one, or even the one I most often choose.
                The light played in the water. The water washed among the rocks. Of course learning—being—loving—take time. I usually think they take time because of the hours that go into love unfolding. Into learning sinking in, like water into earth. Into being. Re-reading Halberstam, I think they also take time because of the uncounted ebb/flow in which ideas wash away, get lost, mingle back into subconscious and beyond before rising up in different patterns. A wave. A sound of rock and water. I let myself forget to post this yesterday, as I sat and laughed and talked with the part of my family that is close by. This morning I sit and forget the distance between me and other parts of my family who are far off, and for a moment I forget all the miles between, like we’re looking at the clouds together. I wonder: how often do we find our way to our loves and our families, in part, by letting some things slip away?

by Azlan

536: What “I’m Asking” (Tochi Onyebuchi)

“Hell yeah, I’m lost. More lost than I’ve ever been in my damn life.”
“I don’t have the answer you’re looking for.”
“Answer? I don’t even know what question I’m asking anymore.”
“But you’re still asking it. That is the important part. That is always the most important part.”
                -Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, p. 178

                I just got back from a walk with my mom. Well, my mom’s some thousands of miles away, actually, so what I had with me as today’s 68 degrees dropped toward tonight’s 36 was my jacket and my phone and her voice, walking along with me. And the blowing leaves. And the shadows of someone else at the park, also talking to someone on their phone. And the trees, the clear skies, the moon. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.
                I’ve lived far away from my family since I was seventeen. For whatever reason, this year’s been especially hard. There are probably several good reasons for that, but instead of trying to lay them out, I’m thinking about the leaves that swirled by with our voices on the evening wind, and the little chill in my fingers, almost pleasant, that’s drifting away now that I’m warming up inside. I think years ago I started wondering what happens if I turn less toward answers. (I know I miss you). I think, these days, I’m also letting go of questions. (What can we say to connect?). Or some of them, at least. There are still the questions that we can’t put into words, and whatever is between and through the questions. The rustling leaves. The wind. Someone else on the phone, talking to their loved one. The branches drawing pictures in the sky. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.

by Azlan

534: “Much Together” (D’Arcy McNickle)

                “Even then, it seemed, they said but little to each other, yet nothing went unsaid that needed saying.
                In those days they were much together.”
                -D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded

                My sibling’s visiting for a week. In the kitchen just now, actually, baking bread. Ten minutes ago we were lounging on the couch together. Earlier today we were walking beneath sycamores. (I love sycamores: the patterned bark, the broad leaves, the nobby branches like fairytale walking sticks or heretale hands waving hello). I think I feel a pressure, when I get to see a loved one again after a long time apart, to try and say everything. To talk it all out: the catching up, the reorienting, the worrying, hoping, planning, sharing. And I really do like talking. I am, I think most of my loved ones would agree, a talker. But I’ve also been sitting—or walking—with the limitations of all that saying. The saying (for me) can be a way of trying to undo the distance we also live in, our lives growing in different places. It works in some ways, and in some ways it doesn’t. More than words, what I want is our connections. And when we also live far apart, when we are together, I want that time together. Here is still a distance, not undone but not all-doing. And here’s our closeness. And here are these walks beneath the sycamores, shared steps, shared stillnesses. We are much together.

by Azlan

528: Reading to “Stay In The World” (Bec McBride)

                “If I don’t read, I get distracted from what’s important to me […] reading helps me stay in the world.” -Bec McBride, in conversation with me today

                At 11:30 this morning the world felt wonderful: Bec and I had been in the park for an hour, sitting in dappled light, catching up about our families and friends, our hurts and how we’re healing, our delights at recent cooler nights. At 5:30 today I was in a real low: a new big chunk of work had landed on my desk, crunching the work already there as it made space for itself. I didn’t know how I would handle everything. And there was something else. My mind clutched, hard knuckled. My beloved Maria José helped me pause for a moment. Helped me remember to step outside. She went with me. Crickets hopped through the grass, and we breathed.
                Lately I’ve been thinking about reading and writing as kinds of worlding. Of making world: of making our world look and feel certain ways. Every day there are so many forces pushing me to world the way they say. Today some commercials, celebrating how world is a chance to buy happiness or bask in “deserved” comfort. My hustle culture to-do list, insisting world is where nothing will ever be enough. News stories about political madmen insisting world is a war that always needs more killing. Posts from activists proposing that right now world is resisting the systems set up to consume us, while building solidarity among all those who resist toward justice. In last week’s post I read Joy Harjo: “Rain opens us, like flowers.” This evening Maria José and I stood outside. I tried to read the trees. They breathe what I exhale. I exhale what they breathe. World as a breath we share.
                For me, reading is one way to slowly, deeply, and sometimes in a momentous whoosh put meaning together. I like reading sounds and silences, movements and words. And learning from Bec, I think I read to find ways back toward the world I choose to keep help making.

by Azlan

527: “Rain opens us” (Joy Harjo)

“Rain opens us, like flowers, or earth that has been thirsty for more than a season.
We stop all of our talking, quit thinking, or blowing sax to drink the mystery.
We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.”
                -Joy Harjo, from “It’s Raining in Honolulu,” which I first saw quoted in Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

                My friends, I was writing a different Uproar post—perhaps for next week–when the wind shifted in the window and then it was raining. Clouds’ fingers dancing on the deck. Then I was outside, too, surprised and opened by how thick the water fell. Then I was crouching beneath a little tree in my backyard, making sure the rain barrel was closed, water stitching down around us, earth into sky, now into before into after. Life into life.
                Rain opens us, like flowers.
                There’s been a drought here. The plants lying down, one kind after another, beneath the dry heat. Until I see wilted ground cover like ragged carpet over hard dirt. Now I’m back inside, skin still slicked, long enough to write down that I think the plant stems will lift back up with this. Like I feel myself lifting.
                We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
                Long enough, and no longer. And back outside to feel the water soaking down, lavish, luscious, alive.
                This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

522: “A Reply” (Moses Ose Utomi)

                “He never noticed that he didn’t get a reply.”
                -Moses Ose Utomi, The Truth of the Aleke, p. 37

                Have you ever talked with someone who doesn’t seem to notice your reply? Who nods, maybe, or doesn’t, and then goes straight back to what they want to say? Have you ever felt a whisper and wondered if you’re doing something like that—if you’re saying without noticing what else is said? I have. Both ways.
                Utomi’s line comes in a moment when his main character, Osi, has written and sent an important letter. And then has gotten caught up in all the other busy, important things he has to do, so he doesn’t notice that the person he wrote to never writes back. I read this and had to sit for a while. Quiet. Whirling. It shakes my ideas of writing and reading. Because the hope is that we’re communicating, yes? That we’re saying and hearing? But how much of my typing away at my keyboard is making space for what I can notice from you (and you, and you)? And how much is leading me back to my own tck tck tcking?
                I mistrust writing. Love it, too, and mistrust it. And I want in it a kind of listening. Which means I love listening practices more than I love writing practices. Which means I’m off, because last night I flew across the country to visit family, and now I want what I hear (my partner and my mom chatting near me) so much more than anything I might say.

by Azlan

519: “You Don’t Know” (Jack Halberstam)

                “You don’t know what your child will be like when they grow up. Just as you don’t know what profession they will have, you probably shouldn’t know what form their social intimacies will take. Maybe they’ll have many friends and date many people. Maybe they’ll be single their whole life. Maybe they’ll join a commune. But the idea that we already know in advance exactly how their life will play out after the age of 23 tames the wild potential of human existence and human complexity.” -Jack Halberstam, in this wonderful interview

                Sometimes—often—I’m sad that so many of my loved ones are in so many different places. Doing so many different things. But today I was outside, seeing all these plants I don’t know growing together and it’s beautiful. With so much up in the air and unknown, I’m trying to listen to Halberstam. To swerve to a kind of open unknowing, a kind of context, in which unpredictability can blossom into wondrous gardens of possibility. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s lovely.
                In the interview Halberstam thinks about “the terms under which unpredictability can thrive.” This isn’t about an individual epiphany. This is looking for social forms that celebrate and support the unpredictable, that make space for different ways that someone might walk. I think about what those forms might be. I think about food systems. Housing systems. Healthcare systems. Education systems. Resistance networks. Mutual aid networks. I think about all the systems that insist they do know what life will look like in fifty years, and how they’re wrong again and again and again. Obviously. Hilariously. Crushingly. With so much up in the air and unknown, I want to feel the wild as beautiful and bursting with life. As it is.

by Azlan