“I can only do my best. I mean, it’s not like I’ll be more exceptional today compared to any other day.” -Yun Na-ra, aka Brewmaster Yun, Culinary Class Wars (Season 2, Episode 11, 57:07)
Sometimes I tell myself that this needs to be the best thing I’ve ever written. This effort should be better, stronger, singular, more notable.A lot of my training, a lot of the systems in which I work and learn, ask me to think that way. And then there’s the delight of watching Yun Na-ra make delicious food and talk about her cooking. I don’t read Yun as being (only) self deprecating. She may have her doubts, but her dishes dance. By episode 11 we’ve seen that again and again. So has she. What I hear is something like this: instead of a story about gathering everything you have to do better than you’ve ever done, why not a story about daily practice, the attention and the tools and the community of it, and inside that practice another intent dance toward another meal to share. Delicious.
Uproar – a quote every Wednesday
544: “We’ll Gain One Another” (Monica Huerta)
“If we sacrifice the singular hero and the need for the same, there’s a chance (however fragile, however sincere, however hopeful, however simple) we’ll gain one another. That, too, is what I’m doing here.” -Monica Huerta, Magical Habits, p. xxi
Today was an especially low tide, the bay pulling back a hundred yards or so from the beaches that I usually think of as its edge. My partner and I walked out. Seaweed. Crabs. Marine snails. Pelicans, seagulls, and four or five other kinds of birds I can’t name. The seaweeds painted many colors, some thin and almost algae-like, blossoming in scattered pools, some thicker and brighter and redder. And shells and fishbones. And somethings making bubbles up through the sand. And kids walking, a long way off. And us.
I think one of the things I’m most particularly unlearning from my training in creative writing is the idea of main characters. Our talk about stories was full of that: whose your main character? I like this main character. The main character’s really carrying the action forward. Forward. That’s another one I’m wondering about, walking across the sand where tides sweep back and forth. But this post’s about main characters, or about not-main-characters, or about what we can be doing, here, on the wash of passing years. I don’t know of any or believe in any singular heroes. I’m letting go of that, and walking along with one another.
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?
542: Rode, Abode (Richard Wilbur)
“What is the opposite of road?
I’d say the answer is abode.
“What’s an abode?” you ask. I’d say
It’s ground that doesn’t lead away—”
-Richard Wilbur, from More Opposites
I love a bit of playful rhyming. It can be such a wonderful way of asking, “What am I looking at? What else might I be seeing?” And I love a long scramble up a beautiful hill. This morning, climbing up Tetakawi, I passed a squirrel running along—near his home, I thought, though maybe he was ranging around, too. And three lizards went clambering over the rocks as I clambered, too. And that’s just the start. When I go hiking these days I often start thinking about how I’m a guest in other folks’ homes. It makes me careful where I put my feet, of course. And more. I was thinking about that this afternoon on the drive up to grandpa’s house, when our road took us past more birds, more squirrels, a jackrabbit I think, though they were moving fast and so were we. A road’s what leads us away, Wilbur quips. Maybe the opposite is also true: a habit of going away makes the world look full of roads. And meaning to stay helps reveal so many overlapping abodes.
541: “Until You Start Visiting” (Ross Gay)
“You know, Ross, you forget the stories until you start visiting like this.” Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, p. 45
I’ve been thinking today about how so much of a story is sharing the time for a story to bloom. Some of my training argues otherwise: I’ve heard lots of people talk about writing as though you have no time, writing as though your reader has no time, writing as though attention is a scarce commodity and at any moment you might decide that I’m not worth yours. Writing hustle. And I understand that. I understand why. But I’m also visiting my family, and after dinner we stepped into the backyard, feeling the wind and noticing the deepening sky. Then we came back inside: dinner to clean up, leftovers to put away. But the thing is, sometimes we don’t come in so quickly. Sometimes we stand there. I feel stories scattering like light through shifting leaves. I feel the kind of visiting that’s timeless, inasmuch as it’s not counting minutes, seconds, words. Opening in that dappled light are memories and misadventures, questions and curiosities, hopes and uncertainties. And so today I’m going to stop writing, here, and ask my family if we want to step back out and visit a bit. Not to make the stories come alive, but to remember they’re alive, and to visit long enough to stop running from them.
540: “What Joy Incites” (Ross Gay)
“And second, I intend to wonder what the feeling of joy makes us do, or how it makes us be. I will wonder how joy makes us act and feel. That’s to say, I wonder what joy incites.” -Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, p. 9
I mean, to start with, I love that phrase—intend to wonder. If this is a recipe, then maybe we could intend to wonder until there’s a book, a practice, a community. But maybe instead of a recipe (as I type with my cold fingers) it’s a kind of invitation to recognize how joy moves you. Moves us. Moves us to the stove, this cold day, to make hot tea. Moved me months ago to the backyard to split firewood because this evening may joy move me to the library to sit beside a crackling fire, to send a few text messages to friends, saying, “We’ve lit a fire. It’s dancing. If joy moves you this way.” Because joy moves. Begins.
Which is to say that joy moves me back to Ross Gay, turning pages I’ve read and reread, wondering how he gardens joy into work (and seeing, again and again, that he does). Which is to say that when I bundle up to go work on campus it will be determination and responsibility but also joy, joy that moves so much of what I work for. Which is to say: where does joy move you?
539: “A Good Recipe” (Lara Pickle)
“Oh, I love a good recipe!” -Lara Pickle, I Feel Awful, Thanks, p. 11
Yesterday my partner and I and another friend were over at Hannah’s apartment, making dinner and chatting, chatting and playing games. Hannah moves in January. At the beginning of the night they gestured at their book shelf. “I won’t have space to take those with me. You all should pick what you want.” We felt sad, I think. A reminder of our friend moving away. Repainting the beautiful pink wall of their livingroom with something more common and driving off to another state. And we felt excited. We love books, carrots were roasting in the oven, and Hannah had already made fruit pie. Later that night Hannah said, “I like how books come into your life like pieces of you, and then you give them to friends. Like pieces of them.” I didn’t know how to say that warms my heart. I took a little stack including Lara Pickle’s I Feel Awful, Thanks.
Last night for dinner I made cranberry sauce. It’s the time of year where I make that, washing the cranberries, going through them one by one to pick out the ones that are already brown. So it’s the time of year when I remember that I never remember my mother’s cranberry sauce recipe. Much, much less sugar. Much more red chili flakes, ginger, and orange juice. Maybe I don’t remember the recipe because my mom doesn’t really have a recipe. I always reach out and chat with her. We talk about how we’re doing, and I ask about the sauce, and my mom says you can make it lots of ways. Spices are good. She likes red chili flakes. Fresh ginger. Orange juice. Maybe that’s my favorite kind of recipe. Add a book gifted from a friend. Add a livingroom wall, hand painted and still bright pink. Add friends on a winter evening. Add chatting. Add cranberries. Add time. Heat, sir, and let sit.
538: “Communally Co-Created Ritual” (With and For Latrelle Bright)
“Communally Co-created Ritual
loving, honoring, remembering, nostalgic, bittersweet
we are a village
we tell ghost stories. who/what are our ghosts?
ritual has very prescribed steps
we need to sing old songs / new songs
we need to make spirit houses for our ghosts
costumes, banners, crowns/garlands
cozy
harvest
it’s in the woods”
-with and for Latrelle Bright
A friend and dear colleague passed away this semester. Her name is Latrelle. She’s the kind of artist/educator/delight who spent her time co-creating communities, rituals, connections. Lives. She taught theater, and so much else. I can’t begin to say what she taught me. That we can come together, more meaningfully or more gently and more powerfully than we have yet hoped?
The text above is from a thought map that was pinned up at a celebrations for Latrelle a few days after she passed away. I think it was from her friends and colleagues, co-creating the ritual that I was at when I saw it. The celebrating and remembering rituals that went on to an afternoon in the park with music and movement a few weeks later. Beneath trees, so almost in the woods. It could just as easily be from something Latrelle taught. She taught that way. Grounded in theater, she called it devising: a bringing together of our ideas, a recognizing of where and who we are, and how we’re moving, until we’re moving together. And maybe it’s really both: because like so many others, I speak Latrelle sometimes, or she speaks me, her laughters and reminders on my lips. Maybe I’m writing this because I want to co-create with her again. Maybe because she’s still co-creating me, and us. We tell ghost stories. We need to sing old songs / new songs. Cozy. We harvest. We gather together. We gather ourselves. We gather fruits and breaths and moments from the trees and grass and each other. Gather lives. It’s in the woods.
537: “A Live Fish?!” (Badell, Rebottaro, & Bender)
“Bunker: ‘A live fish?!’
The Wraith: ‘The true crimefighter always carries everything she needs in her utility belt, Tyler.’”
-Flavor text for The Wraith’s Utility Belt card in Sentinels of the Multiverse by Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro, and Paul Bender
I don’t love this quote just because I love the image. A Batman style utility belt, and inside a live fish—maybe a little dace—of course in water because otherwise it won’t stay alive for long. And I don’t love it just because my friends and I were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse yesterday, and Hannah stopped us, saying: “Wait. This card’s actually pretty funny.” Though maybe in part this post is a you had to be there moment. So much of language is, isn’t it? A connection in a place and time. A hand holding a fish. You had to be there, and it all made sense.
There’s also something ridiculous about that superhero trope of carrying everything you need. Of somehow being fully independent of context and situation, as though prepared enough could keep you dry in a rainstorm, cool in a heatwave, could help you chat with friends around a board game, cure your cancer, ready you for a loved one’s death or an old friend’s return, or the pipes freezing, or your joints aging, or life, or death. Could be ready for all the endless perhapses and certainties of a changing world. For that you really would need a live fish. Or maybe, instead, you could let the fish go back in the river, where it would rather be. Swimming along. Not helplessly, not mindlessly. Not ready for anything but responding to this. These changing currents of river and world. You had to be there, but luckily, you are.
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.
Azlan Guttenberg Smith 