Uproar – a quote every Wednesday

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

547: Stories Together (Acosta, Dragon, Harris & Veselak)

                “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly.” -Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, Lillie J. Harris, and M. Veselak, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, p. 310

                Tonight I stepped out from the cozy room—that’s what we call it; it has a fireplace!—to chop some carrots and celery for snacks. By the time I got back, our friend Margie was drinking tea, and Bella had set on the table a bag of sour gummies. (I love sour gummies). They were talking with my partner Majo about holidays, family dynamics, relationships, cooking. We kept talking. Munched sour gummies. Carrots. Celery.
                “Sal sighed,” alone, isn’t much of a story. “Parish sighed” isn’t much of a story. But “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly”—that’s a story I might want to be part of. And luckily I could be, because Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast is a storytelling game, the kind where friends gather around and make up a story together. (The game has pieces and patterns to support that). Tonight the four of us played for the first time. I don’t have a new idea in this post—at least, I don’t think I do. Just the old idea, or that returning feeling, that writing is my favorite when there are many hands drawing out the words, and my least favorite when it’s isolated, locked in a word processor, individually controlled, alone. Typing this I’m looking down at lyrics Bella wrote on one page of our shared game. At Margie’s little doodle on another page, titled, “Bath salt.” At the colors Majo gave Amelie’s character portrait. And now I’ll stop writing and keep talking with Majo about the game and our days and what snacks to have before bed, because Sal sighed, Parish sighed, Amelie buzzed softly, and it’s in the mix I feel a story moving.

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

545: “Any Other Day” (Yun Na-ra)

                “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.

by Azlan

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.

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

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.

by Azlan

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.

by Azlan

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?

by Azlan

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.

by Azlan