Uproar – a quote every Wednesday

481: Writing Webs (Ishita Dharap)

a word web by Ishita Dharap, inspired by her 2023 artwork “grief maps”
a web by Azlan Smith, inspired by Ishita’s 2023 “grief maps.” We made these together, tonight, for this post.

                One of the (many) wonderful things about my friend Ishita Dharap is that I’m not sure how to describe our friendship.
                We’re art friends. That can be drawing or crafting or eye makeup, familiar mediums, but it also means painting words into classes, balancing relationships into museum art exhibits, playing sunlight like you’d play a piano until it sounds sweet. Or maybe being a piano for some sunlight’s silly hands.
                We’re cooking friends. That means we like sharing meals, love standing over the stove and stirring things, love the blur of heat and flavor into time and texture. I think it also means that we’re mischievously aware of ourselves as cooking, too. The idea for this post has been bubbling away on low for years. We make space for one another’s boiling and slow-bubbling.
                We’re quick friends, ever since our first conversation while trees danced outside. Vibes, Ishita says.
                We’re slow friends. Sometimes we don’t talk for a long time. That’s not a turning away or forgetting. It’s a growing— leaves that flicker in their curiosities, and roots that steady in their quiet, hidden curiosities.
                Did any of that make sense? Do you have friendships like that? Or maybe I should say like all these. I’m thinking about manyness. About how in my experience a friendship that is is many things. Ishita’s approach for mapping words into webs is one of my favorite ways to try and write that manyness. You can read in branching threads, following the different connections. People sometimes comment a lot about the linear structure of an English sentence, the sequence of a word then a word, but when I think about anything I’ve read the words are more a web than a line. Are they that for you? A knotted association of the threads above and this thread here and the next threads, and other memories or thoughts that all these threads tie to? They are for me, and Ishita’s word maps are a way of writing toward that web.

by Azlan

480: Performing Card Tricks (Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué)

                “We cannot emphasize too strongly that knowing the secret of the trick is not the same as knowing how to perform that trick.” -Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué, The Royal Road to Card Magic

                It’s a long way, maybe, from this book on learning card magic to the workshop my partner and I joined last Sunday. And in another way they’re close. In their joyfulness. Their serious playfulness. Their habit of being lost (and found) in the movement itself, and not the knowledge of it.
                Last Sunday’s workshop built on body mapping. We lay on the floor and traced one another’s shapes onto two large pieces of paper. Then we drew around and with our shapes: our hands, our legs, the messy cloud of our hair. We started by tracing with black markers. As soon as I got up I reached for colors. Purples. Pinks. Golds. Next to me my partner started growing roots, up from beneath her feet and into her legs. Watching her roots became drawing my roots. Drawing our roots became twining these roots together, weaving them, our papers and our hands and our colors playing together. At the end of the workshop we were invited to share about what we’d drawn, and I realized I didn’t want to say anything. It’s not that I hadn’t liked the workshop: I’d love it. But I’d felt something and learned something in the drawing, the time together, the crawling on the floor to find my colors, and I didn’t (not then, at least; not yet) want to put any of it in words.
                I know the secret for a few card tricks. At one point I knew how to perform two—how to push a card through the table, maybe, which was always a delight to share on a bored afternoon when we’d forgotten why talking had once felt exciting. Beyond the tricks (or through them?) there’s this playful wonder. This magic. The what? The how? Too often, in thinking, I can mistake the secret of the trick for the practice of its performance, but it’s in the performance that I’m always falling in love.

by Azlan

479: “To Keep My Secrets” (Jean Arasanayagam)

“You allowed me to live the way I wanted to, always.
You allowed me to keep my secrets.”
                -Jean Arasanayagam, from “Portents: For my mother” in The Colour of My Mind, p. 31

Today I’m celebrating secrets.
                This morning, on my way to work, a bird fluttered at the edge of eyesight. Disappearing into a bush. I looked around, trying to see them behind the bobbing branch they’d left behind, but they wanted not to be seen. I realized I wanted not to disturb or disrupt them more than I wanted to see their wings. I could have gone looking, pushing back greenery. I’ve done that before: in looking for birds, in asking my friends questions that they’re turning aside, in demanding (as a classroom teacher) that a student explain why they’re late. I’ve felt like I was supposed to do that, sometimes. And the demanding, asking, looking has felt icky even as I did it. Jean Arasanayagam’s lines help me understand why. It’s wonderful to share, it’s important to ask and support, and it’s also wonderful to have my secret perch in the foliage. To have a family that celebrated that for me, not pushing back the leaves.
                So tonight I’m enjoying the secret stars behind the clouds. The secret movements of small secret feet in the trees. The secrets inside and behind and beneath and running through my conversations and walks with people I love.
                The secrets you want to keep: I’m glad you have them. I don’t want to disturb them. They have their sheltering leaves, their strong branches, their flash of wings.

by Azlan

478: Drawing “What We Cannot Yet See”

                “How do we draw—or write—the emotions and parts of ourselves that we cannot yet see?”
                -Rachel Gu  my friend!) and Azlan Guttenberg Smith (that’s me!), “Our Monsters, Our Breath,” Experiments in Art Research

                Rachel and I sat next to each other in a grad seminar. Hour by hour, I watched shapes and shades wash out from the colored pens she brought with her. The pattern from a classmate’s shirt. The arrangement of our tables. A few branches, framed by our classroom window, and an abstract shape that was Rachel’s response to a piece of today’s reading.
                I’ve been scared of drawing for a long time. A mark on a page can feel so final, so I tried to put down perfect marks, clear edges, and everything I drew felt stiff, self-conscious, incomplete. And I’m also entranced when I watch people drawing. Smudging. Erasing. Playing out ratios and relationships.
                I started drawing along with Rachel. Class by class period, first with the pens she shared with me, then with colored pencils I brought to share with her. I picked up specific techniques, of course. (She dripped water from her bottle onto the table, and used it to smear her pen’s ink, and I loved it). But more than the specific techniques, I felt the space of drawing opening, the fear I’d felt settling into one tree in this rustling forest of shapes and shades as Rachel ran ahead and I followed—or turned off to wander a different way. Months after Rachel helped me start drawing again, I helped her start writing some poetry. These practices together led to the chapter we wrote for Experiments in Art Research, where you can read some of her poems and our translations. And these practices helped me—I hope us—sketch our way into a version of studying that is a kind of making space to share ourselves and share what we cannot yet see.

by Azlan

477: “It Helps Us Hope” (Ai Weiwei)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.” -Ai Weiwei, Elettra Stamboulis, and Gianluca Costantini, Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir

                I want to write poetry the same way I step into the rain. Feeling raindrops scattering. Touched by a sky that whirls and swirls, vast and near, and chuckling along with the wind and the trees and neighbors who are chuckling, too. Which is to say: I want to write poetry the same way I garden, watering seeds, watching shoots grow, noticing shadows and sunlight and moisture. I want to write poetry the same way I cook for you: here, I made this, for us, a little snack. Which is to say: I want to step out into the rain and garden and cook like writing poetry, these little practices of hope.
                I’m less and less interested in good art. In evaluating. (I’m less and less clear about what “good art” means, too, but the question doesn’t draw me). Ai Weiwei and his co-authors put words to this delight of recognizing instead what art can do. My professor played our class a song that one of her colleagues wrote in response to my professor’s poem, posted on facebook. That’s how they became friends, this colleague and my professor. Another time I helped a friend make signs for a community garden: tomatoes, garlic, so volunteers who were planting and visitors who were harvesting could navigate the bursting leaves. Last weekend my partner and I went to the library and drew pieces for a community art project: on one wooden puzzle piece she drew an open door. On another I drew friends beneath a tree. These pieces sit next to kindergarteners’ pieces and neighbors’ pieces and elders’ pieces and strangers’ pieces and librarians’, and the library grows a little more into a place where maybe we meet.

by Azlan

476: A “Pot of Bright Paint” (Isaac Williams)

“Pot of bright paint.”
“Wire bent into the shape of a moth.”
“Dried five-leaf clover, carefully folded.”
-possible starting items in Isaac Williams’ Mausrítter, where everyone plays as a mouse

                I think one of my favorite things about storytelling games (often called roleplaying games, but I prefer “storytelling”) is that little quirked smile of an invitation. Imagine this is you. Imagine, in Mausrítter, that you’re a four-inch tall mouse on the way back from the mushroom forest you help tend, and carrying a pot of bright paint. Why a pot of bright paint? That’s a good question. Why indeed?
                Imagine this is us. A game focuses on a little group, and we each make up a character with stories unfolding between us. If you’re Mangolia, the paint-carrying mushroom minder, maybe I’m Shale, a hedge witch with a scrap of wire bent into the shape of a moth. Maybe we grew up along the same creek. And I wonder who Shale is. What moth the wire is modeled on. Whether I like moths, or am afraid of them, or if I’m entranced by their dusty wings. I wonder who Magnolia is. How your mushrooms are doing. And why you have that paint. Were you making signs for the mushroom forest? Or repairing your house for winter? A storytelling game is a playful chance to remember, re-imagine,  and recommit to who we are together. To wonder why in the world our friend is carrying a dried five-leaf clover. To delight in all these you sees and mushroom forests and wes.

by Azlan

475: Talking in Pictures (Bree Paulsen)

                In the last pages of Bree Paulsen’s Garlic and the Vampire, words fall away. We’ve had lots of words in the rest of the book: funny words and sad words, scared words and laughter. But here at the end friendships are growing, gardens and orchards blooming, and all we need is pictures. A bat flying. A community laughing. Seedlings sprouting. A hat for the nice vampire, as he’s sensitive to the sun after all. A cool evening in front of a warm fire, and next morning some more shared joyous work as the characters repot some plants. The book ends with a smile.
                I’ve never managed to make a photo essay that did what I wanted it to do. But reading Bree Paulsen, I wish I could draw this week’s post for you. There would be some deep shade beneath a sycamore, as it was hot today. A couch in our dim livingroom as afternoon relaxed and three of us sprawled together. A glass of water on a coffee table. Fingers typing, but just for a moment, and then a sycamore again, the shadows grown all up around it into full night. Then maybe a pillow. Then the ceiling. Then dark arcs the way artists sometimes draw when the character is closing their eyes. Towards dreams, all these images washing together, and the sweet excitement of hoping that tomorrow I’ll wake up to friends and shared work the same way Garlic and the Vampire does—and that, tonight, I’m going to sleep. Last night’s thunderstorms still swirling through my mind. A bat flying somewhere. Its soft wings.

by Azlan

474: Puzzle Piece Dreams (Vivid Collection: Sky Roads)

                A few nights ago I dreamed of puzzle pieces. And not just any ones: these puzzle pieces, which I put together on Sunday in one long rush with my partner and our friend Natalie. It was a lovely afternoon of of cheese, crackers, and sliding the colors around. Feeling how they clicked together, how they didn’t. Not here a puzzle piece says. And then eventually it chuckles yep.
                Thinking about that dream, I’ve been sitting with how my mind fills up with what I turn my eyes and ears and hands to. I’m the kind of TV watcher who will be washing dishes, sometimes years after seeing a story, and find myself repeating lines I remember and lines I could imagine characters saying, instead, if the story went a different way. Do you do that? It’s not a habit I talk about much—just like the puzzle piece dreams aren’t something I talk about much—and there it is. Like I’m a glass brimful of what I’ve been drinking. Bump into me and out splashes mixings from what’s inside.

by Azlan

473: “Olfactory Memory” (Feurat Alani)

                “Olfactory memory is the hardest kind to erase. It’s the most emotional, the most arbitrary. It opens the doors without knocking.” -Feurat Alani (trans. Kendra Boileau), The Flavors of Iraq: Impressions of My Vanished Homeland, #728

                My love and I are moving into our new home. Today we were gardening in the yard together, weeding around the echinacea and watering the rhubarb and finding a tomato plant nestled in tall grass (hurray!). The smell of all these leaves and stems and soils wash through me.
                What are my olfactory memories that open the door without knocking? So many—and sometimes like a burst of wind they’re here and then gone, hard to locate, impossible to pin down. But a burst of sea air: sometimes I step outside a car near the coast and childhood moments in sand dunes and surf burst around me. Bay trees. And eucalyptus trees, their scent curling like their dropped bark. Beeswax from making candles. Sweat, the smell of bodies, of hiking up into mossy forests. I love the way smells pick me up and carry me, not a flood to lift my heavy body but magic to turn me into mist, swirling here to somewhere else. I love being pulled away from myself which is also being pulled back. 
                I wonder what these olfactory memories are for you. Not the ones you might think of, now, if you tried to remember, but the next one that pushes all through you without knocking on the door.

by Azlan

472: “Collage is a method of care” (Tim Abel)

“Please read these as invitations:

Collage looks easy.
Collage is surprising. 
[…] Collage happens before, inside, during, after an artmaking/learning moment.
Collage is really about being open to detours.
[…] Collage is a method of care.”

-Tim Abel, “How Is Learning a Collage?” (p. 31) in Experiments in Art Research

                I’m writing this late today, because today’s been a flurry of writing a journal article (due soon!) and setting up our new house with my partner and running off to campus to meet with a friend and continuing some other university work and then having other friends over. The light slowly fading outside. The trees shifting. The dishes clinking into a stack after dinner. Sometimes on a flurried day I wonder, how do all these pieces fit together?
                Tim’s a good friend, an inspiring colleague, a caring teacher/student/companion. His article’s on my mind because I co-edited Experiments in Art Research, which came out this summer. My copy arrived today. I didn’t spend long looking at it, but behind everything else I’ve been thinking about all the wonderful friends who collaborated in writing. About Tim Abel and Ishita Dharap and Sarah Travis and Catalina Hernández-Cabal and Jorge Lucero and Rachel Gu and so many others. I’m thinking about us all as a collage, a coming together of relationships. Lives interspersed. 
                “Collage is a method of care.” Of caring how one piece sits next to, connects to another. A method of approaching the relationship between my research and my friends and the washing dishes and all the interweaving questions and researches and lives unfolding around me. Through me. Maybe today I wondered how do all these pieces fit together, but today, luckily, I also felt how all these pieces are already together. Tim’s “method of care” reminds me that all these pieces are growing together in easy, surprising, open ways.

by Azlan