This week I realized I could listen better with my earbuds in.
“Maybe sound that enters closer to my brain works better,” I tell my husband as we rush for a train in Times Square, the sounds of drums doppler-effecting behind us emanating through the tiled station, white tiles dug into by singular mosaics of revelers on a Times Square New Years Eve***, a lady with blue stockings blowing a horn, a man with a gold hat throwing confetti. The band of deeply entranced Jamaican dudes we ran past, their drumming filled the station with echoes of openings. Usually I don’t like loud noises but I felt every thwack and thump and their vestiges as we moved toward the train, rhythms like really good words.
“Hear that?” I stop to ask a lady sitting along the station’s cold wall, fumbling through her purse and twisting her hair, me handing her a box of two pizza slices while my husband waited.
Image taken from Tantra Song, Tantric Paintings from Rajasthan
A half hour before that and before that, we’d asked a human person to pleas pack the pizza slices, a person who’s job it is to speak and listen, and move from customer to kitchen over and over in one night, a worker at the restaurant where we’d just shared pizza with a friend, after the closing party for another friend’s show, after the subway ride in, after teaching a class midday via zoom after waking up and buying bread for the week after a downtrodden shabbat dinner and every before that which happened in this long lead-up to Sunday morning and a first week of something that felt like a cruelty, a too close kind of pelting.
“You hungry?” I ask the lady and she says “oh yes. YES!” so gleefully and all I want sometimes is to slow down long enough to sit next to her and all the hers and learn more about her hunger and her stories but I know from living in New York City for a very long time, this isn’t always always a great idea, at least not for me.
Something left over in me from some other self wants to connect with every living thing suffering, that wants to alleviate my own somehow, perhaps in this way, through listening or talking, in this city, in this landscape. Too soft is my heart unfortunately. Sometimes I need to ask my husband to confirm whether this is true or not, whether this is a softness that is sometimes a hardness that is too soft or hard for this world sometimes?
“Why is my heart too soft and so sad at the things I cannot fix, the friends and family I cannot reach, this words I mean to land as love but also self-respect and my ideas about certain things, these things, immutable?” I ask. “Maybe you see a truth others sometimes don’t want to see and that can be painful,” he answers gently and I label him one who loves me so much that he is an unreliable witness.
Then I remember I had just spent a year in the situation he is describing only it was me pushing away a truth that was so painful I could not let myself see it.
“What is the way out from here?” I ask but we aren’t sure of the answer and I guess it lies somewhere in the work ahead.
For Better and For Worse
Sometimes I find myself calling this current we have found ourselves swimming in, for better and for worse, the worse being a flattened electronic landscape. I see artists and friends and me too finding ourselves more than not, wanting to be more like any one of a number of someone else’s who bury our profile picture for theirs and then theirs and then theirs, and rather than find the truthiest truth in just a small kindness we find outrage and war in a disagreement.
We mimic the larger culture rather than finding another way through, rather than listening to another or hearing the resounding beats of our collective yearnings at best, pain at worst.
In this current we find ourselves scrolling down and down and down and down, envying people we don’t know but who appear to know us better than we know ourselves, finding ourselves wanting so much, so much more, so much more than we are or have. We find our hearts broken by others who look as though they are not making a business of us wanting what they have and a business of appearing to do and be better than we are doing or being. If others have the answers that we want, then it appears even answers are a commodity in this particular overcrowded desert through which we wander, one where being oneself is questionable at best, the wrong way forward at worst.
But of course we want to support small businesses.
Fallibility
I keep wondering, what if being oneself is being able to say I am fallible, mutable, wrong?
That I am here also in the same current as you and still very much capable of love above all else in whatever small way that continually gets drowned out by a larger ire. Is it not why we have myths and stories? To teach us the way of humility?
Sometimes it seems we’ve replaced social media for myths. See Joseph Campbell for more.*
But then there is the work of the work…
I just reread an essay that took up the better part of my time last fall and which I hope to share in the coming weeks. I didn’t know as I was writing it that I was trying to write into the in-between of right and wrong.
I didn’t know until I found the time I needed to pull at the knot a bit more, a bit more and a bit more, to look under the surface a bit more, to ask all the questions before I found any semblance of answers, all imperfect.
I kept thinking I had to answer the questions but actually it was the questions that began to question the answers
Sometimes the work is the poking and the prodding and whatever lies beneath is a kind of love that being immutable won’t ever give you.
What lies under the water table of us if we can listen a little more deeply?
Hence the earbuds.
Working Toward What I’m Leaving Behind (a quote by Nick Cave***)
Maybe I’m feeling more attuned to my own work, taking old things that confounded me back out again, reflecting. This is what I have always told my students to do but somehow looking at my own work from the last few years has felt too painful, or felt like not the work I said I was going to do so what is it then?
After a week of talking to my residency participants and asking the same them, through the hard conversations, the beautiful conversations, the rolling questions which help us get closer to what makes us make art, and what makes us stop, I’m finding myself in a place of the kinds of questions my work needs to move forward.
The works unfinished, the work I didn’t know how to listen to, the works that floated like an enigma. What does this look like for you? What helps you listen more deeply, what happens when you run into the very things that frighten you the most and what does it look like when you run from it?
Some Serendipities and Synchronicities this week:
• Pádraig Ó Tuama reading Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We Are Right” by Yehuda Amichai translated by Stephen Mitchell, a perfect rendering, just listened to this morning, of all I’ve been grappling with and ways into the grappling.
• Committing to the Bit, a draft of her lecture at Bennington College by Sabrina Orah Mark, my writing mentor and friend, which came yesterday just before I was about to teach my first of a series of monthly workshops yesterday about what is our relationship with our work? What is our work trying to tell us and what shelter will we give it this month?
• ***The Revelers in Times Square by Jane Dickson but also Nick Cave’s, the best reason to come underground to see art…
• A revisit to the conversation between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers from my formative years (which still seem to be forming me).
• Two more monthly Winter Saturday Sessions to go and a welcome for you to join us if you’d like to register for the next two where we might explore together.