Creativity

During my 5 months at the Odin Teatret, I came to understand how complexity is built.

The theatre’s director, Eugenio Barba, said that he’s had a fixation on this phrase from the Bible, “And the spirit became flesh.” How can the spirit become flesh? An answer he found is to produce mechanisms and repeat them. Elaborate them, build upon them, and eventually, “the story arises in spite of us.” When Eugenio builds a performance, he doesn’t have a script. He comes in with ideas and considers propositions. He gathers books, songs, poems, etc. in an alphabetized binder of impressions and he mashes them together and tears them apart to see what functions. He’ll ask the actors, “sing a love song,” try them all out, see if one works, and then maybe use it. He’ll ask each of them to find seven ways of using a tablecloth, or “I have to see [in your movements] a succession of Greek statues.”

This is a biological dramaturgical process. As a director, this style often means saying “I don’t know yet.” Instead of coming in with an idea, it has to do with seeing how things go and fixing (making solid / repeating) things as you go along, and then probably changing them as the structure becomes larger, so that what is being formed is like a living cell. For this to work, the director needs to feel like he/she doesn’t need to know what’s going to happen. What occurs in rehearsals is not talked about or repeated out of the rehearsals. Inside rehearsals, rather than being judged, Eugenio only determines what does or does not “function.” The work of the actor is considered holy, and is protected. Sometimes the structure from the work of six months is destroyed, but perhaps it must be done for the end result to function, and the work of those six months was necessary to get to whichever new beginning.

Eugenio supplies the analogy: when a child is taking shape, it isn’t thinking about what it will be when it’s 20. More important is the anatomy, nervous system, and voice.

This has become my modus operandi in creative work. Freed from the expectation of what I will create, I simply create. If I am writing, I just write. I collect impulses, jump off or build from them, and eventually put things together in a rough structure, work out details, and then shake the structure, toppling it each time until I have something sturdy enough, etc. If I am improvising in theatre/movement or writing, I just see where I go, allowing free association, and as best as I can take ego and expectation out of it.

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Every four years, the Odin gets painted on the outside. This summer, the time had come. For several weeks, on the days it didn’t rain, we would spend the afternoon painting. One of the episodes that sticks with me the most was one of those final days.

A small group of us had been working with Luis Alonso as a little workshop. We were working on solo performances and isolating skills—like voice, object work, and stilts.

The first time we used stilts, we glued ourselves to the walls. The second time, we could all walk. The third time, we could run and dance, and went outside. The fourth time, we used the stilts to explore what characters and movements we could make. The fifth time, for me, occurred when we were painting. Luis gave me a different pair of stilts that were not so good for walking, but viable for standing still. Wearing them was like becoming a Star Wars battle droid; I could easily be blown down by a gust of wind. The feet, a few scrawny rectangles, had to traverse the rocky and uneven terrain outside as I carried a bucket of brown paint and a small brush that I would use to make a single line all across one side of of theatre.

It wasn’t easy. Mirla, the other American at Planet Odin, helped me get to the side of the theatre, holding my hand and worrying for my life. I kept her there for the first little bit while I painted the little line, to catch me if the wind caught me or if I leaned too far in some direction or slipped on a rock. To step, I had to place all my weight in one foot, and then pick up the other with its added few feet in height, and not let that added weight or height lean me in any which way while I moved it closer and down, picked up the other, etc. When there was nothing to hold on to, each side-step occurred very, very slowly. When I had a pillar I could wrap one arm around, holding the paint and bucket in the other hand, I could make a few quicker movements and feel a little more secure before the next few minutes of fear.

After about an hour, I had finished the line. Luis came by and did not offer his hand. Instead, he kept just enough distance that I had a lot of doubt whether he’d be able to catch me. In the past he’d always done that, staying at enough of a distance that the concept of falling was integrally linked with tragedy — but, in the few times that I really did fall, somehow being right where he needed to be. As I stumbled along the gravel to get to a place high enough to sit down, he walked in front of me and asked me if I knew why birds build nests in high places. The first reason, he said, was to avoid predators near the ground. The second reason is so that when the little birds first try to fly from their nest, there’s enough distance from the ground to give them a flying chance. I wanted to say “but Luis, I’m not a bird,” but it was everything I could do to keep waling, arms flailing, and not fall.

A few hours later I was comfortably painting on the roof. Paul, who’s in charge of the theatre’s upkeep, walked by carrying a young bird that’d presumably fallen out of its nest and hadn’t survived the fall. That, I realized, is how it is. Sometimes, birds die before they learn how to fall. Luis had taught me how to fall. It was a lesson on how to live in danger.

Danger is something that can paralyze or that can facilitate a state of complete mental and physical awareness, of just being a human doing its best to stay alive from one moment to the next. Ordinary life runs on a commercial basis, less so on the realizing of an ideal, and doesn’t offer so much of this experience of being totally, dangerously, wonderfully and terribly alive.

A French animated film called I Lost My Body ends with the protagonist making a leap of faith onto a crane late in the night. For all respects and purposes, he didn’t need to do it. He wasn’t chased by anything. He didn’t need to get to anywhere in particular. But he had lost his hand, and his romantic interest didn’t work out, and he was left feeling aimless, disfigured, and alienated. He jumps from the roof to the far-away crane because he’s willing to risk his life, because the quality of being alive is at stake. He makes it, and that’s what makes the ending so satisfying: even though things haven’t gone so well for him and he’s just gambled his life on an aimless jump, it’s the danger and thrill of that jump which gives him the experience of how incredible it is to be alive.

In June at the Odin, the regular training was interrupted. Carolina Pizzaro, the group mother who led our training, gave a speech at dinner on the 16th. She said, “The sun is going to die soon.” Then she told a story of a man she knows who is an expert in Aikido and Thai massage, and who had learned wellness techniques like acupressure. He is 39 and was diagnosed with cancer last November/December, and was told he had a year to live. He says that this was the greatest gift he could be given, because it’s helped him focus on what’s important.

Carolina asked us to do no work the next day, to rest, and to think about what we would do if we had a year left to live. She said “I love you,” with a tenderness that told us we were family.

At that moment, I knew what I would do if I had a year left to live. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten an idea for a novel, and I had fallen in love with writing it. I realized that if I were to die in a year, I would continue to spend my time left writing the novel, even if there would be nobody around left to read it. And if I died without finishing the novel, then I’d have died doing something with love.

Hayao Miyazaki once said in an interview, “it's not that I'm making something adjusted to our time. It's that, as a person living in this time, I have found something I should make because of our time.” Maybe I’m being naïve, but that is much of what writing this novel has felt like.

And just like that, my understanding of what it means to love evolved. I’m finding that the times I’ve felt most in need of someone to love, what I’ve really needed is to feel love in my life. It’s beautiful to be in love with someone, but love is more than what’s shared between two people. Loving is a state of being, like tired or happy. Love is not something you do, it’s the way you are. Someone can unlock this quality in you, but tying your ability to love to the availability of someone to do that for you is really limiting. How many love stories are not actually about love but about security, comfort, well-being, jealousy, fear, lust, or pain? For me, if I say “I love you” and I mean something else, then I am collecting content for the psychological horror novel I will eventually write.

Thankfully, I no longer feel like I lack love in my life. It’s not because I’ve found someone, but because I’ve fallen in love with life. I am no longer in search of someone to experience life with. And jeez, this is hugely liberating. Maybe one day I will marry, but the important thing is that I no longer hold expectations about the people I meet—not because I’ve decided not to, but because my mind is no longer in need of a sense of union.

The days passed and one day of rest turned into another, and into a week, and into more. Throughout June, Carolina and Luis were working with Eugenio and the other Odin actors on the performance I’d come to see in the Collective Mind workshop in March. The Ikarus actors started self-directed training and work throughout the day, and Mirla and I had the month to ourselves to do our own training and creative projects. June became for me a month of cementing my own training and working on the novel. I transformed my room into a consecrated space, setting up knots between images and excerpts that I’m working to unravel through my writing.

But what’s a year? When I started my Watson journey, I felt time bearing down on me. I felt like I had a year, and then I’d probably be off to a job somewhere. The idea that I had only a year led me to take fast travel options to limit transportation time.

But our lives are the longest in human history. We have plenty of time. My fellowship has come to an end, but my adventure has only just begun.

I’ve begun to see that the goal isn’t always the destination so much as the journey to get there. There’s a difference between knowing this and experiencing it, and it has to do with what we really want. When the shift came for me that I really wanted the journey, my orientation toward travel changed. I wanted to walk, bike, sail. If it takes two weeks or three months to cover the same distance as a flight could in a day, I don’t really mind so much. I want to see the world and experience it for reals, and I’ve got plenty of time to do that. It’s not a matter of consumption; it’s a matter of nourishment, cultivation of an ability to relax, and of real, direct experience that inspires creativity, open-mindedness and exchange. It’s less about seeing the world than interacting with it, changing and being changed by it, and traveling in a way which enables that.

But I wrote much of this at a time when I strongly felt these things: purpose, love, and the quality of being alive. When a tempest comes and starts to sweep these out of reach, it becomes harder and harder to understand what you once did and to experience different circumstances with the same quality of joy and purpose. Purpose isn’t something you find and then boom you’ve got it, it’s something that you’re always reiterating within yourself, remembering and forgetting, connecting to and disconnecting from. Maybe disconnecting is its own way of falling. But a bird that’s already learned how to fly can figure out how to do it again.

Looking through my notes from the year again, I find an appropriate Rumi quote:

“The way of love is not 
a subtle argument.

The door there 
is devastation. 

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom. 
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.”

Embodiment

I can’t help but think I’ve been substantially misled by the environment I grew up in when it comes to how I think about the body. 

I feel like a general message I came away with in my childhood was that cultivation of the mind is more important than cultivation of the body. That may be generally true and especially incentivized in this economy, but that way of framing it as a comparison privileges mind over body as if they’re two separate things, and they’re not. They’re just not. 

And I understand how that kind of thinking made me and helped others feel better for not having cultivated their bodies, or for the real health struggles many face that make it really difficult to cultivate the vitality of the body. But at the end of the day, the psychological programming that led me to neglect my body also weakened my mind. 

An integrated approach would acknowledge that how the body works has an effect on the mind. This would mean that what (and when) you eat and drink affects your mind. How you move affects your mind. Your sleep, breath, the drugs you take (including caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc.), and your interactions with people affect your mind. The exercise that you do or don’t affects your mind. 

The integrated approach acknowledges these things, and then asks, so what should I do in order to become satisfied with my body and mind, so that I’m not falling into any psychological traps like unnecessarily comparing myself or physiological traps like being incapable of doing what I strive to do. 

Everybody may have different standards for the strength and flexibility or knowledge and mental acuity they want to have, but that’s not necessarily what I mean. Satisfaction doesn’t come sustainably by reaching goals when it implies dissatisfaction with the current state, i.e. the state of not having reached a goal yet. That kind of striving makes satisfaction contingent on reaching a goal and, having achieved something, tends to make continued satisfaction contingent on reaching yet another goal. 

The sustainable way is to find satisfaction in the process of striving. But that also means that there is no fixed end-goal, only a process. Rather than deciding you’ll be happy when you reach a certain weight, career, or educational degree, it becomes about being at peace with where you are now, submitting to the process of being alive, and improving from where you are at. 

This means that temporary diets that have narrow aims (like weight loss or muscle gain) generally become replaced by an approach to food that integrates all of the ways food affects the organism. Instead of sacrificing general health and performance for weight loss (like the keto diet), it prioritizes health and performance in a way that constantly builds upon these with no apparent end (though maybe some lapses). Becoming healthy, strong, knowledgeable, or skillful isn’t something you do and then stop doing; it’s a choice you are constantly making, so it’s less a temporary diet or training and more a lifestyle. 

My mind often thinks of the Elric Brothers, how they made a sacrifice (their bodies) they weren’t ready for that bore only horror and went searching for an answer (a way to get their bodies back) they didn’t know was there.

The Elric Brothers in Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward and Alphonse, search for the philosopher’s stone to restore their bodies after a failed attempt to bring their mother back to life using alchemy, which in this universe, operates under the law of equivalent exchange: for something to be gained, something of equal value must be lost.

I think that I sacrificed my body for an excess of something that I thought was valuable (knowledge). The result was a chronic illness that debilitated me for a few years, a high level of educational achievement, and a low level of actual knowledge retention. I overloaded in classes constantly, and I paid the price for it. 

My Watson year outfitted me with a blueprint for how to treat my body and mind so that they engage in a process of healing and improvement. Like the Elric Brothers, I’m on a journey to get my body back. 

Aspects of my year abroad established that a) physical strength, flexibility, and general looseness, mobility, and relaxation are worth striving for, not instead of but in conjunction with knowledge and understanding, and b) many steps in the development of deeper understanding are facilitated by putting the body in order. 

When Eugenio Barba went to India and encountered Kathakali, he was struck by the ethos of the boys at the Kerala Kalamandalam school of Kathakali, who got up every day at dawn to do their exercises for hours in silence. Their ethos sprung from the discipline, meticulousness, and humility with which they learned the demanding technique of their tradition. The act of doing theatre was encapsulated by their submission to the process of it. This embodied ethic, a craft’s foundation, is a popular ethos in traditional Asian theatre, and an ethos which under the Western separation between mind and body, muddling of the meaning of spirituality, and linking of work put in with the product that’s supposed to come out, is often absent in Western theatre. Étienne Decroux sought to achieve it in Corporeal Mime, and Eugenio Barba has sought it in training itself.

Eugenio writes, “All the physical exercises are spiritual exercises which relate to the entire development of the man [person], his way of making all his physical and mental energies burst forth and be controlled”; “training does not have a utilitarian goal. It is the amplification of the life of our body.” The training at the Odin Teatret varies widely from actor to actor, with most actors having developed their own individual training over time. What is shared universally is that all the training works on the body, voice, and mind, and is rigorous and consistent. Training is more than a career-motivated goal; Eugenio writes, “the mastery over this technique becomes a personal process which makes the actors discover their own interior flora and fauna, introducing them to the shared territory of their collective imagination… the training and the work on the performance become essentially the work of the actor on him/herself, also as an individual.” Since Eugenio encountered Kathakali, his tenet has become to let roots grow out of the need not to belong in any one place but to shape an ideal homeland made of values without borders. He calls this “to sink roots in the sky.” He writes, “There are people who live in a nation, in a culture. And then there are people who live in their own bodies.”

I speak of theatre because it is embodied philosophy. In The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, philosopher Mark Johnson writes of the embodied mind that “Our task is not to supersede the body but to embrace it, to learn how it allows us to have meaning, and to nurture it as the locus of our world” — because it is through our bodies that we experience the world. And when we view the mind as embodied, then meaning, imagination, and reason are embodied; reason and emotion are not separate but linked; and spirituality, too, is experienced through the body. The meanings we derive about the world therefore become grounded in our bodily experience. The concern of a world without a God was that there would be no inherent meaning. But by noticing our own experience, I think we can come to appreciate how we create meaning for ourselves individually through our experiences, and collectively through interpretation of our experiences. We can start to build that appreciation by becoming aware of, and learning to cultivate, the organism through which we experience life.

My research has largely been about seeing, and in particular, seeing people in their art. I could not see people until I could, at least partly, see myself. Something which has become abundantly clear is that we live within several different ways of knowing how to live, and these ways affect us, and influence our expression. I am not saying that art directly represents the inner state of the artist, but that it gives us a glimmer. Just as we are what we eat, we produce based on the lives we live, and where, and how we live them. I am not surprised that in the past my default expression was of suffering, nor that in the present it is of bliss. Suffering was my pattern of feeling then, bliss is my pattern of feeling now. What I created, listened to, read, watched, said, thought, was guided by how I felt, and how capable, or incapable, I was of separating or aligning myself with my feeling.

Our bodies are representations of how we live. When we move, we therefore represent our strength or weakness, our security or insecurity, happiness or unhappiness. If we’re not to fake who we are, then projecting the person we want to be is a matter of becoming that person emotionally, intellectually, and physically. If we’re not to live stuck thinking about the future, then we should do this wherever we are in the process with less interest in what we will become and more in what we are.

If I for a moment adopt an evaluative lens of my physical progress, I’ll say I’ve overcome the chronic sickness cycle that was holding me back and the lingering cough that was keeping things unpleasant. I can touch my toes now, but in the context of what’s possible for me in the long run I’m still inflexible. My pranayama breathing ratio averages 12 seconds (in) 24 (hold) 24 (out), but in the context of pranayama training and the yogic path this is a beginner ratio. I weigh 136, which is still slightly underweight for my height (6 feet). I ran my second half-marathon this week (the first one in Denmark in July), but my time (2 hr 40 min) is still slow and I have a long way to go before I’m ready for longer distances. I’ve built a lot of strength throughout my body, but I still have a lanky physique and have a lot of strength to build throughout. To get to where? I don’t know. My evaluative lens has standards. I try not to listen to it so much, because wherever I’m going, the journey’s amazing.

Music in Yoga (and other distractions from suffering)

I like music a lot. In the past I’ve been a big fan of alternative music. Circa Survive, St. Vincent, and Julian Casablancas were my jam. For several years I had on rotation a cooing mix of introspective and sadness-infused slow-march ballads that carry the astral beauty only found in loss. I imagine if I put all the album covers together, it would look as if the night sky were wrapped in cellophane. During my first month in Paris in a tiny apartment without WIFI, I pretty much just had that playlist and another that I’d downloaded on a whim before a flight—Soulful Disco. This meant that when I listened to music, I got a choice: either to be haunted by my past or confronted with boogie. The tonal juxtaposition achieved a Neon Genesis Evangelion-like eeriness, where Fly Me To The Moon punctuates every episode like a joyful meditation on death. Stuff like Shake Your Body and When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going did not work well then as my potato-peeling anthems.

When I was starting to get better after my nasal coblation surgery in January, all of a sudden I was more receptive to happier music. Then, I came to a place where I enjoyed pretty much all the music I was hearing. Then I started to experiment with (gasp) not listening to music.

There is the case of too much music. I used to play music to help me study or write, run, workout, etc. (I still do sometimes), but I’ve learned to wonder what noises I’ve been drowning out. One of my teachers at Tattva Yogashala, Sunil Sharma Ji, said it well when he expressed that Western yoga classes play all sorts of music. “But your breath is already such beautiful music!” And listening to things is great, but we have our own internal music—the sounds of our bodies, and all the stuff going on in our minds. I realized that by drowning myself in music, I was drowning out my thoughts, railing myself onto a familiar track so that I wouldn’t confront the terrible roar of silence.

And Sunil said something which deeply challenged me: music is one way we can distract ourselves, and television and video games and such too, but we also distract ourselves with books. Certainly, all these things have the power to inspire, to teach, etc., and are very capable of doing so for a quiet mind. But how much of my reading did I do because I was unable to sit with myself? How much joy, learning, and inspiration from it did I miss because I didn’t take the trouble of organizing myself first? 

Here’s me some years ago, writing about how even though I was taking literature courses, I didn’t seem to be experiencing what I was reading:

Two semesters of British
Literature and I’ve got
to return to you Spencer
Bacon Shakespeare I’m
I’ve forgotten you I never
really experienced your
pleasures I read you
but not really and now
that I’m here I know
that I wasn’t there when I
sat and I leaned down
and words passed through
a machine

There’s a frantic pace to it that comes from the constant reiteration of self (“I”) and the lack of punctuation, embodying in form the very opposite of what the speaker (me) of the poem wants: to slow the hell down and really hear something.

Here’s the first poem I wrote on the Watson, I think it was on the plane to Edinburgh:

If there are thoughts let them be heard
I hear
no thoughts
in here

I’ve had the pleasure of carrying around a book of Rumi’s poems for a while now. Here’s a fragment that pokes out at me at the moment:

“Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.”

It’s this kind of respite from noise that I needed, and that I’ve gotten. In a macabre, surreal (and narcissistic) sort of way, the problematic bits of my nasal turbinates that went up in smoke in January carried around the world and became a pandemic cold for everybody, as well as a shrewd imposition of global isolation—and for some, solitude.

Art comes naturally from a quiet mind, but so does learning, and so does clarity, ability to see. They all feed into each other so that art is an authentic and essential expression of both the individual who makes it and of all that’s around the artist, or to put it in more transcendental terms, of the very universe itself.

For me to begin to quiet my mind, I’ve needed to learn to stop constantly filling it with distractions and to take the time to really sort through what’s already in there. Sometimes I don’t succeed in that. Right now it’s hard. I distract, sometimes to soothe or numb myself, when I know that the hardest and maybe the best thing I can do is sit with myself until, whether the cause of the pain stays or goes, the pain I experience transforms into something else.

Happiness

I’ve been reading my notes from over the year. Here’s one I wrote in January before my surgery: 

Getting the Watson for me was like the universe telling me “all right Blake, good things are going to start happening in your life again. But here’s the catch. It’s going to all happen with your nose clogged. That’s right. Your nose, totally clogged. And it’s going to drip into your throat and make you feel like coughing. Without pause. The whole time.”

In my senior year at Pomona, I became fixated with happiness. Who was happy? Who knew what happiness was? I’d ask a lot of people “are you happy”, and I was usually pretty disappointed with the answers I got. Many people who said they were happy weren’t convincing, and people who said they weren’t happy tended to be at a loss for how to attain happiness.

When the quarantine started, I took an online course called “The Science of Well-Being.” The professor prefaced the course by saying that she herself didn’t feel happy or well. The course was about what makes us happy and what doesn’t. E.g. breaks make us enjoy positive experiences more, so commercials make watching TV more positive; experiential purchases make us feel more alive and less susceptible to social comparisons; we overestimate what our emotions will be like, so doing stuff like getting bad grades, breaking up, or getting married won’t make us feel as bad or good as we tend to think they will—at least not for long, because we adapt to good and bad events. 

But if the professor herself was unhappy, then something was probably missing. Becoming aware of how our choices really affect us and so making more happiness-adjacent choices in everyday life is one thing, but there seem to be missing pillars in here.

Edmond Dantès in Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo says that “I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.” In Confucius From the Heart, Yu Dan writes that “increasing our ability to hold on to happiness is the greatest thing we can learn.” 

According to Yuval Harari in Sapiens, people experience happiness only through pleasant sensations in their bodies. So “the only thing that can make us truly happy,” Harari writes, “is manipulating our biochemistry.”

By adopting changes in consumption (like vegan-based eating focused on healthy foods and a large reduction of distractions) and by adopting practices like yoga that facilitate changes in the body and mind, I’ve re-engineered, however much, my biochemistry.

Moshe Feldenkrais writes, “Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.” In pranayama, just the act of breathing becomes blissful. Improve the quality of breathing, and of course quality of life will feel improved. Learn techniques like abhyanga for self-massage or Feldenkrais, and it becomes easier to remove tension from the body, and with tension reduced and the body able to relax, life feels better. Heal a chronic cold and by golly, life feels better. Reduce craving for stimulation, and the mind becomes clear and life seems to get better. A general feeling of health and wellness in the mind and body doesn’t equate to happiness, but it means there’s a lot less to struggle against to get there. 

Family and community have a larger impact on happiness than money and health. It’s one thing to become capable and well and another thing to address the fear of loving. Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra “Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.” When I graduated, I was at a point that I no longer felt much love within myself. I had to learn to love myself first, and then I started to find family and community everywhere.

More than anything, happiness consists of seeing the entirety of one’s life as meaningful and worthwhile. We make meaning together, so maybe happiness is synchronizing one’s delusions of meaning with the collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conclusion. That was easy to do at the creative environments I found myself in over the Watson year, but has been harder since I came back home.

Finally, a little passage from The Catcher in the Rye has opened up to me.

“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement is designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

I thought my own environment couldn’t supply me with the feeling of love and meaning, so I looked for it in something else. I looked for some feeling of purity, I looked and looked and I found it outside. I’d given up on finding it at home, and possibly, even in the US. But whatever that purity is, as a character named Jeff in the TV show Community (about community college students) says, “Purity that demands exclusion isn’t real purity.” If I can’t find all-inclusive meaning for myself, then I haven’t found true purity, have I? So long as I’m able, I should keep “looking.”

The Non-Verbal Humanities

Though I’ve learned some things about how to write, I am realizing that my capacity to represent on the page will always be incomplete so long as I don’t know how to draw. In drawing, the principles are the same as I’ve been learning. Corporeal Mime is often taught to visual artists because, as a discipline that tries to express thought through movement, it teaches the artist to see the thought in movement, and so, to represent the character of bodies, objects, environment—all things. 

Reading through one of Tom’s books as he explains each movement of a piece in words, I realize how imperfectly words track the dynamism and fluidity of physical movement. Listening to an audiobook about Zen Master Ryokan, it’s evident that a description of each individual calligraphic line won’t give a clear image of the whole. The word and the image are each sublime, in different ways. When the word or the image try to explain the other, naturally, they fail.

Our education is largely verbal, so it fails essentially to do what it attempts to do. It inflicts on the world students of the humanities who know little about humanity, their own or anyone else’s (paraphrase: Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote,

“I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.”

I remember summer 2018, having daydreams of an angel with a clipped wing and writing that “I have a difficult time believing that I have a bright future.” I think I saw myself risen as an angel, having gotten to Pomona, and then having fallen by everything seeming to come apart, me returning home that year, ill, with nothing on my plate to do. 

Huxley explicates,

“Systematic reasoning is something we could not as a species or as individuals do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, into the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended.”

Systematic reasoning is a gift of the verbally-educated elite, a gift which to William Blake makes them angels. But, as Thomas Aquinas asks, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The question is nonsense. The separation into angels is a product of systematic reasoning. 

The key out is unsystematic direct perception. To direct perception, concepts are distortions that make facts into familiar likenesses, general labels, and explanatory abstractions. Nature, as the primary fact of existence, cannot be fully realized by concepts; it can only be realized by experience. I am no angel, I never have been—I’ve just thought I was.

Goethe wrote that “I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches… A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or spoken word altogether.” Echoed through my mind is Beckett’s “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” I still think stains are important, even if they only take something transparent and make a spot of it visible, but I see how much more important it may be experientially for the individual organism to draw, and even, to move—to represent directly.

The non-verbal humanities don’t have to do with the perennial humanities question, “who influences whom to say what when.” The non-verbal humanities ask “how do we make ourselves more aware of inward and outward reality; more open to the spirit; less apt by psychological malpractice to make ourselves ill; more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system” (paraphrase: Huxley). Unbeknownst to me, maybe this is what I have really been studying.

I set out to learn about movement. What I knew was that the way western society has grown to move reveals a deep inner chasm where some essential somethings seem to be missing. I didn’t expect I would learn that the way we breathe, what we eat, and even the way we perceive time are getting in the way of our ability to be expressive. I did not expect that going on a journey to explore the body would take me into a process of healing my mind—but that is exactly what happened.

Act II complete, bring on Act III

And just like that, I think I solved my cough – like a story resolving itself in the second act, only to reveal later that the initial conflict was just a barrier from really seeing another one.

I had a cycle of colds for years, so my body got used to coughing and throat-clearing. I learned yesterday that the more you cough and clear your throat, the more your body makes mucus to protect your throat. So what had been happening because I was sick started to happen because I had been sick, and never stopped. Up until yesterday I was clearing my throat every few seconds, and it was always a major pain and source of anxiety that mucus would interrupt my voice. But knowing that now, I’m making the effort not to cough or clear my throat, and a little over a day into it, I already feel a lot better.

In Denmark some months after my nasal turbinate coblation (stab, zap, shrink) surgery, I wrote

Everything feels pure now. Loving is no longer an apology. 
The Gods kept my medicine
from me for a while, but now, I am cured – 90%. I am still missing 
one last balm. One day, that
may give me too much abundance of health
and lead me to lose myself again.

If that tingling sensation in my throat goes away by letting what is likely to have been damaged heal, then I will be ecstatic, freer to use my voice than I’ve been in at least 3 years. The pressure in my right ear and the physical tightness in my throat might both be related to this, so if it solves them too, then as far as I know, I will have overcome all the physical conditions that I’ve been struggling against, and this, largely because of the time that I had to myself during the Watson, in which I started to notice and address my own problems. I was so motivated by my physical challenges that I made lifestyle changes that are so drastic, spartan, unconventional, that I should have a great chance of living healthily and happily for a long time due to intentional, internal modification of biochemistry through lifestyle choices and practices.

And yet I worry.

I’m hit, at the same time, with the unstable position of my future travel, with the instability of my finances, and my – what is, essentially – wildly unstable current situation, in an environment where the values for taking time, remaining humble and pursuing experience rather than achievement, and above all, listening to and following my gut, do not feel like values that are supported.

When I think of my irons in the fire now, I’m increasingly getting struck with doubt, and much of it because I don’t feel much support in these all wildly challenging – writing a novel, starting a youtube channel, developing classes – endeavors. And because they take a huge amount of time, two months in, I look at the progress I’ve made, and see that it is appropriate progress, and yet, have doubts about whether the two months I have left here will be enough.

I envisioned a different life for myself, and I intend not to forget it.  

Jedi

maybe I can call what came before for me
my Anakin Skywalker phase: obsessed with the ego,
placing undue value on power, prestige, wealth,
accomplishment
and not yet seeing that my passions
and the lies therein
were leading me on a path toward the creation of pain:
psychological pain for myself and others.
Imagine this Dark Side: Phi Beta Kappa and going to
Harvard to become a lawyer, 
but still not knowing why I do what I do
and still relying on the gifts of the market
to satisfy me.
                          I would not have been satisfied
were I even to become a great academic or lawyer in that 
image.
I would still be shooting in the dark,
unaware of living.

Knowing this, I don’t need what my ego wanted before.
The way of the light side is subtle, small, and unassuming.
This path paves itself.

Home

One day a little before the Watson, I held a flower and a blade of grass in my hands. I turned the flower in my left hand, observing it. I was surprised. I was overjoyed. I was finally holding a flower without my fingers automatically folding and cutting at it.

Then I looked at the blade of grass in my other hand, and noticed I’d crumpled it up and sucked it dry with my thumb.

I thought, how much, and what kind of work do I need to do, so that when I hold something I don’t destroy it?

I forgot about that for a year, but when I look back now, I see that the whole year I was searching for answers to this, and encountering these sorts of challenges. Several times, I lived very closely with people who were very difficult to live with. I had to learn how to coexist with them, and encourage the best in both them and in myself — to be an ally, even to the people who can only see enemies.

This became a point that seriously challenged me. Whether I knew it or not, I was learning how to deal with qualities that I saw in my parents and that I experienced in my own upbringing — numbing feelings, feelings of paranoia and crippling regret, neurotic masks to hide gaping hurts, and the lives of lost puppies.

I came home because, armed with a spiritual practice that gave me psychological stability and with the love and support of a theatre group that had given me another upbringing during COVID, I felt ready to love my family. I knew that I was exiting a place that felt like Paradise and re-entering a place that, throughout my life, has felt like the Inferno. I felt like I was finally ready to confront that place, sit with it, and no matter what, to be okay.

I’m still okay. I think, though it’s really emotionally strenuous to be here, that my memories are slowly opening up, and that even if it turns out I can only help myself, then I’ll have helped myself a great deal by being here. I harbor a little hope that addressing trauma here is the key to solving my cough. I don’t know. I’m trying not to be attached to that hope.

Work To Do
I pick a withered, brown flower between my thumbs.
Another day, my automatic fingers would have creased its stem, tucked; creased and tucked
Until crumpled, thumb-sucked, it’d have fallen.

It turns, softly upon my forefinger, already dead.

In my other hand, a small green leaf, picked from the ground, nails stabbing and feeling juice, fingers
stacking it into slivers.

No. 12 by Magda Cordell, 1960

Embryo. Skeleton within. Skin. As Critic Lawrence Alloway put it, “skinned.”

at the Tate Britain, London

The sense of embryo is created by the oval-shaped opening within the thick red. The yellows inside are fluid-like, and mix with the red to be more skin-like. One long line pitted like a bulb runs up to its top, a circular skull-like head, with deeper, more skin-shaped reds in its shadow. The shadow continues through open spaces where the arms would be and to the pelvis, to legs that would be sitting, giving the impression of bones outside of skin. Other legs with lighter mixes connect to the bulb, like they’re perching on a thermometer. 

Bubbles disrupt the red that runs around with brush strokes in different directions like living rivers. At some places, large slices of red pop out, giving dimension. The whole piece is alive and in flux. It’s like an ancient unborn living thing from science fiction.

Red on Maroon - Mark Rothko

Rothko said of Michelangelo that he “achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is hit their heads forever against the wall.” Maybe it’s a testament to Rothko’s success that so many Rothko rooms pepper the world—in the Tate Modern in London and the Phillips Collection in D.C., to name two. If paintings can be all-consuming black holes, these are them. Look long enough and things can start to appear, things you’re stuck in, enclosed by the rectangles and enclosed by the canvas, enclosed in the room, enclosed with you. This Rothko room is particularly suited to ghostly rumination, the rectangles big, dark, and uneven; the other colors hues of red or red made pink or brown that pop and burn.  

Red on Maroon goes up and down. It goes left and right, inside the rectangle and out. There’s enough texture, jaggedness and roundedness to keep the eye moving—and when my eyes are moving around it, I think they’re circling, like they’re trying to escape the space. And when the eyes rest in one place, they might start to create something: a pyramid, an apocalyptic landscape, a hollow crowd, a monumental red archway. And what else?

“I have known Shadow” - Rudyard Kipling

Reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmbq24FVKNg

“I have known Shadow” - Rudyard Kipling

I have known Shadow
I have known Sun
And now I know
These two are one. 

___

The synergy between dark and bright is a common subject in poetry. Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice holds that separately, either fire or ice could destroy the world just fine. What I like about Kipling’s take is the simplicity with which shadow and sun are paired. The switch from past tense to present lets darkness be one moment, light the next, and wisdom the last: that without dark there is no light, and without light there is no dark. It’a a simple reminder to the simple truth that there will be an end to bad times, which will usher in good times; and an end to good times—and, again, bad times. 

Alizarin Kurt - Elizabeth Peyton

I love the dark aesthetic here. I feel like I can get lost in the deep and brighter reds on the left that make the hoodie’s bled purples and whites almost feel safe by contrast. 

The head and neck are tilted forward, the left arm pulled behind him—you can imagine the shoulder up—and the right arm down and front, relaxed, but in a bony, hurt, I-can-show-you-hell sort of way. 

Shoulders are really expressive. Hunching the shoulders and lowering the head protects the neck when a person fears an attack, real or virtual. His hair covers his eyes and ears. Kurt is vulnerable in Peyton’s portrait, and what Kurt’s showing us is a cool acceptance of insecurity and guardedness.

Christ Appearing to the Apostles after the Resurrection - William Blake

The arms are turned so that the palms face out, with elbows bent so that the forearms come out further. His head and neck are inclined to the left, eyes looking down left. His left foot is forward, with the big toe separated and the rest of the toes packed together. The chest is tilted only a few degrees to the left.

The scene comes from the final chapter of St. Luke’s gospel, when two angels announce that Christ has risen from the tomb, and Christ later appears to his disciples, holding his hands out reassuringly to show the wounds from the crucifixion and show that he is there in flesh and bones.

Statue of Liberty

The right arm is fully extended straight up, the hand grasping a torch. The left hand holds a tablet (tabula ansata, a tablet evoking the law, with the date of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence written on it). The thumb is behind the tablet, the other fingers curled around. The body is straightened and robed. Notice how letting the right sleeve come down and bare the arm amplifies the statue’s revolutionary message. While the tablet-holding arm guards, the torch-bearing arm says, courageously, “on!”

“My Religion is Poetry”

(Part 1 of the Partially Understood series, where I try to write freely about what I think I know)

When I was in Jerusalem and asked whether I was religious, I reflected and knew at that time that poetry was my religion. It wasn’t something that I had to make great effort against myself to seek out (and that is how I know I was devoutly religious); it was something that came to me joyously, like breathing magic air. Poetry was what I looked to for spiritual and moral guidance. It was what helped me understand my experiences in the world and what to do about them.

It helped me see that whatever I was experiencing, there was someone else who understood it. Often it was just the feeling of being understood, like I’d found in Baudelaire, but sometimes it extended to the wisdom of someone who could communicate with some connection to truth some advice, something to take from the experience and be edified. 

But what is poetry? I say poetry and sometimes I refer to that art of words put together in lines, and my definition immediately extends to lyrics in music. I think of the way I can look at a person and think “they have a poetic expression”—and what am I referring to? The way they communicate the sublime, I think; the way they make visible their connection to their unconscious—I say this and I imagine a relaxed face with partially parted lips and blank eyes while the body is in motion somehow. 

The Madonna and Child - Barnaba da Modena, at the Louvre

So that when I say poetry is my religion, I’m discovering I’m not referring to the poem but the feeling of the poem, the feeling of connecting to the art, the feeling of being moved by it. Is that what we mean when something is “poetic”? I think in my case that’s right, and when I refer to the spiritual raptures, extasies, and sudden feelings of something so great that it’s like passing from your body into universes—the feelings that sometimes occur in religion—I think of them as the same spiritual things as are gotten elsewhere, and on these feelings I most worry about two things: 1) is the feeling true? 2) where can you get the most of it? 

Blue Sky Noise album cover by Esao Andrews, not at the Louvre

Any false acting in spirituality is doleful and is the worst form of wanting to experience something and wanting others to see it in you too—though maybe here I’m referring to love—and though there are some who experience intense feelings of love toward themselves and others induced through the insights and experiences that religious scriptures give, I find the scriptures only occasionally loving, and not loving often enough to induce me to breathe them. No; I find my love in poetry; I find my scriptures in the wealth of poets’ representations of thought and feeling from whenever we started writing to now when hopefully we will never stop.

The Mona Lisa

Lisa’s chest is rotated at a slight angle to the right, with the motion of turning toward her front, as though welcoming her visitor. With her chest to the right, her head is turned to the left, facing nearly toward the front, with the eyes facing directly forward. She has an understated smile in the mouth and eyes.

Her left arm is held crossed above her waist resting on a platform, fingers gently separated and curled. Her right arm rests on top of the left wrist, the pointer finger bent and touching the skin near her forearm.

I think the two most important details for replicating the position are the welcoming turn and the slight smile. The chest should be coming from the right with the intention of rotating to face forward openly. The smile should be real but almost imperceptible, with a real light in the eyes.

Héraklès archer - Émile-Antoine Bourdelle

The figure’s left knee is bent, his foot supported at a perpendicular line. His right knee is also bent, with the leg turned out to the right. His torso is in a right rotation, right lateral inclination, and a forward inclination, with his head angled in profile so that his eyes are looking toward the arrow. The left arm is fully extended, hand grasping the bow, and the right arm is bent, holding the bowstring with strength. 

The tension in the statue generates the visual of a taut bowstring with arrow, even though it isn’t there. The piece feels powerful, monumental. It depicts Hercules’ sixth labor, in which he would expel the man-eating Stymphalian birds from an Arcadian marsh using Hydra blood-tipped arrows. 

L’enfant prodigue - Auguste Rodin

The statue is kneeling unevenly, its weight unstable. The hips are centered—not forward or backward. From the waist up, the body is curved backward: the waist slightly, and the chest more, and the neck and head completely, so that the eyes are looking just above. This curve occurs along a lateral angle toward the right, which is supported by the left leg and foot being turned out a bit. The arms are almost straightened. The statue’s left hand is clasped in almost a fist, its strength relaxed. The right hand is open with fingers slightly bent. The head looks up toward the heavens. 

The New Testament subject is the parable of a son who spends his inheritance wastefully and extravagantly, and returns home to throw himself at his father’s feet and beg for forgiveness. The Musée Rodin describes the statue as “a sorrowful body with the irrepressible fervor of a final prayer.” I see immensity and ecstatic atonement in the position.

All That is Gold Does Not Glitter - J.R.R. Tolkien

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

____

The poem has a tenderness to it: it says that some gold is harder to see, that a person who wanders is not necessarily lost; that what matters in the long run is what remains strong inside. 

The second stanza supposes a death and rebirth. It takes the moment where all hope would seem to be lost, and suggests that that is where a flame will ignite. The “blade that was broken” has a prophesying significance for the world Tolkien created, but it’s symbolic for any precious instrument that’s been damaged and can be remade.

The word “again” indicates that this is how it is, that it’s happened this way and it will happen again. 

Oath of the Horatii - Jacques-Louis David

Focus: the man in the foreground on the left

He’s in a large L’Homme qui marche (lots of distance between the feet) facing away from our view. While his right arm is straight (fingers slightly separated) and his head is turned to the right—creating a very two-dimensional design—the angles of his hips and arms keep him in three dimensions. The torso is more or less in line with the hips. My favorite part about this person’s stance is the way his left hand (fingers slightly parted) holds the spear. He holds it behind his person, hand above the thigh, the spear tilted at maybe a 25° angle away from him, with the back end touching the ground near his left foot. 

Fire and Ice - Robert Frost

Fire and Ice - Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

____

The poem’s epic scale—the elements, the world’s end twice—is made all the more epic by the final word, “suffice,” which underscores the world’s frailty; that ice would be simply enough to do it in; yet also, in clear understatement, affirms the strength of ice.