Thither - Samuel Beckett

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Thither
by Samuel Beckett

thither
a far cry
for one
so little
fair daffodils
march then

then there
then there

then thence
daffodils
again
march then
again
a far cry
again
for one
so little

away dream all away

I love the sounds in this poem: the repetition of “f” noises like in “fair daffodils” and the “th”s, alongside the repeated “-ɛn” noise in “then” and “again.” They’re soothing, and at the same time heavy, and match up well with the light noises in “one / so little.”

The poem’s progression from “then there” to “then thence” gives the sense of something distant that gets farther away. But because of the repetition in the third stanza, it doesn’t really go away.

The poem grows by repeating itself, seeming to go somewhere while staying right where it began, until the very end, which comes like a wish.

Chemotherapy - Julia Darling

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Chemotherapy
by Julia Darling

I did not imagine being bald
at forty four. I didn’t have a plan.
Perhaps a scar or two from growing old,
hot flushes. I’d sit fluttering a fan.

But I am bald, and hardly ever walk
by day, I’m the invalid of these rooms,
stirring soups, awake in the half dark,
not answering the phone when it rings.

I never thought that life could get this small,
that I would care so much about a cup,
the taste of tea, the texture of a shawl,
and whether or not I should get up.

I’m not unhappy. I have learnt to drift
and sip. The smallest things are gifts.

The Fist - Derek Walcott

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The Fist
by Derek Walcott


The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

The Price - Stuart Henson

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The Price
by Stuart Henson

Sometimes it catches when the fumes rise up
among the throbbing lights of cars, or as
you look away to dodge eye-contact with
your own reflection in the carriage-glass;
or in a waiting-room a face reminds you
that the colour supplements have lied
and some have pleasure and some pay the price.

Then all the small securities you built
about your house, your desk, your calendar
are blown like straws; and momentarily,
as if a scent of ivy or the earth
had opened up a childhood door, you pause,
to take the measure of what might have been
against the kind of life you settled for.

Diet Changes

I didn't think much about what I ate. In community college, I'd eat burritos and taco bowls en masse from the cafeteria, often served with ingredients that tasted much past their prime. At home, I'd cook up something frozen, usually broccoli and beef or orange chicken, or make eggs, and would very often put off eating out of laziness.

At Pomona, I thought I'd hit the jackpot on good food, but I wasn't exactly right. I was just eating healthier than I was used to. Then when summers and winters came, I learned the prices of the frozen packaged meals and decided to compose meals more freely. I got a rice cooker, and would mix vegetables and meat. Only, I would usually eat what I cooked for the whole day. If it was rice and beef with tomato and onions, then it was my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So I started to discover what I could cook for breakfasts to give me some variety. Usually, this was an omelet or pancakes or both, and later, it would often be a smoothie. 

In the summer eating at Yale's dining halls, I wrote that I didn't really care what I ate, so long as it was healthy and enough. I had a pretty loose sense of what was healthy.

I was limited by gluten and lactose intolerance. Actually, it turns out I wasn't gluten intolerant, it's just something I'd internalized from being told that I was for so long. I discovered this in August, when I had difficulty finding gluten-free options in Edinburgh and thought I'd put my body to the test. When I discovered that I could eat bread just fine, the floodgates opened. Not only could I finally — finally — eat bread, but I was also curious about what I'd been doing to my body with the food I ate. 

I want to live a long and healthy life. If eating healthy food can make my body feel better now and reduce chances of getting a horrible condition in the future, then I would prefer to eat healthy food. So here are some of my recent notes from How Not To Die, a book backed by a tremendous amount of research, that has been influencing my food choices:

  • The majority of premature death and disability is caused by unhealthy diet and is more or less preventable with a plant-based diet

  • Eating vegetarian can reduce risk of diabetes by 61%; eating vegan can reduce risk by 78%

  • Fumes from frying as well as second hand smoke can contribute to lung cancer (bacon, meat patties, eggs); safer to fry outside than inside

  • Exercise-induced coughing occurs from diet; especially eggs

  • 3% Americans get enough fiber

  • 80% antibiotics sold go to meat industry

  • Processed foods attribute to 800k deaths a year, 4x more than deaths to drugs

  • Humans are genetically programmed for 10x less salt than is found in our regular diet; daily recommendation is no more than 3/4ths of a tablespoon of salt; reducing sodium consumption by 15% could save millions of lives every year

    • To lower blood pressure: don’t eat salt

    • Cheese is also a major source of sodium

    • 3/4 sodium comes from processed foods

    • Single slice of Pizza Hut pizza = half daily sodium intake

    • Chicken: huge amounts of sodium to increase weight

    • Reduce salt craving by reducing salt intake

  • Alcohol thins blood. If you already have a healthy lifestyle, drinking alcohol does not improve your health.

  • Eat some flax seeds every day

  • Happier people are less likely to get sick

    • Eating less meat is good for us emotionally

  • Benefits of coffee decrease as you add sugar/aspartame/artificial sweeteners

  • Exercise is a lot better at treating depression than drugs

    • Saffron is as effective in treating depression as prozac

  • About half of men over the age of 80 have prostate cancer. Most men die with/of it without knowing they have it.

  • Eliminate eggs and poultry to massively reduce cancer risk

  • Getting a chest CT scan is estimated to inflict the same cancer risk as smoking 700 cigarettes. One cross-country round trip flight can expose you an to equivalent amount because of increased radiation from proximity to the sun. Green, leafy vegetables help with resistance to radiation, protecting immune systems immensely. So can ginger, garlic, turmeric, goji berries, and mint leaves

  • Vegetables yield 48x more nutrition-per-dollar than meat

  • Eating kiwi fruit can combat colds

  • Citrus fruit: boost DNA repair; peel is very important; get lemon

  • 2-3 servings of cruciferous vegetables a day to decrease nasal inflammation; to get the sulforaphane: either don’t cook, or cut the broccoli, wait 40 minutes for the enzyme to activate, and then cook; or cook with powdered mustard (applied before eating)

  • Cruciferous vegetables should be fresh, not frozen

  • Sweet potatoes: one of the healthiest and cheapest foods; the more yellow/orange its flesh, the healthier; one boiled potato a day greatly decreases inflammation; also purple sweet potatoes or purple potatoes are great

  • Garlic/leek/onions are very good at destroying / protecting against cancer cells

  • Organic produce: 20-40% healthier; either buy or buy more regular food

  • Salt bath for vegetables to remove pesticide residues

  • Flax seed: make sure to grind it

  • Flax seeds can replace eggs in baking; for each egg in the recipe, whisk one tablespoon of ground flax with three tablespoons of water until the mix becomes gooey

  • Eating one handful of nuts five days a week can increase your lifespan by two years; nut/seed deficit kills millions of people each year

  • Walnuts are the healthiest nuts

  • Peanuts are not actually nuts; they are a legume.

  • Turmeric contains curcumin and is one of the healthiest spices you can use; eat a quarter of a teaspoon a day

    • Mix black pepper with turmeric to increase body’s consumption of turmeric

    • Can get turmeric root fresh and it will keep for many weeks

  • Fenugreek: a good spice for weight lifting; side effect: makes your armpits smell like maple syrup

  • Ginger is good for headaches/nausea

  • Red onions have 70% more antioxidants than white onions; always eat red onions, same with any fruit or vegetable that has a color/pigment

  • Eat a serving of berries every day

  • Rather than baguette, get darker bread; baguette is tasty but it’s not so healthy; it’s white bread, with salt.

  • Peppermint: most antioxidant-rich common herb

  • Cloves are the most antioxidant-rich spice

  • Vinegar is a condiment that is good for you

  • Cough: avoid caffeinated drinks

  • Instead of cereal, how about brown rice for breakfast?

  • Green tea can reduce allergy symptoms

  • White tea with lemon = more healthy than green tea

  • Coldsteep tea to make it healthier; do it overnight

  • Do not brush your teeth until an hour after eating something sour, because your softened enamel may become damaged by brushing

  • To increase weight gain, don’t drink before a meal, and minimize/eliminate drinking during a meal

  • For protein, eat a lot of legumes -- three servings a beans each day

And that would be that, I would say, except it wouldn't be so honest. I wanted a kebab today, and I went and got it. I would say that's okay — treat yoself — but what I'm suspicious about is the notion that I am treating myself. Couldn't I make something healthier and cheaper that I might enjoy even more? Yes, definitely. How about treating myself this way?

Changing my eating habits hasn't been so much like turning a switch but like entering an undulating train that goes forward and back, comes to its happy destination and then arrives at a meaty carnival, then backs up and goes too far, ending up at candyland. Only, this time, the visit to candyland is short and serves up good reasons not to come back. The next time we get a little closer to stomach paradise, etc. I'm floating in a place where I'm starting to develop my own rules, and gradually, they become firm.

When it comes to diet, I'm learning to try not to undermine what is ideal for what is practical. To a certain extent, I hope to limit the bad ways I could die.

To paraphrase Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, to deal with something as unhealthy as writing, a person needs to be as healthy as possible.

Mime School Trimester

For one of the few times in over two years, I’m genuinely happy again, in a way that feels sustainable, and it’s surprising how much happiness changes you. Suddenly there’s a certain flow to things, instead of a struggle.

I decided to stay in Paris for the Fall, and I’ve enrolled at l’ecole internationale de mime corporel, a school that offers a masters degree in corporeal mime. I’m taking the first and second year courses, along with classical dance and acrobatics. We’re now entering into the fourth week.

In the advanced creation course, we work on pieces from Etienne Decroux’s repertoire. Right now we’re working on Le Combat des Lances. This is like an etude, a composition designed to improve and demonstrate technique. It is very, very, challenging.

In the general technique courses, we’re working on body scales (head/neck/chest/waist/axe conform/axe contraire/axe double/Eiffel tower) and applying these to actions like pulling ropes or extensors, short etudes like Quasimodo Offering the Flower, and stylized walks.

In the second year technique course, we’re doing triple designs on the x/y/z axes within the scales, both progressive (ascending) and degressive (descending), and a more complicated version of Quasimodo.

The two classical dance (ballet) classes provide a helpful basis for our mime technique.

The acrobatics course helps expand our range of movement. We’ve done people-stacking, handstands, cartwheels, rolls, etc. After each day’s classes I usually set up a mat and work on these — it’s taking a while to get the technique down, but I’ve nearly got the handstand, and that feels nice.

On Fridays, we have improvisations. For instance:

  • a person puts on a suit jacket, but hesitates.

  • a person stands or sits in front, with three people behind. The person in front thinks, and the three behind are his/her thoughts.

  • two people sit, one in front of the other. The person in back speaks, and the person in front hears.

  • two people sit next to each other. They like each other very much, but are too timid to let the other know.

  • two people sit next to each other in some kind of waiting room. They detest each other, but try to keep up appearances.

  • a person would like to arrive at a chair and encounters obstacles on the way.

Every four weeks, we present a personal creation, either individually or in groups. The first comes this Friday — I’ll be doing a trio based on the myth of Narcissus and a solo on Aladdin.

Another school, Hippocampe, offers an Atelier Creation that I participate in, and we work on other etudes, like the Offering of the Pomegranate and Salute to the Dawn.

In the evenings, I’ll often go to the cinema or a theatre. I’m becoming somewhat better at understanding French now, though I still struggle to follow the performances that are heavy on dialogue and light on physical movement.

I didn’t expect I would be staying in Paris this long — I thought I’d be hiking the Alps and finding a small place with good air in Spain or Switzerland to hunker down, write, study anatomy, and read essential physical theatre texts for a little while before coming back and traveling loosely around France for the upcoming mime festival. Instead, I’ve got a dorm at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris and have become a temporary masters student, staying at minimum until the end of December. I made the decision to stay and enroll the night before the trimester began, found the room within a week, and now I can enjoy the benefit of being really settled down in a place for a little while. I got some painting supplies, and have started to build up a poetry wall again. Right now it has “To Summarize a Galaxy” by Beyza Ozer — ripped out of Poetry Magazine’s September 2019 edition — “Thither” by Samuel Beckett, and “The Tyger” by William Blake.

The first day of school, I wrote that I felt the stirring of something large, some kind of euphoria, and that I was just about ready to hold it dear to my heart. I think it’s here, or nearly.

My Home In Paris

Tonight I took the plastic nasal irrigator bag that had all my garbage in it out to the trash where I had the comforter sheet drying on the floor, having discovered I didn’t know how to properly wash such weighty things and been in a rush from the laundromat to get to mime school in the morning. 

My apartment is a cute one, the Mickey Mouse sheets smiling up at me as I lean from my tall chair to the short table to spoon around a mix of potatoes and beans after dropping a turmeric bomb, and a glittered image of Shiva smiling down at me as I stretch my legs up against the wall with my head on a fuzzy heart pillow that bleeds cotton from a growing rip, and read Dickens. A humidifier lets out a calm puff, and a big heavy something gets dropped into place outside with a loud clang! that I’ve come to feel a growing appreciation for.

I heat water in the kettle and pour one cup of drainage tea and one bowl of hot water. I let the water twiddle at room temperature or cool in the refrigerator, and eventually put epsom salts in it, sink it into a nasal irrigator, and squirt it up my nose over the sink so that I can blow it out. Aged globules of mucus come out, and each one feels like another step toward absolute freedom. While I do this, blowing my nose into the sink because I’m out of toilet paper, I take care not to touch my face without having first cleaned my hands, because two weeks ago I decided to stop touching my face with unclean hands. For the most part, I have kept that promise. 

I look forward to my next move in a week or two, though I’ll miss this sunless apartment and its two decomposing plants on the shelf. 

My landlord will return soon to share the room, and we’ll live together in this little slice of Paris for a bit. 

Paris Catacombs

The catacombs are a collection of the remains of roughly six million people that were disinterred and reburied from 1785 to 1859 because of overflowing cemeteries, and was turned into a certified tourist attraction during Napoleon’s reign. Most of the bones had been dumped into the tunnels in large heaps. What we mostly see today is the work of quarrymen who arranged tibias, femurs, and skulls in stacks to decorate the tunnels for visitors. 

Part of the eeriness of the catacombs comes from all the voices. A nervous majority of visitors purchase Walkman-like digital audio guides to keep them company. They are not offered with headphones, so each listener holds it up to an ear. I would like to note that there is a difference between the sound of people whispering and the sound of a quiet electronic army of voices that were recorded at lecture volume. In an area with a lot of people, it sounds like the dead are monologuing. 

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But it’s not really so dreary—these bones aren’t here because of a macabre mass-tragedy, but because of the tragedy that is life and death. Death comes after life, and here, we see its form. The catacombs have the tranquility of a graveyard, because this is what they are: the gravesite of six million Parisians.

In the areas for visitors, bones are arranged to be seen. They are given geometrical patterns making macabre altars and honeycombs.

Very clearly assembled for display purposes

Very clearly assembled for display purposes

Outside of visible range, you can imagine the meters upon meters of bones heaped upon bones, mixed up and broken into jawbone and rib bits. 

Droplets from the ceilings in some areas, wearing into the bones.

Droplets from the ceilings in some areas, wearing into the bones.

I was looking through one of the many barred doors, behind it, a huge series of tunnels, each with bones stacked on either side, revealing just how little of the 135 km of catacombs is open to the public, and suggesting just how vast and endless this mass of bones must be. Behind me, a visitor said to no one in particular, “life has no meaning; in the end, it’s just bones.” My answer: “but don’t you see—that they are together!”

Wherever the thoughts go, that is what a visit to the catacombs offers: an atmosphere of death, to think in.

Tarantula

It’s something that makes being a participant a hard thing to do.

At its worst, I can’t begin speaking without coughing first. At its best, my words will flow over a rippling tarantula. I may speak, but at the same time I feel a crawl. It becomes too much, a cough interrupts my speech, and then it resets to a growing tingling again. Morning, afternoon, night, day in and day out for two years. Several times I’ve felt it recede until I thought it must almost be gone—just a light cough that only occasionally warps my speech—and then it becomes stronger, and then it becomes a cold. I think this has happened every month this year, after I set a resolution to “never get a cold again” on the new year.

It’s easy to make changes when you’re desperate to heal. I’d seen a dozen doctors and specialists, tried all kinds of treatments and racked up medical bills. At the beginning of this year I thought, maybe my immune system is just weak and I just keep getting colds sequentially, as the remains of one ignite the next. So I set about improving my immune system.

The first thing I addressed was my weight. At 6 feet, I weighed 123 pounds. I still am underweight, weighing 133, after months going to the gym 5 days a week, then teaching yoga every day, and eating in bulk, but I am stronger than I have ever been and grow every day.

The second thing I addressed, more recently, was my diet. I used to eat whatever without much thought about whether it was healthy or not, or contributed to stuff like nasal inflammation or not. As of September I’ve started to transition to a plant-based diet, eating primarily legumes, vegetables, and fruit. I read How Not To Die to learn how to do it properly. I haven’t gone full vegan yet, but based on how much better I’m generally feeling, I probably will.

Still though, I have a cough. It is debilitating. When I taught yoga, I would often sit up during meditation to make sure I didn’t choke on my mucus. It would change my voice, but my students wouldn’t notice, because that was the only way they’d heard me. I was a damn good teacher and my student reviews reflected that, but I was working with a voice that would often just stop working. For this same reason I was a very quiet public speaking instructor. My cough projected an image of timidity that shattered when I spoke but nevertheless became a characteristic, because it is damn hard to speak with this.

So I proceed, living as I wouldn’t choose to live, more often an observer than a participant because to participate is to participate with a strong cough, to have difficulty saying the simplest things, to resort to only body movements and still cough. When that’s the norm, the simplest interactions become a hill to climb—a struggle rather than a dance. It’s no wonder I’ve struggled with depression these past two years.

There’s a song by ODESZA (“Intro”) that tells a story about a cosmonaut. He’s up in space looking out a little portal window at the curvature of the earth, and all of the sudden a noise starts to come from somewhere. It ticks, ticks, but he can’t find it. Tick. After a few hours, it starts to feel like torture. A few days go by and he feels like the sound will break him. But what’s he going to do? He’s cramped up in a space closet. So the cosmonaut decides the only way to preserve his sanity is to fall in love with the sound.

I told this story in a yoga class, where there’d been construction nearby all week, and a jackhammer ringing on outside the window between the instructions I was giving. Like a curse, I’ve always lived in proximity to ongoing construction since then. Fall in love with this sound, will you, the world seems to be saying.

I dreamt I was copiloting a spaceship last night. We were taking people to the moon when some kind of virus came on board and started making people disappear, so we tried to contain it. This turned my focus away from piloting and had me running around the ship, only to discover we could only cut our losses. When I was on my way back to the cockpit—just before I woke up—I wasn’t sure we could still make it to the moon.

There’s a beautiful game called To The Moon that I played many years ago. Two doctors weave through an old man’s memory to fulfill his dying wish, that he had gone to the moon. In the game, you traverse through his memories and help him live an entirely different life in his head, where he did become an astronaut, and he went to the moon. But to change his memories, you first have to live through his real memories, where he fell short of his dreams, and you come to understand why he, naturally, couldn’t become an astronaut, and why he wished so strongly that he had.

But we don’t get to change the life we lived to fulfill our dreams, and we get stuck with the dreams we lived or didn’t. We make it to the moon, or we don’t, and sometimes there are things that make it harder than it needs to be. For me, this cough feels like one of those things.

Glue

The sense of Scotland I still have is vast, uncompromising green. I miss that green, just like I miss Claremont walks under the moon.

And what if I were a statue, and there were two moons?

There are two moons in IQ84, which smells like hair, when in the new world. There are two moons in Life Is Strange, which smells like light, when Arcadia Bay is about to break. 

So why shouldn’t a memory sculpt?

I am visiting amber, but I see baby blue in spotlight. I am missing green, where I would statue. What?

La Foule, Raymond Mason

La Foule is a bronze crowd in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. In the front, the figures are mostly distinct. Men, women, children; a helmet, a suit, a hat. Behind, the figures become smaller and more abstract until they’re only bronze warbles. The content of the ones in back is suggested by the form of the ones in front. Each one is angled and inclined, creating movement in many directions, while the rising structure of the piece moves the gaze upward in curved lines.

If we didn’t see the front, it would be hard to see the back and recognize a crowd. The piece illustrates the principle of starting with the concrete before moving to the abstract. The complete concept, a crowd, is suggested without its precise depiction. After starting with the specific form of a businessman in the front center, it can deconstruct, reform, and become more human, or more monster, or more block of bronze, or more larva, as it is the idea of a crowd that is being meditated on, not a crowd itself.

Starting with a recognizable form before deconstructing it, making it into just pure form, is both suggestive of the form that contextualizes it and suggestive of more, because a blob can be more things than a face.

In improvised performance, a sitting actor starts thinking, beginning to resemble The Thinker. But then, following the tilted angle of his chest, maybe his head continues this line of force, forward, down, off the arm that, now unsupported from above, slides down off the leg and anchors to the floor. The hand, fingers still bent, becomes a fixed point that the body pivots around as the head likewise tilts, up, revealing the same pensive expression. It isn’t a quotidian movement anymore, but because it began with The Thinker, the image of the thinking person becomes a reference point to interpret the movements that come next. In this way, quotidian movement becomes a reference point to explore what could be inside it.

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Spotify Is A Funhouse Mirror

In August I didn’t see it reflected in my music yet because I’d lost my airpods. But now, living on my own in Paris with snail internet, it‘s become all too clear: my tastes are changing.

The last time I downloaded music for offline listening on Spotify, I gave myself four playlists. The first was a collection of songs by only St. Vincent. The second was a short calming classical music playlist curated by a friend. The third was my major collection, 300 or so of my favorite songs over the past many years, like my 2016-18 favorite Human Sadness by Julian Casablancas and the Voids and 2014-15 favorite Strange Terrain by Circa Survive. I had my Muse, Saosin, Mitski, Death Cab, etc., a cooing mix of introspective and sadness-infused slow march ballads that carry the astral beauty only found in loss. I suspect if I put all the album covers together, it would look as if the night sky were wrapped in cellophane. 

The fourth playlist was loaded on a whim: Soulful Disco.

This means that when I listen to music, I get a choice: either to be haunted by my past or confronted with boogie. The tonal juxtaposition achieves a Neon Genesis Evangelion-like eeriness, where Fly Me To The Moon punctuates every episode like a joyful meditation on death. 

I feel ready to make a change in my music, but I don’t know where it’s going yet. 

I’ve found, though, that it’s not in Shake Your Body or When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going. These have not yet worked well as my potato-peeling anthems. 

Maybe I will be ready one day to gorge disco into my bloodstream, but for now I need it at a slow drip.

My general inability to stream music is making it difficult to discover more-fitting anthems. I can imagine, whatever they might be, they recline some places on the border between joyful and sad. They’re about dough when it’s being kneaded, batter getting whisked, the space between breath. They’re out there, I just need to calibrate my antennae right. 

Barebones

Early on I learned to be in a room by making myself smaller. Maybe my fixation on taking things away in creative arts came from not having much to fill the space with in the first place. Am I taking away environment, dance, song, because they’re unnecessary and get in the way and I want to know what’s beneath them, or am I taking them away because I have been relatively unimaginative, incapable of dance, incapable of singing? 

How It Is by Beckett says that it’s all dirt underneath, mud to muck about in. At the end of the line, after taking everything away, there’s just mud that we’re struggling to move through to get to each other.

I’m prompted these thoughts as I reject the life of one who only gets others to sing for them, whether that be the life of a critic or other, as I learn I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to build worlds with words, but find myself generally struggling with each of these.

Reading over what I’ve written above, I think about my tendency to be intropunitive, to blame myself for things. I’ve tended to think it’s a constructive habit. I think it’s something that’s driven my improvement so well in the past. Even in games I was very aware of what I did wrong, which helped me to do better over time. And over time I’ve become much better at being aware of my deficiencies and mistakes and working at them without judgement. There’s only such a way to go, as there always is.

I just finished reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, something I’d watched the extended editions of religiously though childhood but had never read before. I wonder what drove me to it — impending adventure, a debt to nostalgia, the desire for something familiar. I was most excited by it when the Shire got razed, and it engaged me because it was new to me. Much of the rest of it felt like living out a fantasy I knew. It was adventure, but it felt like returning to a comfortable home, and I needed an unfamiliar one.

A partial art needs imagination. A play on a bare stage needs actors that will transport it. If the only props are pieces of cardboard, they must become the world’s environment and more, and are always at the risk of being just cardboard.

Etienne Decroux wrote of a Parisian street urchin who admired a real flower and exclaimed “Oh, how beautiful! It looks just like a fake.” But when commenting on an artificial flower — “Oh, how beautiful! It looks just like a real one.” 

A partial art gives the idea of one world by the means of another. You could say it represents what it isn’t, or that it represents more than it ever could be. Taking things away can be about what’s left, but it’s also about being more than what’s there. 

Clov looked on the world outside of Endgame’s room and saw “a multitude … in transports … of joy” and “zero” and “gray.” And consequently, we populate their outdoors with the images that come with “zero” and “grey” and “a multitude…”

You could throw everything away, but there’d still be the ideas of things. Without outside, there is still an outside. Without a dancer, there is still dancing. Without singing, there is still a song. There are always the barebones of the familiar. 

Month one roundup

It’s in my usual form to be at minimum a week late in writing about a thing that’s finished.

Having now finished a Jacques Lecoq workshop in Paris, I’ve discovered a strong drive to write about my time in Edinburgh, as if in completing the newest chapter I feel more ready to write about the one that came before.

I think my reluctance to contain an experience in words diminishes as the memory adjusts to fit the words I’ve got.

The Edinburgh Fringe came as a much-needed breather this year. I had graduated, worked for some weeks at the Pomona College theatre department and gotten LASIK eye surgery, and then dedicated long hours as an RA and public speaking & meditation/yoga instructor at a summer camp at Yale. Recovering from a renewed cold, I started off sleeping half the day and viewing performances the other half. I got to simply take things in, learn about the Fringe scene, and let my thoughts begin to swim.

I saw around 70 shows and helped put on Narukami Thunder God. I saw something of everything: physical theatre (Birth, The Words Are There, Only Bones, etc), theatre (Medea Electronica, Teach, The Mackerel Eaters, Macbeth, Ticker, Robert Icke’s Oedipus, Hindsight, The Good Scout, 44 Inch Chest, The Red, Pickup, Leopold Vindictive, etc), dance (Floating Flowers, Untitled #213, etc), improv (Whose Line Is It Anyway, Between Us, etc), spoken word (Cactus, Tuck Into Poetry, Gothic Poetry, Electrolyte), BBC Live (Ouch! Storytelling Live, JazzNow, Richard Wiseman, No Comedy For Young Women), standup comedy (Philosophy Standup, Marcel Lucont, Rhys Nicholson, Audible Live, Brown Privilege, I Pilgrim, Funny Stories About Pain, Hyper Nice, Andrew Maxwell, Spank! etc), circus (Backbone, Blizzard, Circa Humans), music (The Bowie Experience, Young Elvis, Cello on Fire, Voices of 007, Simon and Garfunkel, MKC, The Shakuhachi Experience, etc), musical (Thrones! The Musical Parody, 50 Shades of Shakespeare, Space Junk, Libertarian Love Songs, You and I, etc), and other (Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein, The Dark Room, Shitfaced Shakespeare, Alice Through the Cocktail Glass, Aindrias de Staic, Commedia de l’arte, Chris Betts vs the Audience, etc). 

It is challenging to try to write about this many shows, especially when so many of them leave so deep an impression. It’s nice to know now that Bowie started as a mime. Because of I Pilgrim, I know I am going to take on long hikes and currently salivate over the idea of doing the tour du Mont Blanc. Because of Aindrias de Staic, I’ve just completed an incredible workshop at l’ecole internationale de Jacques Lecoq where I feel like I’ve regained a sense of play. I’ve found with Theatre Re’s Birth that my favorite use of physical theatre is not in taking away words but in letting the body speak louder, so that the stories told aren’t framed by what is missing. With Robert Icke’s Oedipus, my sense of theatre as something capable of eliciting that deep spiritual feeling of something sublimely great is revivified. Because of circus, I’ve found a strong drive to reach some ideal physical capabilities. I understand now what kinds of shows I would want to, or be capable of taking to the fringe, and how to get started preparing for others. 

In the face of so much there is little more I can do than list and, giving them space and time, let all the seeds that will bloom.

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The Unicorn Tapestries

I’m told I am immune to poison now because I touched a unicorn horn. It was an ethically harvested horn, one that came off by natural causes just like a baby tooth that comes off to make room for the unicorn’s second—and final—horn.

The unicorn is the national animal of Scotland and one of my favorite animals because I’ve only ever been able to imagine what it’s like, and I imagine it talking, doing magic, and having a benevolent disposition.

I’ve had Unicorn in Captivity as my phone screen for more than half a year now, meaning that other than myself it is the piece of art I have looked at the longest this year. It’s a unicorn with a collar and a chain attached to a pomegranate tree, encircled by a wood fence, to a background of plants and flowers that’s not too unlike Barack Obama’s portrait.

I actually didn’t know it was a pomegranate tree until I visited the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry recreations at Stirling Castle in Scotland—I thought of it as more of a coconut tree. Reassuringly, one of its artists wrote that contrary to the accuracy in the other plants in the series, the pomegranate tree is “completely inaccurate.” 

It turns out that a collar on a unicorn was supposed to mean it had been tamed, but that the collar was not secured and the chain did not connect to anything. The unicorn simply remained by choice and could retire if it chose to do so.

This is a nice way to see the thing of magic and beauty chained and enclosed in the tapestry. I like the thought that the unicorn chooses to remain attached to a symbol of fertility and prosperity, like it’s sacrificing itself to some greater duty — or choosing the safety of a small enclosure over the danger of roaming freely. I can’t tell though whether the unicorn’s chain really is unsecured.

The unicorn tapestries were made in the 15th century, but little is known about their first 180 years. In 1680 there’s record they belonged to a French duke. They were then looted in the French Revolution, recovered in the 1850s, and purchased by the Rockerfellers before they were given to the MET. The recreations in Stirling Castle took 13 years to make, and are now on display in the chambers. Long ago, said an attendant working at the castle, the lords and ladies would change out sets of ambiguous tapestries to keep speculation about meaning flowing.

Two common readings are of the Hunt as a religious story and the Hunt as a medieval love story. 

Religious story

Men go on a hunt for a unicorn and find it dipping its horn in a stream to purify the water for the other nearby animals, like Christ redeeming man by taking on the world’s sins. The unicorn is pursued unsuccessfully, as it was thought that unicorns were so fast and fierce that neither man nor beast could tame them—only a maiden could. The hunters therefore get a maiden to enchant the unicorn and allow them to capture it. They kill it and take its horn. To me, this sounds like the death of childhood. In the last tapestry, The Unicorn in Captivity, the unicorn is alive again, enclosed and tied to a pomegranate tree. It represents the risen Christ the Unicorn in the garden of paradise.

Love Story

The unicorn is the lover and the maiden its beloved. The hunters are love. Tied to a pomegranate tree symbolizing marriage and fertility, the unicorn has been struck by love and bears the wounds on its back.

Notice the thistles, Scotland’s national plant. There are bluebells, carnations, columbines, and a dandelion. There’s also a frog among the flowers in the bottom right corner. 

Unicorn in Captivity

Frankenstein’s Shoes

Our nests tend to teach us some silly things. We learn, in part, a way to be in the world. I’ve learned some silly ways to be. 

I learned first to put on feathers, to make myself seem bigger, better than I was. 

For a long time I left shopping for clothes to my parents, who almost always got me clothing too big, and I never thought much of it. 

I recall one episode distinctly: my mom came home with somewhat pricy clothes that were too large for me. I said they were too big, and was told that “girls like it when you look bigger.” Something had already clicked by then, but it came into larger focus there.

Obviously it’s better to be honest with who you are and comfortable in your skin, and the first step to choosing clothing that reflects that is getting something that fits. Was I being asked to look bigger than I was, or was I being asked to be bigger?

When I started shopping for myself my first fixation was button-ups. I felt powerful in them. I could run and sweat in a button-up, but when I looked down and saw the fluttering untucked cotton and those important buttons, I felt like my body was encased in gold. It helped me remember that I could do better than where I was. I think of it like those sweaters that say “Harvard” or “Stanford” that people wear, and, in a similar vein, those blasted “Calvin Klein Jeans” shirts. 

Increasingly I’ve simplified my clothing, opting for neutral shirts and sweaters, plain jeans, etc.

Which brings me to the topic at hand.

My family tends to opt for things that last long over things that don’t, so when my feet stopped growing we invested in good shoes. My Nike Free Runs lasted me through college and some of high school. By the time I gave them up a month ago their soles were coming off and I could push my toes through the toe caps.

In anticipation of my year abroad, I wanted a sturdy shoe that was comfortable to run and walk in for long distances, good enough for some hiking, and protective against rain and puddles.

I got a pair that could do all of those things: Nike Huaraches. 

I got them a size and a half too big. 

I didn’t realize they were too large, I’d been used to the US size 11 shoes I’d purchased online and worn the past five or so years. I hadn’t measured my feet in a quarter of my lifetime and was in a rush to get back to my work duties, so I walked into a Nike store, asked for a shoe that met my travel needs, tried it on, thought it was nice, and got it.

The first time I thought something might be wrong was on the uneven streets of Edinburgh, walking for hours every day between Fringe shows. It felt like my feet were doing too much work. Normally I’d notice something like that and think it was the walking, but recently I’ve been more ready to investigate things I thought I knew.

After the Fringe I went to a sporting goods store, asked a lot of questions, and got my feet measured. Size and a half too big.

These shoes had been expensive, and I am unable to return them. So after much consultation and deliberation I got thicker insoles made for hiking, for a smaller shoe size, that cup my feet at the heel and arch and artificially decrease the space they have to wander within the shoe. 

I am now wearing running shoes that are adapted for hiking, that are smaller on the inside than on the outside. The adaptation works a little, but I think my feet still have more space than they should.

It turns out I am still wearing clothes that are too big for me.