La Notte Scorsa

La Notte Scorsa means "last night." I think it's one of those perfectly lilting Italian phrases, and also, the past few weeks have been burned into my memory as a dense string of "I can barely believe what just happened last night's" recurring in such a way that I got overwhelmed with the idea of writing about it all.

I went to see Leonard Cohen at the Nokia center on Friday, April 10th. I'll count this concert as a watershed, pivotal moment in my life forever, because it was the night that began a new era of embodied living. I didn't even really know what that meant as I watched Leonard's angels (aka The Webb Sisters) whisper visions through shining lips. All I knew was that something was very, very different here. Anth and I finally figured it out, we think: these are people who are absolutely unafraid of their own bodies, unafraid of intimacy, unafraid of looking directly at each other for what most Americans would consider "too long." Too long for what? It turns out that direct eye contact is seductive, and that I have so commodified the gaze I can't even look long at someone, and have them return the look, without thinking they want something from me, or are even in the ACT of taking something. Something I may or may not want to give them--sex, conversation, attention, and so on.

But what Leonard wanted from those he locked eyes with was exactly what he was already getting: the very best and most beautiful expression of abject sincerity every person on stage had to offer. And this is what he inspired in us: a new commitment to speaking abjectly, and to living our art more sensually, more embodied.

What I've discovered, after seeing Leonard take his hat off to his musicians, is that I'm really, really, really fucking proud. I'm like a monster of ego. I'm supremely concerned with how I will be perceived, whether I'll be loved enough, and if I'm good enough for the things I actually want to do with my life. I don't think I would have been ready to do a whole show from my knees like he did, and that means I'm still living in a world where my ego/pride decides a lot of what I do and think.

Gross. I hate it. I felt I'd made a kind of triumphant breakthrough by discovering this issue in a new way, by having a new way to think and speak, and then a week later I saw Leonard Cohen at Coachella. Again I was transfixed by his perfect, Buddhistic awareness of each person, his genteel way of ripping back the layers of social posturing to reveal raw human love and lust and insanity and calm. Again I felt certain that my life was changing, that I was losing a certain performance anxiety and emerging from a chrysalis. But. That night I got stuck--I hated Coachella for its capitalistic bullshit and I hated the drunk Urban Outfitters kids sloshing around the awesome art, and I hated myself for having no really smart or creative thoughts about any of it, and I got nervous about jumping a fence, got conservative with my body and my words. Failure. Trying to speak abjectly about my own failure, to stay honest and quit explaining--I failed that too.

The answer, Len told me, is in the body. The answer to anxiety, the answer to fear, the answer to boredom, the answer to frustration, the answer to anger.

Those close to me have identified a certain face I make when I'm "composed." To most, it probably looks like I'm concentrating. To Anth, Linz, and Louis, it's a signal that I'm struggling to seem alright in a social situation that seems to call for it, when really I could cry or scream. What I'm doing now is not just switching behaviors to crying/screaming INSTEAD of composing. I'm actually eradicating the source of the fear that makes me want to cry and scream. Yeah, that's right--it's possible. And, I don't think I have a right to any of that anxiety anymore--it's not part of my personality or some precious bit of my psychology that informs my writing. In fact, it's the biggest hindrance to my writing, my dance, my being a good person. It's not Mine. It's a virus I picked up along the way that I'm letting people like Leonard Cohen rehabilitate me from. The result is that my face is actually more beautiful, says Linz.

I've had instincts towards this truth, needing to bring the body into my art, for years--why else would I love Susie Bright? Why else would I want to use Cohen's song Anthem as the inspiration for my novel? Why else would I struggle to integrate an intellectual (writing, grad school, teaching) with an embodied (dance, acting) career? But this discovery--that I was not always honest about the petty, stupid, insecure, fearful thoughts, and that this was reflected in my body--is big, big, really big. I had nice posture! But I was holding up shoulders that were wracked with tension through force of will. I'm sure I've seemed very tense in the classroom, even when I was enjoying myself, because of all the unconcsious concern I used to have about how I was being perceived by my students.

I want to find an erudite, organized, creative way to finish this blog, which is original, so that you'll all like me better and send my blog to your friends. I'll turn it over to Len instead.

Leonard says:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Return to the Expanse

A Venezia, e due belli cappuccini.

I've been in a cabin for three days, writing, doing yoga, talking through some principles and emotions with Linz and Anth. The pictures above are from our Italia trip last year, and the thread that connects is Louis: he took the one in Venice, and the second cappucino is his. He was present by phone, and also in our consciousness and conversation all weekend. I chose these pictures to introduce what I'm thinking about because on the trip to Italy I had a profound, concrete experience of the abstract idea of the Return to the Expanse. It was echoed strongly this weekend and I'm reminded of it almost every time I leave my home for a few days and am engaged with a new space.

The first photo is an example of something I and most people I know love to do: take in a view. It's a vista, a moment of largeness and a representation of the sense of awe one feels at the sheer magnitude of beauty that is possible. People hike mountains and go to beaches for this, they eat at rooftop restaurants, they stare out the windows of planes, they build huge windows on the front of hillside properties and they make their ceilings higher and higher still. But it is a condition of wealth in our country to have access to The View--you can't travel, live on a hill, etc. without money. We associate the richness of beauty in The View directly with financial riches even though, of course, people can hike in parks for free or sit on their own roofs. But it's very stark when we're paying for our spaces: book a cabin on a cruise ship and the main thing you pay for is? The View. Book a beachfront hotel room? The View. Buy a house in the Hollywood Hils? The View. And I think the conflation of material magnificence (the aesthetic joy of encountering something so vast as an ocean, city skyline, etc. in the physical world) and materialist priorities (demonstration of wealth in the access to/ownership of the ocean, skyline, etc.) is deeply embedded in our culture. I think most Americans would have trouble separating the joy of seeing the ocean from the pleasure of being wealthy enough to make it to the ocean, even if they tried hard. Even tougher to separate the aesthetic and materialist pleasures when you OWN the View.

Of course the opposite to The View is something small, contained, and therefore undesireable. I'll call it The Basement. Small home to live in, small area of town in which you are safe, the cheap damp rented room, the shitbox car. The obvious lack of means demonstrated by The Basement sets up a false set of categories, however, and it should already feel strange to you.

If a View is defined by its physical size and scope and not its content, then we know that not all Views are beautiful (Ex: looking down from a helicoptor at Vietnamese villages getting napalmed) and we also know that not all small spaces are ugly (Ex: the table holding our cappuccini above), so why even discuss the categories this way?

The problem is that the unconscious association of real aesthetic beauty with materialist satisfaction, such as our fascination with The View, has manifestations that are still very pervasive and subtle despite our ability to come up with counter-examples.

One subtle consequence of materialism that I consider often is boredom. It is impossible, really, to be bored if you are attentive to the many minute opportunities for beauty, awe, and information in one room, in one body, in one piece of media. But we don't feel rich enough if we spend all day at home--and I'm referring to richness in both stimuli and money, since we conflate them. We might temporarily substitute internet or television for a physical View, because the preponderance of options inherent there imply the same sort of largeness of experience. But we can grow bored of anything (or anyone) if we succumb to the pressure to be constantly owning/having access to more.

And thus the great overwhelm of Italia: my impulse to seek out and get lost in The View paired with my impulse to attentively investigate the minutae both being constantly fed with the new, new, new. Add my gratitude for the opportunity to go, the imperative I felt to do something creative and useful with my experiences, and it's incredible that I didn't come back paralyzed.

It seems like the opposite would happen in weekend at a small cabin with no internet. Indeed, on the first day I walked through the space and thought, "Cute! Ok! Let's go see the town!" and thought nothing of that restlessness, because I feel it so often. We did go for a walk, saw some landscape and town, met a few goats, and bought some buffalo jerky from the man who raised the buffalo. But then we settled in. We entered an altered state to write, and be together, and the hours we spent talking, working, listening to music, cuddling, reading, etc. were full and long. The cabin, which had seemed so small, had many corners and crevices and mismatching dishes and inches of history to notice. My computer, which I look at everyday, had files and files of notes and stories I hadn't looked at for years. Our hearts, which we bare to each other more honestly than anyone else I know, still had vulnerabilities to offer up. Instead of seeking The View, which is measured in miles, we returned to an awareness of true expansiveness, which is not bounded by space. (And yes, I appreciate the irony that this kind of thinking was made possible because we are able to get to a cabin in the first place.)

I can often access a Return to the Expanse when I'm doing yoga, dancing, making love, or getting a massage, because it is through the body that I am concretely reminded of how vast the landscape of a person, and by extension, everything, is. I am aware of "my back" when I'm sitting in a chair, but my awareness of it becomes more complex when I'm making tiny adjustments to my posture in yoga, or having a particular muscle worked on in massage, or feeling the electrifying touch of a lover. Suddenly my back, and then my whole body, feels infinitely realized: every inch a new world. When I slow down to attend to a lover's body this way the possibilities for our intimacy multiply exponentially.

This clearly can extend to all of the corporeal world: every space and object offers us information that is more complex than we think. But it is not enough to think of this as some phenomenon divorced from the political/economic reality in which those objects/people/rooms exist. It's not easy to peel back the layers of obstruction our culture has stuffed between our senses and our understanding--but it's possible, I think, to be ever more aware of them.

I had a great writing teacher at Emerson who asked us to go home and write a two-page discussion of an object in our home. Most people found it difficult to get beyond basic description of their object: it's a mug, it's got a teddy bear on it, a chip on the handle. But when we started reading these aloud, a visible discomfort emerged in the students as they realized that the object they chose was suddenly functioning as a symbolic representation of their self, and even more uncomfortable (because it was somewhat less irrational), their class; and so the fact that one student described a piece of very expensive diamond jewelry while another described a broken coffee cup from the Goodwill forced us into more awareness of how much a part of our perception of self and identity class really was. Remember, again, these were all people who were able to gain access to graduate school.

It becomes problematic then, to say things like "I love the tropics" (The View) as if it is a personality signifier wholly separate from the assertion "I love not being poor." Maybe I love the tropics more than I love diamonds, for reasons I can articulate beautifully, but the fact that all my preferences are directly related to what I have access to can't ever be ignored. And so it becomes an important political act to attend to The Basement in such a way that it can be aesthetically informative and even pleasing. This is not an exoticizing or displacing of the problems of poverty. This is a refusal to be dictated by the capitalist aesthetic so pervasively understood to be "obvious" in our country.

The Cult of Genre

I write from a soft beige chair, afternoon light coming through slightly dirty Riverside windows. I'm impatient with Italian adjective exercises, restless from staying home all day, perpetually hungry for chocolate, trying to work, getting distracted by the sweet air outside, thinking about Jon Stewart.

Last week I watched almost a half-hour of Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer. (link is to Pt. 1, don't forget to watch 2 and 3 as well.) I've never seen Mad Money, and so I had to do some research to understand what was going on, at least insofar as I could understand the criticisms Jon was leveling at the quasi-contrite Cramer. I did do some research, and I think it's clear that Jon is heroically representing us all in his anger over the secrecy, elitism, and exploitation embedded in our financial crisis.

What I knew beforehand, even before I was totally clear on the content, was that Stewart had decided not to be funny for the entirety of the interview. Who knows what Cramer thought would happen--but likely not the investigative journalism he suddenly had to face. Brava, Stewart, for that crassly irreverent move.

I call it such because of how much I see the Cult of Genre running the opinion machine. Comments on the clips generally run from--and these are paraphrase-- "you're so AWESOME" (which is useless as it contains no analysis) to "you aren't a real journalist, you're a comedian, shut up." This is the notion that is most problematic to me.

If Jon Stewart is smart enough to get an investigative staff together (let's assume he's not the one doing ALL the homework), smart enough to conduct this interview, and smart enough to articulate himself as well as he does night after night, it's ridiculous to say he's "just" a comedian. He's brilliant--and I do offer credit to all the people who make it possible for him to do what he does. It's nearsighted to wish he'd stick to one genre when it's clear that he's better, his art is better, his word is better, and therefore we're all better, when he doesn't. Yet the "stick to your field" argument follows even him.

The cultish attachment to keeping works and people within genre extends to music, literature, academia, anything. I'm not defending people who cross genres poorly--I don't like dillettantes, anti-education arguments, or people who get public attention for crappy "side projects" just because they're already famous. What I'm defending is the creative act of operating actually outside the system of genre. What WAS that episode of the Daily Show? It wasn't exactly news, wasn't exactly comedy. But it was great--and whether or not something is great is much more important that whether it can or should be categorized.

This issue came up recently after a crew of Sacred Dicers all went together to see The Watchmen. Most of us had read it, a few hadn't, and suddenly at the end of the film I had to face my own attachment: the moviemakers changed the ending. I had to let go my love of the graphic novel's ending in order to see clearly that the movie ending actually worked better. That's right, I said better--and Linz had to say it aloud before I could even think it. What's admirable about the graphic novel is still admirable. What's pertinent and brilliant about the movie simply outshines it. The novel's ending is absurd; horror and comedy, which have been paired throughout the book, are juxtaposed most extremely in the last pages as a sentient squid-beast explodes over New York and kills thousands. You are made to feel part of one very large, very sick joke. The movie ending retains some of this absurdity, but follows through also on other themes: Jon as a Christ figure, framed for the fatal explosions in many of the worlds' cities and ready to martyr himself for world peace, Laurie and Dan's addiction to being masked adventurers, the fact that warring nations would likely need to suffer similar casualties in order to work together so quickly.

But if I had stayed in the Cult of Genre I wouldn't have seen that. (And if any of you are still members of the Cult of Plot, and annoyed with me for "spoiling" we can discuss that later). As a Cult of Genre member I would have been so blinded by the lack of squid, which I'd loved, that the movie ending would have seemed like a cop-out. No absurd squid? Who do these guys think they are!? This is isn't THE WATCHMEN!!

No jokes? Who does this Stewart guy think he is!? This isn't COMEDY!!

No stories about ex-boyfriends? Who does this Vanessa think she is!? This isn't a BLOG!!

And so on. I read many academic papers in grad school that spent paragraph after paragraph attempting to define a genre or category in order to defend a particular piece of work's position in or out of it. This seems a limiting pursuit, and possibly evidence of the arts/humanities insecurity about big brother Science. See, Science? We have structures of classifaction too!

So maybe I'll take the line out of my query letter that calls my novel "literary fiction." The line actually reads "this is literary fiction with the colors too bright and the sound too loud." Remember back in January of 2008 when I saw Susie Bright and decided I wanted to start a genre called "Philosmut"? Walter Mosely published a book he called "Sexistentialist" and I'd like to keep that project going, except instead of only inventing new categories, I'd like to try changing the systems of categorization to being more like webs. So each text would have a number of tags, just like they do online. I think it's possible, and I think it's already happening, and everyone had better start thinking this way or they'll just walk around in a constant state of outrage that their world isn't conforming to their assumptions.

It's all true, and it's all fiction. There. Now we can keep working.