supposed to be writing (#36)
... sometimes the break takes you
hi! i'm supposed to be writing, which is also to say this project lives on. i keep thinking of strange phrases that get stuck in my head, and they make so much sense in the moments where i repeat them to myself in the silence of a half-woken state. but i know that saying them out loud will freeze them. explode their meaning from the inside with the expansion of moisture that weaves its way into smaller places.
all that to say that writing is still hard, and i often find it harder when it either means nothing to me or means quite a lot. i feel a lot of pressure in the absence of writing – like thank you notes, like responding to texts, like jotting things down, like making a list. and i know because i’ve done this before (in this lifetime and the last, probably the next too) : when you take a break, you feel like you can never start again.
i think i made it worse by telling myself that i would write every day this year. each year my dad wisely resolves to make no resolutions, but i’m stubborn (also an aquarius) and so instead i set myself up for paralysis. five minutes is no time, but getting to my desk or to paper, a napkin, looking in relative silence as i change something of what’s in front of me, takes forever. it feels like forever passes between when i want to say something and when i have something to say.
and lately, i am most productive when i’m avoiding something harder, something that takes more emotional energy. so yeah, this project is back. and i’ll give you the drafts of november and december, because i wrote them, and then didn’t press send. which is against the rules!
and since maybe the year starts over on february 1 i’m also going to tell you that while this project will resume its regular monthly schedule, i’m also going to write, for myself, for five minutes everyday, and send out my drafts at the end of each week. if you want to read that, you can upgrade to a paid subscription [which, honestly is making me cringe and i’ve set at the lowest possible fee], so that i don’t overwhelm your inbox without you opting in. i only want to send this to people who would like to read more from me (and so many of you generously subscribed even without knowing me first) and i also want the pressure of not letting you down. sometimes you forget the reasons that you’re doing something— like exercising, like singing in the car, like eating scrambled eggs for dinner— and then the days get longer and the sun comes back and you remember again.
november
moi aussi je vais écrire
a practice of writing when you don’t want to, a practice of seeing what you can’t write down, like the imprint or embossed lettering on the grey pickup you follow for a few dozen miles
READING.
how many times do you repeat this word to yourself, alternating between pronunciations: read-ing, red-ing. And you wonder also why this is the name of a person or a place in a way divorced from the verb you read it as to begin with. the drive is blurred not just by my tired cloudy vision but by the fact of
we all talk to ourselves as we write
so it’s funny to see the ways in which we have to hide this fact or bother others
what is bothersome honestly
i guess you need to be tired enough to let yourself write, that your own reflexes – a resistance to
is that really what i meant to write about
the image that keeps repeating itself for me are the hollowed out barns
the barns that lean, they tilt as if swayed by the wind. As we fly past you look through them
there’s a problem of
there is a problem of reduction
there is a problem of seeing through or on top of things
what already has happened to you is hard to unknow
and it makes it harder to push forward into the snow
that was something i thought about earlier, how the rain would have been icy 30 years ago, we would have been trapped by the elements and desperately trying to thwart them
the warmth of this month didn’t used to be possible but it is an antidote to the lack of sunlight, to the ways in which i want to crawl inside of the freshly laundered sheets as soon as darkness falls. There should be a sort of sweetness, even in the miserable raining days, the days of being stuck inside of a cloud, but it is instead as though my body remembers what it is like to be frozen, remembers what it is like for the blinding light of snowdrifts to invade you, for the chill to steal away your air.
Then how is it different, to be stuck inside of the grey dismal wet, a cloud that descends
december
I got up in the middle of the night to write but I forget why, I think it’s because my glasses are dirty, smudged with the residue of my clumsy fingers. I keep being surprised by that kind of remnant, except it’s the fragments of things I wrote down in a different state of being. I wrote down a dream, which maybe I’ll transcribe, but when I read it back to myself, some 7 months later, I had no memory. I don’t remember dreaming it, I don’t remember writing it. I don’t remember why I left the warmth of my bed to stare into this artificially warm light. It’s easier writing against a dark backdrop, and this side of the house gets no light.
I made my students dismantle utopia, and the thing we learned is that it is fleeting. There seems to be an urge to destroy things we want to keep close; I nearly wipe the peanut butter clinging to my fingers on the stack of napkins I intend to transcribe. I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be writing—rubbing dirt from your day onto something absorbent.
I put myself through the same exercise:
“I travelled through cities, or a city, through lands, or a land.”
The part that seems important is the lack of definition. Even number becomes something that lacks contours. I think there’s something fundamentally upsetting about this kind of resistance to the ways we’ve been taught to order knowledge. If I can’t count, how do I know where the boundary between objects is ? The boundary between myself and others becomes dissolved, or dissolute, in a way that leaves me lost. At the same time, I am somewhere, though I am no longer able to recognize it.
This has woken me from a bureaucratic dream.
read/saw/heard/did - nov & dec
📚 goodbye tsugumi, banana yoshimoto
🍲 sundubu-jiggae
📚 les guérillères, monique wittig
📚the straight mind and other essays, monique wittig
📚 rousseau
🎶 songs of courtship and complaint, peggy seeger
🎥 beijing queer film festival 2023, selected shorts
🔥 firepits & vin chaud (prost mw)
🛍️ vegan artisanal pop tart & vintage
🦬 bison
📚 empire of the senseless, kathy acker
🐶 other people’s dogs (cl & ml)
🥒 fried pickles
📚 parade, hiromi kawakami
🍲 cabbage roll soup, carolina gelen (see my simplified version and a different sleepless night here)
🦾 getting stronger (tysm mm)
🎬 the death of stalin (2018)
🍋 hot toddy w/ cloved lemon
🎬 spirited away (2003)