This is pretty much a mash up of blog posts I’ve drafted and never finished over the last couple of years. Today, I decide they are all related. Today I publish this mix of thoughts, all joined up without the lines, differently dated and side by side. Find what calls to you. Make your own lines and alliances. Jump in and out. Or don’t. I share them for my own pleasure, and warmly invite you to be alongside me if it’s our moment.
smiling [06/19]
I was watching back some video of myself the other day. This is not something I usually do. The video was of me describing something quite painful, an incident that was bound up in racism. I was watching it back – listening, in fact – in order to transcribe my own words to help me prepare for a talk I was about to give. I was transcribing my words in order to understand something of my own language around resistance, invisibility, voicelessness, and my own shadows. But what I noticed most of all as I transcribed this video is that I smile throughout. Not a small smile, but a broad all-teeth smile. The one people often compliment me on. When I look back at it, I see that smile as a grimace, and as armour. It says: here I am, all armour in position, ready to make myself vulnerable at your pleasure. It’s disturbing. Always smiling, always ready to be in agreement, always the one to find a solution, never wanting to disrupt too much. The smile, I realised, is a pre-emptive way of being in the world. It foresees rejection, fear, and difficulty, and is underlined by shame. It offers protection. It says: I am already smiling, so how can you harm me? But the harm is already done. Smile!
applause [12/17]
I’ve always found the applause of theatre audiences troubling. I dutifully applaude at the end of most shows, but somewhere in me I have always had a feeling that I was in trouble. What I mean by this is that when I have seen a really powerful show, and then it ends, I often don’t feel like applauding, so when I applaude I am following along with a convention that feels fundamentally wrong in that moment. I’m troubled by the idea of what that applause does, and what it stands for. My experience is always that applause comes thick and fast, often moments before a show has finished or a final echo of sound has finished resonating. It is as if audience members want to leave the experience behind as quickly as possible – closing the door on whatever has been opened during the performance, to return to a more familiar terrain. The applause is closely followed by questions about what we all feel about the show we’ve seen. Did you like it? What did you think of it? Did we have a good time?
A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette.* The show was everything I have read about it – funny, devastating, painful, honest. And like many people, I would describe it as one of the best shows I have ever seen. But it also brought something into focus for me, about what it means to be in audience and how that is related to being alive in the world with other people. Because at the end of the show, after a standing ovation and two short bows, many of us in tears, Hannah Gadsby left the stage, and the house lights went up and everyone filed out of the theatre. And it kind of broke my heart that it felt possible for us to walk out of the theatre like that, to move back into sociality so easily, with a round of applause. Because the show had been difficult and confronting, and had opened up something so rare that I feel like it’s barely touched on in most shows I have seen.
And yes it was all the stuff before that led up to this moment, but I realised that this moment always breaks my heart a little. When we sit together and share something like that, something that is about what happens when we are in a theatre, and that is simultaneously about what happens when we look at each other in the world - how we make stories about ourselves and about others, how we cause violence to each other, how we are capable of so much more - when we see something like that, and then we are left sitting in a room together, I want to know that we are not capable of simply walking back out into our lives. I want to know that something like that changes us, that it allows us to relate to each other differently, that maybe we take a moment to see whether another person is okay. I want to know that we could sit together quietly before dispersing.
It told me so much about how we function as a society inside late capitalism [& the performance I saw was at the Sydney Opera House, fully resonant with a violent colonial present] that I had been sitting in a room with hundreds of people, and we had shared an incredibly moving experience, and many of us were weeping, and yet when the house lights went up most people went to the bar and made chat with the people they already knew, or travelled home. Transaction completed. There was no room for processing, no room for quietness or difficulty or awkwardness, no room for messiness, no room for being together across difference. It was almost as if the being together had never happened.
* I saw Nanette in the theatre, not in its later Netflix version, and I think these are fundamentally different experiences
wonder [10/17]
A few weeks ago I began a Feminist Killjoys Reading Group on Darug land in Western Sydney. Each day we read a blog post from Sara Ahmed’s feministkilljoys.com and we talked about our own experiences in relation to the ideas in that blog post. On the second day, I introduced the blog post called ‘Feminist Wonder’. In it, Ahmed writes about wonder as something that is not necessarily outside history, or outside politics, but that brings historicity into view as something made. Something that has been made and can therefore be unmade. And then she writes about shattering:
“I am interested in how consciousness of gender (say, as a way of directing human traffic) can be a world consciousness that can leave us shattered. But shattering is also what enables us to become alive to possibility. Becoming feminist can inject life into a world by allowing you to recognise not only that things acquire shape over time, but that this shape is not necessary or inevitable; that possibilities are not always lost, even when we have given them up.”
This is what it felt like to me at the end of Hannah Gadsby’s show, like the world had been exposed as made, in a moment of both horror and wonder. The show left me feeling shattered. I think this is a good word for it. And the theatre, as I have known it, is one of the places where I can experience this shattering feeling without needing to put myself back together too soon. A world made and unmade. Constructed through wonder. In the company of others.
And I ask myself: what do you need in order to feel safe enough to become shattered?
racism [07/18]
I recently published something that had at its centre my own experience of a racist incident. An incident that you might call ‘mildly racist’. But these are the ones that pull at my guts, and I have come to believe that while some racism can cause more immediate harm than other forms of racism, the idea that some racism might be ‘mild’ is misleading. The small things are perhaps the most poisonous. It is in the detail that the violence is rooted.
But you see the thing is that when I published this something, I knew the fallout would be too great, and I left it out. I left the word ‘racist’ out of the writing. Cowardly? Maybe. … because… it was minor / I did not want to deal with the consequences of calling this person out / my life has been filled with these minor incidents of eradication / they seem not worth telling. I am, finally, able to feel them deeply, but I have no idea what to do with them. They do not feel like they warrant attention from a wider audience. And yet, they have shaped me, held my body in place, and taught me to be very quiet for a very long time. And now I want to do something with all those moments, because they are gathering, and they are teaching me that it is not an indulgence but a responsibility to both feel them and share them with others.
feminist killjoys [12/18]
“If we think with and through orientation, we might allow the moments of disorientation to gather, almost as if they were bodies around a different table. We might, in the gathering, face a different way. Queer objects might take us to the very limits of social gathering, even when they still lead us to gather at the table. Indeed, to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder about the very forms of social gathering.” – Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
This is one of my favourite Sara Ahmed quotes. I come back to it again and again, finding myself differently in relation to it. I read it out loud at some of the first sessions of the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group. To set the scene. To say: you are welcome here. To say: we can do this differently. And to say: but it will take work – the work of sustaining wonder about the very forms of social gathering.
How attention is distributed is political. It is the most political thing.
Several years later, the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group continues. Now there is a core group of five who meet regularly and organise monthly events at which anyone is welcome. It is a growing community. And creating this community is one of the ways of saying: it takes work to be a killjoy, and we need each other in order to be able to continue doing this work. In order for this work to exist, part of the work needs to be the work of finding solidarity. And not parcelling each other up in the process.
The other day, I spent time with some of the killjoys reflecting on the work we have done so far. One of the reflections was: We have survived. We took this as celebration. Survival as celebration. We all knew what this meant. To have continued, to have survived, means we are doing the work.
reciprocity [05/19]
I keep having this conversation with friends, peers, people I’m mentoring. I find it is particularly something that comes up around people who have been raised as girls and women, and that it is particularly heightened in racialised bodies. It is an inability to receive. A difficulty in finding oneself worthy of receiving a gift, a kindness, attention, gratitude, or praise. It is an inability to perceive worth in self. But the conversation I keep coming back to is about reciprocity. What it takes to create/allow flow in the world, to create/allow community and conversation and belonging. That it takes both give and receive. The ability to be generous and to take a stand in one’s own body and belong there. They are always linked. To be able to receive what is being offered, to be able to both see and be seen. This work is transformative, and hard, and necessary for survival. reciprocity
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 July 2019
Monday, 8 June 2015
Not a tight community, but a community
A few days ago I was lucky enough to be on a panel with the wonderful artist Rosemary Lee, who has inspired me for many years. She said something that struck me. She said,
What I’m looking for is a community. Not a tight community, but a wider community.
There was something important about this for me. The idea of community so often gets presented as a tight-knit and overstated set of similarities, based on place or race or gender or age. It inevitably has outsiders and insiders. It sometimes has artists ‘coming in’ to ‘do projects’. These communities do exist, of course, and there is value in feeling like one is inside a tight-knit community sometimes. But in relation to arts practices, and in relation to my life and needs, I find that this notion of community as something solid and contained is always deeply problematic, and will primarily generate a feeling of outsiderness for me – something that will feel difficult to enter into.
A loose-knit community feels so much more like something I might aspire to both create and be within. It feels like something that has space to breathe, that might change, over time and space, that might welcome newness without drawing too much attention to it. And that one day might fall apart in a way that wasn’t alarming or threatening, just the course of things.
I’m interested in how we might allow those kind of spaces, and how we might hold those kinds of spaces. I’m interested in how to hold something just enough, not to constrain, and not to let go completely, but just to hold and commit for as long as it is there.
Saturday, 28 March 2015
Three short thoughts
I wanted to write a blog post about the bananas. I want to unsettle the way we hear things. I want to unsettle the way we see each other. I want to put into words some of the conversations I had with Andy that week, the dialogue, the thinking-through, the working something through within the medium of words. And are words only these things, the signs that we make with our pen-strokes? Are they just as valid when they are spoken and not written or recorded? Are they an extension of our bodies? Are they also these words that I type without leaning in?
*
The phrase ‘lean in’ has become quite popular I’ve noticed. Lean in, lean in, lean in, while I speak quietly and you must listen. Lean in and hear the news. Lean in and show you are part of the club. Lean in, put your weight on me, I will carry you. Lean in if you can bear to trust me with your weight. Lean in to show you are in the club of those who trust and are trusted. It’s a complicated phrase, just like all of them. I think that one of the reasons I like using a microphone when speaking is that I can speak in my quiet voice and other people can hear without needing to signal anything by leaning in. Some people tell me I’m wrong, that a microphone is a physical barrier between me and the audience, that it is more genuine, more friendly, more honest, to speak “naturally”. These people are usually people with loud, resonant voices. People who are used to being heard.
*
I have a feeling that everything about language has become a club. We trust words too much. I wish we had only just invented them and then we might treat them with a kind of wonder, a mistrust, a reluctance, a reticence. We might prod them and not know how they would respond, what kind of creatures they were. We might invent them at once more carefully and carelessly, playing with their form and their weight as they travel between us. We might not kill them with presumption and the expectation of fixity.
Next up: a blog post about the bananas
*
The phrase ‘lean in’ has become quite popular I’ve noticed. Lean in, lean in, lean in, while I speak quietly and you must listen. Lean in and hear the news. Lean in and show you are part of the club. Lean in, put your weight on me, I will carry you. Lean in if you can bear to trust me with your weight. Lean in to show you are in the club of those who trust and are trusted. It’s a complicated phrase, just like all of them. I think that one of the reasons I like using a microphone when speaking is that I can speak in my quiet voice and other people can hear without needing to signal anything by leaning in. Some people tell me I’m wrong, that a microphone is a physical barrier between me and the audience, that it is more genuine, more friendly, more honest, to speak “naturally”. These people are usually people with loud, resonant voices. People who are used to being heard.
*
I have a feeling that everything about language has become a club. We trust words too much. I wish we had only just invented them and then we might treat them with a kind of wonder, a mistrust, a reluctance, a reticence. We might prod them and not know how they would respond, what kind of creatures they were. We might invent them at once more carefully and carelessly, playing with their form and their weight as they travel between us. We might not kill them with presumption and the expectation of fixity.
Next up: a blog post about the bananas
Monday, 6 October 2014
There are moments that feel like life
I want to write this before it’s come into focus. It’s a
strange sensation because, for me, writing is often a kind of
getting-into-focus. So I am trying to do something while arresting and
resisting the very thing that I am trying to do. I want to write it quickly before
it comes into focus, and I want to write it slowly so that it never comes into
focus. The water is turning to glass or the glass is turning to water. There
are moments that feel life-changing. I don’t mean the big ones, the ones that announce
themselves like a soap opera and break you down. I mean the quiet ones, the
ones you might miss if you hadn’t been facing a certain direction at a certain
moment, ears up to the wind. This is one of those. This was one of those. It’s
a sequel, though. A sequel. A sequence maybe. A series of indeterminate moments
of being. It has a relationship to other moments that have come in the years
before. Heavy weeping moments. Clunky moments of understanding. Things clumsily
falling into place without knowing why. Sheddings of fear. Sheddings of
complacency. And I want to write about it in a way that teaches you nothing,
that directs you nowhere. I’m not sure why I want to do this, why I want to do
this with you and not only on my own. Maybe as a kind of intervention. As a
kind intervention. A kindly disorientation. A pocket of lost-ness in your
well-planned day. Maybe as a resistance to answering. This, this desire not to
bring my thoughts to a waking state, this is why I am writing without paragraph
breaks today. A lump, somewhere between states, not yet differentiated. That’s
this blog post. Read it slowly without wilfulness. It resists arriving. It
resists unpacking. It resists being yours or mine and it resists, also, being
held back. It even resists having friends. Or maybe it just resists being tied
down by friends, or maybe it resists being tied down by friendship as a
suffocating niceness, maybe it resists all the things I’ve done only because they
were to be done, and only for you, and only for you on a small scale, and maybe
it resists those things because they are merely excuses, because I have been
using our friendships as an excuse to be held in place when what I wanted was
to be between in so very many ways. I could leave you behind. And you could
leave me behind. And it would be kinder. It would be kind. And if at one moment
several people stood in a room in a particular constellation and that happened
to change the course of their lives, it wouldn’t have to be written about and
it wouldn’t have to be monumental, it would only be the what-happens that is
around every day, that is around us every day. And if one of us disappears, or
one of us becomes famous, or one of us begins to live with other animals, well,
that’s just how the landscape changes all the time. A kind of dreamscape, I
think. A dreamscape that is more ours than we have allowed. And the title of
this blog post is a mistake, they’re all mistakes, the things that sit
alongside what might have happened otherwise. And maybe a mistake is like
sleeping, or just like what is next to being awake.
(influences: a week spent in dialogue with Karen Christopher called We are capable of so much more:experiments in listening; and seeing Doing Dirt Time by Suzi Gablik performed by Philip Ralph, Fern Smith and Jane Trowell)
(influences: a week spent in dialogue with Karen Christopher called We are capable of so much more:experiments in listening; and seeing Doing Dirt Time by Suzi Gablik performed by Philip Ralph, Fern Smith and Jane Trowell)
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Lying Fallow: a new project
Lying Fallow is a project for Rajni Shah Projects, led by Mary Paterson, Rajni Shah, Susan Sheddan, Tiffany Charrington, and Mark Trezona (facilitator). It will take place over seven months, over three meetings.
For more information and to take part (deadline for expressions of interest Sunday 14th September 2014 at nightfall), please visit this page:
www.rajnishah.com/lying-fallow
Following is a personal statement on why the project matters to me.
17/08/2014
My favourite way to describe Lying Fallow right now is this:
an invitation to experience the changing light together
It’s the simplest collection of words I can find to describe the project that doesn’t involve loads of backstory. It’s an invitation that doesn’t make assumptions about who will be there or what they will choose to bring with them. And in that invitation to experience lie a myriad possibilities of ‘how’ Lying Fallow might happen.
But there’s a whole lot of thinking behind that invitation. And maybe it’s useful to hear something about that too.
So, if you want it, here’s some backstory:
A few years ago, for a whole number of reasons, I decided that I needed to step away from directing performance and to see what else might emerge as a way of being in the world. Figuring out how to do this has been a long process. In fact, it continues to be a long process; years and years of a kind of waiting, a kind of widening of the gaze, slowly attuning to what might be next, loosening my grip on to the way things have been and even the way things are.
This decision has prompted a series of discussions within my company, currently called Rajni Shah Projects, about what that means for us, since for fifteen years the company has supported projects initiated and directed by me. In the past three years we held three company Away Days, sent out a questionnaire to all the different people we’ve worked with, formed a working group which met regularly for a year or so – in short, we’ve initiated a whole number of conversations about the future with all kinds of people. And yet ‘nothing’ emerged as a clear way forward for the company.
When I say nothing, of course I don’t mean nothing. In a way, this series of activities was its own project: a thinking process for a group of people who had gathered around a particular way of working. We collected beautiful texts and testaments, we feasted and walked together, and other projects and writings spun out from our time together. But I think I now understand that what was preventing ‘something’ from ‘happening’ (and that something always included the option of closing the company) was simply an attachment to the idea of ‘something happening’.
The term ‘lying fallow’ has come up several times during this long thinking process, and I’ve always been drawn to it. But I realise now that I associated its connotations of unproductiveness with the idea that it only held value in the context of what came next. And in the case of the company, this prevented me from seeing what was obvious: that we were already engaged in a kind of fallowing, but that in order for it to have any value, I simply needed to stop observing it through the lens of ‘what’s next’.
At the end of 2013, I invited Mary, Susan, and Tiffany to work alongside me for a year, in an attempt to find our way towards a more collaborative company structure. Lying Fallow is the project that we have created.
It is, above all, a way of providing a frame within which a group of people might work through some of these ideas together. It’s a simple premise but feels urgent and exciting to me, because it invites the possibility of great change without determining how that change might happen, where it might come from, or what it might be. It feels important to be clear that Lying Fallow isn’t about Rajni Shah Projects any more than it is about any one of the people who might attend. But I hope that this rather long backstory helps explain the context within which I have come to be a part of the project.
There’s one more thing I feel I should mention here. Whilst Lying Fallow is a collaborative project that is being led by all four of us, I’ll also be submitting it as part of a practice-based PhD I’m undertaking at Lancaster University. This doesn’t affect the project in any way, but it would feel strange not to mention it to you up front.
To close, I’d like to offer a few words that describe ‘lying fallow’ for me.
A clear space.
A state that is neither active nor passive.
A frame that can embrace the exhausted and the silent and the passionate and the engaged in an act of listening.
Maybe see you there.
rajni.x.
For more information and to take part (deadline for expressions of interest Sunday 14th September 2014 at nightfall), please visit this page:
www.rajnishah.com/lying-fallow
Following is a personal statement on why the project matters to me.
17/08/2014
My favourite way to describe Lying Fallow right now is this:
an invitation to experience the changing light together
It’s the simplest collection of words I can find to describe the project that doesn’t involve loads of backstory. It’s an invitation that doesn’t make assumptions about who will be there or what they will choose to bring with them. And in that invitation to experience lie a myriad possibilities of ‘how’ Lying Fallow might happen.
But there’s a whole lot of thinking behind that invitation. And maybe it’s useful to hear something about that too.
So, if you want it, here’s some backstory:
A few years ago, for a whole number of reasons, I decided that I needed to step away from directing performance and to see what else might emerge as a way of being in the world. Figuring out how to do this has been a long process. In fact, it continues to be a long process; years and years of a kind of waiting, a kind of widening of the gaze, slowly attuning to what might be next, loosening my grip on to the way things have been and even the way things are.
This decision has prompted a series of discussions within my company, currently called Rajni Shah Projects, about what that means for us, since for fifteen years the company has supported projects initiated and directed by me. In the past three years we held three company Away Days, sent out a questionnaire to all the different people we’ve worked with, formed a working group which met regularly for a year or so – in short, we’ve initiated a whole number of conversations about the future with all kinds of people. And yet ‘nothing’ emerged as a clear way forward for the company.
When I say nothing, of course I don’t mean nothing. In a way, this series of activities was its own project: a thinking process for a group of people who had gathered around a particular way of working. We collected beautiful texts and testaments, we feasted and walked together, and other projects and writings spun out from our time together. But I think I now understand that what was preventing ‘something’ from ‘happening’ (and that something always included the option of closing the company) was simply an attachment to the idea of ‘something happening’.
The term ‘lying fallow’ has come up several times during this long thinking process, and I’ve always been drawn to it. But I realise now that I associated its connotations of unproductiveness with the idea that it only held value in the context of what came next. And in the case of the company, this prevented me from seeing what was obvious: that we were already engaged in a kind of fallowing, but that in order for it to have any value, I simply needed to stop observing it through the lens of ‘what’s next’.
At the end of 2013, I invited Mary, Susan, and Tiffany to work alongside me for a year, in an attempt to find our way towards a more collaborative company structure. Lying Fallow is the project that we have created.
It is, above all, a way of providing a frame within which a group of people might work through some of these ideas together. It’s a simple premise but feels urgent and exciting to me, because it invites the possibility of great change without determining how that change might happen, where it might come from, or what it might be. It feels important to be clear that Lying Fallow isn’t about Rajni Shah Projects any more than it is about any one of the people who might attend. But I hope that this rather long backstory helps explain the context within which I have come to be a part of the project.
There’s one more thing I feel I should mention here. Whilst Lying Fallow is a collaborative project that is being led by all four of us, I’ll also be submitting it as part of a practice-based PhD I’m undertaking at Lancaster University. This doesn’t affect the project in any way, but it would feel strange not to mention it to you up front.
To close, I’d like to offer a few words that describe ‘lying fallow’ for me.
A clear space.
A state that is neither active nor passive.
A frame that can embrace the exhausted and the silent and the passionate and the engaged in an act of listening.
Maybe see you there.
rajni.x.
Monday, 23 December 2013
Filling in the gaps
For example:
Some of you will know that I recently started a PhD, and that prior to that I was directing a large project called Glorious. On a CV, it looks seamless. But the reality is very different. There was (and still is in many ways) a long process of acknowledging an ending and inviting an unknown future, plenty of doubt and frustration and sadness, uncertainty and certainty vying with each other, a long process of letting go and listening carefully, of getting off the train but trying to stay on the horse, if you know what I mean. And there's something about the place where I've arrived that means I want to preserve the gaps in activity - I want to tell the actual story of how that looks and not gloss over it. Maybe because I've spent most of my life so far telling the story of what I've done - in funding applications, on CVs, through my website - in response to the heavy demand on artists (and everyone?) to document even better than we've lived. In many ways it's easy to make it all look smooth, filled-in, glossed-over, and sometimes that's a very fun exercise. And it's not that I've not enjoyed those things, I love telling the story of it all, it's a form of fiction. But something has shifted for me.
I've always valued transition moments. Moments of breakdown and questioning, even if they're hard, are the most significant and exciting moments in life. But I think what I'm trying to say is that now I want to be more public about those parts. That's some of what this blog is for me, recognising the value in being open about the transition moments. That's where change lies, in the potential to share those moments.
For example:
I've been leading a workshop in Brussels for the past week, six full days and evenings of intensely being with people, discovering, nurturing, listening, asking, being open open open to what might happen next, making a plan and letting it go. And now, in a short day, I turn around and go on holiday. And I can't think of anything more luxurious. I'm very lucky to be in this position. But this moment, this exit from the workshop, entry into the holiday, is so much more complex than it should be! I'm exhausted and emotional, and I don't know what to do with those things. The concept of holiday is actually quite complex - how do you let go of everything, just for a short amount of time, temporarily transition your whole life into something that doesn't resemble it at all, and then just at the moment you're getting used to that other thing, transition it back? It's a weird idea. I like it too - and I think it's very healthy to stop working for a while. But let's not pretend this thing is easy, just because it's nice.
For example:
I'm writing a PhD. It's part practice-based, which means that in theory I get to use my artistic practice as part of my thinking during this PhD. And I love doing it. I love the study, I love the learning, and the discussion, and the writing, and the reading. But the idea of validation is so closely related to an idea of knowing. And my expertise lies in not-knowing. So I walk around these days feeling inspired and excited and at the same time angry. Not angry specifically, like something made me angry, but carrying a kind of passionate rage under the surface. I think it's a good thing. I think it's an anger that's related to the gaps, an anger towards dominant structures, towards a general inability to recognise a different kind of literacy. It's existing in a space that's filled with the possibility of change, even if I've no idea yet exactly how or what that change might be.
For example:
During the workshop, we spent one full day in silence. We went to a museum in silence, walked back to La Bellone in silence, ate lunch in silence, and then entered our workshop space in silence and were in the space together in silence. The lunch especially was awkward, difficult for some, strange. But in that strangeness we found so much communication. Emotions were expressed that could never have been expressed in a normal speaking day, they arrived and they passed without being held up by the worry of words. A great frustration was encountered by everyone, but instead of getting stuck inside it, we had to find ways to be with it, and eventually, recognise it, let it move on, or let it be. A shift happened within the group that would otherwise not have been possible. At the end of the afternoon, on a piece of paper, one of the workshop participants wrote, "La parole est peut-être ce qui nous sépare des autres." Maybe words are what keep us apart.
Some of you will know that I recently started a PhD, and that prior to that I was directing a large project called Glorious. On a CV, it looks seamless. But the reality is very different. There was (and still is in many ways) a long process of acknowledging an ending and inviting an unknown future, plenty of doubt and frustration and sadness, uncertainty and certainty vying with each other, a long process of letting go and listening carefully, of getting off the train but trying to stay on the horse, if you know what I mean. And there's something about the place where I've arrived that means I want to preserve the gaps in activity - I want to tell the actual story of how that looks and not gloss over it. Maybe because I've spent most of my life so far telling the story of what I've done - in funding applications, on CVs, through my website - in response to the heavy demand on artists (and everyone?) to document even better than we've lived. In many ways it's easy to make it all look smooth, filled-in, glossed-over, and sometimes that's a very fun exercise. And it's not that I've not enjoyed those things, I love telling the story of it all, it's a form of fiction. But something has shifted for me.
I've always valued transition moments. Moments of breakdown and questioning, even if they're hard, are the most significant and exciting moments in life. But I think what I'm trying to say is that now I want to be more public about those parts. That's some of what this blog is for me, recognising the value in being open about the transition moments. That's where change lies, in the potential to share those moments.
For example:
I've been leading a workshop in Brussels for the past week, six full days and evenings of intensely being with people, discovering, nurturing, listening, asking, being open open open to what might happen next, making a plan and letting it go. And now, in a short day, I turn around and go on holiday. And I can't think of anything more luxurious. I'm very lucky to be in this position. But this moment, this exit from the workshop, entry into the holiday, is so much more complex than it should be! I'm exhausted and emotional, and I don't know what to do with those things. The concept of holiday is actually quite complex - how do you let go of everything, just for a short amount of time, temporarily transition your whole life into something that doesn't resemble it at all, and then just at the moment you're getting used to that other thing, transition it back? It's a weird idea. I like it too - and I think it's very healthy to stop working for a while. But let's not pretend this thing is easy, just because it's nice.
For example:
I'm writing a PhD. It's part practice-based, which means that in theory I get to use my artistic practice as part of my thinking during this PhD. And I love doing it. I love the study, I love the learning, and the discussion, and the writing, and the reading. But the idea of validation is so closely related to an idea of knowing. And my expertise lies in not-knowing. So I walk around these days feeling inspired and excited and at the same time angry. Not angry specifically, like something made me angry, but carrying a kind of passionate rage under the surface. I think it's a good thing. I think it's an anger that's related to the gaps, an anger towards dominant structures, towards a general inability to recognise a different kind of literacy. It's existing in a space that's filled with the possibility of change, even if I've no idea yet exactly how or what that change might be.
For example:
During the workshop, we spent one full day in silence. We went to a museum in silence, walked back to La Bellone in silence, ate lunch in silence, and then entered our workshop space in silence and were in the space together in silence. The lunch especially was awkward, difficult for some, strange. But in that strangeness we found so much communication. Emotions were expressed that could never have been expressed in a normal speaking day, they arrived and they passed without being held up by the worry of words. A great frustration was encountered by everyone, but instead of getting stuck inside it, we had to find ways to be with it, and eventually, recognise it, let it move on, or let it be. A shift happened within the group that would otherwise not have been possible. At the end of the afternoon, on a piece of paper, one of the workshop participants wrote, "La parole est peut-être ce qui nous sépare des autres." Maybe words are what keep us apart.
Monday, 26 March 2012
Before I read
Today before I read my emails, or check twitter, or gloriouspeople.ning.com, or spin any other of the daily plates...
I'm just back from three-day Vipassana meditation retreat. It was short - compared to the more usual ten-day courses, where one undergoes quite a transformation from everyday life. However, it was long enough for me to witness once again how distinct and beautiful it is to be with other people who are not speaking or making eye contact.
I realise that might sound a bit absurd.
Like - "it's okay to be around people as long as you don't have anything to do with them".
And maybe that's a part of it - that our lives weren't there to get in the way. We had no pens or pencils or phones or books or maps or letters or make up or fancy clothes or music or dancing or internet. Instead, just our bodies, in a space, practising meditation, eating simply, sometimes walking, and sometimes resting. Making no sound, and making no eye contact with each other.
And you might imagine that because we weren't talking or making eye contact, that we weren't really present with each other. But on the contrary, we were all holding a space together - and much more aware, in a compassionate way, of the other people in the space.
I think what it comes down to is this:
No-one bumped into each other.
Not with words or bodies.
Because there was space to be both in our own bodies and with others.
And this is a rare combination out here in our lives.
At the moment when we knew we were about to start speaking again, to make eye contact, to be with each other - there was a sense of anticipation. An excitement. But there was also a re-learning. A quick refresher - so quick it was barely perceptible - on how to mask truth with language, how to cover shame and embarrassment, how to be a girl or a boy or another kind of container.
This moment of reprogramming was barely perceptible. But the shift back into our everyday lives was immense. And within minutes, we were all navigating our worlds again, getting ready to head homewards, making friends, passing judgements, asking how the experience had been, asking how to get to the train station. Separated by communication.
So this post is a reminder - to me, mostly - to taste words more carefully. To remember that underneath all the layers of pens and pencils and phones and books and maps and letters and make up and fancy clothes and music and dancing and internet - there is always just a person, walking into the world.
I'm just back from three-day Vipassana meditation retreat. It was short - compared to the more usual ten-day courses, where one undergoes quite a transformation from everyday life. However, it was long enough for me to witness once again how distinct and beautiful it is to be with other people who are not speaking or making eye contact.
I realise that might sound a bit absurd.
Like - "it's okay to be around people as long as you don't have anything to do with them".
And maybe that's a part of it - that our lives weren't there to get in the way. We had no pens or pencils or phones or books or maps or letters or make up or fancy clothes or music or dancing or internet. Instead, just our bodies, in a space, practising meditation, eating simply, sometimes walking, and sometimes resting. Making no sound, and making no eye contact with each other.
And you might imagine that because we weren't talking or making eye contact, that we weren't really present with each other. But on the contrary, we were all holding a space together - and much more aware, in a compassionate way, of the other people in the space.
I think what it comes down to is this:
No-one bumped into each other.
Not with words or bodies.
Because there was space to be both in our own bodies and with others.
And this is a rare combination out here in our lives.
At the moment when we knew we were about to start speaking again, to make eye contact, to be with each other - there was a sense of anticipation. An excitement. But there was also a re-learning. A quick refresher - so quick it was barely perceptible - on how to mask truth with language, how to cover shame and embarrassment, how to be a girl or a boy or another kind of container.
This moment of reprogramming was barely perceptible. But the shift back into our everyday lives was immense. And within minutes, we were all navigating our worlds again, getting ready to head homewards, making friends, passing judgements, asking how the experience had been, asking how to get to the train station. Separated by communication.
So this post is a reminder - to me, mostly - to taste words more carefully. To remember that underneath all the layers of pens and pencils and phones and books and maps and letters and make up and fancy clothes and music and dancing and internet - there is always just a person, walking into the world.
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