It has been a bit of a whirlwind as usual. I was in Montreal for the week and time has slipped by in this really amorphous way as I have been without a phone for a week (because I dropped it in the toilet). In-between a vernissage and dinner parties and bathtub timeline jumps (what me and my friends have coined hot tub time machine after a sloppy drunken timeline jump in a hot tub in a cabin in northern Quebec—truly a story for another time), I felt like I’ve been existing in every moment as if it was the only moment that ever existed. Montreal is just as I left it and it’s been fun experiencing the life that I had (and the life that I could still return to if I wanted to). I feel the version of myself that exists here, how much I really loved that version of myself. And yet, the small, but noticeable, distance I feel from her now.
I love this lil ol vehicle of identity that carries us through reality. And I found myself asking my friends this week the same questions. Who were you being in 2022? What era or energy did it encapsulate for you? And what about 2023? For me, as I have already detailed, 2022 was essentially about high drama/ low stakes. And the more I’ve been asked to reflect on that (as December often implores of us), I’ve realized that essentially what I wanted was to hold myself in every desire, every high and every low, I wanted to hold my most dramatic, most feral, most messy self. Which to be fair wasn’t all that messy nor feral because I am a Capricorn after all… And I wanted to feel like the stakes were low! As in, no matter what I knew I had myself and all of it surely was only as dense as I allowed myself to make it.
And this was new for me. It was only up until recently when a grace for myself could only be granted on the conditions of the ever changing definitions I had of moral and spiritual excellence. As this year comes to a close, I have been drifting in and around this grey area outside of such notions of purity, hoping to find possibility elsewhere.
Beyond Purity
There is a Rumi poem that funny enough I came across through Brad Pitt, via Ottessa Moshegh’s article in GQ. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.” A quote that my mom later recited to me unprompted over takeout Thai food.
A sort of moral ambiguity has been consuming my reality lately as I’ve been seeming to find it in everything from the books I’m reading, to the video essay’s I’m watching to the small dramas in my life and my friends lives. Maybe it was my catholic upbringing, but I really used to find a lot of solace in the fact that there was right and wrong, good and bad. The world felt too unruly, too chaotic without these guiding principles. Ya sure I genuinely thought I would go to hell if I lied, but at least I knew the rules of salvation.
What was right and what was wrong shifted and changed throughout my life, but I would find myself jumping from one cult of moral purity to another. From catholicism, to fitness and health, to veganism, to new-age spiritual purity, to productivity, to online social justice activism. All of which would claim a moral righteousness that I would happily buy into.
In my three week stay at my parents place, (a time that I am coining my stay-at-home daughter residency), among my other artistic pursuits, I have been experimenting with different recipes, all that include healthy sizes of butter and cream. I’ve been told that butter is making a comeback, with tik tok videos dedicated to butter cheese boards, and french butter, and butter infused with herbs and garlic. People want to eat butter, a shit ton of butter, and they don’t want to feel even a little guilty about that. I don’t know why butter is the symbol I’m latching on to to articulate this shift. But, I’m noticing externally in reality and internally in myself, that there is something about butter, a particular obscene indulgence, that feels notable as a site for dissolving the boundaries between right and wrong. Butter, that once, only felt safe to smear in small quantities on toast. Butter, that would make my skin crawl when I saw recipes calling for a whole stick. Butter that now is just one way I submit to the small and joyful indulgences of living.
Every year, in December, my friend and podcast partner hosts a screening of the Last Holiday starring Queen Latifah. A quick synopsis… Queen Latifah who has found out that she has only a few months to live decides to throw caution into the wind and gives up her life of lean cuisine meals and budgeting to go to a five star hotel in the Czech Republic to celebrate life and eat from one of her favourite chefs. A scene that both of us are particularly fond of and recited from memory during this year’s screening is one where Queen Latifah is talking to chef Didier in an outdoor market. He turns to her and whispers in her ear: we both know the secret to life is butter.
Of course, similarly, butter stands in as a symbol for so much more. It is Queen Latifah letting go of all restrictions and any notion of trying to lose weight. We witness her transformation as she celebrates life, indulges, takes risks and becomes the person she has always dreamed of being. What really is quite remarkable about this film is that unlike other films that traces a character's arc to success through their hard work and determination, Queen Latifah finds her success through enjoying herself, relaxing and stepping into a version of herself that is able to both accept who she is and take her desires seriously. Honestly pretty ahead of its time for 2006, an era famous for it’s fat-shaming and impossibly thin female leads.
Back to butter…
I’ve been really challenging lately everything and anything I contained as good or bad. It feels really freeing, especially after you sit through the initial discomfort of so much grey area. I guess more than anything I’m allowing myself to be my own authority on how I live.
The solace that I found in the possibility of such binaries made me feel safe but only momentarily. It made me feel like I was on the right side of things, in fact, that I could even go so far as to define myself in opposition to what I was not. I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t ignorant, I wasn’t unevolved, I wasn’t uneducated, I wasn’t unhealthy etc etc etc. I know everyone is sick and tired of talking about ~cancel culture~, but that is something I think fits well here too. A public retribution that grants all those that participate the opportunity to purge their own impurities through someone else. To adhere to anti-racism through finding and publicly admonishing the racists. There are so many people that have talked about this way more eloquently than I can, so I’ll leave this thread here.
Defining yourself knowingly, or unknowingly as being not something also puts you at dire risk of being found out, of being revealed to be an imposter. Because honestly, I really think that we are all perhaps a little scared of being all the things that we claim ourselves to not be. We all seemed to be riddled with contradictions and hypocrisy, there have embarassingly been far too many times that I have found myself repudiating the doings of others to find myself turning around and choosing similarly. Maybe it’s all a mirror?
I’ve been thinking, mostly for myself (I suppose that is where everything starts) that maybe there are other frameworks of just and compassionate living that can exist beyond the most sanitized of existences. Maybe I don’t want to be right, maybe I just want to be free.
Enter the Portal…
Finally…a celebration.
After a long time of being huddled up in bunk beds in hostels or at cafes where I order one cappuccino and stay for hours, the video game I’ve been working on with @endoftheworld.research is out into the world. After a window pane legitimately fell out and crashed to the ground (thankfully no one was hurt), we drank spiked punch, we laughed, we giggled and by the end my makeup was smudged all over my face.
you can now play here. (best to do so on desktop)
A Home on the Sea
After a timeline shift I was doing in the bathtub I had this image of a house on the sea in my head. I entered into this house surrounded by water, and I felt immediately that this was somewhere safe, a refuge of sorts. The ocean outside of the house was unruly, chaos in its purest form. It was too vast and large to understand, much less control but here in my house I was contained and safe.
All over my journals as of late I have written the same thing over and over:
I need a container.
I need a container.
I need a container to hold all of this.
And here it was.
But the container wasn’t external. I was the home, and I got to create the conditions of living inside of myself.
To yield to the space that exists in-between right and wrong is to abandon many containers that once held you before. Emphasis on held. They can be helpful to sort through the chaos, the infinite unknown. Though what holds you can quickly become the conditions of your containment when your shoulder press up against the boundaries of its walls.
The contract of living (as a human) on earth is already to be contained within the self physically defined within the body. Maybe this is the only container I need. Here inside myself I can create a lush and rich inner world. One that can shape-shift and hold myself in every iteration, to hold room for complexity and contradiction. An inner world defined by wonder, whimsy (of course) and curiosity. And as is the way with mirrors, outside of myself I will see that world reflected.
See you next week ish.
Love, Thai xx