Before we start this edition of notes on here and elsewhere, a quick note from me (thai in the future). It is my birthday today. With the winter solstice yesterday, and the new moon in capricorn tomorrow there is a little bit more magic in the air. This newsletter is around 6 months old while I am, now, 23 years old. So, it feels like the perfect time to set some intentions, and aim myself in a direction. After all, spells are simply: intention (ritual) + aim (direction).
I’m hoping to eventually make this newsletter paid. I really like this newsletter and see it as valuable. Seeing ones work as valuable is a journey for sure, and I truly feel like the confidence I have in myself and what I create increases everyday. Value is subjective and like good or bad is often more about how you feel about yourself rather than any type of intrinsic meaning. Hopefully it will look like a combo of one free newsletter a month and the rest paid. We will see!
Thank you, for reading and being a part of this. <3 Now…onto the newsletter.
I’m off again in a few days. Like the last time, I feel wholly unprepared but nevertheless excited and hopeful. By the time I’m sending this out I will probably already be in Costa Rica. Wild.
These past few days with the full moon a deep melancholic haze has settled over me. Perhaps I’m being a little dramatic, but when I get like this, I have no choice but to lie down on the floor for hours staring at the ceiling or the wall. I was playing scrabble with my parents and Morning Elvis by Florence and the Machine came on the speakers and I started crying. Florence said “if I make it to the stage, I’ll show you what it’s like to be sad.” My dad heard “I’ll show you what it’s like to be saved” and said, “I want to be saved.” I thought that was somehow poetic.
Somehow this makes it all better though. Turning this feeling into a story I can tell to you. The feeling isn’t as forever; it's something that even sits outside of myself, something beautiful like art. My friend said something once about how the show “Girls” (yes, with Lena Dunham) reminded them that any experience no matter how ugly, embarrassing or gross could be useful. It can be more than the sum of its parts, and shine with meaning.
She recalled a particular scene at the end of season 1, where after an emotionally tumultuous night Hanna (our embarrassing and audacious heroine) fell asleep on the subway and made it all the way to coney island. She walks to the beach just as dawn is breaking and sits and stares at the water. It is such a familiar feeling, these brief moments in-between the uncertainty, the insecurity, the doubt and the chaos where you feel that perhaps everything is okay. Or it isn’t okay, but it will be.
I’ve been thinking about this capacity we are given to produce meaning. To turn something into something else.
I read a text once about how every being has the capacity to tell stories; rivers co-produce meaning with the land, animals and plants not only shape the stories that humans tell, but they are co-creating with us in that very story-telling. It felt true when I read it, so it must be true. What is reality but the stories we tell? Though I do think there is something unique in our human capacity to live in stories, to attribute meaning to almost everything that happens to us and the people around us. For better or for worse.
That is the thing with story-telling it creates a multi-dimensionality to reality. Every story in a sense is an illusion, once we produce meaning or decide which aspects of reality is meaningful there is always something that remains omitted.
I think about this a lot. What is relevant or irrelevant to a story?
I was watching Frances Ha the night before I left, and like the first time I was taken by the film. A film that at once felt so familiar, and embarrassing and beautiful. Directed by Noah Bambach and co-written and starring Greta Gerwig, it emerges from Greta’s mumblecore roots, but it is really something all its own. I see a lot of homage to french new wave cinema and Godard’s Breathless with its black and white short vignette sequences where you can’t quite tell where a scene begins or ends. Nothing feels overtly connected to each other, so, of course, it all feels connected to each other.
In many ways Lady Bird, the film that shot Gerwig into filmmaker status, feels like a prequel to Frances Ha. Young girl goes to New York city from Sacramento. Half-girl, half-women, ambles around New York city, returns home to Sacramento, fails, fails again, goes for it, pulls back, and in her own way, reaches for some form of self-actualization.
In Frances Ha, like in many Godard films, you are drawn to the omission. You enter conversation midway through and leave before you can get a grasp on why or who her mom gave their tamales away to. Is this relevant to this story?? Are we missing a piece of critical information? It’s hard to tell. It reminds me of a scene in a Godard film that for the life of me I can’t remember where the camera moves away from the scene to the trees across the street and lingers there.
Who's to say that the way that the trees are moving in the wind isn’t relevant to the story? Who’s to say it wouldn’t radically change the entire meaning?
Omission is also considerably political. There are small stories we tell about our lives and the people in it, and large [hi]stories we are told about how we got to this point in time. A point in time that has “progressed” from other points in time before, thanks to notable historical actors and not thanks to [redacted] non-historical objects. Everywhere you look you can find stories about progress and civilization, a story perhaps fundamental to colonization and capitalism, starting in Greco-Roman cradles of “western” civilization and ending somewhere, here. I could go on, and maybe I will, maybe in another version of this newsletter in another time I would bring up Saidiya Hartman or Derrida’s archive fever, but this is my newsletter about my inner world, so let’s bring it back to me… The (finite) self that I (the infinite) is revolving around.
It is occurring to me that every story is a partial truth, no narrative can account for the infinite chaos that is existence. Reality is truly everything, everywhere, all at once, but we are given the capacity to produce meaning to lend our conscious awareness to particular timelines and allow them to expand and grow.
Oh hi, funny meeting you here. Let’s begin again.
The beauty of knowing that there are infinite amounts of ways that you could perceive reality, and as buddha famously claims every perception or story is ultimately an illusion, in any given moment you can change the story you tell yourself. In many ways, this is step one of shape-shifting.
In Granada, I saw this really interesting parenting moment that lingered in my mind long after I had left the arid south of Spain. This dad was walking with a kid in a stroller, but being a cobblestoned area with many stairs this kid was getting bumped around quite a bit. The kid started to get annoyed and I watched as it bubbled up into a full blown screaming tantrum. Instead of the dad reacting or refusing the kids experience of reality, he simply started saying weeeeee every time they went down a bump. And all of a sudden the kid started laughing. I was like woah, nothing about this situation changed the dad just reframed the story. Just moments before this kid was experiencing a reality that was annoying and bothersome, but now it was delightful and joyful. All of this changed in only a span of a few seconds. Wow, wow. It kept occurring to me long after that I witnessed some form of alchemy. An alchemy that I think I’ve been doing for a while now, before I had the words to articulate it as so. {I’m not nervous. I’m just excited.}
If growing up is being your own parent and inner-child simultaneously in this self-love spiral I think, to me, re-parenting looks a bit like this, negotiating with the part of yourself that wants to have an all out meltdown freak out, and being the adult that has the ability to negotiate a different narrative. (or something like that).
Storytelling alchemy feels fundamental to at least my existence. I’m always amazed by people who can take the densest of experiences and turn it into something else. I think this is why I love the process of creating, something becomes transformed, it can sit outside of your own subjectivity and it becomes expansive and readily available for others to engage and release something in themselves. I think this is close to what I experienced watching Francis Has; this sense of catharsis.
In Francis Ha, the release is not so much in the sensationalized tragedy or drama, but in the mundanity of loss. In friendships that shift and become different, in ideas about the future that need to fall away to make room for other dreams, in growing up or not being able to, in desperately holding on as things do what they always do, change.
Those feelings like sadness, heartache, shame become something beautiful, something special, not as dense. It could all be a part of the dance, the sorrow and the joy, all of it beautiful and imbued with meaning even if that meaning is just dancing amidst the ever changing ebbs and flows of life, at least that is the story I tell myself.
If alchemy and transformation is the aim, then storytelling is the vehicle.
Airplane Movies Review
Teehee I like this as an official section of the newsletter
The Fallout: I was actually pleasantly surprised! At first glance the premise does give trauma porn vibes, it is about a school shooting and the ~fallout~ of PTSD in the main character Valda’s life as a survivor. Jenny Ortega and Dance Mom’s alum Maddie Ziegler gave really incredible performances. A lot more nuanced than I thought it would be, they didn’t shy away from the queer nature of the trauma bonded relationship Valda and Mia (Maddie Ziegler) share. Okay maybe this is a weird take but there's a lot of hate on trauma bonding, and I like how this film displayed both the complicated parts of this type of enmeshment, but also the beautiful and necessary parts of finding healing in someone else through shared trauma.
The Worst Person in the World: Wow! Been meaning to watch this for a while, and was not disappointed. The film takes you on a four year journey in this women’s life in Oslo through various relationships and self-discovery. Beautifully shot, tender, nuanced, familiar, I have no other coherent thoughts about this one, but I loved it.
A Recent Revelation
(…)
A small poem I found on my hard drive. It felt relevant.
I was going through a stage when I was 19 when I was really into Sufist poetry, I have a lot of little poems like this that mimic that style. Simplistic, sweet, always about the ecstatic felt presence of God.
Heaven, Now
Be heaven, now Enter in to paradise. Weave your soul into the wind and shadows and light on curtains. No waiting belongs in heaven
Talk soon,
Love, Thai xx