Life has been lovely lately. Really, very little complaints. It is moments like this when I feel like I get it. When I catch that break that I’ve been waiting for, and all I can see is still water. This is the reality that I’ve begged, cried, prayed over and now it is here, and it feels how all life feels—mundane, at times exciting, at times unbearably boring.
In this figurative room, there is a window and you can see the sea. You have been sent here (you are a 19th century British woman with some aristocratic breeding) after a hysterical mental episode, and in witnessing such vastness the constraints around you have released, now there is room to move. Time is floating in this endless way, a whole afternoon stretches out in front of you.
I haven’t posted a newsletter in a while. It is partially because I’m engrossed in another writing project, partially because I have felt more and more happy to witness the coming and goings of my life without all the footnotes about it. As the doubt of the unknown has subsided, my tarot cards remain under a molding mug of tea, untouched. I have stopped giving readings altogether.
Now, I think often about art and writing. I go for walks on sunny days and listen to great artists and writers talk about their work and they feel close to me. Those times I feel practically ecstatic, bursting forth with wonder and excitement about the world. And then, there are other times when I’m sitting at my desk and thinking about how Anne Carson said that all writing is just one true sentence after another, and for the life of me I can’t think up even one true word. I give myself as much permission I can in these moments as well. I could spend the entire winter just thinking about a concept, mulling it over in my head, seeing it from all sides, and that would be okay.
In the winter, I am reminded more than ever, that it is always worth it to take my time. In fact, perhaps, it is the best thing I could ever do for myself.
Over the course of this fall I have witnessed a sort of magic in real time. Magic that is sort of an art-making all on its own. The truth is, the moment I’m living in, right now, I had dreamed it up. At one point, at the end of the summer, it was just a thought in my head. Just a page of writing in my journal, and now here it is tangible to the touch.
It’s most basic elements composed of:
A job with freedom
A room for sanctuary
Sunlight on my bed (see. naked sunbathing i.e. what I am doing as I write this)
A partnership
Space
My writing
My painting
My books
Right now, it is perfect. Often this little act of creation, of meeting a desire, often goes by unnoticed by me. As it goes, desire begets more desire and all the things that you thought would make you finally happy, finally satisfied, don’t. It is easy to wish away a moment you have dreamed of for another one. Desiring, of course, makes me feel deeply human, but it is nice to relish even for just a moment in the feeling of having everything you need. Knowing that there might be a time when I look back on this moment and feel a deep yearning for it.
In desire stands grand and delightful paradoxes. Desire both pulls the self towards reality, demands it’s participation in the game, and also pushes it away marking the self in absence—what the self isn’t, what the self has lost, what the self doesn’t have. Desire is this great tool that we will get to play with for perhaps the rest of our lives. It is deeply liberating and sweet, and also bitter, brutal, filled with suffering. Like an arrow pointing back at the self, back to the heart of the matter, desire reminds me of my boundedness. It constructs and writes the limits of myself, of my body.
A few true sentences:
To be desiring is to be staring at absence. It is to be gazing out into the hole. It is a wide gaping mouth.
Simultaneously, to receive what you were desiring requires the absence of desire itself. As in when I have what I wanted, I no longer experience the desire for it.
In the annual pre-halloween watching of halloweentown, Debbie Reynolds (magic witch grandma) said, “Magic is easy. All you have to do is want something and then let yourself have it.”
I knew magic was intimately connected to desire, but have never heard it put so succinctly. Magic, in her terms, requires not only connecting with a desire, but also a negotiation with the self. A permission only you yourself could grant.
For me, enacting my own magic in my life was a conscious decision, one that was even documented in a previous newsletter. I felt the little life I wanted so close to me, and also between us I felt a lot of shame and misery about the present. I was in the depths of an unemployment era with little prospects.
I wanted a job, most of all, to relieve me of that feeling. I felt myself spinning on this impossible loop, chained to an absence that pressed up against the boundaries of my life and pushed it away, pushed it far away. I wanted not this, anything but this. The hole was gaping, blistering and oozing out like a wound. All throughout there was refrain, a familiar note echoing in my head:
(you’ve been here before,
you’ve been here before,
you’ve been here before)
From it a radical thought that emerged. All I ever wanted was the time to do what I pleased, and here it was heaping buckets of it, and I couldn’t even enjoy it. I wondered, isn’t this everything that I desired?
I spent my time doing the things I loved. I let the wanting to rid myself of some misery slip away. A job, of course, followed soon after one that allowed me to keep all that free time I loved so much.
In other words, I let myself have it.
And the truth is, like everything I ever wanted, there was no euphoria or exaltation.
The feeling was just like this:
(oh)
Sending you lots of love.
It cannot go without mentioning that your voice, you body, your prayer is worth a lot. May the Palestinian people be free.
-Thai