I’m asking you to enter this room. It is all black, as we speak right now, but soon it will take shape and form. It will be many things, but it is nothing now. Just a room. Hold it in your mind. It is essential that we start here. First, here. Before desire soils every corner of it, before lovers litter it with enter and exit wounds. I want you to remember it as it is. A holding space. If you’re very quiet you can hear the floorboards shifting.
The newsletter has a new name. It is summoning something new. It is a statement and an invitation to approach some mystery. We are in a room. This small sentence has been echoing around my head for some time now like a clue or an opening that I couldn’t quite shake. I think most of all I liked the mystery of the sentence. Not so much a invitation, but a statement. Definitive in that it gives no room to deny it. What did it mean?...
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Most fundamentally, I knew it was extending towards an image of a container, a room…
Our existence on earth is constituted through our containment. A newsletter is a container, our bodies are a container, this earth is a container, a thesis is a container, so are words, relationships, selves, stories, categories, books, paintings. These containers can be spacious, suffocating, miserable, lush, boring, expansive. They inherently produce separation (something must remain always outside), but in it they provide structure, safety, coherence.
Meditation is where I go to be in the infinite muddling of everything and nothing. Writing is where I go to make some sense, gesture towards all of it. Failure in some ways is the condition of writing. I will never capture that essence that I’m reaching for completely. Something will always remain just outside of the container I create and necessarily so (see. secret third thing). We need it to produce meaning, even if that meaning is in itself porous, liminal, rupturous (this isn’t a word I don’t think I just liked how it looked on the page).
Am I losing you? I hope not.
The art, the writing I enjoy the most all share qualities of space and atmosphere. It opens up a container, a portal to somewhere else, and you sit there with the artist as they weave an environment for you to inhabit with them. It can be intimate or crowded with ghosts, fertile or barren. Either way, it is a space that feels exciting and rich. It is a room you enter into, whatever happens there is between you and the artist. It is a beautiful thing.
We are in a room. As I read that sentence now I can’t help getting to the center of the matter. Aren’t we all just in a room? All of us here on earth, at this time? Aren’t we all contained by the same rules of physics, gravity and the needs of our bodies? Either way, it is too hard for a brain to consider every human being on this planet at this time. So, let’s take down the scale of the ‘we’ a bit. It is just you and me. Maybe it has always just been you and me.
Okay—a new name calls for a new introduction.
I, me, Thai
Your faithful narrator. Your unreliable story-teller. Fleshy carbon playing God. I am a performance ground, a series of stories dropped at a moment's notice, a kale salad and a cigarette smoked shortly after. I am everything and nothing. I’m playing small, discrete, contained finite, until all the rest comes oozing out of every orifice. There was a book-shaped hole in this world just for me. It was that nostalgic feeling for bare legs on floorboards. It was a house in the distance. It was a cold glass of milk too close to the edge of the table. It was you in autumn and summer. Need I say more?
As I have mentioned before, I have moved to a new apartment. It is endlessly interesting creating a home somewhere new. A bedroom of one’s own feels so luxurious. At its best it can be an echo back of who you are being, it tells the story that you are writing. The notes on the mirror, the incense holder by the window, the books stacked in the corner all become important symbols. It all feels so intimate.
I have started painting again. I try to do so with some purpose. I am in my studio, one that I share with a dozen other artists and writers. At times everything I create in this medium feel referential. That is a kinder way of putting it. Some may say it is lifting—mimicry, stealing away with another's visual language. I don’t feel shame about this though. In many ways, these are the conditions of learning. My painting at this point in time feels derivative, maybe even a bit boring, and yet I keep going. It makes me feel deeply human to be trying, to be so far away from mastery. I don’t feel as if I have the skill to execute what I want to, in many ways I am limited by it. Though this limitation in itself feels like a creative gift. Too much freedom can feel suffocating. As always, it is good to have a container.
Picasso claims that painting is just another way of keeping a diary. I look at my diary and all I see are thoughts and feelings. Who I am loving, who I am having troubles with, it is littered with curdled feelings of self-doubt, suffering and then triumph and that ecstatic well of possibility. Though there is nothing of the color of the day to day–the objects I was touching, what I was eating and how I was filling my hours. Painting feels more like that to me. A visual lexicon of space, form and objects.
Currently, I have an obsession with finding every podcast Sheila Heti has ever done. Just last week, I hit the jackpot. I found her little known podcast, podcast for raisins, that has all been erased from the internet, except for the wondrous internet archive that has saved the mp3 of a few. I listen and re-listen like it is my religion. In one podcast she discusses painting. She is often jealous of it because the viewer can see it all at once and get a sense of the whole picture, the whole thing. Yet, in writing it takes much mastery to create a whole thing that feels cohesive, for the reader to have a whole image in their head when they finish reading a book. It is fun to play with that, having it be received all there, all at once.
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Goodbye for now, I will leave you with this love poem
I’ve longed for it. I came to this earth, needy, desperate to tell a story about how the moon doesn’t much care about your problems, and loves you, still.
As always, if you enjoyed and want to get a little something every week or so, think about going paid.
Love you, many kisses xx
-Thai