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VI.

I’m back in the corridor somehow. I’m not sure how many laps I’ve walked. I hear the sound of cicadas and step into a familiar room, though its dimensions feel different. I pick up the teapot and pour two cups of jasmine tea.

Hesitation, Iridescence

What makes space to hold complexity? Or perhaps to move with it?

I make another circle around this question, reshape it, read it again: There’s so much in life that triggers tension. What says to our bodies relax? I’m not sure if it’s the same question. But there’s something in my slippage between the two questions (What makes space to hold complexity? / What says to our bodies relax?) that feels related to my experiences in the creek in the Sequoias, to the sound of Boulder Creek flowing through empty boxes, to Ambika’s essays on joy and gratitude, holding and letting go.

I made a small mixed-media piece when I was in middle school sometime, a wobbly looking violin done in pastels, with two sheets of photocopied paper glued on top, in would-be-casual angles. The photocopies are from my etude book Schradieck (a book of finger exercises that’s thorough and satisfying in a boringly masochistic sort of way). On one of the pages, in huge exasperated letters, my teacher has written: “If you relax physically it will be easier to concentrate with your mind. Then you will sound better without having to work so hard. –Ancient Proverb” and “Remember to Exhale!” On the other page, in between each of the lines, he’s written “Relax!!!!” some dozen or twenty times with varying numbers of exclamation marks.

 

Whenever I tell my friends about the way my teacher used to grip my wrist as he yelled “relax,” we laugh. Of course it’s not relaxing, especially combined with his tendency to accidentally deliver a static-electric shock to your wrist on his way over to your music stand from his low wool-upholstered chair. And yet, whenever I teach violin lessons, the question comes back through all the embodied habits of alertness and perfectionism; I’m constantly needing to make wide loopy detours around my habits in order to open up spaces for humor and warmth, love, relaxation. Holding a violin is not an automatically relaxing thing to do. Especially when it’s loaded with expectations, with a desire to please, or to be seen as who you are, it can be (like any unfamiliar thing) a trigger of fear. I have one violin student at the moment, a twelve-year-old girl, and I fill our lessons with as much lightness and softness as I can: from violinist Mark Steinberg, I borrow the trick of dancing the meter while playing the tune, and my student’s ballet training turns the awkward high-steps of his master class into a graceful waltz that she continues gamely back and forth while her left and right hands tangle in a brave delightful mess. I invite her imaginary hamster Snickers into the cup of her left palm and the collapsed grip of her right hand. I think back to my mom gathering lines of puppets to listen and clap for me, to notice when my right elbow is sticking out or my intonation is off. And still I find the tension sneaking back into my neck, I notice my student mirroring my linear focus and my fear that I’m not teaching her well enough, reflecting it back to me in her desire to please me.

What am I circling around? Maybe it’s a desire to hold the ways I keep failing and thawing again in something like the cradle of loving-kindness, Maitri, that Pema Chodron speaks about so reassuringly. Holding our fearful heart in the cradle of loving-kindness. There’s a contraction and expansion that I keep moving through: draw in, let go; contract, release. Sometimes these cycles happen so fast that they resemble panic attacks: sudden inhalations, forced exhalations, the pause in between a moment of suspension, of holding.

I look for a moment of exhalation in my memory and remember listening to Pauline Oliveros’s The Well and The Gentle while lying on the floor of the apartment I shared with Phil in Boston two years ago. I was assisting Claire Chase with her New Music Ensemble at Harvard, and I felt like she had just gifted me (us) something magical in her assignment of this recording from Pauline Oliveros, whom Claire had known not just as a teacher through her words but as a fellow human. After falling in love with Pauline Oliveros’s text scores and with the ripples of her work as they moved in the values of my California feminist improv collective, after having read her playful and deep, deeply playful essays and compositions, I felt as though here in this sound of her playing I was suddenly present with Oliveros in a bodied way, with the way she leaned into her accordion and filled the resonant space in which she was recording with her act of being, flowing.

Her accordion folds— compression, release— feel like an opening to staying with the moments of tightness and refusal that I’ve been trying to talk myself out of. Like maybe they’re natural, maybe they’re part of something as flowing and cyclical as breath. (When I write these things down I feel silly: yes of course, they’re natural; yes of course, they’re breath. But feeling them . . . )

I’m swept into the pulse and resonance of her sound. Letting go feels like flight, like saying yes.

. . .

Some ten pages into the grey notebook I started during the summer after my first year at Stanford, while I was in Tours studying French on Stanford’s dime, my handwriting goes wildly slant, the ink thin from the speed I’m writing. Reading my words now, in my studio in Boulder, I feel like a different person, like I’m holding the nested doll of my past self, gently. “I can’t sleep,” I read, and remember what it felt like that afternoon, half-running from my apartment across the bridge and into town to get to the bookstore before it closed. I had just found out that Lili Boulanger, the composer I’d stumbled upon while at a residency with my piano duo partner and scanning IMSLP for composers who weren’t dead white men, had been working on an opera based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck at the time of her early death, and that sketches for this opera existed and could be consulted at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. I suddenly knew what I was doing for my dissertation, and I had that feeling that makes you send extra copies of your notes to all your email addresses and hope that modern civilization doesn’t suddenly collapse before you can bring your idea to life. I was wearing a skirt just because, and I felt beautiful, ecstatic, as I ran on the cobblestones toward downtown Tours.

The idea felt perfect in every way: Lili Boulanger’s music moved me, like on a visceral level, and stirred the indignant overachiever who had been edged out of competitions and conversations by louder brasher more male colleagues. The fact that she had actually won the Prix du Rome satisfied the part of myself that craved external validation and confirmation, and the fact that I’d never heard of her through my twenty-seven years of musical education (two years longer than her whole life!!) put fire in my inner feminist crusader. And here I was in France having just learned from an article by Annegret Fauser that her magnum opus, an opera based on a symbolist play, existed only in fragments, sketches—Sketches, my favorite! and that I could extend my research on Beethoven’s sketches in a direction that would actually feel meaningful and impactful. Imagine the rich red-carpeted lobby of Davies Hall filled with hanging silk painting that turned her sonic sketches into visual forms, with whispering fragments of sound merging and disappearing, a visualization of an idea in process, hovering, of potential.

I haven’t done this yet, not because it no longer feels like a good idea, but because its pull feels too far distant from the place where I find myself now and the sounds and colors and ideas that have given me hope and movement in a time that has often felt still and closed-down. When I talk with my mom about the past five years, how I haven’t wanted to play violin or paint or research, I see her grief. It’s a grief colored by her sacrifices and her love, by the years she spent driving me to chiropractors and masseuses and doctors and physical therapists in order to try to heal my arm injuries, by the years of four-hour-sleeps and laundry and stir fries and teaching and taking me to lessons and, and, and. My first reaction is frustration and annoyance: how can you not see how impossible it is to continue when I see my life’s foundations as the flowers painted (gorgeously) on a scaffolding that upholds a patriarchal racist ableist sexist homophobic colonial capitalist system of oppression? And my second reaction is a clenching feeling: what is wrong with me that I can’t get over myself and do something? And in my more dour moments: is there anything I’m even useful for at this point?

 

Lady Cardinal lands on my dour thoughts and chips quizzically, then flies off, wingbeats in my ears. I breathe in, let go again.

 

The last seven years feel like a long hesitation, or cycles of contraction and release. I’m guided by Pema Chodron’s voice (drop the storyline, feel the energy) into an article by Alia Al-Saji, a philosopher I encountered through a footnote somewhere and whose words lit a small warm flame inside my doubting self.

It is, without a doubt, a difficult task to address at once the state of philosophy as embodied by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and the place of one’s own thought within it. [. . .]

We seem to be, however, at a different (though by no means uniquely

dark) juncture, so that another dimension—the historical, political, affective

situation in which, and according to which, we live—intertwines with

the philosophical, institutional, and phenomenological-existential to create

a conceptually thorny and affectively muddy no-man’s-land, in which

I could not but find myself bogged down as I tried to write this address.

In this no-man’s-land, my positionality as “foreigner,” “nonresident alien,”

Arab, Muslim, Iraqi woman sits uncomfortably—absurdly and pessimistically incongruent—with my long belonging to SPEP, this on first view U.S.-centered (or may we say implicitly “American”) organization. This

incongruence makes me hesitate. My essay receives its impetus from this

unease, this hesitation. And while the essay begins to think from my positionality, it is also about more than that location, since the experience I

parse has resonances and intersections that cut beyond my foreignness and

beyond who currently administers the United States government. It speaks,

I hope, to other hesitations within SPEP, within the histories of Continental

philosophy, and within philosophy more broadly. Though I do not claim to

speak for them, I want to show how such hesitation can itself be philosophical, how it might be constitutive, and not simply marginal, to what we do in SPEP. Can I find the resources within philosophy to survive this lived tension, this hesitation—and to think it—without reducing it to a mere schema or dismissing it as an accidental sideline of history? (332, emphases added)

She gathers others around her words, people who also have felt their way into hesitations:

Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl,”28 the “tetanization” and muscular spasms of the colonized and the explosion of the racialized body schema in Frantz Fanon’s work,29 Henri Bergson’s equation of duration with hesitating and delay,30 Gilles Deleuze’s stuttering,31 and the painter’s quivering, responsive hand for Maurice Merleau-Ponty;32 and there are more. Yet, in many philosophies, hesitation becomes an obstacle to be overcome, a stage in becoming, or a means to a more seamless and fluid activity. In the foreign pairing of the works of Bergson and Fanon, I find the models to think of hesitation differently. This may be because, instead of resolving hesitation, they do not seem to be afraid to dwell with it, to perform and sustain it, to think it. (336, emphasis added)

And then she offers a corrective, a hesitation and redirection, of something she’d written three years prior (“A phenomenology of hesitation,” 2014), in which she had differentiated “productive and paralyzing hesitations, the latter often resulting from internalized situations of oppression”:

 

[T]hough hesitations tend in different directions and can be the source of

changes of direction, it is unclear to me, now, that hesitations can be categorized in this way. There is an unpredictability to hesitating, an interval that it creates, which means that what I make of my hesitations, or what hesitating makes of me, is a singular unfurling of time. As much as hesitation may be produced by situations of oppression—and by the weighting and fracturing of the past in the present—it also lives these situations, feels and expresses this duration. Thus, the immobilizing hesitation that Young describes in “Throwing Like a Girl” can become feminist reflection; and the paralyzing fragmentation and waiting that Fanon lives in Peau noire, masques blancs needs to be dwelled in to become militancy and world transformation. (337, emphasis added)

 

At first read, I hear an insistence on productivity, even or especially in the hesitations she had previously described as paralyzing. But reading farther, the word “productivity” feels less expressive (more loaded with capitalist assumptions) than the word she chooses later, an “opening”:

The colonial past has uneven affective weight—disregarded, indifferent, or

“ankylosed” from white, Eurocentric or U.S.-centric perspectives, yet intensively structuring the everyday for the occupied, racialized, and “formerly colonized.”38 Often for us, this past can be felt in the present in the form of hesitation, delay with respect to meaning-making in the world.

Could hesitation be a means for interrupting this recalcitrant disregard,

for attending to or redressing this past (to use Saidiya Hartman’s term)?39 Could it be a method for healing philosophical disregard (if only philosophy could make itself hesitate and treat its institutional occlusions)? That would be too easy a remedy—one that, moreover, reinstates the self-mastery of philosophical systems. The interval of hesitation is intimately tied to the past; as it delays a habitual or unreflected line of action, hesitating creates an opening into which memories could come flowing back. But the past that is actualized, or recollected, is already weighted with colonial narratives and racial stereotypes; unless fissures of resistance are mined, this

version of the past dominates and, through repetition, is amplified. What is needed, I think, is that hesitation be not only an interruption of the present but also a critical reconfiguration of the past. This is a deeper hesitation, leading to what might be a critical phenomenology. Critical hesitation, on my account, draws in the past so that it, too, hesitates. It is not a masterly, or direct, reiteration of the past—of our pasts, of philosophies past—but indirect and faltering. Feeling its way with care, even love, it is a lateral reworking of the past along with the present.40 In this “lateral passivity” (to use Merleau-Ponty’s term), the impetus for hesitation comes from outside, from its situation, world, and others (familiar and alien) upon which it constitutively depends. Critical phenomenology, by being about structuring conditions, must have a feel for the past—those pasts that remain with us, and immerse or buoy us up, in the everyday, in the pre-reflective flow of lived experience.

The words care and love feel pivotal in this paragraph. In the “even” with which she qualifies “even love,” I hear (or perhaps insert) the same hesitation I feel when I’m sharing something that feels radiantly truthful and I see blankness in the person or audience I’m speaking to. (“We die without resonance,” I reread in my notebook from a lecture quoting the architect Renzo Piano, whose attention to space extended to the sonic qualities of its embrace. Suddenly I want to do an ethnography of the acoustics of a conference hall…) It’s a hesitance to say a word that doesn’t come back to you, that feels full inside yourself and is reflected back as something flimsy, or just something that doesn’t belong—doesn’t belong in philosophical discourse, in academia.

So I want to gather bell hooks’s compassionately and bravely theoretical book all about love as a companion and conversation-partner for her words. Three fragments stand out to me, as seeds from which the rest of the book unfolds in me:

“To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling” (13)

“Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. [. . .] When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack.” (67)

“Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.” (93)

 

The way in which Alia Al-Saji gives shape to her methodology of critical hesitation feels like an action of love, something beginning with her perception of hesitation in herself and a willingness to care for it, to listen to what it might be saying: to draw close to it, rather than to judge it as productive or not productive. As I continue reading, I draw in Christina Sharpe’s writing on “wake work” as a visceral metaphor for the ways in which Al-Saji’s critical hesitation encounters the past as something living and present.

In order to explain what I mean by critical hesitation, I need to take a

step back and elucidate the theory of time that underlies my account. Thus,

in the second half of this essay, I develop a nonlinear—and somewhat

alien—theory of time (Bergsonian in impetus yet also moving beyond

Bergson). I understand the past, at once, as lining the present and as reconfigured along with it. Reconfiguration of the past is my own term; it is a concept through which I rethink the “conservation” and irreversibility of the

past while avoiding the pitfalls of facile revisability and erasure, on the one

hand, and selfsame preservation, on the other. What such “reconfiguration”

might mean is crucial: How do the ways we remember, read, and actualize

the past—know or forget it, live with and based upon it—reconfigure

that past? I understand the past as deeply textured and relational—where ways of knowing and of misrepresenting the past participate in “forming” it but also where this activity itself leaves a trace (and can be uncovered). More

generally, this could be called an “ontological” rather than “psychological”

past (to evoke Deleuze), since this past overflows what is recollected of it

and since it plays a structuring role in experience.41 But this past also has

texture, weight, and materiality; it is neither a container of ideas nor simply

a spiritual or mental substance. This past is not only multiple and moving but also fissured—scarred by racial formations and their colonial durations, by their violence in past and present, and by the recalcitrant disregard that operates in colonial retellings of the past. Thus, slavery but also calls to move on, the refusal to feel the heaviness and persistence of its duration; imperial projects that are rephrased but remain and the ways they are lived every day in the Middle East, yet disregarded there where these projects emerged and are prospered from. This fracturing of the past affects the structure of possibility of the phenomenological field of the present. It is these pathologies of time that critical hesitation cannot heal, on my view, but can feel—make perceptible, discern, and perhaps think—in an “attentive” reconfiguration of the past, a caring-remembering, which I understand as a critical phenomenology and an ethics of the past. (339-340)

Surrounded by these words, by the shimmering trees, by recent conversations with my therapist and with my friends, by the feeling of joy of knowing that the people gathered around at a recent outdoor performance I’d taken part in had broken into dance, I feel able, cautiously, to attend to my hesitation of the past seven years with what Al-Saji calls “a caring-remembering.”

I hold first only fragments of memories, loosely:

The feeling of warmth and fullness, of knowing, as I listened to Harumi’s performance of Janacek’s sonata for violin and piano, that if my future hypothetical child could experience what she had just shared, it would be worth it, worth the weight of bringing a life into this broken breaking world.

The frigid crashing water of the fountain in front of Green Library where I stretched my arms out and tipped my head back as Barbara filmed.

The exhilaration of the late-night air pouring in from the open window as I sat on my bed after the first Tiny Studio Salon, wine glasses piled in the sink and the wreckage of chips and empty plates scattered across my apartment, realizing that this feeling was the same feeling I had when I performed on my violin and everything connected.

The joy of realizing that the chaotic and snack-centered chats and occasional sound-making experiments with the all-women fff collective actually and miraculously came together into the most spectacularly fulfilling performances I’d been a part of.

The flight and the warmth of improvising on Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 with the looper pedal at Julie and John’s wedding.

The mindblowing, heart-opening experience of experiencing conducted improvisation with Mazz Swift and with Matana Roberts: Mazz passing the baton from person to person; Matana stepping back and handing the power to the group, wrapped in the structures and imagery of their text score.

The ecstatic organ-and-trumpet interlude in Tyshawn Sorey’s rehearsal of Autoschediasms, coming from the two first-years we’d looped in from our Music and Community seminar.

These moments feel like flashes of color. I touch this color to other feelings, layers wrapped in stillness and tightness. They shrink and recede. Ok. I follow what that shrinking feels like, a moment when it felt held and cared for.

Here: a meeting with Matana, via Zoom, two months into the 2020 pandemic. I’d scheduled the meeting earlier in the quarter, before a white Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, before the lockdown had extended indefinitely. I’m in my third year at Stanford, and I’ve become obsessed with Black feminist theory-praxis. I carry bell hooks’s All About Love like a talisman, and cite Jennifer Nash’s idea of “beautiful writing” whenever I am trying to articulate what I want, her idea that there are some things, some shades of loss, that can’t be held except by beautiful writing. By the body of words.

Our conversation is already flattened a layer by the Zoom screen, and here I am writing about that conversation, another fold in the flattening. I wonder if I make enough folds whether a different body will emerge, something true, even if it’s not necessarily real? [cite Tomie Hahn, folds]

I listen back to the recording of the Zoom conversation. A bird chirps, and I can’t tell if it’s in Germany or California. Matana’s speech reminds me of the patterns of emphasis in Beowulf, the only poem from oral tradition that I studied in my undergraduate English major: their voice modulates phrases across a layered topography of pitch levels, with repeated sounds and emphases gathering the words around them into nested internal rhymes, like stitches.

Annegret Fauser, “Lili Boulanger’s ‘La Princesse Maleine’: A Composer and Her Heroine as Literary Icons,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122, no. 1 (1997): 68–108. http://www.jstor.org/stable/766554.

Alia Al-Saji, "SPEP Co-Director’s Address: Hesitation as

Philosophical Method—Travel Bans, Colonial

Durations, and the Affective Weight of the Past," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 3  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018): 331-359.

MR transcription 1.png

My mind goes to listening to the album for the second time. I was hemming a piece of silk I’d painted as the album guided me through layers and layers of experience. Deep in the middle of the album, my body froze around the needle as I registered screams – a sound of pain (horn? saxophone?) – the immensity of which I still can’t wrap words around. It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth listening to the album that I was able to register how brief this moment was and how deep and soft and thick the layers of love wrapped around it, humming voices wrapped in humid night skies and the heavy-lightness of Matana’s incantations.

MT: What did that look like, this-- the collective energy in that specific, um . . . ?

MR: Um, well, for the first time, like, I  . . .  . . . yeah I was just easier in the studio in terms of not making them plow through the whole thing in like a day, or . . . like we really took multiple days of, of different takes, um, which I don’t always do, I generally have, like a [hand straight down middle: focus] this: this is what it is, and this is what I want, and. . . also because, you know, those records, you know, as wonderful as Constellation is, --they’re wonderful people, but—the budget for those records is really low, and I have to be careful, um, with the time, but for this one, we just kind of . . . I was a little more lax with, like, the-- the regiment, um, of it, and then had to comb through hundreds of takes,

MT: Hmmm.

MR: it really—it was very harrowing to do it that way

MT: I can’t imagine

MR: [I said] I’d never do it like that again—Oh God! It was—

MT: you were—

MR: it was madness [laughing].

MT: So you were sort- just trying to stay attuned to what every everyone was feeling, in the moments of –

MR: Yeah, because also, like, I had known the story on that record for so long, that I forgot that speaking it, for people who were hearing it for the first time?

MT: Mmm.

MR: It’s violent. It has- it—there’s feel-bad energy around that, and so trying to keep people lifted, during a recording, um . . . trying to . . . just trying to guide them with as much compassion as I could, uhh,

MT:Hmmm.

MR: without, um, making them feel even worse than they already were.

MT: That’s a huge—that sounds like a huge burden for you that you’ve not only internalized, this and been holding it for so long, and then you’re also . . . holding it for the people you’re working with.

MR: Well that’s the—you know [pause, stillness] that’s the – the, Constellation Records has actually given me their social media feeds today, they gave me passwords, and they’re like . . . [laughing] we want you to go over there and talk about whatever you want to talk about, and so I was like, okay, well, let’s talk about internalized modes of white supremacy, let’s like really talk about that, and talk about the ways that people of color . . . uh . . . have to navigate, like, the consistent navigation, and I don’t . . . [17:17] I can only imagine what it’s like for you to also, like, just this [leans back and forth] consistent navigation in academia, of language, and of understanding that certain ways in which you communicate things are not going to be understood. Trying to find new ways to communicate them, but also keeping in your mind [opened hand toward back/side of head] your intention and your goal.

I pause here. I can only imagine. I’m uncomfortable with the vastness of Matana’s generosity, and also grateful for it; for the layers of care in their turning to me and touching my academic struggles to their labor to make their lived experience accessible in spaces that have previously erased it. I feel a stitching together of tectonic plates, the distant corners of which reach to the foundation of the institution I’m a part of, the fractured centers of which are mapped in Sylvia Wynter’s descriptions of the racialized invention of Man. Internalized modes of white supremacy. The word wholeness comes to mind, together with collective energy, love, violence, fear. My train of thought feels messy, and I try to follow threads back through it. Words slip through my hands but there’s a core that I hear in Matana’s voice, a warmth and a lightness that holds steady with the cutting weight of what they describe.

 

They don’t use the word exploitation to describe what they’ve been “invited” to do, but I hear a heaviness in their pivot to being asked to do the social media takeover for Constellation, its echoes of the double labor they performed in keeping their collaborators lifted, feeding the collective energy, in the face of what they have carried for their whole lives and for generations of lives. From the lack of care and awareness evidenced by someone without this experience asking them to lift the weight again, in public, for them, though Matana doesn’t say this.

MR: And that’s the whole—it’s kind of the W.E.B. [Dubois] double consciousness method in action really. . . I’ve gotten so used to holding, internalizing the violence of white supremacy . . . Not wanting to have it, but it still sits with you, because it teaches you [there’s an object missing here, teaches you something] . . . [switch register] and that’s, it’s a really difficult thing for me to talk about, also, because my family is such a mixture of all different types of people, I really do come from a very, like, looking at all of them it’s like looking at a crayon box, like it’s just some of everyone. . . and, um . . . I exist because of this, like, incredible mix of people.

[new start] But the ways in which this kind of [hand making horizon-gesture] glossed-over version of -- of whiteness . . . ‘cause some people they’ll say, well, you know, white people, but to me I’m not even . . . it’s white ness, it’s the, the insidiousness of this idea of whiteness that is really problematic, and you start internalizing certain things without even realizing that you’re, um, that you’re doing that, and so . . . I see what’s going on right now also having a lot to do with just this, um, [19:10] brown skin, white masking sort of movement towards some kind of reclamation . . .

[I meant to ask about this at the moment but didn’t; now looking it up I discover both the book Brown Skin, White Masks by Hamid Dabashi and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), to which it responds. Now, reading Dabashi’s text, I see another depth to the connection Matana made earlier between double-consciousness, language, and the idea of being a performer/artist in academia. From p. 26:

MR: but I —I just feel like I’ve been dealing with it all of my life, and I have learned to mute things, and then I try to put it into music because I need to put it somewhere. . . . But I feel like this time calls for an even more honest rendering of what that means for me.

 

I go back to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and come across a passage that reminds me of Matana and Sylvia Wynter at once:

 

Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a ‘yes’ resonating from cosmic harmonies. (xii)

 

It’s this yes-ness that I’m humbled by and drawn to in Matana, the opening and openness that burns in the face of an undoctored witnessing of everything that tries to shut it down. I read farther in Fanon and find a passage in which he defines “real love” as “wishing for others what one postulates for oneself when this postulate integrates the permanent values of human reality” (24). I let this sink in for a bit – wishing for others what one postulates for oneself // when this postulate integrates the permanent values of human reality. I’m reminded of something that Matana said later in the interview, that “through the Coin Coin project I’m definitely trying to build some sort of monument to the human experience (which I’ve said way too many times).” There’s something monumental also in Fanon’s words about love. I wonder how the geography of Martinique and metropolitan France plays into the ways he metabolized and redirected his education on Freudian psychology. . .

And although we have Sartre for portraying failed love, [. . .] the fact remains nevertheless that true love, real love—i.e., wishing for others what one postulates for oneself when this postulate integrates the permanent values of human reality—requires the mobilization of psychological agencies liberated from unconscious tensions. (Fanon 24, emphasis added)

 

I feel that I’ve dropped some stitches here. I go back through the sensations that led me here: Hesitation. Shrinking. Love. Collective energy. Pain, held in love. Doubt, tightness in my neck. Matana’s presence.

 

Folds gathered back into a question about hesitation . . .

 

My intrusive inner-critic voice pipes up. Is this critical hesitation, as Alia Al-Saji defines it? Or am I just rambling, being lazy, not finding the point? (Hello, hedgehog friend. Your quills are so tightly wrapped that you are hurting yourself.)

 

I think of a sine wave, its troughs and peaks displaced reflections of one another:

fanon.png
sine.jpg

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated from the French by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008). Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (Éditions du Seuil, 1952).

Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2011).

Is my attention to the troughs of my experience, the moments of negativity, something learned, or perhaps the reverberations of a survival strategy honed to perfection by my grandmother and shared by my mother? Grandma would see racism everywhere, more and more as she got older, or maybe she just got tired of filtering her experiences. (The way Aunt Joan folded her laundry? Obliviousness, a.k.a. racism.) I would sometimes get annoyed with her apparent fixation on her experience during the war—I’d never say it out loud, but look at those contraband photos you snapped of the lake at the internment camp where you spent just a summer before you found a job on the East coast— it didn’t look that different from the summer I’d spent at the Banff Center for the Arts. But then I remember the way my body shut down for days after a flippant remark from a studio-mate lumped me in with her and the rest of the group of “white ladies” who she assumed made up our art studio space—something I couldn’t even compute as a racist remark, just an assumption within the lines of which I didn’t feel whole. I slipped from that to the racist graffiti and policies and assumptions that had been the stew in which she had lived prior to being deported, and her bitterness felt if anything compressed and smaller than it should have been.

 

I breathe into this space, the space that Matana holds open for me, and I think about the way they answer a question I asked about sound and touch:

that’s really what improvisation is, I mean it’s composition in real time, but also kind of like it has this sculptural element [. . .] at least through the Coin Coin project I’m definitely trying to build some sort of monument to the human experience, which I’ve said way too many times, [. . .] sound like a broken record, but that’s how it feels and I feel really grateful? I have so much gratitude for the human experience, and that I’m still getting a chance to explore it, because I have had friends who didn’t make it even this far—I’m not that old, but it’s— to see people die in their twenties and 30s [. . .] in between feeling angry, . . . I just feel really – grateful.

 

The thing I’m trying to get at— a shift of perspective that frames the moments of tension, hesitation, contraction as the troughs between moments of love, warmth, collective energy, yes-ness— feels too easy, too simple a resolution. I turn back to hesitation as an embodied sensation, something like shivering, and hold this sensation in the light of gratitude and warmth. From this side, shivering seems actually beautiful, a small shimmer of contraction and release, tremors that turn an experience of cold toward warmth. I google shivering because I’m suddenly not sure if it’s actually a helpful response or something more vestigial, and find a paper in the Journal of Physiology:

 

Shivering is an involuntary somatic motor response that occurs in skeletal muscles to produce heat during exposure to cold environments or during the development of fever. (Nakamura and Morrison 2011)

 

The word “shimmer” came to me from an article that Claire shared with me several years ago, by Deborah Bird Rose, describing an aesthetic (in the broadest and most alive sense of the word) that she has learned “from Aboriginal people in the Victoria River region of Australia’s Northern Territory, a place to which I have been returning for more than thirty years” (G51). The warmth and love and heart-break in her writing voice as she explores a space centering the tender dance between flying foxes and fruit bats through a rhythm and awareness of shimmering, vibrating ephemerality coexists with Rose’s presence as a white woman and scholar writing about, and with, Aboriginal knowledge and experience. I breathe with Donna Haraway and Pema Chodron, to stay with the trouble, and reread her article: its shimmer captures me again, catches my breath. “I learned about bir’yun [brilliance, shimmering, as used by white British anthropologist Howard Morphy in his description of Yolngu visual art in Northern Australia] through dancing all night.

In contrast to Morphy, I did not work with people who were visual artists; rather, I encountered people who focused on performance, who connected bodies and earth through dance and song. [6] In music, there are multiple different temporal patterns, and it is through those temporal patterns that one starts to experience shimmer. (G54)

[I’m reminded of an exchange with my partner that I shared with my friend Jonathan Leal, after he’d sent me an ecstatically syncopated riff he’d been working on. M: “I wonder if grooviness is simply the ability to float between multiple levels of rhythmic clarity.” P: “That is a decidedly un-groovy definition of groovy.”]

Ethnomusicologists describe these experiences as iridescence. [7 – cites Catherine Ellis, “Time Consciousness of Aboriginal Performers,” in Problems and Solutions: Occasional Essays in Musicology Presented to Alice M. Moyle, ed. Jamie Kassler and Jill Stubington, 149–85 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1984).] The temporal patterns are a kind of foregrounding and backgrounding, flipping back and forth to the point where the music and dance become iridescent (or shimmer) with ancestral power.

As the example of brilliance in sun on water indicates, bir’yun exceeds human action. [. . .]  The ecological patterns are manifold, and for the sake of encountering just one example, we might think about pulse. At an ecological scale in northern Australia, one of the most obvious patterns is the pulse between wet and dry seasons. [. . .] For shimmer to capture the eye, there must be absence of shimmer. To understand how absence brings forth, it must be understood not as lack but as potential. (G54-55)

 

I dig through my files and find a blog post, something I started during the darker days of the pandemic, and then left dangling. I hold up the last paragraph in the warm blue sunlight and imagine it expanding.

 

I wonder if hesitation is slow-motion iridescence. I wonder if spelling out each shade of uncertainty might eventually flicker into the moving image of a butterfly’s wings, if instead of hating my uncertainties and hesitations I could find a way to love them into motion. . .

Deborah Bird Rose, "Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed," in Art of Living on a Damaged Planet (Ghosts of the Anthropocene), ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

 

I’m drawn to a book gifted to me by one of my advisors, Denise Gill (thank you!). It’s called Decolonizing the Body: Healing, Body-Centered Practices for Women of Color to Reclaim Confidence, Dignity, and Self-Worth, by Kelsey Blackwell. I flip through the sections on belonging, on the imposter-syndrome sense of being too ambiguous: “multiracial people tend to face the highest levels of social exclusion compared to any other racial or ethnic group,” she quotes Dr. Sarah Gaither saying on the podcast Code Switch (92). I let the wave of yes, and (yes, and being light-skinned is a place of privilege, a locus of violence and complicity) move through me, and then find the passage I was looking for:

 

SOMATIC PRACTICE: Everyday Richness

 

Joy lives in the mundane. When we get close enough to any experience, we find it in the details. I’m reminded of a quote from ornithologist Drew Lanham (2022): ‘I’ve had those days where nothing is going right, and it seems like there is more coming that’s going to go wrong. But in that moment of that little brown bird, that’s always so inquisitive, that sings reliably, in that moment, I’m thinking about that wren, I’m not thinking about anything else. That’s joy.’ Lanham points to something essential about our joy. It cannot be taken away from us. It is something we can access anytime. It’s something we can tuck away and store up for ourselves. It does not answer to anyone. Our joy stands up to acts of harm, degradation, and inequity in a nonviolent way. It communicates our values while at the same time restoring rather than depleting us.

 

A life that centers joy invites us to be present with our world. (128-29)

 

I can’t read this, can’t write it here without glomming like a magnet immediately onto Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (a gift from another advisor, Claire Chase – thank you!). I flip through to the almost-last poem, the title of the collection, read his dream of the dancing robin who “opened and closed its wings like a matador / giving up on murder”:

 

jutting its beak, turning a circle,

and flashing, again,

the ruddy bombast of its breast

by which I knew upon waking

it was telling me

in no uncertain terms

to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones

(sousaphones! yes!)

the whole rusty brass band of gratitude

not quite dormant in my belly—

it said so in a human voice,

“Bellow forth”—

and who among us could ignore such odd

and precise counsel?

 

I want to continue copying his words here, the tumbling wide-openness of his care and the ways that his thank yous accept into their outspread arms the fullness of death and love and joy but told not through grand metaphors, through particulars: the mundane, vast.

 

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,

the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems

slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

 

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,

holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky

hurtling our way like so many buffalo,

who said it’s much worse than we think,

and sooner; to whom I said

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

 

I don’t want to finish the poem; I leave its last lines dangling.

Postscript (Gratitude)

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IMG_0152 draft garden.HEIC

Kelsey Blackwell, Healing, Body-Centered Practices for Women of Color to Reclaim Confidence, Dignity, and Self-Worth  (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2023).

Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

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