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V.

I dream again of a river.

Flower for Tom

Holding / Letting Go

Draw a box ///

 

 

 

Fill it with sound

 

 

[This section will begin with a scrolling audiovisual section similar in setup to this mockup coded by CCRMA student Tristan Peng, in which you will be able to scroll through and look at/ listen to each of the boxes from my Reservoirs exhibit. I'd like to set this up as a wordless nutshell of the concept that unfolds in the text below. Apologies that I haven't figured out the coding yet-- I intend to ask Tristan if he might be willing to help me directly, since he was so helpful with my initial inquiry.]

 

 

 

I’ve been obsessed with boxes; specifically, with filling them with sounds that spill out of their edges. It turns out that boxes are also fantastic resonators, especially cheap cardboard or plastic ones.

 

One of my collaborator-friends from the Reservoirs exhibit, Ambika Kamath, touched words to this material contradiction: the tension between holding and letting go, containing and flowing. Ambika and I have criss-crossed paths since meeting as undergraduates, and our latest life events had taken us both to Boulder, Colorado. She’s a brilliant scientist, writer, and social organizer whose friendship along my journey has been both a guiding light and an anchor. One of my earliest memories when we reconnected in California was of a living room open mic party she hosted in her Berkeley apartment. If my party-host-persona runs on chaotic snacks and exuberance, hers runs on soup, thoughtful structure, and collective trust. By the end of the evening, I felt like I knew every person there intimately.

 

I had commissioned Ambika to write a poetic invitation linking the opening ceremony of the installation with a spark for climate action, specifically about the ways in which material goods were linked with greenhouse gas emissions, which had been a catalyst for my design of the exhibit. Alejandra Calvo, another collaborator-friend whom I’d commissioned to do paintings for the exhibit (and whom I’d met in the context of the Denver facilitator workshop), had just sent me a snapshot of a painting she’d done as a possible graphic for the exhibition placard I was working on, and I excitedly shared it with Ambika:

When I’d gotten the snapshot the day before, the image had made me feel a simultaneous inward pull and outward fling—the whirlpool felt like a gathering, a holding; while the splash let go, released.

 

Ambika pointed out that the seed of this friction was in the name I’d chosen, Reservoirs, and the installation’s tension between flowing water and dry containers; and I was suddenly glad that when I’d gotten cold feet about this title I’d been too late in writing to the printer to get it changed to my alternate title, Invisible Rivers. The friction I felt in the word "reservoirs," my discomfort with the image I called up of the artificial containing and parceling of waterflow, was the point.

 

I want to explore this sensation, this in-between of holding and flowing.

 

It feels present in my first desires to bend the archival space of my dissertation into a performance or artistic action, and also in the verbal shapes that it is now taking. Perhaps, as much as I have bucked against boxes and containers, I’m still a little afraid of flowing. Or perhaps I just like in-between-spaces.

 

When I think about the contradictions inherent in the juxtaposition of holding and flowing, I am drawn back to an essay that I read early on in my PhD curriculum, the first assigned reading that really lit me on fire. It’s by (mainstream) musicologist Carolyn Abbate, a deep-thinking writer whose foundational work centers on European opera music. The essay is called “Music-- Drastic or Gnostic?”, terms that Abbate used to try to parse out the significance of the hot, slippery experience of performed music (something that at the time of her writing was more of an afterthought in musicological studies, which historically has been based in the ideas that might be parsed out of the Eurological and abstract concept of a musical "work").  This hit me hard as a recent DMA-graduate in the middle of my first year at Stanford, because it seemed to me like here was someone who really got it: who loved and wanted to touch the “ineffable” core of what it felt like to make and listen to music as a lived experience and not as a cryogenically preserved abstract shell of itself delivered in the Eurological frame of a musical "work." But her imagery, linked with the ideas of French philosopher-musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch, left me frustrated: she spoke of music as something wild whose gift of freedom was repaid by hypothetical scholars by putting it in a cage of mystical symbolism, as if there were no other way to know music without the constrictions of a theoretical box. Why the binary of cage vs. freedom, I wondered? Why not be more of a musical ecologist, I wondered, perhaps tagging and releasing the metaphorical bird, observing it move in its natural habitat? 

 

At the time, and in the place where I found myself (introductory coursework in a conservative musicology program), these feelings I had— of situating my work in a conjoined in-between-space of theory-praxis— felt distinctly marginal, radical even. Now I see them joining a huge body of work that has long been sustained by people working by choice or by necessity outside institutionalized Western colonial canons.

 

For a long time since beginning my studies at Stanford, I’ve been swimming in these beautiful currents of queer, Black, women-of-color-feminist, Indigenous, and other decolonial artist-theorist-activists. But in rereading Abbate’s article today, I find myself connecting with her even more than I did at first. I’d like to return to this article, which was a part of my introductory musicology curriculum at Stanford, not because I think this is the most relevant source to engage with in the context of a broader question about holding and flowing, but because for me, in the midst of the theoretical texts that were centered in my required curriculum, and in the midst of my own journey as a performer trained in Western art music traditions, this was something that reached into a densely knotted theoretical space and opened up something like a possibility for breath.

In "Music-- Drastic or Gnostic?", Abbate comes to the powerful and vulnerable (in)conclusion that there is no mystical, symbolic truth to be uncovered within the experience of a musical performance, however much she’s tempted into the search (both by the historical traditions of her discipline, musicology, and by the mythology and mystique of the music around which this discipline arose). “A performance does not conceal a cryptic truth to be laid bare,” she writes. “But accepting its mortality, refusing to look away, may nevertheless be some form of wisdom.”

 

To return again to my conversation with Ambika about Reservoirs, I find flickering connections between Abbate’s injunction, to refuse to look away from the difficult mortality of an experience, and, say, Donna Haraway’s project of “Staying with the Trouble,” of not looking away from the hot, decomposing mess of what Haraway calls the Chthulhucene:

 

Chthulucene is a simple word. It is a compound of two Greek roots (kthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures. There is nothing in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of comings, of nurturing what might still be. I hear kainos in the sense of thick, ongoing presence, with hyphae infusing all sorts of temporalities and materialities.

 

Haraway’s injunction, after I've listened to Pema Chodron’s audiobook The Places That Scare Us multiple times, feels like an extension of the Buddhist practices Chodron describes: opening to the difficulties, abiding in the energy, letting go of labels. But there’s a particular delight in the messiness that makes me picture Haraway elbow-deep in hot compost, that makes me wonder whether the kainos of Buddhist sitting meditation can hold Haraway’s beloved metaphorical tentacles and knots. (But does it need to, another voice asks? There’s space and there’s need for so many ways of moving . . .)

 

I follow these connections back to the spark that led me to propose the project that became Reservoirs, which was the experience of reading the city of Boulder’s climate action plan. In it, I learned that inhabitants of this materially rich and racially exclusive city were responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of goods manufactured elsewhere— electronics, building materials, food, packaging – than all other sources of emissions combined. In other words, the trappings of the materialist culture that made Boulder look so wealthy and manicured had invisible strings trailing across the earth around it and eventually leading into the warming air. 

 

In the particular context of the Boulder Public Library, which like many public libraries has become a sort of de facto welfare service for people shut out of the expensive housing and consumer culture of the city, I found myself thinking of inheritances: inherited houses and land, in particular, which felt especially charged in what Christina Sharpe would call the ongoing wake of the genocidal violence through which white settlers claimed both the land and the gold that they found on it. What if I asked people in the area to share objects that they’d inherited, but not the traditionally (capitalistically ?) valuable heirlooms, just the boxes they’d been kept in, and perhaps the stories that were intertwined with these containers? What if I used transducers to play the sound of Boulder creek through these containers, to allow the materials to speak their own stories through the ways they filtered the water’s resonances? Could this be a way to open conversation around disposability, intergenerational connections, embodied emissions, and complex inheritance, without shutting it down immediately through feelings of guilt and defensiveness?

 

I was inspired by the work of adrienne maree brown on Pleasure Activism, which in turn connects with the work of generations of Buddhist practitioners including Deepak Chopra, whose words (paraphrased slightly) I first heard in a class taught by Taiwanese-Japanese-American theater artist and teacher named Haruna Lee: “What you pay attention to grows.”[1] How could I stay with the trouble, refuse to look away from this difficult friction, without contributing to the fear and defensiveness around inherited and purchased property?

 

[flower for Haruna, for amb]

 

I imagined an invisible river of boxes filled with the sound of water, an opening of wonder in objects that have come to be seen as disposable. Re-knitting them into relationship with one another, with their material sources. My proposal to the Boulder Library was entitled Inheritances, and probably also carried a bit of resentment around the fact that housing in Boulder was so expensive even on my Bay-Area-calibrated graduate stipend. 

 

But I ended up erasing this explicit link with inheritances from the invitations I created as calls-for-participation in the exhibit, because I felt it was too complicated to explain at once. Instead, I asked Ambika if she would create a poetic invitation to climate action to share in the installation’s opening ceremony, and I hoped that the resonance of the materials themselves would awaken an attention to the materials that made up the disposable and consumer-oriented culture that I associated with Boulder.  This is what she came up with, as she shares it on her blog.

Carolyn Abbate, "Music-- Drastic or Gnostic?" in Critical Inquiry Vol. 30, no. 3 (University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 505-536.

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

The compost is a metaphor she develops alongside her source Maria Puig Bellacasa ("Encountering Bioinfrastructure: Ecological Struggles and the Sciences of Soil," in Social Epistemology Vol. 28, no. 1, January 2014, pp. 26-40).

 

See, e.g., Haraway p. 32, where she talks about "compost" as a substitute for "posthumanism"

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019).

[1] "Whatever you pay attention to will grow." in Deepak Chopra, Why Is God Laughing? The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008).

There’s a poem I often think of when I’m just getting to know someone, or some place. If I’m lucky, I get to read it to them, maybe during the second or third time we get together. You’ve probably heard this poem; it’s called Good Bones by Maggie Smith. I’m only just meeting most of you, but still, I want to read this poem to you today:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

The reason this poem comes up for me when I’m with new friends, new lovers, new kindred spirits is because it’s about hope and it’s about fear. In those early days of something new, hope and fear swirl together, and this poem helps me make sense of the swirling. It helps me realize that what matters is what we hold on to, and what we let go of. We must begin, as the poem does, by experiencing all of it, the fearful and the hopeful. In the swirl we see, we hear, we touch, we feel and then, we choose what to do. We see and hear and touch all of it, we feel all of it, and then we move forward by letting the universe tell us what to hold on to and what to let go of. We choose to listen to the universe.

We find ourselves together here today maybe because we saw a flier for this event. Maybe we contributed a container, maybe we were just passing through. However we got here, we have a chance now to embark on a journey together. If you choose, you can join us today in making a commitment to showing up for ourselves, for each other, and for our future.

You live here in Boulder or somewhere nearby, and so I don’t need to tell you how precious this place is, how fortunate we are to live nestled amidst rock and creek and wind. And you know already that we—the collective we–are risking this place, and our futures here and elsewhere, through our own behavior. The world is at least fifty percent terrible—we know that!

But often, we disagree when we try to identify what’s terrible; we disagree more when trying to agree about how to fix what’s terrible. Thankfully, that is the work of political organizing, not an art installation!

Which is not to say that our gathering here isn’t political. It is, but it lives in the realm of bridging the political with the personal, in a way that all of us here, all of us who belong in a public library which is to say all of us, can find common ground.

So here is something we can find common ground on: we all, to live our lives, depend upon things. The things we buy (or don’t), consume (or don’t), use (or don’t), and discard (or don’t) …these things organize our lives, our choices, and our aspirations.

In describing a 2020 study on the impact of our choices here in Boulder on carbon emissions and climate change, the City of Boulder says the following:

“One of the most important findings…was the true size of the embodied emissions of what we consume in Boulder — meaning the emissions associated with the whole lifecycle of products we purchase and use, from production to disposal. Embodied emissions are not currently included in our emissions inventory. [The study] found that the size of embodied emissions is larger than all local sources of emissions put together. This means that even a small change in circularity and reducing consumption can have an enormous effect on [our] overall impact.”

What do you feel when you hear these words about our impact, arising from our consumption choices? If you’re like me, you feel fear and hope swirling together. The fear: what have I been doing? Do my wants make me a bad person? What do I have to give up? And the hope: oh, we can actually change something here! We can do things differently!

The point is not that we are the problem; take a deep breath and gather in that breath the fear that lives in little corners of you; then breathe out. Let that fear flow through you. Not because the fear isn’t warranted; perhaps it is. But because the fear gets in the way of moving us forward, towards action.

When you breathe out, let yourself taste a freedom from fear. Let this freedom leave, in its wake, a true sense of responsibility. Find, in the debris of fear, a real sense of hope that we can do more.

It won’t take just one breath; it’ll take many. So begin this breathing here, as you wander through this space amidst the sounds of the creek resonating through everyday objects. Find the pocket of sound that feels like home to you. Settle in, and pick up one of the river stones you find nearby. We invite you to hold onto your chosen stone for this month. Carry it with you, and let it witness your life—all you already do to make our world better, and all your intentions to do more. Each time you remember what you’re moved to do, breathe again. Fill this breath, and this stone, with the strength, the resolve, and the sparks of joy that remind you of what we are capable of doing together.

And when, inevitably, you find fear, or guilt, or anger, or despair, springing up within you, let it flow, like water over rock. You know how sometimes when water flows over a rock, it clears and sharpens, and sometimes it eddies and froths. You needn’t make sense of this, just watch it, and let it go. Come back to what helps move you, and hold on to that.

Carry this stone with you, and with it in your hand, cast a new eye on what you see, place a new palm on what you touch. Are there things in your life, actual things, that you can hold on to for a little bit longer, find new use of and new meaning in? We make meaning with our imaginations, with our attention, and by forging connection. So when you pause to really be with something, can you see its place in this whole flow of carbon and energy and precious minerals that make up our world and our lives? Hold on to that bigger picture, and then ask the universe: what is the right thing to do with this plastic bag, that cardboard box, this twice-worn shirt, that years-old can of beans?

Maybe, imbued with new meaning, you hold onto this object longer. Or maybe, imbued with new meaning, you find a better home for this object than you can give it, a different place where it will have a longer life, or where it sparks more joy. Our hope is if we all do this, over and over, in time we will let go of our wants that are forged in fear, and hold on to what we actually need. And most importantly, fueled by hope, we will see what we can bring to each other. We hope you’ll join us again a month from now, with your stone, to tell us what you found, and how you will move forward.

We can make this place beautiful.

reservoirs invitations.jpg

A version of the text above was printed in these little invitation booklets that folks could take home with them

We gathered again a month later, and I wrote something for our closing celebration too. The event was called Reservoirs of Joy, to link up with One Book One Boulder‘s pick for 2023, The Book of Joy, by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (from which I’ve taken the quotes [in italics] below). Here’s what I wrote, it’s called Can We Let Joy Save Us?

When we gathered here a month ago, we were each invited to take a stone with us to hold onto until today. Our hope was that this stone would be your guide, your friend, as you brought awareness to your journey of commitment to acting with kindness and peace towards our world. I asked you let this stone remind you that you have choices about what to hold onto and what to let go of, be those material objects, feelings, old patterns or new convictions. We hoped that this attention to our choices would bring us closer to ourselves and to our truest needs and wants, shedding some layers of the fearful impulse to consume that so often masks those truest needs and wants.

Here’s the stone I took, and ironically enough, I’m a little sad and scared to be letting go of this stone today. We’ve had some good moments, this stone and I. Just a few days after our opening event, I had this moment of very strongly feeling like I needed to take an impulsive trip to New York City to see a play that’s based on a book that I love. But this stone was sitting on my desk as I searched Kayak.com for flights and hotels, and the stone jolted me into pausing. The stone asked me to ask myself if I really needed that specific, energy-intensive, expensive, carbon-emissions-heavy experience, or was there some other absence in my life underlying this impulse, an absence that could be tended to more simply, more kindly, and with less impact? There was, it turns out. All I needed to do was spend time reconnecting with a friend, the friend with whom, some five years ago, I had shared this book that I so loved.

Perhaps it is a question of priorities. What is it that is really worth pursuing? What is it we truly need? According to the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama, when we see how little we need—love and connection—then all the getting and grasping that we thought was so essential to our well-being takes its rightful place and no longer becomes the focus or the obsession of our lives.

There are two coffee shops within a ten minute walk of where I live, and communing with my stone over the last month has helped me realize that I am in very different moods when I want to visit each of them. When I go to one, where, to be honest, the coffee and pastries are solid but not amazing, I go because there’s a reasonable chance I’ll run into the kind-looking man who told me once about a conversation he had overheard, right there outside the coffee shop, between a raven and a sparrow. He’s there often (so are the birds), and I like that we can reliably look into each other’s eyes and smile just for a second. When I go to the other coffee shop, it’s because the coffee is really very good. In the last month, my stone has helped me see that I need moments of joyful connection more than I need good coffee.

The more we turn towards others, the more joy we experience, and the more joy we experience, the more we can bring joy to others. The goal is not just to create joy for ourselves but, as the Archbishop poetically phrased it, “to be a reservoir of joy, an oasis of peace, a pool of serenity that can ripple out to all those around you.”

I want to be a reservoir of joy. I like the journey I’ve begun with this rock, and I’m somewhat nervous that when I let go of the rock the journey will end too. But it doesn’t have to. We can, each of us, keep moving slowly closer and closer to living in alignment with our deepest convictions, convictions that I know, at their heart, are life-affirming, peaceful, and joyful. We’ve gathered here today to let go of our rocks—let’s instead make today’s shared experience the thing we carry with us going forward. Let us be each other’s rocks.

I believe with a steadfast faith that there can never be a situation that is utterly, totally hopeless.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed about climate change, about the state of the world and how quickly we seem to be destroying it, and I’m not going to pretend we’ve freed ourselves entirely from overwhelm in the last month, any of us. But I have a feeling that we may have gotten a little bit closer to seeing how we save ourselves—through joy.

And the thing about joy is that it needs to flow. It needs to flow among us, and for joy to flow freely we need to trust completely that we will never run out of joy. As Brother David Steindl-Rast reminds us, quoted in The Book of Joy:

When you are grateful, you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. A grateful world is a world of joyful people.

I am grateful to you all for joining us here today. I’m grateful for this journey we are on together. I think we’ll be okay, if we let joy flow through us, and in flowing, let it truly change how we connect with each other and the world we live in.

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