Escaping the Hologram, a poetry night, a screening of AILEY
March 1-7 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
3/1: Hello March! Hello my angels in the smoke! Hello lessons I am still learning and habits shaking and popping in the frictionless heat! Hello, what will I do w/ you? What will you do to me? We are holding out for the illusive last snow fall and change to come. My window is open a crack. The little black cat of the neighborhood found another cat to play w/. A third bouquet of flowers has been dried and hung on the wall behind me. I can smell the salt of the sea even from here, if you can believe! It is supposed to rain until the predictions stop - over a week, if they’re right.
I am remembering last fall, last summer, rain-soaked, coming home and wringing myself dry, shaking off the relentless wet. I remember how even joy would wash away quicker than the seasons before.
I look tired lately, I learned that in the shower. I don’t know if I want to cut my hair yet or not, I learned that in the rain. I am learning surrender in all these little ways and resistance in bigger ways, imperfect always. My body has been lonely, feeling abandoned and forcing strength. I have let my body endure violence and ecstasy, rarely softness, I learned that from my friends.
When I write, I am in my body and when my voice rumbles through, I am here too. I am in the body of my city as much as I can be. I view my body as a city, learning my way around in smaller ways than before - before when I was new, when I was still learning street names and sharp corners. Shit keeps changing but I know what was here before it was all hotels and dispensaries. The ways people come and go but the tide still returns w/ the moon.
Some seasons, the water gets rougher. I remember when the world was all crushed seashells under bare feet. Before it was a city of glass it was a city of brick and before brick, mud. I look at the trees all crooked, their necks all sprouting up to find sun, their blooming eyes looking too - in the snow as it adds weight. When my friends and I were camped out on the frozen lake, I looked at the trees all around us and back to busy gloved hands and feet in a small circle. We are all just growing around each other, I realized. All of us - the trees, the hotels, the lovers, the families, the neighbors. Roots in the ground, brown, like vertical stripes towards God. I feel this growing thing, never before w/ so much effort so yeah, I look tired. Tired, dirty work this is, digging up a life. I dress for the weather and keep my focus.
I lied a little yesterday, when I said we screamed at karaoke - I didn’t do any screaming. I’m not typically the type to demonstrate resignation. I was running hot and feeling shy about it, looking for water.
I am thinking now of when the Malibu had a coolant leak - the Malibu came before the Vibe, the Vibe before the Soul. It was hot like May and I was driving to Keene to see A. I had been having some issues w/ it but I took a couple gallons of water w/ me to try and manage it. T said, try. My angels said, we’ll be there. Off I went. The Malibu started to heat up quick just after the Piscataqua River Bridge. I popped the hood on the side of the highway and started pouring, cars rushing and whipping past. I looked up a mechanic I knew in that part of NH. I looked up at the exit I had pulled over in front of - the exit that led right to his shop. I drove on through. It took a couple hours. I played rummy w/ a couple of the mechanics, waiting it out. They got it going but only temporarily. I had to choose either to complete my journey or turn around. Ultimately, I headed home, trying to be smart. On the ride home, I drove tight-gripped and awake, facing the sun as we spun away from her. Almost to the exit that would take me home, an 18-wheeler didn’t see me and almost tail whipped me off of the highway. Luckily, I acted quick, but I admit to being pretty shaken up when I did finally get home.
Anyway - Wednesday night I was running hot. I watched my friends screaming, screaming. It looked like fun. It looked like they needed to scream, really needed it. I had a song to sing, would use my voice there instead. My heart directed me that day - mighty beats, earthly love, keeping tempo. W/ the rain and w/ all the work, I was electric and unpredictable even to myself.
I hold my friends’ screams in my body, can hear them still. I am alive in their throats w/ them knowing their strength. We give each other permission to believe in ourselves, to love even harder, to go insane. This, we promise to do together. In spring, I hope to see my friends more. I hope for grace and a change of pace. I hope the future becomes beautiful again, something to believe.
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3/2: When I wake up at home, the first thing I do is feed the cats. Both Mallory and River are 12 now, December birthdays that bookend mine. Save for the year I was in Savannah, these cats have grown w/ me, kept me company and let me know when it was time for breakfast. When they were kittens, we got them used to a bowl of wet and a bowl of dry, set in the morning to last all day. The types of cat food have changed slowly over time, finding a balance between what I can afford and what they need to live strong. On weekends, they wait a little longer while I nestle into an extra hour or so in bed. They have their routines and I have mine. This morning, they lay together until T got up and out for a work thing. Mallory headbutt her way under the covers and into my arms, like she normally does, but River was decidedly awake. My boy is loud, asks for what he wants. He was especially restless this morning.
Mallory covered her eyes and squirmed closer to me. Most mornings, I pry myself away from her to meet my day. Sometimes she follows and other times she burrows deeper. I got out of bed, threw on something soft, and considered Saturday - my ambition was almost awake & uncertain. Since the start of the year, I’ve been thesis-less and preoccupied w/ competing realities.
River was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, meowing at the soft sounds of me. He ran in circles towards the kitchen where the bowls waited and the water fountain flowed. The wet food bowl was empty, expectedly. The dry food bowl was asymmetrical, a mound and a ditch down to clear plastic. River whined away. Of course, I thought w/ understanding. River gets anxious when he sees the bottom of the bowl. There could be cups of dry food all around him but once River hits pan and learns that the bowl is not, in fact, bottomless, he gets antsy, antsy and loud, the cat who has never once gone hungry (There is a metaphor here, can you find it?).
As I topped him off, I explained to him that a ‘lack’ mindset only bears more lack, whereas an abundance mindset brings more abundance. Yeah, yeah he meowed, whipping his tail as if tapping impatient feet.
Mallory joined us in the kitchen at the sounds of plastic rustling and kibble collapsing. Both cats waited in their little corner. Here, they knew, is where we eat. After all the fuss, River walked away after one bite. He does this most mornings. A gentleman, he lets Mallory get her fill first, despite making all the noise. The simple purpose of feeding my beloved inside animals sets me up for the day. I feed them then I feed me and everything else comes after.
So much in my home is wood brown and striped red, like the world outside my window before the rains come. I long for green. My friends w/ plants encourage me to get plants. Often, my excuse not to is that I will kill them, saying I don’t know how to take care of something that can’t tell me what it needs. I speak from experience. Plants dead, body aching, the silence that stretches between love. I rely on the cats to meow. I rely on my stomach to rumble. I rely on my loved ones to interrupt. It is here that I am human, that I am hypocrite, that I am stubborn.
Desire used to feel obvious & universal. I thought desire was something I could be certain about but I found more beauty and relief in the unexpected. Desire moves through me differently now, I learned to move different through it. For a while, it seemed that when I got what I asked for, I felt worse. Then I got shy about desire, felt unworthy of the energy at all, felt punishing of it. To the point where asking for a desire to be fulfilled felt like a curse I put upon myself. I learned not everyone wants the same things and not much in life is fair, not all our dreams feel like we expect them to, that reality is chosen, and sometimes, we are ready though we insist we are not.
It feels like I have spent half my life silent and waiting to receive and the other half making requests too grand or too specific. I do not know if half is accurate but it feels like an even split. I believe both in attachment and detachment, in letting go and holding on, in waiting in alignment and asking in alignment. In my tests of each approach, I have been tested. There is exalting evidence in both. Like everything else, I figure it comes down to belief. Like everything else, it comes down to balance.
My center of balance is right in my core, where the ache and squeeze is; I’m having trouble finding the belief I can’t resist. My problems all end up being spiritual problems. Is that the case for everyone? Or is that another belief I hold half-heartedly? This nuance is important, this nuance is hard to hold, this game of choice. Do I believe in a punishing world? Do I want to? All love, all fears, all ideas yes, but ideas that live in our bodies and animate us. The way we do one thing is the way we do everything.
I have lived a lot of my life looking for a reaction and feeling reactive myself. I have relied on it and experimented w/ it and shied away from it, trying to find balance. Transactional, at worst & an attempt for fairness and excitement, at best. To be alive, in my eyes, is to react and change together - the things we end up doing anyway have been our purpose all along. No good, no bad.
I am having a hard time dreaming for a future that feels impossible. I am saying it - I am not an impossible thing. You are not an impossible thing. But the future, our future collectively and all at once, it feels impossible. We must react to it intentionally, diligently and w/ love, or else we have nothing. We do little things every day and big things when we can. In this, I feel flawed in my humanity. I feel imperfect as hypocrite. I learn how I am stubborn in my fears.
I am making up for a lot of disappointment in myself these days but I am starting off so shy. Clarity is far away. I have been trying to force myself before I am ready, in ways material and performative - I want to be ready, I want the world to be ready, I want to be different, I want the world to be different.
I vibrate w/ all this in the shower, in the hot hot water. I change out the water on my altar. I grab a couple more glasses I found from when A was here. I dream of moving my body every night - running from or running towards, walking, wandering, fucking. I arch my back into valley and my chest into mountain range, a river flows from my mouth all wet and wavy. Strength and diligence and patience, flexibility and future. To become when it stops being involuntary - it requires opening to the world, it relies on respectful exploration, it has no room for certainty.
The crossroads remain up through the rainy season, more washes away while new things grow. I say I am ready but I still expect snow to fall and freeze, this winter w/ too much color & too much noise. I do not yet feel like fertile ground. I look at the tiny jar of dirt on my windowsill, all stringy w/ roots and the clay all dry. If I do nothing else today, I will add some water back into it.
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3/3: I want to rejoice while the world is still dry but I am still waking up - a pause at the start of the week, at the start of the season. The war goes on in agony. The spring sleeps in the ground. We again face an anniversary, a reminder of inside, of when the world was tilting further into the sea, and nothing has been resolved since. Deeper, deeper we dig, consistently and relentlessly we spin, our familiar axis thrown off center. My city filled w/ protest red and white and green and black, hundreds and then thousands and then in every city w/ hearts still beating.
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3/4: I uninstalled Instagram today - severing myself from the Hologram for at least the month. I am inviting in change. I am inviting in reality. I am exploring disconnect and playing with my hands. I believe I am 29. I believe I have been falling flat of myself. I have gotten stuck in the performance. My passion is impatient and my apathy, a bad habit I must now counteract. The too big world becomes bleak. On days that lacked color, I was not creating, I found color on the screen. On days full of horrors, I found those too. I am late to admittance, late for it all.
My connection to the Hologram has been integral to how I've learned to dream but I haven't been seeing life clearly for some time - surreal and desperate. W/ my boredom, w/ my shame, I experiment w/ doing w/out, w/ touching the world all over.
I don't know if I will ever live the life of my dreams. I don't know how many dreams were mine to begin w/. I don't know if I have the patience to be human, to be lover, to be artist. I don't know if I am worth much at all. My words are good but they are nothing in a contradictory, repeatable life. Already, I look for distractions and I lose my train of thought. Already, I want to give more than I have. Already, I ooze uncertainty and self-blame.
Have I been making excuses my whole life in service of shame, tricking myself into satisfaction intangible? How long have I been waiting waiting waiting? Have I forfeited a future for complacency and emptiness? Have I bought and sold myself past the point of potency? Do I believe what I say, what I write, what I align myself to?
I learn that sharing art is a way to tell the Truth and that telling the Truth is a way to confess hypocrisy. Is hypocrite the worst thing we can be - like the Hologram tells me, like the Hologram sells me? I am at the mercy of a cruel and glorious reality, grander than I, more complete than I, progressing w/out me. I have no choice but to lose it all, to come clean, to be the child I have stunted myself into being. I am passionate in my fear and humbled in inexperience, curious endlessly, bound to fail.
I am limiting now both the ways I distract myself and the ways I define myself.
My body asks only to be moved around more. My mind asks for gentle consistency. My heart asks forgiveness, forgiveness & my soul asks for freedom.
When I attempt presence, I walk around. When I try living w/ the questions, I pick up the pace. The Hologram, how I use it, is an archive, yes, but it is also an escape, a reason to keep dipping out, a way to create quickly through a screen. It is a way to participate in life w/ the illusion of total control. It is an excuse to stay dissatisfied and insistent, disguising it as inspiration. What about the books unfinished and the projects left in dreams and the worst ways I've spoken w/out thinking?
My echo chamber is artists that know how to finish something, open hearts who read Ram Dass and watch ethical porn, all my friends who can't be in the room w/ me right now or ever again. I have crafted all kinds of ideas in the Hologram, ideas of love and self and community, of reality and advocacy and success. I feel at home w/ my mirrors, my friends, my history as I've recorded it. It is everywhere else that I feel disconnected, disconnected and underdeveloped.
I am overheated & lusting for the world.
What keeps me online keeps me digging at love - the urge to create and exchange, what people have always been doing, ancient things. I am still looking for every part of me to be loved. I dream through mirrors.
Will we ever know how much the world means to each of us or each of us to it? The Hologram is the curtain that hangs red velvet in front of love, the mud of love, the mess.
I resent how art has fed the Hologram and I enable it, at the same time. From the feed & the feeding, I am escaping back into the wet. I am pulling the bars apart a little more each night while the circus troupe sleeps. I am afraid still, moving slow. It is embarrassing to stand where I stand. I am getting my feet wet. I am moving forward imperfectly. Why am I afraid of what I will become, who I have been all along? Maybe I'll find that out. Look at me, still learning my lessons the hard way.
WHAT ARE THE RULES? No Instagram, no X, no YouTube w/ breakfast. Free games and subscriber sites are allowed. Answer messages & texts same day and w/ intention. Assume mystery. This is how we build trust. This is how we do beautiful and difficult things.
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3/5: Where do I find myself now? In corners and closets, among crowds in my dreams. I still dream of crowds - crowds and mess and travel, unfinished and running late. I wanted to do more w/ my day yesterday than wrestle w/ uncomfortable feelings and big statements. I did not keep track of how many times I reached for my phone but it is still more than I liked, only a day into it.
How clay has taught me patience and play and forgiveness, has given my hands something to do, has made room for what is difficult and beautiful and unique to me. Our pottery class has ended and I can’t afford to take another one for a while. But I still have some clay to use up, ashtrays to glaze, final touches to make.
Lately, I have been listening to my doubt rather than dismissing it. My optimism and idealism are still holding hands but it is raining and they are getting drenched. My commitment to art wants to be more tangible, more dedicated, more prolonged. My hands want something to squeeze. My body wants to put all this down.
Maybe I’ve simply stopped expecting art alone to change my life. Maybe art is just what we make w/ life and not what transforms it. I am disappointed in myself for relying on my ideas over my reality and demanding life follow along. I am disappointed art isn’t more valued, isn’t more powerful, isn’t more pure - made untrustworthy in our world.
I am dedicating myself further to the Here & Now of it all, when it is difficult and when it is beautiful, when it is fair in its cruelty and cruel in its fairness, when it is generous, when it reflects myself back to me and when it doesn’t consider me at all. Today, I will empty the dishwasher and arrange my clothes into something new, put on a dress for once. I will go to work in the rain and I will go to poetry in the rain. I will lay my head down on my cat’s soft center and breathe w/ her. I will pack a lunch and a prayer for presence.
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3/6: Sky goes flat. Sirens call and call in the wet. I park & pay to work & get paid. It is Wednesday, 4:33 and I am sitting in the Soul to write. I got home late last night from poetry. It was quiet but the list filled up. I needed to hear my city, here in its basement. I haven’t found a way to talk about how I am doing or how I’ve been feeling. I sit w/ the poets in respite.
I went straight to MC after paying the Doorman. She kept saying, I feel crazy, like I’m going insane. I felt bad, almost like she had caught it from me, that specific chaotic energy, but I knew it wasn’t just me. It has been going around. Her boy is far away for now and she is electric in her work, her grief, her dreams. She usually sits at the round table in the center but last night she looked at me and said, wanna sit at the bar, would that be weird? We posted up w/ our red wine and black bags and talked to Our Lovely Bartender for most of the night. She gave MC and I a small pad of paper to play w/.
Beer Money got the show going and Walt joined us at the bar, all of us sketching our neurosis - hands and faces and dice and spirals. I used my one sheet of paper as graffiti wall, little symbols, a mess all over. Walt drew a psychedelic face, poetry for hair. MC kept drawing a curly haired woman in rough sketches, the same face on sheet after sheet, saying It’s me! I feel crazy! We made little nonsense cootie catchers w/ dares on them, like the kids too restless to pay attention in class. It was really a different way to stay present, ears open and hands busy. It was a way to keep percolating energy tempered in order to soak up everyone else’s.
I told MC I felt like I was laying belly up in life, in surrender. MC told me she felt like she was glitching.
The place cleared out quick after list & waitlist. We blinked and the place was empty. I kept putting my jacket on and taking it off again, starting conversations that ran long and hugging tenderly my friends once twice three times.
The sky was light on the way home, foam settling over my neighborhood, light pollution leaking out from my city. No rain after sunset but still wet wet. I slept poorly w/ dreams overcrowded and rowdy cats. My pages would have to wait, I had to obey time today. It was sunny this morning, even sweaty. I left day job w/ windows rolled down listening to the Blues. I got paid at poetry last night so I bought myself a taco to-go before my cleaning gig, grateful bites of fried shrimp, grateful bites of pickled onion, revived.
I’m parked, now, in Portland by the square, by the corner of a busy intersection a block away from where I used to work. The theater just past the dispensary underneath the studios. Starbucks out of business now, a For Lease sign hangs in the window under a gallery nobody talks about - a gallery for the visitors. The Museum of Art sits in brick just behind. Traffic blocked up at the lights, folks sharing cigarettes in the gray, the book shop closing up for the day. The Soul is quiet while she idles. We are quiet, now, together. I’m working at SPACE tonight, tending bar for a film on Alvin Ailey.
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3/7: My city, a new thing at night, wet and glorious in the rain. I walked w/ it as it dripped. I locked up SPACE after 9 and waited w/ an older gentleman for his Uber - I recognized him from the screening, he didn’t like the canned wine (too sweet) and he didn’t know how the Uber app worked (Oh, I can’t read that) and he ran gingerly in the rain when the Toyota came by to pick him up.
This morning, I am rewatching Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in full, remembering how movement speaks and how bodies feel feel feel. I think, no wonder the Spirit chooses body, chooses muscle, chooses mud - it’s no wonder, the way Spirit stretches through to the tips of us to move and stretch, to stretch and touch, to touch and shake. I miss dancing most of all. It makes me want to give up words and voice to live strictly in the body.
When I was growing up, I danced 5 times a week. Contemporary, jazz, lyrical, improv, ballet and modern. Modern was the style that spoke through me hot and ready. Our instructor led us through the different styles of Modern over the years, from Ailey to Cunningham to Martha Graham; she had a soft spot for Ailey. I have a memory of dancing to Wade in the Water at our small NH town’s Old Homes Day (yes, it is strange that a group of white high school girls would perform a rendition of such a spiritually inspired and culturally black dance to a small group of parents and townies in the hot July sun but that’s what happened). It was part of a summer program my best friend and I took together. I remember our instructor sitting us down in her small office w/ a VHS of Revelations and teaching us about Alvin Ailey, inspiration stuck in her throat. We didn’t get a lot of context around Ailey’s work aside from his choreography but I got emotional while I watched, eager to get started.
What I loved about Modern, while I was regularly practicing, was the abstract nature of it - how new shapes could be created, how each flex and each point was strong and intentional. I loved that it was a spontaneous combination of disparate forms of dance. Most importantly, I loved the emotionality of Modern dance, the choreography inherently expressive and elemental. Plus, I loved any kind of dance I could do barefoot.
In the film last night, a choreographer at the Ailey School said that the dancer was a “physical historian,” rooting into the story of humanity and using their bodies to express on our behalf, carrying what he called “blood memories.” I watch the white lace flare around black hips, hypnotic, like ocean current. Glorious angles, immaculate control, freedom freedom, defiance defiance, centuries centuries of a people. Ailey’s dance is all hands and wingspan, strong lines and undulating backs, ripples and flow.
I trust dance before I trust anything else. I watch and I believe these dancers can do anything.
Revelations was first performed in 1960 and it changed the world. Since then, Ailey crafted 79 ballets over 2 decades. Ailey traveled the world w/ his choreography and dance troupe, the first majority Black dance company, and he started his own dance school in New York in 1969. His choreography was a throughline of his life and a dedication to Black people, through celebration and persecution, through joy and exuberance as well as fear and rage and sorrow. Honor was the center of Ailey’s work.
In 1971, he choreographed Cry for his mother’s birthday, in honor of her and of all black women and mothers, the backbone of his community. Cry is performed by Judith Jamison dressed in white, an absolute force of nature. Jamison was interviewed throughout the documentary about her experience in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company and her relationship w/ the choreographer. She shared w/ us a memory of the end of Cry as the audience stood in ovation and she dripped w/ sweat, a memory of Ailey whispering to her, saying Now what? She sensed he meant what he would do next, what he could possibly do next.
According to friends, Ailey had what dancer Bill T. Jones called, that demon, the one that says, If I’ve gotten this far, it is because I pulled one over on the world and I am going to be found out. Ailey’s reality grew shaky, his health declined, he was lonely. It is a familiar story for artists, notably artists that work over years and years, decades and decades, dedicating their life to the irresistible compulsion to create. Ailey reached that point as an artist where his medium became his first language. As a result, his world changed, became both too large and too compact. To paraphrase Jamison, his name became bigger than him.
The artistic impulse takes commitment & sacrifice before it becomes compulsive. It starts w/ worshiping what you love and building belief in the self. In turn w/ trust, it becomes about experimentation and expression and great risk. The artist practices play and meaning. The artist practices the act of starting followed by the act of finishing. The artist gives and gives to their world. The art changes the world and then the world changes the art. Artists die and new grass grows, tickling the toes of lovers. The soil grows wet wet, fertile, invites the new artists to stomp all over it, a new generation birthed in blood.
This entry is a part of my Nightmares & Morning Pages series, where I write every day and share the good stuff. Subscribe to keep up with me & share what you like (please).
My messages & chat are open for inspired journal prompts or anyone who wants to pick apart the world with me. Catch you on the next go around 𖦹
G