Little blurp

Transcribed from my book (non-elec-tron-ic) journal:

Jet-lag I used to enjoy, because I've always liked the selective company, misty visions, and distant sounds of early mornings.
Now at 2:58am, this sucks, because I actually have a busy day ahead.
But I am not unhappy at the fact that I am kept up equally by creative anxiety and the writing impulse. Little segues here -- beginning and follow-up unexplored --, an opening title there, projects, projects, fantasies, dreams in my world of one as it happens to be right now.

I have an active imagination.
I would like to think that I have the imagination, but not the illustrative skill, of an animator, which to me also means having the heart of a child and a willingness for laughter and magic.
I imagine it would be terrific to be able to call oneself an animator by trade, rather than simply character. To wear that label. To be worn by it. To have that on your namecard.
It does sound ... dominating, in the heroic sense.
"I ... am ... an ANIMATOR" (stress: "-TOR"), much like "GLADIA-TOR", or even: "THOR".
What excites me most about this is that behind every name is its verb, and in being an "animator" one animates, how terrific is that?, as opposed to analyzes, or markets, or "academes". That one brings images, stories, characters to life by giving them shape, movement, and surrounding.

3:18am. I am hungry! But I want to be able to go back to sleep! Or keep writing -- that's also OK.

I love writing. I love reading. I adore even the idea of having an idea. Even now, this almost felty touch of nib to paper, it's scritchy-scratch and the fertile white plain of paper soaking ink ... it's beautiful. A finished page of hand-writing -- it's beautiful.

Fucking hell, honking below at 3:20 in the morning.
Again! Hell!

[The writer has gone to the refridgerator. REFRIDGERA-TOR.]

Return of M.E.L.

To whom it may concern:

Those of you who are my regular readers (hello, Mummy) may be wondering what has happened to me after my bout of depression, somewhat depressingly and suprisingly thoroughly well-expressed on this blo--I refuse to call it that ... on this on-line journal. Those of you confused, exasperated, or worser still: bored, with my unnecessarily specifying usage of adverbs may wonderingly wonder why I have continued these acts of tree-felling in an empty forest. Hello? Hello? ... Hello...lo...lo...lo...?

Well I'm back. I'm back from travelling to the cusp of my navel (staring into the dark void) and back. I'm quite unable to articulate exactly what has happened, only that my outlook has changed. I'm determined to be successful. I no longer desire to be invisible -- only selectively so. It's hard to explain this -- people who have observed my attachment to performance over the years may think that I have only ever desired to be highly visible. But understand, acting and dancing were only ever avenues through which I could transcend visibility, to levitate above it or to dig beneath. The studio was a place to immolate the self.

Self-critically, I could say that I've always taken it way too seriously, too cosmically, too spiritually. Not that that's a terrible thing. I fancy it was quite brave of me to do so. And quite necessary. To my death, I believe I will locate and create my soul in the theatre because it can represent so much of what I fear and love. It's where I told God He could find me on terms hospitable to us both. I'm sure he may not have entirely appreciated that I was seeking all sorts of different desires through these avenues concurrently, but I'm sure he understood.

Well, I don't want to sound like a born-again. I'm doing stuff. I'm invested in applying for grad school (stating program specifics here would ruin the prose). I'm writing stuff. I'm lucky to have continued chances.

So hopefully I'll soon have labels to help you (regular person) define me on your (society's) terms apart from "nut job", "aimless", or to quote TIME magazine's latest, a "twixter": those "betwixt and between," who live off and often with their parents after college, going from one temp job to the next. NOTE THAT WHILE I WAS AIMLESS I WAS NOT LIVING OFF MY PARENTS ... NOR WAS I WORKING FOR ANYTHING AS CREDIBLE AS A TEMP AGENCY. I WORKED AT A CAFE, DAMMMMMIT. AND I ATE MY FILL OF ORGANIC CHICKEN JUST LIKE THAT ARMANI-CLAD WAIF ACROSS THE COUNTER. Now that I have a little more ambition, I am happily returned to dependency, a la etudiante. This is part of the ridiculous logic of mine that were my parents dissuasive of my love for dance, I would have taken ALL their money, but since they were superbly supportive, I ripped up cheques. Such is the logic of MEL.

MEL.

M ...E ...L. Celebrate MEL!

To commemorate the launch of the newest upgrade of myself to a Superhero in the making, a convert to normalcy, subscriber to causes greater than the self, I am launching a new Superhero Name in the acronym of M.E.L.. I refuse to go the way of Christo. There is little uniqueness in the monikered abbreviation of LEE. Swarthmoreans of all ages already know, courtesy of my Student Council platform, that there are at least 95 million others in the world that could lay the same claim. Not to mention a brand of jeans.

Rather, we have M.E.L., providing all sorts of possibilites:

Multitudinous Expulsion of Language ("she talks -- a LOT").
Mellifluous Ebullience of Living. (I like this one)
Magnificent, Extraordinary, and alLuring. (cheating, but useful)
Mountainous. Menacing. Energistic. Erudite.
... Lacking.
Lazy?
... Manifest Example of Lostness.
My Expatriate Life.
Masculine Ejaculation of Lust. WHAT?!?!

Well. YOU can vote for your favorite by commenting on this post on this blo--um, journal, or alternatively submit your own acronymic conceptualization for a winning prize of $1000 (from the royalties, later, of course). I recommend the humble dictionary: playing upon my childhood pasttime of researching and memorizing all interesting words beginning with "mel-", there are already plenty of spookily appropriate selections:

From the Greek for honey, we have mellifluous: having a smooth, rich flow; from the French, melange: a mixture of incongruous elements;
also melee: a confused struggle.

Don't forget: melodramatic!

I excitedly await your opinion.

Magnanimously, as Ever, Longingly yours:

M.E.L.

Article: There's Nothing Deep About Depression (NYT)

There's Nothing Deep About Depression
By PETER D. KRAMER

Published: April 17, 2005, New York Times On-line edition


Shortly after the publication of my book ''Listening to Prozac,'' 12 years ago, I became immersed in depression. Not my own. I was contented enough in the slog through midlife. But mood disorder surrounded me, in my contacts with patients and readers. To my mind, my book was never really about depression. Taking the new antidepressants, some of my patients said they found themselves more confident and decisive. I used these claims as a jumping-off point for speculation: what if future medications had the potential to modify personality traits in people who had never experienced mood disorder? If doctors were given access to such drugs, how should they prescribe them? The inquiry moved from medical ethics to social criticism: what does our culture demand of us, in the way of assertiveness?

It was the medications' extra effects -- on personality, not on the symptoms of depression -- that provoked this line of thought. For centuries, doctors have treated depressed patients, using medication and psychological strategies. Those efforts seemed uncontroversial. But authors do not determine the fate of their work. ''Listening to Prozac'' became a ''best-selling book about depression.'' I found myself speaking -- sometimes about ethics, more often about mood disorders -- with many audiences, in bookstores, at gatherings of the mentally ill and their families and at professional meetings. Invariably, as soon as I had finished my remarks, a hand would shoot up. A hearty, jovial man would rise and ask -- always the same question -- ''What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh's time?''

I understood what was intended, a joke about a pill that makes people blandly chipper. The New Yorker had run cartoons along these lines -- Edgar Allan Poe, on Prozac, making nice to a raven. Below the surface humor were issues I had raised in my own writing. Might a widened use of medication deprive us of insight about our condition? But with repetition, the van Gogh question came to sound strange. Facing a man in great pain, headed for self-mutilation and death, who would withhold a potentially helpful treatment?

It may be that my response was grounded less in the intent of the question than in my own experience. For 20 years, I'd spent my afternoons working with psychiatric outpatients in Providence, R.I. As I wrote more, I let my clinical hours dwindle. One result was that more of my time was filled with especially challenging cases, with patients who were not yet better. The popularity of ''Listening to Prozac'' meant that the most insistent new inquiries were from families with depressed members who had done poorly elsewhere. In my life as a doctor, unremitting depression became an intimate. It is poor company. Depression destroys families. It ruins careers. It ages patients prematurely.

Recent research has made the fight against depression especially compelling. Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive -- the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder. To work with depression is to combat a disease that harms patients' nerve pathways day by day.

Nor is the damage merely to mind and brain. Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endocrine glands, to bones. Depressives die young -- not only of suicide, but also of heart attacks and strokes. Depression is a multisystem disease, one we would consider dangerous to health even if we lacked the concept ''mental illness.''

As a clinician, I found the what if challenge ever less amusing. And so I began to ask audience members what they had in mind. Most understood van Gogh to have suffered severe depression. His illness, they thought, conferred special vision. In a short story, Poe likens ''an utter depression of soul'' to ''the hideous dropping off of the veil.'' The questioners maintained this 19th-century belief, that depression reveals essence to those brave enough to face it. By this account, depression is more than a disease -- it has a sacred aspect.

Other questioners set aside that van Gogh was actually ill. They took mood disorder to be a heavy dose of the artistic temperament, so that any application of antidepressants is finally cosmetic, remolding personality into a more socially acceptable form. For them, depression was less than a disease.

These attributions stood in contrast to my own belief, that depression is neither more nor less than a disease, but disease simply and altogether.

Audiences seemed to be aware of the medical perspective, even to endorse it -- but not to have adopted it as a habit of mind. To underscore this inconsistency, I began to pose a test question: We say that depression is a disease. Does that mean that we want to eradicate it as we have eradicated smallpox, so that no human being need ever suffer depression again? I made it clear that mere sadness was not at issue. Take major depression, however you define it. Are you content to be rid of that condition?

Always, the response was hedged: aren't we meant to be depressed? Are we talking about changing human nature?

I took those protective worries as expressions of what depression is to us. Asked whether we are content to eradicate arthritis, no one says, ''Well, the end-stage deformation, yes, but let's hang on to tennis elbow, housemaid's knee and the early stages of rheumatoid disease.'' Multiple sclerosis, acne, schizophrenia, psoriasis, bulimia, malaria -- there is no other disease we consider preserving. But eradicating depression calls out the caveats.

To this way of thinking, to oppose depression too completely is to be coarse and reductionist -- to miss the inherent tragedy of the human condition. To be depressed, even gravely, is to be in touch with what matters most in life, its finitude and brevity, its absurdity and arbitrariness. To be depressed is to occupy the role of rebel and social critic. Depression, in our culture, is what tuberculosis was 100 years ago: illness that signifies refinement.

Having raised the thought experiment, I should emphasize that in reality, the possibility of eradicating depression is not at hand. If clinicians are better at ameliorating depression than we were 10 years ago -- and I think we may be -- that is because we are more persistent in our efforts, combining treatments and (when they succeed) sticking with them until they have a marked effect. But in terms of the tools available, progress in the campaign against depression has been plodding.

Still, it is possible to envisage general medical progress that lowers the rate of depression substantially -- and then to think of a society that enjoys that result. What is lost, what gained? Which is also to ask: What stands in the way of our embracing the notion that depression is disease, nothing more?

This question has any number of answers. We idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues. Like tuberculosis in its day, depression is a form of vulnerability that even contains a measure of erotic appeal. But the aspect of the romanticization of depression that seems to me to call for special attention is the notion that depression spawns creativity.

Objective evidence for that effect is weak. Older inquiries, the first attempts to examine the overlap of madness and genius, made positive claims for schizophrenia. Recent research has looked at mood disorders. These studies suggest that bipolar disorder may be overrepresented in the arts. (Bipolarity, or manic-depression, is another diagnosis proposed for van Gogh.) But then mania and its lesser cousin hypomania may drive productivity in many fields. One classic study hints at a link between alcoholism and literary work. But the benefits of major depression, taken as a single disease, have been hard to demonstrate. If anything, traits eroded by depression -- like energy and mental flexibility -- show up in contemporary studies of creativity.

How, then, did this link between creativity and depression arise? The belief that mental illness is a form of inspiration extends back beyond written history. Hippocrates was answering some such claim, when, around 400 B.C., he tried to define melancholy -- an excess of ''black bile'' -- as a disease. To Hippocrates, melancholy was a disorder of the humors that caused epileptic seizures when it affected the body and caused dejection when it affected the mind. Melancholy was blamed for hemorrhoids, ulcers, dysentery, skin rashes and diseases of the lungs.

The most influential expression of the contrasting position -- that melancholy confers special virtues -- appears in the ''Problemata Physica,'' or ''Problems,'' a discussion, in question-and-answer form, of scientific conundrums. It was long attributed to Aristotle, but the surviving version, from the second century B.C., is now believed to have been written by his followers. In the 30th book of the ''Problems,'' the author asks why it is that outstanding men -- philosophers, statesmen, poets, artists, educators and heroes -- are so often melancholic. Among the ancients, the strongmen Herakles and Ajax were melancholic; more contemporaneous examples cited in the ''Problems'' include Socrates, Plato and the Spartan general Lysander. The answer given is that too much black bile leads to insanity, while a moderate amount creates men ''superior to the rest of the world in many ways. ''

The Greeks, and the cultures that succeeded them, faced depression poorly armed. Treatment has always been difficult. Depression is common and spans the life cycle. When you add in (as the Greeks did) mania, schizophrenia and epilepsy, not to mention hemorrhoids, you encompass a good deal of what humankind suffers altogether. Such an impasse calls for the elaboration of myth. Over time, ''melancholy '' became a universal metaphor, standing in for sin and innocent suffering, self-indulgence and sacrifice, inferiority and perspicacity.

The great flowering of melancholy occurred during the Renaissance, as humanists rediscovered the ''Problems.'' In the late 15th century, a cult of melancholy flourished in Florence and then was taken back to England by foppish aristocratic travelers who styled themselves artists and scholars and affected the melancholic attitude and dress. Most fashionable of all were ''melancholic malcontents,'' irritable depressives given to political intrigue. One historian, Lawrence Babb, describes them as ''black-suited and disheveled . . . morosely meditative, taciturn yet prone to occasional railing.''

In dozens of stage dramas from the period, the principal character is a discontented melancholic. ''Hamlet'' is the great example. As soon as Hamlet takes the stage, an Elizabethan audience would understand that it is watching a tragedy whose hero's characteristic flaw will be a melancholic trait, in this case, paralysis of action. By the same token, the audience would quickly accept Hamlet's spiritual superiority, his suicidal impulses, his hostility to the established order, his protracted grief, solitary wanderings, erudition, impaired reason, murderousness, role-playing, passivity, rashness, antic disposition, ''dejected haviour of the visage'' and truck with graveyards and visions.

''Hamlet'' is arguably the seminal text of our culture, one that cements our admiration for doubt, paralysis and alienation. But seeing ''Hamlet'' in its social setting, in an era rife with melancholy as an affected posture, might make us wonder how much of the historical association between melancholy and its attractive attributes is artistic conceit.


In literature, the cultural effects of depression may be particularly marked. Writing, more than most callings, can coexist with a relapsing and recurring illness. Composition does not require fixed hours; poems or essays can be set aside and returned to on better days. And depression is an attractive subject. Superficially, mental pain resembles passion, strong emotion that stands in opposition to the corrupt world. Depression can have a picaresque quality -- think of the journey through the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan's ''Pilgrim's Progress.'' Over the centuries, narrative structures were built around the descent into depression and the recovery from it. Lyric poetry, religious memoir, the novel of youthful self-development -- depression is an affliction that inspires not just art but art forms. And art colors values. Where the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are depressives, dark views of the human condition will be accorded special worth.

Through the ''anxiety of influence,'' heroic melancholy cast its shadow far forward, onto romanticism and existentialism. At a certain point, the transformation begun in the Renaissance reaches completion. It is no longer that melancholy leads to heroism. Melancholy is heroism. The challenge is not battle but inner strife. The rumination of the depressive, however solipsistic, is deemed admirable. Repeatedly, melancholy returns to fashion.

As I spoke with audiences about mood disorders, I came to believe that part of what stood between depression and its full status as disease was the tradition of heroic melancholy. Surely, I would be asked when I spoke with college students, surely I saw the value in alienation. One medical philosopher asked what it would mean to prescribe Prozac to Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up the hill.

That variant of the what if question sent me to Albert Camus's essay on Sisyphus, where I confirmed what I thought I had remembered -- that in Camus's reading, Sisyphus, the existential hero, remains upbeat despite the futility of his task. The gods intend for Sisyphus to suffer. His rebellion, his fidelity to self, rests on the refusal to be worn down. Sisyphus exemplifies resilience, in the face of full knowledge of his predicament. Camus says that joy opens our eyes to the absurd -- and to our freedom. It is not only in the downhill steps that Sisyphus triumphs over his punishment: ''The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.''

I came to suspect that it was the automatic pairing of depth and depression that made the medical philosopher propose Sisyphus as a candidate for mood enhancement. We forget that alienation can be paired with elation, that optimism is a form of awareness. I wanted to reclaim Sisyphus, to set his image on the poster for the campaign against depression.

Once we take seriously the notion that depression is a disease like any other, we will want to begin our discussion of alienation by asking diagnostic questions. Perhaps this sense of dislocation signals an apt response to circumstance, but that one points to an episode of an illness. Aware of the extent and effects of mood disorder, we may still value alienation -- and ambivalence and anomie and the other uncomfortable traits that sometimes express perspective and sometimes attach to mental illness. But we are likely to assess them warily, concerned that they may be precursors or residual symptoms of major depression.

How far does our jaundiced view reach? Surely the label ''disease'' does not apply to the melancholic or depressive temperament? And of course, it does not. People can be pessimistic and lethargic, brooding and cautious, without ever falling ill in any way. But still, it seemed to me in my years of immersion that depression casts a long shadow. Though I had never viewed it as pathology, even Woody Allen-style neurosis had now been stripped of some of its charm -- of any implicit claim, say, of superiority. The cachet attaching to tuberculosis diminished as science clarified the cause of the illness, and as treatment became first possible and then routine. Depression may follow the same path. As it does, we may find that heroic melancholy is no more.

In time, I came to think of the van Gogh question in a different light, merging it with the eradication question. What sort of art would be meaningful or moving in a society free of depression? Boldness and humor -- broad or sly -- might gain in status. Or not. A society that could guarantee the resilience of mind and brain might favor operatic art and literature. Freedom from depression would make the world safe for high neurotics, virtuosi of empathy, emotional bungee-jumpers. It would make the world safe for van Gogh.


Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease. Resisting that claim, we may ask: Seeing cruelty, suffering and death -- shouldn't a person be depressed? There are circumstances, like the Holocaust, in which depression might seem justified for every victim or observer. Awareness of the ubiquity of horror is the modern condition, our condition.

But then, depression is not universal, even in terrible times. Though prone to mood disorder, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was not depressed in his months at Auschwitz. I have treated a handful of patients who survived horrors arising from war or political repression. They came to depression years after enduring extreme privation. Typically, such a person will say: ''I don't understand it. I went through -- '' and here he will name one of the shameful events of our time. ''I lived through that, and in all those months, I never felt this.'' This refers to the relentless bleakness of depression, the self as hollow shell. To see the worst things a person can see is one experience; to suffer mood disorder is another. It is depression -- and not resistance to it or recovery from it -- that diminishes the self.

Beset by great evil, a person can be wise, observant and disillusioned and yet not depressed. Resilience confers its own measure of insight. We should have no trouble admiring what we do admire -- depth, complexity, aesthetic brilliance -- and standing foursquare against depression.




Peter D. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and the author of ''Listening to Prozac.'' This essay is adapted from his book ''Against Depression,'' which Viking will publish next month.

the depths of self-pity

here's a real blog:
FUCK

which was going to be the title, but my rational self, even now, told my emotional self that I would regret that later on ...

ever self-contained,
fermenting within,
bloating,
so full because there's no one to share with --
the sadness and self-pity of those barricaded by pride.

But I'm still proud of my pride.
It's all that I've got left.

I've only cried like this once before -- wailed, really, sobbing, manic -- within this past year of anxiety alternated by apathy and disinterest (in everything). It was when I was talking on the phone to Mark, sitting on Ken Sharpe's porch, and realized that I would leave to Linz (the plan at the time!) and we, as friends, would never be the same again. That I would lose the best friend I'd ever had, though I'd never known it till it was gone.

The reason this latest onslaught arrived was upon news of the progress of the Green Chair Dance Group and their plans, together, for the future. To Poland, in the summer, to Linz for the boys, to London for Sarah and Ben, poor Hannah to suffer but not terribly finishing her last year at Swat.

Wherefore this agony? Is it longing? Is it jealousy? Why this ache, this anger? From whence the righteousness, the sense of injustice, almost: the violence?

Upon this latest news, I see my dreams a flight, and I -- left at the terminal. Was it my dream, upon graduation, to start and maintain a dance troupe? No; but what they represent to me that hurts me so much is their success in friendship and in dance that I somehow cannot seem to achieve in any arena. I feel like I, alone, am a lesson in missed opportunity, worse than failure -- either because you never really gave it a try, or because you survive well through the attempt in order to regret it. I feel pretty stupid and useless like this. It's a feeling that just makes me want to throw something around, or drive into a brick wall, or scream (more likely option). I do all this research, over and over again, and I do nothing with my ambition. I do not have a vision for my future except that I no longer want to do it alone.

Why the insistence on difference? Why my insistence on hardship? I discover in conversations celebrating the achievements of my peers that for any sort of artistic or social innovation, among my first instinctual questions is, "Is so-and-so American?," as if manifesting such dreaming is only allowed for the American and not for me. I have possibly been my worst enemy at the worst times, and it's through this, this attitude of foreigner pride in the distinction of cultural difference yet incapacity for action that has limited me from bringing significant things to completion.

Of course, I am truly happy for my friends and their achievements.
And yes, I value my place in having supported and in some instances vaulted the possibility for their coming together.
Yet I feel unvalidated.

Yet, as I said before, I am almost all the more so proud of my pride.

Well, perhaps a more perverse, but more acceptable way of saying it is that I am proud of my guilt.

Because the truth of it is that every one of my choices and my non-choices and my choices to not make a choice were by virtue of pride, and guilt. I was too proud to be around on campus after graduation -- prying eyes were everwhere, quickly fatigued as the inmate, once friend, shuns the freed; I was too guilty to run off pursuing wanton dreams in far off lands while my (expensive, mind you) education had done nothing but teach me of the many underserved and unprivileged, unlike myself.

(Now, what on earth does a far off land entail to someone who in the span of her lifetime has thus far made regular trips half way around the world and back in order to establish a sense of home on three different continents? WHAT?!?!?!?! Am I proud of my current sense of landedness, my fear of travelling? Does this equate to a sense of rootedness?)

So playing poverty, living under the dime and dollar, playing like I haven't had the opportunities I have had -- and ignored, or missed the deadline for, or didn't want, or didn't know about -- makes it OK that I am not a success. It even makes it that I am not a success rather than a flat out failure. This is what my skewed version of right social action has been for a number of years. "Do badly," I would encourage myself, "it's what you deserve. And it's all you can live with."

I find myself wanting to blame someone of course, but I've released Mum a short while ago as being the root of all personal ailments. That habit has been rather unfair, and cruel.

I want to blame Sarah for ruining my dancing relationship -- or rather, dancing opportunity -- with Greg and John, who were robbed of me my senior spring after our successful fall semester together to study abroad. I want to blame Sarah, who stole my initiative of the Green Chair Dance Group as her final senior dance project. I want to blame Sarah, who now has done the worst of it and stolen my dreams.

But I am making a big effort to be nice to Sarah about this. (Let me remember for future reference though, my friend Youssef who has been out here in NYC for a year, by himself, now: age 19: "Fuck nice -- you gotta hustle.")

I also have to learn to be careful, and patient, with my dreams. Maybe the article Mum sent me was not far off, the one about the Singaporean inventor of the thumb drive, who counselled future inventors (hey: that's me) not to patent before having a strategy to conceal the product during the three year (?) waiting period for the patent to actualize. I am an inventor of movement right now without a laboratory for experimentation, without a cohort of fellow scientists, with my first invention stolen because I left it lying around, unprotected. So now what? Now What?!?! Maybe home isn't such a bad idea, to start afresh. Old milk goes rancid, and in the mouth burns but lays sticky a mildew, a coating of the desire for vengeance.

I told Greg it might all be over. I may not dance again. The crest in his voice, the instinctual arc of sadness, makes me see a glimmer of hope. It is the same disappointment in Juma's voice hearing the same, my continual self-doubt, stifledness, fear, that similarly makes me rethink my own negativity.

It doesn't change the fact that I've not been this afraid before. This is not acting class. I don't go home to anything else but this -- me, my loneliness, my ineptness.

It doesn't sway me from my growing conviction that I may actually be classificably, medically, ill. I'm not sure what it would take for me to actually seek mental health treatment -- I suppose someone in a starched white jacket might just say instead: "Get over it! And exert some will power!" -- but I have been making my own self-assessment based on recurring thought patterns and behaviours over the last three/four years.

Yet the hopes of my friends, even though they are not mine, keep my buoyed above "drowning in my own self-doubt" more so than they may realize.

The truth, tonight, (sorry), April 19th 1:02am.

Confession

Sitting, sleeping, sulking in my room for an entire sunny day and no guilt, no guilt, no feeling but mild self-pity and angry frustration. No walk, no jog, no facing to the sun in disarray - I eat instead. More self-destruction, one inhaling bite after another. Did Chi-Chun say I looked happy when I eat? Then happiness is self-immolation into a faceful of cereal, chicken salad, breads of any kind, whatever is lying around. It is a desperate reach deep into a bowl of something sticky, leaving traces of sin on the knuckles, on the sheets, on the notes of the keyboard.

But I am being characteristically melodramatic. It's really not so bad. I just decided to have my first lazy day. Days doing nothing but trying to do something don't count. Today, I made that choice. Rather than end up a loser, I chose to be one. And that's almost more allowable, especially since it's new. It still ain't strong.

But it is free weekend minutes day as well, my only one, since Sunday will be a day of work and rehearsal, so I did also allot this day for phone calls. Almost a couple hours with Mummy, some with dear Win, a little Mark here, a little Anna there. Waiting for the latter to touch base again, to see if Melkizedeck of Kenya, '03, is able to rouse himself from his headache to have a night out. We're attempting to drag out Youssef from Egypt, also '03, currently in Jersey City, but, with incomprehensible anti-socialness, will apparently only answer phone numbers he does not recognize. Anna's been jilted enough times, so we wait upon the powers of Arpita Parikh to sneak up on his cellular and demand his attendance to an event that I somehow initiated.

So I think it can be said that I am to some level good at getting people together. Moreover, it is something I both enjoy and think is valuable to society at large and in private. I don't think I can say the same about the other things I am trying to achieve in my life -- studying, dancing, commenting upon and therefore changing the world by making art. I will alternately enjoy them, abhor them, think they are critical to public discourse, perceive them as escapist and irrelevant. Nothing is more fickle than a vascillating and dispersed idealist.

My mother today tells me to "just put yourself together" and move forward. A very present and welcoming woman I met at the Harlem Center for the Performing Arts the other night (at a presentation of Bill T Jones' new work) answers my quiet inquiry of, "How does one know when to let go?" with the assurance, "You know, honey, you know ... leting go is your ability to say, 'I am stronger than my past.'" Win bolsters my doldrums today with the words of our mutual friend at Swarthmore, Brandon King: "Nothing is more beautiful than self-confidence." How I am yearning for that kind of beauty right now. The confidence to say that you are on the right path, the path you were made for, that all your efforts and intentions are not being betrayed. Ultimately, I know too, that through self-doubt, we are our own worst enemies. I am tired of living in ambiguity, although I don't know if that is something I can willfully change.

So how hard can it be to make a decision? "Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin," I've known for years, and my tendency toward inaction because of fear of the unknown is extending it's full force all over again. What happened to March? I know I moved; I know I moved somewhat traumatically, slowly trucking minor belongings across the M60 from Astoria to Harlem, as much of my minor life as could be carried in my hands each time. I know I had a birthday. I know I ate a lot of cake. I know I held a baby in my arms. I don't think I held a man in my arms. That was one day in April.

And what happened to April? Blossoms emerge, bravely in the late chill and absence of rain, but the opening of my heart is stunted, is unwilling to come out so naked into the sunlight without an assurance that it is finally, truthfully, warm. I thought I was in love, but really I was in memory. My fantasies are vivid, and I almost desire banality so I can forget. But only almost. A part of me does still want to live. A larger part wants someone else to ask first.

Were they right?
Was R Charles right in his observation that I was "afraid of success?"
Was Phil Metzidakis right in his insistence that, among the anvils and the hammers of the world, I was an anvil, only trying to be a hammer?

Is my strength in letting this dream go?

"I can make peace on earth / with my own two hands ..."

In the company of sister outsiders

Return to academia ...
Went to a lecture tonight by Alexis de Veaux on her decade-long biographical project on the “literary lately dead” Audre Lorde: “black feminist lesbian mother poet warrior.” Strangely – or perhaps not so, since I insisted on taking social science classes and a miraculous few in the humanities outside of dance or theatre at Swarthmore – I only encountered Lorde near graduation, when I happened upon Anand Vaidya in the fragrance garden and he lent me Sister Outsider after we commiserated eating Tarble toast over our viewpoints as foreigners in America. The collection of essays felt like something I would have been ape over three years ago, but reading it more recently, I feel like I have a more matured consciousness about the realities those essays reflect upon, to add to my eagerness over its stylistic sensuousness and gynocentric standpoint. De Veaux was a presence in her own right – perhaps not as formidable as Ms. Lorde herself, although much of that mythological status she had ascribed to herself – and spoke openly and honestly about the intimate, perhaps invasive, and risky process of writing biography. Not only did the lecture format remind me (fondly, in retrospect) of days immersed in academia, but de Veaux’s itself poetic expression of the complexities of subjectivity and self-identification in putatively objective academic work recalled my own exposure to and personal wrangling with the concept of Otherness in the Sociology & Anthropology of Swat, and the importance I ascribed to it then. I don’t feel as Other now … but neither do I feel the creative impulse as strongly. My thesis advisor Bruce Grant often mentioned, confounded by yet another desperate rambling submitted as work – desperate, and rambling, not only for the expected bad study habits of a burned out yet over-achieving college student, but for the genuine and heart-felt closeness I felt to the subject matter and how desperately I wanted to be able to articulate it – that my paper writing was like poetry, was enraptured with alliteration and literary devices, was too expressive to be credible. I know that this was as much criticism as warning, yet I delighted in the comment nonetheless, thinking that even if it was a ‘mistake’ and at cost to the soundness of my research, I was at least being acknowledged for my creativity.
Now, absent rules and structure, I am thirsty for knowledge and confused about what creativity is (many artists whose work I’m seeing evidently don’t use it, so who then?), which makes me wonder whether creativity for me was a greater truth or simply rebellion. Whether I am now doodling symbols and patterns in the sand, or whether I am building up a vocabulary and exposure to multiple ways and concepts of moving for the purpose of developing my own capacity for expression and invention. Invention! This, alongside a slice or two too much of well-meaning birthday cake (now attached unattractively to my paunch, hips, underarms, and butt) have given rise to the “wee helpless moment” of yesterday in which I was questioning my ambitions in dance.

Onward in dance ...
So going to an academic lecture on a literary figure made me think about dance in two ways: firstly, in response to the above-stated questioning of yesterday, I thought that much as Ms. De Veaux can relate to being one among the highly respected black female writers, in my own artistic career I should aspire towards being highly considered among my creative peers (should I actually get down to it and MAKE WORK). I realized in this that, although not a bad approach at the outset, I can’t keep up putting out for other choreographers as a dancer for too long. Not only is my right knee already having problems (oh, and did I mention my weight?), I can’t aspire to be, essentially, a letter on the keyboard rather than the writer herself. I won’t just be a tool – with all respect to all the letters out there, who I do think are works of art in themselves. And I know I have it in me – just the other night having coffee with a new friend, I found myself, after lamenting another banal performance of wanton technique and not much more, in surprising glee at breathing the words: “just you wait ... just you wait till I can show you what I can do with dance.”
Secondly, in discussion of the outspoken and controversial persona of Audre Lorde, I reflected upon my blessing and my curse of being mentored by Jacek ("yah-tzek") Luminski, of how compulsively significant he has been to my at first uninformed pursuit, understanding, and not always healthy consideration of dance. How I will, in Modern Class X, when the young teacher struggles to find a way to articulate a principle, often wish to myself that Jacek could just emerge from the air to tell everyone really what’s up; to invoke “luk” (the bend of the bow, one of the images and movements he uses to stretch the spine), or to lead us in an absurd half hour of breathing and plie, in order to feel the true weight of the pelvis. But then I realize that maybe Jacek himself got some of these ideas from the artists here – meeting Bill Young again in New York, for example, after an introduction at the festival in Bytom last year, I am surprised to hear that he first met Jacek in 1993, contextualizing the development of Jacek’s technique in a way I hadn’t thought of before, because to me, as a faithful student, he was always the first if not sole proprietor of contemporary dance.
So what my relationship with Jacek Luminski has to do with Alexis de Veaux’s writing of Audre Lorde is that because of my intimacy of knowledge yet outsidership with him and his company, and my attachment in the years following my residency there, I have always thought that maybe one day I would want to, and perhaps be allowed to, write about Jacek and his work. Not necessarily about his influence upon a national aesthetic in dance in a post-communist society, or about the community outreach of the company, or about the festival even. I would write with the primary objective (one that I identify with my own mission in dance, of course) of conveying what it means to pursue movement arts as a philosophical quest. But put in those terms, I might as well write about tai chi or yoga, which profess that very pathway. Perhaps I should instead write about how a Polish choreographer has returned me to my true Asian heritage!

We women of the hallway
Perhaps another reason I would want to invoke the apparition of Jacek in these hallways of DanSpace Center, New York City, 2005, is for him to give to the many seeking and loving women caught in lifetime affairs with dance the same sense of the phantasmic and other-worldly, because that is what I think they deserve for being here, for sacrificing whatever it is they must in order to be here. To be pinched and prodded and realinged, if not with instructing fingers then with oppresive gazes from the outside, from the magazine covers of Universal News downstairs, from personal memories of other studios, elsewhere close and far away. From the pure science of the athletic work that we do.

How is it that this is the venue for freedom -- for me, a large-boned and -built opinionated activist, well-traveled, privileged, ambitious, but vague? Or ambitiously vague? Or vaguely ambitious?
For Anna ("Ah-na") of Italy, eyelids striped fuscia and dyed-black hair messed and matted, a black-clad flexi-fairy-goth dancing with theatricality and barely contained abandon?
For Anna ("eh-na") of Portugal, lithe and little in purples and coastal toastal tan?

How and why do we find ourselves here, my sister outsiders?

Bill T Jones is quoted on his company website with the following anecdote: "About two years ago, sitting down to breakfast in a Bay Area diner, I had one of those curious confluences of sight and memory that produce a reaction only to be understood as a series of questions...
"The sight was that of three men, between the ages of 50 and 65, enjoying coffee at the counter. These three friends, seen from the back, flesh pouring out of their shirts and over their trousers, represented for me the privileged position of their age and gender in our society. Their privilege was to be unconcerned with their appearance. In fact, they probably seldom had the experience of having their bodies scrutinized or objectified. The expectations and gaze of a dance audience will probably never fall on these three. The spectator's gaze, on the other hand, defines me."

(http://www.billtjones.org/people/index.html)

I won't be fully actualized as an artist until I am presented. That moment is one I long for and that I fear. I am building ideas and dreams in my head, ideas that I passionately want people to see, want people to feel, to dream as I do. Are these worthwhile? Are they "worth it"? What is the alternative, how else can I be useful? How else can I be me? What is so freeing about being constantly defined by the gaze, about being addicted to it -- about being a performer?

(Edited April 16th)

a wee helpless moment

what am i doing and why?
what am i doing, and why?
what am i doing?
why?
what am i doing and why?
what am i doing and why?
what am i doing and why?


where do i go from here?
where do i go from here?
where can i go from here?
where could i go from there?
how do i get from here to there?


who am i?
who are you?
who am i to you?
who are you to me?
why are you who you are to me?
why am i who i am to you?
where are we?
where is we?

if there is not we then i am not me.

My Golden Birthday

Scrawled by streetlamp light (can we still call them sodium lamps?),
1:05am EST, March 23rd, 2005,
restless in a queen sized bed uncomfortable like a marshmallow trough, sinking in the middle, but at least I have a place of privacy and my period of bodily and emotional trauma from the sickness and the moving are making a graceful exit.

One of those nights when I again feel like adventuring out on strange streets in my maroon nightgown [those familiar with my "Freddy" story from Poland will understand this more intimately] -- instead I venture out onto my gritty "balcony" -- a fire escape -- and feel an unthreatening chill ... spring is finally, finally here.

Returned to my room and seated before my expanse of glass, beneath the iron spirals I catch a panorama of ungodly-hour street life: an old hunched man systematically rummaging through the sidewalk trash mounds awaiting weekly pickup, collecting bottles?, or something that clinks into his little rolling shopping cart. He looks around anxiously for possible observing eyes -- little could he suspect a girl on the fourth floor sleepless in her transition to womanhood.

It is my birthday, and when I draw the blinds there is close to a full moon in the sky, high in the sky that I spy between brick arch and iron ladder -- this is a great present to me. Brings me to thoughts of wilderness and wildness and the fact that I think random roamings in one's pyjamas is romantic.

I really enjoy my room, with high ceilings and double windows framed by a brick arch outside protecting the escape ladder at a diagonal. I feel like I am before a stage -- or perhaps on one? When I lean out, I can see the Hudson river, and the lights from the Jersey high rise apartments opposite reflect in its blackness, making me think of carnival when I walk home to a hardy woman selling "CHHUUURRRROOOOOSSS" outside the subway station and the lime green gated front steps of my walk-up.

I still hear the bottle man in the distance -- I last saw his stooped shadow walking along my side of 136th, but reflected in the facing side's second floor windows.

***

When was the last time an audience has had to become strangers to themselves in watching something entirely new, something they could not recognize, something they had to decipher?

What is the eventual purpose of outsidership, what kind of value can we put upon moments of watching, such as my secreted short of life's continual struggle?

What is Otherness? Can we not train our societies to marvel at it -- whatever it is -- rather than fear and seek to obliterate it?

***

From Bill Young's modern dance class today:

Sometimes you move; sometimes the movement moves you.

Where am I moving next? How am I getting there?

A new place, a new start

March 13th, 2005
619 W. 136th Street Apt. 15, (Harlem) New York, NY

Again, a frustrating inability to access the internet when my laptop is seemingly picking up a network somewhere in this universe, somewhere here, somewhere near this fourth-floor walk-up apartment that I now share with a Hispanic family of ever elastic number – first a mother (Rosario), a father, an English-speaking friend, a teenage daughter, a sullen pre-teen grandson (Isaiah). The next day add one or two babies (“cousins”), a teenage/young adult male (Tito), another teenage girl (friend?). That same evening, add a legion of middle-aged women primping before a Saturday night adventure, the young girls mimicking in the room next to mine where they all sleep. I feel a little strange and alone, in my 10 x 10 x 12 room, on my big queen bed, all by myself, compared to the closeness of the uncountables next door, and I hold a quiet prayer in my heart that I will manage to remain aloof yet friendly enough to retain that persona of foreignness that gets me quizzical smiles and nothing more threatening in this neighbourhood as I live female, young, and without family.

We were, over my first couple days, the loudest apartment in the building, which I noted with a smile and enough sickness, still, to sleep through—-blasting hip hop/reggaeton music interspersed with hysteric laughing voices can be heard from downstairs all the way up the stained staircase of what is now my new home.

My world in numbers

March 1st check-in, Melinda Lee reporting.

My life in numbers:
6:53 am Preemptive strike – head falls back down to the pillow
7:00 am Alarm rings
7:04 am Raise head again to look at clock
7:09 am Actually get up out of bed
7:48 am On the N train, ready to go
10 oz. Coffee from my little espresso machine in my hand in an old Starbucks cup
3 pcs. GOYA brand Mari biscuits consumed
One Seeing-eye dog accompanying blind passenger
8:14 am Change over to
#4 Express train to
14 th St. Union Square, transfer to
#6 Local train to Canal St. (if this is Tuesday or Thursday, minus an hour and a half to all of this to arrive at Astor Place by the same train by 7 am)

All this scribbled on an emptied Nestle hot cocoa packet in sharp lead pencil after thinking that writing my life down in numbers would be an entertaining exercise, until I realized that anything actually innovative to count would be tedious and may require forethought, such as: number of steps taken from home to work; number of people I made eye contact with on the train; number of people smiled at/from on the train; minutes taken to realize that the morning’s AM New York, albeit free, isn’t worth the retinal effort to read for the quality of its writing content. In order to be significant or insightful, the exercise has to either be sustained, or systematic, or both – or maybe neither. I chuckled to myself trying to devise means and goals in this effort during my commute, so if anything, then, it was worth the reconceptualization of what is otherwise routine.

Seeing the world in numbers is also a new and difficult perspective for me to embrace. I have for many years now aspired to viewing the world qualitatively, aesthetically, poetically, perhaps to the point of the impractical. Seeing in numbers now means seeing people as demographics, as representations, as symbols, as capital, rather than as colors (think “rainbow,” not race), friends, compatriots – but correspondently, also adversaries and competitors.

Yet seeing in numbers is helping me make judicious decisions. Emily’s mother Nancy – whom I chatted with after her ritual morning coffee and cigarette when I went for a blitzkrieg Philly jaunt to hold six-day old Kirsten against my bosom! – clarified for me that what I appear to be doing now is learning how to make decisions for myself. She said that was beautiful; I am surprised at just how simple and how right that is. To not feel compelled, but to have my own agency – this is what I am learning to achieve at this time.

Not that I have much of choice – preparations, considerations, and choices have to be made at this point. Due to my current roommate’s father’s ailing condition, I will have to move somewhere in nine days –

(my life in numbers:
9: days: till circumstance throttles me into nomadism once again)

which opened up for me again the possibility of fleeing somewhere else, or going home – Philly or Singapore, oh all those demons once more of "who am I and where am I supposed to be?". Those of my friends who think I think too much – you’re right! – may find it characteristic that yes, I had to think this one through again, because it is difficult to let go of the idea of opportunity for change or for return because those things, as means as well as ends, are familiar confrontations to me. Change means a chance to start afresh, to do better by yourself. Change was also hardly ever my choice. These are the numbers that I had been counting throughout my education:

Prior to arriving at Swarthmore for college, I had moved house or apartment 10 times; I had moved country four times, continent: two. During the tumultous high school years in international school in Singapore I didn't have a consistent close friend for any more than six months to a year at a time -- I lost six significant friends to school transfer, repatriation, and, in one case, the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 90s which lost her father his business (and thus repatriation ensued). Soon after entering college, my parents became missionaries with an organization, Mercy Ships, that has a primarily humanitarian medical mission upon floating hospitals off the west coast of Africa and the Carribbean. They trained in Texas, then served on the Africa Mercy, then lived "with long-horned cows as neighbours" in Garden Valley, TX, when my father became the Chief Operating Officer at their administrative base. By that time, I had returned simultaneously inspired and confused (and just a wee bit heartbroken -- in the time-relative scale of things, because otherwise it was pretty devastating) from my time in Poland. When my parents had visited me in Poland in 2002, I had gone without seeing them for two years. Our gathering as a family of four in Singapore in December of 2003 was the first time we had been all together in our country of origin in four years.

I only restate these numbers as a way of explaining how it is that I have for many years felt homeless. These are in no way uncommon circumstances, but I think I felt it more difficult because of the ambiguity (still existing) of the nature of our moving -- whether immigration to America was ever in the picture (because culturally, an Americanization was happening regardless), of what relevance our vagrancy had to what was putatively our home -- also a ceaselessly shifting landscape, a little natural-resourceless island with a cosmopolitan, hybridized identity developed to adapt to market necessities in order to survive independently.

But I also restate these numbers as a recitation of the struggle and yet the alibi I gave myself for not disciplining myelf to succeed academically, so that I can move on and become a more positive person. Because these numbers are all of what was lost or what was absent -- they are lamentations, epigraphs -- and do not reflect a personality that counted my blessings. I am a lucky, lucky individual, and I have had a rich life in both provision and depth of experience and relationship.

My life recently in numbers:
106: number of people auditioning for a project this July with Shen Wei (whose work I truly respect and would love to learn from)
21: number of us retained for the second round of selection
11: number of us who went home appreciated, challenged, but still jobless
2: number of auditions in as many weeks I’ve been called back for, but not casted in
1: number of auditions in that same time frame I was casted in, but turned down

Making choices, in my case, and despite both an instinctual and conscious reluctance to be involved in the production I did get cast in, still takes the good amount of time of four days. What is important is that I finally did turn it down, because I was able to articulate to myself, primarily, that the cabaret/burlesque style of the production was not going to be helpful to me in achieving what it is that I am here to achieve. This means I must be able to now articulate what it is that I am here to achieve. Huh.

To hone the style of improvisatory dance that I want to specialize in is to go through a detoxification process of life philosophy and physicality. It means to go deeper into the craft of embodiment and creation. I am actually happy to relinquish an opportunity to perform if it means that I can grow in distributing my expressive energy in a way that is neither destructive nor narcissistic. I want to be at the cutting and the discursive edge of my field, I want to develop to be respected and engaged by other professionals who excel at it – but which “it”? Dance as culture or dance as craft?

Not that I think of them as exclusive, but oftentimes I forget where I come from and that ancestrally there are beats, rhythms, and ways of seeing that are not tied to these lands I now traverse, not tied at all to this snow and cold. It occurred to me at some point in February that I was Asian. This occurred to me as a feature, a heritage, that I am allowed to embrace (see my second blogpost: "is it OK?!?!"). It is, like many of the blessings in my life, something I already have.

(Written March 1st, 2005, edited and posted March 23)

Upheaval, yet another cause for self-assessment

It's been said that the Japanese revere the rebel of lost causes, but that in America there is no such thing as a successful failure. I bring this up in the context of engaging a cost-benefit analysis of the future direction of my life.

The anthropologist and the modern dancer share one key desire, and that is to excavate human ancestry and therefore find something "authentically" human. This is fundamentally to do with human communication -- therefore, for a dancing anthropologist (or an anthropologizing dancer), dance is primarily a communicative art form -- not just exercise, not just athletics or acrobatics.

Modern Dance in its staged presentation hankers for the Pre-Modern, not so much fighting as demonstrating against the mechanization of the human body in post-industrial society. There is an assumption of the existence of an elusive but ideal way of being a cohesive self. (if the modern condition requires such healing, such putting back together -- what broke? why did it break? can we prevent it? can we just "get over it" and move on?)

Anthropology seeks answers to the existential question through measurements and codifications of human physique and cultural, that is group behaviour, over time and across geographies. Yet Anthropology is not just a science, but a theology -- and I'm not trying to be grandiose here, this is the Merriam Webster dictionary's exact definition -- "dealing with the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings." It is evolutionary in outlook. It must be, I think to myself, a search for an absolute, because there is no joy, let alone purpose to living (well, aside from the process of living itself), in the opposite (that our destiny is purely survivalist, or anarchic).

But does this only hold true if destiny, rather than knowledge, is the object of the anthropological/artistic search? Is the concept of destiny itself passive? It connotes pre-destination, rather than immediate action; it assumes incontrovertible forces or agents exerting themselves upon, beneath, around, through, and with our real, immediate lives. What are the possible forms -- by this, I mean ways of daily living -- of a reflective AND active "political philosophy," as Arendt (my tragic inheritance: senior thesis 2004 on ... what?) would posit? What are the practices of political philosophy, as they are engaged now and as a normative ideal?

My questioning here now becomes pragmatic, and quick, also because I am going to a dance class in ten minutes.

Should I leave New York?

My roommate Ricardo Orellana, with whom I've been living these last two months, had news for me before bedtime last night. His octogenarian father living in Bolivia has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and will be coming up to America for treatment ... in two weeks, coinciding with the juncture of my February and March tenancy. I am very sorry for his family if this is true, for this is not a comfortable financial or personal situation for anyone to be in. But on my end, it means that my finally getting a little bit of a schedule in New York -- working cashier and coffee at a health-food cafe downtown on alternate days between my dance training -- is again disrupted by dislocation, and I either need to find another place by March 10th, or pack up and go ... back to Philly? Home to Singy? After a quick perusal of availabilities on Craig's List, I simply cannont afford the down payment on any housing options here in New York -- I'll have $900 in my bank account by the time Ricky pays me back my security deposit and March rent (I was, after all, only paying $250 a month for my half of the room). What to do?

Of course then I reassess my politics, and my philosophy, two considerations that I must live my life by in order to stay grounded, real, and sane (the others being family and friends). The homogenous (post-)modern dance world I now frequent is enlivening only as a continuity -- and as opportunity. I need work. I need work in order to practice. I need professional exposure. I suppose this means I must stay.

(Feb 23rd, 2005, edited and posted March 23)

Books of 2005

This is an on-going summary of the books I read this year, and, when I can, my thoughts and/or quotes from them. They are listed by month of completion, with a running list of mid-read or future titles at the very bottom.

JANUARY:
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, Heinemann [1967] 1988.
Said the "classic novel of Kenyan independence," it travels through the years leading up to Uhuru and after it through descriptive and intimate psychological portraits of young people coming of age in their autonomy as much as their nation. The first chapter is arresting -- we instantly encounter the mental torment of protagonist Mugo who we later discover betrays the leader of the revolution, as well as a brief but shocking vignette of the dumb and mute muscleman Gitogo who is shot as just "another Mau Mau terrorist" while running to protect his mother when their town is under seige. We are placed in a very tense and politicized time, where survival is not necessarily reserved for the strong, and where private choices have significant public consequence.
The novel grows in intricacy this way, but soon there is little distinction between major and minor characters -- everyone gets the opportunity to disclose their emotional states, and the narration becomes monotonous and unnatural. The style shifts from imagistic and montaged to mid-afternoon psychological-melodrama. The problem is one of tense -- so much falls in retrospect that all events are memory, not action, and no specific conflicts are ever laid out, so they are never fully resolved either.
The voices are so frequently in third-person that it soon becomes apparent that the author is judgmental against all his characters, never quite embodying them, so that he has to explain away their failings in serving the independence movement rather than have us, the readers, understand them as if they were our own. And when the expositional voice is needed, neither does Ngugi succeed in stepping away from the characters to indicate what is symptomatic of the tragedies that do occur -- most pointedly for me is the vignette of Mumbi's momentous decision to "let Karanja make love to me" after years of his pursuit when he reveals to her that her husband has not indeed died in police detention and will return home. This incident remains Mumbi's mistake, resulting in her having a child that devastates her marriage with Gikonyo who only sees personal betrayal and not the greater injustice of Karanja's position of power under a system of oppression, if not torture. Ngugi's main characters all act out of compulsion, and it is unclear whether he chooses them to have no agency as a critique of reality or if this is a literary flaw.
There are gems. Everyone is crazed by upheaval, and it is enjoyable to hear Ngugi's sardonic tone beneath the voices of the confused British displaced at Kenya's achievement of self-rule, such as Dr. Lynd in "a sudden upsurge of pure holy self-pity." Ngugi is also above all concerned with the British, specifically, Christian legacy Kenya inherits (Mugo plays Judas, after all), and the cross as the symbol of both oppression and salvation, rebellion and sacrifice, is the unstated heart of the struggle for true self-governance in post-colonial states.

Lim, Richard, Got Singapore - Bits and Pieces from a Dot in the World, Singapore: Angsana Books 2002.

"Like it or not, we live in a state of perpetual insecurity. That is our karma. ... In our modest way, we must have our own sense of destiny." -- Brigadier-General George Yeo, Minister for Trade and Industry and former Minister for Information and the Arts

p.26 "And yet, underneath the pragmatic sophistication, there is the immigrant mentality -- do not waste what you can save.
I look around me: all this modernity, all this gloss, yet as a people we have not learnt to flush our public toilets. A law has to be imposed to teach us to do it.
But reflecting on it now, I guess it shouls not be such a rude revelation. After all, we phased out the nightsoil system, which had served us for about a century, as recently as January 1987, when the last of the nightsoil carriers -- by then only 78 were left -- hung up their yokes and buckets."

p.90 "The Buddhist mind is an open mind, ever prepared for change. It goes with the flow ... to go with the flow and not against the grain [may be] to submit oneself to the political order of the day, even if it is dictatorial or inhumane.
But submission is very different from openness and preparedness...Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on inquiry, is subversive in the eyes of those who believe in the perfection of dogmas and ideologies.
Some people have also told me that Buddhism is a passive religion. They understand the word karma as fate ...
But karma is not fate, it is the seed one plants when one chooses a course of action and, to be simplistic about it, one reaps afterwards what one has sown."

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." V.S.Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)

p.167 Lim on Naipaul: "the ultimate exile, the prototype of today's global souls who carry the world within them, but who belong to no one particular society."

"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you have got the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you have got the meaning, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?" Taoist sage Zhuang Zi

p.242 "In the post-ideological world, where even the leaders of developed countries have shifted their roles from statesmen to global salesmen, and where commerce and pragmatism rule, the new morality will be that of the market."

FEBRUARY:
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Vintage [?] 2004.
Too much to say, or too little, when so much is felt!

Reage, Pauline, Story of O, Ballantine [1976] 1981.
I finally read this just over a year after being somewhat provocatively propositioned by an older gentleman who told me to read it, and I finished it in just over an hour because I decided that was about as much supposed erotica (sick, sick, stuff, could be another description) I could afford to infiltrate my consciousness. I am only writing about it here because I actually don't think it deserves to be ignored by the non-SM community at large -- if read for its themes and its delicate illustrations of what is human and normal at the root of a woman's desire to be enslaved and tortured, I see it as a confrontational critique of those who abuse that root -- which is love. Love "too-thick," perhaps, like in the book (above) I finished immediately prior to this one, that led Morrison's protagonist to similarly disastrous ends.
A lot of the book is repetitive anyway -- OK, OK, O gets whipped, lashed, humiliated, oh, OK, she's taken front and back by multiple men while blind-folded, she is pierced and branded, OK, OK! Enough. I flip pages to look for new character names, or little plot asides that are actually the significant moments. I find O being asked to pleasure herself and she meekly responds that she can't -- aHAH, social critique number one: woman is not socialized to understand, respect, and engage her own sexual pleasure. OK. Then there is Eric who, as a new initiate to the castle of Roilly and the atrocities that occur within it, falls in love with O and wants to marry her and save her. O herself refuses by allowing her owner Sir Stephen to showcase her to Eric "spread-eagled and gagged," who was so sickened that not only did he lose his love for her, but his resistance to the perversity of Roilly and himself takes O for the next three days and abuses her the worse. A-Hah again! The pain and power of vengeance! How natural and human appears Eric's soppy attraction to the quiet nobility of O's vulnerability, yet how evil his disappointment! Worse than unrequited love, crueler was the realization of O's lack of desire to be saved. And importantly, how shallow Eric's love, which was proven simply a self-reflexive love still primarily about his ego, his ability to save or to dominate the same.
Then there is the chilling form of 15 year-old Natalie who herself professes love for O after witnessing everything in the pleasuring of Natalie's older sister, Jacqueline, by O herself. Untouched, incognizant of sensual pleasure, Natalie's perverse desire is blatantly a reaction to the severe kind of loneliness only adolescence can be, especially encased by the shadow of her supermodel sister and whatever else kind of depression regular 15 year-olds find themselves facing. Natalie in this story is kept as an observer to all exploitations of O in preparation for her becoming initiated into Roilly herself. It would be sick, were it real, and for me her entrance into the book is a firm ethical call, because one can almost save this girl.
Good God, I wish this book could stand as testament to the ultimate consequence to everything *wrong* about sexual relations between men and women; good God, please let relations between ours sexes be at the worst about sharing properties (mortgage, bank account, kitchenware?), and not, as here, where one is property to be owned and exploited by another. It is to be noted that Reage's women are not painted as victims, and I am glad for it, because victims are completely helpless but yes, ladies, we can help ourselves.
P.S. Good God, please let curiosity not kill this cat.

MARCH:
Hansen, Phillip, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship, Stanford University Press 1993.
In progress, on the edge of "lost interest," but it more or less seems to say in almost as rambling a way what it was I tried to relay in my senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and the Sublime: something else post-colon I can't exactly remember, and which I probably made up in a five am stupor the morning of its submission. We will return to this, because she (Arendt ... and myself) deserves more credit than that.

Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Vintage Books 1999.
Also in progress -- I was happily "strung" along (haha!) when I was still able to comprehend the science through strenuous (almost painful) high-school-recall. I find this absolutely fascinating, and absolutely relevant to my work in movement, but I need a breather. We will also come back!

APRIL:
Moore, Julia, Fat Girl: A True Story, Hudson Street Press 2005.
"For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss."
Picked up by chance, and two (more?) hours later the book allows me to feel ... recognized, purged even? The author truly had a miserable childhood with little respite, but this gave her the startling courage to view and voice the truth of what it is to be obsessive, compulsive, lonely, ostracized, self-hating.

From New York with love

A letter to Hofan, who is studying movement theatre in Paris:

I am watching le comedie humaine on the streets and in the subway, such as this surprising ambulance arrival to the curb outside my window. Old man, red beanie, being loaded up and cared for. There, too, a family of orthodox Jews heaving boxes into a purple minivan. Here, more hints on the old man -- a bald and rotund police officer pouring water onto the pavement, and I see red disperse and disappear -- blood?

Japanese, maybe, girl, walks past my window and into the coffee shop. Green, not army-fatigue, but a military sort of olive, fur collar on the hood, white lace-up leather boots. Windscreen-like tinted glasses spanning temple to temple. Curly -- krinked, even -- bronze highlighted hair. If I guessed her beverage of choice, would I be right? She's a tall, not a grande girl, but not an addict either, no regular coffee here. Simple cappucino, maybe, elegance yet normality. Not like one of those tall skinny ladies with cups as long as their legs, ice-cold blended beverage whipped cream on top. Suck it through a straw, also long and slender. No, she I saw yesterday, and I wondered if that was the only thing she let herself eat all day.

So, how is New York? I am being a cruel observer of human life, and the more I do it the less I want to participate. I imagine with envy the comfort of regularity, but know that without constant change I feel like I die. I watched Eduard Locke's Lalala Human Steps last night -- an almost anaesthetized display of technical prowess, the dancers in abstract relationship to one another, if not to themselves. I fell asleep a little, missing the all male sections, but really no heart break because this was a piece made for the woman (note that though it was choreographed for the memory of Amelia/Emile, the transvestite friend of Locke's youth, the title is simply: Amelia). On pointe, with rapid turns, fast foot work, and equally torrential yet detailed hand and arm gestures, it was almost comic when Locke threw in a "modern" floor roll here and there, because the momentum inherent in such an action wasn't used. Instead, they continued in their Barbie-on-crack gesticulations, and the audience was enthralled. New Yorkers are such suckers for anything with a whiff of European tragedy.

But my main point is that afterwards, in a post-show discussion with Locke, he mentioned in passing his discovery in dance of movement for movement's sake; that dance moves for itself. The way he said it close to personified dance to me -- like "it" was a deity we invoke, appease, please, annoy, gratify, pleasure, depending on the nature of our movement. Which, to relate to my current detachment from place, purpose, or power, makes me think of what is achieved in travelling for travelling's sake, moving just to be moving -- the process of pilgrimage and not it's destination. It makes me think of busy-ness and how we so easily adjust to different paces of life. I think of New York and remember that I am in the capitalist center of the world, and that maybe that is why I cannot feel at rest. There is a sense here that one man's busyness makes the world turn, when really, the planet revolves on its axis regardless. I often feared that I had been "suburbanized" by my time at Swarthmore, but insofar as that may mean "de-urbanized," perhaps I am thankful, for I think I have realized gentler pleasures. That said -- this place must be great in the summer.

Where I live -- Astoria, Queens -- feels like a British seaside town on a sunny day. Pigeons rather than seagulls line telephone poles and rooftops, but the way they draw infinity in the sky, ensemble, and at random, carries an atmosphere of promise and timelessness that draws me to a feeling of walking along a wooden boardwalk above pebble beach. All buildings are low-rise -- nothing above four storeys -- which also gives me a sense of unattainable space; not immersive, like an actual landscape, rather distant but ever-present. The sky is a sexy lady, and whether it appears that she waves goodbye or beckons, you can't ever touch her.

A attractive young man walked out of the coffee shop, stealing glances at me, as he had done while seated, as he walks off to get lost in Union Square. I see him now at the traffic light, looking bewildered and with map or guidebook in hand. He spoke French on his cellphone -- Parisian? Moroccan? Tunisian? At this point, I think maybe he's waiting for somebody, because he's pacing.

"Susan," before me, is also leaving -- dressed hoodie-satchel-hippie-chic, I know her name because it was written on her coffee cup. I observed her as she oddly sipped at her orange juice and coffee alternately, swallowed, then slowly protruded her lips with shivering specificity -- a ritual of sorts, an act of self-poisoning? Staring into the distance with glazed eyes, her notebook and fountain pen which was to record, no doubt, the process of her magic imbibing, sat untouched upon her lap.

Moroccan (as I've now decided him), is back, speaking on the phone to his reluctant date. I wonder if I should try and start a conversation with him when he's done, just to see whether or not he really is African.

Not going to the Steps (an uptown dance studio full of ballerinas and jazz artistes) work/study meeting this morning was a good decision. Though I am fast fatigued by the downtown (improvisation) dance scene and its post-modern philosophical mess, going uptown for 20 hours a week would distract too much from honing my own craft and learning to listen to my own creative voice, which are my primary aspirations right now. Which I do for free, for me, sitting in Starbucks coffee. But only in New York!

Coming to terms with capitalism

Slow, relatively uninteresting days, completely by myself. My phone cut off for a full – gasp – 24 hours – requiring what equates to just over a dollar for each hour to reinstate it (ouch!) – and my internet connection repeatedly “unavailable,” it’s no wonder that I spoke so openly with Black Male Bill sitting across from me at the Barnes and Noble coffee shop/magazine section. Noting that I was jotting down the website address for an MS program for Public Policy and Human Development in the Netherlands, he asks me if I’m applying to grad school, and I, peering at his selection of books on essay writing and career change ask him the same thing. What ensues is a solid lesson in making choices, one that I am finally ready to hear, as my silver spoon is coming up dry and empty and I have to learn to survive. I blatantly take notes from our conversation – questions such as “Do I embrace the capitalist model?” arise from the confrontation of our differing perspectives.

I don’t name him Black Male Bill in jest, only he was very forthright in highlighting his identity as such as a major hindrance to the achievement of his goals in life. I wonder how overt the racism has been as his computer programming workplace, or if it has just been the gradual accretion of dismissive remarks and lack of promotions that has characterized his experience. Of course I would not know what this is like, but he is sympathetic in hearing me state frankly that, “No, but, I am a woman,” which presents itself with its own societal and biological pressures and limitations. Ultimately, I am Melinda Lee, and that is probably the worst demon of all that I have to deal with. Maybe Bill for Bill also, though you wouldn’t know it. He is expressionless and speaks in a calm monotone his articulate explications on “judicious decision”-making. Whether he takes aspirin for a headache and whether he should marry his current girlfriend are decisions similarly made – “judiciously,” with thought to the amount of risk involved (the pill makes me drowsy and I have to drive in an hour = no), added to a touch of intuition (we get along really well = yes). I used to find such a process unfathomable, incomprehensible, maybe even inhuman and uncompassionate, but that’s only because I didn’t have to go through it myself. I have not really made any concrete decisions for myself in life, or set myself parameters or goals to achieve and then move on from. I can’t commit because I’m laden with carrying around the past and the unfinished – a single person surrounded by STUFF, unwilling to relinquish any of it because in every bit of material possession there is an affirmation of those memories, experiences, and potentials in me. Unwilling to take on any more STUFF because, firstly, it would further complicate the absence of organization with Existing Stuff, and secondly, because it would consume valuable excess storage for Better Stuff that may or may not come in the near future. Sitting at the buffet table of life, Melinda Lee wants it all and therefore, none of it.

I always thought capitalism was the root cause of most all evil in life, resentful that it was my benefactor yet the thief of my father from daily life and of my family from national significance. Then I blamed, in turn, the West, colonialism, our English language, and our Christian legacy (I am the fourth-generation). I blamed my mother when my father turned out to be all right human being who said “sorry,” and she became the embodiment of all things wrong about domesticated womanhood. I eked out from her confessions of her dramatic past in order to “heal” it but in so doing also assumed a position of superiority and intimacy despite a gaping 35 year difference that maybe we were both wrong to accept. I blamed the trauma of displacement in adolescence for falling in love with the wrong men, I blamed class and cultural difference for break-ups, and I blamed heartbreak for not knowing what I wanted in school. And often, I would come back to hating my privilege. “Why couldn’t I have been born to a working class family?,” I would hear myself think. “Through the struggle of survival, we may have had stronger family values, and I would have learned how to toughen up and work harder.” What a ridiculous romanticism. Along with wanting to “play baseball in the yard with my dad,” had I, of course, been a boy, such internal voices I am now going to blame on the infiltration of Western mass media into my childhood. In terms of resenting the money I come from, now that I’ve graduated from an elite and expensive college I realize that everybody wants what it was that I got. Well, hell. Couldn’t somebody have told me this earlier?!?!?!?!

So now, there’s no one left to blame. Any shame I may feel in having been spoilt and lazy only incapacitates me further, so I am taking the time out from all expectation to give myself reason to make myself proud of me. And let’s get real and grow up – not only did my foreparents work long and hard to provide for us, but also we were not, despite the cultural confusion, raised in America – there are very distinct class barriers that exist in a more traditional, less “developed” society that Singapore is not exempt from. That I inherit a legacy of progressive thinkers – insofar as aspiring for something better is progressive – is something I should be proud of.

So priorities, high, medium, low, and percentages of effort spent in them. Checkboxes.

An important day

I feel grown up today.

So I may not be making oodles of money -- or at all, actually, though I am living off my own savings -- and I may not have a namecard. I have a postcard with my feet jumping out of the frame and my phone number is on there although my service has been disconnected because I haven't paid the bill since November. I have a performance venue in March for which to make and show new work -- OK, so it's at my alma mater (the benevolent Swarthmore), but why fight it? I have an important audition coming up in two weeks that's exciting because it's not only paid work but with four different new choreographers in a month-long residency project. For this I need to prepare myself, physically and psychologically. That's purpose. I am beginning to understand what it is like to truly create and define yourself -- to be a self-made woman, to be fashioning myself according to my personal desires. If I'm not directly saving the world yet I am definitely growing and developing maturity and skills with which to maintain a positive self, which is the first step.

Why today?

For the performer, life can be lived only for the purpose of four minutes.

I lucked out on a Monday morning to have one of Danspace Center's studios available for me to "stretch" and quietly work in, after doing my regular Monday, Wednesday deal of cleaning from 8:30-10:00am in order to get $4 class tickets (down from the regular $14!). I did various necessary and silly things the rest of the day, all the while manuveuring my way to getting my solo song onto CD and trying for the life of me to set movement to the entire four minutes, rather than just the 2 and a half I did for the Green Chair show. I went to the improv jam at the Children's Aid Society later that night and tried to stow myself away in a classroom adjacent to the gymnasium where the main activity occurs -- foot-crushed goldfish crackers on the otherwise inviting hardwood floor -- in order to continue pushing through the movements of this solo work, only to be found by various distracting jam friends (so I just went and jammed instead). But there I danced with Joe, an Oberlin graduate, who moved so fast and autonomously, it was a very different challenge to dance "contact" with him. But in talking through this style afterward, he instructed me on the contact of energetic fields, or distinct states of being, recounting in rapture a prime example of this in a solo of Bill T Jones.

"People don't remember your movement, they remember your energy," spoke Joe,
"Bill T Jones only used 12 movements, but as I was watching from the wings tears were running down my face."
"How long was the piece?"
"Seven, maybe eight minutes, even, but it didn't feel like it. Just 12 movements. It seemed that he could open and close his own pores upon command, that's how clear he was. Me, in my movement, and when I'm dancing with you, it's not about me trying to 'hear' what you are 'saying,' but for me to be clear in my directions and we will see where that takes us. I dance with old people as a part of my job,"
-- here I grin, recalling movement therapy sessions at the Caritas old people's home in Bytom, slightly afraid but loving witnessing the revelry possible in extended movements from limited limbs --
"and this lady the other day, she moved so simply, just like this --"
Joe closes his eyes, smiles, and pops up his shoulders: right left right --
"It's the energy that matters."

Thus it was that I could redefine the concept of my solo as the embodiment of an energetic state, for indeed, I had found only a few key elemental movements but was using them in the context of some heightened beingness. Thanks, Joe.

So I proceeded home, nervous and tired, strangely at peace in procrastinating, buying groceries, eating yogurt, tending to split feet, all the while waiting to lie down, finally at 2am, to listen to Iron and Wine Track # 2 over and over again. To watch myself, to find the logic and the journey in correspondance with my character and the music. I rose at 6 am to repeat this exercise, which was an interesting way to choreograph because I was trying to locate the correct energy rather than steps. I am reminded of how frustrated I would feel during Composition class with Sally Hess because I tried to force myself to "make" movement before I had clarified to myself the nature of the motivating energy. Up at 6, I listened to the music and my vision in it, I wrote the description required of the audition and listened all the more, I got up to have a little breakfast and yet another blessing occurred. Leonardo and his wife both left, and having fired the babysitter recently, left Fabrizio to his own devices. Ricky was still asleep in our room, and I was beginning to question how I was going to try out some of the necessary new movement without waking him or looking like a stretch-meister-idiot, when Fabrizio calls out and Ricky supplants himself to the other room to quiet the boy down. Isolation! Me, my tomatoes (which were to go under my dress and fall out before the actual emergence section of the dance), and a creaky floor as the only giveaway that I was dancing. Thank God. I left the house at a decent 8:45 to reach Dance Theater Workshop just short of 10 to make-up, warm-up, and calm down before my 10:40am audition slot.

So there she was: my protagonist in Study for a Portrait of a Young Girl (jumping out of her skin). This is how I am feeling grown up. She is no longer me, and when I dance her, I am "she" -- not "me." The performance act is not my heart on a platter, but a state, a force, not an exposition, but an almost allegorical figure. The choreographic question is HOW does THIS CHARACTER move, and WHY? The question of why people dance and why they need to dance will always be a perplexing enough one to ask. Does it have to be because there is no other way? Or because some rites must be seen and felt, not simply rationally understood?

"The piece enacts a female struggle for selfhood in an explosive yet detailed solo work. It journeys through stages of development by distilling and embodying energetic states. It is itself a rite of passage, a cathartic rite."

Was it "good"? Did I suck? Was it messy (a little bit -- cold feet, you know)? Was it moving? Did I fully engage that huge vessel of space? I am trying not to judge myself or over-analyze the reactions of the ten person deciding panel. They have another full day today and next Monday to think about all of us candidates in context and against each other. What it was for me was NE-CE-SSARY and at that point that's all that mattered. It was indeed a coming of age process to put myself and the quality of my ideas to the scrutiny of professionals, without disdain, without panic, yet without detachment -- bravery, not bravado. Of course it matters -- I would love to perform in their showcase in April -- and of course rejection will hurt, depending on what they say, specifically. But I feel defined, and am ready to move on, excited to keep creating. I'll be showing it again at the University of Utah's MFA audition this Friday -- just for them to see me, and to get a better idea of their program -- and She -- the "boxer girl" -- will come back probably more refined than ever. Six months after her first inception, this is the longest I've ever retained a relationship and I like the feeling that there are many places yet to go.

MANIFESTO I

My response to a provocative inquiry in an interview with myself:

ML: You ask me about the "usefulness" of dancing? First, let us acknowledge that somewhere in this question is the presumption that modern dancing can be useless, merely recreational or fanciful. Second, let me use this opportunity then to prescribe dance education for politicians, social workers, dictators, and bureaucrats, as much as for children, athletes, actors and acrobats.

The politician will learn a social and cultural empathy unavailable in journals or cabinet meetings. The politician must learn the motivation behind revolution in the streets by the revolution within his own body.
The social worker needs a break to celebrate human life after working so hard to sustain its most complicated elements.
The dictator may learn how it is to create something vital rather than regimented; something beautiful rather than brutal.
The bureaucrat may find cause to lessen or make more efficient everyday people's administrative tasks -- for in the dance studio, there is learning, there is sweat, there is community, there is fun!

Healthy, articulate bodies make easier healthy, articulate minds and hearts.
Invoking Erick Hawkins: "the body is a clear place."
Dance traditions are designed for clarity, economy, precision.

There are moral lessons to be learned in dancing, there is coaching in self-assertiveness and compassionate interaction. Dancing has every sortt of pedagogic value as a well-taught sport --
that in discipline, there is freedom and discovery;
that in balance, there is always movement;
that with violence, there will come justice.

Yet this does not mean that any setting of class labelled "dance" will necessarily present its benefits, the same way not everything labelled with goodwill, or the church, or even progressive humanism will. I am not here attempting to set a quantifiable standard upon which to judge good/bad, right/wrong, worthwhile/waste of time -- these are for the technicians and the insiders to battle out, a process healthy and required for the advancement and maturity of the form.

Me, I am an outsider to most things and an insider the same. The more you see, the less you belong, but all the more you have to share. Consciousness comes at the price of discomfort, but what you gain is in the loss itself. And that's OK. In everything durable, there is opposition -- this is another lesson I have learned in dance.

So the lessons are specific.

Specifically, how to release (weight, muscular tightness, memories, regrets, pride) and of how to retain (alignment, strength, integrity, faith), of how to catch and ride the wave of contingency and wash up on shore, sputtering or smooth surfing, either way.

The application is specific -- finding a movement style or movement culture that quickens your blood and helps you locate your center is everyone's personal project. The role of dance practitioners, the bearers of its progression, dissemination, and public display, is to remember that the source and resource of meaningful art is life, and that the price of clarity is sometimes to have to be a stranger to yourself in order to keep it real.

Being always in a hurry takes two hours to write about

I wrote a pleasant reflection on Sunday night, entitled "Appetite and Apathy," including some of the usual navel-gazing -- quite literally, if not navel-pinching, a habit resulting in my resignation to a life-long love-hate-necessity relationship with my belly and the fat around it -- but also some quality instances of compassionate humanism. I wrote about Fabrizio, my two-year-old housemate, who laughs so shrill he jumps in the air to meet his pitch and falls onto his bottom in glee, an action which is now among my favorite of dances yet. I wrote about the ginger-haired Tempest-reader on the N-train home who had the Union Jack sewn into his boots. I wrote about the woman who cooks and serves at the New Beijing Chinese restaurant a few steps away from my apartment building who walks with a limp. Then, it got deleted. I here pay homage to the death of my good thoughts, knowing that there will be others, but in true character I am still reluctant to let it go ...

(breathe)

OK! So to today. It is sunny and not as bitingly cold, and I am able to gather together lost parts of myself by gazing at a clear blue sky. I look forward to the future again. I am in seated in one of the three locations where New York City happens for me: the dance studio (any of many), the subway, and Starbucks coffee, where I may buy a token beverage, but otherwise shamelessly bring in my pack lunch and soak up their electricity to feed my computer similarly. In the winter, it is hard to find a low cost reprieve in the middle of the day, especially one as ubiquitous as this. There are 150 Starbucks outlets in Manhattan alone, I dare say I have found at least seven of them in my four weeks here so far.

* * *

I have often wished that I could draw, but now I will simply paint with words. There sits on the couch seat next to mine an elderly man with beautiful, deep contours on his highly sketchable face. He sits with his left hand lightly supporting his head -- fingers to temple, thumb to cheek -- a ballpoint loosely fitted between. He may be reading from the loose leaf, hand-written notes on his lap held by his right hand, but from the gentle heaving of his chest I think he is asleep. He seems of good European stock, almost elfin ears that point at the upper tips, a narrow yet sculpted and long nose, a squat face (receded as it is into the folds of his lapel). His thumb moves and squeezes some of the flaccid cheek flesh against the bone. He has three distinct indentations on that cheek, or rather, three layers piled on top of each other. He has horizontal-wishbone-wrinkles marking the lower recesses of his eyes, and one strong crease down the center of his forehead that splices faint frown lines across it. He wears blue denim jeans, a black denim jacket, and a black beanie hat. I try to imagine what his voice might sound like – warbly like his chin, or strong like the history he seems to carry? He woke with a start and an inhale – I wonder from what alternate reality he has been carried back to this one? I smile at the thought of the universality – by this, I mean common experience – of waking just like he did, a reaction to impromptu, almost illicit midday slumber, so soon alert and present … so unlike the morning.

* * *

Quote:

"STARTING next week, working in an operating and grant-making foundation, I will have to retrain parts of my brain. That may not make me a big man on hippocampus, but it means less of the horizon-gazing that required me to take positions on everything going on in the world; instead, a welcome verticalism will drive me to dig more deeply into specific areas of interest. Fewer lone-wolf assertions; more collegial dealing. I hear that's tough.

But retraining and fresh stimulation are what all of us should require in "the last of life, for which the first was made." Athletes and dancers deal with the need to retrain in their 30's, workers in their 40's, managers in their 50's, politicians in their 60's, academics and media biggies in their 70's. The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.

... Intellectual renewal is not a vast new government program, and to secure continuing social interaction deepens no deficit. By laying the basis for future activities in the midst of current careers, we reject stultifying retirement and seize the opportunity for an exhilarating second wind. ... When you're through changing, learning, working to stay involved - only then are you through. "Never retire." "

-- William Safire, "Op-Ed Quartet: A Columnist's Farewell," New York Times 01/24/2005

Thoughts:

Firstly: “big man on hippocampus.” What a great line!

Secondly, as life philosophy: Safire’s mantra is pertinent to any packaging of time one may choose. A performer must “never retire” in their embodiment of a character (which may last the length of a play, say, two hours), in their execution of a movement sequence (which may last, with equal difficulty, any sum of minutes), in their commitment to it as a vocational choice (life). The question at hand is: How can I discover the process to productive longevity, of my mind, of my body, of my faith?

I have an attitude problem when it comes to this sort of perseverance, I have trouble being patient, I have a lot of residual and immediate internal stress, I find it challenging to maintain relaxed consciousness as opposed to violent discovery or its counterpart, paralysis. Whew. I had to pause. See, even then, writing comes as rambles and nothingness. I wonder where this frequent state of emergency comes from. As the positive result of this current self-realization, I bring with me to class the understanding that I no longer need to keep dancing as if the dance class at hand is my last. There is in haste a sense of wanting to get it over and done with, as if living can be got over and done with and then would come the comfortable stillness of death, the satisfaction of having lived once, perhaps intensely, but not now, not again. Rather, what I am looking to engage in is psychophysical training in the practice of living calmly, continuously. I would like to approach these movement arts as exercises in focus and concentration. What I may grow to accept in this renewed understanding is that I may not, therefore, actually be seeking a career in the arts. OR, that my approach to a career in the arts is maturing, and I just don’t know how to recognize myself yet.

On being a lone-wolf with pack-ties and likening the wolf howl to the human need for expressive arts:
“Lois Crisler has said, “Like a community sing, a howl is a happy occasion. Wolves love to howl. When it is started, they instantly seek contact with one another, troop together, fur to fur. Some wolves will run from any distance, panting and bright-eyed, to join in, uttering, as they near, fervent little wows, jaws wide, hardly able to wait to sing.”
While the functions of howling are not fully understood … Once thing is certain, howling appears to be the glue that keeps the pack together and plays a role in the formation and/or the maintenance of strong bonds between other members of the pack.”
(http://www.wolfsongofalaska.org/)
On me? Maybe it's still OK (what is this constant mindplay of what is "OK" and correspondently, not "OK" to be, to pursue?!?!?! Obviously I have not yet grown out of the schooling mindset of right and wrong!) to approach expression with "fervent little wows"! I've been told in David Dorfman's class to relax and slow down; I've been admonished by Miguel Gutierrez to stick to the combination and not add anything extraneous (neither of which I was doing consciously). I respect both these statements as valid to accomplishing that which means excellence in their forms, and for finding calm in a torrent of movement. But something in me hungers also for the aliveness of fervent little wows and a big group howl!

Note:
“A wolf may spend up to a third of its time on the move.”

Note:
"Torrent" and "thirst" share the same Latin root, torrere, meaning to parch, to burn. Yet "Torrent" = 1 : a tumultuous outpouring; RUSH; 2 : a violent stream of a liquid (as water or lava); 3 : a channel of a mountain stream. I suppose the dryness inherent in the torrent is not so much its constitution (which is actually liquid), but it's destination; the initiation of the movement of the torrent, its quest, is to quench.