These endless catacombs of self-reference.

 

conflict (v.)

early 15c., from Latin conflictus, past participle of confligere "to strike together, be in conflict," from com- "together" (see com-) + fligere "to strike" (see afflict).

In the first stages of development after we are born, we begin to define ourselves in space - it is pushing against things that lets us know ourselves, and I don't think that ever changes, that what we come up against shows us who and what we are. What we really believe in. How what we risk can also reveal what we value. How what we attack can tell us what we are afraid of admitting about ourselves most. And finally, how necessary discomfort is to inspiring change.

There exists a number of primal urges for survival that we share, especially predictability, certainty, structure. There is a refuge in rules. Rituals, habits, landmarks are all ways to synchronize ourselves in time and space, moving to the metronome of our breath, but maybe without conflict it is hard to tell where we stop and another person begins. I have a hard time arguing that war and injustice are unnecessary when they have taught us so much about ourselves. That maybe there is something uniquely powerful about being stripped down to your core, so you can build a house that YOU want to live in, on a foundation you believe in - and not be constrained to the limitations of its previous identity. Maybe the idea of catharsis is deeply intertwined in destruction of anything, but manifests as violence against other, since destruction of our own identity calls up the question of what we have left to orient ourselves around - and in choosing what we value automatically implies a devaluing of everything else.

Is there a way to honor something in its destruction? Like a Viking funeral, can we also dispatch of our history with reverence? To honor the life of a fallen building and all it has silently witnessed of our trials and tribulations? Mourning the death of an identity is necessary. Healthy. Valuable. Cathartic. Maybe extending an invitation to affected communities to be participants in the mourning of that symbolic relationship and the shift in their emotional landscape might make letting go just a little bit easier.

I recently learned that in the Torah, there are prayers devoted to people who have committed suicide - and the language focuses a lot on the individual having nowhere to go, nowhere to turn... that they didn't have space.

Maybe there is deep psychological value to considering how we orient ourselves in time and space, how it can help us, as well as how it can hold us back, and how it can be used against us. How making space can be an invitation rather than an attack. How it can honor the past by being a sacrifice to the future. That an inhale is just half of a breath, and exhaling its necessary conclusion to make space for the next one. How choosing what we keep and letting go of things that no longer serve us can be a powerful language for expression of Self.

 

- from an article about the evolution of rap

''There was a sea change in organizing when [NWA’s] “Fuck tha Police” came out. Before, even dope dealers I knew had this feeling, like, the police are the good guys. “Fuck tha Police” changed that orientation; it kind of chronicles that. [Their songs have] got misogyny, they’ve got glorifying murdering each other, things like that, because it comes out of the culture that capitalism has created. I think it’s important for us not just to edit the culture that capitalism creates, but to create the material basis for a culture that we want."

 

- Boots Riley

an American poet, rapper, songwriter, producer, screenwriter, humorist, political organizer, community activist, lecturer, and public speaker

 

 

 

and I said to the star, "Consume me".

 

 

As my yoga apprenticeship draws to a close, I am engulfed by waves of feeling that are completely unfamiliar to me. I have one class left, and am already mourning what may be lost in my day to day. I had thought my previous class was going to be hard in my emotional state, but as soon as I walked into the studio, the wash of calm came over me, and I was too filled with a sense of rightness to feel anything else.

Having the break from construction work, from constantly having to ignore my body's needs to serve someone else's purpose, the teaching and taking of yoga is such the opposite - reminding self and others that conversation with body may be the most important conversation of our lives - the push and pull in such opposite directions feels almost like choosing between life and death in a very real sense. And that starts to bleed into other aspects of life, like expression of creative self, of feeding curious, hungry parts of self, of inspiring growth in self. So I have looked with clear eyes on other parts of my life that I am giving time and energy to, but will not render out into something I want to be or have in the future. Sometimes we need things, like habits or jobs, to keep us moving forward into some kind of future and sense of security. But there comes a time where those things can begin to hinder us, because they are easier to continue doing, than to explore our boundaries and move beyond them. The yoga reminds me how much more is to be had inside of my own body - all of the things we aren't taught to explore or question or listen to. If, the more we do something, the more we become it (the mind AND muscles develop neural pathways and bulk up in the areas we exercise the most), the feeling of rightness when I walk into a yoga studio makes me increasingly aware of the opposite feeling in other places. Of how much more there is to be had in Life.

So I have been slowly turning down the freelance jobs I get offered that I am more than capable of doing, but that feed a future I am disinclined to be a part of. A lot of the entertainment work fosters aspects of the economic and cultural structures that I am finding myself fiercely against, and what is perpetuated in real lives that feed that machine, which only cares about money. But as I let those things go, so too do I lose the power I had to fulfill other people's needs, to be filled with and validated by achieving other people's desires and deadlines and budgets.

And the people that formed vast networks of support and deep understanding of the worlds we crawled around inside of together - the farther I remove myself from those layers of knowing and getting through the bullshit together - the less connected I am to those webs of people, as the similarity of our priorities and experiences evaporate. There will always be love, but our beliefs about our needs and desires are suddenly diametrically opposed. Awareness of the subjugation of our flesh and time and soul incites a revolution against those things, and not everybody is ready to fight that battle. The cost seems too great when you have learned to look at the value of your flesh as relative to the value of money.

Those things have meant life to me.

I learned so much about how to wield my body with power, how to use my words to move small armies of men with precision. I was able to find things that were stripped from me in childhood and rebuild a powerful seat for my soul. But redefining my sense of power means allowing myself to be emptied of previous concepts. Refusing to be defined by other people's needs means I have to let go of the feeling of being purpose driven by them. I must become a Vacuum, before I can be filled my own needs and my own purpose.

I never anticipated feeling so uprooted, because I have never had a sense of being rooted to something. The sting of feeling disconnected, untethered to time and space, and my sense of where I exist in proximity to those things has become suddenly overwhelming. But like the practice of pouring ourselves into asanas (yoga poses), something that shows us how we respond to intense and unfamiliar territory - I have always backed off too quickly to reach whatever lessons may lie on the other side. Missed out on the strength that may be born from learning to feel without running away. Of course I can't take anybody with me on a journey inside myself - turning inward is a necessarily singular path, even if I mourn the loss of what I once had. There are different rules in this game than ones I have gotten used to playing, so I have to let my habitual reactions fade away as they do not serve me here. The ways in which I communicate needs and desires will inherently have to change, as I navigate a landscape that has no map, and all of the external images and associations I've consumed in my lifetime can provide no assistance to an internal compass.






We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
- Jack Gilbert

 

 

 

 

and he tells me that maybe we used to be flint.

Once, during an exploratory meeting with another creative type, as we were discussing a potential partnership of sorts and researching warehouses for rent, I nonchalantly pulled out a painting I had done recently on a piece of wood and handed it over in lieu of a description of my work.  The painting was on a small square of 3/4'' plywood, taken from the shop I was working in, one of a million pieces of scrap used to shim up height variance in the building of platforms. 

In the dry spells between busy seasons, in the industrial district of Greenpoint (Brooklyn) one could almost see the comical tumbleweeds blow past, gray-green metaphorical shadows against the acidic spray paint colors shaming the walls around me, it was like the wild west, lonely and desolate and sometimes blisteringly hot. In the blinding, scraping nothingness of boredom, my awareness to the things I was blindly stacking and re-stacking, to keep busy, to avoid censure, suddenly shifted focus and I saw music, frozen into the surfaces around me, and emotive eyes, pure poetry looking up at me out of the rich textural grain from the massive amounts of sturdy sheets of wood being tossed into the dumpster every day. Little, practically worthless bits of wood, that I smuggled a handful of home like a bandit with a bag of diamonds became resonant and full of depth, after layers of varnish and the backsides of each, supple and soft from ruthless sanding, because the world is beautiful, and we have no respect for it, like Pocahontas mistaking corn for gold, like our own bodies, strong and resonant and capable, but we move through life too full of fear to express its full power, so we forget how to see it, or what it even looks like - the shape and texture of our uniquely human motive power. Those worthless bits of refuse were like the shining pieces of my soul, that were getting whittled away from the disregard, from disrespect, from the fact that in those old movies the sheriff is always dirty, and the law is often opposite of justice. Those pieces that I salvaged, that I could take home and buff away the splinters and the lies from, barely needed a hint of paint to be sodden with purpose and a potent extension of self. 

The other creative type, a carpenter with whom I was sharing this recent excavation of my soul with, could have had no idea how much that painting on that piece of wood meant to me. What it represented. So many people look at artwork face on, and it doesn't penetrate any of our other senses. The barriers of visual art keep us from reaching deeper into the craftsmanship, the meticulous care with which some of us strive to make a piece complete, and something about the remove makes me fiercely angry, because it is perpetually inaccessible. What is the point of any kind of expression, if it cannot truly breach the boundaries of perception? Why are we so afraid to touch each other, or to let ourselves be examined in return? Are we afraid of what others will see?

He took it from me, looked, appraised its visual appeal with his eyes, then rolled it around in his knowing, work-roughed hands. He flipped it over and felt the back, he looked at all sides of it, found value in it and acknowledged that as he handed it back to me. It was a moment, but it was my entire life, my soul and body's yearning to be handled and explored so specifically, respectfully as a whole, the front and the back, the hard and the soft parts. To be explored and witnessed, and accepted for what is there... by hands as sensitive and conscious as eyeballs. All the blemishes and scratches, down to the roots and the core, the structure underneath the shine, witnessed and accepted as valuable simply because I exist. 

He will never know what that meant to me, and my interactions with him are random and a bit strained due to the odd consistency of life (full of lumpy weird bits)... but I learned something about myself in those few seconds, like a sudden burst of clarity. There was no emotional exchange, yet the depth of sharing from myself that was given without fear or expectation, based on my innate knowledge that the product I had created was of value... became the most intimate exchange I've ever experienced. Like a caress to my deepest principles. He would never remember that tiny moment, but I saw it, and it meant something.