as the website is rebuilt, and I pore through the bowels of pages and pages of journals, or boxes of photos, or digital dossiers of materials, and pluck out the memories to hang and situate just so on the shelves of a new corner of the internet, I’ve had occasion to reminisce—a most beloved pasttime—which leads me to say the following: I think nostalgia is remembering things exactly as they didn’t happen, and I much prefer the anguish, delight, and heart-wrenching acuteness of sentimentality; that is, the placing of significance upon all the moments and instances that did happen, that went unseen, that were left behind or unvoiced or unheard, that meant everything and nothing, that stick out for no known reason, but lurk somewhere in your mind such that when you brush your teeth, every morning, really, that image comes to mind, and you are forced to remember that you’ve never forgotten it.
I must have written a poem like this once. I’ll find it.* I certainly made this film.
in my never-ending pursuit to put a little language to that which has no earthly sound, I’ve cobbled together a bit of thinking in the form of terminology.
for example:
— imperative aliveness
after Kevin Quashie, [Black Aliveness, or Poetics of Being] – indisputable, enduring; “the operating assumption…in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness” (Quashie, 7); worldmaking in the midst of witness, of Black being, in cosmological arc, in quotidian magnificence; beingness as aliveness as necessary Blackness as invocation as we-ness as non-reply as totality; deviation from anti-Blackness as center of thinking; Afrofuturistic logic/s and frameworks linking Black bodies and organic wild (trans*corporeality) generating irrefutable lineage and necessarily centering the Black matrilineal imagination (cc: Hortense J. Spillers, Alice Walker) and vernacular as expert in its breadth of conception, especially in object-demand; refusal of nonbeing; wayward opacity as process by which we surpass terror as “uninflected language” (Quashie, 16); a becoming.
it seems so final, really, to name a term, though it’s as fluid as thinking can be, and this constellation of words explodes to form a temporary picture of how I’m moving through language toward practice. it’s this process that I (reverently) call ‘methodology.’ in truth, I’m a rehearsalist, trying on the shape of moments again and again, until they seem to fit the place I never knew they were always meant to call their own.
there’s no one way, is there. (that’s rhetorical.)
some practice-led methodologies I dig and am excavated by include materials, like, words, the page, blankness, marks, rhythm. the rehearsal space, the crowded room, speculation. mortality, compulsion, oration. used garments, costumes, relics, found material, salt, indigo, fragments. water, submersion, Atlantic grey whales, vinyl records, disco balls. found things: sound, audio clips, textile. conflict, transition, duration. shoreline/s. or, habits, like stacking, compiling, grouping, labeling. dis/association, daydreaming, sound bathing, editing. consumption: serialized images (visual archives, films, mixed media), fragrance, recompositions; texts. masquerading, “given circumstances,” voyeuristic observation. inquiry, boredom as portal. episodic organization. or, even canonical traditions, like, the Black elegiac + theatrical: tonality, musicality, restraint. ‘Afrofuturistic Southern Gothic Surrealism.’ call + response, repetition, choral presence. ‘90s hip hop production design: sampling, rhythmics, references, cento. Meisner Technique: repetition, noticing, “always you, as if the given circumstances.” dramaturgical contextualization.
it’s all research, to me. most especially, the living.
*found it.
I forget sometimes that I am precious; don’t do it. I remember my girl hood address. I remember to brush my teeth in the evening. I remember the hiss of the elongated X as she spit ‘mixed’ in my August face. I remember my ex and his email address. I remember to hide likes. I remember to flirt outrageously. I remember my whole card number because I lost the whole card. I remember I’m so busy, and that time in Rome over and over; I remember the Spanish word for soul. I remember I want to be called the Spanish word for soul. I remember to bring books. I remember their looks. I remember my shame. I remember to rejoice. I remember Cisneros. I remember her birth (as if it was yesterday). I have forgotten yesterday, I have forgotten I am precious—don’t do it. I am so precious to this life I could not bear the weight of my precarity, and so must daily remember to remember I forget sometimes I am precious. Don’t do it.