no. 1

this implies there will be many, but really I just mean "of ten promised days."

from the after/hours archive: how do you keep on going on? [January 21, 2022]

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In her New Yorker farewell to writer Joan Didion, Zadie Smith exalts the feminist-adjacent icon and her initiation of a veritable army of women writers, students of alertness radicalized by her alacrity and unprecedented interrogation of, well, everything – thoughts, feelings, political atmospheres, the state of things. Smith reminds us of Didion’s unflinching and unrelenting critique, demanding a reckoning with the context of her sentences. In Smith’s depiction, we are asked to examine our sentimentality for a pioneer who craved neither nostalgia nor titles.

Smith reminds that in Joanie’s world, “Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes—as Didion has it, perfectly, in “The White Album”—“a narrative line upon disparate images.”

Have we been pulling quotes from the paragraphs that agitate? Have we been making meaning from chaos?

I sure fucking have. I thought it was, maybe, the least of the work here, and I’ll die on that hill, perhaps. While I delight in the precise craft of Didion’s sentences, they reflect an impartial witness to a world I cannot fathom experiencing without emotional natural disasters and rolling miracles on a near-daily basis.

Maybe I’m a good dancer. After all, code-switching has served me.

I've been in public education for a decade, and I've navigated my share of situations – elementary, middle, English, social studies, classroom teacher, instructional coach, artsy charters, geographical districts, to say nothing of the influence of American national rhetoric, local politics, and collegial dynamics. Most weeks, I was certain I wouldn't make it until Friday and that needed debrief with a co-worker.

There lived a relative safety in my confidence that I would skillfully switch between trusted student confidant and collegial partner; between artist and instructor; between Xennial and Boomer-translator; between authority figure and system disruptor. I learned the languages and worked the fringes to find my way.

One of those languages has been magical thinking; not a gross delusional refusal to engage, or an escapist mechanism for my fear, but a soulful commitment to my wildest dreams (& it’s fair to say my wildest dreams are grand, and probably still not wild enough). 

That’s why I liked Friday afternoons; it wasn’t the drinks, and sometimes wasn’t even the company, and it wasn’t that ‘working for the weekend’ feeling, either. No, I liked dreaming together of the good-er work to do and the good-er people to become. I liked the magical thinking.

[via: @poetryisnotaluxury] From Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998, William Morrow 2003

Or maybe I had practice in creation.

I did my first play at seven. I was a Hot Lunch Dancer in the summer camp production of Fame (please hold your questions) and I was amazing. I was quite certain this would be my life's work from that moment forward, but the work of making theatre is something altogether different, and there were productions, or roles, and even sometimes just one dreaded moment in a scene that was ~wOrK~ to slog through. Together, we built a whole world, proof positive of collective potential.

I can taste the opening night bubbles.

I can feel the squeezing hands.

I can breathe that sigh of relief, even now.

I'm trying to put a finger on the name of this feeling: that last day of school feeling; that unbutton my pants cause I'm finally in my house feeling; that “weekend” feeling. Maybe it's freedom –a sense that I am no longer bound by the trappings of the place or the demands of a job.

I haven’t been, like, withholding of my opinions. Let’s not pretend my letters have been really reserved or that I haven’t spoken my mind. The shift that happens isn’t merely in what I say, but how I say it; the shoes off feeling is one of being fully spread out, balls to bosom, within yourself. It’s glamorous.

“Luxury is…to be able to take control of one’s life, health, and the pursuit of happiness in a way that is joyful.” – Andre Leon Talley

And a million mothers in yesterday’s-breast-milk-stained tees throw their collective tomatoes, and they aren’t alone. Their ranks of bewildered, questioning, and plain old exhausted people are flanked by legions of us fringe-dwellers who make no kind of sense in this world even as we sit at our altars, arms wide, bellies full of thanks for the magic that has touched us, even if only once. (Give the mothers five years. Studies suggest mothers rate labor pains significantly lower years later as compared to months; we are forever editing our wounds to allow for the love that came after.)

What if grief is a practice, not a season? [*furiously Googles: what do flowers do in winter? #forideas] What if this magical thinking of mine is willing a kind of reality? Is it my ambitious will killing all my darlings? 

Is winter nature's happy hour?

In their rebrand, The Marginalian lays bare our complete lack of control. “We are born without choosing to, to parents we haven’t chosen, into bodies and borders we haven’t chosen, to exist in a region of spacetime we haven’t chosen for a duration we don’t choose. As physicists know, we don’t choose the particular atoms that constellate our particular selves or the neural configurations that fire our consciousness. In consequence, as James Baldwin knew, we don’t even choose whom we love. But amid our slender repertoire of agency are the labels we choose for our labors of love — the works of thought and tenderness we make with the whole of who we are.”

Dear reader, am I always like this in January or is this (essentially) the third pandemic winter I've weathered while working in public schools and single parenting and trying to keep multiple businesses and my creative livelihood afloat? Kind of a “both/and” situation there.

In truth, yeah, every January I make plans and plot courses and dig deep into purpose and mope around in the same sweater mainlining tea and championing the joys of elastic waistbands. I mourn, and my parched skin buries itself beneath layers, like seeds. I lose my color and hunker into the darkness, and I will always, no matter the production or the job or the collective crisis, because that's what the earth is doing and I am of the earth. I am earth, and this is my winter.

That freedom to indulge in luxury? To shluff and scrub off the dead bits? To sigh loudly and unclench your jaw? To get comfortable? To nuzzle close? To return to home and hearth? To get home before dark having snuck in one really good, warming blabber session with a beloved, or a few more scribbled pages in a journal, or a quick daydream?

Tell me that's not the magic stuff of winter.

It’s now that we drop the pretense, and while I’ll fight her on much, maybe Joan had this one right.

I hope we strip to our barest selves, like freaking trees.

I hope it's beautiful and tender without saccharines.

I hope it's soft and sexy and zero fucking effort.

I hope it's chock full of witness and brisk gaiety.

I hope we make art of what is both inevitable and surprising every time.

[via: @blackarchives.co] Laicos Club in Montgomery, Alabama. Photographs by Jim Peppler (1960s) via the Alabama Department of Archives & History

In the late summer before sixth grade, we moved to Bethel, Alaska in what seemed to be a plot to kill my spirit and destroy my life. I’d switched schools to the upper elementary just the year before, so this move was the second of sixth school changes by 11th grade. I decided to make it character study for a version of myself I was writing, one infinitely cooler and less awkward and afraid than the real me.

I got good at the sale: Why, yes, I’m very cool and have an interesting backstory.

I got good at the yearlong friendships: Activities both artistic and academic; I do!

& I got good at the reinvention, reintroducing myself over and over and over, a chameleon. Where some may have stuck to the script, I searched for words to make me make sense to this crowd or that, in this town or that. Joan and I shared this, but what whiteness and generational accidents protect, I was laid out to the world’s heartache as fuel. (Oh, glory, the teenage dramatics.) Bless me for it, because it brought me bell, and how I needed her.

[via: @savedbythebellhooks]

bell championed my magical thinking, uplifting within me a kind of purpose for being–my intersectional marginalization compels my demand for creative world-building, yes. 

That’s, like, the stance.

I begin from that truth, and though it is entirely true, it is not the whole truth. Because also the working together for our future and joy thing is hella good stuff. It is joyful work, and it has been Black women who persistently remind me of the rich humor, joy, and excitement in bearing witness to a world under construction. Please allow me to impart their teachings: If you are not enjoying your participation in the creation of a new world, with humble love, I suggest that you stop right now and consider if you’ve made labor of liberation. 

[Author’s note: we’re working to make it all lighter.]

Perhaps that message has been lost in translation. But bell made real Joan's diagnosis that “we tell ourselves stories to live.” Mine have grown to be not just those of dreamy hopefulness, but of the dirty work, too.

Between the hobbled backs of our burdened days and the universal book-closings of national cultural icons, the jabs have been swift of late and have landed hard. It was the passing of Sidney Poitier that did me in.

I have been out of conservatory for almost twenty years. I’ve found all manner of words to give understanding to that season and all the ones that followed, and I see now that I have been collecting to pieces of learning and life that allow me to create the worlds for my words to breathe. But my guts have never let go of the first time I saw him onscreen and, with him, a particular vision for myself.

I was going to be an actor.

& then I wasn’t. It was the reinvention I wasn’t prepared to sell to myself, and the thing bubbled back up with every recall of that one night, watching AMC with my mom, aged nine.

If Didion, Poitier, hooks, Smith, and even Talley intersect anywhere, it’s within me. That’s what art does. Art opens portals inside the witness. It’s meaning is made within the spirits and minds and hearts of the one who sees it. Let her rail against our sentimentalism, but our creative ancestors let us see a whole world, and their deaths hurt as sincerely as kin and stack as high as the senseless mounds of souls lost to raging viruses and ineptitude. These titans created the home in which I unbuckle my pants. Call it crude, but they unhooked my bra and fed me pasta and rubbed my back to sleep and set my alarm in the morning. Their lives do not end with their bodies, just as their deaths pale against their offerings.

Nick Cave puts it this way: 

He continues.

“Your spirit is the part of you that is essential. It is separate from the imagination, and belongs only to you. This formless pneuma is the invisible and vital force over which we toss the blanket of our imagination — that habitual mix of received information, of memory, of experience — to give it form and language. In some this vital spirit burns fiercely and in others it is a dim flicker, but it lives in all of us, and can be made stronger through daily devotion to the work at hand.”

I keep going on because I’m here for the words, and I’ve got more.

I keep going on because I delight in the luxury of my existence.

I keep going on because I’m buoyed by the personal + political.

I keep going on because my teachers + beloveds are dying, and there is work to continue.

I keep going on because a good goddamn time in a safe, loved body is the righteous promise, & I will have it.

Consider James Baldwin’s summary, and let it stand for my own feeble attempt at a conclusion.

“I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, forever and ever and ever, every day.”

Until then, Adrienne xx