something else

In my sleeping, I see mom. We're in a room in an old house where the light fragments everything. She won't stay in time. I am trying to see her. We talk. I remember she begins scatting. I forgot how much you liked to play with language, I tell her. And it occurs to me with immediate and undeniable certainty, you had a good life. She moves into the shadow and I stay still, still, striving to see so hard my eyes open to a white wall in Poughkeepsie. The houses that you can take apart and drive on trucks. I am east of the Mississippi, east by months.

What does it mean to have a good life?

I think my mom was disappointed by a lot of things. She didn't write the plays that she wanted to write. Or have the career and recognition she wanted to have. She fought cancer for 17 years. She fought with my dad. She fought with her self. I wouldn't say she was happy. Not often happy. If a good life doesn't depend on happiness, what makes a life good?

I read books when I can't sleep. I am rereading Roethke.

Loved heart, what can I say?
When I was a lark, I sang;
When I was a worm, I devoured.

It doesn't seem like enough - to be functional. Enough to live for. Let alone the materials of a good life. To achieve desires. Not enough. In the room with dark 70s wood and the glassless window pane or over by the light on the wood table my age. I forgot how much you liked to play.

emilybemily annabanana ba ba ba baba
T. mom
re mind me the free of sound beat pulse beat played a beat played and silence
I play tentatively with the memories I dream of you - perhaps I am talking to my own dead self - the space in me where you live now - I dream myself life beyond failure - to love past reason. I dream myself shag carpeting and a rose cushioned bench seat, dark wood. I dream you close, close to me and scatting. I dream that death in me likes to play with language. I dream judgment. Mercy, mercy.

What makes a life good?
I dream I am blind with searching.
Or perhaps blindness is apt. Space for being seen.
Or perhaps if the land of the dead were a basement room out of time in a 70s deco house and if I could go there, I would give you this...I love. I love your life. I don't get it. I love past owning.

crossing

The day to cross the Mississipi. The bridge is down on the 80 and a gentleman with a pleasant toothless smile sits at the last rest stop before the river to help travelers who are confused by the detour. He sits and reads a book with cowboys. He knocks on my window and generously insists I come with him into the little rest area house so he can show me where we are on a map.
Iowa
on the verge of east.

The day gives some resistance.
Road and mind traffic.

nebraska, flat line

Destination Lincoln. The snow makes the day feel out of time. Black coffee, the flat of white covered grain or when you can see a light storm stretched out to the horizon, the weight of it, straight road, backtrack to I-80, the weight and non-stop of it. Don't close your eyes when you're driving. Snow or sleet or rain or the afternoon or a gas station in the middle of nowhere with the keys locked in the car standing in the freezing in flip flops because you can't feel the gas with your toes when you wear shoes, and even though they are too small, you can slip the shoes against the souls of your feet that like to feel themselves against the accelerator and you can set the pump to automatically feed gas into your engine while you reach over the seat to look for the perfect object to leave behind. It's already the case that the door is locked and you put the gas pump back in its little hanger so it can rest.

A man who works in the gas station wants to help. He bends a coathook like he's giving my car an abortion, jimmies the window away from the frame and tries to catch the lock inside with the handle. The lock won't turn. He calls a locksmith.The locksmith has to consult a book and I think, man, I am here in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold and this guy has no idea what he's doing. He keeps having to pull out different tools because the lock won't turn. After, maybe an hour, he tries, out of complete frustration, to turn the lock the opposite way. And of course, the door opens. I told him to turn the lock the wrong way. That's why it took so long out in the cold. I'm fascinated by my arrogance. What is it in me that doesn't trust that people in a strange place have their own knowledge?

I've been listening to Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

All I do in Los Angeles is drive around and listen to Toni Morrison and wonder what could be the purpose of living. I've been thinking about her much because when I graduated from undergrad in May of 2001, she was the commencement speaker. It really stuck with me because she talked to us for real. She told us, the eager, hungover 21 year old crowd in plastic white gowns ready for beginning, we were inheriting a broken world. And that it wasn't our job to save it; just don't hurt it anymore. And I've been thinking much the last 10 years what that looks like. The generation charged with keeping very still. I think it has something to do with compassion (like this - If it's not apathy, not turning away, it suggests an impossible compassion. How can one be present to broken-ness in helplessness? In vulnerability? As if there were another way to be present...) but I'm not sure.

Her writing is hard and hypnotic and sad, an in-the-body sad. she writes around holes. And after listening to her writing, I hear something uglier and unbearable in her request that I didn't see before. Because I think I've been carrying around this feeling like "don't hurt it anymore" becomes a kind of saving, but in her writing, the release is more complicated. Like Beloved where the bottomless needy thing is not defeated or free at the end of the book. The characters survive her, but she is still, still in the river. She could come back. She needs to come back. She has a remembering that is needed. And the forgetting of her is a violence. There is no not-hurting in the world. For what, then, does one live? And her writing feels like a spending time with this question in the direction of greater complexity that comes with intimate relationships and away from answers.

So, this book, A Mercy, is set in colonial America. The project involves showing an America that might not have happened. A messier time where everyone was an entrepreneur trying to pull something off - how to grow food in an unfamiliar soil, what crops would make you rich if you had a lot of land, making a family with unfamiliar people... it could not work out. It could so easily not have happened at all. It also involves writing a world where the concept of slavery becomes separate from race - the lived reality of white indentured servants- who do not have the piece of paper that says when their service is complete, of women who are wived, of a free black man's accusation to a young slave woman who loves him that she is a slave because she has come to know herself as a slave in her mind. In the world of this book, slavery is an oil slick surface coating everything and there are perpetrators and victims but there is no freedom. The concept - slavery - some kind of sad thing - with its own life and power - some kind of sad thing - cannot be contained in a person. Only it is sad.

I visit Lincoln. I have coffee at the quirky and quality coffee shop, The Mill, with my CalArts classmate Joel Egger, who is working to start a for-profit arts and eating place in and for Lincoln. Responding to the need for sustainable and local art making. Stay tuned for greatness...

In the parking lot on my way out, I get a phone call from the woman who I met in the Denver art museum. She's driving this way and we agree to split a hotel room and stay up til 3 talking about our books on tape and Israel. She lived there as a teenager and she says there is a church, one building, that at least 5 different religious groups consider a holy site so everyday the church is a house for a different worships. Same house. So much room for god.

what are you calling the world?

I made it to Denver.

I'm visiting my friend Steve Kelly. He's a Buddhist priest in the process of converting to Judaism. The local rabbi gave him a list of instructions - what being Jewish looks like. The first thing on the list was to support the nation-state of Israel's right to exist. I'm not trying to argue that Israel has no right to exist. That feels heartless. What does supporting a nation-state's right to exist look like, thousands of miles away in a Denver studio? What does it have to do with the work of finding god? One thing I imagine: it could be a metaphor that you believe there is a space in the world for you, your people, god.

I've been listening in the car, to a lecture series on 20th century democracy. The woman - I don't remember her name, blonde, she lectures somewhere near San Diego and there's this canned clapping that starts each of the lectures that puzzles me every time I hear it - she says that the nation state as the standard for political unit became institutionalized in a new way at the end of WW1 in the Paris Peace Talks (Here, the Charter for the League of Nations was ratified because Wilson believed, "A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.") This was in January 1919. She says that close following this meeting, April 1919, there was a large demonstration for independence in India where a British commander ordered soldiers to fire point blank into the crowd until the bullets ran out, the Amritsar massacre. She says a gesture of recognizing self-determining nation-state as sanctified next to a gesture of denying the right to express the desire for nation through extreme brutality - colors the lived experience of this word (nation) in the 20th century. The promise and the denial on the same breath.

Is there space for all of it?

We journey to the Denver Museum of Modern Art. The museum has an exhibit on Africa where they are looking at ways of re-framing Africa as a place in the world intimately connected to the US. Their curatorial strategies include placing artifacts in unconventional cases - they don't feel like looking through a window, they are shaped to create a feeling of vertigo - like the object inside is hurtling at you. They include artist names or "artist unknown" for all pieces. Art by someone who makes art. Not natural history. They have chairs where you can sit and listen to African music or American music influenced by African music (jazz, gospel...) while you spend time with art. They have a video on the rituals involved in making - some piece - what is it- ruining. story. ah! - also, they have contemporary pieces next to older pieces - like the one in the photo above - a tapestry constructed out of the tops of liquor bottles. On the whole, a useful project respectfully executed. Although to be honest, I think a little tame in its demonstration of interconnectedness. It's still a little African room in a giant modern art museum.

A woman overhears us deliberating on restaurants for dinner and asks for a recommendation. Turns out she too is driving across the country - from SF to DC. We exchange cards. Maybe we will meet again.

We go to Blockbuster which is selling bags of candy in the form of fake blood and we rent a movie with Keanu Reeves about good and evil and saving the world and it snows. It snows in May.

After Wendover

After Wendover, driving. Pure and simple. Until the rain starts. Snow in the elevation. Or hail. I can't see. I can't see the white lanes on the roads. I pull over. I drive. I pull over. I drive. Finally, I stop in a rest area. It's freezing. The little thermometer in my car says so. I have a car full of things. I have blankets.

In the truck stop, I sleep fitfully. There are two other cars here and a line of trucks. When I wake up again and again in the night, they comfort me. Each time I wake up, I see the face of someone I know and a feeling - yes, you can love this person. And I dream, I dream that I am traveling on this summer trip to Rwanda with my teacher and he asks - are you ready? Are you sure you can do this? Something about this question has never occurred to me before. Not, are you willing? Yes. Yes. I'm willing. Can you do it? I run my mind through the dramaturgy of the trip. Different ways to be still with a memory that is very sad. Or letting in room, more room, to see everything alive now: politics, economy, entrepreneurs, delicious food, bus rides. A cacophony of presence. In the dream I don't want to answer this question, which is a dead give away for the answer: no. No.
As if I am not able to be alive.

What is that?

Trucks parked still in fog. Truckers sleep. Cold.

King talks about this. At a time when he was receiving death threats and reckoning with prioritizing his vocation or his life. He talks about how we can strive with our selves towards a thing - being part of a particular family, or ending racial injustice in America - and we can want it the way we want breathing, it can be the substance of our hearts, and still we never touch it with our hands. I do not understand what to do with the size of this disappointment. King says, inability to live, contained in life. Not a thing that pulls you out of it. King says thank god we have hearts to put something beautiful in.

Only...


At the dirt of dawn before the sun, before the real dawn, I am driving to Denver.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, or how I learned to love the land

Woke up.
Discovered a mountain white and blinding out the window. Surprise!
Mountain!
(It looked bigger in person.)

One thing I like about the morning is that you realize mountains and also you realize all the stupid things you did the day before. I think I sent an email to everyone on this summer trip to East Africa listserv about how King has me thinking about racism as the opposite of experimentation. He's responding to the "separate but equal" slogan that clothed the inequality of racial segregation. The guy who reads it has such delight quoting King's "There is no such thing as separate but equal." Which, I think, King follows through to question the concept of "separate" (and especially its associations with race in America). He is clearly not naive in recognizing differences of lived experience, but I think he had deep questions for institutionalizing practices that divided people growing out of separate water fountains, separate schools, out of the time at the airport where he was asked to sit alone in his own section because everyone else on the plane was white and it made him sad. Against that, he's proposing a well-organized and awkward anarchy. A kind of figuring out, from the historically shaped truth of where you are in the moment, how to be present to others and how to work collectively toward a greater good. Something beautiful about the size of that work... you could spend your life on that.

Anyway, I'm so glad I can be the inarticulate white girl sharing theories on racism via email to a listserv. King talks about meeting Kennedy running for president and he remarks that Kennedy was intellectually invested in civil rights, but not yet emotionally invested. I think it's useful to be curious. But it's not the only way to engage the world. What is the system of power that helps me to feel comfortable to impulsively share my unformed and not felt through ideas? Anyway, am of no use.

I am trying to change the subject in my mind so I put on a CD in the car that Jubilith gave me by Ada Mendoza. She's an experimental guitarist who, in this record, uses popular songs as places to hang out in, take wrong turns, stop at historic markers, admire vistas. An inspiration for travelers at how to move playfully.

I am driving to Wendover, Utah. A small town across the border and a timezone from Wendover, Nevada and the home of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It's an old school operation " Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived." They have a center in Wendover for artist residencies and it happens to be that two artists are beginning residency this afternoon and founder Matt Coolidge has graciously invited me to accompany the tour.

My afternoon at CLUI could be a novel. Am taken up by the place and by Matt Coolidge's pervasive personableness and his patience for complicated connectedness.

According to Matt, tumbleweed is actually Russian.

CLUI's main residences are located next to a big hanger where they held the planes that test dropped replicas of the atomic bombs before dropping the real bombs. Apparently, this is something that happens here. There is a fake German town designed by Eric Mendelsohn, apparently a famous architect! no relation - somewhere in Utah, built for practice bombing Germany in WW2.

Wendover, Nevada has a casino and an airport where the casinos fly people in - from Salt Lake City - and buses them to the airport. As if nowhere. Nowhere run by workers from Mexico.

The airport has so many flights for the casinos that they got a whole lot of money from the government and they built a museum. In the museum is the most accurate model of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki made over the course of 10 years in the spare time of a truckdriver. And he took it to a convention and had the original pilots sign it. And something interesting here is that it's a document of camaraderie - a moment where these men celebrated their doing a thing together, and having it acknowledged in this personal way by the truck driver. It feels like a weird moment to walk into, given the sad thing, given the towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the people who lived in them. I also feel the people in the museum/airport office are so friendly. I hope they like me/us and give us the key to go exploring on their land.

CLUI has a residence inside military land. This one is hardcore with a compost toilet and a special bike to ride to pick up water. This is where my friends Jen Hofer and Rob Ray stayed and made some art. Once there was a residency that coincided with an army practice - for a thing, that I don't remember and so am ruining the story - and the military gave them clearance to hold an artist residency in the space anyway, saying I understand you have a job. And we have a job. Just don't go any higher than 10 feet off the ground cause you'll get fried by radio waves.

The land is beautiful. Salt hard and blank. And used for target practice.

I am skipping the part about the real fake plane from ConAir, the Russian housing units full of abandoned artifacts for the men who came over to inspect nuclear disarmament, the bunkers, the strip joint that served alcohol next to the strip joint that had full nudity and the window between them, even the salt flats themselves, the miles of white nothing that don't look like distance and a rose petal lying by itself on the salt.

It's getting late, but Matt pulls up into a pot ash processing plant. The plant pumps water full of pot ash out of the salt flats and brings it here. We drive where we're not supposed to, down a small road, up a small dirt hill that levels out onto - not what I expected. Thin blue aqua as far as the eye can see, cut by a dirt road. Inside aqua, the growing grey of the clouds. I never imagined industry as ... beautiful.

It reminds me, at the start of the day, we pass a truck full of copper ore - bound to China, Matt tells us. He knows the route it takes too and the amount of round trips this particular truck makes every day from the mine to the train, was it? Sara, a documentary photographer who likes to take pictures of paintball parks, comments about the ravaging of the world. Of standing inside the hole of a copper mine. The shocking ugliness of hole. Sure, Matt says, but you like wiring, right? You like electricity? The shock of that hole, yes, but think of how much copper comes out and what it can do. And perhaps the shock itself is a gift. An aesthetic experience true to the world in which we live.

When we arrive back at the base. It is already 5pm. Maybe 6. I get confused because of the time switch. I am meant to be in Denver, 10 hours away, tomorrow morning, and I'm excited to do something hard and to be here. I'm excited to be nowhere.

Day 3: fake money, real snow, Nevada

So, my grandmother cooks delicious pancakes for breakfast. Thin, like crepes. The kind my father cooked every sunday when I was growing up.
580. Birmingham. Thin windy cave like road in Berkeley. A eulogy. Martin Luther King Blvd. I park and my friend Jubilith gets out of the car in front of me where she has been practicing a speech for tomorrow when her company, Theater of Yugen, opens for a visiting Japanese Noh performance. We are early and I, by pure coincidence have parked behind her. We sit in Jubilith's car like teenagers discovering freedom at the lightening speed of technological progress in a midcentury melodrama, even though we are not.

Then, the Tibetan teahouse. The religious have set up stalls of delicious food - mango sticky rice, papaya salad, pad thai, roasted squash, curries, an overwhelm of food. The monks and nuns cannot handle money so you have to trade your money for special coins to pay for the food. And then all the guests sit together on benches and broad tables in the middle of the courtyard and talk about going away.

The Sierra Mountains, mist, is that snow? yes that's snow. the mountain top. on the mountain top. Decent into night. The night. Flat night. Asher calls, my brother. Parked on the pitchdark shoulder of the highway with a bad connection. We are struggling with our dad getting remarried because it confuses our sense of family - how to maintain a relationship with our mom who is so still and a relationship with our dad who is moving, moving. How do we relate to both of them? There are no cars here on the nighttime highway in Nevada so it feels safe.

Driving.

I splurge for a motel 6 a few hours from Wendover.