i am also afraid but i have to keep moving

.

"Each time our hope for a better world is based on a system, this system collapses, due to the corruptibility and imperfection of human beings.  I believe we have to go back and work at the growth of human beings, so they will not need systems, but will know how to rule themselves.  Now you have suffered the shock of disillusion in an ideology which has betrayed its ideals.  It is a good time to return to the creation of yourself, not as a blind number in a group, but as an individual.  Poetry is merely the language of our night-self, in which are imbedded the seeds of all we do and are in the day.  We can only control it by knowing it.  Better to make this journey back to what you had first intended, rather than to die of disillusionment."

The Diary of Anais Nin
Volume 4, page 10 




i live wildly these days.  maybe i'm trying to make it back to a life and self i had once intended.  i return to reading.  everyday, i long for the companionship of my books.  i miss the books that are stowed away in my storage unit.  i want so badly to go rescue them from that cold cell.  it's hard to believe i've gone so long without them. how long has it been now?  10 months?  so much has happened.  so much has changed.  i wind my way back to an earlier idea of myself.  i return to the pages that evoked my rebirth.  Anais Nin's diary.  the healing waters of her words and rhythm.  i scribbled this passage from her diary in to my own.  i read it on the train a few days ago and i've been thinking of it ever since.

i have no answers.  fear is normal but should never be allowed to become King.  change is a scary motherfucker.  especially when the individual is in charge of making change within their own life.  i've been listening to the song posted below for days.  and while my shoulders bounce as i dance alone in my white room, i consider my actions and the wages of all my "sins".  my biggest mistake thus far has been allowing my fears to dictate my actions.  or, rather, my inaction, if i want to be more accurate.  i have stood still when i longed for motion and have remained silent when i longed to speak.  these instances haunt me and torture me and yet, after years of this mode of being, i became so accumstomed to minding the egg shells that, now, when i do otherwise, i am immediately met with stabs of guilt.  i sit and stare at the words i write and wonder if i'm being bad.  i look at the romances i've enjoyed and wonder if i'm immoral.  i look at my late nights of dancing and worry i might be a glutton.  it is the old training kicking in, the instilled fear and implanted guilt of the particular system i was brought up in.  i was taught to fear myself, my own desires and dreams.  i was taught to second-guess my own insticts and to veiw my interests as selfish and wrong.  and i'm not just talking about family or religion but the larger cultural climate in which the spheres of family and religion exist.  the sexism.  the deep hatred of women.  the assumption that desire is evil and must be regulated, must be doled out, defined, prescribed.

i don't know what i'm doing half the time but i know i'm tired of feeling bad for being interested in normal things.  i'm tired of being haunted by the tenents of a religion i am not a member of.  i'm tired of all the alarms going off in my ear; alarms i don't agree with and wish i could silence forever.  as the new year approaches i begin to think again of all the dreams i've held close for so many years.  i begin to think of my "night-self" and who that could be.  especially now after having chosen my freedom, after having chosen to write and to go on writing. 

.....

and then i started drinking with my budddy, ate some mexican food, started thinking about theory and sushi.  we said, "i could do a roll...  " and mean while hip-hop does its thing in the background.  we've been talking all night about art, what it means, what it does, how to make it;  and last night at dinner with my beautiful friend Freya, we talked about life and priorities, how life and priorities change based upon era, the era of one's life.  one feels a certain way in their twenties.  one feels a certain way in their thirties.  one feels a certain way in their forties.  so on and so forth.  and here i am, early 30s, horny as hell, apparently normal (relative in all the worst ways), caring only about music and booze and art.  satisfy me.  and if you can't, at least pay attention to me.  let me pant in your ear.  let my image hang on your wall. let my script dance below your eyelids.  i'll take your beard burn if you attempt to take me seriously.

but is that monolithic?  do i need your faith?  do i need your faithfulness?  are we circling back around to the thing i'm complaining about, the thing that harms me, the thing that hurts you?  we are all subjects.  do you feel compromised?  i do.  how do i reconcile this shit and how do we, as a UNION or COMMUNITY proceed.  seth asks , "but how do we have a non-system?"  how do we inter-relate?  if not based on the systems that have already infected us/informed us...  informed our fear?  my fear?  am i afraid of you?  damn right.  you're a fucking monster born to hurt me.  i'm only just now realizing that i am as well.  i am a monster in my own right, especially if you look at me through a Christian/Muslim/Jewish lens.  please look at me through an artistic lens because i am, in fact, an artist and i govern myself with an artistic criteria.  a criteria i hope you will someday examine yourself with and view yourself through.

and now at 3am, i feel useless, semi-embarrassed but somehow still entirely alive.  could this be a condition of my survival.  my friend eddie said "there's a time to make art and there's a time to live.  you gotta have something to make art about."  i look at the text i've hung on my walls: don't cry.  and all i can think is: cry harder.  could that be the way back to what i once "intended"?

lucky

there are particular bits of wisdom i always run to. lately i have snuggled down in to the quilts other women have made. i burrow down deep with my thoughts and projects and books. it is there that i mend my heart.

i've been crocheting like crazy. 2 new sweaters have been completed but i want to keep them all to myself for a little while longer. i want to keep my images off the internet for a bit and just see where i end up. i've needed a bit of time away from the digital world. i've needed to recoil from its immediacy and curl in to myself instead. the world of flesh and touch and words spoken aloud. i've needed the privacy of my own bed and notebook and to keep my words and images for myself. a cocoon. i'm still drawing skulls, still faithfully following these impulses. i wake with so many images and ideas swirling around inside my sleepy brain. i make tea and sit down to write.

i have the day off from work today but it is the first day of a new semester and i will be counted at roll call later this evening. a new day. a new week. a new class. a new semester. and i love the way it times my life. not too short, not too long, and always building toward something better. and so i can be languid this morning. i can be easy and slow. soon, a run around the lake but i've spent the morning writing and reading and before i do anything else i wanted to transcribe something here. one of those bits of wisdom i cling to. a mother's warm hand:

What has kept me going and still keeps me going is the knowledge that being an artist is a privilege. And the second thing- which is a consequence of the first - is that one must not ask too much. Well, what do I mean by that? Simply that the pursuit of happiness is fine - we all want to believe in it - but most of the time it is just that, a pursuit. Now the privilege of being an artist consists of three things. First, to have something of your own to say. And then - and this is a fight to the finish - to be able to communicate that to people. At best a school can help you with the second part, but it is obviously up to you what you are going to say, what spark you have, what subject. Now what does this all have to do with making a living?I do not know. When you start to define being an artist in those terms - as a profession like any other profession - you place yourself on a downward spiral. You begin to think: "How am I going to survive?" "I hate my job." "I am a prisoner of the people who depend on me, of people's expectations for my success." "I know that there is loads of money out there but the system is so crooked none of it is going to come my way." "I know there are hundreds of galleries in New York and I have a right to be in one of them - or I'm not in the one I want to be in." The important thing about all these statements is that they are all true - or could be true. But the mistake is to confuse art with a "right" at all. One has no birthright to be an artist. One is lucky to be one and that is all. So why have I mentioned these pessimistic things? Well, in fact, it is to say - as I have said - that things really are not so bad all the same. You are privileged to be what you are, and you have your whole life - fifty years - to figure out how it will be. But if this seems to general, all I can say is that after fifty years as an artist it is my privilege to say it just the same. That is all.

-Remarks prepared for art students at Rutgers University, Louise Bourgeios

this statement, paired with the poverty anais nin lived in during her 30s and 40s (which i am currently reading all about - the horror of it and how absolutely defeated one can feel at times) is a great comfort to me, a great and steady encouragement to continue. i have enough money for supplies. i have enough money for books and food. i have enough money for paper. i'm not sleeping on the street and i will not go hungry. i am learning and making my way through the world and it is a privilege in deed to be able to write and make art all along the way. if there is any time when i feel the value of pain it is when it has been transmuted in to a piece of art. it keeps my feet moving. one foot in front of the other. always forward. to be reminded that i am privileged to be what i am is a humbling thing. i am a lucky girl.

a good thing to hold on to

.


We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.


-Anais Nin


.

anais nin and judas and the world a diary makes:

i just read this passage in volume 2 of her diary a few days ago and copied so many of these sentences into my own notebook. what a gift to stumble across this reading. a gift to hear her voice, to hear her read and giggle.





and there's something about this, most obviously that last bit, that pairs so well with lady gaga's new video JUDAS that was released today. listening to anais read her ideas about women's creations needing to be made with their own blood, nourished by their own milk, but with the acknowledgement that she did not come to this act of creation alone (a very post-modern notion, nicht wahr?) and is not turned away from Creating by this fact, is important to hold on to when engaging with today's art, no matter what form the art takes. i think gaga is a grand example of this. she is helping to create a language which embraces the feminine, the bloodiness of being female, of Becoming a woman, Becoming a human, Becoming an artist. it is a bloody job. i listen and i look and i see that her mirror is familiar to me. there is something in this that calls to something very basic within my construction as Female. her words! confession. the honest onslaught of hidden desire, the secrets that must be kept, the truth that must be squelched... these are things a diary would contain. could a pop song be a diary entry? could it be an extension of that mode of private practice, an outcropping of a totally private world? yes. and her make-up! and when my mother died all i wanted was bright red lipstick and luscious perfumes. i wanted beauty around me. i wanted the reverie of gorgeous smells. we are called Whore for wanting such things. we are called Whore for having Wants. i watch and i listen. her luxurious references! her fake fingernails pointing, pointing, pointing! the weaponry of them, bejewelled skewers. she is a golden thesaurus! she becomes her own judas, betraying her king, betraying herself, but not shying from the work of Creation... not shying from the language that women must create for themselves. still. the awful silence will be born again tomorrow. we must scratch and scribble every day.

as i read anais nin's diaries i wonder if men read them too? do they respond to the language that is made. the caress contained within each turn of phrase, the glory and horror and beauty of exposure.

i wonder if the diaries have, again, become dangerous books? silence is thick these days and i am guilty at times of it as well. i'm trying to become less guilty. with everything i've got and it is hard, i am trying to Become less silent. i scratch and scribble and maybe i am making a world too. notebook as tool.

what it is to Make Art:

.



Henry states in seventy-eight pages of his book the most tragic of all truths: "Life does not interest me, what interests me is what I am doing right now (this book) which is parallel to it, of it, and yet beyond it."

-Anais Nin, Diary Vol. 2, p. 89



.

one thousand

with half my life packed into bags and boxes, and the other (more important) half packed into notebooks, i wake to a busy day of study and apartment hunting. there is an open-house later this afternoon i must attend before heading off to work, and previous to that i MUST spend an hour or two in the language lab at school in preparation for a huge test tomorrow morning. but the biggest necessity of the day has already been obeyed and satisfied. i woke early, made english breakfast tea, and got back in bed with my notebook and stayed there scribbling for almost two hours.

i am no where near as prolific or eloquent as anais nin was with her diary but i think it is honorable and humble to aspire to her level of commitment to the form. i am so inspired by her dedication, her craft, her marriage of nuance to passionate explosion, her absolute artistry of The Diary. i think of her more and more while i'm writing... all her questions, so similar to my own but so much better expressed, endlessly more beautiful, so beautifully articulated (my notebook is overflowing with slang and crass expressions of speech)... what is it to be a woman speaking? what is it to be a woman and an artist? what is a "diary" after all?

reading hers, a diary is nothing short of a life's work. her collection is astounding and i've only yet made my way through a tiny portion. already i am in love and enamoured of her. already i feel such a close kinship, such a tight affection for her and her work. a dead woman. i love a dead woman. but that is not at all uncommon for me these days:

i cannot tell you what my life is guided by at the moment if not by my love for dead women.

the body i once lived in while i was growing in her belly is gone. the body we once shared is gone. dead and burned up. incinerated. her body: ash in a locket.

i do not wear the tiny silver heart for fear of it falling from its chain. she is packed away with her blue copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, pictures of us when i was a baby, of my two siblings when they were babies, pieces of stitchery, a jar of pearly buttons, a marriage certificate, scraps of lace...

this is the diary she made. this is the diary i keep and cherish. stored in a antique cardboard suitcase.

a few days ago, a cd of her singing arrived in the mail. a gift from my uncle, her youngest brother, made from a tape of her singing when she was 18 or 19 years old. my mother's voice before she was my mother. i have not listened to it yet and i probably won't for a very long time. her voice is so strong within me already. too strong to be coupled with song. it would undo me in ways i cannot afford at present but i am thankful to have the songs nevertheless. the day will come when it will be a guide in my life (thank you, uncle mark). for now, it is added to the suitcase: the diary she built and i keep.

this blog is part of the diary i keep. my diary lives in so many places and takes so many forms. this place, my beloved Blackland, is altogether different from the paper diary i keep. and both of those are entirely different from the visual diary that is my practice... all these portraits strung together, all these images and phrases, all these words words words... letters sent and letters received, postcards and valentines and Notes to Self... and this is my 1000th blog post. it's so weird to me and so amazing too. i thought i might give the blog up when i reached this point but the idea of that, now, feels wrong. it's only right to push forward, to keep the record of this search, to make the portrait again and again and again...

to establish and re-establish a mirror.

i must learn how to be this new thing that i am. i must learn its textures and depths. now: no mother, no father, just me. who is that?





do you know that words make the world?

comfort

.


"The same thing which makes Henry indestructible is what makes me indestructible. The core of us is an artist, a writer. And it is our work, by our work, that we reassemble the fragments, re-create wholeness."

The Diary of Anais Nin, page 69


.