Today: I remember the breathing
I was thinking tonight about a talk I went to last November. A whole room full of people breathing together. Ross Gay, Karen Russell, and Michael Dickman on a stage with John Freeman.
There was a question about how you get to a place of imagination — how you use that muscle.
All this talk of muscles all through the hour, “delight” and “kindness” and “joy” and “imagination.” Flabby impulses these people hone, maybe.
And a lot of “maybe,” too. They talked about things they’ve made, and they could say what they’re about, sort of, but also they absolutely couldn’t.
Reassuring to hear a person comfortable with words like [insert here — I can’t remember] who is also comfortable saying they can’t explain something and then stopping.
The audaciousness and hope of stopping.
But I was thinking about that last question, which was essentially what the whole hour was about. How to find imagination, today. The conference organizers titled the session something about the ordinary and that’s true. It’s what we discussed. But what’s also true is that all we talked about and also what we never said — what we kept sketching in half-finished sentences and trails of nervous laughter
[I don’t know if I can write it]
was to point to the large asteroid hurtling our way, which is a lazy metaphor to use to describe something we made, that we keep making every day, that we could stop making.
We could just say that we don’t know what we’re about anymore if we ever did. That we can’t explain it and so we’ll stop now.
[I know I still haven’t written it]
Michael the poet says what he enters is older than any of us. He feels safe there. Karen Russell finds solace in reading: “the cosmos is reduced to the speed with which your eye moves across the page.” Ross Gay says, answering the question, “having what we love.” Which isn’t really a how-to, but it’s an answer of a sort.
And maybe that’s where the ordinary fits in. Where we are. That room full of people, breathing. I try to have what I love. I try to move my eyes across the page. But blooming inside me, always: I want to call to you from inside my bedroom-turned-cosmos-reduced. I want to remind you of the people breathing in a room. Can’t we just say, please for the love of, can’t we just, can’t you just
stop? Where is that place, and how can I imagine you there, with me?
