In Tentative Preparation
To be asked point-blank about my needs feels a little like being caught being painfully unskilled at something obvious as an adult, like using a fork correctly or tying shoelaces. My escape from the thankless grind of what Jasbir Puar calls Neoliberal Eugenics Lifestyle Programming is so very recent. I am learning to create routine, establish and accomplish cycles of work, rest, care, and maintenance that a deeply and also recently disabled body needs. How does one sleep? How is it that no one tell you that sleep is something a body often has to learn, and then learn again, and then learn again? It can also learn not to sleep. There is something almost comforting about the helmet of weight on my skull now, insomnia being the only form of true consistency I have achieved. But I am skirting the question. What are my current needs as an artist, and as a person? What if I am only just learning how to be either, or both? Please don’t tell me we all are. It’s not the same. I’m so tired. Medically, chronically more tired than a body should be tired and the tired never leaves. It nags like a voice one can’t shake out of one’s head, no matter how hard the head banging or how discreet the surgery through the ear.
As a person, I need sleep. I need my body to wake up and speak to me in ways that are less often in the register of crisis, panic, complaint. Perhaps I do not give her enough credit, but this body keeps insisting on carrying itself through extremes, as if anything else is a lie. This is what the artist needs to show somehow, this body in love, this body in exhaustion, this body in pain, this body in crisis, this body in recovery, this body in all of its conceptualizations and literal, material flesh. I need even just a single person to say hey, you need to work on the book every day, and it looks like this. It looks like these times on these days. It looks different on each day and it can look like the following. Let me tell you my story and you can steal some threads of it to make it your own. Hey, imagine holding it in your hand, it’s weight. Years of work you keep pretending you haven’t been doing in fits and starts. Like having an intellectual affair with poetry while in a formal relationship with secondary education didn’t do something meaningful to how words take shape, how a story is told.
I keep thinking the story has a beginning and an end, but it doesn’t. I am in it, in its tunnel, and perhaps the book is a flash of light that shows some parts of its shape to another person in hopes that they might find themselves in the glare, the shadows, the shapes, or at the very least choose to be with me here a while so I might be less alone. That’s not true. Yes, there is no beginning or end and I come to my reader in media res but I am not lonely, I am angry, and I want them to hear me so that they don’t learn the things I’ve learned the same way. I want to tell a story like your friend at a dinner table and I want to tell a story like the whispering podcast and I want to tell a story like the rain-soaked hyperventilating stranger begging for help in the door. This will be the book, or so I believe today. Who knows what tomorrow will hold…
The areas in which I feel supported are, ironically, the very areas in which I have always lived with absence. For the first time in so many years I have a space of my own, love in my life worthy of its name, the stones to shed the poisonous and a glimmer of a way forward. The areas where I need support are far less glamorous in their scope, less fun to think about. I need to read more poetry and reviews more regularly and write in response, I need to throw all of the work into a single document and start putting things in some order to admit that they tell one story and belong together, admit I’m writing a book. I need a mentor, a class, something to follow, a structure. I feel amoebic, moving through dark waters with no guide. I need someone to hold my hand and make excitement and expression overtake the dread and self-doubt. Isn’t that what everyone needs?
