Hi friend,
I went scrolling back through my instagram this morning, looking for a photo of something I thought I might write about today, a poster by an artist whose name I was struggling to remember (middle age, wtf!). Scrolling back all those years, watching myself get younger and younger, slimmer and prettier, moving apartments backwards in time, going back to the job I quit, flirting with long ago flirts, finding lost necklaces, seeing friends with whom I’ve fallen from favor — it gave me feelings of nostalgia and regret, two emotions I normally don’t tarry with much. Could it be that this short winter cleanse I’ve been on has surfaced submerged misgiving and longing?
But no, it isn’t the cleanse. In recent weeks before now I’ve struggled similarly: a vague sense of not quite knowing how I am this one who I am now, and not that one who I was then.
And not only that, but that, transformation being perpetual, there’s no precise line across which one steps. No place to pinpoint when one becomes unlike the way one was.
No place to pinpoint when I became unlike the way I was. Is what I mean to say.
Who says I am not like myself? Or that I’m not not the person I think I miss?
Perhaps not “who is” the person so affected by the presence (or absence) of an object, but “where is” that person? New objects displace the familiar sensations.
I mean, I miss my thrills! (Which is precisely the kind of thing one thinks and feels while one is restricting one’s diet and downshifting one’s happy habits. My partner reminds me that just yesterday I said I wouldn’t call gospel on any feelings I was having while fasting.)
But that’s not it. It’s not my thrills I miss. It’s the way I was oriented towards those thrills. When? Once upon a time. What thrills?
Of course there are clear markers of the eras of one’s life. You get together, you break up, you graduate from something, married, divorced, a job, another job, a parent dies, a partner does, a friend, your heroes drop off the map. But when you become other than who you were is difficult to know. Identity is a sham shack, shifting in layers around the core which is stable, that inner-est seed in which we recognize ourselves for who we are. Do you know what I mean?
I should say I. I feel my identity shift in layers around an inner-est seed which does not change and through which I see this shifting shack of “I miss my thrills”.
But this morning, after a good night’s dreaming, I get what the problem is. (Also, I’m beyond the cleanse.)
I know myself as writer, poet, an artist in community with other writers and artists, and for the last several years I’ve been in deep study in a completely other kind of practice, Ayurvedic medicine, in community with people who would like to be healers (and some of them are). Currently neither habit quite fits. (The very word “healer” gives me the pip. I’d say “and it always will!” but that would controvert my thesis, then, wouldn’t it!)
Neither habit doesn’t not quite fit, either, so neither can fall away. The new normal is feeling forward half-sightedly in both.
Another part of the truth has to be the truth of middle age. Smoke, drink, party-all-night, the wild joy of anxious youth, extended far too long into long adulthood, is not a thing I can, or want, to do any longer and for a decade and a half already this has been true. But, wild longing seems to have left my capacity too. I’ve exchanged it, perhaps?, for joyful stability.
On the cleanse I was feeling hungry. Hunger (the elective kind) is a special form of creative joy. Possibly what I miss is the key to consistently creating a cadence those former feelings made for me.
In any case, here’s the image I was scrolling for:
If you look at the poster carefully here you’ll see the faint outline of a perfect circle around the text, text which reads THINGS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. The circle is printed on the reverse side, a dashed line in black. (The letters of the text in outline, a dark blue.) The artist is Will Rogan, and the poster was one of a stack of giveaways shown in a group exhibition “To Your Left is South, To Your Right is North, Depending,” organized by Julie Deamer for Refusalon gallery in San Francisco, in 2001.
Refusalon gallery was one space in a basement suite of spaces, where a fluorescently lit hall led to a series of doors. Before the show opened, Rogan cut a neat circular hole into the exterior wall of the gallery from the hallway, crawled through it, and then restored and repainted the wall. The dashed-line circle on the poster is the precise size of the absent cut. I texted Julie this morning to find out if maybe I was supposed never to mention the fact of this action, and quite to the contrary she told me that no, there may even have been photographs of it on the wall. Now, this poster has been with me all these years, I don’t think there’s a place I’ve lived where I haven’t had it up, and all this time I thought the work made no direct reference to the cut! Now that she’s schooled me, though, I remember how it really went down. At the time, I thought this artwork would have been much improved by not mentioning the action. And I remember myself as that person! (What a purist!) Now I disagree with myself.
Or do I?
Maybe this letter’s a first pass, a rough draft. Perhaps it prevaricates, to avoid some subject I really wanted to address. But what?
The beauty of this form: it slips quickly into the past.
housekeeping
++ An invitation: send me (an image of) an object you might like me to talk / walk/ write through
++ thank you! to everyone who wrote to say you enjoyed hearing my voice in my last post. more audio to come, why not
++ you can always hit reply & say hi and I love it when you do
Your friend,
Suzanne
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I tried to read this first when I was at work but I was doing things too fast--it was all about shifting and sifting--to go at the pace of this piece. Now I'm reading it after falling asleep for five minutes and I'm slow enough to read it twice. I know both of these versions of myself as general concepts but will not remember them specifically later. It is fascinating to read you rewriting one version of yourself from the perspective of another version of yourself that you feel almost as if it's existing right now, although it doesn't quite maybe, both of them noted as having features to highlight. But it seems like it's also all about what you don't remember and won't?
Thank you for the memory stir. I am looking for the small framed photo of Will moving through the hole in the wall. And, yes, I do know what you mean.😌