Overall, it’s a treasure trunk of an album, full of sonic trinkets—
Not all of them will excite every listener, but odds are there will be at least one that scratches an itch.
Julieta Brur is a Berlin-based experimental electronic artist represented by Protomaterial Records, out of Vilapena, Spain. The label specializes in “experimental and creative works”, which makes it a fitting home for her debut album. Heart of the Heart is an eclectic mix of material that is clearly unselfconscious about genre boundaries. Its progression feels like a set tasting menu. Over its course, you’ll get to try out dishes of bitcrushed electronic noise (“I Am Dead” and “Diet Heaven”), gently odd electronic pop (“To Me”), and chilled-out trip hop (“We Were Only Drafting”) reminiscent of Portishead.
“Before It_s Dark” feels darkly whimsical, in the same vein as “Exploration” in the intro sequence of Coraline: like a warning masked as a lullaby, Brur accusatorily sings “you’ve been here” and “you took a piece of sky”, before softly threatening “give it back before it’s dark”. These lyrical premonitions are heavily contrasted by their positioning—a darkness is stuck squarely between naively playful string plucks, hypnotic vocalizations that bloom with reverb, and twinkling synths dressed up as xylophones—like glitches in a daydream. “Cost of Living” and “Scum” read very Late Night Alt Club Scene.
A solid front-to-back listen with polished production, mixing, and composition.
Fans of Snail Mail have been patient. Now, with the release of Ricochet, Lindsey Jordan’s third album, their five-year wait has been justly rewarded.
The album is simultaneously diverse and consistent: there’s continuity of identifiable characteristics present in Valentine, while somehow managing a fresh perspective, both musically and philosophically. Interesting melodies, well-timed peaks and valleys, and heartfelt lyricism help Jordan carefully carve her way through interrelated existential themes—her evolving perception of time and identity, clashing optimism and anxiety about the future, and emphasis on the pervasiveness of life’s bittersweetness.
Strings sound exceptional, which makes sense: she worked with four studio musicians on strings alone. There seems to be a country influence in terms of guitar tone, most notably on tracks 1, 5, and 6, and I can’t help but wonder if this is part of the Wednesday influence on indie rock music. I had one small complaint: her use of “na na na” (at the end of “Dead End”) and “la la la” (at the end of “Nowhere”). This stylistic choice unintentionally comes across as filler, either due to a lack of lyrical content or a lack of patience to let the instrumental do the lifting. Regardless, it’s a well-written album overall and proves Snail Mail definitely still has something to say.
Evidence—January through March
When January ended, I posted my personal “digest” on Instagram. I wanted a pill-sized time capsule that could average an image of my life through the lens of the media I had engaged with. The format intrigued me for several reasons, but here are the two best: time travel and the study of self.
My nostalgic side dreams of the archival quality: access to a personal library of lived dioramas could feel like flipping through a sensory album of sight, thought, and sound. To chronicle the inner lived experience across time is to gain the ability to traverse it, study it, guide it. feelings and moods of the past can mix into a clay to shape new ones. Or, they can simply aid the act of remembering: when so much of life—work schedules, goal setting, project planning—is prescriptive, there’s relief in admiring the completed seasons with the same intensity we place on the value of the future ones. Three months in, and my hand has been glued to the heart of self-appreciation. I am looking at the evidence of my ‘self’ and understanding there’s proof of life. I am curious and engaged. I am doing just fine.
The experiment feels important to me because trying to identify my true ‘self’ has always felt like attempting to look right at the sun. I thought if I could just see its shape directly, I would finally understand. But selfhood is fluid and changing. It is easier and more enjoyable to see it peripherally; here is the coalescence of media that shaped my life across a month, and here is what that did to me. Here is what the sun felt like. Here is what I want to feel next.
I knew my biggest challenge from the outset: I’d have to resist the impulse to scrutinize the output to shreds. If I want to be an archivist of my life, the practice has to be honest and the motive entirely personal. This is the only way it can work. I want to explore for the sake of exploration. So, I require myself to have the desire to share, so that sharing does not become driven by its consumption. common sense, but it’s something worth reminding myself. And, despite the joy I feel in sharing, it still has its challenges. Being seen takes practice. Exposure is a habit. Over the past few years, I’ve been throwing myself into heart-pounding situations in the name of “getting out of my comfort zone”. Does the unease ever go away? I’m not sure it does.
The investigation is still underway, but the past is already here. And its portrait is this: an impressionist painting of January, February, and March. A little triptych. Here it goes…
——
January
It is the first day of the year. I start and finish Evidence by Mary Oliver and cry all small and quiet. So soft it barely happens. This, in a single afternoon, winter sun slanting low through the window by the dining table. Out of pure random chance, it is the first book of the month and of the whole year, slotting itself into that coveted position of its own accord. It seems to buzz, emit a tingly magnetism in my hands as I turn the pages. Everything is data, and I’m awake to its gathering.
There is a spot for it on the far left of my bookshelf, where the annual tally will begin. I return to my desk, place a square label on the front of my square sketchbook, and write: ‘Evidence’.
—
I’m in the drugstore coffee shop with Orphic Paris by Henri Cole. The late morning is grey and crusted with old snow and so aggressively cold. I’m already dreading the return walk to my apartment. Orb lights hang stiffly in a row at the ends of poles jutting down from the ceiling. They glow yellow, attempting a countercharm against the dull sky pressing in against the windows behind the espresso machine. The table too is yellow. Laminate. No matter– Henri and I are standing in a cemetery, walking the narrow streets, pondering a taxidermied bird, listening to bees, remembering things only he could know. I could be back in Paris. Flat light, heavy introspection. It’s all here.
—
I keep encountering mirrors in the media that I find, or that find me. These are explorations of identity, purpose, and perseverance. I fantastically become a determined worm in the dirt (“keep on going like a worm in the dirt / don’t give up now”) in Dora Jar’s “Timelapse”. Do women have a special fondness for worms? I often see us comparing ourselves to and imagining ourselves as them. Remember when we were all asking our boyfriends if they’d still love us if we were worms? When I ask M what he would do if I were a worm, he asks no questions about what led me to the form or what level of consciousness I maintain. Instead of humouring the bit and promising me a spot in his shirt pocket, he tells me he’d put me back in the dirt. Huh? Where is the fun in that? Why can’t we play pretend? (Upon his advance reading of this piece, he would like to clarify that putting me in the dirt would be temporary, and for my own enrichment, like play time. I’d come find you later, he tells me.)
—
At some point, without any prompting, I tell my sister that The Bell Jar isn’t what I’d thought it would be. She asks what I thought it would be. I say I don’t know, just different. This amuses us, the vagueness of it.
—
M and I arrive at the B&B. It is a grey-blue attic room above a garage, illegal on a technicality but grandfathered into permanence. We both find it charming. Here’s something: it is astonishingly quiet as the days pass. Sometimes a dog is barking a few backyards away. You can walk the whole perimeter of the town in under half an hour quite easily. I like to listen to the CDs I brought alongside my old clock radio.
In the night, the wind howls like a punished spirit. It unsettles me, rattles the bones of the attic, but M is fast asleep. The train wails, too. There is a subtle tone of agony in both of these voices, travelling toward me like premonitions. They take turns warning the town at intervals. Fittingly, trains had recently cropped up in my reading of A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews.
Because of their sudden, heightened emphasis, I can’t stop thinking about how much trains freak me out. I think about them for practically two weeks straight. I tense, stupidly, every time one of them plows through the darkness. In my unrealistic anxieties, I am always uselessly anticipating disaster; the ground rumbles, vibrating into my bones, and this means a dirty steel giant is coming to kill me.
The memoir does more than remind me of trains, though. It takes me around Winnipeg, around the world, across language alive and fading, over self and family and life and death… and into the core of writerly reason, or the foundational yet evasive ‘why?’. I started to wonder too. Why? Why write?
—
I like to walk when I want to stop thinking, ironically. Or maybe it’s to process a clogged thought so that I might continue thinking. A memorial bench rests on a small slope above a half-frozen creek. I sit down to watch the water move. The tears fall. I hadn’t expected to cry at this moment, but I am also not surprised by it. There’s been a heaviness draped over the world in recent times, more so than usual. I do what I can, but mostly all I can do is feel, feel, feel. I try to convince myself that my depth of feeling is a radical act. I apologize to the earth. How awfully disappointing it must be to host our horrors.
Without knowing why, I pull out my phone and take a picture of my salty-wet face. I think I want to validate the depth by documenting it, in case I forget what it’s like, in case the systems at play attempt to dull me. I want to stay sharp. Not like a weapon, but like a needle to deliver an antidote.
—
A bright, windy morning. M and I are about to leave the small town, the smallest of the constellar trio tucked into the mountain pass. He doesn’t drink coffee, but I do, and he obliges my request to stop for one. The destination turns out to be a tiny, bright green A-frame house with a screen door, above which a sign reads “Cafe & Fly Shop”. I order a latte, then stand in front of the illuminated flatlay of faux bugs, each kind resting in its own wooden compartment. My eyes are devouring the sparkly flies, and I’m taking pictures of my favourites. I might as well be a fish, the way they affect me.
I don’t fly fish, I admit quite obviously to the baristas when I return to the counter to buy a neon fly. I am just deeply fascinated by the aesthetics. They laugh and nod, but I don’t think they really understand what I mean. There is art everywhere. A small prosthetic bug is also a miniature sculpture if you say it is. Why shouldn’t it be? One of the baristas thoughtfully hands me a small plastic condiment container so I can transport my new art piece without poking myself.
Soon after, M pulls off the highway for us to see a famous dead tree. The wind is strong enough to lean back against. We laugh as we try it. I stare at that petrified tree, its gnarled black silhouette statuesque against the bright blue sky. The grasses around it thrash and ripple in unison, but the tree just stands there, unaffected. This seems partly because of the metal rod fastening one of its ambitious branches to the earth, but I mostly think it’s because of the supernatural longevity of trees.
A cog jerks into motion within me. It stirs up that profound bittersweetness of being alive. I’d felt it before, most recently in an old-growth forest along a different highway. There’s something to do with feeling suddenly and incredibly small under a vast blanket of time. There’s deep-rooted and incomprehensible wonder. Being in the presence of old trees is spiritual.
Virginia Woolf said the saddest part of a view is that it will still be here when we’re not. I think she was right at the time. But now? In the context of rapid human destruction of the planet, I believe the saddest part of a view is that it may not be here when we’re gone–that our children and their children and so on may not get to witness it, feel it, be formed by it. We can see infinity shrinking, and the end has a flavour we’ve started to taste.
——
February
february is but a blip. it goes like this: I celebrate my birthday,
which has always felt tricky because of its singular emphasis: you
get this one shot, so don’t blow it! I mean,
to celebrate anything is sort of difficult. how does one
live up to the word? am I fully getting at the feeling, or
am I imitating it until it feels real? how will I know that
I’m having fun after all? bewildering is a word
that might describe it, me, trying to practice elation
correctly, trying to drop my shoulders before the flash can
freeze me in time, and often, with the internal pressure
of the day spilling over into the rest of the days—am I enough?
grateful? patient? accepting? happy? successful
enough?
it’s hard to say what the word means to me, so unsure
of whether anything I do will prove me to myself, so convinced
there is a secret right way to do things, so if someone could
hurry up and clue me in, well, then…
all I want to do is lie on the earth, arm dangling
into the creek, cheek warm on a river stone, thinking
about as close to nothing as possible. but the cold’s still
here, still interrupting the budding thaw, refusing to be
forgotten, really leaning into the encore of the freezing sky
and when the day has faded long enough, had it ever
really happened? or was it a dream dispatched
from another realm?
questions. accepting the passing clouds
through future sleepy summer blinks.
everything is absurd. everything is okay.
——
March
I am doing it. I am scared. I am doing it, scared. I’m looking inside my obsessive heart. There’s an obvious desire to be brave and also prolific. There’s the trick in my brain that lies about a clean cut creating a tidy before and after. That’s who I was, and this is who I am from here on out. Now I will be exactly who I want to be.
No. It is never that simple. nothing is. At Commonwealth, I hover above myself: purple and blue and red lights beaming at the other me on the stage. It is difficult to watch her like this. She is moving and singing and erasing the memory card in real time. There are unidentifiable people blended into one crowd, which helps her ignore all the eyes. It’s normal to be nervous, but the sensation argues its singularity: other people can do this, so why can’t you? You are the only one to have ever felt like this aghhhh.
Not true, obviously.
Back in my body, I smile, think, I am smiling. I am having fun, like I wanted. See? And it feels real enough to accept it as reality. Then the event is over, and there is a rush of insane confidence, which must be the reality. Back at home, the magic has already begun to level. I shower, eat a late-night snack. I don’t know. Does anyone actually like being looked at? not seen, seen is lovely… but watched, looked at? Is it uncomfortable for me because I know the world’s tendency to view me as an ‘object’? If I were a man, would it be easier? Regardless, I have learned that bravery, or at least the progress on the other end of it, is about repetition. and the repetition is either made from resolved acceptance or optimistic compulsion. or both: I can see the glowing future, but getting there involves force-feeding myself cough syrup or black licorice.
—
warp
still, a burning desire to exist
in the world that wakes only once
I fall asleep. so here it is:
another one. we are both there. you, extending
pale blue arms in the dreamlight, laughing as you do,
saying all the time that we’ve figured it out and will forget
by morning, sweep the pieces, scatter them along
the floor, the popcorn ceiling seems different
upon waking, kernels of white are simply hiding stars, vast
constellations of stippled paint, and my eyes do that zoom
thing they do when they can’t determine the distance, and
desperately try to calculate the bedroom, to enact math
as the dimension shifts and the heart sinks, now I notice
the soft-tissued wound where the connection severed
off, where you stepped on, in, boarded that train to reality
until walls replaced infinity, until the beat of loss ran pulsing
through time and space, declaring a new song, and,
well, we’re just dying
to meet again, to share an exclamation, laughter, those
knowing looks, you know, the ones
where we could really see
—
The trilogy is now coming to a close. Will it be neat, or will it bleed like dye on cloth? I’m on my path and don’t know where exactly it leads, but I trust it is the one I needed to take. One day, I am sick as a dog. One day, I will have improved, in time.
Time. It rolls onward with the changing season. The love stays true in me, plentiful. J shows me her new checkered kitchen floor and giant red chandelier in her Berlin apartment. We are so far apart. for now, for now. The Blue Morpho brothers framed on the wall gleam blue from their tricksy scales. My sister makes me laugh at everything. M and I bake banana bread together. I think I love myself. I think it’s a choice. Nothing is perfect, and everything is perfect. I know this because I have all the evidence.
I am allowed ease. I think to myself, unexpectedly one morning, plainly, I want to soften. like a once-forgotten mantra. Yes, it is almost spring, and I want to soften.
——
Thank you for reading.
One of many somethings: imagination as obsession, cringe as evolution, and art as innate
I do this thing… that I guess I feel weird about. Not because I’ve ever had any intention of ever sharing it, but because I’d always felt that the practice or the desire was just inherently weird… and like, uncomfortable, even on a personal, private level.
I don’t think that gets talked about a lot–the feeling that you are uncomfortable with something, even in complete privacy. It’s sort of like you’re being watched, but by a bodiless entity who kind of thinks you’re an idiot. And it’s likely to do with anxiety, or imposter syndrome, or negative past experiences of judgment and shame, or just having a wildly active imagination. Or maybe it’s all of those. For me, it’s all of those.
I’ve always logically known there was nothing wrong with the hyperfixation. Not morally, not practically, etc., etc. But, because I had, of course, analyzed it to death, there was always that lingering current of “I dislike that I’m like this. It feels freakish and isolating”. That current ran beneath my inner life, zapping upward at me from a murky place of embarrassment. It didn’t matter that it was innocuous or unspoken; my personal judgment goblin would still show up, uninvited.
It’s not an easy living situation. Shocker, I know. I think writing often feels like confession for me. Or, it feels like it needs to be, or like I need it to be. And sharing it feels like a self-prescribed humiliation ritual, only magnified whenever I try to measure it with artificial metrics. Views and likes can’t accurately show me meaning or value, so I shouldn’t use them to determine the worthiness of the writing or my sharing of it. I’d also like to stop mindlessly and subconsciously using that artificiality to measure others, in isolation or comparison. I’ve felt firsthand how easy it is to fall into it as an artist: logic says this isn’t real data, feeling says it’s everything. Maybe the tug-of-war is eternal, I don’t know.
Okay, where were we? Oh, right. Ugh, here’s the imaginative instance we’re talking about today: I do this thing where I collect images and words and other sensory input… and sort them. I place them into different personas. Many are my own parallel selves, with differing proximities to my current reality. Some are mysteries to me, inhabiting a collection almost of their own making, personifying a particular consciousness that I can’t always trace perfectly all the way back into the misty labyrinth of my subconscious. But alas, here they are. And here I am, looking at all these people and wondering who they are and if any of them are me. Or could be. Or shouldn’t be.
‘Okay, so you imagine different versions of yourself. You come up with characters. Nothing embarrassing about that. People imagine things all the time.’
This is what you say to me. Fine, fine, but here’s the thing… I would like to chill out if I could… and I know that won’t happen. The ‘but what if!!’ compartment of my brain is so persuasive like that. I have tried to logic my way out of anxiety, depression, adhd, asd, the list goes on. Obviously, it did not work (nor did it need to have worked, but that’s besides the point for now). With that said, you’d think this imagination of scenarios might be a bit different. But, at some point, the fragments reach the power to start feeling real, taking on lives of their own. If I begin to inhabit their worlds, if they creep into mine…then what? That omniscient embarrassment over the vividness of my imagination is a constant tide in my life. One of several, but anyway…when it’s low, I run way out into the soggy, hard-packed sand of what once was and wonder how the hell I was ever drowning in it. Then, when it rushes back, I feel certain the expanse of exposed seabed and littering of shells was all a strange dream (how could anything have been so free and wide?).
It’s an identity simulacrum, really. Or multiple at once. OR the formation and destruction of them are the simulacrum itself. Because I do try on selves in real life too. Most people do, I think. But I’m still curious… did the process happen first in simulation and melt into reality, or are both a co-occurrence? In other words, did my permission for the simulation’s existence give rise to the self-permission for my real-world experimentation?
Hyperfixation. It is really an excellent word. Sometimes these semi-forged identities (desired or not) become obsessions. I must study them to fully understand them. I’m not exactly sure where the compulsion comes from, but it’s really there when it’s there. The most addictive identities are the ones I struggle to understand or relate to, whether I desire to or not. Anything opposite to self or experience, whether innocent or taboo, becomes a thorough, nearly scientific examination.
I like to get really specific with it. I have to. I rarely see the point in doing anything halfway. Imaginative activities included. It’s why I’ve hardly ever been the first to finish what I’m doing at those paint-your-own-pottery places, as an example. I always beg myself to do something straightforward, but I simply can’t help myself, and never listen.
The first instance of intense world-building was in grade four or five. I had just one friend at school. I was jealous that her name started with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet, while mine was near the end. I was jealous that she could draw on her shoes without getting in trouble from her parents. I don’t know if she was jealous of anything about me. I’ll never know.
We sat alone during recess and created entire worlds in our notebooks, with detailed rules, currency, marketplaces, and, of course, an array of characters. They probably represented ourselves and people we knew, although we never said so. They probably also made visible the uglier parts of our realities, but again, we never said so. Many of my characters were orphans or amputees. I think the visibility of their situations appealed to me.
These were our dream journals. That’s what we called them, which is strange considering they weren’t perfect utopias. And the practice wasn’t a one-off activity. No, we were committed. We did this every day for at least the entire school year, gradually adding to, subtracting from, and editing our multiverses. I don’t remember when or why we stopped. Time is weird when you’re a kid. Reality can bend.
Recently, I wrote a story, not about her, but naming one of my characters after her. More recently, I edited the name out. If I’m going to write her name, it might as well be in the actual story she’s in: the one in my real life. I won’t tell it right here; I’ll save it for later, when I have decided how I want to tell it. For now, I just wonder if she still has these imaginative tendencies, or if she acts on them. Sometimes I wonder if she ever remembers or thinks of me. If I dare more broadly, I wonder if anyone has ever written about me, fictionally or non-fictionally. And, after I wonder this, I feel selfish for it… but never regretfully so.
But back to feeling weird about everything I do. Super hate that and super don’t know what started it. Was I susceptible to it, genetically or environmentally? It has always felt like this, so it’s not like I ever knew a comparable “before”, but still. I remember never feeling “normal”. I remember screaming at my mom, “No one understands me”. I understand that me now. But at the time, did I just assume serious glitches were going on inside me? That I had, at some invisible point, been permanently altered? Or had it been external, formed from a small shame that snowballed linearly with time until it was of a lethal size? Whatever it was could only be felt as incorrect. A source-blurred undertone of wrongness, alive.
—
Something recent. One of many somethings:
There’s a newly realized and vital distinction that I must develop for myself when it comes to the choice of whether to share my writing and which writing to share, and it has less to do with honesty and more to do with metabolization. It’s like: I can and will say the true thing, but is it showing up in a way that gives its truth justice? Does it give it room to evolve? Does it offer nuance?
I think the reduction of barriers to self-publishing art (music, visual art, writing, etc), while overwhelmingly a good thing, does carry the risk of self-exposure before proper metabolization within oneself. Increased access to this kind of exposure, combined with the immediacy culture of social media, means that artists of all kinds are forced to act on or compare themselves against a norm of rapid production and release, to a degree that humans have never experienced.
—
I’m no exception to its pull–I look back on younger selves with a mix of pride and embarrassment. The feeling is valid, but without a proper container for it. Of course I cringe rereading my older work: my craft has improved to the point where prior work feels outdated at a certain age. I know this isn’t unique to me, but I can’t help but wonder how much shame we’re placing on our past truths when their only flaw was in their containers, in how they were shaped and delivered. Shame and embarrassment were expanding in my chest and across my face until I had the thought– but this is the only way it could have happened. How else can you become great, or even good, at something unless you are first a beginner? And boy oh boy, being a beginner publicly is really hard.
I think this is expounding on extremes for young artists in today’s rapidly accelerating technological age. It’s both: making it difficult for more reserved and disadvantaged artists to experiment freely to find their footing, while simultaneously speeding up artistic refinement for the louder and perhaps more privileged creators who are more unapologetic in their failing forward.
So what do we do with this? Do we expect the former to metamorphose into the latter? I can see the social pressure to assume this is the only option, especially online. The expectations of immediacy culture have not only altered our perception of what constitutes adequate creative output in terms of frequency, but also our perception of artistic validity/merit in terms of that output’s delivery: medium, aesthetics, and level of polish (even for works that desire to seem “real” and laid back).
And, aside from the practicality of building careers as artists, what is this doing to our ability to even conceptualize our art in the first place?
I was in preschool when I made the best thing I’ll ever make, or at least, it’s my personal favourite. What I made that day was a collage. A colourful translucent paper collage made up of hands- my hands, that I traced and cut out with the help of a teacher. The hands were each a different colour. The two on the top faced the same direction, thumbs on the left. The three on the bottom faced the opposite direction, thumbs on the right. Each hand overlapped only once with another. So simple, but there was something there. Only, was it? And why is it my favourite? I had to ask myself.
Turns out it was not in the art itself, but in what I felt looking at it…and isn’t that the art?
I also think it has to do with its purity. Undistilled, uninfluenced. It is the most raw and real art I have ever made and will ever make–unimbued with/unburdened by internalized expectations, comparison, criticism, thematic objectivism, subconscious influence of theory, etc. From that moment on, the “burdens” begin to accumulate as you grow and develop into a fully formed person.
Some may say this innocence is what makes the art “bad”, and by that, I think they mean lacking skill, or meaningless, or directionless. But haven’t we gone so far in the other direction at times that we’ve failed to imagine this manifestation of art as beautiful, or complete as it is? We’re trying our hardest to curate, to perform, to reform, to aspire. This is undoubtedly an aspect of art that can make it interesting, but it isn’t our only formula, and it doesn’t work for everyone. The pressure to copy and paste is very real, but when broken down, it just doesn’t compute.
Back then, there was nothing inside me telling me how I ought to start or when I ought to stop or how I ought to go about the middle portion of the process. I just saw, felt, metabolized, and produced. Not linearly in the way we tend towards as we age; it all happened at once, or traded different combinations until my little brain was either satisfied with the result or tired, but either way, there was a blissfully unobstructed “happening” and then a conclusive “complete” regardless of how I felt about it. In my memory sits a vague recollection of the room, its classic classroom scent (Elmer’s craft glue, crayons, and some loosely medicinal disinfectant–softer than a trip to the doctor’s office, but omnipresent in a way you become accustomed to until it’s basically forgotten), and the sensation of being. Of sort of knowing I existed, and sort of knowing what that was. My earliest memories of being were from this era of life and included the preschool art sessions and little else.
I suppose you could take this full circle by arguing that “imperfection” and “incompletion” are not worthy detractors from the desire or plan to share the work of art. Agreed. But what I’m really saying is: what if we were able to create without worry again and intuitively know what we were doing without trying so (!) hard (!) all (!) the (!) time (!)?
What if improving our craft and defining our own success felt easy? Need it be an “uphill battle”? Need it be any kind of battle? This isn’t to imply that highly curated and perfected pieces are too self-serious and that only proof of the realistic should provide “success” or admiration. It’s an invitation to invite honesty and individuality into our individual artistic practices– a permission to grant ourselves full selfness in a world that tries to make us all compete on a single plane with boring, standardized metrics. To remember we can do whatever we want, and that our power as meaning-makers actually comes from that openness, not despite our strained efforts to pass it through a singular, popular funnel.
—
There is a photo wall at the place where I started volunteering. I was told all the new volunteers would make it up there over time, as the photos accumulated. I had only started my shifts a few weeks prior. It seemed so caring to have been included in this kind of emotional forethought. Little old me? Already a consideration for the wall? Huh.
Less than a week later, I dreamt a dream that mattered from a place so deep I hadn’t known it was there. A cave so treacherous that I had rightfully forgotten it in my lack of reason to go there, or lack of instruction to get there, had I even wanted to go.
In both hands, I grip a picture of my child self. She is smiling. The way she is smiling always hurts me to look at. She, we, can’t remember who is taking the photo or who else is in the room, just that it’s a classroom. Her (our) shirt is red (When did she—we—stop wearing red?) I ask if I can put this photo on the photo wall, instead of the one that was about to be taken. They say, of course you can. Excited, I tack it up on the wall, next to everyone else. I stand back and look at it. Was it the smile that got me this time, or was it something else? I puzzled. No one is speaking, or I am not listening. I just stand there, staring at the photo of myself that I hardly recognize but desperately and mysteriously ache over. It is like I am waiting for something.
And, suddenly, there it was: all her life until right then, she had been viewed, but had rarely been seen. Not truly. Not like this. Not every day for everyone to notice. A belonging, finally. Tears welled.
It had become too much, and the dream fractured. I awoke halfway. My eyes were coated with real tears. That surprised me, and I awoke further. I mentally checked that I was awake. The feeling was real because it lingered long after the dream ended. The message was immediately clear. There was an energy vortex around me, building in momentum. Things were happening. There it was again, that cusp feeling. That I’m on the brink of something good, I just know it. No proof, just “spidey senses”.
—
I’m more able to see flaws with my work now, because that’s how hindsight works. Otherwise, we’d all be perfect, and, well, incredibly bland. The journey creates texture and insight. I’m disinterested in generalizations, but here’s what I’ve found to be sitting in the pit of me, so I have nothing to lose in clacking a few words onto my screen and seeing if this presence sits in you too.
Forget fighting for a minute. Consider travelling joyfully. Sailing smoothly. Moving in a way and at a pace that feels comfortable and meaningful. Whatever it looks like for you. Regardless of mode or method, I think the question becomes: if you aren’t coming from somewhere else, from anywhere else at all, then how are you approaching anything new? Are you even arriving, or had you just never moved in the first place?
I’ve been given insight into my dilemma with being seen. I desire to be seen through the clarity of what I’ve made, which becomes distorted when I wander into territory where I directly ask to be seen or tell you how I want you to see me. I have to be the only one I can convince of how to see myself. The rest has to come from the way the work speaks for itself. I cannot force an image. I’ve never been that good at it. Outright lying is also difficult. Possible, but so weighted with mental energy entry barriers that it’s never seemed logical. It also just mean, and I’ve decided to be nice at all costs. So, there’s that.
At the end of the day, or whatever time it is for them on this random spinning rock, I want the reader to do a little “oh…huh”, or “so that’s a combination of words that perfectly describes something I couldn’t name”. I do not want them to go “wow, she’s desperate for me to understand her”.
Even if I am desperate to be understood. And I know we all are.
——
Thank you for reading.