There is writing that needs to be done right now. There is a creative voice that needs to be listened to, and there is a much larger, stronger, louder voice that thinks you are stupid and unable to do what you have set out to do. Ignore that voice. Please, ignore it.
Author: Alex
MFA student, writer.
Light House
One morning, I found myself peering into a crevasse deeper and stranger than I’d known. It ran right through me, right through the center of my abdomen and as much as I tried, even my own arms weren’t long enough to reach all the way in there. Though the topography of my body was new and strange, my partner, kind enough to act as though there wasn’t a great rift in my being, took me and my crevasse to the ocean.
Clambering down hundreds of zig-zagging steps we found a tiny house on the beach, a structure whose front porch lay ten paces from the waves’ farthest reach at low tide. Inside, a black cat, a radio, and a friend all sat together by a window looking out to the sea. The friend handed us both hooded wetsuits and we slid into the frigid water, tumbling over breaking waves and fighting off riptides that bound our ankles in kelp. Sea foam entered the place in my middle that had opened up and it stung, so I sat in the shallows for a while and watched as the tide entered and exited my body, looking on at the play. From the house, the black cat watched.
The sun began to set and the temperature began to drop, so we pulled ourselves inside and made a fire. The opening in my center felt clean and cool from all the salt and foam, and as much as I examined it, even by the bright flame all I could see was dark. “In flux, we find flow and prime,” my friend murmured to the radio as he moved its dials swiftly through static.
The sun was not quite gone so I climbed a cliff to watch it melt through layers of fog into the waxy sea. The black cat trailed behind me. At the highest point I could find, I stood and let wind enter my body through the crevasse as the sun gave way to a full moon rising up behind us. Then, both our sets of green eyes tracking it like prey, I reached up and swatted down the moon, trapping it between my hands. It was damp and soft like moss, and very much alive. In one quick move I swallowed it whole, and for a moment the sky was empty and all was black. Then, as the moon traveled down into my abdomen its light appeared again, pouring out of the once-empty place in my middle.
I watched as ships in the distance turned their bows in my direction and began sailing.
this
is such a beautiful thing that I am a part of. I’m not sure I can express to you what it is, but I can tell you what it means.
It means that I am privy to the most secret moments, to the things we do when we think we are alone and we are afraid and uncertain. Do we grasp so desperately at experience that in fear we swallow the entirety of it whole so that there is nothing left to appreciate? Do we freeze, unfamiliar with advocating for oneself and incapable of moving forward unless we are instructed to do so by a person we deem authoritative? What about an object, or a text? Do we trust a sign as much as we trust a human being, so long as it looks official? I am a [mostly] humble witness to the questions that box us about the ears and pinch us in our most tender places.
“Hello?” she calls, into the darkness to meet no response. “Hello?” I hear her, but I do not move. She does not need me.
She moves forward on her own accord.
I am the dark, and I am holding you.
Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst
Today while doing some research on Remedios Varo, I came across this painting of hers that I’d never seen before. “Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst” is bitterly funny to me when I think about my experiences with male psychotherapists. I can’t stop thinking about exiting a session and peeling off the analysis part as I return to the world. I just jotted down a quick, rough poem about it:
By age 20 I thought I’d emptied myself
completely and fully
purged of cobwebs that gather in the places where bones meet
spots damp with cumulus clouds laid out to dry in the sun
ribs cracked open
flesh peeled back, pinned
exposed, splayed, light.
No more to show, I am flat now
every acre explored
every inch claimed,
staked, identified,
colonized.
I have recorded the depths of all my rivers
heights of my mountains
classified what is bountiful,
what is endangered,
what is irretrievably lost.
We have quantified my resources
allocated to places that are underdeveloped
and here you are
the man who will draw me my maps
while himself remaining unexplored territory.
What you don’t know
is that I have learned since then
how to once more let myself grow wild
set fires screaming through the suburbs you so carefully pieced out
stop hacking at blackberry brambles, sweet and thick and bloody
flood the rivers until they send out water to all the places that have been parched
by diagnostics, by pathology, by the defining of my madness.
I am summoning earthquakes from my core
to topple the metropolis that was never mine,
I am letting you fall
like overripe fruit.
dive
October 2014
Kolymbari, Crete
In which I dive and meditate on pee.
I have decided to dive. I want to wander in another way instead of down streets. Streets are everywhere. I choose a dive shop in Kolymbari because it is close to me (15 km, like the closest market to the remote village I’m staying in) and Chania is farther and full of tourists. When I do a Google search for Kolymbari the only options are one olive oil tour and one dive shop. I find the dive shop walking around on my first day and schedule to dive the next day.
I wake up nervous because the last time I dove was over a year ago and it was in the freshwater cave system in the Yucatan, Mexico. The cenotes are chambers that resemble limestone cathedrals, with hyperrealistic visibility and an almost complete absence of any life forms. The cenotes were the water source and supposedly sacred burial and ritual grounds for the Mayans. The current-less water demands from its explorers utter stillness and perfect neutral buoyancy, while not kicking or breaking off delicate crystal and stalagmite formations with clumsy fins or tanks. It feels like swimming in a skeleton, or how I’d imagine it is to be religious. Earlier this year I tried to dive in the cold brown waters of Monterey with a friend, but after five minutes of clinging to the same kelp stalk and joining the nonplussed sea life as we were ripped back and forth by the current in the world’s most violent tennis match, we made eye contact and no hand signal was needed for us both to surface and call it in.
Today the divers are only me and a professional rugby player my age from Holland. His name is Ashley, and I find it funny that by conventional American standards our names are mis-gendered (I’m Alex). My guide is Stathis, who is not much older than me, who’s bright and animated with short hair, a beard and a muscular back. Ashley’s guide is Georges, who owns the shop. Georges looks like Robert Redford in his 50’s and chain smokes hand-rolled cigarettes, even as he drives the boat. He’s got just the right amount of saltiness, and as they say and although I’m not sure how you can, you can tell he’s seen some shit. We will all go together but we will each stick by our designated dive masters.
On the boat ride over I find out that Stathis is ex-paramilitary, and Georges was a Navy Seal. Stathis is in his first year of being divemaster, but Georges has done over 50,000 dives. He and his friends are the ones diving the Antikythera shipwreck at 55 meters (180 feet) in specially-designed exosuits. The site, which I’ve hungrily read about in my fascination with underwater archaeology and sunken cities, is not far from here, on another island. The men joke that I’m the safest girl in Greece right now.
They tell us we’re going to dive an underwater city, an archaeological site whose remnants are over 6,000 years old. My jaw drops and I think they may have chosen it partially because I immediately asked about Antikythera. The site is named after the close-by beach, Menies, but the city was built on a remote peninsula, and named Diktinna after the Cretan god of war. Diktinna, though male, bears similarity to the goddess Artemis of the Greek pantheon. When the city collapsed, parts of the temple fell into the ocean and remain there for divers to see at angles and proximities unachievable on land. Scattered among the columns, Georges explains with mainly hand gestures, are mines and rockets leftover from World War II. Don’t worry, he gesticulates, they won’t explode if you touch them. He mimes an explosion, “boom!” and then shakes his head.
When we arrive and drop the anchor, I see what I think are shaggy dogs scurry across Menies beach in the distance, but quickly realize that they’re wild goats. We dive, and the water is crystal clear. The sky is partly cloudy and the sun strobes across the white sandy bottom. I immediately want to dance on it, glide across it in a gravity-less tango impression, the world’s biggest ballroom floor. The ruins are disguised by sea life, turned into a manmade reef, but they are obviously ruins. Stathis touches mines, points out fractured columns, although they’re impossible to miss. I make up stories and narratives in my head as I swim and occasionally push myself off the massive ruins with a single finger. How fitting that these mines and rockets, modern skeletons of combat and industry should lay buried among the ancient temple of a war god. I think about the future, about diving to see the felled bodies of predator drones, the splayed and broken wings of these metallic insects scattered throughout the Red Sea. Bug splats, indeed.
Stathis picks up pottery, entire clay bowls covered in barnacles. He hands them to me. He points out a decorative spiral carved onto one of the column fragments. I trace it with my finger. Ashley and Georges go up, because Ashley is out of air. We stay and I come up after an hour with nearly a third of a tank left.
I am quiet for a while as we drive to the next site. I want to remember the stories and I have a headache. It’s rougher here, and when we go down I sink fast. I look at my gage but don’t feel like converting meters to feet to figure how deep we are so I just follow. We swim for a while and the reef is more alive here. There are different types of fish, more colors. I see grouper and scorpion fish. The rock itself looks like pieces of clay that have been squeezed hard by giant hands, with the dips and cavities impressed by Cretan god fingers. There are lots of holes and crevices to peer into, and on the non-reef side are fields of short, soft purple kelp.
Eventually we split off in our pairs, and I realize that my head is starting to pound. The back of my neck is stiff and constricted in the hooded suit I’m wearing. We come across a school of small silver fish, which I’ve seen before, but I notice myself hanging transfixed in the traffic of their sparkling city, obsessed with the way I’ve forgotten whether I’m floating in the sea or the air. Even the fish can’t tell me as I entertain for a moment the idea that they’re flying too. The water is blue enough to confuse.
I start to lose track of myself and my place in the blue, noting how tired I’m becoming. I can see everything and nothing at the same time, only different shades of the same color spanning forever. I am falling behind Stathis, and my limbs start to hurt. I consider panicking but it would take too much effort. Suddenly I can only think about whether I should pee in my wetsuit right then, because I remember I’ve had to pee for hours now. I become very concerned with whether Stathis will be able to tell if I pee in my wetsuit. Is the water so clear that you can tell what is and what isn’t ocean-liquid? Can you even see pee in the ocean? What if the compressed air has left me dehydrated and you can definitely tell I’m peeing because of the color? But colors are distorted underwater, right? What if this wetsuit is too thick and I just end up with pee up to my neck, swimming forever in my own urine? I know what it’s like to clean pee-soaked wetsuits (working as crew on a South African cage diving boat, I learned a common reaction to being surrounded by Great White sharks is to pee, and I also know some people choose to stay warm this way on cold dives) and it is both very obvious and very unpleasant. If I pee will he be able to see it in my eyes that I’m peeing? I really like the lady in the dive shop. I think about her cleaning my wetsuit and also I think about a ruptured bladder and wonder if that’s a thing. Maybe I can clean my own wetsuit. I’m sure they’ll understand.
I obsess about pee.
Suddenly I realize I am very nauseous and my headache has spread down my neck. I want to take a nap and I think this is probably not a good sign. I don’t know how long it’s been but I know that I don’t want to vomit into my regulator, because although it’s possible to do so, I also know I’ll probably panic and spit out the regulator and choke on water. After a few attempts I grab Stathis’ leg and invent a signal for headache, which is touching my head and rolling my eyes around. We slowly climb shallower and I want to go up faster, because the more distant the bottom grows the more nauseous I become. We finally surface near, but not next to the boat, where Ashley and Georges have come up just before us. Stathis says I can hold onto him and throw up, no problem. I don’t, but he guides me onto the boat and I sit with one of the most splitting headaches of my life. I try to make a joke about the worst hangover ever.
“It’s the nitrogen. You’ll be ok in half an hour,” says Stathis. I sputter exhaustedly about this never being a problem before as I try and catch my breath with my head in my hands. “Hey, it happens all the time at 24 meters. You don’t even realize you’re down there until you start feeling like shit.”
“24 meters?” I ask. “That’s like…” I can’t do the math right now.
“80 feet,” calls Georges from the captain’s seat. His cigarette smoke is blowing back onto me as I try and stare only at the horizon. It’s incredibly rough here. I haven’t been that deep since I was a teenager, and now I remember the tired, drunk feeling of nitrogen narcosis, the feeling that the ocean floor would be a perfect place for a nap and that you should check your gage, but you really don’t feel like it and that’s an acceptable reason not to do so.
I return to shore with a spattering of red in my eyes, newly ruptured blood vessels. Georges brings me a strong coffee and I sit with him and the dive shop lady, who turns out to be named Dina and who is his wife, on the porch of their shop, petting their German Shepherd. She gives me a ride to the ATM and says I should come hang out with her tomorrow since she gets bored there. She can’t dive because her ears won’t clear, and Georges won’t teach her because he doesn’t want her to damage them.
I go next door for lunch, order far too much food and when I ask for the check I get halvah and what looks and feels like a carafe of vodka. My eyes probably give the impression I need it. It’s warming and makes me care less about the fact that the house I’m staying at doesn’t seem to have hot water.
On Claustrophilia, Dark Tunnels and the Tactile Dome
It’s safe to assume that if you’re living in or around the San Francisco Bay Area you’ve either visited or heard of the Exploratorium. In its sleek new home on Pier 15 in the city, it draws children and adults alike with its interactive exhibits on everything from optical illusions to soil biology and its friendly, please-touch-the-glass attitude. Cultivating curiosity and encouraging free play, the Exploratorium has retained many of its original exhibit concepts from when it first opened in 1969 at the Palace of Fine Arts. One such exhibit is the Tactile Dome, a sizeable geodesic dome in the center of the building, which in 1971 was created by August Coppola, the father of actor Nicolas Cage and brother of famed director Francis Ford Coppola. The original press release for the Tactile dome reads,
“The purpose is to disorient the sensory world so that the only sense the visitor can rely on is touch. The sensation is so outside ordinary experience that a few people panic. An attendant in a control panel can reach every part of the ant-hill like maze almost instantly.
Pre-opening visitors have compared the experience to being born again, turning yourself inside out head first, being swallowed by a whale, and inevitably, being enfolded in a giant womb.”[1]
One of the original intentions of the tactile dome was to help people reconnect with the senses, such as touch, that often go underutilized in a world where sight is heavily favored above other types of perception. Furthering this sentiment, the Tactile Dome was part of a revolutionary form of immersive art in which the audience does not just view the art with their eyes, acting as a sort of receptacle for the artist’s message, but actually participates in the art and by doing so, becomes a part of it. After all, what better way to remind ourselves that art is meant to be felt than to ask an audience to literally feel it with their bodies?
For some, the effects of such sensory deprivation may go beyond just a cool experience to actually be therapeutic. My relationship with the Tactile Dome and with other dark, tunnel-like spaces is wholly positive. I have always been drawn to tunnels, mazes, and rabbit-holes for their ability to put me in a physical place where I am completely immersed in another world, whether it posses a creative narrative, like a dark ride at an amusement park, or be simply experiential, like the Tactile Dome. This immersion helps break down my rational mind and my ego, and engage with the space as if there is nothing separating us. Focus is increased, and unlike some, who feel a sense of panic when confined, I am calmer than ever when I am taken out of the stimulating and noisy external world. My creativity is heightened when the limits and judgments of the mind are gone, and I find it easy to slip into the world of play and make believe that is so essential for my own arts practice.
My interest in dark tunnels manifests in a slightly obsessive scouring of the Internet for the most interesting and immersive tunnels, caves, and experiences out there. It has led to a pilgrimage to the Netherlands to visit one of the oldest amusement parks in the world renowned for its dark rides, to a musical mechanical robotic experience in a basement in Berlin, to scuba diving freshwater caves in the Yucatan, to crawling down manholes to explore the strangely beautiful world of Bay Area storm drains. Yet when it comes to experiential tunnel projects that are affordable and accessible, options are few and far between.
Located beneath a bar in Berlin, the now-defunct Peristal Singum used rabbit holes, visual and audio effects, and sensory exploration to challenge visitors to embark on a journey of the unknown and to effect them in visceral ways. From their website,
“For some, Peristal provides opportunity for intrinsic reflection with one self and surrounding environment. For other, it is simply an amusing experience of something different.
The one who is open for a change will find it in here.”[2]
Part maze, part surreal art installation, the idea of the Peristal Singum was to both take participants completely out of their comfort zone and also ask them to reflect inwards, to trust themselves in a completely backwards and unfamiliar setting without relying on the common sense we use to navigate the above-ground world.
For those who are claustrophilic, for whom the idea of walking into pitch darkness to lose the sense of self does not trigger a sense of panic, I strongly advocate dark tunnels and immersive mazes as a part of creative therapy. It can be as simple as visiting the Tactile Dome in which there are no wrong turns and your experience is carefully monitored, or as adventurous as (safely) spelunking into caves. For those who are not physically able, blindfolding oneself as August Coppola did for weeks in preparation for writing his book about a character whose strongest sense is touch, can be an experience that creates deep and profound shifts in perspective and relationship to the self.
[1] http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/west-gallery/tactile-dome/1971-press-release
wave
September, 2014
Positano, Italy
Today I sat on the edge of a dock, where I’d spent some time the past few days, watching the ocean and brainstorming ways I could start to let go of the mental attachments that are keeping me from being fully present and are keeping me in a state of anxiety each day. I started seeing the aspects of home as different components of the sky above me, constellations that present themselves in various orientations throughout the year. I thought about where I am now, and how the sky is the same container and my home constellations still exist somewhere within it, but they are not visible in the way I am used to from this point on earth. There are different constellations in front of me at the moment, and the ones that looked upright and center at home may be smaller, skewed and off to the left here, or upside down and beyond the horizon and visibility. Those groups of stars and planets and I still exist in relation to one another, but we’re staged differently.
I looked again at the ocean, at the fishing boats moored in place, and thought of the anchors keeping them in casual circumference to a particular point at the ocean’s bottom. Free to drift, but not too far. I envisioned my home life as an anchor, and the sheer expanse and greatness of the ocean around me. I cut the chains and let the pain of giving up control sink in. I let myself feel the impact of this lightness, the way it hurt my chest and made my stomach drop. As I opened my eyes and started to wonder if I was free now, and again began to think, I saw the ocean drop by my feet, and understanding in an instant what was about to happen, looked up at the enormous wave heading in and preparing to lift me and my belongings off the dock.
Thankfully, the ocean only took my phone (and politely gave me back my shoes and hat) but its message was laughably obvious. I’m a little bummed about losing all the several hundred pictures that just today I had been trying to back up to my iPad, and frustrated at myself for feeling any kind of loss over a thing like an iPhone and for not having been patient or organized enough to figure out how to back up my data. I’m incredibly grateful it didn’t take all my money, which was in the same bag, or my passport. I have a lot of things.
For days I’ve been asking whatever forces that may be for help letting go. I’ve been looking at the ocean, admiring her gentleness and how clear and easy she is to understand while I greedily take pictures and invent new traps to try and capture her beauty, and out of what? Out of some fear that I cannot possibly take in all that she’s giving me, that I need to take all I can get and more than I need? Today she made a fool of me and snapped me out of my navel-gazing.
valleys
September 2014
Sorrento, Italy
The more I pursue what I deem meaningful, the more my collection of situations and people I can feign interest in being around grows. My ability to shoot the shit with strangers is diminishing, not out of lack of shit-shooting skills but out of a reluctance to spend my often limited energy in ways that won’t increase it.
Last night I went out with a group of hard-drinking Brits, who were all very kind and fun to be around. When I was younger I’d make fast friends with anyone I met traveling but now I find myself more content observing and in doing so, often giving off the impression of not being totally with it. This outsiderness, feeling not committed to any one person or group, usually comes from just the opposite, from being present and being more secure in my values and needs. I feel less of an attachment to people I don’t have a deep connection with, and while I’d like to practice my ability to connect I don’t desire to shapeshift like I used to so readily.
Heading back to the hostel on a narrow twisting road through Sorrento surrounded by high stone walls and creeping vines, a railway worker and I started talking about the symbols in the graffiti around us. Swastikas. Penises. Hearts. He loved symbolism, he said. We got close, but not deep enough. I didn’t push it. I wondered aloud about how to get into the valley deep below us with its abandoned paper mills.
We found two fresh cigarettes placed side by side on the road and smoked them, a last-ditch offering to connect on the basis of synchronized inhales and exhales.
Insecure Writer’s Support Group
Insecure Writer’s Support Group
Last Friday I attended an orientation for the MFA program I’m starting. I met a classmate who warmly reached out and suggested I join this group, although I took the suggestion to be more of a command since I’ve never seen anything that so perfectly describes my relationship to writing. I am the epitome of an insecure writer, which is not something I want to be, but of all the things I am insecure about writing might top the list.
There have been times when I’ve sworn that I would never stop writing because it was the thing that I absolutely had to do to be ok. Some people maintain their state of ok-ness by exercising (ha!), or by painting, or by maintaining close relationships, or by baking or doing charming and brilliant crafts, but for me it was always journaling and writing poetry that was fueled by painful growing experiences. It was the best way for me to comprehend what was taking place, and provided a place I could express the full extent of my emotions without criticism or judgment.
I’ve grown up with depression and anxiety, and with a whole host of other emotional and mental health issues that stem from those things, and largely from being too sensitive to function “normally.” Everything is a punch in the gut or a stab in the chest. I’ve often felt that my deeply emotional responses are too much for people, and are too heavy to exist anywhere outside of writing. To make a long story shortish, I stopped writing for myself a few years ago. I stopped writing regularly in a journal, I stopped writing down the poetry that was the surprising byproduct of the things I let ferment inside me, and I stopped believing I had the right to invent worlds and people that I knew nothing about just for the sake of invention. After a few writing classes here and there that emphasized the confessional style that is so popular right now, the mantra “write what you know” began to feel like a creative death sentence. I didn’t want to only confess my traumas, my stories, my mistakes. I was still too raw and still too young to act like I had any wisdom around them. Those things I wanted to keep in my journal so that I could distill them to their purest form and use that essence to make my characters more human, more flawed. But I didn’t want to write about them yet.
Now I’ve decided that the best way to get back into writing regularly is to enter a program in which I am forced to write, because as a product of the Catholic church and the private school system I am a sucker for discipline. Sadly enough, I need to be told to write, to keep a blog even. You should see the list of blogs I’ve had that never made it after a few weeks or so. I know that this won’t always be the case, that I won’t always need discipline and deadlines, but that’s why I’m here- to get used to those things for myself so that I can apply them to my writing life after I’m no longer in school. And honestly, I really like school when I’m learning about things that I like. As someone who was always good at English and horrible at math and science, I’m finally living the dream I’ve had since 6th grade of getting to go to school for only writing. Middle school me is very excited.
So hello to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group folks- I’ll be checking out lots of your blogs today and introducing myself in the comments. I’m really glad to know you’re around.
Hm.
I’m side-eyeing this blog as I side-eye all the blogs I start in moments of motivation, keep for weeks, then ignore until they decay into obscurity, since nothing actually decays on the internet unless it becomes un-viewed, outdated, and irrelevant. The motivation for this latest attempt is a syllabus for an online class in my MFA program, which I’ve just started. Good, I thought. Another round of obsessing over fonts and headers, writing passionately about things and then getting nervous that I got too carried away and too intimate with my anonymous audience, then chopping down those posts until they are blandly obscured or gone completely.
I have a handful of Tumblr accounts that are mostly blank. I think I’ll use one of them to post the visual and audial things that inspire me, and leave this one for the word people. You know who you are.
If you want to look at weird and pretty things instead of reading all these boring words, you can find that blog at http://opiadouble.tumblr.com/
doubleopia 