the pursuit of nothing
on chaos & the unwritten
There's a reckoning that happens between our severed selves… it’s the hardest one to pass through. We create chaos and chase away visitors from the world of silence with every convenient excuse. To not rest is fine, but to leave unwritten what needs to be read is dangerous. If I ask myself, why haven’t I written and I answer, because I’ve been busy, I have to disbelieve it. What I’m trying to say is that busy is created by a guilty mind, a mind that knows there’s a meeting that has to happen with the self, and because the self only comes with truth and robs us of our lie, our lie that it’s all right, it’s all right to love the man that does not love me back, it’s all right to hide away in the house of a woman who will without doubt destroy me, it’s all right to allow this man to touch me without love, it’s all right to go on another month in this place that makes me sad, it’s all right to leave the project untouched for another week, to remain without money, without movement, without warmth… because it doesn’t allow us the comfort of our delusions, and instead begs action in its silent spilling of the truth, and because we’d rather not act, and not acting is easier when we don’t know what it is we are refusing to act on, then, it makes all the sense why we’d do all that we can to escape any chance of encounter.
And, for what the truth? How does it help a woman to know that there’s an unanswered and desperate desire for touch inside her with no one around her to answer that truth standing awkwardly inside her? What about a woman who’s spent 50 years with a man who may or may not have loved her, only to find herself completely alone in a large house, unable to face all that he’s left opened in his absence? And if she sits with that opened box, then what? Will she find a lover to answer the regret and desires she’ll find in those boxes?
Life without record: The past three months
There’s a long war I’ve lived through that’s ending.
A war where every action was birthed with the intention of creating a life that was nothing more than a protest against a very ugly childhood. But in the past three months, that war, which was the very essence of who I was and what I did, began to end before I was prepared for its ending. I can understand now, maybe just a little, the allure of conflict. When all your actions come from a desire to survive, then our answer to everything is simple. Our direction is singular and uncomplicated: to live. But when you take from us our war, suddenly what we do has to be guided by a different intention, a deeper sense of direction. But what if you remove the war and our actions continue from the same source? It becomes insanity.
Sometimes I feel like the soldier who stayed behind in his hole simply because he’d forgotten, or, in my case, never knew, life without that primal desire to stay alive. My earliest memories are as full of abandon and danger as my most recent ones are. And yet the war has finished. The man has died. His sons are far from me. I am my own mother and father, and neither can harm me unless I want them to. There’s no lover either, so the possibility of abandon is gone for now too. The woman who once tried to destroy me is too tired to try again. So you see, the war is over. My actions have no stems, no roots, no intention. I am guessing and guessing and as I do, life passes, and all I can manage to answer in every moment is maybe, maybe, maybe…
What I want to say is deeper still. Maybe there’s no words for this life of war without war, the desire to fight with nothing to fight, the urge to resist with nothing to resist. The stage is empty. The war grounds are empty. And still the soldier with his gun in a hole in the ground, and still this woman with all that she meant to tell them in her throat. How can the solider just casually walk to the bakery for bread, when every meal was fought for with his life? How can I just speak and laugh and dress as if every moment of laugher and dressing wasn’t a war I had to fight in my grandpa’s eyes? So the war ends and just like that, what I do can no longer be guided by what was done to me.
How?
Strange that I’ve left the ending undocumented. For someone like me so preoccupied with photographing every moment, I never believe it’s a coincidence when certain times of life go unrecorded. It’s often that the times I pass through without record are the ones I lived through mostly deeply, whiles the times I captured were often filled with a deep craving for more. The lived experience felt hollow, and it must have been that the camera in those moments embellished the disppointment. It was distracting enough to silence that nagging feeling that often follows recorded moments of my life. I can look back at photos I collected of a certain time and recall (almost always) being unhappy then. It’s often loneliness too. Alone, my camera is the only thing I can share a moment with. I think that’s what it is. I have such a strong desire to share it all, and often, too often, I’ve found only a black box to share it with.
Still it’s a question that follows me everywhere — the question of what is lost when we photograph a moment and what is lost when we don’t. Some of the moments I remember most vividly in my life I have not a single photo of, and some moments I’ve photographed I can’t remember. It’s as if the mind abandons memory to the camera, but in its absence, resumes its natural tendency to gather images, voices, scents. I’ve always felt like there was something important that was lost to a camera. And though the sense of loss comes to me too when I leave a day unrecorded, it’s not as strong as when I don’t. Sometimes too, I wonder if there’s something about that time I’d rather not see…
These past three months, I spent many evenings in the hospital, watching a man dying, a man who’s been dying for years and years. I painted and cried a lot; I changed houses three times. I filmed and returned to my work at the museum. I hardly spent any time in the van I love. I said goodbye to my grandpa. I cried beside him and asked why he’d hated me so much, why he’d never tried to get to know me. He was buried on a very cold day and I thought of his little body in the lonely, frozen ground that night while I walked home from the metro. Even in writing, I can’t stay beside him for too long. I can only pass him by briefly in mind before I run off, just as I used to when I was a fourteen year old girl with a flower in my hair and lipstick I’d forgotten to erase.
I liked a man, for a few days. Thought maybe it could happen, then realized I was wrong. Women have come into my life through the medium I love more than anything in the world. It feels almost unfair, how much calligraphy has given me.
And I discovered what a beautiful thing a woman is just as the man who’d taught me otherwise was leaving this world. I’ve never looked to them the way I do now, in awe, in absolute admiration. They are what I want in my life now.
Then they burned our precious Gaza, violated the body of our Palestine. And still the harder they fought, the more urgent our own births became, our art, our resistence, our shameless grieving. In their violence, they’ve shaken awake something in the Arab body, something that has endured our long, long humiliation.
Divine Sensuality, working through another war in writing
Like Bukowski’s blue bird, I have one too that tries to come out at night..tries to undo everything. Or, doesn’t try at all, it’s just itself and in being who it is, which is who I am, truly, unravels the whole performance of indifference. But that self is dangerous. She wants things she shouldn't, goes places she shouldn’t go, acts on thoughts she’d promised to keep in her mind and only there. She is strong against the bird in the day, but in the night, like Bukowski’s, the war softens, the door opens slightly, and she comes out a little, and says, I’d like to be touched, and sometimes there’s a man around for that, but it’s never the right one. She wants to look men in the eye, to confuse them, to haunt them just as much as these desires haunt her. She should be ashamed but she isn’t. It should feel wrong but it doesn’t. And what is it about sensuality that calls for war among men, when it’s their own odds of pleasure and happiness that they fight too? And why, as free women, do we carry their wars in our minds, and even in our freedom, impose their laws on these beautiful bodies. It is war and isn’t. I know it falls the moment I touch it, but when I forget, when I return to my father’s world and forget the delicacy of that lie and that it can be touched and so easily crumbled, when I return to my fear and forbid myself what was forbidden for me, when I cowardly say no to what my body says yes to…that’s when I remember that the war I thought I ended yesterday is far from over. It’s a tidal war, sometimes the bird is stronger, sometimes the old god with the thick beard and mud-stained hands is. They take turns. One day, they won’t and it’ll only be one of them left in me..
Audre Lorde on the erotic & poetry
There’s an urgent force in me (I believe in all of us woman), and instead of embracing her, of using her energy in my life, I hide her and pretend she isn’t me. It’s been too long that I’ve thought of myself as timid and committed to a life of quiet pain. There’s a lot this small body carries. It isn’t easy when the other side of me appears, when she gets fed up and steps outside of this body and faces me, and faces them. Sometimes I can feel her screaming and once in a while when I’m too tired to contain her, she’ll say something to someone, something warranted and deserved, that surprises me. It’s been happening more often lately. Instead of beating her into submission, this tough year has begged more of her appearance. I see her reappearing in my art, more than anywhere else…a sensuous woman violating all the childhood codes of life, daring in her voice, in what she leaves uncovered, in the audacity of her threats to break her silence.
But will there always be a severance between this woman that appears in art and disappears in life? Will the people I meet always be surprised that it’s this fumbling woman that made that photo, that spoke those words and made that threat?
Notes from Audre Lorde
“Eros” — the personification of love & creativity in all it’s aspects
Erotic knowledge — a woman so empowered is dangerous // Erotic as source of power & information.
Once we know that fullness, we can know which of our endeavors brings us closest to that fullness. We demand more of ourselves. We go beyond mediocracy.
We fear erotic knowledge because it encourages excellence and the strength to pursue it.
The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force for any woman who does not fear its revelation.
Giving into fear of feeling is a luxury that only the unintentional, who do not wish to guide their own destiny, could afford.
Once we begin to feel deeply all aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and all our life’s pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy that we know ourselves to be capable of.
Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens with which we scrutinize our existence, forcing ourselves to evaluate honestly
We have a responsibility not to settle for what is convenient, expected, safe.
We were raised to fear the ‘yes’ in ourselves and deepest cravings.
Demands of our released expectations lead us inevitability to actions which will help bring our lives into accordance with our needs, knowledge, desires. And fear of our deepest cravings will always keep them suspect and keep us docile and loyal and obedient and lead us to settle for and accept so many facets of our oppression as women.
When we live outside of ourselves, when we live by external directives only, what is expected of us rather than on our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms. We conform to a structure that is not based on human needs. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic and allowing that power to illuminate on the world around us, then we begin to be responsible towards ourselves in the deepest sense.
As we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up the necessity of being satisfied with suffering. We empower ourselves to action.
Pursue genuine change within our world rather than merely settling for a shift of characters within the same weary drama.
