Week 8, without Dakota
“We try to live 100 days in one day.”
-Billie Holiday
A Difficult Week
I’ve gone far back. Everything I’ve built, every step I’d taken in the opposite direction seems to have, within a couple of days, been entirely undone. I can’t pretend to know what it is anymore, only that it has happened, and that it has taken me with it. I’m ashamed too, because it is in moments like this, this “lowest” that so many artists have been pushed towards their craft. But it’s in these moments I avoid it most. The thought of writing feels too heavy, too demanding. So I turn from it. To fool myself, I open a notebook from time to time, right a meaningless line here and there, but it’s nothing really. I can’t stand to spend much time with it. I just have to quiet my hands down and make them believe they still exist with purpose. But they’re smarter than that. They know what I don’t want them to.
I hardly spent any time in my van too. This week at work has been the most exhausting, and only once or twice was I able to steal an hour away with Dakota. And even then I only sat and smoked and hardly did much. I’ve been feeling so tired, even when there is no reason to.
I felt sick with rage too. I haven’t felt that surge of anger in so long, and suddenly, there it was, and I felt the urge to break something, mostly, myself. I wanted to inflict the pain I felt from the inside on the outside that always has to bare the burden of appearing like all is well.
Part of me wanted to drive right then to New Orleans. It’s one of the only cities in the world where you can be openly broken, and not give a damn. It’s a city that gets pain, gets crazy and rage, doesn’t ask that you put on any show but your own. I’d blend right in with all that hurt.
But I had to hold myself here, and quiet, for once, this impulse to run. I have to be more careful about it. This time, I am not planning for an escape that will last only as long as the money will. No, this is permanent, and requires a silent, rooted patience, one that I’m not so sure I have.
I’m getting tired chasing what I don’t want
I’ve been taught to want it, every artist is because art’s a sin that only success can pardon. But I’m all right with my sin, and I don’t need pardoning anymore. But, can I continue to create with no one to read, see, or hold it? When I could answer this with an honest yes, then maybe then I’ll have reached the highest levels of artistic practice. But the answer, now, is no. Truth is, I do want to see my writing in someone else’s hand, my films before an audience of people who don’t know me. Sure, I want all these things. But then this wanting leaks into my writing and into my visions, and it corrupts it. It begins to serve a purpose, rather than serving an intention. It troubles me, and more than that, it creates a bloc more stubborn and unyielding than any other bloc I’ve known.
And in this stupid effort of wanting what I don’t really want, I’ve been trying to change with it the parts of me I don’t really want to change. I’ve been trying to curb my desire to wander, to lose time, to be without agenda. Everything, it seems, is in the service of a timed and rigid deadline that can’t be violated. Disrespecting it, ignoring it, pretending it’s not necessary means a life passed in accident, like all of a sudden the end’s standing right there across the street from you and its your fault you’ve got nothing to hold up to it. I’ve heard it in many subversive ways, that either I continue leading the life I lead now, with all my fantasies and run aways and various art trials, or I can finally settle down where I am and get serious. The way they speak about it makes it seem like only one of them will get you anywhere.
I’ve been trying to be just that, serious. But I’m so damn bored with it. I hate these formal artist talks, these convincing acts of artists pretending like they know all about why it is they wrote or painted or filmed that way. There is no room for the unanswered, for saying, here is the art, watch it, leave room for all that is unknown. Why can’t we allow art to be messy? No, we’ve got all these statements and detailed explanations we are obligated to write about, which hardly makes any sense because that was the reason why we made that piece of art in the first place, because there weren’t any definite terms for it.
an unfinished painting I’ve been working on in my van, the blues of depression, the blacks of sin
Meeting Bella
On Friday, I drove half an hour east to meet Bella, this beautiful brown mare that could have been me— manifested on four legs and without all the inconvenience and weight of trauma. I was to work with a woman from Asheville who had come up with a way of using horses in her therapy and coaching sessions. I was deeply skeptical. I did not drive there thinking I was going to be cured by a horse, but I did feel like there was something in it I needed. Before I knew what I was doing, I had agreed to a session and was standing in an arena with Bella, the horse of my choice. How it works is that the horse senses your energy, your emotions, your thoughts, and in sensing it all, she responds, in her way, through her body and her movements. It should have been no surprise to me that when they let Bella loose, she went crazy. She was jumping sideways and hurling herself in the air in a way I’ve never seen a horse do before. Even her trainer was shocked. She told me Bella had never done that before. And she wouldn’t stop either. She kept going and going. Back and forth, back and forth. I thought she’d never stop. I was standing on the side, scared out of my mind. The way Bella was running reminded me of the time my own horse had let loose, how I nearly died because of it. But the moment, and I’m not exaggerating here, the moment I said verbally and openly that I was scared, Bella, on the other side of the arena and no where near me, almost instantly calmed down. I guess she likes truth, this Bella.
Then she came to where we stood. And when I was ready, I was put into a smaller, gated area in the corner of the barn. The gate, just a thin wooden post, was closed behind me. It was me and Bella in there, and I was terrified. All my memories of my incident with the horse came flooding back. But as the hour went by, with Bella coming to me, and leaving, coming and leaving, something shifted in me. Then, she walked towards me for the last time, and with her neck curved, her ears still for the first time, I felt her listening to me. But here’s the strange part. I felt like I was listening to her. I realized something just then. And again, right at the moment that realization struck me, Bella turned her neck and walked away, as if to tell me, not unkindly, that I didn’t need her anymore, and she didn’t me. I guess sometimes if we’re lucky we get to see a version of ourselves in the kinder half of the living world, and there I was, in Bella, the me that was murdered by my family, the me that with time, strength, and yes, distance, stood a chance of returning.
Thinking back on it now, Bella’s wild run in the arena might not have been what I thought it was at the time: an embarrassing manifestation of all the chaos in my head. Instead, it could have been her private message to me, that I am trying to reach a level of calmness, discipline, and productivity before I’ve truly let my body do what it is it wants to do and hasn’t gotten enough of, which is to run wild, to use its untapped reserve of energy and life, to command me according to its own, kinder vision on life.
I remember the trainer telling me over and over again that we have to let her release her energy, that we won’t put her to work until she’s calmed herself down and made herself ready. I loved that, that autonomy, that respect for the wild portion of her, that total disregard for the impatient hand of time, and instead, letting the body decide when it was ready. And in loving it, I realize how necessary it is to have this same kindness and patience with the part of her that I harbor in me.
Fredericksburg
