We Are Transmitters

Loud, allowed

One of the most frequent comments I get, from friends, family, co-workers and even strangers is— “you are SO LOUD!”

Recently, at a bar, a friend told me that she couldn’t even “hear herself think” if I was talking nearby.  Dang!  I must be a woman of unstoppable confidence, to be so brassy and audible, no?

No.

I haven’t always been loud.  In fact, I started out on the opposite end of the spectrum.

When I was a little girl, I was deathly shy.  I would make my mother stay with me at all times, even at birthday parties, where I would cling desperately to her leg.  My parents didn’t dare hire a babysitter because if they were out of the house I’d wail with unquenchable sobs until they returned.  Every. single. time.   One of my earliest memories is someone asking me repeatedly to speak up, and feeling a mix of irritation and terror that was rooted in the thought, “what do you MEAN speak up? I am trying!”

  Even though I was shy I still had lots to say.  Once someone became close to me, I would talk their ear off and force them to engage with me in my make believe games.  My parents saw a performer buried within me, and asked me if I’d like to be an actress.  Even as acting became my youthful passion, I still insisted that my father sit with me on uncomfortably small chairs every Saturday morning, watching after me.

After years of training, I started to speak more loudly, with a larger persona, and project so that no one ever yelled “SPEAK UP!” from the back of a room or a crowd.  This didn’t, and still doesn’t, mean that I always want to speak or feel like speaking.  It doesn’t mean that I always feel confident in my opinions or feel unafraid of the company I keep. The thought of it often still terrifies me, even though it’s my job to speak to groups of strangers in public every day. 

So my heart goes out to you, young women whom I see nervously presenting with a slumped, self-doubting posture.  The stutters and stumbles, the apologies, the nervous laugh, the hair twirl.  I do it too.  But we’ve got to stop!  We are doing our ideas a disservice.  Even if you have the worst idea in the world, if you present it with charisma, someone will listen to it and consider it, if only for a moment.

“But what am I to do?” you wonder.  “I have always been this way!”

Practice.  Talk from your gut, not your throat. Practice on people who already love you or who aren’t trying to like you.  Take a deep breath and stand up straight. Look your audience in the face if not in the eye. Give the birthday toast at your friends’ parties. Share a story with someone whom makes you slightly uncomfortable— a strange uncle or neighbor, for example,and work to convince them of your ideas.  Engage the grocer, the bartender, the shop clerk in a conversation, even if they’re reticient.  This is the only way.  Much better to practice now, on everyone, than on an important night for people you want to impress.

It’s not just for your own good, but for the good of all of us, who might find wonderful inspiration in your ideas if only you allowed us to be invigorated by them.  You can still be terrified and full of doubt.   Embrace an empowered alter-ego. If it feels like a performance at first, don’t worry. Eventually…it will just be the real you.

Why I Like The Babies

Pitchfork reviewed the Babies album today, one that I have been obsessively listening to for the past six months.  The thing about it is, I feel like much of this album’s purpose has been lost in the writeup.  Of course the critic has already dismissed me by implying that I probably like the band because of who is in it, not due to their music’s credit.  Maybe.  But I listen to the album way too much on my own to really believe it’s for such an external reason.   I really believe in this album. Here are my reasons why you should give it a chance. 

The Babies album possesses an earnest depth in it’s messiness that has been completely lacking from most recent indie rock.  Personally, I’ve grown so tired of the irony and detachment that’s overwhelmed the sub-genre.  The Babies provide an antidote to that tiring trend with their forthright vulnerability.

The Babies aren’t singing about boyfriends, girlfriends, parties or twee desire, they are, on a deeper listen, singing about existential crisis.  Through the album, I feel as if I’m following the Babies two vocalists as I would follow Orpheus, leading me down through the afterlife while they try not to look over their shoulder.   The uncertain vocals that Pitchfork complains of are, in my mind, completely purposeful… in the same way that the best French New Wave directors hired plaintive, simple speaking actors who did not seem to be acting to convey the lost purpose in modern life, the Babies, through their sometimes wavering voices, demonstrate to us the uncertainty at the heart of coping with powerlessness. 

 ”The Babies” possesses cohesion, with each song connecting back to a stage of mourning. We begin by exploring a determination to rediscover the thrills that begin to escape us as we age (Somebody Else, Meet me in the City,) the fearful anticipation of the inevitability of death (All Things Come to Pass, Sick Kid in the Distance, The War) and the impossibility of ever really coping as our friends are taken from us (Wild I and II, Breaking the Law).

On “All Things Come to Pass,” it seems like Cassie’s trying to convince herself, and us, that she’s over death— she’s not afraid.   But there is a sharp edge of despair to it.  Cassie and Kevin are not our typical indie rock protagonists telling a simple story.  This story is rife with doubt and denial.   “Don’t be sad when it’s over and done, days go on like a loaded gun.” Her voice takes on a demanding quality— she’s not telling us this because she is over it, but precisely because she CAN’T get over it.  Every day brings the possibility of the irreproachable final bullet.  The next song on the album is our evidence.  She murmurs— “Yesterday someone I used to know.  And now they’re gone and they’re gone for good.”  Kevin tells us “this heart is broken and this heart is torn.”   As if to flee this unfurling despair, the Babies hit us over the head with “Meet me in the City.”  It’s a manic escape— compensation for the sorrow, confusion and pain.  The following tune increases it’s panicked mania with even more fervor and despair.   Then, suddenly, nostalgia in “Breaking the Law”… remembering the safety we once found alongside each other before we knew the risks, that we can’t seem to find anymore. 

I’ve never heard an album that so opens it’s heart and reveals the personal complications that surround loss without any sense of melodrama. The exhaustion of pain, the despair that accompanies our drive to lose ourselves in thrill seeking, the satisfying break that comes when we finally acknowledge our inescapable agony (Wild II.) 

  I love the Babies not because, as Pitchfork implies, I am charmed by the members, but because I have experienced the obsessive despair that the album outlines.  The mania and fear that surrounds us after we lose someone. The fearful awareness that we, ourselves, are also hurled towards eventually devastating those we love.   The push and pull, the un-spooling thoughts that draw us into obsessing about our own inevitable departure as we mourn someone, while denying the depth of our despair.  The optimism when we finally re-approach life, having come through the turmoil of death’s foretaste.

The Babies speak to the reality of my early adulthood more than any other album in my life right now.  I have pushed against my responsibilities, fled from my feelings, and now, near twenty-seven, am beginning to accept the darkness that surrounds us as we age and let go of one another, and hopefully learn to embrace what we can, and cannot, control.

irrationally resolute…

For the past four months, I’ve had a new “New Year’s Resolution” nearly every day.  And yes I realize it’s February, and yes, i DO intend to imply that I’ve been making them since Thanksgiving.  When is it too late to stop?  When does my “New Year’s Resolution” have to become something else?  In yoga my teacher keeps referring to “daily intentions,” which I like the sound of but seem to carry no weight.  And boy, do I like some weight on my shoulders.  A neck without an albatross is nearly nude in my eyes. 

I wonder if I should establish a protocol for the titling of my resolutions.  Perhaps the ones do I actually intend to keep versus the ones that I am saying to make myself feel better between beers? But acknowledging the difference would be defeat my self-delusion.

Today’s resolution is to “write everyday.”  So here I am.

 Yesterday’s was to “take responsibility for my privilege.” This, my latest self-flagellation, is connected in equal parts to my middle class family, my blue-veined whiteness, my artsy degree from a liberal private college, and last but not least— my Anglican upbringing with an Irish Catholic last name.   Oh, and probably some feminist baggage mixed in there too.  Lately I find myself strangled in a daily wrestling match between my desire to identify with the oppressed and my knowledge of unending contemporary privilege.   

It’s gotten to the point where, at least twice a week, some beloved friend will casually refer to my “weird guilt thing.” 

The best perk from my brooding is that it generally ends with an exhausted collapse into a satisfyingly indecisive halt.   What could be more comforting to someone who suffers from unending shame than to get nothing accomplished?

But today’s resolution comes in turn from yesterday’s.  So this is at least progress.  Upon announcing yesterday’s “responsibility” clause to my now impossibly burdened 2011, my friend J. looked thoughtfully aside, then smiled.  “Yes, yes, now you’ve got it!” he declared.  “What you’re doing now is perfect.  Your turning your guilt against yourself— by saying that you have to live up to all you’ve been given, which you already hate yourself for, you might actually have a shot at getting something done and making something out of your great potential.”  I blushed at that insinuation, and he added, “because ultimately, Emily, it doesn’t matter if you’re a genius, or talented, or not.  All that matters is if you can navigate your life in an effective way and take advantage of the opportunity, regardless of whether or not it’s warranted.” *

It seems my effective route to self-actualization will be ridden with reflexive blackmail, bribery and manipulation. 

Now, how do I fold that into a snappy sounding resolution?

*I paraphrased.  Sorry J.

somatic despair

This evening at work we had a meeting about how to tap into imagination and “somatic experience” to communicate and connect with historic people, events and ideas.  “History is a different country,” she said, “and you have to convince people to take the trip with their imagination.”

  Somatic experience is the memory that our bodies possess without language— the physical acts and awareness that communicate ideas we can never verbalize.  We had to practice imagining and describing our own secret, sacred spaces to one another in detail.  When I closed my eyes to revisit my familiar space, I was walking down the creaking stairs to my parents basement.  I felt the exhilaration of the dark stairway when the lightbulb was out, the coarse indoor-outdoor carpeting, the cool musty odor, the light blue paint on the walls. But then that emotional experience kicked in— and I remembered a buried feeling of anticipation, rounding the corner to see if my friend, my visitor, was asleep on the futon— or awake.

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(In Anticipation of) Labor Day

Today was sunny and pleasant, with breezy soft air finally pushing through the humidity.   It was so pleasant that I decided to save a few dollars and walk the entire route to work at 9 am.  As I walked, I thought about work and the nature of it, and how I couldn’t decide whether nice weather on a work day was a good or bad thing.  Deep in my own head, I traversed beneath the bridge.  Not until I noticed a large crowd by the bus stop did I stop and take note of my surroundings.

  I saw 20 to 30 men waiting, morose.  At first I considered that the bus was late or broken, which explained the agitated scene.  The men were crowded together, murmuring, some leaning against the fence but most milling about, looking down the street or at the cement. They looked like they had been waiting a long time.

Then, suddenly, one of the men yelled and pointed.  A black Lexus SUV was speeding up to the stop, then pulled over.  The crowd of men sprinted over to the SUV and huddled around the windows, a few hammering on the slightly tinted glass while gesturing towards themselves.  I crained my neck to peek in— and I saw what I expected.  The man was holding up different work orders, written on pieces of paper in permanent marker in both English and Spanish.  After quite a bit of fussing amongst the men, the driver cracked open the passenger window. The men then started pleading aloud.  One man was pointed to and gets in the back of the car.  The rest of the men retreated back to the curb, as the car zoomed off and the milling, the agitation, the waiting resumed.

Labor Day is Monday, and who do we think of?  Generally not those men that I saw today under the bridge.  In fact, we rarely think of them at all.  But really, it’s meant to be THEIR holiday.   They probably won’t intend to take it as a holiday, however.

A few more than 100 years after Labor Day was founded to honor the toiling worker, the GOP Speaker complains about how the government has “over-regulated” business.  Wasn’t this holiday, in a way, to show respect for the idea of such regulations back then? (First the 10 hour workday, then the 8 hour work-day, the health and safety and wage reforms?)  While a day off (although to be honest I am working the whole weekend) with a barbeque sounds fun, this 1889 account of the Brooklyn Labor Day Parade sounds more fun:

“And if the celebration of Labor Day does nothing else it shows to the general person at large that the distinctive Union Labor men are worthy of respect and confidence… The organizations, or the members of those who so desired, headed to Ridgewood Park or the Labor Lyceum.  At the former, games and dancing were held, and a reception was held at the Labor Lyceum. (…) Bricklayers will contend with Carpenters in a friendly tug-of-war.  Horse Shoers will run against Bakers, and Ship Caulkers will struggle side by side against Street Pavers for supremacy in high jumping.”

—”Labor’s Hosts: Brooklyn’s Toilers Make a Splendid Show.”  Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Evening, Sept. 2nd 1889.

Labor Day used to be considered one of the most important international holidays of the entire year.  Now it seems that the people it is meant to honor rarely get to participate, and very few even remembers why it began in the first place. Something to think about.

Real Talk, and the people who love it

It’s Monday night, so I am sitting here with a Polish beer and splotches of gray all over my arms and legs.  I’ve just returned home from ceramics class, as I have done every Monday evening since the early spring.  When I initially signed up, I was having a small existential crisis.  I would have called it a “quarter-life crisis,” but honestly, how many of those can you possibly have before you realize that you are, in fact, in crisis all the time?  I needed a creative outlet.  I needed to be away from all of the ideas in my head about who I am and who I am supposed to be and to have something to focus on, something to mold with my hands and create.

  In those early classes, I remember feeling such an incredible risk of embarrassment that butterflies would fill my stomach every time I bent forward towards the pottery wheel.  To be new at a craft is to feel ignorant and clumsy.  But lately, there has been a change in the dynamics of the class.  It has become incredibly cathartic.  But lately, it’s been more than cathartic— it’s been revealing.

During last month’s course, I was sitting awkwardly in a studio room with another woman, the two of us both entirely alone, listening to the hum of a fan and feeling awkward in the silence.  After several deep breaths, I sheepishly began a conversation with her.  “I’m Emily… what’s your name?”  My heart was pounding.  If there is anything to make a person feel young, it’s approaching a stranger for friendship.  She looked up at me warmly, told me her name (we’ll call her A.) and soon, like children at recess, we started to slowly unfold ourselves to one another.  

The next session, we were joined by another woman, S.  Within one class, we poured out the stories of our lives.  We were so compelled to share with one another that it almost felt like we were speaking not just to pass the time, but in actuality, to accomplish some unrevealed by imperative goal. Who we were, where we lived and why, how we lived and why.  There was a hunger to the conversation— a desire to bond with each other as women, as dreamers, and as thinkers.   Soon, the class evolved from a journey within myself into constructing a community of selves, sharing ideas, encouraging each other, and supporting one another.

Tonight, our room was crammed full of women.  Instead of three at the table, there were seven.  Other students had walked in on our conversations, which we nicknamed “Real Talk,” and craved to be a part of it, and… why wouldn’t they?  We’ve built a community that is both organic and safe.  It seems that everyone has turned to art, and to creation, not to have Tschockies or nice dishware, but to find something else— something inside them that perhaps they can’t verbalize. To find Real Talk.  To share with a certain degree of anonymity one’s dreams and frustrations and thoughts, without fearing any repercussion, but also, to maintain an open and inspiring relationship throughout the weeks and months.

I recently read that during the Women’s Liberation movement, one of the common “revolutionary actions” was to form groups in which women could safely discuss their own experiences without anxiety.  And certainly, that’s what I feel in ceramics.  But, it strikes me that we are so HUNGRY for it.  People say that the women’s movement is over, is a shadow of it’s former self— yet women still feel repressed and misunderstood and unable to extract their own true feelings from society’s expectations of them.  So much LIMITS us.

  This hunger certainly also denotes a lack of Real Talk elsewhere.  I know— I feel it.  I remember when I worked at the shop, after a few open ended sentences, I’d often find strangers passionately telling me about their most intimate struggles, and coming back week after week to give me updates, to share. Why is it that the openness that we desire we are so hard pressed to find?   How is it that passive aggressive interaction, “safe topics” and small talk seemingly overwhelms our society?  We NEED Real Talk… but frequently give an easy, prepackaged conversation instead.

People flock to and embrace the honest ones, yet honesty is still terrifying to approach. 

As tonight’s session concluded, women I barely know, but also, know deeply, looked one another in the eyes and sincerely promised one another to share new stories, new ideas, new fears, in the next class.  It was a authentic promise, one not pledged flippantly.   Evenings like tonight, filled with Real conversation about Real life, are so powerful— and in turn, so incredibly vulnerable.

I can’t wait for until next class.

“Born in N.Y. City, 1891.” -or- Myself and Henry Miller.

  When I was fifteen, there was nothing more interesting to me than the mysteries found on my brother’s bookshelves.  He had just moved away to college and I sorely missed him.  Many days after school I would retreat to his room to lay on his bed, smell his bedspread, and comb through the relics of what he’d left behind.  I didn’t route through his drawers or private possessions.  It seemed to be safe enough to look towards the bookshelves, at what he was displaying for anyone who visited to see… to read and write in a space that, in a different time, my brother had read and wrote.  An electric landscape of dust, secrets, ideas and sleep.  My brother to me at that time seemed infinitely wise.  In many ways, he still does.  While I sometimes felt betrayed, misunderstood, or abandoned by him simply because he was older and ahead of me in life, I also felt that he knew so many of the answers to my questions— the questions that stick like burrs to your heart, that hurt even to pluck them off and examine them; the questions that were too deeply stuck to even consider asking most adults or friends.  With my brother, these questions needed no verbalization.  In fact, he answered them without a word, but with the books he left behind.

One day I found a book that began a lifelong journey to the heart of the beast— that would give birth to a change within me— essentially where all the ideas I hold close to my heart started.  If I recall rightly, it was a humid summer day, cicadas creaking, and I was sidetracked in my brother’s room on my path to shut all the windows in the house. A tattered black paperback was tucked in the corner of the shelf by this window. This book, The Time of the Assassins by Henry Miller, recalled a man’s profound relationship with a writer (Rimbaud) whom he had never met and had no hope of meeting, separated by time, mortality, space and country.  This was easy to connect with, as I soon became the next link on the chain— I became fascinated with the fascinated man, Henry Miller.

In many ways I am quite a distance today from that young woman who picked up the withered paperback and decided that reading it was more interesting than chores.  But happily, in the most important ways, I still share an intimacy with her through the ideas that began to percolate through that book.  The idea that a grown man could feel so passionately connected to an author long dead whom he never knew gave me permission to do so.  And do it I did.  It seems that for years (and to this day) I was fixated on what I referred to as “my spiritual family.”  Ancestors who did not share a bloodline with me, but rather, a heart line.  Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, John Keats, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, The Situationist International, Shostakovitch, Tchaikovsky, Billie Holiday, Susan B. Anthony, Ben Franklin, the list goes on.

 (Today I realize with chagrin that most of the founding members of my spiritual family were men— that my own heart carried along with it a dearth of female counterparts, or so I believed.  These days, I’ve become obsessed with finding them.)

  It’s hard to believe that the it all started with an middle aged man from Brooklyn, who became tired of a “Good Life” and gave it up to chase wild dreams through which he could discover himself.  This became fuel for many youthful fantasies.  As an independent adult, sometimes I come down hard on myself for not being more wild, more adventurous with my life— but I do still feel that I am embracing his spirit, simply because I am trying to live out the idea that there is more to life than a comfortable paycheck.  

Later I went on to read bits and pieces of his other books, including a long-fought struggle to finish Tropic of Cancer, (I can’t tell you what happened in it because it took me so long to finish!) but it remains that to this day I prefer his non-fiction and his essays.  Because it is Henry, truly Henry that I love.

“Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all.  Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types.  Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit.

The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair than just plain hard work.  Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation; how to celebrate his hungerings and sufferings, turning disappointment into something positive— a great book, a sonata, a film, a painting, or a dance.”

-Henry Miller, Reflections

I still struggle with that word, “artist,” and what it’s come to signify in my own mind.  Artist, always with a CAPITAL A, always with an air of pomposity and importance.   I used to strive to be nothing but an artist.  But today I would be loathe to call myself one.  Mostly because that conversation always seems to lead to the other party classifying whether or not they feel what I do is Art.  And let me be the first to tell you, most people do not include an obsession with history, conversation and making people feel the tireless tread of humanity around them art, especially if it’s not Poetry or Painting or Music. 

It is true that I think about creating art more often than I actually succeed in making it.  But to me, trying to make this life work, this life that is within the boundaries that my spiritual family has set around me, feels a lot like art.  To live a life that compromises no one’s integrity, a life that works to create and/or maintain a world that is safe and creative and significant for a variety of people, to live as honestly and equitably as possible— this is a difficult task.  There are so many obstructions to work around, and I want to make it look effortless.

Today Henry crept into my mind as I was artfully re-arranging my bank account to attempt to avoid an already percolating “maintenance” fee.   I wondered if the real reason his books were banned in 43 countries was not the sex, but rather the exhibition of an anti-capitalist lifestyle— a life governed by a love of adventure, of being human and experiencing humanity and being honest about it’s darker colors—rather than a concern for security and the “American Dream.”

I wouldn’t put it past us.

Tonight, riding my bike home from work, I rode past Henry Miller’s house. I still can’t quite accept that I live so close an epicenter of the mythology I hold so dear.  It is there— just a normal private home that betrays its secret history through the visitors sneaking onto the stoop for a photograph.  Maybe they feel how I feel.  Maybe that photo, of themselves on the stoop of a house that once contained Henry Miller, but not for a long time… maybe that is a photo of them with their spiritual Grandfather.  I know that’s how I feel.