Beckett on K

 It kills me that I’m not writing anymore. I read my writing from this time last year and I want to die. It was so good. I am such a good writer. Now I think in different terms, or my attention span is shorter, or I’m just out of practice. It’s always something and I’m just getting so tired of it all. I’m in psychoanalysis. I have friends. I still smoke cigarettes. I’m referring back to my younger self. I wish I was my younger self. I wish I was even just 24. I only have moments left in the relatively grand scheme of time to continue to swim in the unknown and in the possibility of my own failure. I need to decide what to say about all this time. I need to comment on my body of work so far. I need to say something about myself and my artistic practice as a … performer, artist, writer, dancer, actor, deviser, director? I don’t know exactly what I am. I know what I do: I earn money, I eat, I dance in rehearsal and class, I tutor, I babysit, I drink, I smoke, I fuck, I buy clothes, I steal clothes, I text my friends, I post on my Instagram story, I deactivate my Instagram account, I write in my notebook, I write on my notepad, I write on TextEdit, I look at images on my phone, I go to galleries, I make investments, I cook, I ride the train, I perform in other people’s work, I make plans, I cancel plans, I read books, I listen to music, I see live performance, I go out, I play my guitar, I walk around, I sit down. I’m not sure what my voice sounds like now. My voice on the page, I mean. My voice in living life is struck by bronchitis and COVID, stymied by a shrinking vocabulary and the menace of aging. I am feared by my own perceptions these days. My spirituality is nowhere to be found. Am I being too fatalistic? Probably. I can’t stop talking to myself these days. Is this merely a symptom of being present? I feel that I change so quickly that I must record what I can record of the version of me in this moment. I just wish something persisted. That’s constantly my gesture––complaint: wish: settling. I don’t know what that is. I want an answer, I guess. 

Now here’s a question worth pondering: Why theater? When did I actually, or did I even, consciously decide that I wanted to be on the stage and screen? What does it mean to write for the stage and screen? It seems I have only previously ever written for myself in my bedroom. An alone scene for an alone girl. A fantasy mysterious even to me. I don’t know how I got this way. I’m 25 years old now. What does that mean? What am I going to do with my life? What is happening to it now? I had this affair with a man over a decade my senior. I have a difficult task before me: make an evening-length work by October 23rd. I don’t even have my cast. I don’t know who wants to be in it. I’m not sure who wants me: is that what I mean when I say I don’t know who wants to be in it? Am I funny or interesting anymore? I don’t think I’m beautiful anymore. I can’t tell. People think I have something. People want to be my friend. People want to be around me. I spend money I don’t have. I’m mean to children sometimes solely because I don’t like them. I know I’m doing this because I’ll be kind to the ones I like. It’s usually peculiar, gentle, intelligent, beautiful, gathered children that I like. I like the one’s that are collected. Collectors. The ones who seem older than they are. I like the children who can read my subtext, who can smell the ghosts on my clothes. I’m thinking of this one brilliant child, Marta, with silvery blond hair and a voice like a stone dropping to the bottom of a well. She smelled me like an animal the day I wore my lover’s sweater to work: “Whose sweater is that? I like it.” I felt guilty. I feel guilty when I’m with a child and I allow my eyes to drop into my face and my voice to come from outside of me. When an emotion overtakes me. Usually with them it’s one of anger. Sometimes I take a young girl’s clean, filthy head in my arms and cradle her with force to my breast, as if to insist that I love her. As if to portray my own version of tough love. The one parroted by my mother. I can’t stop using the word parroted. I don’t even really know what it means except it’s one of those words whose meaning is baked into its appearance. You know the kind. 

I still have hope for truth. I still have desire for beauty. I still yearn toward goodness. This is to say that I have not yet totally cast off my family and my past. I am maintaining belief in my self and my body because that’s my training; that’s my practice. That’s my artistic practice. I use performance as a way to practice believing in my self and my body, and to perceive just how the two work together. I need an audience to know what “I” can cause. And then there’s the whole question of we. And who’s it going to be. And do I even know them yet. I used to love this idea of: There are so many people in the world waiting to meet you. It used to feel truer than I have to be sure it still is now. But the fact is that I am traversing my own lifespan, and there’s no way to stop neither inner nor outer movement. “It” being movement is the fact of existence. Buddhism taught me this. Movement = Impermanence = Flowing = Time. Actualized by all things. By big-bosomed blonde women and autistic greying men. By the bald middle-agèd and curly-haired 27-year-olds. By orthorexics and transsexuals. By traumatized immigrants and bootlicking professionals. By an innocent child and an innocent adult I am made myself. I have to keep believing this is all. 

The Talk We Have

1—Change is the most regulating force on earth

2—You have yogurt on your face 

Winter

I AM SECRETLY PROUD OF ALL OF YOU

September 10

A chess game ends in a park where I begin to regret my choices. Gotten but for this metal in my mouth. “Love is an act of not knowing,” I think as I fight this city. Where would I rather be? No place I’d rather be. I would rather be a place. No place. To the screams of the man on the street that lasted all Sunday: I can never not hear you. This too may be love. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8iQPz_13uk&list=RDM8iQPz_13uk&start_radio=1

You knew just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for 

Someone I really could care for. When I love you it’s like invisibility, ultimity. I mean the feeling is invisible: I want you to have everything you want. Which I’m learning includes me. We are made just so under the same night, once. Springing resiliently from one thousand to the next. You don’t go on too many adventures do you? The second woman counted her dollars––palmed them like babies. Something pinwheeled touched the inside of my wrist in the Mystery section of the library. 

Forms of addressal fell away, entire worlds
You pass from one hand to the other, my hands

I step over us on my way somewhere. Redacted loosens its grip. You’ve found your vocation. My mother resorts to the microwave in her old age. Swans sing for reasons to do with design.  

—Why do you keep doing that with your lips?
—Doing what?
—That.
—Oh I guess I'm just nervous.
—About what?
—Upstaging you.

Art Work

I FIND IT TOO PAINFUL NOT TO WRITE

I STOPPED ASKING WHAT MONEY IS USED FOR, TOO BUSY ASKING WHERE IT COMES FROM.

IT DRIPS OFF ME

1––I DON’T GET TO YOU

2––NO YOU GET TO ME

I’M IN SUNGLASSES THAT YOU FOUND

SHROUDED DIALECTICALLY

FROM THIS BLACK 

SUN

ONE GETS THE SENSE THAT EVEN IN THE MOST CAUSTIC OF CLIMATES, YOU DO FIND MOMENTS OF REPRIEVE. THEY DON’T FIND YOU. YOU ACTIVELY SEARCH FOR THEM. 

YOU ARE DRIVEN BY THE DESIRE FOR A HACK THAT WILL ALLOW YOU TO MAKE THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF MONEY USING THE LEAST AMOUNT OF TIME:

NOW: IN SIBERA A 20-MINUTE INTERVAL DURING WHICH THE SUN IS MOST VIBRANT, AND AT THE CORRESPONDING PLACE AT THE BACK OF HER SOLAR PLEXUS. WHOSE SLOW WARM STAYS WITH HER FOR AT LEAST AN HOUR, BUT REALLY IT’S THE WHOLE DAY. GEOGRAPHIC PHENOMENA TEND TO SEEM BOUND IN PLACE BUT REALLY THEY’RE JUST SEWN. 

1––I SHOULD READ PLAYS WITH THE CHILDREN. 

2––WHICH ONES? 

1––PLAYS THAT DEPICT SELFLESSNESS AND/IN FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, AND REAL PAIN. 

BEYOND THE SIGNIFIED’S BEING BUTTONED TO THE SIGNIFIER, THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FORM OF CONNEXION. A FREEDOM. A CONVERGENCE OF PARADOX OR REALITY WITH ITSELF. PURE MOVEMENT. SOMETHING FAINTLY GREEK? 

Dad, I Wish You Would Make it Easier for Me to Hate You:

1––I WISH YOU WOULD GIVE ME A JOB.

2––WHAT WOULD IT BE?

1––I DON’T KNOW.

And that’s just the problem. I harbor latent resentments against your gender, self-hatred, nascent anger toward one or both of my parents, misgivings about time, a tendency away from sequentiality, my heart beats to strange polyvalences, blood courses through like archaeology, I can’t seem to remember what to do ever, “Your TBI is showing.” Whatever whatever whatever. I’m willing to be the most both: schizophrenic and depressed girl on this train. 

“You, I wish you would make it easier for me to hate you”, is graffitied on someone’s blue Lexus sedan. I hope everyone reads it. I hope Google Maps sees it.