You thought you’d write this issue after reading two books that have waited on your desk for weeks now. Along with this, you planned to finish reading the essay about art that you’re halfway through because you knew that these would, without a doubt, deepen your understanding of the world and your place within it. You wanted to see how it would reflect in the writing. You thought this issue would touch upon everything you’ve been thinking about and feeling and observing lately and present it to the world in a compact, neatly wrapped package. This has obviously not happened, seems obviously to be impossible, and is probably (definitely) not even what you want.
Meanwhile, beautiful things have been happening. All sorts of reversals you could not have imagined. A childhood dream came true last night. It was the silliest, most perfect dream. (If all these loops are coming to a close, what new beginnings are unfolding? It’s so exciting to wait for.) An ornament half your age has disintegrated; when you get it fixed it will be lovely. When you’d lamented about your distance from dance a few years ago, a dear friend had said that sometimes distance helps you unlearn certain things so that when you return to them, you can see them anew. She was right.
You’ve been doing brave things, very different from before, but you’ve also been haunted by fear, skirting around the edges. Someone you admire deeply has told you that the passion that drew her to you has dimmed somehow. You make all these things up and then they blind you. You will have to let go of yourself; you cannot sing if your hands are tied up.
Your dreams are slightly different now. More magic in them. In one dream, with feet stained purple from the jamuns that lay crushed on the ground, you were shaking a tree for its fruit. The fruit rained down and was lovely but then the tree spoke to you and said that you were hurting it. It was a very kind tree—it guided you with what to do, you did as directed and then the tree was okay. (A child in your life writes stories in which things are always okay in the end. It’s nice to imagine that this dream was inspired by him.) Very little remains of dreams in terms of facts but the feelings adhere. Thank you, tree, and I’m sorry.
Ten years now since she died. You’ve said everything you could based on what you know, so for a while now there has only been a vacuous unknowing. Grief confounds you and perhaps it always will. This poem you’d written a long time ago remains relevant. Reading things like this beautiful essay by raju tai is good.
This woman is extremely cool.
These days, more than ever, you are finely attuned to the fragility and unreliability of perception. In dance class, you see in the face of each little girl an expansive world of which you briefly get a glimpse. The whole ordeal reminds you of visits to the optometrist as a child, and the empty frame on which they stacked lens upon lens until it dug into your nose. You could say that the exercise of pointing out the perfect lens was a pain or boring or fun or what have you, except now you’re struck by these lines by Heather Christle from her poem “A Perfect Catastrophe”:
To have stood midfield among the vast and livid green
and never heard the grasses take their vow of silence
is experience, not evidence […]
What is an “experience” and what is “evidence”? The word evidence comes up quite often in your days, in both literary and non-literary contexts. The internet tells you that etymologically, it refers to “an appearance from which inferences may be drawn”. The “meaning “ground for belief” is from late 14c.; that of "obviousness" is from 1660s and tacks closely to the sense of evident.” You click on the entry for evident and it says, “perceptible, clear, obvious, apparent”. Except—what about perception is obvious? Innumerable inferences about an appearance may be drawn. A lecture comes to mind in which your professor had clarified: perception is always of something by someone, and one can either come to it through experience or through convention. Too often you have been blinded by convention, and it has hurt people, hurt yourself. At any rate, from what you make of these lines, for Christle, the rustling of the grasses does not make a statement. The statement is one’s inference of the rustling. This seems super obvious now, lol. And then what is experience? You will come to this later, perhaps. All in good time.
For now, this painting by Steven Mayer:
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Your words have found me this Sunday morning like an oasis of reassurance while I starve (myself?) of old comforts. I'm also being increasingly transfixed by your writing- tender yet succinct.
I love how relatable number 1 is. ❤️ And how beautiful the painting is. 🌺 And all the glimpses of you in between. :)