Tag Archives: lisa o’neill

April 20, 2013 · 11:02 am

Diana

diana cropped

 

Last night, we held our third the dictionary project presents! reading at Casa Libre en la Solana. And we finally revealed the word that our writers and readers had been working with for two weeks: Diana!

We were all grateful for having to engage with Diana: Roman goddess of the hunt, of the moon and childbirth, of all things wild.

One of the most exciting things about our reading series is assigning the same word to a group of writers and seeing the different ways these brilliant minds and hearts experience and interpret that word.  I am grateful to Ian Ellasante, Hannah Ensor, Kindall Gray, Tc Tolbert, and Teré Fowler-Chapman for their writing and for reading last night. And I am grateful to everyone that came.

We will post photos and videos soon from the event, but in the meantime, I would like to share with you the piece I wrote as an introduction. Wishing you a beautiful day.

 

Diana!

As many of you know, whenever I bibliomance a word for tdp, I close my eyes and run my finger through the dictionary and then over a page. This time, I landed on the image of Diana.

 

 

In yoga asana practice, there are several poses named warrior. In my favorite warrior pose—I say favorite because I’m not holding the position for several minutes now—the right leg lunges forward, knee bent, while the back leg is straight and sturdy, giving the illusion of stillness even as the muscles are working and the tendons wrapping strong around bone. Arms are outstretched in a T-shape with palms facing down, hips positioned to the side. Shoulders are released. And the chest, the chest is open.

 

The first hundred times I did this shape, or any warrior shape for that matter, I focused on where I felt weak. My arms ached. My legs shook. Holding the position for any length of time felt impossible.

 

Years later, I have a different relationship to the pose. Instead of noticing my weakness, even though the pose is challenging, I can instead embrace my strength. I can feel my feet and legs holding me up. I can radiate out from the extension in my arms. I can be aware of my chest as it continues to press into the air, opening.

 

I realize now that the challenge of the pose also reveals my capacity to hold it, but first I have to choose to see it that way.

 

All week I have been thinking about the different meanings of the word warrior.

 

I have been tuned in to the presence of violence and the threat of violence, in our country and in the world. First, with the horrible bombings at the Boston Marathon that resulted in the death of three and injury of almost one hundred and fifty. Second, with the news of car bombs in Iraq that killed at least thirty-three people. I listened to politicians and advisors talk about the difference between the word “terrorism” and “murder” on The Diane Rehm Show. I heard a filmmaker talk to Terry Gross about how he survived an IED when he recorded footage on the frontlines in Iraq and about the documentary he just finished about his partner filmmaker who was killed from a shrapnel wound while filming the uprising in Libya. Then, I read and heard about the Senate’s decision not to pass revised gun control legislation that would require background checks before purchasing these weapons, and the responses of both our president and victims of gun violence saying “shame on you.” And finally, yesterday and today, I have watched the unfurling of armed robbery and gunfights and gun deaths and the ongoing manhunt as Boston police search for the surviving suspect of the Boston Marathon bombing. Perhaps by the time I read this, in front of all of you, he will have been found and thus we will have someone to hold accountable. Perhaps we will have some resolution to one particular tragic event that harmed so many and incited fear and anxiety in even more.

 

And without lessening the burden placed on those that committed all these individual atrocities, the truth is that every one of us is accountable. We are accountable for living in a culture where power and privilege aren’t always used mindfully but instead used with arrogance and thoughtlessness. Accountable for when we choose aggression over talking things through. Accountable for valuing purchasing more and more objects over spending time with our neighbors. Accountable for electing people whose job is to protect us and who have made decisions that do exactly the opposite. Accountable for every word said in anger, every aggressive face or hand gesture made while driving. Accountable when we harm ourselves or others, when we do not live up to our best potential.

 

At one point or another, we are all guilty of being the wrong kind of warrior.

 

I grew up in the South, in a city built on the backs of slaves, and in a time when I could count the African-American women who attended my private Catholic school with me on two hands. There were firm divisions by race in this town, ones I was never asked to question but merely recognize and keep. In every unspoken gesture, I read clearly who I was supposed to be friends with and how I was supposed to be. It took going to a poor bordertown in Mexico when I was ten to show me the devastating impact of poverty, as I witnessed children my age begging on the streets, because I never went to neighborhoods where I would have seen it in my hometown.

 

Life was constricted not only by issues of race and class but by issues of gender—by pantyhose, by scripture passages, by too few female role models giving permission by their presence for me to be creative and curious and strong. For a long time, I struggled to reconcile my femininity with my strength, so entrenched in me were the values of my culture which said that these things could not exist in one person, in one body, in a woman.

 

My freshman year of high school, I was assigned Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. The front cover of the paperback was black with bold white letters and an image of a man riding on the back of a winged horse. I had been an avid reader since early childhood so I was familiar with stories, but these struck a new note. These were mythological figures that I was allowed to think of as icons (as was not permitted with biblical ones). Here were stories I needed. They were the stories of men and women, trying and failing and trying and failing again. They were the stories of gods and goddesses, all of whom had tremendous power and inevitability colossal flaws. One of the goddesses that bewildered me most was the Greek Artemis, or in Roman culture: Diana. She bewildered me because I grew up in a town where pearls hung around the necks of the women who hosted garden parties and gathered children round their legs. I didn’t see any women walking around with bows and arrows, not even metaphorical ones. Even my mother, who I now see as one of the fiercest and most warrior-like women I know, didn’t appear that way when I was growing up. I read her through the lenses that were provided to me and as a result she seemed more careful and cautious than bold and brazen.

 

Diana, Giampietrino

Diana, Giampietrino

 

So when I first read about Diana, I judged her for what I perceived as her “overly masculine” behavior and I wondered how I could fit her into my perception of female heroines, who I had learned thus far were to be smart but not too smart, conversational but not in a way that took up too much space, and above all, beautiful.

 

Diana is the goddess of the hunt. She is also the goddess of the moon. And she is the goddess of the process of birth. In her, the power for livelihood, for the ebbing and flowing of tides, and for the creation of new beings come together. In her, masculine and feminine energies combine, and it is this balance that gives her so much power.

 

dianawithanimalcrescent

 

I’ve been thinking about Diana this week, not just because her name is the word for tonight’s event, but because I feel that her particular kind of warrior spirit is needed in our world right now. Hers is the warrior spirit that stands up against the would-be warriors who say that background checks aren’t necessary, that the solution to weapons is more weapons, that the solution to violence is to meet it with more violence. I’ve been thinking about her because her warriorship is not about using her power to benefit herself; it is not about killing innocents; it is not about encouraging war or bloodshed. Her warriorship is about living from the marrow of the bone, the tender tissue of the heart. Her warriorship is about expressing the fiery aspect of her being without entirely letting go of the reins. Her warriorship about being assertive but also compassionate. Her warriorship requires us not to back down from that which is right but also not to meet those who oppose us with unchecked anger. We will meet them with our minds, with the strength of our spirit rather than swords and shields, rifles and semi-automatics.

 

In 2011, the United States’ military budget totaled 644 billion dollars. We praise our servicemen  and women, but when we see images of them, we don’t so much see their human bodies as we do the items that cover them: guns, magazines, helmets. As a culture, we praise their power and bravery but when they suffer, we refuse to see their humanness, we refuse to recognize that violence does damage to everyone involved. We only honor the fierceness of these warriors without acknowledging their tenderness.

 

“I came to the Greeks early,” Edith Hamilton told an interviewer when she was 91, “and I found answers in them. Greece’s great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don’t really act as if we believed in the soul’s immortality and that’s why we are where we are today.”

 

Diana of Versailles, Leochares

Diana of Versailles, Leochares

 

In it’s most simple definition, a warrior is a brave or experienced soldier or fighter. It is up to us what we fight for. Because being a warrior at its core is not about death and is not about killing. Being a warrior is about responsible use of one’s power and energy. To be a warrior is to act with bravery and courage and to make wise choices in situations of extreme pressure.

 

It’s not that we don’t need warriors. We desperately need warriors. But we need the kind who soldier for love, compassion, and understanding.

 

When I was fourteen, I might have thought that a goddess could not be charged with the duties of hunting and also of midwifery. I might have seen these powers emerging in Diana as completely contradictory. But I don’t think that anymore. Both hunting and childbirth require intense physical and emotional strength. Both require fierceness working alongside wisdom and compassion. In both rituals, there must be encouragement, there must be patience, there must be integrity, there must be a time to hold still and a time to push forward.

 

–Lisa O’Neill, written for The Dictionary Project Presents!, April 19, 2013

 

 

Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon, Hans Makart

Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon, Hans Makart

 

Diana bathing with her nymphs, Rembrandt

Diana bathing with her nymphs, Rembrandt

 

 

Artemis

Artemis

 

Diana and Cupid

Diana and Cupid

 

dianadogs

 

Diana, David Swift Photography

Diana, David Swift Photography

 

 

 

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April 2, 2013 · 12:20 am

spoke

 

spoke*  (spōk),  past tense or archaic past participle of speak.

 

    IMG_1019

 

Today, I am on a plane from New Orleans, my hometown, to Dallas, and then I’ll get on another one to fly to Tucson, the desert town where I live.

 

Last Sunday, I was dancing—moving my feet and shaking my hips—to Rebirth Brass Band, a band from my hometown who was playing at a festival in Tucson. Trumpets and trombones. Snare drums. If there’s a sound the inside of my chest makes, I think it must sound like horns and drums. Blares and beats.

 

The Sunday before that, I was sitting talking with dear friends after four days of silence. Earlier that day, I prostrated myself on the floor in the direction of where my parents live, where my teachers are, where my community resides. Mala beads were placed over my head and I received a new name.

 

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I am thinking about motion and staticity. I am thinking about what it means to move forward, what it means to hold still, to hold stillness.

 

I met my niece for the first time this weekend and as I held her in my arms, I was struck by her substance, her solidity. She is seven months old. She has not yet said her first word. She does not have an understanding of object permanence. She does not get peek-a-boo. She does not know her name. Yet she knows how to smile and make raspberries. She has obvious preferences: from when she wants to be held  and when she wants to stand up to when she does and does not want to eat. She has already formed into a self and she is still in formation. Different each day and also still her. What a gift to watch these changes in increments. What a pleasure to watch her as she awakens to the world.

 

Is this then about spoke, about speaking? There is nothing more fleeting than words spoken. I spend my life impossibly torn between the desire to record every instant for posterity, to write every word spoken down, and the desire to throw away my pen and just listen, knowing I will not remember.

 

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We are flying over the river now, the Crescent City is crescent because of the way the water bends into the land. If I put my hand on the window, I could trace the river’s path, no larger than the tip of my finger. Yesterday, I stood on the bank and watched seagulls overhead. I sat with my parents. We had gone to the French Quarter on Easter Sunday as we had when I was ten. When I was sixteen. When I was twenty-four. We caught the end of the Easter Parade and shiny purple, pink, white, and green beads joined the simple brown ones hanging around my neck. There seemed something fitting and sacred about each strand. My parents said that when they were last in the Quarter, they saw the portrait artist who drew me when I was ten. That drawing lost in the floodwaters that came when the levee broke. Or as my parents said, “We lost that one in Katrina.” What made this man a good portrait artist is the way he could capture the uniqueness of each individual’s eyes. I looked at my eyes and saw it was me. A year or two later, my dad and I went alone to the French Quarter on Easter. My parents had separated. When we saw the same artist he drew me and then, on the same paper, my dad. The two of us without my mother. I don’t remember seeing that portrait after they got back together.

 

On my flight to New Orleans a few days ago, I was sitting next to a mother and her son. The woman looked to be in her forties. The son looked to be about twelve. He intertwined his arm with hers and later, she cradled him against her body and they slept. I thought about this intimacy, tender because of its transience. Soon, this boy will begin to pull away from his mother, from this body that birthed him. Soon, those small intimacies will be grieved by his mother. I imagine her: sitting alone at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a mug of tea, remembering this flight or any other of the millions of tiny moments of closeness and hoping her son—now out with friends—is safe. But for now, they have each other and the closeness of their bodies, this proximity, feels like something sacred. I am both riveted by the tenderness and embarrassed to bear witness, sitting just inches away. This: the moment of a bubble before it breaks, a flower before the petals begin to fall, the last lingering note before the song is over.

 

Sometimes I feel awash in all the talking. Is there a time, I wonder, beyond and below what is spoken?

 

When I didn’t speak for four days, I noticed the energy spared. And I noticed how much could be communicated with a simple facial expression, a slow bow, the way one sits or stands. Intention isn’t always clear in language but it seems more clear in what the body says.

 

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For our family get-together, my parents rented a bouncy castle. Strong nylon whose shape is held only by air. Air pumped in. Air moving around.

 

Sometimes, when I am speaking while walking, I stop mid-step. I have only realized recently that I do this. Or maybe I realized it and then forgot it and then realized it again. Someone could be five steps ahead of me before I realize, before they realize we are no longer walking together. One friend called this caesura an exclamation point. “An em dash?” I offered.

 

“For one day,” I told my students, “your mission is to communicate only in the form of questions. Be curious. See what happens when you have more space to listen.” It was hard, they told me. But many were shocked that their friends and classmates didn’t even notice their lack of declaration. In the absence of their statements, the others easily filled the space.

 

IMG_1035

 

The flight is only an hour long. Soon we will land. Soon all the passengers will collect their purses and suitcases and plastic bags. They will move forward down the aisle. They will go home or on vacation. They will walk towards baggage claim and then on to funerals and hospitals, to weddings and baby showers. They will fall into the arms of lovers. They will get into the cars of family members. They will hug their roommates. They will stare at the gray heads of friends they haven’t seen in years. They will drive into cities teeming with people and countryside sparse with them. This flight will move from an immediate experience to an unremembered one. It will become part of a collective memory, one of many uneventful flights, defined only by its unremarkable nature: smooth air, easy takeoff, seamless landing, no delays. This time will collapse into empty space in their memory. Their slow movement through the sky will be marked only by fading numbers on cheap paper tucked into a paperback. Maybe a year from now, they will pick up the book they bought at the airport that they left unfinished. Maybe they will look at the date and the destinations and a specter of the person they sat next to will be conjured up in their memory. Or maybe they will, without looking, toss the slip of paper into the recycle pile, the last piece of evidence of this moment in the ether will be ground back into pulp from which new things will be made.

 

 

*composed 30,000 feet in the air

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February 10, 2013 · 12:04 pm

ly·ric

 

Screenshot of Woody's Journal taken from "The Making of The Works," album with music by Jonatha Brooke and lyrics by Woody Guthrie (click for video)

Screenshot of Woody’s Journal taken from “The Making of The Works,” album with music by Jonatha Brooke and lyrics by Woody Guthrie (click for video)

 

ly·ric  (lir ik),  adj.  [ < Fr. Or L.; Fr. Lyrique; L. lyricus; Gr. lyrikos],  1.  of a lyre.  2.  suitable for singing, as to the accompaniment of a lyre; songlike; specifically, designating poetry or a poem expressing the poet’s personal emotion or sentiment rather than telling of external events: sonnets, elegies, odes, hymns, etc. are lyric poems.  3.  writing or having written lyric poetry.  4.  in music, a) characterized by a relatively high compass and a light, flexible quality: as, a voice of lyric quality.  b)  having such a voice: as, a lyric tenor. Opposed to dramatic.  n.  1.  a lyric poem.  2.  Usually pl. the words of a song, as distinguished from the music.

 

 

the words of a song/as distinguished from the music

 


 

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.”

 –Sherwood Anderson, letter to his teenage son, 1927

 

 

Lyrics have always been a kind of savior.  From times before written word when sounds were bellowed round a fire, when epic poems were sung as a way to pass down history and legend of how a people came to be. Even the sound of the word om, a mantra for invocation, deemed sacred in part because of the vibrations sent out and the resonance of the sound when sung, a-u-m.

 

Lyrics have saved me at various moments in my life. I think perhaps the greatest gift of these words set to music is their ability to do away with the notion that we are alone. When I am in pain, that is the moment I find it hardest to see beyond myself. There is a meditation practice Pema Chödrön writes about called tonglen. Tonglen is a practice where you get in touch with your own suffering and then breathe in the pain of others. This is in direct opposition to many new age practices that promise relief through visualization: go to your happy place, imagine a bridge covered with ivy and a brick cottage, breathe in the scent of your favorite flower. Tonglen instead asks that you connect with and breathe in the intensity of your own pain and breathe out relief. Then, tonglen asks that you think of all the people in the world who at this very same moment are experiencing the same pain as you—whether grief, loneliness, anger, jealousy, or fear—and to breathe in their pain and breathe out relief. Tonglen makes you aware that you are not the only one feeling what you are feeling. Tonglen gives you an opportunity to offer relief by seeing outside the parameters of your own pain. Lyrics do the same thing.

 

I have an uncanny memory for song lyrics; they are stacked, filed, catalogued in my brain—the ones I want to remember and the ones I wish I could forget. I also have a habit from when I was very young of spontaneously breaking into song, singing about what’s happening to me or things I see, or inserting song lyrics when someone says a word that reminds me of the song they come from.

 

I noticed past this fall that I listen to music less and that I sing along less in the car. I’m not sure exactly when this began, but I recognize some of it. Sometimes, even things I love can become things I resist or deny myself. I go through periods of not writing when I am overcome with doubt, when I become focused on product instead of process. When I’m not feeling good about my songwriting or my singing or when I feel I’m not doing enough, I deny myself the moments of even singing along in the car or playing guitar for fun in my home. I even start watching movies as I move about my home instead of listening to music, so permeating is the feeling that I should be doing more. I resist that which matters to me when I don’t allow myself space for it. This is a harsh reality for so many of us: When do we not provide space and time for that which we love out of fear? When does what’s made become more important than the making?

 

I think in truth that most of us have ideas and words and architecture running just under the surface of our skin. The power of all that we could create scares us into not making time, into making excuses, into making work that is so much more superficial than that which our deepest knowing dares us to make.

 

Too often, we are liars.

 

We tell ourselves that the world doesn’t need one more song, one more story, one more sketch.

 

We are wrong.

 

The best songs I have written have been the ones that have come out quickly and seamlessly, seemingly out of nowhere. I have sat down with a pen, a notebook, a guitar, and the song has spilled out. This is not evidence of the quickness of art but rather how quick art can come if we pay attention and allow space for it to emerge. Songwriting is a sort of channeling. I know there are people in Nashville who can turn a phrase, who make their living shaping songs for superstars. But like writing, even those who are prolific, would tell you of a certain spark, a certain word or turn of phrase, the key turning in the lock that opened the way to the rest of the song. A crack in the dam. A snap in the hinge. A pull in the thread that unravels the whole hem,  one seam untying to stitch another.

 

And the lyrics that are made and sent into the world become a place for others to rest within. For hours after a college boyfriend, the first guy I really fell hard for, left to return to the country he was from, I lay on my bed listening to the same song on repeat for hours. It was a Sundays song called “When I’m Thinking About You.” I remember my dorm room and where my bed was positioned by the window. I remember feeling that I had never loved like this before, fearing I would miss him so much my heart would surely break open inside my chest. There were many tears: so many verses and so many choruses worth. I found comfort in the repetition of the same lyrics over and over again. I listened and I cried and by the time I turned the cd player off hours later, I felt better, even if my heart was still broken.

 

Lyrics become a way of organizing our experiences in life, a place to store our suffering and our solace. The spectacle of karaoke feels less about nostalgia or the desire to be the center of attention than it feels like confession. Singing in unison, the resonating feeling of these words that everyone knows. I, too, have felt this way. Like communion, me too.

 

 

“I hate a song that makes you think you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I’m out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.”

—Woody Guthrie

 

 

Several friends have spoken with me about the songs that saved them. These songs held words they needed to hear during dark times. And somehow the fact that the song existed provided a shelter. These lyrics, a place for solidarity and witness. These lyrics, a kiva, where a voice reaches out of the speaker to our waiting bodies, mouths, hearts, skin as these parts of us echo back a simple reply, yes.

 

One of my favorite songs is Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times, Come Again No More.” The first time I heard it, I was in my early twenties and these three young men, handsome and brilliant musicians, were coming through town on a Woody Guthrie Tribute tour. They played this song in harmony on guitars and accordion and it broke something open in me.

 

Foster wrote the song about people living in deep poverty and deep despair, something I knew  nothing about at the time, something I know a little more about now but not in the way the people he is writing about knew it. And yet, I could hear myself in the chorus. Hard Times, Come Again No More. I feel a sort of yearning in this song and a feeling that the song itself beckons a wish, that in singing the song loud enough, often enough, we could somehow stave away suffering. A hope. An impossibility. When I play the song now, I experience it as a remembrance and a tribute, an acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that is an inevitable part of being human.

 

Researcher Brené Brown talks about how: “When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak, when you ask them about belonging, they tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. When you ask people about connection, the stories they tell you are about disconnection.” It makes sense then that for many of us the songs that resonate most are the ones that reveal that aching aspect of being human: having loved and lost, having reached out and been turned away, and the hope we hold for a future when things will turn out in a way that meets our needs and desires.

 

Lyrics feed us. Because we require constant attention and ever-present opening. Because we cannot do it alone. Because we have lived through heartache and heartbreak and have to learn what it means to stand again. Because we must uncover our hands once more from atop our hearts. Because if you needed me, I would come to you. Because there is no other way. Because this fuel, this fire, this field, this flood; this avalanche, this arc, this arch, this aspen; this meeting, this movement, this martyr, this made; this sacrifice, this sepulcher, this sergeant, this soot; this tandem, this tangent, this target, this tongue; this blanket, this buckle, this banter, this bare. Because in singing and seeking, we come to know each other better and we come to know ourselves.

 

I sing because I’m grateful for having been sung to. And I sing because it is when I am singing that I feel most alive. And I sing because no matter how hard my day has been, no matter how uncertain the road ahead is, no matter the current state of things, I need to be reminded of the beauty that can be found curled up inside a long held note and the calm of the silence in between one sound and another. Songs are of us and for us. They are of our making and they are how we are made.

 

 

 

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January 6, 2013 · 12:03 pm

de·cap·i·tate

IMG_8294

Washington, D.C., Lisa O’Neill

 

Phoenix, Lisa O'Neill

Phoenix, Lisa O’Neill

 

Detroit, Lisa O'Neill

Detroit, Lisa O’Neill

 

de·cap·i·tate (di-ˈka-pə-ˌtāt)  v. behead

 

The word architect comes from the Middle French architecte, from Latin architectus, from Greek arkhitekton “master builder, director of works,” from arkhi- “chief” + tekton “builder, carpenter.” An Old English word for it was heahcræftiga “high-crafter.”

 

To be an architect is to use your mind to conceive of bodies, buildings, frameworks. It is to see how objects could align, could fit together. To be an architect is to construct a dwelling made of many parts.

 

Structures are about foundations and support and design. They are also about absence. They are about what is contained and what is uncontainable.

 

Last night, I saw two improvisational dance groups perform: The Movement Salon and The Architects. A dozen years ago, I would have been dismissive of improvisational dance—much as I was of abstract painting or performance art. I would have sat there making myself miserable as I picked apart what was wrong with art created in the moment, without “preparation” or “process.” I would not have thought about all the process and preparation that went into being ready to construct something in and of the moment.

 

But much has happened over the last twelve years, so tonight I was in awe. I was deeply moved and lightened and full of gratitude. Here’s why: because improvisational dance is not only amazing to watch: the spontaneity, the interplay of the performers, the moments of synchronicity in movement, song, speech. The experience of improvisational dance provides amazing practice for life. Life requires risk and being vulnerable. Life requires presence in the moment and paying close attention to the actions, movements, needs, bodies, thoughts, feelings of all those around you. Life can have you laughing one minute and crumpled on the floor the next. Life is made in the living, no matter our designs or plans. Life contains multitudes.

 

After the performance, some friends and I, one of them a performer, were having a conversation about the show. I shared what came up for me while watching. That we—okay, I’m going to take out the safe plural pronoun—I can live my life so contained. I am often measuring myself. How small do I need to be in a given situation? How large a space am I allowed? It’s as if I’m on a rollercoaster and must keep my limbs inside, as per the instructions. Only instead of just my limbs, my emotions, thoughts, opinions, heart, and mind must be contained as well. How little can I be to make myself safe?

 

But how limiting is that? How constrictive?

 

These performers embodied expansiveness. They committed to their movements, to their words, to their interaction with one another. They stomped on the floor. They slid across. They took one another’s hands. They lept from one side of the stage to the other. They cracked jokes. They sang. They plucked strings and then led the bow across them.

 

Many people in my life have told me about the process of growing a bigger container, to hold the richness and fullness of life: the light and the dark, the weightlessness and the gravity.

 

“We have an expression we use all the time,” my performer friend said, “Even when you are out, you are in.”

 

Even when choosing to push yourself into the corner of the stage.

 

Even when you aren’t moving.

 

Even when your voice is a whisper.

 

You are in.

 

The only decision is whether we acknowledge that we are.

 

To live is to be vulnerable, regardless of what we tell ourselves. No matter how many barriers we construct, no matter how small we make ourselves, we will face pain, suffering, rejection. But we do get to decide whether or not we reject ourselves. We get to choose how small or big we are. It’s the difference between folding our arms tightly across our chests or stretching our arms wide.

 

When I was in my mid-twenties and going through a particularly shitty period of my life, my younger cousin sent me a card she had made with a painting of a girl outlined in black and colored in red. But instead of the red being contained within her figure, it spilled outside. Across the top, she had painted: “Some passions are uncontainable.” Inside the card, she told me the girl was me. That is maybe the best compliment anyone has ever given me.

 

I want to spill over, to spill out, under, through. I want to live my life in a way that when I’m done, I will have spent it. I will have left this earth with heart, mind, body used up. No more paint in the tube. No more tea in the cup. No more pennies in the jar.

 

We can live in our heads, constantly marking and processing how to be in any given situation. Or we can choose to fill up a space with our entire bodies, to be all in. We are the master builders, the high-crafters of our lives. We have the materials. We have the time. We have all the space we allow ourselves. The only question is: what will we build?

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December 3, 2012 · 1:45 pm

fm

transistorradio

Photo by Kristin Korpos

 

fm : frequency modulation, fathom from

 

I have been incessantly watching Bridget Jone’s Diary. Okay, not incessantly, but I have watched it three and a half times in about as many days. Maybe it’s because the holidays are approaching. Maybe it’s because I want Colin Firth to make lots of babies with me. Maybe it’s because it’s the end of the semester and I need films that are funny and easy to watch. Now is not the time for Requiem for a Dream.

But I think the real reason I’m watching is because I find Renee Zellweger’s Bridget Jones to be such a likable protagonist. She’s funny and well-read, but she fumbles. She doesn’t say the right thing all the time. In fact, she often says the exact opposite of the right thing. She loves her friends and she struggles with insecurities about her weight and appearance, her job, her single status.

I can easily watch the opening sequence over and over again because I see my shadow self so clearly in it. Who has not had that moment? That moment of sitting on your couch in your pajamas, hair disheveled, teeth unbrushed, watching lousy television, listening to the radio and singing along to some song in the lines of “All by Myself,” having a pity party, cursing the gods, feeling like a complete fuck-up, finding it hard to believe that this year will be any different than the last? Tell me you’ve never had a moment like this, and I’ll tell you that you are a liar.

I had plenty of beautiful moments and experiences in the past year. I’ve had my share of hard ones, too. Yet when I think back to New Year’s Eve, I can’t feel much of a difference in my actual self from then to now. At a gathering at a friend’s house, we all partook in a ritual in which we beckoned in the new for the new year and burned messages that contained all we wanted to shed. Many of the things I beckoned for last year have not yet emerged. And I have done work at the shedding but some of the same habits, patterns, and insecurities are here. If I’m honest with myself, I can see the nuances of change, both in my life and in myself, but the changes are not always as demonstrative as I had hoped or expected. Beyond this, my life feels steeped in uncertainty at the moment and uncertainty is quite good at seducing anxiety and doubt. Everything is okay, but lately both the ups and downs, the moments of joy and the disappointments, feel heightened and intertwined.

So, I think I find such satisfaction in the movie because within a two hour block, Bridget Jones is embarrassed and depressed, resolves to change her life, fucks this resolution up royalty, lives vulnerably, opens up to possibility in life and love, says and does foolish things, finds more self acceptance, and, of course, love: from herself and from others.

I like it because it is packaged and condensed and easy. Not like life and yet enough like life that it allows me room for trusting.

After her lip-synching to Celine Dion, she narrates her desire to change. She says, “And so I made a major decision. I had to make sure that next year I wouldn’t end up shit-faced and listening to sad FM, easy-listening for the over-thirties. I decided to take control of my life…and start a diary: to tell the truth about Bridget Jones—the whole truth.”

Sad Fm.

I like the idea of Sad Fm because it feels like such a ripe metaphor. (It reminds me of KFKD, for those of you who have read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.)  Sure, there is the literal act of listening to sad songs about love left, love gone awry, lives fucked up, seemingly irrevocably. But it feels so apt for the times in which our minds circulate around the same fucking songs, the same damn static. The static that says, at full blast no matter how gingerly you turn the dial: Not enough, Not smart enough, Not loved enough, Not pretty enough, Not worthy enough. And the songs with refrains all about past mistakes and your undeniably abysmal future. Sad Fm is the mind’s way of separating us from the world around us, isolating us and making us feel as if we are not connected. And Sad Fm is only one station but when you are listening, it feels like the only station. As if there is a sumo wrestler sitting on your chest and preventing you from standing up and just simply switching the dial to the radio which is a football field’s length away. The force feels that real and strong.

But it’s not. I began this post earlier in the week, and today, I am listening to a different station. Know what helps? Little things like watching a movie with a protagonist that isn’t fully realized and developed, that struggles to honor her worth and accept her whole self and yet still manages to walk through life, living and being vulnerable and fucking up and standing back up and dusting herself off. That is a protagonist I want to root for. That is a protagonist I can offer love and compassion to. That is a protagonist that reminds me to offer that same love and compassion to myself.

Rob Breszny, author of Free Will Astrology, writes in his book Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: “Have you ever been loved? I bet you have been loved so much and so deeply that you have become blasé about the enormity of the grace it confers. So let me remind you: To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you’re smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness. Animals, too: You have been the recipient of their boundless affection. The spirits of allies who’ve left this world continue to send their tender regards, as well…You are awash in torrents of love…Think about that. In your life, you have been deeply and completely loved. Probably many times. Many more than maybe you are even aware of, with a depth that you might not be able to fathom.”

Awash in torrents of love.

Embedded within the movie is the best romantic movie compliment of all time. That being when Mark Darcy tells Bridget he likes her just as she is. Her friends retort, “Just as you are? Not thinner? Not cleverer? Not with slightly bigger breasts and a slightly smaller nose?” No, just as she is. This is the hardest thing to do for ourselves and the thing we desire most from others. To be loved, with all our flaws and with all our beauty. To be loved not despite but because of all that we are. Such a remarkable gift, this blessing of hearing through the static and noise to the place of acceptance and of being seen.

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November 21, 2012 · 11:41 am

the dictionary project presents: re·ta·ble

 

On October 26, the dictionary project held our second the dictionary project presents reading featuring Tucson writers writing to the word: re·ta·ble. It was a truly magical, inspired and inspiring evening, hosted at Casa Libre. We constructed an altar in honor of the word, and the readers offerings were poignant, funny, smart, and beautiful. It seems appropriate in this time of harvest and of giving thanks to offer these readings to those of you who could not be with us in person on that evening. Please enjoy these offerings of words and ideas as you consider what people, talismans, gifts are on your own retable.

 

re·ta·ble  (ˈrē-ˌtā-bəl)  n.  [Fr., contr.  <  *reretable; rere (see REAR) + table (see TABLE)], a raised shelf of ledge above an altar for holding altar lights, flowers, etc.

 

A million thanks go to Casa Libre Assistant Director Tc Tolbert for recording and uploading these readings so that we can continue to enjoy them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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November 11, 2012 · 2:09 pm

sa·bot

 

Tree, Lisa O’Neill


 
sa·bot    (sab-oh)  n.  [Fr.; altered (after bot, a boot)  <  savate, old shoe; via Turk.  <  Ar. sabbat, sandal]  1.  a kind of shoe shaped and hollowed from a single piece of wood, worn by peasants in Europe.  2.  a heavy leather shoe with a wooden sole.  3.  a small sailing dinghy whose hull somewhat resembles a shoe.  4.  in military usage, a wooden disk or soft metalclip fastened to a projectile, formerly used in muzzle-loading canon.
 
 
“Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But (just) leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it”

–Shantideva

 
 
 
The ground was rough. So the girl decided to carve herself some shoes. She was tired of stepping on thorns. She had enough of cuts from tiny pieces of glass. Her toenails were torn. Her arches were sore. Her feet were calloused from walking the stubborn earth.
 
She had tried looking carefully at where she was walking. She had tried looking ahead at where she was going and hoping for the best. She had tried praying for the ground to be other than it was. She had tried laying out a mat which she would pick up and throw in front of her every few steps. All of these were tiresome. None of these worked. So at long last, she decided, though she was no carver, to carve herself some shoes.
 
She went walking to the place where there were many trees and once she arrived there, she considered them keenly. She placed her hand against the bark. She felt the smoothness of their leaves between her fingers. She considered the maple, the mesquite, the magnolia. She sat on the roots of mighty oaks. She pressed her nose to the skin of the cedar. She did this for days, or was it weeks? She smelled the sassafras. She leaned her back against the bark of the elm. She touched the ashes. She tasted the sap of the pine.
 
She wondered which wood would give best, which would mar her feet. She considered what she knew about the rings inside those trees, the color of the wood. She considered the way the wood would sound when it met the earth, in walking or in dancing.
 
She walked to where the water met the trees, she waded, and finally, she settled on something. Cypress.
 
She pulled something sharp from within her coat and she began to saw. She thanked the tree and took her branch with her.
 
The girl found a place on the earth to sit and placed her large branch across her lap. She had never made a pair of shoes before. She had never carved anything besides letters into words, color into walls. She wondered where to begin. Begin with this wood, she heard. Begin with this tool. Begin with this time.
 
So she did. She found the process long, this slow hollowing. The only indicator of time spent was a small curve in the center of the block. And yet there was something satisfying about the sound of her knife cutting into the wood and the sight of curled shavings falling to her feet.
 
She scraped and she notched and she pulled. She worked and as she worked, she sang. These were the songs she had been taught over the years. Her mother had sung them. And her mother’s mother had sung them. They were songs about truth and what it means to sit in the presence of another human being. She became lost in the music and the slow rhythm of scraping and when she came out of her haze, she saw she had cut a hole clean through.
 
So she began again, slowly carving, this time not forgetting where she was. People passed her as she worked, some offered to help her carve, some gave her suggestions. She thanked them, she listened, and then she continued to work. The light turned to dark then to light then to dark again, and still she carved. She noticed the rings in the wood. She noticed the changes in color. She noticed the smell of its skin. She chipped, she chiseled, she cleaved and divided. She etched, she hacked, she hewed. She molded and modeled and patterned and sculpted and shaped. She, at long last, whittled the last bit of excess away.
 
And then she looked at her work. These wooden shoes were not entirely even. They were not exactly smooth. She held one in each hand and considered their weight. She thought about her efforts and why she had begun in the first place. These would not be the most comfortable shoes. They would not be the most attractive. They looked like they had been made by a beginner. And they had. These shoes would not spare her the miles walked in them. They would not spare her the wrong turns. They would not keep her from encountering hard rain or hot sand or a horizon obscured by too much foliage. These shoes would not do this. No shoes ever would. But still, the girl had made these.
 
She slipped on the shoes.
 
She began to walk.
 
 
 
 

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· 12:23 pm

nonfiction november

There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole World, Installation by Chris Cobb, Photo by Andrea Scher

 

Hi Dictionary Project People,

I am very pleased to announce that we are adding a new event to our repertoire: nonfiction november.  I tend to write nonfiction essays for the regular weekly words. During November, I wanted to open the doors to other nonfictioneers. All month, we will be featuring short essays inspired by bibliomanced dictionary project words.

While we are on the subject, might I just say that I’ve always been a little unsatisfied by the word “nonfiction” as a descriptor for the genre. A definition in negation. A genre defined by what it is not. I haven’t as of yet found a word or phrase that works to be encompassing of the whole genre, but I’d love to see one. I think what most attracts me to nonfiction as a genre, to write in and to read, is the discovery of all that is true and truly bizarre in our world. I like making connections between seemingly unconnected things. I like listening to people’s stories and thinking about the ways they intersect with art and music and culture, with things I’ve read and things I believe. I like the attempt to get to the heart of the matter. Truth and reflection and beauty are of course present in all genres of writing. Nonfiction, I think offers one thread of connection between the writer and reader: here’s what I see, let’s make sense of it together.  I look forward to sharing with you the nonfiction pieces of writers this month. Stay tuned.

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October 24, 2012 · 2:48 pm

the dictionary project author interview: ander monson

Today, we feature an interview with Ander Monson, author in all genres and known innovator in the world of nonfiction. I think what I appreciate most about Ander’s work is how he brings to the forefront the unexpected and neglected musings that are often relegated to the sidebar, the footnotes, the parentheses. These ideas are investigated, interrogated, violently disassembled and put back together again in surprising, compelling, and sometimes confounding ways.  As he once told me, the essayist’s job is to show the inner workings of the writer’s brain on the page. Enjoy these synapses, these nerve endings.

 

 

1. Please share a memory/story/thought in relation to a dictionary/dictionaries:


I’ve collected old dictionaries for years, starting mostly when I lived in Alabama, and happened on a whole pile of them at Alabama’s Thrift Store, now named, instead, America’s Thrift Store. I’d buy them all. I must have had forty. They were all well outdated. I wondered what worth there was in an outdated dictionary. But they had the most lovely images: etchings, woodcuts, weird handmade diagrams of things. I got excited. I kept them for four years, acquiring more, but had to discard most of them when my wife and I moved to Michigan. They weigh a ton. They take up too much space. But first I pillaged them. Now I restrict myself only to specialist dictionaries (medical dictionaries, photography dictionaries, tool-and-die dictionaries, mathematics dictionaries, etc.) and to my OED condensed, 1971, in micro-script. It comes with a magnifying glass.


2. What is your current favorite word?

Library.


3. What is the most obnoxious/insidious/annoying word?

Utilize.

 

4. What word has been your (recent or past) muse?

I almost never think of words as muses. To me they’re tools—sometimes worlds.

 

5. Could you talk a little bit about the interaction of words and space in your work? 

Well, that’s a big question. I’ll narrow it down a bit. The piece I wrote for this, Dear Sepulcher, is part of this book project I’m finishing up this fall in which I write short, associative, compressed essays in response to things happened on in libraries: five words (in this case), a passage from a book, a striking image, an snatch of overheard conversation, a human hair, a punch card, homophobic marginalia, a packet of seeds, a due date stamp, just to name a few. Once written, they are originally published back into the book in the library in which I found the originating thing. So they’re words written in response to words I found in any one of a series of particular spaces (libraries, loosely defined), and published back into that space as a communication to a future reader. In this way I’ve been thinking of the library as a medium, a meeting space for brains to find each other. I’m also collecting these short essays as 6×9 cards, unbound, unordered in a box. So in their production I’m thinking about space and language, image and design (as I often do in my work). How language can be a tool of design—or design a tool of language. Either can serve the other, but they work best when they can have a conversation.

 

6. Please respond to the following words and definitions*, picked exclusively at random for you:

 

se·pul·cher  (ˈse-pəl-kər),  n.  [ME. & OFr. sepulcre; L. spulcrum < sepelire, to bury],  1.  a vault for burial; grave; tomb.  2.  a place for the safekeeping of relics, as in an altar.  v.t.  to place in a sepulcher; bury.

 

Al·a·bam·i·an  (ˌæləˈbæmɪən), adj.  of Alabama.  n.  a native or inhabitant of Alabama.

 

ken·nel  (/ˈkenl),  n.  [ME. kenel, keneil;  OFr.  *kenil; LL. canile < L. canis, a dog],  1.  a doghouse  2.  often pl. a place where dogs are bred or kept.  3.  a pack of dogs  v.t.  [KENNELED or KENNELLED (‘ld), KENNELING or KENNELLING], to place or keep in a kennel.  v.i.  to live or take shelter in a kennel.

 

Pa·pe·e·te  (pəˈpētē), n.  a seaport on Tahitia: capital of the Society Islands and French Oceania: pop., 8500.

 

re·ta·li·ate  (riˈtalēˌāt),  v.i.  [RETALIATED (-id) RETALIATING], [<L. retaliatus, pp. of retaliare, to require, retaliate < re-, back + talio, punishment in kind < talis, such}, to return like for like; especially to return evil for evil; pay back injury for injury: as, if he is hurt, he will retailiate.  v.t.  to return an injury, wrong, etc. for (an injury, wrong, etc. given); requite in kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Definitions taken from Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, copyright 1955.

 

 

Ander Monson is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website, and five books, most recently The Available World (poetry, Sarabande, 2010) and Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (nonfiction, Graywolf, 2010). He lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona, where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM  and the New Michigan Press.

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October 10, 2012 · 10:37 am

the dictionary project author interview: kate durbin

 

Today, I’m thrilled to share with you an author interview with writer, performer, and transmedia artist Kate Durbin. Kate’s work brilliantly engages with pop culture, celebrity culture, teen girl culture, fashion, and media.  I first became aware of her through her Women as Objects project and Gaga Stigmata, an online arts and criticism journal about Lady Gaga of which she is founding editor.

All glitter and turquoise and bite and wit. Enjoy!

 

 

1. Please share a memory/story/thought in relation to a dictionary/dictionaries:

A few years back one of my students showed me the brilliant Urban Dictionary, an online collection of slang. The website was created by a freshman in college and the dictionary’s very first entry was a definition of “the man.” Today’s Sept. 19, 2012 entry is “penis game”: “This is a game that needs a minimum of 2 players. It can be played anywhere from the workplace to school. It starts when one player says penis ! The other player must say penis ! but louder than the first person. It goes on until one player quits or can’t get louder than the other.”

I think it’s appropriate that kids are collecting the language that expresses our cultural moment, although were Shakespeare alive today he’d likely be adding words to the Urban Dictionary too.

 

2. What is your current favorite word?

Chiffon. The shhh of air in my mouth when I say chiffon is like the very lightness of the material. I heart the luxurious language of fabric: duchess satin, sequined slipper silk, crushed velvet, crinoline, chantilly lace, chenille, moss crepe, sparkle organza, taffeta, liquid lame, tender buttons!


3. What, in your opinion, is the most obnoxious/insidious/annoying word?

Hipster. I feel that term has become an acceptable way to dismiss someone who you perceive to be a threat to your own coolness. Oddly, though, the people who complain about hipsters the most often seem to resemble the criteria for the term itself. But that’s beside the point, as there is no such thing as a hipster.

 

4. What word has been your (recent or past) muse?

iPrincess

 

5. Could you talk a bit about the language of youth culture, particularly teenage girls? I’m thinking specifically about your “Women as Objects” project, which collages images from different teen girls’ tumblr blogs. How does language function here? in their world? in your integration of their language? In the land of the Internet?

For Women as Objects (www.womenasobjects.tumblr.com) I not only curate images but text posts as well from teenage girls—so it is both a visual and text-based project. Some of the images have text on them, too.

I think language functions in the online teenage girl’s world as a means of radical self-expression, as tumblr is a place where they can express themselves more liberally than in their IRL existence. At the same time, language functions also as a hook for attention, and so that means they are competing with one another by creating increasingly abject or pop culturally savvy text posts. They create their own language, a sort of iPrincess language of the internet. It’s equal parts computer keyboard and Cher from Clueless.

The way I’ve integrated the girls’ language most directly is in the video art pieces I’ve done, where I’ve taken a collection of the girls’ text posts and conversations with one another and performed those texts directly, in costume, as tumblr girls in bathroom settings. By taking their texts out of context of the Internet, which is a space where the larger culture is sick of seeing girls spill their guts, makes the girls’ humor, vulnerability, abjection, cleverness, body awareness, and pop cultural savvy more apparently brilliant, glittering, pleasurable and important.

 

 

6. If you were to write a dictionary definition for Lady Gaga, what would it say?

Lady Gaga: woman having proprietary rights or authority especially as a feudal superior : woman receiving the homage or devotion of a knight or lover : dame : infatuated : virgin mary : usually used with Our : doting : woman of superior social position : crazy : woman of refinement and gentle manners : foolish :woman, female : often used in a courteous reference : marked by wild enthusiasm : show the lady to a seat : or usually in the plural in address : ladies and gentlemen : wife : girlfriend, mistress : any of various titled women in Great Britain : used as the customary title of a marchioness, countess, viscountess, or baroness or the wife of a knight, baronet, member of the peerage, or one having the courtesy title of lord and used as a courtesy title for the daughter of a duke, marquess, or earl : I can’t understand how anyone could be so gaga over golf : woman who is a member of an order of knighthood : he thinks that most artists are at least a little bit gaga : origin French, from gaga fool : of imitative origin : First Known Use 1917

 

7. Please respond to the following words and definitions*, picked exclusively at random for you:

 

2up  \əp\  adj   1 :  risen above the horizon <the sun is ~>  2 :  being out of bed (~ by 6 o’clock)  3 : relatively high <prices are ~>  4 :  RAISED, LIFTED <windows are ~>  5 :  BUILT, CONSTRUCTED <the house is ~>  6 :  grown above a surface <the corn is ~>  7 :  moving, inclining, or directed upward  8 :  marked by agitation, excitement, or activity  9 :  READY; esp: highly prepared  10 :  going on: taking place <find out what is ~>  11 :  EXPIRED, ENDED <the time is ~>  12 :  extensively aware or informed <~ on the news>  13 :  being ahead or in advance of an opponent <one hole ~ in a match>  14 :  presented for or being under consideration <~ for promotion>  15 :  charged before a court <~ for robbery>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

block·ade  \bläˈkād\  n : the isolation of a place usu. By troops or ships — block·ade vb  — block·ade·er n

 

 

 

2sluice  \slo͞os\  vb    sluiced; sluic·ing  1 :  to draw off through a sluice   2 :  to wash with running water: FLUSH

 

 

 

a·sep·tic  \ āˈseptik\   adj :  free or freed from disease-causing germs

 

 

 

re·par·a·tive   \ri-ˈpa-rə-tiv\    adj   1 :  of, relating to, or effecting repairs  2 :  serving to make amends

 

 

 

 

 

(All images taken from tumblr)

*Definitions taken from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, New Edition, copyright 2004.

 

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer, performer, and transmedia artist. She is author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books) and E! Entertainment Diamond Edition (Insert/Blanc Press, forthcoming). She has also written five chapbooks, including, most recently, FASHIONWHORE and Kept Women. Her projects have been featured in Spex, Huffington Post, The New Yorker, Salon.com, Denver Quarterly, AOL, Poets and Writers, TMobile’s Your Digital Daily, Poets.org, VLAK, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Black Warrior Review, berfrois, Drunken Boat, NPR, Bookslut, 1913, LIT, and Yale’s The American Scholar, among others. She is founding editor of Gaga Stigmata, an online arts and criticism journal about Lady Gaga, which will be published as a book from Zg Press in 2013.

 

 

 

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