in other words,

I was raised by freelancing parents. Our bracket was southern and not wealthy. The majority of my arts education has been made possible by scholarships, based on both financial need and talent. Even as I entered college, having studied my instrument since the age of eight, I’d never hear the word luthier. In grade school, I was performing as assistant CM of the CSYO, and leading my high school’s program, which was enormous. I was, artistically, speaking, a big fish in a little pond. 

I’m working on an essay. It’ll help me to share it as I go; a way to hold myself accountable and Keep Going... because I always quit. 

---

Dear Jane,

I have been in an abusive relationship with classical music for years.

The power of imposter syndrome is undeniably real in classical music.

another JW memoir, different from Leaving the Witness, an especially intense memoir I finished this summer. It hit hard, but after sitting with it, and being reminded of its emotional impact without warning, I’ve come to a few things:

1. While poignant, and true in a myriad of different, differently nuanced versions, these experiences differ from mine in ways that are extremely fundamental. These differences mirror each other across the experiences that color my personal and professional life. 

The differences span social and fiscal gaps. At the core of it all is whiteness; whiteness in its accessibility, its privilege, its warped sense of place on the global stage that has, for whatever reason(s), enabled it to be relentless in its commitment to the extraction of the finer points of nearly every culture but their own. 

For this reason then, and for instance, someone like Amber Scorah, a white woman who woke up to her truth while married to another white missionary in Japan, the idea of being unemployed in New York City would seem like an opportunity, as opposed to the terrifying notion of ultimate vulnerability that a fuckless place like New York City thrives on. Up and until that point in the book, I’d felt a kinship with this woman that resembled something close to sisterhood, despite having never laid eyes on her in person. Suddenly, I was reminded of the feeling I had during my first summer as a fellow at Spoleto. I’d found the festival online and applied simply because I needed summer work. I arrived to find myself sharing a dorm suite with three other girls who spent their entire holiday season continuing to study, perfecting their auditioning skills by way of summer festivals in beautifully inaccessible places like Tanglewood and Aspen. Money simply did not occupy space in their immediate consciousness, save for group jokes about our pathetically low stipend. At the time, the reality of my surroundings, as well as the way in which they profoundly affected my own, had an emotionally isolating effect, but perhaps more vivid was the physical sensation of Less Than. Equally cruel, but almost religiously consistent, was the feeling I had while reading a white woman wax poetic about the inspiring way that New York found a nobility in learning how to eat around the city on the cheap. 

---

Tonight was our first show of the week, at the Hollywood Bowl. I looked around at the people with the teslas in the parking lot, the musicians living fat off this tiny margin of recording la la land, and how miserable and stiff and fucking jaded they are, and I realized that the feeling could have been the same. The potential for it all to be the same, a replication of the same cycles of isolation and the willingness I previously had to double my existing burden through the endless weight of self-critique. The difference tonight is one hundred percent due to the work I’m doing in mindfulness and meditation. To even have the mental space to implement the R.A.I.N. technique onstage in front of thousands was empowering on its own, but to have it work! To see the proof in the way I felt My Power. That the experiences I have lived and fought and worked and choked and drowned and swam and bled through, define nothing less than the things that make me invincible. They exist within me, and they are within reach of my control. I can master the click and release it as if it was never there, as if I’d never sat behind the walls of a booth for hours on end for weeks at a time. I can tune the violin to 415 for an early music masterclass, and then take a train to a bus to the nation’s capital, where I can sit in with an orchestra that plays Argentinian tango music, exclusively. I can wake up the day after and travel back to on a bus that charged me $10 for the ticket, to get into the city in time to take a train to a train to Chinatown, where I know how to ask for the same jasmine tea I loved in China when I was sick and swimming in smog so thick you couldn’t see your hand if you held it arms’ length away from your face. I can then teach a class of damn near twenty kids how to play the violin, how to improvise, and how to hear, really hear, the way brown culture is laced in everything they will learn to play and ever live performance they attend. 

Freedom is realizing/accepting who you are not beholden to. I am beholden to no one. 

After days of procrastination, days of research-laden procrastination...

I have finally managed to at least outline, through excerpts, how I’m going to structure this tribute piece to TM. From the minute I was asked, I’ve been planning. It has been overwhelming, to say the least. How to put together something about someone who means so very very much to me? How to represent that in the most fitting way possible? ..shuddering at the idea of gaming the queen from wherever she is observing in the afterlife...

SO HERE, HERE IS THE QUOTE OUTLINE I HAVE CONCOCTED:

___

MAVIS (pg 21): 

The neighbors seemed pleased when the babies smothered. probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they died had annoyed them for some time.

___

GRACE (GIGI) (pg 65):

The man with the earring didn't come looking for her. She sought him out. Just to talk too somebody who wasn’t encased in polyester and who looked like he might smoke something other than Chesterfields. 

He was short, almost a dwarf, but his clothes were East Coast hip. His Afro was neat, not ragged, and he wore seeds of gold around his neck, one matching stud in his ear,

They stood next to each other at the snack bar, which the attendant insisted on calling the dining car. She ordered a Coke without ice and a brownie. He was paying for a large cup of ice only.

“That ought to be free,” Gig said to the man behind the counter. “He shouldn’t have to pay for the cup.”

“Excuse me, ma’am. I just follow the rules.”

“I ordered no ice. Did you deduct anything?”

“Course not.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” the short man said.

“I ain’t troubled,” Gigi told him, and then, to the counterman: “Listen, you. Give him the ice you weren’t going to charge him for, okay?”

“Miss, do I have to call the conductor?”

“If you don’t, I will This is train robbery all right - trains robbing people.”

“It’s all right,” said the man. “Just a nickel.”

“It’s the principle,” said gig.

“A five-cent principle ain’t no principle at all. The man needs a nickel. Needs it real bad.” The short man smiled.

“I don't need nothing,” said the attendant. “It’s the rules.”

“Have two,” said the man, and flicked a second nickel into the saucer.

Gig glaring, the eagle man smiling, they left the snack bar together. She sat down across the aisle from him to expand on the incident, while the man crunched the ice.

“Gigi.” She held out her hand. “You?”

“Dice,” he said.

“Like chopping small?”

“Like pair of.”

___

SENECA

“The chauffeur had picked her up for Norma like a stray puppy. No, not even that. But like a pet you wanted to pay with for a while - a little while - but not keep. Not love. Not name it. Just feed it, play with it, then return it to its own habitat. She had five hundred dollars, and other than Eddie, no one knew where it was. Maybe she ought to keep it that way. 

Seneca hadn’t decided much of anything when she saw the first place to hide - a flatbed loaded with cement sacks. When she was discovered she was held against a tire, splicing his questions, curses and threats with mild flirtations. Seneca said nothing at first, then suddenly begged permission to go to the bathroom. “I have to go. Bad,” she said. The driver sighed and released her, shouting a final warning at her back. She hitched a few times after that but so disliked the necessary talk she accepted the risk of stowing away in trucks. She preferred traveling resolutely nowhere, closed off from society, hidden among quiet cargo - no one knowing she was there. When she found herself among crates in a brand-new ‘73 pickup, jumping out of it to follow. coatless woman was the first pointedly uninstructed thing she had ever done.”

___

DIVINE

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good.

Love is none of that. there is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging of tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason ro motive except that it is God.

You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn-by practice and careful contemplation-the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. 

How do you know you have graduated? You don’t. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is only interested in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who share and understand that interest. 

___

PATRICIA

“What did Daddy say to you at that AME Zion picnic? The one held for colored soldiers stationed at the base in Tennessee. How could either of you tell what the other was saying? He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music is so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must have been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since-no matter what business venture he thinks up.”

___

CONSOLATA

“It was while Consolata waited on the steps that she saw him for the first time. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. A lean young man astride one horse, leading another. His khaki shirt was soaked with sweat, and at some point he romped his wide flat hat to wipe perspiration from his forehead. His hips were rocking in the saddle, back and forth, back and forth. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Consolata saw his profile, and the wing of a feathered thing, undead, fluttered in her stomach.”

...

“Casually, perfunctorily, he looked her way. Consolata looked back and thought she saw hesitation in his eyes if not in his stride. Quickly she ducked into the sun-baked Mercury, where the heat emend to explain her difficult breathing. She did not see him again for two months of time made unstable by a feathered thing fighting for wingspread.”

...

“They drove for what Consolata believed were hours, no words passing between them. The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm. She did not know or care where headed or what might happen to them when they arrived. Speeding toward the unforeseeable, sitting next to him who was darker than the darkness they split, Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb. Out here where wind was not a help or threat to sunflowers, nor the moon a language of time, of weather, of sowing or harvesting, but a feature of the original world designed for the two of them.

Finally he slowed and turned unto a barely passable track, where coyote grass scraped the fenders. In the middle of it he braked and would have taken her in his arms except she was already there.

...

“He kisses her lightly, then leans on his elbow. “I’ve traveled. All over. I’ve never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?

“I’m looking now.”

...

“Let your mind grow long and use what God gives you.”

...

“They had promised to take care of her always but did not tell her that always was not all ways nor forever. Prisoner wine helped until it didn’t and she found herself, full of drinker’s malice, wishing she had the strength to beat the life out of the women freeloading in the house. “God don’t make mistakes,” Lone had shouted at her. Perhaps not, but He was sometimes overgenerous. Like giving satanic gifts to a drunken, ignorant, penniless woman living in darkness unable to rise from a cot to do something useful or die on it and rid the world of her stench. Gray-haired, her eyes drained of what eyes were made for, she imagined how she must appear. Her colorless eyes saw nothing clearly except what took place in the minds of others. Exactly the opposite of that blind season when she rutted in dirt with the living man and the thought that she was seeing for the first time because she was looking so hard. But she had been spoken to, half cursed, half blessed. He had burned the green away and replaced it with pure sight that damned her if she used it.”

...

“Non sum dignus,” she whispered. “But tell me. Where is the rest of days, the aisle of thyme, the scent of veronica you promised? The cream and honey you said I earned? The happiness that comes of well-done chores, the serenity duty grants us, the blessings of good works? Was what I did for love of you so terrible?”

Mary Magna had nothing to say. Consolata listened to the refusing silence, more wondering than annoyed by the sky, in plumage now, gold and blue-green, strutting like unrequited love on the horizon. She was afraid of dying alone, ungrieved in holy ground, but knew that was precisely what lay before her. How she longed for the good death. “I’ll miss you,” she told Him. “I really will.” The skylight wavered.

...

“My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teach me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed her until I met another. My flesh is hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the woman rescue me from my body again. Twice he saves it. When her body sickens I care for it in every way flesh works. I hold it in my arms and between my legs. Clean it, rock it, enter it to keep it breath. After she is dead I cannot get past that. My bones on hers that only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No different from the man. My bones on his the only true thing. So I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like bones. It is good, like bones. One sweet, one bitter. Where is it lost? Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve.”

_______________________________________

These are the quotes I’ve chosen to use to frame the piece. These are the quotes that have struck me at my core, the pieces of this masterpiece that stick to my soul like glue (for lack of a better way to describe the intensity with which these vignettes travel my bloodstream). 

The plan is to structure cells that apply to each character. Within each cell, I will record an idée fixe that works for each character of the novel, each representing a different nuance that any black woman may or may not experience.  

Do you think of me? 

Do you wonder?

Or do you think about me at all...

Or are you like me

impenetrable,

until you are not.

Confident, in the extreme,

   until you are not?

Are you  mindful, meditating, self-confident,

>>fukk the rest of you motherfukkas

CHILL

   until you are not?

because I am so humanely unsettled

I was so humanely unsettled

until I was not

And now that I am not

Now that I am learning

& unlearning me

now that I have had the first days without loneliness, 

and in the company of myself,

now that I have found joy in the Sun without imprinting

the gravity of the earth’s rotation

into your Person 

     so that you found it hard to breathe

Now that I can be present in the moments that count

without perpetually wishing you were there

Now that I can be with my people without wishing for what they have

while still loving it 

and ever learning to love the ones that were always there,

or may have left 

but never betrayed

As I am learning the value in having friendships that thrive on the beauty of simplicity, 

in purpose/practice

in humor, joy, 

in honest challenges

As I begin to accept the way that my energy reacts to anything harmful to my energy

All the while understanding the core truth of compassion of self means,

the scope of the discovery

And understanding, as I understand my books,

why I have made the decisions

removed of blame and void of regret

why I have hoped so consistently, 

and with such intentional fervor

Now that the air is clear 

I can see the rift in the shimmering space above ground

where the two of us should be

would be

our shadows an imprint but somehow entwined in an unending loop,

as in,

as you love,

the natural symmetry of a circle,

The Wheel

time moves forward

and where are we?

do we go forward

or just I

Paradise, Toni Morrison

She had misjudged. Again.

grateful to have a workspace in the sun

Mavis, from Paradise, Toni Morrison

Mavis reciting the rules of engagement between men and women to a white reporter who is there specifically to guilt this black mother according to the unposted rules of social class and race. The brilliance of Morrison is this, the ability to pack an entire sociological lesson into a single sentence. 

In this, familial structure and stability is entirely contingent on the 

Toni Morrison, Paradise

Paradise is the Morrison closest to me. I was asked to prepare a set for an upcoming celebration of her work at the Schomburg Institute, and nearly as soon as I agreed, I realized how I would curate, research and frame the tribute: 

themes of loss: loss of the illusion of safety from an organization/partner/lover/parent, loss of control by the men who have self-declared themselves leaders, judges and jury over the town of Ruby, OK, loss of the illusion of freedom within the confines of someone else’s deigns on your life, etc

This speaks to me personally, on each level. The choice to frame whatever I write around this seemed easy. This blog will be a sketch of the process, with the intention of recording, but also as something I can read and reflect on in my personal performance and mindfulness practice later. As I said, sketches. Not complete portraits. until there is something complete to share.

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back to the quote: