“Nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn.”

You are always on display, you china doll, you morning flower. Downtown, you imagine throwing yourself into traffic. You want a house on a hill. You want a house by the sea. You want your mother back, or someone else’s mother. A better one.

But in the day-to-day work of an organization, no matter what its finely-crafted mission statement might promise, the necessary and often dulling tasks of building and sustaining the systems and processes to support the work, is not what many would consider to "spark joy."

Lift me up to the window the white frame and the glass between....

“So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world.”

From our individual practices, we bring preoccupations with speech and language acts, sonic textures, improvisational methods, and experimental textual forms.

standing face to face with the memory of it. it misses. it's missing. still. what of time. not more. remains there. misses nothing. time, what is. all else. all things else. all things other. subject time. must answer to time. time dictates all else, except for some. it misses. all installed in time.

How what we do arises from who we are, what we need, what we love.

Why now, you think. Why revisit. The 90s in the zeitgeist again? The chunky platform shoes and plaid skirts?

We drove out to a small seaside town, where a friend of ours had a house on a hill. Behind the house, a path leading down to a stretch of pebbled beach punctuated by sharp black rock formations.

In the parking lot of the converted barn where we held rehearsals, we paced and argued for what seemed like hours. He was doing me a favor, she said. We can't do that to him.

Susan Sontag (1964): “I valued professional competence + force, think (since age four?) that that was, at least, more attainable than being lovable as ‘just as a person.’”

There is the pressure to rush on, lean in, to pretend that there has ever been a “normal” to return to, to be in it, not only to pick up where we left off, but to make up for all the lost time.

I'm making my way back to writing projects that I'd abandoned. Returning to them, the pages and pages of notes, printed, hand-written, with post-it notes and strike-throughs. All the evidence of having engaged with and invested in sentences that now seem unfamiliar and stubbornly obstructive.

Even in the dream, the persistence of the phone alerts, the messages and reminders of never quite being free from the needs and demands of others. But as I say this I know how often this tether can be our only lifeline.

Nabila Lovelace: “In the ‘Ars Poetica’ is a question worth daily consideration: what are we willing to do with language?”

Took some notes on an essay about walking that I’ve promised. Cleared away a few administrative tasks. Made dinner for a very dear friend I had not seen since summer.

I wheeled a shopping cart through the streets. I joined a yoga class on a stage while artists and performers milled about around me.

This morning, I took a little time to make some notes on a project and it only took a few minutes to realize that it needed to be completely re-conceived. Perhaps this is what I have been avoiding all along.

It's been difficult to write, so I work with my hands instead, sewing, drawing patterns, mending socks and sweaters.