performance

Always after a rush of new pages, a sudden road block. Scattered doubts, questions I don’t yet know how to answer, decisions that I’ve put off, insistently returning. I sit, I read, I stare at the ceiling. I try to resist the big doubts, they don’t seem useful to me anymore, seem childish, indulgent. But still, as time passes, anxiety pulses beneath the surface of all my plans and ambitions.

I sent my last manuscript out in a flurry of administrative decisiveness. I don’t know what will become of it, but it helps to think of it “in play.” For work, I have to now assemble all the last year’s efforts and tell a story of intention and accomplishment. It’s a familiar task that can feel, at times, even satisfying. But it is also true that all of it — the exercise of sending out work, of documenting activities — can seem a bit unreal and performative.

I suppose I have performance in mind. I am reading, occasionally, from a book on performance studies, (Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains) that examines, among other things, historical reenactments. There is much of interest, conceptually, but I don’t know how or whether any of it makes its way to the book. I am interested in the way reenactment messes with time.

Schneider characterizes the study as

“a theoretical investigation into reenactment as an activity that nets us all (reenacted, reenactor, original, copy, event, re-event, bypassed, and passer-by) in a knotty and porous relationship to time. It is about the temporal tangle, about the temporal leak, and about the many questions that attend time’s returns.”

What compels us back, in memory, in action, to patterns of thought and behavior that no longer serve? That were formed, perhaps in a time of trauma or distress, when we were unable to articulate or know our own pain or fear?

For years I have thought about setting up a little space — the word “altar” feels too formal here, too tied to the vestiges of years of Catholic mass — through which I might perform my own ritual of mourning. A little space for acknowledgement, for recognition. For knowing. My friend sent me a few suggested methods that I am adapting. It feels, at first, a little awkward, a little performative, too. But it seems important only to begin, and perhaps to let the rest reveal itself in time.

I have felt these last few days a bit overwhelmed — with teaching again, with my own work, with the many time-consuming habits of domesticity I have come to find satisfying and comforting through these months of isolation. How to fit it all in? How to know where to turn first? It is perhaps a good problem to have. A problem of abundance. An ample life. Steadiness, attentiveness is perhaps what is most required. Steadfastness, openness. An open heart.