I’d heard talk of Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs in that infamous interrogation scene, but when I finally saw Basic Instinct, it was her shoulders pushed back on the chair that totally stunned me. I’d never experienced shoulders accelerating my pulse. I’d never seen a pair of shoulders communicate point of view. Liquidate a room of all its men and their presumption. Sharon Stone’s shoulders pushed back were like Whoa.
There was Robin Williams’s radius of funny; of voices; of titan warmth. He seemed to outperform humankind. Somehow anthropomorphic, though that makes no sense. As a kid, I believed he was the only person who could be in two places at once. Who, like Genie, could balloon into hot air, float above us, convulse into the cosmos.
Watching movies was consonant to those scenes where the underdog team walks through a stadium tunnel—where their cleats click as light approaches; the blinding pull of sky and turf, and the phenomenon of soon feeling telescoped and giant, both. Watching movies was, and still is, an opportunity for my heart to rush irregularly while the cost, for me, remains low. Because no matter how afflictive, heartbreak on-screen pales in comparison to that first night of a breakup where one’s only thought is not When I wake, I’ll be alone, but How? How will I wake up?
There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on. Or after after we recover from a hike. From seeing fifteenth-century ruins and wondering how Machu Picchu was built when Incans had zero knowledge of the wheel. Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious. Like a small dog carrying an enormous branch clenched in its teeth, as if intimating to the world: Okay. Where to?
I remember seeing Etta James live at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier during the Montreal Jazz Festival, seven or so years before she died. She performed much of the show sitting on a stool, and even then the stage and the theater could not contain her. We the audience, at capacity, fit into her palm. That was the sentiment. Like still air before it becomes a gust of wind. Like water behind a dam; a snowpack before it avalanches. Like Monica Vitti before she sucks on a cigarette, a kettle before it whistles, Etta James, before she performed “At Last,” was possibly the most compelling example of potential energy. Ever.
There’s might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you’ve been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what’s weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn’t only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero.
Groping through the dark is, in large part, what writing consists of anyway. Working through and feeling around the shadows of an idea. Getting pricked. Cursing purity. Threshing out. Scuffing up and peeling away. Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you. Observing writing’s alp and honoring it by scribbling a whole lot of garbage and then clicking in agreement: Don’t save. Exaggerating until it hurts. Until you limp and are forced to rest, and then say what you mean to the sound of thunder’s cannonade; to the lilting hum of ghosts that only haunt the sea, or of Debussy in your earbuds, and the sometimes-style of piano that sounds pleasantly soiree-drunk and stumbly.
Until you write what is detectable but dislodges you. Like the smell of cinnamon. Like sex with someone where your bodies conform, and your hands and legs fold into each other, even if it’s been years. Even if there’s been hate and pitiless hurt.
Thinking of someone the way he was is really just another way of writing. Thinking about someone I was once in love with—how he’d peel an orange and hand me a slice or how his white T-shirt would peek out from under his gray sweatshirt. The way it would curve around his neck somehow made me disposed to him. Thinking about that crescent of white cotton is a version of writing. Thinking about how, once, to make me less nervous before an interview I was preparing for, he pulled his pants down in public. Remembering his smile as my nerves relaxed, and as he pulled his pants up and looked around, is how I write and what I write about, even if it’s nothing I’ve ever written about.
My quick-summoned first love—how everything was enough because I knew so little but felt cramped with certainty—is, I’m afraid, just like writing. That is to say, what can transpire if writing becomes a reason for living outside the real without prying it open. How, like first love, writing can be foiling, agitated, totally addictive. Sweet, insistent, jeweled. Consuming though rarely nourishing. A new tactility.
First love fools you into thinking about nothing else. Into believing a whole city belongs to you; that you can conquer … it doesn’t matter what. Which is, experientially speaking, furthest from finding yourself. Which, let’s face it: can be temporarily curative. Time off. Rescue. A beer. Its froth. Thinking maybe it’d be good to travel. To go to Budapest and pick fights in Budapest, and then make up over a game of Twenty Questions on the bus from Budapest to Vienna.
First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself—about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.
Because writing is, off and on, running smack into Aha! and staring down Duh. Is my function to reach zero and leave nothing in the way of obstructing truth? Or to tender what’s still shapeless? The baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose. How can I present what’s, for now, finished, while also taking comfort in knowing it will evolve? That these words are only materials; provisions for keeping me observant and hopefully light-footed enough to plan my next project. My next many.
Which is why the mode for labeling a visual artist’s work, when exhibited, has always appealed to me. How the artist’s name and the title of the piece are followed by the medium.
? Oil on canvas
? Tape and acrylic on panel
? Plywood, forged iron, plaster, latex paint, twine
? Wood, beeswax, leather, fabric, and human hair
? Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water, and spectacles
? Fat, felt, and cardboard box in metal and glass display case
? Bronze
? Metal and plastic
? Hand-spun wool
? Fabric collage
? Carrara marble and teakwood base