Hi all,
In March, a wave of heat descended much too early on these Gulf Coast swamplands. Suddenly, midday felt too hot to go outside with any comfort. I got scared when the heat arrived. I wasn't ready for the onslaught.
But as April arrived, so too did some not too cool and not too hot days, and the reprieve is appreciated. I find a definition of "reprieve" as "temporary respite" or "relief or deliverance for a time."
I've been very much in my head these last months (or years?) but I started dance classes last week, and moving my body has been a relief. Pliés and relevés and hip swerves and jumps and arcs of motion tying head to torso to arms.
At some point in the middle of last night, I woke up briefly with the realization that, just like any other friend, sometimes I show up for myself and sometimes I don't, but I still have to recognize an underlying love is there, even with all the attendant missteps.
Mostly these days, I find writing and art-making to be a little bit too removed from other people or the world or I feel it as far too little in the face of the onslaught. I'm craving something else, even though I don't know quite what to call that otherwise.
I had a poem come out in The Brooklyn Rail that I'd love if you'd read and share with people who might enjoy it: A Note on We. It's trying to think about who "we" is when we are with one another.
I remember once in high school when I wrote a text in the school newspaper that was very emotionally intense, the headmaster, a Benedictine monk, brought me into his office to make sure I was okay.
Also, a book I translated—a book that I love, by a person I love—has just been released into the world. It is called Trash. For several years, I lived with the voices of these three women whose lives intersect in the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. I tried to imagine and recreate those voices in some various Englishes of El Paso and Texas.
I remember the first time I drove down I-10, tracing a path between the mountains and along the course of the river, I had an eerie sensation that I would end up living there at a later stage of my life. Maybe that sensation was really the sensation that the voices of the place and the dust and the afternoon desert wind would come to live in my body, i.e. translation.
I wrote an essay recently about that same river but a different part of it, about trying to get closer to it physically in the area around Del Rio with my friend María José Crespo. I wrote about her art and accidental beauty in unexpected shapes for Southwest Contemporary.
When the heat arrived, I had to water and water the little seedlings I'd planted. Many of them died when I left town on a little trip away for a week.
Most days, I feel my desire wilting, withering with the force of the years and the breakages and the heat of the onslaught. Most days, it is a challenge to believe.
But then when I actually am able to muster the courage to make something, and then the bodyfate and the nerve align to make something otherwise feel possible, then there is a reprieve, a temporary respite, a deliverance from the weight of it all.
And I make something again. Or a few little somethings. And share them.
Yours,
JDP