Today is the Solstice, and then in a month from tomorrow I’ll turn 34. Everyone I know is arranging their summers like ikebana, optimizing for balance and breeze and aesthetic pleasure. At present, I’m struggling just to rest enough. I feel, as the heat blares in, like a cartoon character in a jalopy speeding downhill so fast its eyeballs remain behind, suspended midair at the starting line, just before they elastic-snap back into its skull.
A few weeks ago, the third anniversary of my moving to New York passed by without my noticing. I haven’t lived in one place for longer than a year, often less, since I went to college. Every day, I break a record for myself. Jo and I decided once that one year of anything marks a phase, two years a stage, three years a period, and upwards of that, an era. In this era, I’ve lived in three apartments and held three jobs (six if you count the side gigs). After all of that and all the concomitant changes and detours and efforts, I find myself in an arrangement that might not prove any more durable than the last several, who knows, but which makes me feel, for the first time, that things could stay like this for a while and it would work for me. It makes me feel like a normal person, which feels strange. It gives body and dimension to my ideations of the future. It makes me feel itchy for the the next big change, because I have moved around so much and started and finished or failed and abandoned so many endeavors. But I am trying to be curious about what happens when I stay in place. I am stayed by newfound attention to the inevitability, anyway, of attrition: the passing of relationships, opportunities, my own desires and interests and identities, out of my life. And there’s also the persistent influx of newness and things returning. All of this feels so different in the absence of deadlines or departures or other forced transitions. I have to sit with it all.
The teachings and discourses of a ten-day Vipassana meditation course1 remain unchanged course to course. Though by now I know their general contents nearly by heart, different lines ring out each time I sit. The last time I did, one such line was: in every human life, wanted things happen, and unwanted things also happen. Could there be a truer postulate. But the punch line is that nonetheless, or regardless, one must maintain the balance of the mind, and therein lies the implication of a way to participate in the unceasing flux that is living.
In Sally Potter’s adaptation of Orlando, Orlando (played by the uncannily ageless Tilda Swinton) moves through the intertitled centuries, through romances and far-flung voyages and a change of sex, and ultimately returns to sit at the base of the tree where they sat at the opening of the film, hundreds of years ago, penning the first lines of a poem. At moments, Orlando regards the viewer through the lens with a meaningful look, sometimes a remark or aside, as if to collocate us in a mutual knowing. This knowing is neither premonitory nor fault-finding; these looks are confidences, flashes of sympathetic amusement at the vicissitudes that befall our hero/-ine.
I write this for no one in particular, for 65 email subscribers, for myself, to punctuate the ongoingness with similar glances. Is it interesting, is it indulgent, is anyone gazing back? I write this to quell the desire to upend everything as it falls into place and flee. I wanted stability, I tell myself, so I could circumscribe within it a space of total freedom. There are losses I still feel keenly underneath the settling and plenitude. I still grasp at understanding what in the seismic depths of me surfaced in those theatres of disappointment. But even as I strain to look back, new scenes devise themselves before me, populated with new figures, new affects. And I want to participate in them fully, steer them away from tired plotlines.
I think sometimes about the performance art scene from La Grande Bellezza (2014, dir. Sorrentino). A small audience lounges in pairs and clusters scattered across a grassy lawn at the foot of a huge stone aqueduct. The artist, facing them, kneels on a platform that extends from one foot of the aqueduct bridge. She is naked; two women dressed as angels wind a length of translucent white gauze around her face and shoulders. The platform extends to a pillar of the bridge by a long black ramp, bisected by a broken white line, like a road. The artist stands. She paces in place a bit, her eyes closed, then turns around to face the bridge. She takes the preparatory, angled stance of a runner. Then, with a roar, she sprints toward the pillar. She smashes headfirst into the stone and collapses. After a beat—the audience is silent, expectatory—she heaves herself upright. There is a spot of dark blood on the gauze, over her forehead. She staggers back down the length of the ramp. Standing before the audience again, bleeding and trembling, her voice is raw, exhausted, vehement as she cries out: I don’t love you.
Years ago, when I first watched this film and this scene, I felt a pang of identification, like it distilled or allegorized my own inner triangulation of art-making, love, and self-destruction. Watching it again in order to describe it, I see a humor in its self-seriousness. No more running headlong into walls. I’m not in that era anymore.
My dear friend Michael recently sat his first course and wrote about it here.