050626 / REHEARSING OTHERWISE
REHEARSING OTHERWISE is a series where I share experiments in writing rooted in black study1. These are dispatches from the rituals of play I facilitate in my own writing practice, embodying disobedience (or, dis-embodying obedience)2 through methods of reading and writing Otherwise34. I publish these tangential5 drafts with commentary as a gesture toward the revision process.
Recently, I went to a discussion ran by atLouisPlace about Facilitation as Creative Research. My impulse was to take notes in a way that attempted to capture everything that’s important. You may know this perfectionistic trap: the fear that there’ll be a quiz to discipline your learning, that if you miss something that should’ve been written down then you’ll be failed, judged, corrected, (i.e. shamed). Even in such a welcoming learning space, I was carrying recollections from educational environments that were much less forgiving. Luckily, I’m not in the space to get things right, I’m there to be curious with others.
I decided on a form of note-taking rooted in that purpose. Since I didn’t know what to listen for, I asked myself what I was curious about over and over on the page throughout the session. I consider this note-taking format part annotative, part inferential, and especially ritualistic.
Ritual is a wonderful place to learn, I’ve discovered. It requires my return, my participation, and my not-knowing in order for transformation to happen. And learning is a transformative thing, so why not try it this way? I’ve found that even in the most basic of rituals, I’ve been called to access my curiosity until it puts me in that creative clearing where learning becomes easy. I tend to think of this part as intention-setting: holding some intention to be present enough to learn. And so my notes reflect this repetitive questioning because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to learn, but I needed to keep myself available to the learning I was sure to come across6.
Today I’m offering my notes from that session as a text composition. (I am skeptical of calling it a poem since I do not pursue poetry, though you’re welcome to read it as such.)
Notes on: Facilitation as Creative Research
What am I curious about?
What do I want to learn about performance?
What do I want to learn about learning?
(pedagogy: learning about learning)
What do I want to learn from a sense of ‘missing’?
(missing: limitations; invitations)
“Do you want to learn with me?”
What do I want to learn about curiosity as a (site of) rigorous practice?
What if research is just revising an original question?
(revising: unfinished process)
(question: invitation to learn)
What do I want to learn about the writing that is underneath the writing?
★★★
Thanks for rehearsing & studying alongside me,
Paris
“…there is a distinction to be made between black studies and black study. Despite its radical origins, Black Studies as an academic discipline is now assimilated into the corporate university and too often reduced to performative reform. Alternatively, study is ‘a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you.’ As a mode of practice, as Stefano Harney puts it, study is happening with and against the university and, most importantly, outside the university…I would posit that black study is the practice of refusal of Western civilization.“ — djones, Black Study as Practice: Claiming the B-Side as Black Study. (2023). ↩
“There remains some aspect of my speaking that expects a different mode of expression than English provides…This comes from a desire to resist assimilation, but equally, it arises out of a sense of exploration or adventure, a sense of puzzlement: as if something has happened to my occupation of the language, where a kind of split occurs. I move through it and see myself moving at the same time. It’s a double consciousness, a questioning that simultanates my rendering of experience.“ — Renee Gladman, The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture ↩
I came into the concept and praxis of ‘Reading Otherwise’ through Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Keynote on Visibility for Center of Book Arts 2022 Conference. ↩
“I think these ideas of world building really gives this freedom of also trusting what you already know and what you're already carrying, but also try to imagine other ways of being together, or other ways of encountering something. …thinking about alternative histories that is not through the lens of colonialism…there’s always a possibility to think of other ways of being together.” — Sandra Mujinga, “"I cheer for the monsters." | Artist Sandra Mujinga | Louisiana Channel.“ (2023). ↩
“A tangent can be a generative digression that invites learning or an abrupt change in course that introduces you to new ideas. Tangents are not mistakes rather, they are offerings…A tangent is a form of waywardness…” — Kameelah Janan Rasheed for Orange Tangent Study ↩
I fiercely anticipate being fulfilled in my desire to learn in honor of lines in a poem from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ essay “The God of Every Day” published in Topical Cream. She shares the wisdom: “Expect sun and rise to meet it…Expect sun to rise to meet you and love yourself.” ↩