072226 / REHEARSING OTHERWISE
a reflection on ritual & revision
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.
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Recently, I went to a workshop about Ritual Poetics ran by Gabrielle Civil. I was drawn to the idea of learning about preparing for ritual as ritual, which is a major part of how Rehearsing Otherwise happens for me. This workshop was a supportive place for me to reflect on how ritual shows up in my facilitation work. As an extension of that reflective process, this journal entry is a text composition from the notes I took, with some additional thoughts.
Notes on Ritual Poetics6
What comes up for your body when you hear the word ‘ritual’?
I could feel
the vibratory sense of writing,
…poetics, erotics, density…
once I slowed down.
Who are you bringing into the room with you?
(Who do I want to…?)
What is moving in you right now?
What is moving in you to write, now?
What is moving in you to rite, now?
How do you get yourself out of ritual?
…repetition, utterance…
…Attraction, transcendence…
This time I broke,
I overlapped the spiral.
Each time I offer
my unknowing,
my gratitude.
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When I’m facilitating a sacred space of play or contemplation for engaging with writing, ritual becomes a necessary container for holding the possibility of revision. I sense revision to be a dialogue with the fragments of writing I already have (even if they are mere inklings in my mind), the intentions for learning that I possess, and the means to embody the creativity needed to not know what the next version of my writing will look like, sound like, or breathe into life.
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Thanks for witnessing my rehearsal,
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 ↩
Italics throughout the text composition indicate wording directly referencing Gabrielle’s workshop slides/instructions. ↩