The Gym No. 7: Roots
Hey there.
I’ve been tossing this letter around for months—between the hands of despair and hope, of anger and spring, of documenting and moving on. The journalist in me disapproves at my failings in timeliness, but this letter is a moving reflection, possible only in the near rear view. That is to say, it took the time it took, which is longer than I would’ve liked, because I also had to keep my eyes on the road.
I don't want to forget how profound the lack of physical togetherness felt in the last few weeks before we began to crack open our doors to vaccinated life. After a year of distancing, shock and novelty had worn off, and we’d grown weary of the interfaces—verbal language, software, audiovisual transmission—required to express our togetherness.
I also don't want to forget that there was, and still is, always another body to be carried away, a victim of racist violence, flowers to be laid at the scene. In April, Charles Blow’s op-ed “Rage Is the Only Language I Have Left” laid bare the futility of language and journalism: “There is no new hot take. There is very little new to be revealed. These killings are not continuing to happen due to a lack of exposure, but in spite of it.” We were knotted, self-bound in words and systems, when we most needed to look into the eyes of a stranger, to hear the strength and fragility of their breathing.
Outside the window near my desk, the buds of a returning clematis vine pointed upward like new paintbrushes at the ready. Work emails and chats fell silent as the world waited for the verdict on George Floyd’s killer. There was no app or interface to replicate what I wanted then, to have that silence in basic physical togetherness with my everyday coworkers, honest body with honest body in our shared workspace.
The building that is our design studio had previously been a theater. The winter after we moved in, the heat failed. Without the added thermal energy generated by active performers and a house packed with audience members shoulder to shoulder, the system could not keep up. We wore coats at our desks.
By the next winter, of course, all the theaters were vacant, and for a few weeks in Texas, our worries plunged to the bottom of the hierarchy of needs: freezing to death, broken pipes, lack of potable water. When temperatures rose, propelling us toward spring, we remembered we had no live festivals or performances or graduation ceremonies to go to.
We’d been through the wringer, with disparate severity largely determined by socioeconomics and race. The interfaces of language, politics, and money had failed at facilitating honest challenges of our systems and concepts for new systems, or antisystems. Instead of interfaces, we needed something akin to mycelium, a true, unsayable empathy to connect and open us to some mysteries of humanity.
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“Bodies in a state of exertion are only ever earnest,” writes Lizzie Feidelson (in a piece on fixing the sport of women’s gymnastics).
“I don’t think you can actually be human if you don’t know you have a body. You can’t have compassion, which is a physical experience at its root.” This is poet Jorie Graham in an interview.
“I want it to be a confounding space. . . . I want to operate in the back of the mind.”—Okwui Okpokwasili on her work, in a Fuse podcast interview.
In spring 2021, the need to be confounded, to be stewarded into created worlds where our interfaces—linear language, logic, assumptions, opinions—would be useless, seemed dire. Nothing else was working; we needed a direct channel for listening and accepting. Empathy via the senses and love, bypassing the cerebrum. In the front row, palms open, eyes shining. We needed live performance. We needed to gather in places where the air was heavy with droplets. We needed the theatre.
My mind returned over and over to a work I saw at Fusebox Festival 2018, Johnnie Cruise Mercer’s Process Memoir 1: plunge in/to 534. (I’m not sure what’s possible to get from a video, paltry picture.) In a rigorous and methodical teardown of physicalized experience, Mercer and his dancers were present, urgent, racing, pacing, breathing, running, sneakered, noosed, hooded, free, restricted, taking up space. At the climax of the action, Mercer invoked Whitney Houston’s ghost voice over the speakers—the spectre of a treasure lost forever, killed by an irresponsible and ungrateful society, the same one that had done the hooding and noosing, that allowed racism, misogynism, and capitalism to chew her up and spit her on the sidewalk. For me, the result was something like feeling American racism, heavy but everywhere, in the molecules of the air and in the cells of my being.
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I can’t recall where I read these gardening instructions, sometime after the February freeze, but they’re what started this letter:
after a freeze,
cut off the soft parts
keep going until
you feel something hard
I don’t think I’m alone in that some parts of the past year-plus have softened me, and others have made me harder. I’m also louder and quieter, more fearful and bolder. I suspect that within many of us, these paradoxes hold a clarified center—humbler, more present, more seeing. This feels new. Maybe it is, or maybe I’m just more attuned to the tone of urgency—to hold presence, to listen, to question, to do the work all the way down to the somatic level. The will to not just carry on as before. To decolonize our bodies, our creative spaces, and uncover embodied supremacies.
In March 2021, there were still mushy piles of freeze-damaged cactus paddles and agave spears in my neighbors’ yards, and the directive to cut them away, useless though they were, seemed cruel in light of everything we’d been through. Impatient and carried away by spring, I ripped up some plants by the roots and waited in lines at garden shops to buy replacements. Now, two months later, an aloe I forgot about is just poking new spikes up through the mulch.
I’ve been to an art opening, I’ve attended an outdoor dance performance, I’ve heard a live band, I’ve picnicked at the symphony. I’ve closed my eyes in the dark and raised them to the sky, overcome by the effectiveness of just one interface, my body. The kids will go back to school in the fall. There is a hope that they will, in their own way, whatever it means for their generation, be all right. It seems certain that we will indeed sit shoulder to shoulder again.
At the same time, I worry that there was an openness, a listening, that is already getting busied away. It’s a struggle not to revert, but I’m trying to remember that our aplomb is in the roots. Let’s not break it, that radical tenderness. Let’s all sit in the front row, artists and audiences alike, eyes shining.
