Zine cover, movement and survival: big feelings all around
Hello friends, and welcome to 2023. This letter contains no resolutions; it is the circumstances' turn to improve.
In this letter we have:
- zine update! cover reveal for "What Cannot Be Held"
- a quilt on the wall
- survival, movement, and despair
- a happy dog
Our song for this one will be a pull from a while back, "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie. Listen to lyrics for the feels tie-in, or just enjoy the excellent bed-dancing stop motion animation.
I finally have my desk cleared and my desktop computer fired up again so I can see about making some progress on various design and A/V tasks. Things are in motion, most notably "What Cannot Be Held". I made a cover!
I actually made several, in the classic vein of "final.jpg", "final-real.jpg", "final-real-best.jpg", etc, and then in the end scrapped all the extra bits I'd put in and just left the hands and the emptiness. I like it. (This version is compressed for email purposes.) It has sixteen poems in it, assuming I don't make last minute changes, mostly written during the ongoing pandemic. They are a blend of speculative and literary, and full of love and heartache for all of us still trying to survive, especially my queer/trans disabled folks. Digital, printable, and (hopefully) audio versions will be available, pay-what-you-want including free. I'm shooting for mid to late February, presently, but we'll take things as they come.
That is very much the shape of things for me at the moment: have some goals, try to make movement in their direction, but not cling too tightly to plans. Plans cannot really be made right now, not much, not far out. Too much is unknown and unreliable, from pandemic safety to my ribcage and hips to the weather.
Quilt Update
I figured out I could pin the Passacaglia to the wall at the bottom of the stairs! I did it because I wanted an easier way to check color/print flow and to make sure I got all the fiddly joining parts in the right place, but another result is that now I get to look at it all the time, which is wonderful and so gratifying. I can lie on the couch when I need to rest, and gaze at it. I am frequently entranced by it and lose track of time.
I talked in letter #1 about the soothing sense of progress inherent to English Paper Piecing - each bit you sew really clearly tangibly Makes A Thing - and having it up in view intensifies that feeling considerably. The sense of progress had started to ebb, as I got into the joining-up parts, which are many and fiddly, but once it hit the wall it was suddenly, shockingly, nearly a quilt, and not just a pile of bits in a box. There is much still to go, and a few parts I will go back and revise now that I can see how things work together - that top right corner was joined very early, when I still thought I would be using all white stars for my joiners, and now I want to reduce that white density, so some must come out - but it's going so well. Six months now. It's so nice to look at it and know: I made this. I am making this.
Despair, Movement, Survival
Both the poems and the quilt attach to this, though really I did not plan it that way: being in the feelings, finding places for movement, the small things, the possible.
I have been thinking lately about despair. The world being what it is, a lot more folks are encountering despair/hopelessness to a greater degree than they are used to, or for the first time; I am seeing more of it circulating, present or being disavowed. But some of us have been here for a long time - due to our neurobiology or trauma or social circumstances or whatever else - and I think our experiences might be helpful, or at least, play a useful part in discussion. It is something we otherwise often talk around rather than about. (Like its cousin, grief.) I want to speak to you here as someone intimately familiar with despair, and tell you some of what I've learned from my twenty-odd years moving through it. Maybe it will be new to you, maybe not so new. Sometimes it is also good to hear the familiar from somewhere else. This is not so much a survival guide as observations made while, sometimes about, surviving. What despair is, what survival is, what movement is.
(Not actually a downer of a segment, I hope - but also definitely no toxic positivity here. I have consciously avoided major triggers, it is not that kind of essay, but please take care of you, friend.)
The one key definition, to start: despair is not a choice. You can perhaps sometimes choose to engage deliberately with it, sit with it, be immersed in it; sometimes you can choose, if the need is enough and the circumstances are right, to fade it into the background enough to attend to something else for a time. And there are fluctuating degrees to it, long-term - the depths, the slopes, even if you’re lucky the shallows. (Everything I’m about to write feels very different when I’m deeper down, where everything feels like a lie.) But you can’t choose to turn it off, and you don’t choose it start it up in the first place. Choice feels impossible, overall.
Because - nothing feels possible. That’s the whole deal with being in despair. Nothing possible, nothing meaningful; maybe you feel like everything has stopped, maybe you desperately wish everything would stop.
It does not stop. This is the first thing I would tell you about what I have learned. It does not stop. Nothing stops. No matter what, it all continues.
This is pretty immediately and profoundly unconscionable. An added layer of unbearable. People will tell you that you are strong for not giving up when they don’t know just how hard you have tried. No matter how much you say you can’t, you stop, you quit, you give up, the emails come in and the bills have to be paid and the body needs oxygen and sugar and protein and water and complains if it doesn’t get any and the day rolls over into the next and it all happens again but with more dirty laundry. (Aside: my favorite tool for “wait, am I supposed to be taking care of myself? but how” is this interactive flow guide.)
But it is also - not comforting, because comfort is a distant abstraction from the bottom of the pit of despair - but it is how you keep going. You keep going because things keep going regardless of your opinion on the matter. Whether it’s a positive or a negative. The value judgment becomes immaterial; good or bad, what remains is the fact that everything keeps on happening. And that includes you and me.
This is the stone that rock-bottom is carved into. Painful but solid. The immutable facts of the universe - if nothing else, its relentless continuation - are just there. The world simply is, the despair just is, I just am. My adequacy or inadequacy are moot, irrelevant. My cells keep metabolizing whether or not I feel like I deserve it. The moon pulls the tides whether or not I believe in them or myself or tomorrow. Tomorrow believes in itself. I don’t have to make it happen. I don’t have to make myself feel any kind of way about any of it, I don’t have to know how to continue, and it will still go on.
These things are true at the same time: it is unbearable and it is how I keep going. The world is relentless, but not particularly orderly, and frequently, annoyingly, many contradictory things are true at once. (Likewise, I'm sure some of these observations won't hold true for others.) It will happen, like everything else, regardless of how I feel about it.
What I come back to, when everything is too much, is seeking movement. Something to change, anything, something to ease, anything to be not this, not now, not here.
Sometimes I can find it - maybe cross something off my to-do list, maybe sew two blocks together, maybe move my body in space, maybe write a poem, maybe realize today differs from yesterday, maybe just remember that getting a blanket makes me stop being cold - and sometimes it seems, like everything else, completely impossible. But the truth is, because nothing stops, I haven’t stopped moving. (This one took me a long time to learn, and I am still working on it.)
In dance we know that stillness is an illusion. A dancer immobile in space on stage is still breathing, their blood still circulating, and on a closer-to-conscious level their muscles are working, making tiny corrections to maintain the illusion, based on even tinier environmental movements all around them, relayed in their vestibular and other sensory systems, from touch, or vibrations in the floor of others’ movement, or the air. They blink. They sway a little. As they fatigue they will shake. As you look closer you can see movement after movement.
This is also true in life. Nothing stops. Whether I feel stuck in a dead place, or stuck in an overwhelmingly, relentlessly active one, I’m still moving. Again, this is without a value judgment. This is not a chipper “so everything is fine” or a punitive “so it’s all in your head”. It is just a statement of fact, albeit one we lose track of, or devalue because in our slow moments the movement, the change, is “not enough”. Not big enough, important enough, visible enough…
(You are enough.)
Even tiny changes matter. There are a lot of ways to come at this. The old “for want of a nail” sequence, or the butterfly effect; or microbiology or chemistry or physics, where a slightly different molecule or atom or particle makes a completely different material or state or being. I am a dancer so again I come back to dance. Part of what makes stillness a challenging illusion to chase is that the closer you get to still, the more obvious movement becomes. Choreographically this can be used for emphasis, to great effect; when a dancer, or even a whole ensemble, are quiet and approaching visible stillness, the tiniest movements draw laser-sharp focus. The most intense, riveted, held-breath, hear-a-pin-drop audience experiences I’ve had are always in a time where the focus is narrowed to a specific movement, gesture, quality, relationship, expression - not the big numbers where everyone is bouncing around in exuberant motion. (I wrote a while back about pursuing meaningful movement while experiencing pain and/or fatigue, if you would like to try it: “Small Dances”, free-to-read on Patreon.) Details are powerful. Intimate attention is powerful. Tiny things are not trivial. Nothing is too small.
And stillness is an illusion not just in the body but the mind.
The brain, of course, keeps fizzing away, facilitating all the unconscious being-alive of the body. But I am referring more to the mind. It doesn’t stop going either, even at rest - rest is not a cessation, just another kind of process, integral to the others. (And we know that it is radical to claim it, in this late-stage capitalist colonialist mess, even though and because it is hard. Rest, ironically, can take great effort. Of course it counts.)
Resting and mental/bodily “stillness” are part of the whole process of motion. To dip back into dance as an example, every choreographer I know spends some time laying on the floor staring up at the ceiling. This is an important part of the process - of arriving to a place, integrating ideas, being ready and able to listen to the body. Thinking. Thinking, thinking. Creative work needs room to unfold. Even when not actively thinking, the bodymind uses its “downtime” to integrate information. You don’t only learn while you are taking a lesson or doing an assignment; things keep cooking on that back burner. Short term memory becomes long term memory becomes understanding. If nothing else, because the world keeps going, even if you have “done nothing”, you have kept having experiences - big and small - and by the time you can return to the idea or the work, you bring that additional accumulation of yourself to it. You may not have been “moving” or “working” or “doing” but you have continued; you were not ever truly stopped.
Not going to say it’s not frustrating. It is. It can be frustrating, disappointing, and possible-making, all at once. And boring! Wow is being stuck and sad boring! (This is another thing to have learned - other feelings can weave in with despair and they make one another no more or less real.)
So back to the desire for movement: I make it, or look for it, where I can, and that is how I survive. Maybe I can create it in a small way in my life or body, maybe only look for it happening, maybe only wait until I can see it again, someday, or someone can show me. Maybe one small choice lets me find a follow-up choice and so I gather momentum. Maybe it does not. Maybe it just keeps me going for right now. Maybe I can turn my attention to something that is growing or changing, or maybe I can’t find it yet, and I will only see it later, if then. Maybe I choose not to stop - to agree in my mind that things are not stopped no matter how it feels. That’s enough. It is enough even if it does not feel like enough.
It’s enough whether or not anyone can tell it is happening - which is a topic for another time, our perception of effort, meaning, or attention in others, but the tl;dr is that we know “laziness” is fake (from capitalism and ableism, a combination of unrealistic “productivity” standards with lack of accessibility, supports, care, leading to apparent inaction; here’s one description), and we know that it is impossible to know what someone else is striving to learn/develop/survive looking solely from the outside.
It is enough. That is the last thing (for now) that I am still trying to learn about despair. It is and I am and one way or another, that’s enough. You, too.
(Shout out to my therapist, and my dear friends, and Disabled/Mad essayists, and poets, and novelists, and more, because I did not get this far alone.)
A Happy and Hopeful Dog
In closing:
Jax is ecstatic for snow and for cold and would like to know, please, if we can go out again, like, right now, preferably for, you know, five to ten hours. Or days. Weeks? That would be great, thanks.
Until February, which somehow is not so far away,
Toby
PS I literally always like to see your pets of all species, please feel free to email/tag/text/etc me all of the creatures, any time, they are great.