fearfully and wonderfully perceived

skin-encapsulated ego

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

meditation on: perception

When I feel good, I’m walking the five flights from my apartment down to Clinton Street, shattering the marble stairs with my Frye boots and listening to Beast of Burden, which is the best song to begin the day with because it’s so goddamn stupid. I’m going to get a latte at a bakery where I might also buy a loaf of bread if they have any of the good ones left by the time I get there at 8:45am, which they most often don’t. I actually like it that way—it’s always a perfect surprise when there’s a slovenly sourdough boule left, bloated and slumped over and begging to be chosen. I’m walking to work at my job which I’m scared to speak of actually on the internet in case my disdain for it be found out and I do finally get fired. I hate the work but I love the walk to it. I think I can say that.

When I’m feeling good, I’m walking, and thinking, and unwinding all the unhappiness that sits in my back teeth.

I have been thinking so much recently, it’s been incredibly hard to focus on one kind of anything to write about. I’m thinking of how and when I feel nurtured, and how easily I feel hurt. I’m thinking of how intense I’ve become about my own life and feelings, or more exactly that I’ve been allowing myself to finally consider my own self with any intensity, that I no longer feel it’s so essential to be, and to be perceived as, carefree. Now I think one of the most important things is to figure out exactly how you feel about everything. 

I’m thinking about how much I want people to feel my anger that deserve to feel it. I’m thinking of how winnowing my patience has become for niceties and, on the contrary, for people who won’t be nice, for rich Brooklyn artists so big-eyed and blasé, and women who feel threatened by women, and men who can’t text to say they’ve thought of you in the last 7 days since they smushed you against a car door and licked the Negroni from the inside of your mouth.

I’m thinking about how to make peace with a life that, in its logistics, doesn’t reflect me at all. I’m thinking about how much, increasingly, I am too exhausted to consider how I’m perceived. It isn’t helpful to me, and there’s absolutely no consensus. People find me to be both intense and laidback, kind and unkind, disgusting and adorable, too insecure and too confident, disheveled and uptight, too Taylor Swift and too pick-me. It’s why I cried so hard at that America Ferrera monologue in Barbie that we were all taught to make fun of, because she did such a great job of explaining the fury and exhaustion of existing inside the contradictions of society, and self. A woman is too much and too little of everything—fearfully and wonderfully perceived. 

There’s a song I love, called “body” by Gia Margaret, that samples the voice of Alan Watts from a talk he gave on overcoming social anxiety. Gia is playing Lego sounds on her piano in the background of the lecture, which speaks about the way in which we live inside ourselves, nearly to a fault:

“Why do you feel so heavy? It isn’t just a matter of gravitation and weight, it is that you can feel that you are carrying your body around. Common speech expresses this all the time—life is a drag. ‘I feel I’m just dragging myself around. My body is a burden to me.’ To whom? To whom, that’s the question. And when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden, the body isn’t a burden. But so long as you fight it, it is.” 

As a result, I got really into Alan Watts this week, and mostly because I’m getting tired of listening to Blur discography, and I want a break. Apparently the break I want is to listen to this Twilight Zone-sounding self-proclaimed “philosophical entertainer” (imagine…..meeting a man at a bar who says This is his job. That would be it for me, the final straw of Brooklyn) wax poetic about humans as “skin-encapsulated egos,” dragging me into the tunnels of his understanding like that one part in Howl’s Moving Castle where Sophie is taken into Howl’s memory, which is mostly a black, gooey, ethereal tunnel, and that disgusting bird dog is pacing with her through the goo, as she wipes away her tears that turn into bubbles and float past her. That’s me, I’m Sophie, and Alan Watts is the dog, Hin. (This newsletter plummets further into the weeds of my homeschooling every time…I can’t explain why but I feel so certain the next will mention Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary.) 

In a different lecture, Watts says something we know but don’t often think of: “you as a living organism are not the same as your idea of yourself. That is to say: your organism is not your personality, is not your ego. Who you think you are is entirely dependent on who people have told you you are. You are not that. The wake doesn’t drive the ship any more than the tail wags the dog.” How relieving, don’t you think, to remember all the time that the actual soul and interiority of ourselves and bodies and minds are untouchable and unknowable to everybody else. And how infinitely infuriating to turn that idea around and think how you’ll never know anyone else, not really.

I, of course, lest ye be fooled by my Alan Watts talk, have to confess that despite pretending I’m all Eastern philosophy and introspection these days, I am not doing anything but wearing halter tops and going out, eating burritos, crying with completely no warning. I’m loving going out because of the possibility in a New York evening, which is always as boundless as you decide but a little more boring than you anticipated. I’m loving burritos because I’m still a little too depressed to chef up a 90-minute Indian recipe, which is always a go-to for Julia Of Sound Mind, and there’s nothing my body has ever loved, that has ever calmed it and nourished it, like black beans. I’m crying, I think, because I’m thinking a lot, which actually I prefer to not crying and not thinking a lot. Is that what makes an artist?

Post-burrito, pre-going out, mid-pinot blanc

review of:

You know, I again don’t want to do this and I think if I find that again a third time I don’t want to do it, I’m scrapping it. Everything I want to “review” I’m just putting in recommendations and I don’t find compelled to add my farty opinion to the discourse of anything. I mean, I’ll tell you this, I did NOT like May December. I thought that was a waste of my time and I am really anti movies that fuck with a true narrative, especially one with perverts (see: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, dir. by Pervert). My roommate, Kate, who writes this amazing newsletter, recommended that I go ahead and use this space for the stuff I find on FB marketplace, so I’ll do that this week:

recommendations:

• I’m loving this:

• I’m listening non-stop to the Sinead O’Connor cover of House of the Rising Sun. Am I getting too exhausting? is my brand becoming too one-note?? well shut the fuck up I don’t live in your perception I live. IN MINE

• This Lucille Clifton poem threw me for a loop, as did this Dorianne Laux one.

• Here’s all the music I’m liking in January.

• I’m loving this book by Carl Phillips sooooo so much, truly so much. I’ll probably end up writing about it, but anyway it’s not one of those “writing for life” books that’s so clunky and lame and a hodge-podge of ass-kissing craft essays for lit mags. It’s just honest, interesting advice for making anything. He says all these gorgeous things about stamina, ambition, devotion and celebrity. 

• If you should need to cry, you can feel it and you need a reason to, you can listen to the whole aforementioned Gia Margaret album, called, reverse-eponymously (anyone have a word for this?), Mia Gargaret. Also just really good background creative sound. I listened to it while I wrote this so you can decide for yourself how effective it was.

• This bar in Bed-Stuy is perfect for one-on-one drinks and plays great music, and this bar in Williamsburg has pool and a cheugy photobooth situation that’s so fun and if you go in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday there’s no one there to disturb you and your High Life.

• I really loved Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), which in my humble opinion, had nothing to do with Scorsese’s regular movies and I mean that as a compliment to this movie without being a slight to Scorsese. It’s just that I don’t really want to cuddle up in my room and watch uhhh Shutter Island, but I did enjoy cuddling up to this. Basically a down-on-her-luck mom who wants to be a singer has to tote around her freak 12-year-old through Arizona while she tries to make ends meet and keeps falling in love with various men. People that like Paris, Texas will like this, but it’s more fun and less moody than that.