the end (and then?)

reflections and directions

Upcoming performance: If you will be in Portland, Maine, on March 11, maybe you’d like to come to WORKS AND DAYS, a collaboration about small things, time, seasons, process, repetition, and improvisation between Nina MacLaughlin, Matthew Houston, and me. Sliding scale at the door.

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So here we are, reader: you and I, in the little room of the word.

Just over a year ago I set out to write an essay a week and put those essays in a public place (here)—a challenge to my tendency to squirrel things I write away, then wonder why no one knows I’ve written them, and a challenge to the part of me that resists a deadline. I set out to think for a year, loosely, about an essay called “Bewilderment” that has stuck with me since I was first given it, in a creative writing class in my last year of college, by my teacher Ray González. I set out to make a place for myself, for saying and for seeing—for looking at and thinking about what I think matters, why I think those things matter, what it means that they do, and how I work those questions out. I set out to make a record of the walks I take and of the other repetitive processes (teaching, housework, writing, artmaking) that fill my days.

I have done what I said I would. And now I am done. The weekly pace has been exhilarating. It has also been exhausting. I have a list of ideas that I’ve kept and there are many more ideas than there have been weeks, but the need for pause is calling. For the most part I have been able to manage the writing tempo with enjoyment (in part by storing up drafts in less busy weeks that I have developed in more busy weeks); it was only at the very end, in the last month, when other pressures impinged, that it began to feel like work. That means I have truly found the end of this phase of making and writing. The form is complete.

What have I found in this form and these weeks? I have found that I do think seriously and centrally about teaching; that I think of teaching as a creative act in itself; that I think of students as collaborators; that I think of my own teachers nearly every day. I have found that I like to think about paintings and other works of art, and I also like to think about the objects and views of my everyday life (as art). That I like to read and I like to be read. That I can’t separate my politics from my aesthetics; not that I thought I could. That “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (however that last word is to be understood) feels about right to me. That doing anything over and over for a long duration will teach me in ways I can’t anticipate, and will yield interest and meaning. That, in other words, the process is the thing. Amen.

I have also found that, more and more, I want to limit my attention. I want to use my energy to make a few things really well, in a few carefully defined regions. I want to know more about those regions and their adjacent areas. I want to read more in the coming year. I want to read carefully. I want to read in ways that allow me to just be reading—not also looking at lights on a screen, not navigating among tabs. I have found a new appreciation for literary journals, reviews, and magazines as well as for long-form interviews, really well-made podcasts, and books that show me the writer’s mind at work. I like the limits of the page and the book form. The apparent endlessness of the internet, which can be so immediately alluring, these days feels overwhelming to me. I want to spend my time in the lands of finitude. I want to work in the realm of material objects. I’d like to learn anew what I used to know, which is how to find things in three-dimensional space; how to live at the pace of the postal service; how to read and write criticism and formulate an understanding of a corner of a field.

So this brings me to the ‘directions’ part of this week’s Bewilderment: where to next? Well, to objects: to things that can be help in the hand, read, looked at, and passed along to someone else. Things that, once the requirements of production have been satisfied, stop using electricity and water. Things that incorporate their own finitude. I’m thinking about Corita Kent’s “Irregular Bulletins”, about photocopied zines and newsletters, about chapbooks, about band flyers hanging in the doorway of the co-op or record store, about notes and notebooks, letters, postcards, and the pleasure of handling paper. And I’m thinking about the magazine and books I made, with a bunch of you, for about seven years. (MIEL is still on hiatus, because the books are still in an attic in Flanders. And I do still hope to get them back.)

So, in any case, reader, that’s what’s next. I’m going to make some books, and some magazines, and some of what I make will appear here (or, really, will appear in a twinned location, a place I plan to move Bewilderment to in a month or so), but most of it will appear in your real, live, postal mailbox, if you sign up for it. (Sign up how? Information to come in May or June.) The first installment will contain a number of the walking essays from this year of Bewilderment, and I hope it will be ready in the middle of summer. The second installment, if all goes well, will be on writing and teaching, and I hope to have it ready in September. What will follow? Space for other writers (information about how to get involved yourself will also come in May or June) and for more b/Bewilderment.

The two ends of time are always touching, past and future. They often touch inside the pages of a book. There we go. Thanks for being here. Hope you’ll come along.

To keep up what’s coming next with Bewilderment, you don’t have to do anything. Once things are migrated to the new site (information about the planned move is halfway down this post), if all goes well you’ll receive emails just as you do now when a post goes up. And you’ll hear from me via these channels about how to get a copy of Bewilderment on paper sent to your mailbox. This marks the end of my weekly essays here, and the beginning of the evaporation of the archive. I’ll be back in early April, mid-May, and mid-June with an essay and some news.

Thanks again for reading my work over the past year. And as always:
Comfort for everyone, and safety, and beauty, and belonging.
And freedom from occupation, and from fear, everywhere.
And shared, active liberation, to make a world where we all are free.
And peace of the positive kind, that is the presence of justice.
Swords into ploughshares.
Free Palestine.