CHAPTER FOUR
Part One
Using what is already here
Mid 2022
Sustainability means using what is already here.
Using every part.
Making sure there is no waste.
No waste.
The places and embodiminded qualities of my surfacing everyday unseen practices have been relegated as waste in my life. Or to use a non-ecological term; "failures". My sick-doing practices have always been excluded from my professional, seen, visible practice life. Creatively... professionally... these have always been "practice failings". My internalisation of "good" body scripts have soaked my ideas of creativity wet through.
Sustainability means using what is already here.
What is already here?
Voice Memo: 03.06.2024
[very tired and low, slow voice]
Sometimes I think [clears throat]
of...
and I have always thought of this as
when my body is more like this
like a base
base
base level...
not level as like a hierarchy base place...
just me
and my body
honestly
and my symptoms
honestly.
My symptoms are flared up
but I think it's more normal when they are.
Like... I feel like this is just more me.
This is more my natural state.
It takes weeks and months of intense mental preparation and mental structuring to get myself to a point where I like have a schedule and I am trying to take care of all the things that I am meant to do for each different diagnosis and when my body gets to the point of doing that
let's say it's the fourth week
I can see my body doing that
but my soul isn't in my body.
I am not there as a person.
Me as a person can't exist in that bodymind
because all my mind is taken on just holding that person at that... at that way of functioning.
And when I do
when that isn't able to keep going and I collapse
I feel like I am just really coming back to me and to like my base level because after like a couple weeks of just being here like this
I am myself.
My soul is back in my body.
My soul is in my body when I am just honest with my sickness.
Honest with my sick.
And
that kind of up and down...
I don't want to use my brain to
resurrect a
a facade of function.
um again.
I think that is mentally unhealthy (for me)
and I just want to be here
at my base place
and
move and do and work from here.
Yeah... I...
That's what I want to do.
I want to give myself care and I want to create.
What is already here?
Hidden.
Secret.
Private.
Repressed.
Unspoken.
Peripheral.
Background.
Inbetween.
Underneath.
Absent.
Lost.
Waste.
These are my everyday unseens of practice.
The everyday unseens that come from within the self. The everyday unseens that are socially or culturally imposed perceptions and positions.
My recognising of my illness as failure... as my sick in practice as failure... has made waste of my creative expression.
Centering the practitioner...
I look for waste and failure footholds.
What is already here?
At first my creative unseens are more blurred shapes of experience. I gather small experiences within this emerging assemblage. Soft and slow sketches and forms.
"The personal is political" (Hanisch, 1970), and so the "private is political" (Hedva, 2016, p.2). The political can be soft and small and quiet sometimes too. For those of us who are soft and small and quiet sometimes our stories are stories of agency, protection and advocacy no matter how quietly they are told. My bed is political. My bed is method. What I feel here is political. What I share years after being in here is political.
I need to be laying down. I can't get out of bed. My sitting life and my standing life are so immediately different. My sitting and standing self. Selves. My standing and lying down selves are whole other people. I begin thinking of how different a perspective of a laying down researcher is different from that of a standing researcher, a bed researcher... housebound researcher, from an outside the bed and house researcher.
"For almost a year, I have been bedbound, housebound." I watch a documentary about hermit Buddhist monks who live and practice for decades in caves in the mountains of China. People who live in the villages nearby describe how it becomes difficult to re-find where the hermits live. The mountain paths become grown over as the monks hardly ever come down. I feel the idea of both dictated paths and all desire lines becoming grown over an affinity image and occurrence. And something I think I desire. I am losing the tracks of how to do things. How and why things must be done in particular ways. My disciplined manicured trails of doing and knowing are full of weeds and wild flowers and insects. I am a happy hermit.
"I can't express things fast enough or move fast enough." This is a failure deficit descriptor of the slowness I am now embracing. I draw this little diagram and put it next to my computer... where I will see it always when I am exploring how to work. It is to keep me honest to what I need to do to be sustainable.
"No, there isn't really anything I can "show" you." Material is soooo much energy for me. During this time material doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel good. The physical world and material expressions are not available in ways I can work within right now.
These are early assemblages where my invisible embodiminded unseens of creativity and expression and practice come from (Figure 1). I stay with a curiosity of embodiminded creative sustainability.
Figure 1
Being here... inside and with my own places of genuine embodiminded needs... I think of how it has taken me so long to be here. And I think... and how staying with these needs and my illness when exploring the waste of creativity might be read as "resistance". But from here... I feel... resistance is not coming from me. Any resistance of me... is not from me. It is from what denies me or excludes me or will not see me. Remembering the idea from Stengers, Massumi and Manning (2008), of an assemblage affording a participation in one's own experiential resistance... I notice also how assemblages can show where resistance might be coming from. And maybe to surface and show and articulate the resistances. The points of resistance.
I want to notice... be in relation with where the resistance is coming from.
Look at them through assemblage lenses of finding.
You Lead. I'll follow.
Expand the assemblages.
Expand the centering.
Expand the relational.
Expand my attuning.