Serious Play

I. The I in the Center of Experiment
Giving myself the assignment to conduct experiments in joy this past spring was initially a way to shift my approach to following through on something I had signed up for on a more courageous and adventurous day. It was reunion weekend. I had to tell a story. And it had to be true. The guidelines: a time limit and a zing where my calculations had predicted a zang or an equivalent twist. The rest was up to me. I could do this, I reassured myself. I was a writer and performer, a woman of many voices. Delivering prepared remarks about a subject I knew well should not inspire dread. So, I would pick a story from my life—or, all things considered—cheat and invent one. If I was careful, I hazarded…. Really? I shook my head. What would be the point in that? This was not good. What in the wooly mammoth had I been thinking? Had things been going so well that I had forgotten who I was? So much of my accessible episodic memory was traumatic; I didn't want to lead with that. And, the most recent past was tedious, thoroughly ordinary personal growth yadda yadda. What story could I tell? And What “I” would do the telling?

Almost always the “I” in my poems or essays had been a consciously donned, construct, or an elected element of the author function, a persona that belonged to the ‘text,’ lived there in the text for the glory of the text–whatever that might entail. The last time I had addressed some assortment of this group of people endeavoring to tell the truth, I had taken the mic on the campus library lawn and spoken at some length about violated trust. It was a Speak Out Against Violence Against Women. There had been a hush, rapt attention and tears, and my body had gone numb as I stood back from it, a ripple of transcendental selves each looking at the others with curiosity and suspicion. This time I wanted to feel good and remain present–I wanted to hold firm—because it was my life to lose or gain and at this place I had begun writing and had begun to be restored. Returning, I was determined that the correlation between the speaker and my multiple selves would be as exact as I could make it. I reminded myself that the process of Experiments in Joy contained within it permission to fail. It had no precise method, no predetermined form: it might reveal itself to be a grinning baggy monster hopping to and fro or a monstrous bag from which we’d tumble in a heap, exhausted. Or it might manifest a muddy wave of giggles and guffaws. Or silence. And polite applause.

It could be, by definition, an effort toward discovery, a quick jaunt to gladden the heart and delight body and mind. It need be neither perfect nor memorable. Even the worst of it could be sweat out at the gym and washed away with a shower (or downed with a shot of tequila).

So I made a plan. Three versions of which I wrote and successively left behind in three places on the way to reunion. Multiple drafts of version 1) Chicago; 2) Brooklyn; and—just before showtime—3) my hotel.

Arriving at the chapel, finding I had:
     a) left my scripted speech,
     b) fuck all for notes,
     c) with me not one prepared word,
before the program began I hurried to scribble an outline and key points on the paper I did bring—a 2” x 3” a credit card receipt. What the hell. WTF. Wooly mammoth in a bog. Classic amnesiac. Sigh. Too late to back out.

There were a few people before me in the lineup and they had their notes or full on pages, perfectly timed, everything was going swimmingly. Yep, yep. Remember to breathe. Drink some water. Just one more, then me.  I stopped fidgeting to listen.

I wasn’t ready. The speaker before me brought me to tears. I was splitting, there in the chapel, under water, in a dark corridor, between forearm and thrust. A teenager again. And in my early twenties. And younger. All in my feelings and judging: betrayal and hurt, confusion, self-blame, and accusation—trying to sort who I was from numb chest and my breath held in an awkward passing. I was next.

I felt myself weeping. I went to the mic. The energy in the room had shifted. I steadied myself against the podium and looked out at the faces. At the woman I had just imagined myself to be. The violence and devastation of navigating a world you did not make, that was not made for you. I let go of the perfect idea of my “story,” its images and turns of phrase, its profundity, its perfect execution.

Acknowledging my sadness, its weight—I stood firm in it and in my body. I held with me as I spoke, terror and despair, gratitude and compassion, resilience, her courage to spill still evolving self-confidence and ambition, a reaching worn down to a stark vulnerability. And owned my joy.

I set aside the scrawled outline and began from awareness.
 

*

 
In writing this post I came to realize that over the course of that weekend I had dropped a hardened rind of myself that I no longer needed.

II. Best Laid Plans
Emboldened and invigorated by reunion lessons, I happily committed to repeating the process. I hadn't handled paint since middle school and had never worked with anything bigger than a large sketchpad, but when I reconnected with Sandra and she told me she was working on another mural I was determined to participate: I invited myself to assist—date undetermined. Months passed, I found reasons not to stop by—all good.

The mural progressed.

Finally, I hopped in the car dressed to the threes in painterly rags (including a pair of my dad's pants circa 1951 and four prescriptions ago backup glasses). En route I learned that there’d been a mishap and there’d be no painting that afternoon. Nevertheless I had put a sock in my chatty inner critic (all mouth), made a paint and play date with myself, invited a couple of professional artists to bear witness to my joy, and showed up.

I took photos and awarded myself a biscuit (gluten-free).
Okay, I actually ate dinner with the artist and had a kale salad with avocado, salmon, and almonds and a hibiscus margarita (way better than a biscuit).

III. Serious Play (An Alternative to Fun with Weapons)
Sample Media Headline Swirl 15 August 2016
At Least 70 Dead and Dozens Injured in Pakistan after Bomb Rips through Hospital in Quetta • Unprecedented Flooding in Louisiana Kills at Least 6, Displaces Tens of Thousands • Chicago Police: 8 Killed, 26 Wounded in Weekend Shootings • 33 Killed, 28 Injured as Crowded Bus Veers off Nepal Highway • Swiss Train Attacker and 1 Victim Dead, 5 Injured—2 Critical Including 6-Year Old • Houston Mother Arrested after Police Find her Children Dead Under House • Saudi-led Coalition Denies Targeting Yemen School as 10 Children Killed • Ohio Trans Woman Rae'Lynn Thomas Murdered by Mother's Ex-Boyfriend—19th Trans Woman Known to Be Killed in US This Year • Brother of Pakistani Celebrity Qandeel Baloch Admits Murder, Says He Is ‘not ashamed’ • California Wildfires Destroy Homes, Force Hundreds to Evacuate • New York Imam, His Assistant Shot Dead Near Mosque • Thai Police Find More Unexploded Bombs Following Coordinated Blasts • Police Shooting Protests Turn Violent in Milwaukee • Magnitude 5.3 Quake in Southern Peru Kills at Least 4 • Islamic State Says Bus Blast Killed 50 at Syria-Turkey Crossing • South Sudan Troops Raped, Beat Foreigners as U.N. Force Ignored Calls for Help • Aleppo Airstrikes: Dozens Killed in Hospital Attack—Shortages Grow, Bombings Intensify

There was more violence, devastation, and ruin in the last few days than sources report. And there are voices, vantage points, multiple critical frameworks absent from these reports. There is also joy. While focusing on and courting joy does not remedy adversity, extremity, violence, devastation, etc., it does alleviate my suffering and fatigue, renewing my faith in the possibility of human becoming, encouraging me to continue.

For me, the practice of conducting Experiments in Joy is serious play. As such, this practice is critical to exercising and expanding the imagination and subsequently the range of possibility. It is life affirming and restorative—strengthening and refreshing the self/being—and generative—yielding creative ideas to be made manifest and shareable in the material world. It is also self-renewing (Step 5: Repeat) and in-action thwarts paralysis and despair that otherwise threatens to overtake and consume me. This practice enhances activity of Mind toward creative solutions and empathy and creates space for the experience of love where fear resides. Let the poems come from this place.

In a newly initiated poetics project, I am inviting poets and artists to participate in my creative-critical arts practice by attending to the Call & Response Performance Ensemble’s prompt to conduct Experiments in Joy (first announced at Antioch College in 2014). Folk are invited to share reflections and creative works towards shared joy and our collaborative creation of the worlds we inhabit—and the worlds that inhabit us. These are two of the responses.

***

Experiment in Joy: T.E.E.T.H.
Yolanda Wisher
Philadelphia, PA

Tell the truth
I make music with my 6 ¾-year-old son, Thelonious aka Theo, and it’s what you could call “joyful noise.” We make tunes out of pots and pans. Tabletops. Spoons. This, too, is real music. It happens organically. We harmonize and synchronize without theory, without lessons. We ain’t studyin no record deal.

Make something new
I started whistling and snapping the other day. Theo joined in with his plastic kazoo. I dumped the voice memo from my phone into Garageband and made a loop.

Invite someone in
Theo came upstairs to my office before bedtime, and I invited him to add to the track. He was excited about the headphones and the sound waves on the screen, but he couldn’t figure out what to say. “I’m empty!” he exclaimed. So we grabbed a book off the shelf to read from: Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World. He picked these two:

#358
From out of the thickets
The sounds of trickling water
Fill the hazy fields.

#360
A pink afterglow.
Behind nodding sunflowers
And the smell of mint.

Document
We played around with some audio effects and chose a cover image: an x-ray photo of the inside of Theo’s mouth from his last dentist visit. We titled the track T.E.E.T.H. (Theo Eats Eggs & Toast Hot).

Repeat/Reflect
Yes, we will (continue) to “live in music” (á la Shange), to experience the joy that comes with creating song out of what you have on hand. This is not separate from my mothering or my making. This is how we pass and pass on the time.

***

Field Etymology: some notes towards joy
Ching-In Chen
(en route from from Texas to Michigan via rural Indiana; Chicago; Hot Springs, AR)

Beginnings…

–at the recent Poetry Incubator organized by Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall and Ydalmi Noriega, listening to Ross Gay talking about the fun of making up etymologies and again to the excessive abundance of his garden (“to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude”)…

—at the Chicago Poetry Block Party to see the youngest member of The Happiness Club make her stance, challenge my partner’s six-year-old son to a water fight by biting off the bottom of the water bottle

—arriving at my friend Chelsesa’s family farm in Indiana as visitor and farm-sitter…. and being asked to befriend large and tiny tomatoes, broccoli plants, potatoes, beets, corn, gourds of all kinds, purple beans, gladiolas, peppers, Thai basil, brussel sprouts….

—sending the boys (age 6 and 9) to photograph insects, animals, plants and Connor’s photo of his last animal, taken early this morning through the mist...

*

Begins with what I can see – a grain of spider scramble through the leaves, meld and bend ground. I was born a milk. A stalk. I wanted to dance.

          Instead, you bit my hand and flew my ear.
          Instead, you give me purple bean to suck, pull my ear to make
                 it white and hot.
          Instead, I went down each row with you      It is hard for me to write a straightforward line. I am breathless and want to break flight and scatter

                              Was small boy finally figured to catch butterflies growing in my throat. I rarely have the green in front of me
                              To derive the sun –

In Houston, we chased bats           which circles the smoke creature I found nighttime by the latch

          you did not hatch from the land
                    you did not grow soaked with the hose
                              no forest grew your friend            but you inherit deep red not suitable for mechanization

                              there a solo sweet tree
                                        an early silk baby
                     oxheart cherry           dusky flavor
                               mild, slender, ridged spikes

          I said gimme a word … and there was bird
          gimme a word … and he said brother
                                                            without wind or texture

                    a figure always chasing to
                                        sing the song to open bottlecaps
                                                            to pluck each crown from green home

There is a joy and a freeness to make silly, wear voices amongst them both. At 9, I had shaken off that bird, hid in my own stories, made friends with my winds. I saw alone in the lunchroom and on the playground and often on the bus.

Last month at Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Tim Z Hernandez asked us to share a childhood memory with a listener and Alex Espinoza asked us to write about a place we were happy, where we felt melancholy and where we felt scared.

The story about my name, which means Happiness. As it was invoked, I was a happy child, lost my name in the courthouse, holding onto my mother’s hand, at my own request. Trying to shake off the Chink, the Chicken Wing, the Ching Chong, to re-name myself White. I have translated melancholy and fear through the years, but the hardest to write still from a place of happy. I sat and erased, sat and erased, feeling utterly blocked while shamed by the sounds of furious writing all around me. So because I need to practice this gratitude, this excessive and wild joy,

     Dear reader, I’m asking you to practice with me this day, this week...

Say a kind word for a being unjustly taken. Say her name. Place a sweet note under your tongue. Re-visit the stories of your names – where they’ve been and how you wear them. Say hello and yes to each of your dark green hearts. Give consent to sing the song they need to hear.