On Keeping a Talking Book
Why I'm turning my digital notebook of sound and video into a series of dream books
The triage—ic (not tragic), self-ambushing strategy of working on several pieces of writing simultaneously soothes and delights me. I unfurl the one into the many and discrete figures are forced to embrace in conversation until I’m a choreographer staging solo dancers for a group performance only I witness. I can achieve what James Baldwin warned us to never avoid, in bearing witness to this impossible but undeniably real paradise. Today I’m writing through research-accompanied-reverie, about Kurt Cobain and Abbey Lincoln and James Baldwin and North West and OJ Simpson and my father and mother and myself. All of this alongside a series of poems on child stars. I write first from instinct, but because I grew up dancing ballet and other forms with the intensity of any would be child actor who doesn’t know quite what mire she’s appeased when she goes on stage or across the floor on pace with “Remember the Time”— a cult or fix or trance, or a labor union with constant unseen dues. Everybody takes credit for her facility and gift and discipline unless it all spirals into a lethal ego, a drug addiction or, worse, mediocrity. She’ll be humiliated by leaning into the same potential she’s actively realizing, every stumble an aspect of the ritual that teaches there’s either immense unruly nerve or never making it. After she succeeds we never speak of the years (or decades) of subtle hazing again, it’s the subconscious equivalent of the mother you visit in the asylum once a year on holidays, if you’re Malcolm X, or Marguerite Duras. If you’re still able to discuss your time in the purgatory between professional and understudy or between childhood and innocence rescinded lucidly, however, you’ve survived what tried to kill you off without becoming a zombie.
Sometimes I write to the jolt of my first ballet teacher’s yard stick tapping the floor in stoic intervals of 8 for a heartbeat, hitting the calf or arch of the foot if it was too low on a developer, trembling with dread and defiance. This sense of the line steered toward extremes of strength and beauty with a muscle that should never bulge has become instinctive for me, the demands of grace that’s expansive but never gaudy, replete without clutter. You have to crave bodies in just the right position making just the right micro-gestures and translate that taste into language’s unforgivable and cruel grammar, and you have maintain the stamina to accompany any music that comes of this, to both invent it and dance to that allegro so fast it splits you in half or adagio so slow it aches. There comes a time to refine and trouble these instincts with new processes that begin as awkwardly as the first day of school or dance class. The first tap of the ruler awaits and that violent expectation is also peace for we who are traumatized toward creative freedom. You arrive in your costume and leave humbled but inspired.
I’ve been thinking for a long time that I need to turn the play and work I do with archives and memory stored as data points into digital annotations, a note-booking practice that gambles on itself, scraps and samples arranged like songs that I can revisit when I need to recall a private idea or association but that also keep track of the material and texture I intend to apply to writing. An excuse for the part of my process that feels like arbitrary digging to make space for what I’m trying to say in the gentrified and often cynical collective consciousness. How do we break up the congealed thought forms there so that we can make fresh discoveries? Now that the stakes of my research are raising and will culminate in more formal settings, I feel compelled ritualize this investigation and hold myself accountable to keeping a record of what I dig up and throw onto the stage of language in angel drag.
I’m going to implement this practice by periodically djing in the archives and inscribing that digital notebook here as a source of both pleasure and rigor; one thing dance teaches indelibly is that the two are inseprable, they go together real bad. Their collaboration ruins us for anything too easy, everything but intensity makes us feel like imposters, everything but dancing full out. So I’m venturing into taking notes full out too, ( I already demand of myself that I write full out and refuse to make a habit or bait of what dance calls ‘marking it.’) Now I’ll carve some territory and inventory between Joan Didion’s rationalization for keeping a notebook, Stevie Wonder’s opus on the Talking Book, Dilla’s endless beat tapes, and my own sense of the atemporal unions that occur when you force your private preoccupations to interact as unfinished songs and snatches of song, stolen lives restored by testimony in unison, a litany of muses and anti-muses in a concert than can never be except as mythography. Now when I write about Kurt Cobain, both Malcolm X and my mother are trapped inside of him coaching his whims to supernatural triumph. Everyone’s story is connected in its inconclusiveness. Complete pieces of writing are often too concerned with sounding mature and sophisticated; they land on a heap of fake epiphanies, a real conclusion, Fiona’s blue oblivion. In these bending notes I hope my subjects can frolic like children who were never adulterated by the strict regimes of training, for better or worse their instincts don’t court pain as an indication of impending breakthrough. Though I’m good at hiding it in enjoyment of that feeling of being sore but fortified and better for it, mine do.
Talking Notebook 1.1 : 6.6.2024