Embracing the Cloud

No, not that cloud

The Writer has dissolved and reformed, just like a cloud.

As a writer, I am embracing my cloudlike existence.

I am telling myself: It’s okay to change form.

The first semester of my PhD has been a special kind of hell. My living situation has been difficult and unstable, and I’ll be moving again in January.

At first I thought I’d be moving within Tallahassee, and staying here.

But now I am not so sure.

Any minute, the edits for my book will show up in my inbox, and I will need to work on them, and they will bleed into the next semester, and things will be really hard again, and I am asking myself: do I always have to do the hardest thing?

I am asking myself: do I need to be here for five years, praying at the altar of writing composition in order to have any value to the academic system?

I am asking myself: if I want to be a better teacher, why would I stay inside of a system that encourages me to give less effort to teaching, and weighs me down with so much work that each thing I am doing is of less quality than I’d want it to be.

Quitting is a full-stop word. I don’t think we can quit anything, because life is a continuous journey and everything we do is connected to the next thing and the last thing.

If I let myself think in a non-linear way, everything I’ve worked hard on orbits around me and inside of me. It all exists together. Nothing is lost.

caption...Richard Tuttle, System 2, Winter, 2011, 2 x 4“ fir lumber, 4 x 4” fir lumber, acrylic, asphaltum, balsa wood, beet juice, bolts, bubble wrap, cotton string, enamel, fabrics, feathers, fir plywood, galvanized metal, glass beads, leather, metal, pine, vinyl-coated steel cable, powder-coated iron, straight pins, Styrofoam, wing nuts, wire, 96 x 96 x 96". (VIA ARTFORUM)

---

I have spent my life being scared. Scared of people, scared of scarcity, scared of poverty and homelessness, scared of myself.

When I am confronted with people or events that trigger these deep fears, my immediate instinct is to protect myself. For me, that means self-abandonement. I abandon my body, my self-care rituals, my needs. Instead of tending to myself, I tend to the needs of the very people and institutions who have shown me that they don’t respect or care for me. Who instead see in me a tool, a cog, a ladder.

My habit has been to get on all fours and lift others up. Then, when I stand, those people are gone.

“So, what happens is that the artist is born into a family that has no idea what that person is. So, automatically you get all kinds of pain- like they try to make you what they are.” -Richard Tuttle.

What I am asking myself is: what do I want? What do I really, really want? That is not a question I’ve allowed myself.

I have been asking myself that question. What is my answer? I would like a house or a permanent dwelling. I would like to have time to write, and go for walks. I would like to live somewhere vibrant. I would like to help others, and the planet. I would like to write, and have time to write.

I would like to rescind the contract I unknowingly signed in my childhood— the one that said I give myself to you. “You” being any person or institution that fails to fully perceive the depth of my humanity, and my inherent worth.

I would like to share myself with others, and also keep myself to myself. This requires constant recalibration. True recalibration and balance requires presence.

Our presence has been commodified. We sell our presence. We give our presence away. I am asking: who and what do I want to give my presence to? My energy? Because while energy itself isn’t limited, the energy that lives inside this body, this mind, and the experiences which orbit and inhabit me are not infinite.

I know that, in our capitalist society, I must sell parts of myself. But to whom, and for what?

“I find in my experience that the best artists are the most disciplined people I have ever encountered. That’s how you take care of the artificial side of things.

You have to explore nature; parts of nature, kinds of…things that happen to you as a natural person in a natural world. There are no books. There’s no one whose ever been there before. It’s like going into invisibility. This is one of those classic distinctions between feelings and emotions. There are certain feelings I have that I think are special or unusual and valuable, and I would like to give them to other people. But that’s not art. And people are responsible for their own feelings…

Generally, art is about emotions; the difference between emotions and feelings.” -Richard Tuttle

An Interview with artist Richard Tuttle, on art and being clouds.

---

We are made of clouds.

“When you look up at the blue sky, you don’t see your cloud anymore, and you may say, ‘Oh, my cloud has died.’ In fact it has not died…

“You know, you are made of cloud. At least 70% of you are cloud. If you take the cloud out of you there is no ‘you’ left.”

“The cloud can never die. A cloud can become snow, or rain, or ice. But the cloud can never die. The cloud becomes the rain. The rain becomes the creek. And the creek flows down and becomes the river, and the river goes to the sea, and heat generated from the sun helps the water in the ocean become cloud again. So the cloud has a good time traveling and wearing all kinds of forms.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

---

THRIFT STORE FUR by AIMEE SEU (published in the Los Angeles Review)

What world did I open
by finding you—forty dollars of
milk-pale beast. Each of our lives
started over. My hoodie laid back
over thick emperor collar, purple gloves
like crocuses blooming in snow.
In my room, in paste jewelry & black petals
of eyeshadow, I lord over the mirror.
Driving alone, just a coral slip
underneath, rolling a blunt, mobwife of midnight
convenience store, buying peach rings,
white chocolate & a lighter
engraved with the initial of everyone
whose name starts like mine.
O, my tacky & shameless score.
Glamorous hair-shirt, wolvin
cloak of thick cloud. Shell of body
for the body, & I regret this
but why waste you now?
Vicious in lipstick, my canines smile.
Creature, you have made me so feral.
If a girl leaving the bar took you
off the wall, I’d bite & claw.
If someone threw blood
I’d wear you stained. I gargle
a deep growl, my eyes like two circles
of lit glass in the dark. Unable to feel
a cell phone’s buzz through the lining
or the frigid gust of a departing train
or enclosing cold at early sundown.
These long nights used to scare me.
Now I live forever in heat.
Once, drunk & stranded, without keys, phone
or sense, curled on the porch swing in November,
you saved me. Knees pulled to chest
and you, blanket of chance, secondhand
destiny, guardian pelt, silver & coarse
as moon-landing photographs.
As if my whole body were mane.
As if the winter were soft, & the wind
something sweet whispered softly
in my ear. Each of my breaths a howl,
each a ghost. Something woke in me hungry
that had slept for so long. Now my body
in a blizzard, is a window fogged by heat.

(You can buy Aimee’s beautiful book here).

Thank you so much for reading this newsletter. I hope it made you feel something.

If it did, please share in the comments.

And if you liked it, please share it widely.