The War of Art

Some excerpts I want to keep.

*Resistance and sex
Sometimes resistance takes the form of sex, or an obsessive preoccupation with sex. Why sex? Because it provides immediate and powerful gratification. When someone sleeps with us, we feel validated and approved of, even loved. Resistance gets a big kick out of that. It knows it has distracted us with a cheap, easy fix and kept us from doing our work.
Of course not all sex is a manifestation of resistance. in my experience you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. the more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust but resistance.

*Resistance and the choice of a mate
Sometimes, if we're not conscious of our own reisistance, we'll pick as a mate someone who has or is successfully overcoming resistance. i'm not sure why. maybe it's easier to endow our partner with the power that we in fact possess but are afraid to act upon. maybe it's less threatening to believe that our beloved spouse is worthy to live out his or her unlived life, while we are not. or maybe we're hoping to use our mate as a model. maybe we believe (or wish we could) that some of our spouses power will rub off on us.
this is how resistance disfigures love. the stew it creates is rich. it's colorful but is it love? if we're the supporting partner, shouldn't we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike our spouses' coattails. and if we're the supported partner, shouldn't we step out from the glow of our loved one's adoration and instead encourage him to let his own light shine?

*
As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer-culture. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, but only by doing our work.

*Resistance and Self-doubt
Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. it reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. if you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends) am i really a writer? chances are you are.
the counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident.

*The artist and mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create new life, only bear it.

::thinking::

just some ramblings ahead:

*It's interesting to think that i can be "looked up" on google, that I have enough presence that someone can "look me up" and find my work and say they love it. Things like that are interesting and scary and humbling all at once.

*Despite my initial rejection, NYC seems to be growing on me, and I'm looking to make some moves to get into the city, I believe.

*I've been doing things out of the ordinary as of late. For good measure, mostly. I've been trying to acculturate myself properly and use my free pass to the museums I have. I've spent five hours at the Whitney Museum of American Art visiting Kara Walker's exhibit. I haven't come to a conclusion of a critique but I definitely suggest going to see it before it comes down (Feb 3) and acquiring your own thoughts, and then I'd love to talk about it.

*I decided as one of my New Year's Goals that I wanted to pick back up my Swahili if for no other reason than to give me something to do that was totally separate from anything else. I found a group of people that meet weekly in a coffeeshop and we try our hand at the language.

*My really great friend from Charleston (one of the few things that I take from that experience) has me thinking about a lot of things right now, namely, how we abuse ourselves for something we think we want. And how it's not so much self-abuse but more so, continuing to stay in a scenario where you know is destructive can also be considered self-abuse. How women, black women, twist themselves for a non-existant (it seems) ideal, how I'm willing to overlook a lot of fundamental things just so I can say I've met a black man, etc etc. And how we carry our baggage along with us. And I'm thinking of this artist -- maybe it was Kara Walker or someone? -- who a teacher Juan Logan was describing once: a woman on all fours with a trail of excrement following behind her. And it's of course conceptual, and at times problematic, but sort of signifying how we trail the things we don't need (how feces are the things the body does not digest for its nutrients) behind us, how we keep them (how it was still attached to her), and how it breaks us...thinking about how she was not standing, was not bipedal, but on all fours as if animalistic, as if a baby or thinking of one of the big things that separate us - so they say - from the primates...that we had the knowledge to stand upright, and walk as human beings.

*It's interesting trying to find a new rhythm in this world, in this post-college life. I'll have freetime - though I'm not sure if it's any different from my time while I was in grad school, and how it was distributed, however, it feels different, because instead of doing "work" for a grade, I'm doing work for a paycheck, and trying to fit into this equation finally figuring out how this city works and lives and breathes. Trying to figure out how to organize my life, and be grown. Because as I remind myself, it's a new year and I'm a grown ass woman. :)

*I've finally tapped into something -- though miniscule it may be -- and have picked up the pen again. Thinking in terms of some short fiction and of course, poems. I'm really thankful for the incubation period of reading these other materials, of returning to the basics -- of thinking like a jazz artist and knowing that you have to know the ins and outs of the capabilities of your instrument of your range andthe notes you can play and when before you improvise or before you depart from the structure of the song and the melody to really play.

*This is the year of health and breaking bad habits. The bad habits don't always have to do with health, but I just thought to clump it in this category. I'm excited in some ways about who I'm becoming and evolving and growing into. Everyone else should be too.

if it's one thing i thank rutgers for...

it's this inclination towards teaching. i think if it hadn't been a situation of baptism by fire, i would have shied away. i wouldn't have thought i was capable of teaching, much less teach college, of being in front of and responsible for 24 students, of having them call me "professor" of handing out grades and being hard and fast and saying "no, i cannot give you the higher grade because you have not earned it" of having students say mine was their favorite class.

but this experience, gave me a heads up into some nice, nice work i found in the city, which means it looks like something is keeping me here despite the thought of it wanting to throw me away. and i'm excited, and thrilled (who would have thought!) about the future.

i'm trying to get into the discipline of writing poems for myself. this is the first time really that i dont have any reason other than purely for myself to write poems. well, i would write them for myself as a means of getting away from doing my assigned work. it was sort of my procrastination technique. now i don't really have anything to procrastinate. i just have time and time. i need motivation and push and drive. and do.

i have some things to get done. i have some things to fulfill.

birth means death, death means birth

i am fearful of new beginnings if for no other reason than i know it's darker side. i am a believer in the laws of physics that say no energy is ever lost, but is transferred from one thing to another. i think our ancestors knew this truth before some white man put it on paper when they said that when a child is born someone dies. they don't have to happen simultaneously, but expect one or the other when one is happening.

my god sister (whose mother died in 2004, who was my god mother) is having a baby boy and is 38 weeks and dilating.

my dad called me this morning to say my uncle died.

Some of you know more about my uncle than you think. Those in CC and heard me talking about this idea of a turtle, or of a family member who was sick, whose legs were in need of being amputated because the body was rejecting him. and i thought it was karma, how you take things away from people and people get things taken away from them., how despite all the shady things this man has done to my father and our family my dad still loved him if for no other reason than it was the last bit of blood he had.

now my dad is the last male dameron who had no sons.

i am the last dameron.

i say that, too, because i am selfish. i am extremely selfish and part of my mourning comes from the fact that i made efforts to go and see people over christmas break, but i did not go see my uncle. i was scared and selfish and have an unspeakable fear of hospitals. so i didn't go, despite my father telling me i should. and iknew my decision would have reprecussions. this isn't the first time it has happened as such -- my family urging me to see someone, and i refuse for my own selfish reasons, and then they die while i'm away and there's nothing i can do about it.

and too, i knew it coming up here. my family basically saying 'why are you moving away so far when you know there are people here sick' and my response was "i've been around death all my life, and have been making decisions on my life based on that fear of death and dying." moving this far away was acknowledging the fact that someone(s) was going to die but that i needed to make the moves. again, its selfish of me, and again i have this void that says it will never feel closed. the last time i saw my uncle he was holding two brand new babies and smiling and i thought, maybe, maybe he had been given a reason to live, because he was well enough then to adopt twin boys, jacob and zachary.

but he's gone now. and two adopted boys will be brought up fatherless, again. and my father has lost his last living blood to kidney failure and how the body protests itself over and over. and my father has lost all of his family before he's even turned 50. and all he ever wants to do in his life, he's explained, is do what his father never did and make it to 50. and i want him to have higher goals, because i'm afraid that that's all he has left to live for right now. and he'll have surpassed that goal next february.

and my body knew something was being taken away in the universe. i always feel bad for no reason right before something happens in my life. the past couple of days have been unusually depressing, and i succumbed to that pull and retreated and realized the city is the wrong place to be lonely and thought thoughts that i shouldn't have, and was thinking about death, not for me, but just death in general, and it was preparing me. my father called me this morning and i knew it. it's interesting how i've come to be a professional bad-news-hearer. how to suppress your initial want for outbreak and outcry to ensure the bearer is all right, that they don't need anything, is there anything i can do? but i'm six states away and i dont have the money right now to go down there and it sucks, and i'm stranded on an island by myself, unable to grieve correctly because if it's another thing -- i hate crying in front of people, and my roommate and i are not to the point wher ei feel comfortable enough to share that side of me. so i have to keep on like nothing's missing, like there isn't some big hole in the universe waiting to be filled.

but, i am waiting on a call from my cousin/god sister announcing her son's birth.

Cutting back, moving forward.

So, I am making a couple of cutbacks in my life. Namely, the ways in which I employ procrastination to keep me from doing what I need to do, which is write, create, live. Procrastination manifests itself in many forms in my life: instant messenger (incarnate in 3 different interfaces), facebook, myspace...the list goes on and on. it interferes with my ability to connect with people in real life. and i knew this. i knew this for a while, yet I kept on. If you haven't noticed, and probably most haven't, but my motto is, "it's a new year and I'm a grown ass woman" and part of this motto is contingent upon my acceptance of the necessity to do the things that I need to do in order to get where I'm going.

I've been doing a lot of recalling. Memory is an important tool. The uninvited memory is important, too, as it gives you glimpses to things you need to see that perhaps you wouldn't have gotten on your own. For example: I am reading this book "Writing on Both Sides of the Brain," and this one example of a six year old writing a story reminded me that I have been writing since kindergarten. My school had a "publishing" center. Basically it was fancy wrapping paper and cardboard and colorful masking tape, but if you had a story, you could go to this corner of the library, pick out your "cover design" and give them your manuscript and author's photo, and they would bind it for you. Really it was just staples and the gray flimsy paper with the writing guide-lines on it where you wrote almost three times as big as you would today. I remember doing all sorts of stories just so I could take my manuscript there and have them bind it and I got to hold the finished product in my hand. I needed that memory. I did. I'm in a slump and not really writing, and sometimes it worries me. Then I needed to be reminded about the childhood inhibitions and how freely I wrote, how eagerly I sought to get it in people's hands. I have proof that I was destined to do this since age 5. However, something in my immediate environment would have me think otherwise. Why do we do this to ourselves? Psyche ourselves out of the things we've known all along only to drift so far away that you're out in the middle of the ocean on a broken boat and remembering that if you had just done one thing differently you wouldn't be where you are now, and now is in a situation that will take only faith to get out of alive.

So you cling to faith. So I have been clinging to faith. It's the only tangible thing in the middle of the ocean, right? Faith as tangible. Yes, I said it. Sometimes, my faith is so strong I can hold it in my hands and see it - I can see what I believe will happen or come to be. Sometimes that requires a step back. I have to see who I was before I got here: in kindergarten wanting her words in a book. I have to hold that image in my head for a while, and then attack my situation with the same childhood abandon as then. The idea of being out in the middle of the ocean would never have occurred to me then. I always had answers and solutions. I was a smartass. In someways, I still am, though I've tamed my tongue and subsequently tamed my actions. I'm not visiting that publishing center as I would have (as I did) in kindergarten. I'm not sending my work out. I'm not producing work. My kindergarten mind never told my pen no, that's not a good idea for a book. And so my pen always had things to write. My kindergarten mind was hardheaded and never took no for an answer. I need to go back and reclaim parts of my self.

honoring (essay's brewing, maybe?)

my name has been a life-long dispute with myself. it wasn't always a life-long dispute, i should say. there was a time when i absolutely was in love with my full name, all four names, and would introduce myself as such. i was four. in preschool (and i still have the vhs to prove it!) my daycare went on this morning news show called the Mr. Knozit show where we would introduce ourselves and say what we wanted to be when we grew up. when it got to me, and Joe Pinner asked my name, i said, in one breath, all four names (if you ask me independently, i'll tell you all four). The man didn't understand, and asked "what?" and so the whole class exclaimed "delana!" and still, defiant, determined that this man would recognize my full name, i said it again, in one breath, the four names, the 9 syllables that constitute my name.

fast forward to learning to write. my mother told me that i was named after a white girl she used to teach. her first name De'Lana. (she pronounced it day-lay-na). when you enter into the public school (probably especially in the south, probably especially if you're black) fights with pronunciations of your name with lazy teachers abound. too, reading a name typed in all caps from an electronic roster doesn't help either. for the longest time i wrote my name simply: Delana. and pronounced it (da-lay-na). Something in me a couple of years down the line made me grow to hate it. I don't know why. but I wanted to go by my first middle name. I hated that my first and last name started with the same letter (this is before i learned the aesthetic qualities of alliteration). i had ignored for so long that everyone mis-pronounced my name, and my parents even, stuck to the second alteration of my name.

in daycare, too, i hated my name. in fact, i insisted my friends call me by a different name. it stuck, sometimes. other times people thought i was silly. it didn't help either that my daycare teacher was my mother's friend and had told that i was insisting upon another name. my urge to change my name was short-lived, but sometimes i still wonder if a rose by any other name...

I don't believe it was until middle school when I enrolled in french class that I learned my name - I showed my teacher the correct spelling and accentuation - had a french pronunciation and would be honored as such in the class. It was then I decided to take back my accent agiu, and my capital L in the middle of my name. But outside of the class, I didn't take back my accent agiu in pronunciation. At least, i decided, i was honoring it in how i wrote it.

Too, the public educational system leaves no room for the student who defies the norm, or has two middle names. my two middle names are the names of my grandmothers. when filling out papers, you only have room to put one initial, so invariably, the second grandmother - my father's mother - was always left out. i didn't think about it. that the school system was forcing me to alter my name, until my high school graduation when they called out your full name and you had to fill in three blanks for your full name, and i, too, left out the second middle name...because i thought they didn't have space for it. so my father, after my graduation, asked why i decided to shorten my name. it was more a question of, why aren't i honoring his mother.

still, i conformed to writing only three initials. my first, first-middle, and last. for years after that. thinking: who has two middle names, except my sister? and she doesn't write out all of her initials. so why should i? then i thought, i would be fancy and sign my name in script with an initial - grown folks do that, they write their initials. and still, i couldn't bring myself to write down that second-middle name or initial.

too, the fight with my name stems from this realization: i am the last of my father's line. for some reason, when i was in middle school, i was thinking of this truth -- that my father had two girls, and none of his siblings had any children, and the name would die out with me. i vowed then to never change my name. i vowed to have a son and give him my last name. this, of course, was done without any consent of any man. or any consideration. it was what i could think to do to ensure that my father's name lived on beyond me.

i guess you could say i was relieved when i entered into the poetry world, and was accepted, full name (well, first and last) and was told that my name sounded so poetic, that i should introduce myself always by my first and last name, that it has such a ring to it. and when i started publishing, and realized that, too, i am writing this name into eternity, it gave me great pleasure, and also great sadness. people were not honoring my spelling and distinct capitalization. they were changing my name again, they are changing my name again. but my conviction was in the truth that i still hadn't written into my own name my father's mother, the woman who saved me over and over, and keeps me still, in her spirit.

all of that is to say, this year is an especially trans formative one. i believe in its powers and strengths and what it will deliver to all of us. i am starting a new life outside of the academy. i am entering new territories in the writing world. i am beginning new legacies, and it is now that I need to begin to stand up and honor all of the roots that are supporting this tree, these branches, these leaves, this fruit.
i had to go fill out the important paper work for these new jobs i'm working in NYC. i sat down, and decided, yes, i'll write it. both initials. all four names. i'll sign it too. i'm finally around to honoring all of myself. and this, you'll know, is a big step.

it's a new year and i'm a grown ass woman

I dont know where I got that phrase from, but it's the kind of confidence that I have right now. I know, I could have that confidence without the profanity, but it's a kind of swagger that it's giving me, a kind of head cocked up, an assurance that this is going to be one amazing year, and I don't believe I've ever entered a year with this kind of outlook.

I stayed home for almost two weeks. Well, to say I stayed home is an exaggeration. I didn't stay home, because I went all over to see friends and catch up, and hang out, but I was in the southern region for two weeks. It was an interesting time. I spent a lot of time in the bookstores and in coffeeshops reading. i read this book eat, pray, love, which i'm sure everyone in the world has read and i can't really say i walked away with much from it except that sometimes I wished books like that existed and were written by black women. not that everything has to be representative of me, but at times i had a hard time connecting just because it wasn't a story i was familiar with. but it kept my eyes going, and something, hoping that something would come through and be an "ah ha" moment kept me reading. i finished and was like "oh." but with this realization - if anything - that i want to have a story much like it. maybe that's the point? seeking the three essentials in life? pleasure (food? interesting), prayer, and love. i will say though that sometimes i find it disappointing the state of christianity and the rep it has these days. would this book have been a big hit (though i know a lot of christians have read and recommended it)?

anyways. i didn't come here to write about this book. too, i picked up this book "organizing for the creative person" and finally, FINALLY my messiness (yeh, i'll admit it.) makes sense, and the whole "i'm an artist, i'm supposed to be messy" is no longer an excuse. this book has helped me turn my world around, really. maybe it wasn't just this book, but that i really wanted to turn it around, and not be messy, and work on my organization, but i never really had anyone or anything to give me permission to be, from someone who understood the difficulties. it was like being counseled into cleaning your room. ha. so now i'm sitting in a crisp, clean room (admittedly, it'd been a dump since i've been up here in august.)

what else? it's a new year. damn. it's a good new year. my last day home i flewww from atlanta (literally, it was that serious) to see my old high school teacher who i credit for a lot of my success and my push and drive. i have such unconditional support from this man. and i love it. he made me promise to let him be the first to buy a copy of my book when it's published. and you know, he wrote me a note when i graduated from high school that he looked forward to teaching my writing in his english class, and that prophecy has already come true. so. i promised him my first copy. and the galleys.

what was really bittersweet, was seeing my really good friend from chapel hill for probably the last time in two years. we call each other twins. we met in this christian organization - well, we had a class together, and realized it in this meeting where i spoke, and she introduced herself to me in class later and we've been really close ever since. we realized we were a lot alike. hence, we called each other our twins. and really, her prayer, her steadfastness in god has kept me, i believe from so much. you wouldn't believe how many times she's randomly (i say random but know better) she's called me and i had just gotten in an accident: i mean, literally, in the ditch on the road waiting for the highway patrol man. or called me and my house had just been broken into. or gotten online after a long time and i was in another car accident. and it lets me know that i am supposed to be here. and there are people that are here for me. and it makes me know i'm loved. i'm going to miss her dearly. i'm really glad i got to see her and another friend from the same christian organization who will be going overseas for two years, too. please keep these women in your prayers.

this was my first year that i didn't do new years resolutions. i just didn't feel it in me this year, and it's interesting the correlation, how i didn't want to do any resolutions and i have the most faith in this new year.

i will say, however, that it's a bit scary. this is my first january in 17 years that i haven't been about to start class. i had to fill in paperwork for my new job, and not say i was a full time student. that was crazy. but exhilarating. and that's where i get this attitude. it's a new year. and i'm a grown ass woman. i'm claiming my independence. and claiming the goals i've got planned to get done in the near future. yep.