thank u rayne fisher-quann
I didn’t know what to call this and I didn’t know how to start. I still don’t. I’ve been jotting down notes and writing little haphazard think-pieces and anxiously leaving them open on my computer then coming back and starting a new one. But an introduction should be easy, right? An introduction is flirtatious. It’s exploratory. You don’t know me yet. I don’t know you. I hardly know where I am. It’s like a first date, right? I’m telling myself that beginnings are softer than endings because I don’t like the word easy. People often say that at the beginning of a relationship you sell someone on an ideal you have of yourself that you actually can’t uphold. I mean, if you could then you would have. It’s a good thing to reflect on. Maybe that person I was when we first met is the person I want to be more often. Maybe this person writing right now is who I should be more often. In any sense, I believe it is softer than the ending. It’s slower. Kinder. You allow yourself to be brave.
It seems odd that I haven’t done this before. Unless I’m completely unselfaware it probably seems odd to those who know me intimately: I love to write. I love to be fucking weird and public about that weirdness. Maybe what I haven’t been so good at expressing is that I love to combine that weirdness with a more refined intellectualism. I knew I wanted to write this way when I was in my undergrad at U of T. I took a course called American Literature of the 20th Century, because duh, that’s what you do when you’re young and sad and all alone. I went in expecting to read Hemmingway. I didn’t expect to listen to jazz, to see postcards of lynchings in the south, to learn about beat poetry. On the first essay I wrote I got 67%. I was devastated. Partly because I was completely enamored with my professor; he was exuberant and brilliant and intimidating and magical. Partly because I thought I was doing what I *should* be doing. And so on my next paper I just said, fuck it, I’m going to take a risk; I’m going to write how he teaches, and so I handed in a piece that I titled “All Hail O’Hara” because, again, fuck it, that’s what I meant: I meant all fucking hail frank o’hara. And it showed me that good writing is being starved when you shove it into a template. That’s when I fell in love with the marriage of form and content. How dare I write about poetry being “the language of humanity” in five neat paragraphs with no “curse words,” no run-on sentences, no texture in the lines to stumble on. I got 90% on that paper. I still remember finishing the essay with “as it arises in abrupt, enchanting waves.” I love that line.
At this point in my life I haven’t been expressing myself as a writer at all. At least, not formally. Thank god Instagram introduced the photo dump because it has given my emo tendencies a place to host a short public unraveling. My small following actually seems to resonate with me when I write a sad girl caption that kind of reads like a journal entry and kind of reads like one of those screengrab poetry accounts with lots of commas and what-ifs. And so I thought, well I could make those longer; it might help with the dream I have of putting together a full-length philosophy text that I’ll mask as a self-help book (thank you Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing). My formal writing career ended after I completed my Masters degree. Yes, I have an MA. No, I am not currently “using” it *professionally* as so many bros have asked me over the years. But I fucking thrived in that program. I tore so many emotionally repressed muscles. It validated what I love to do: access this critical part of my brain that can make connections where there are seemingly none.
An artist friend of mine, after sharing that I would be starting this publication, said to me, with an artist’s amount of gusto: Yes! Get into the practice of writing and releasing! This is the same girl who introduced me to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way 13 months ago. Obviously a good friend. And it makes me ask myself the question, are you a writer if you don’t write? Are you a writer if you don’t release? Are you an artist if you are not living an artist’s life? Yet, I’ve always thought of myself as living out art in some way. Everything is art. The way I look outside in the morning, the way I look at my hands, my hands especially, cutting a fruit, even the way I think - I think in the way a poem reads, catching myself on the cliff of a punchy line, how it hammers into my chest and knocks the wind out of me, how every moment could very well be that cliff. And it makes everything very intense. Viggo Mortensen, and you can see it in his eyes that he means it, said “you don’t have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.” And I believe this. But I also believe in the refinement and homage to craft and practice. These two beliefs of mine can co-exist. You can refine your life to be an artistic activity. No, it doesn’t have to be something that people call art, but it must be slow enough for your own mind to recognize it’s making in the moment. Otherwise we’d all be artists. And we are not. Otherwise it’s all retrospect. And retrospect is subject to all sorts of bastardization.
I think a lot about what role artists have in shaping versus responding to the world. In my case - engaging with the world, with a community, hence my enthusiasm for self-digitization. I recently had a conversation with a friend about those habitual reactions people have when they’re experiencing something uncomfortable… we are revealed under those circumstances. But I don’t believe that avowal is stagnant; nor is it permanent. The point of any revelation is precisely that: to make known. So that we may harness it. If I were to summarize, with a more-often-than-not sensibility, perhaps my whole life has been uncomfortable. And my impulse, what has been revealed about me, is isolation, it’s solitude. And so I’m here to express that solitude, to be responsible for it, to take care of it. And I mean that, to take care, because a harness is not a prison. I am here to talk about real life magic. A magic that, for me, is quickening, it’s gaining momentum, but it’s not unnerving and I don’t feel as though I have to catch up, it’s just kind of all around me wherever I go, and when I sleep - it sleeps too. I’m learning how to speak to it, so I talk slowly, as if to a child. I have to close my eyes and shut the noise out or else I won’t hear the answers to my questions. But sometimes, the magic asks questions of me. What do you know to be true? James Baldwin said that “the role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” I understand it this way as a responsibility. If I love you, god, if I love you, I must make you aware. I must beg for your attention to my own awareness. And I am so in love. What’s on the other end of that affection might be barren at times. Fuck, if all I have to soothe that, to quench that rapture, is retrospective revelation then I’ll lay myself bare. I’ll let it all flow out, I’ll take care of it, because beginnings are softer than endings.