from october 2018

My brain works differently these days. I remember very little about the last four weeks, except swathes of time like thick plaster wiped along my mind’s eye, different shades of greyish for each general activity: 

on a bus. 

Looking out my window.

In bed. 

In the studio.

Reading. 

There is a lot of looking out my window, which is a greyish, greenish coloured swathe. 

I forget things quickly, and the surprise at how fast  the things I forget pile up is both ridiculous and terrifiying. My to do list (written in several different places) makes me cry when I look at it, days later, to realize I have been working off a new, different one, with different tasks, without having considered the things on this one. I become exhausted if I have to take more than one bus ride a day. 

Words evaporate in my throat on their way to my mouth. When I communicate in public, I watch the mouths of people on the other side of counters (coffeeshop, reception desk) fall from their corners, as time suspends between us, the word gone.

I continuously bump up against my ableist fantasies about what, how much, and how well I can do things. 

Make it like a puzzle 

In those first few days post-concussion, I managed somehow to read an entire novel. I think I believed I might eat my own arm off if I didn’t have something to do. The novel was about a woman who decided to try and spend as much as one year as possible asleep, with the assistance of enough pharmaceutical drugs to kill a horse. One of the main plot points was that she somehow didn’t die. I myself wonder: if I could put myself to sleep for a month, a week, even, could  Icome back to life with the brain I imagine I had? (I can’t remember what it felt like to have that brain, except that it wasn’t like this). 

This writing didn’t set out to be about how to make work after you get a concussion, but that is where I am, so that is what it might be. 

Tell a story -- true or untrue -- about a time you were appalled 

( i sleep like a teenager) 

(mornings used to be sacred for me, half an hour or an hour by the window with my coffee and notebook)

(If I wake up before 9:30 it is a miracle) 

(If I wake up before 9:30 I have an anxiety attack) 

On the 8th day of being concussed, I learn that there are two types of death: brain death and heart death. I learn this in a private waiting room in ICU at Vancouver General Hospital, where 5 of us have camped out for 2 days after someone in my family had a sudden, massive heart attack and stroke. 

I learn that he may have already died that morning, in one definition of the word.

In another, we as a family get to choose when he will die, by taking out the supports that keep his heart and lungs working. After the doctor and the social worker and the spiritual chaplain leave, we sit in this room with its conference table, its 2 days worth of fruit and crackers, pillows, blankets, camping mattresses, changes of clothes. In this greenroom between realms we talk about which kind of death carries the spirit with it. We lean towards the kind where we have a choice. 

Scatter something with your whole body secretly 

In the studio, Andrea and I talk about family. About grief and the unravelling of parents as the mirror image for the unravelling of ourselves. We talk about what we might have inherited, and wether it’s possible for our parents to inherit things from us: movement practices we share with them, little openings into how they might perceive their fast-aging bodies differently. 

My mother was never in a band 

When I began working on this piece as a solo for myself 

 (pre-concussion)

I was working on a ritual to shift time and space. To rearrange what I carry in my body so that it might not equal me so fully. So that I might encounter it on my own terms. So that I might call on witnessess for this encounter. 

Toss and Groove

And now I am asking those things I was working on to be a container for someone else’s carrying, and perhaps in the future many someone elses’. I wonder about the ethics of asking someone to describe a place in their body as a room, to enter it and to bump around in there with the risk of unearthing something surprising, perhaps menacing.I wonder about staying present so that each action feels vital. Not precious, but vital. I wonder about Andrea and I surprising ourselves. Ridiculous and terrifying. 

I will forget everything I’ve written here by tomorrow. 

Caving is the memory of entering a space and having it get smaller 

I wonder about how our bodies: carrying their electricity, weight, and time, imbue the things we touch and make. I wonder about working with things (material, objects, spaces) 

not props. 

(heart, brain)

When we made the decision to let him die, the nurse printed out his last heartbeat for us. It was  not a prop. 

Is dancing any way to ask these questions? 

shirt/that shirt has been in your arms/ and I have/ that shirt is how I feel 

When this person died it felt like the map I was lazily, indulgently drawing, with no risk or rush (with this ritual, with my conversations with him, in dream and over email) was taken away from me. I am the inheritor of what began before him. When he left I believed he took answers with him. Now, with my brain newly shaken in its container, with every re-remembering a surprise, I wonder about finding openings and moving towards them. I wonder about forgetting how it should be done (forward moving, always building, watertight). I think about making something for a “show” and the distance between this and there feels so great that it is almost a relief how impossible it feels. I cannot even imagine. 

Place your body in relation to the light sources in the room 

In the studio with Andrea, we talk about how fun it is to try and do something difficult, like break down an everyday action into a series of tiny repeatable movements. To tell a story without any attemp to charm or entertain. We talk about the inevitability that doing something in a theatre will make us feel fucked up about it. I love watching Andrea work out the puzzle of a task in her body, and I love the surprising ways her presence and dedication makes me laugh or well up. 

I find this in our notes: 

Nice thought: I promise not to wish that you were someone or something else.