The erotic search for home
An audiovisual experiment using sensuality as a compass, in Spain
What if life is lived from the same place poems are written?
“We are raised to fear the ‘yes’ in ourselves, our deepest cravings...In each of us, there is a dark place within, hiding our true spirit against our nightmare of weakness...the places of possibility within us are dark and ancient and hidden. They have survived through that darkness. ”
I. The end [06/12]
I once had a home that could move to any place I wanted. I built it with my own hands, in a van that had been used to save lives – Stained with the blood of a lover I used this home to run from, this white van that became a part of my body. Later it would be my own blood on its walls, and my own life that needed saving. How could I have known when I drove the long, impossible road out him that there would be others? And that each time I discovered the lowest, life would guide me to another depth. But there too was this: the feeling of lying in a dream that had lived in my mind and now lived around me. To touch it. To touch a vision, to move in it, to become in it. That feeling! I needed to live the image of a morning spilling into a window overlooking the sea, a bird I loved more than anything I’ve known in bed beside me, a French press against the sandy floor of a home that was on its way to another story. I lived a dream. I really lived a dream. It also meant I would live through its end…
It was my story. I chose this. There were runaways and migrations that spilled into the most embarrassing failures, loneliness you can’t understand unless you have lived it, unless you have found yourself circling an unknown city in the dark many times before landing in an unlit harbor, one eye asleep and one eye guarding the window, of dreams forgotten in the insomnia of sleepless nights spent searching…searching… for what? I’ve forgotten. I can’t remember anymore what I’ve run from, and, what I meant to run to.
Every honest writer will tell you this. When they start a story, though they may know its beginning, they never know how it will end. And still, they choose to do it. They choose to write into what may be an end that devours them. To write towards an end that may not find them. I couldn’t have chosen such a painful ending. But it is the price of having the freedom to choose to begin, and, of having the courage to move in the direction of that choice.
And having arrived at the end, an end that took half of me and left me the other half out of pity, or kindness, I choose to begin again. To move in the direction of another vision, a very different vision, one that feels just as impossible as my first dream of a home that could move. But this time, I want a home so rooted in the soil, so devoted to its village, so in love with its own, permanent image that it shocks me to think of how much the pain must have changed me unknowingly. How much does each end take? And how much of a necessary truth rises to breathe in its place?
Hotel Beirut: from my first search for home, four years ago (2021); there is always a death that precedes it, a great loss that initiates it
II. The beginning [06/19]
Today marks one month since I took a plane to Corfu and began this long journey that led me through Lugano and Zurich and El Bruc…
Here it begins: the inevitable fall.
I want to give up. Take a plane back to New Orleans, find another cafe, bury a dream I’d never really been sure of. Fall in love with another mistake, another regret to lose myself in, forget the war of these poems. Toss the past three decades in the Mississippi.
Then walk home through the river’s thick fog… slowly. Emptied, simple.
Home. I had the audacity to believe in soil, in land and animals. But this new, submissive desire for home is humbler. I return the image I carried in my mind back to the impossibility it came from, and I reach for something easier to carry. A desire that asks for a little lamp, a small table, a bed that can’t be folded. A French press. A cup and saucer. Maybe even a little tray I can take to the window, where I will sit with my little life, my quiet animals that fit in the space of this small death I chose, and wonder about the other life, this one, the one I am near giving up.
This is the old, tortured voice in me writing this late into the night, and I let it. Like a child that wants its tantrum. I take her to a room, and let her spill into a scream what her new words couldn’t carry. This new language that needed a good day, good warmth, a good lie..
Because you can only march alone for so long. Because one pair of legs can only carry you so far, and the fuel of your own voice is never enough to land you where you meant to arrive. I’ve tried to wait for the arrival of something new, someone to continue this journey with. I’ve tried to believe in what I carried no memory of, to imagine the taste of something I’ve never tasted. But this highway is long, empty, and I am bone-tired and too weak to say no to any small room with a yellow lamp that I may find along the way.
Maybe, precisely because I am prepared to sacrifice all for this lamp, to trade granduer for smallness, desire for the sinlessness of wanting nothing, even this tiny desire goes unanswered. And I am stuck in this lifeless space between a little room and the soil of land I can’t touch. Here, there’s nothing.. an empty page, a pen that doesn’t work, and a scream that won’t voice itself..
Maybe, that is how the story ends: I submit to the half-yes in place of the erotic yes I couldn’t answer. I do it quickly. I mumble a shameful sorry while looking away, part from her knowing I leave a lover I was meant for, one I lost in the failure of my sacrifice, in the middle of a journey that was either leading me to the right place, or not leading me anywhere at all.
Halfway and half of who I was when I started, how could I know?
III. The Middle [06/20]
Exiled in the name of god, for searching for god.
No. I will not give up.
Maybe the real migration has been waiting for me in poetry, not to take me away, but to return me to myself.
Maybe the places we are born in don’t allow this return to happen. The people who raised us, who began this severance, can’t bear their own pain of witnessing a woman attempt a journey they have denied themselves..
IV. Lost [06/21]
It scares me to think the journey may be all in my mind, and that outside this body no movement happens. Or a false one. It is possible to stand in the same soil miles away. I don’t know how but it is. The migration of land with the body. You take a plane to run away from a farm, and you look down at your foot eight hours away and there’s the same farm and across the street is a man carrying’s your father’s beard, his tilt, the whole painful shape of him..
Where I could be anything, I choose to be an end. When I am allowed all, I give myself nothing.
I imagine I am writing this to you, who will walk the same soil one day. Whose eyes will see and understand what it hasn’t lived through, but in loving me deeply, lives it, and knows it just as painfully. This is for you, who may or may not be a body I will meet in touch one day. For you whose breath I feel against my ear in the empty space, whose essence I felt in the bird I loved more than life itself.
You who I’ve imagined in the falling house on Iverson Street, in that little room with no air, and bars on the windows. On those terrible Sundays when those ugly rooms would hold the grey sound of my father’s farm. When death was a hand reaching for me at night and life was a shove I had to keep giving. When death was a pair of foggy brown eyes at the top of a long body leaning into its madness. Those terrible buckets with milk and grain. I could burn those buckets and everything it fed, everything it took.
The irony, this delirious irony, is that what sustains me on this journey away from the ghost of my father is what was taken from me to feed it. What was given to the goats who took the place of his daughter returns and allows me to live through a loneliness very very few of you could understand. It’s nothing I can explain. Its lives outside the territory of language. It’s a sharpness in the center of your chest that starts to beg the air for answers. It’s shameless and restless in its begging, pacing the hallways, the garden, the stairs for something it knows it won’t find. But we live on our lies, and my pacing feeds me an illusion I need to pass through the day. On mornings when I am motherly, tender but firm in admitting the need for truth, I sit for an hour in the stunned silence of what I’ve opened. I knew there was a hollow place in me, but I did not know the depth of it, the vastness of it, the age of it. It is as old as I am, maybe older. In the confession that my restlessness guards me from, I am a still shape in the garden by the clothesline, unable to make sense of why I am here, and why no love arrives and why no end has been written for me. On kinder days I imagine a fistful of soil in my hands, my knees against the ground, in my hands what has carried my name and waited for me. But where? Where on this earth does the soil carry my name? I’ve searched for my name in the bodies of men, then women, then animals, what I found has left, and most was unfound.
If not among the living, how could I believe it will be found in the indifferent, exhausted earth?
***
How long had I wanted to be where I am now when I was younger? Only I don’t have her laughter, her new body, her beauty…
The search for home is larger than that. It’s a timeless march towards something completely unknown. On days when the uncertainty eats at me, when I’ve used all the life in me to rise from bed that morning, the familiar hell I’ve always known tempts me. Find another man whose cave I could enter, destroy myself. Erase this desire for something nameless in giving it any name, any place. Crawl back to that little room by the river where for reasons still unknown to me I packed everything and ran from, twice. What terrifies me is that the road I’ve convinced myself is a road is nothing more than a gravel circle returning me over and over to my doom. How can we know when we have only ourselves to speak to?
And if I have the chance to arrive, if the next room I find is not another temporary nest sent by god to catch me through another fall, will I find in me the strength to step into what I’ve never known? To recognize it for what it is? To not run from it? Will I finally be able to part with a search that began from the first day I was born? Or has this longing become a part of me, and to end it is to end a part of me?
What has been waiting to rise, to unfold in me, to live that has not because I have not allowed this longing to die into its answer?
“What if I stay? You will find yourself destroyed by grief. All you know will be around you, and at the same time far from you. Better to find a new place now. ”
still from a visual collage and meditation on home
“Here is the promise from the wild psyche to all of us. Even though we have only heard about, glimpsed, or dreamt a wondrous wild world that we belong to once, even though we have not yet or only momentarily touched it, even though we do not identify ourselves as part of it, the memory of it as a beacon that guides us toward what we belong to, and for the rest of our lives.In the ugly duckling, a knowing yearning stirs when he sees the swans life up into the sky, and from that single event his remembrance of that vision sustains him. ”
I don’t know if I’ve been kind to myself, but I’ve been honest. Brutally honest.
V. March forward from the belly
My proximity to my belly is my proximity to god.
There’s an artist I love who describes sensuality as slowing down enough to feel it all. The slowing down, for one who has (literally) used running to move through the worst pain, then complete chaos to pass through the last decade, is the most terrifying thing you could do. To slow down enough to feel it all requires a courage I ask god for each day. And though it scares the hell out of me, I need the slowness, because I can’t trust the decisions I make in the rush. I’ve gotten it wrong, so wrong, in the hurry and in what I thought was the silence of my intuition. The voice in our belly requires a mode of life so foreign to most of us. And perhaps, after a longtime of not being allowed this pace of life, then rejecting it on your own terms, it’s not so quickly and easily that the voice from our belly returns. I don’t know why, why this long return that leaves us questioning if anything within us is listening and if we’re crazy to wait for a response. But I have nothing left but to trust, to stubbornly and passionately trust that there is something still alive in a womb long abandoned, and that she is as desperate to speak as I am to listen.
And my promise: to move my life in the direction of what this new stillness spills into my ear.
[06/22]
I believe the body feels it, when the earth is hit. How else could we explain the unease the precedes it? Suddenly, there’s a pain in the body that is not one’s own. The soil’s wound is the body’s wound, and the body’s wound is the soil’s too.
Today I walked by the mountains with the rawness of a woman who walks the earth with open skin, moving slowly with the weight of feelings that had no words and spilled out (when asked) in little, useless sentence about the state of the world.
I am trying to migrate out of the mind and into the body when I write this. I want my people to know the simple joy of walking through an old village at the foot of a mountain, of an ice cream melting into your shirt beneath the summer sun, of photos taken by beauty that stays standing through the years. Of safety, not as a passing breeze, but as reliable and as familiar as the mountain. Of water. Of water at the end of a long walk through the heat. A cup on a counter that doesn't tremble beneath the passing tantrums of a traumatized world that can’t bare the to sit with silence.
We march forward from the belly, because I don’t know where else from the body we find the strength to move with. Water seems to spill from every part of me, but the womb, lifeless and abandoned as its been, holds a permanent water, a presence that defies the impermanence of all else. From there I drink, from there I water the earth. To there I return, always, and from there I speak my prayers.
What I desire with madness for my people I desire for myself too: a balcony overlooking a street where lovers lift their heads when they pass, and laundry lines that hide only the shyness of a woman who wants to watch unseen. Where the memory of the country is washed with divine rain and we begin anew: all of us returning with nothing but our bodies, because we are just as badly in need of starting again too. We link our weak veins with the river’s drying body, and together we fill. Two lonely breaths become one, and neither is living the hell of wanting the other. We are no longer half-lovers who visit in the summer. No, we have moved into one house …
“Creating one thing at a certain point in the river feeds those who come to the river, feeds creatures downstream, yet others in the deep. Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. ”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. (Women Who Run With the Wolves)
I wish we lived in a world without language. I am exhausted of witnessing the death of myself each time I open my mouth to speak…the migration out of my body that takes place with every sentence. The gates to my belly, its voice — they only open in the silence. In speech in the presence of others, it locks. I need to build gates around the gates, so that the inner courtyard can always stand open. For who! Who deserves the erasure of myself!
And after this long journey, I stand far from the end, having learned only that the erotic search for home leads you to a room within where god’s yellow lamp sits on the table besides the prayers you pen into poetry, where life is a white curtain blowing, a butterfly untangling itself from the fabric, a permanent silence in the chaos of your train departing, a bus arriving late, a plane trembling in the sky, on your way to search for home. Because where you went within to ask for directions, to beg, to listen to your questions fall unanswered into a space you never knew you held, in the time you sat breathing and waiting for the slow arrival of a voice to guide you to your land, you discovered something else: a divine territory disguised as sin, harbored in the sack that holds all the shame. A space where god’s voice laces with yours and you can’t tell them apart —where home is a promise, as sure as my own end.
