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Openings

 

It took me a long time to realize that this first essay is, at least partly, about grief.

 

At first I wanted to describe the installation and performance called Openings that I organized with the interdisciplinary feminist improv collective fff in my second year at Stanford: Tiffany Lin in her cowboy hat typing questions from our audience ballot-box on her projected typewriter, Simona Fitcal with her video-box turning my violin into a gritty rainbow. The fff collective had been a brainchild of a few friends, including Michele Cheng and Julie Zhu; a collective space where women artists could come together and create and support one another. It was exhilarating, an utterly new experience for me: rehearsals that centered snacks, conversation, and mutual care, and then somehow solidified into something amazing by the time of the performance. I wanted to share this liberating experience of feminist collectivity.

 

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But then I sifted through my notes and the hundreds of emails I’d sent about this and found a version of myself that pulled me back into a feeling of smallness.

 

I’d originally had the idea for the concert because I wanted a way to connect the worlds in which I felt most alive, and that felt stranded apart from one another in the architecture at Stanford.

 

There was the part of me that hauled my paper-covered lamp into the basement of Braun Music Center (the hub of traditional performance and non-tech-oriented music classrooms), where I practiced Kurtag and Bach inside the cork-boarded practice rooms that smelled like the Round Building at Indiana University. And then there was the part of me that made bathroom-moth-installations in CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where my violin felt like an oddity among screens and modular synthesizers. And then of course there was the part of me that I was there for, the student of musicology, the one who pushed late into night asking questions about the why and the how and the what-then of the feelings I got when I listened and moved. I was having a hard time connecting with this part of myself in my musicology readings, but in my collaboration with fff I saw an opening. 

 

I had recently started playing some pieces that used specific string tunings [3] to bring out different resonances on the violin, a practice known among Western classical musicians by the Italian name scordatura. The practice is older than the instrument, though it has become much less frequent since the end of the nineteenth century, when the mythology of Western classical music solidified into the forms typically taught in present-day conservatories. [4] The word scordatura has been used in English since the late 19th century [5]: the “s” is a negation of its body, cordare, which means to tune. Untuned; discordant.

 

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Over bubble tea in the busy parking lot of Town and Country Village, I pitched a performance to my new friends in the fff collective: an event called “Openings” that would bring together folks from CCRMA and Braun through the shared opening of experimental tunings. I’d ask Christopher Costanza of the St. Lawrence String Quartet if he wanted to play some Bach with the original scordatura tunings, and see if Christopher Jette, who had shared a mesmerizing electronic piece using a vibrating magnet (an “e-bow”) and a monochord at my most recent Tiny Studio Salon, might want to share that too. Maybe this could be a catalyst for another fff group performance, an improvisation or installation or . . . ?

 

As I described my idea I felt something shutting down in some of my new friends, and I became aware in the context of these new friends of the oddness and specificity of my background as a violinist trained in Western Classical music. As much as I wanted to focus on the wonder and the potential of these niche connections between Baroque tunings and experimental music, the sheer weight of cultural associations wrapped up in my instrument and standing out against the background of bubble tea and Palo Alto parking lot outweighed this wonder. It was like wearing a chicken suit while yelling Shakespearian sonnets and expecting bystanders to be moved by Shakespeare’s slant-rhymes.

 

So I pivoted, making a Google doc for sharing the questions that were on each of our minds, the things that were motivating us in our creative explorations. The event that grew out of the continuing conversation was beautiful, a turning point for me. But there’s a small part of it that still feels balled up, that I think I still need to unspool here.

 

I hold the tangled ball and feel for loose ends:

 

Here: frayed and red-orange. I tug and it goes taut: a feeling of shame. This is me hearing myself, the twist of my body in motion, reflected back as something foreign and hurtful. I cover my shame with the warmth of generous words: Openings, Living Space. The words aren’t quite enough to name what I feel, and I feel my body shrink and disappear in their softness.

 

I turn the ball over and over.

 

Here: tucked carefully in, an end of iridescent purple. I pull. Mother tongue.

 

A conversation with my friend Jonathan Leal, prompted by the complexities of our struggle to find a common collaborative musical language, leads me to a video of M. NourbeSe Philip’s reading of her poem, “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” [6]

 

[. . .]

English

is my mother tongue.

A mother tongue is not

not a foreign lan lan lang

language

l/anguish

     anguish

  -a foreign anguish.

[. . .]

 

Her steady stuttering holds care, holds violence.

 

I put this poem beside a passage I read in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, a beautiful in-between text of memoir, history, and critical theory:

 

When I hear the phrase ‘Asians are next in line to be white,’ I replace the word ‘white’ with ‘disappear.’ Asians are the next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. [7]

 

. .  .

 

 

My mother was my first teacher, my first violin teacher. When I was three, she began teaching me, using puppets to tell me all the things that I would not have listened to from my mom. She used a modified version of the Suzuki method, a way of approaching violin teaching that rested on the belief that any child could develop musical talent the way they learned their mother tongue. To Shinichi Suzuki, the method’s originator, this involved exposure to the sounds from an early age (infancy at best), modeling by the parent (in Suzuki’s writings, almost always the mother), patient repetitions, and a focus on the development of embodied memory rather than text-based learning. [8] Suzuki’s phrase only practice on the days you eat sat side by side on my mental family altar with do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 

Suzuki’s father was a part of the wave of westernization that took hold in Japan at the turn of the 19th century; he turned the family side-hustle of building shamisen (three-stringed plucked instruments) into a business manufacturing violins. As a teenager, Suzuki became enamored of the sound of the violin from a recording of violinist Mischa Elman that he heard on the family’s new hand-cranked gramophone, and ended up studying in Germany for eight years between the wars. [9]

 

My mom gave me a copy of Nurtured by Love, Suzuki’s autobiographical manifesto on his pedagogy, years ago, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I only just now read it. [10] Parts of it make me cringe (he talks with wonder about a story of two girls allegedly raised by wolves in India, citing their hairy bodies as evidence for his absolute belief in the power of nurture over nature), but I’m surprised by how I’m gripped by it, how interested I am. (Sorry, Mom, you were right.) Intertwined with the assumptions that I buckle against are things that connect in unexpected ways with other spaces that have been guiding me. Two of these connections—his approach to education as loving cultivation, and his emphasis on the inseparability of mind and body — feel especially relevant in the context of this “companion for liberatory practice,” so I’d like to spend some time with them here before returning to the personal threads that drew me to them. [11]

 

Suzuki advocates for love-based cultivation as the basis of education, rather than authoritarian information transfer, which calls to mind Black Feminist bell hooks’s writings on education as “the practice of freedom,” a practice that she insists can and should be pleasurable and exciting. [12]

 

He talks about developing the habit of acting, rather than just thinking, which resonates with artist/ethnomusicologist Tomie Hahn’s writing on traditional Japanese philosophies of the unity of mind/heart/body:

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As is generally known, philosophically, theory and practice are not separated in Japan—the mind and body are not considered to be separate entities but are instead regarded as interdependent. [13]

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Tomie Hahn's words connect seamlessly with what I've learned from bell hooks and Brazilian educational activist Paulo Freire, which in turn link with the words of Buddhist teacher-practitioners Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh-- here is bell hooks drawing them all together in a way that connects with Suzuki's protest against disembodied information-based teaching (what Paulo Freire calls the "banking system" of education in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed) [14]:

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Paulo Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are two of the 'teachers' who have touched me deeply with their work. When I first began college, Freire's thought gave me the support I needed to challenge the 'banking system' of education, that approach to learning that is rooted in the notion that all students need to do is consume information fed to them by a professor and be able to memorize and store it. Early on, it was Freire's insistence that education could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called 'conscientization' in the classroom. [. . .] [Thich Nhat Hanh's] philosophy was similar to Freire's emphasis on 'praxis'-- action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. [15]

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bell hooks goes on to highlight Thich Nhat Hanh's emphasis on "wholeness," which she defines as "a union of mind, body, and spirit." Crucially, this wholeness is framed as the bridge to participation in a fully interdependent world, not an insular idea of self-sufficiency. I'm drawn to a beautiful conversation between Meredith Monk and Björk, [16] two other people whom I claim as deeply influential teachers (though I've never met or worked with Björk). In it, interviewer Susan Cahill asks about physicality as a possible link between their two practices. Meredith Monk describes how her singing practice "came from the center of the body out," out of dance and movement, and Björk used a word, "holistic," that I had avoided before hearing her say it, because it carried too many vaguely new-age connotations. But when she used the word, it felt fresh and earnest, a way of connecting her embodied practice with the Icelandic ecosystems and communities that had shaped her. I recall talking with a friend after listening to this conversation, full of bubbles from Björk's words, and telling him that I thought maybe my dissertation was about finding "wholeness," about bringing together all the fractured parts of myself. Something in the cautious tone of his reply made me halt again: I heard the word "wholeness" reflected back as something tinged with neoliberalism, with the illusion of self-sufficiency. He spoke about the importance of communities and interdependence,  and in the moment I felt deflated and abandoned the word “wholeness” instead of looking again, with more care. Let me try again, with apologies to my friend.

 

In the pervasive context of contemporary capitalism, wholeness snaps easily into the idea of self-sufficiency. The system of ideals and policies that collapse "wholeness" into "independence" can be understood through the lens of neoliberalism, which I follow sociologists Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy in defining as "an economic model or paradigm that rose to prominence in the 1980s" and that resurrected the "classical liberal ideal of the self-regulating market." Within this value system, government policies and cultural ideologies empower individual independence above social interdependence. [17]

 

Yet as Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961, the idea of self-sufficiency can only ever be a myth (148-149). We’re living organisms, and we have needs [see Ross Gay’s definition of gratitude on p. 205 of Inciting Joy, discussed below]. The only way a myth of independence can be sustained is by making the work of others invisible. [18]

 

 

Freedom, as Arendt defines it, is a deeply interdependent phenomenon that requires not only liberation from the condition of enslavement, but also “the company of other men who were in the same state, and [. . .] a common public space to meet them-- a politically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed.” [19] The way "liberal" is used in "neoliberal" is an abstraction that hinders the actual practice of freedom. [20]

 

The meaning that I hear Bjork reaching toward, and that I experienced in the ways that Meredith Monk led rehearsals and workshops, shares more with what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn calls "the open whole." [21] Kohn takes foundational anthropologist E.B. Tylor’s definition of culture as a “complex whole” and adds the crucial inflection that “complex wholes are also open wholes.” [21] In other words, no context is complete in itself. Likewise, no human is self-sufficient: they are always both a complex and an open whole.

 

The distinction between these different senses of "wholeness"— the quality of open wholeness that Kohn describes and the idea of wholeness as it has been packaged by neoliberal mythology— is similar to a distinction that Angela Davis talks about in reference to the evolution of the concept and practice of intersectionality in her decades of experience as an activist and critical theorist [22]. She describes the origins of the word as something at first localized to the body, to a Black woman’s body (Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated the term "intersectionality" in 1991, used it as a metaphor about violence experienced as a result of being in an intersection of racial and sexual forces of oppression [23]). And she describes more recent uses of the word to describe intersecting political movements, something that sociologist Patricia Hill Collins describes alongside Italian feminists as transversal politics, an additive solidarity between overlapping groups. [24] Intersectionality is a capacious word: in the former inflection, it holds the impact of divisive violence, and in the latter inflection, it holds possibilities for collective power, for being more than the sum of parts. [25]

 

Similarly, in its neoliberal sense, wholeness can be a statement that divides the self from external needs, whereas in Kohn’s sense, it is a locus of potential and necessary connection. Kohn, an open whole like his work, is deeply influenced by the indigenous worldviews that surround his experiences as a researcher who has spent twenty-five years in “sustained and ongoing anthropological research with Amazonian indigenous people living in one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth.” [26] In this context, the word “whole” is most useful not as a way of marking the boundaries of inside and outside, but as a way of naming and honoring a system of internal relationships that is functioning without superimposed divisions.

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. . .

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Throughout Nurtured By Love, I hear Suzuki's insistence on care, which he elides with mothering in a way that feels inseparable from the Japanese patriarchal structures in which he was raised. I search through the text for any mention of his mother, but I don’t find any, despite plenty of descriptions of his father and his father’s violin factory. I find her name finally in an article by a former student of Suzuki’s named Kerstin Wartberg: Ryo Fujie. [ 27] The article shares a photo of Suzuki’s parents side by side. The stiff tilt of his mother’s head in the formal portrait reminds me of the photos I’ve seen of my great grandmother; her eyes avoid the camera and her face fades into darkness. I can’t tell if the hint of bend in her mouth is humor or disapproval.

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. . .

 

My mother started playing the viola in public school. She was raised by her two Japanese Canadian parents, who were both survivors of the forced removal and incarceration of Canadian citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Because of their experiences, they raised her to speak English rather than Japanese. Music, as it was taught in her Canadian school system, was my mother’s second language, one she chose and dedicated her life to sharing with countless young students, including myself.

 

One of the most difficult things of my recent journey has been trying to articulate to my mother, to both my parents, why I’ve (mostly) not been excited about playing my violin since coming to Stanford. I think part of why this is difficult to articulate is because I haven’t really articulated what I left behind in doing so; the ways I’ve been diminishing or ignoring the parts of myself being left behind.

Writing the word “grief” here feels self-indulgent, even hurtful, in the context of a genocide being enacted against Palestinians by generational survivors of the Holocaust, funded in part by the money that I’ve received from this institution and paid in taxes to the U.S. government. I hold that sense of censure in a palm steadied by Pema Chodron and Yumi Sakugawa, [28] turn it around, breathe into it. Can I turn from a sense of scarcity here, to one of abundance? Abundance of grief. I think of the mother cardinal. What I want to say is that the magnitude of my grief for this small bird was right, and that from this place is an opening to something unfathomably vast. Something that can’t be held alone.

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Can my grief for my musical identity, my mother-tongue— a grief that I can’t untangle from the chronic migraines, nausea, and depression that I experienced after coming to Stanford—  be an opening? [29]

 

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I’m at Stanford; it’s May 2023, week five of the ten-week quarter. I’ve just gotten off a Zoom call with the two remaining students in the class I’ve been teaching, Liberatory Practice Lab. One is auditing, and the other just told me that they are burned out and as much as they wish they could continue they need to drop the class. I have COVID, and the desk of my friend’s studio that I’ve been subletting is covered with Kleenex and extra copies of the sunflower-colored zine that I made as the syllabus for this class.

 

I call up Liangyeh Tai, a dear friend, musician, and somatic educator whom I’d invited to give a guest workshop to my class the following week. I skate quickly through saying that my class has dissolved, and begin to apologize for not being able to host her after all since, well, there’s no class anymore, but she hears something in my voice and stops me, makes space for the tears to come. “Beautiful,” she says as I cry. “Beautiful.”

 

. . .

 

This is a flower for my grandmother.

 

Grandma, I miss you.

 

When I was young I used to call you Northern Penguin, and sign my cards Southern Duckling. This was partly because I was silly and you were too and I enjoyed making you laugh, and partly because it was a way of deflecting from a hardness inside you that I didn’t understand, something that got denser and more explosive as you got older.

 

Sometimes Mom or I could get you to talk about playing field hockey as a teenager, about how much you hated cooking.

 

I think of the Japanese word “ganbatte.” Carry on, persist, you’ve got this; with an undertone of don’t complain. You were good at this, but also you were good at complaining. Usually it was disguised, slant, cushioned in something innocuous, something that the person it was actually directed at might miss but my mom and I could always read. We had practice with each other.

 

In your nineties, you seemed to have nightmares more frequently. You shouted things in Japanese. Your voice was harsh, rough, frightening.

 

When I visited my parents recently, my mom showed me your sewing book, the one you submitted to your program for Western dressmaking. The stitching took my breath away. Each intricate fold, the perfect pockets—if each stitch was a word, what I read was an ocean.

 

Repetitions. Patience. Perfection. I think of your daughter, my mother, patiently practicing with me every day for a year until I was able to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with no mistakes.

 

I think of a peony, the dense fist of its bud, its abundant curling petals.

 

 

This is a flower for my father.

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Dad, when Brixi had to be put down and you Skyped with me and Phil, you told us how much she trusted you as you held her head on the vet’s table. You were crying as you told us; you choked on your words and apologized: “Sorry I’m not stronger.” I’ve never felt closer to you, more in love.

 

Some years ago I found a YouTube video of you performing the Enesco Legend on a tour in Japan. You are young, and the video looks like it’s from the eighties, though the caption says 1993, when I would have been five. Your sound is soaring, free; I recognize hints of holding maybe just at the tail end of notes, when you put the trumpet down, but I don’t recall attending recitals where I was able to listen like this, to be carried easily in your sound. Listening to your ease made me cry.

 

Sometimes when I look at photos of your dad I wonder about what violence he must have experienced to have left its traces so deeply in your neck cords and shoulders, in mine. I think about painting in the garage while you repeated the same passage over and over, each time ending in a high note that splits into a strained curse. You throw yourself again and again against the wall of that note; my shoulders brace.

 

You’re right that you’re fine, that I don’t need to try to heal you, that I can’t even if you wanted me to. What I want to say is that I see you, the part of you that chose music even though your dad would have preferred something “manlier,” the wide-eyed wonder that makes both of us susceptible to niche obsessions and passionate, self-immolating dedication to what we believe in.

 

What I’m laying to rest here isn’t the music you chose and dedicated your life to. It’s the idea that expressive nuance depends on power, on the ability to play a high note. It’s the idea that your worth as a human being depends on the next faculty recital you give.

 

I realize that it looks like I’ve given up on my violin. That’s not true; it’s just that I’m still figuring out what particular habits in my body connect with what ways of thinking, and how to practice embodying the version of myself that feels most true, most alive, most radiantly connected with what I believe and seek in the world. Which feels like a very Dad sentiment to me.

 

 

This is a flower for my mother.

 

Mom, the smell of camellia flowers reminds me of your arrangements, the blue-handled clippers on the washer when you’d come back in with a bundle of leaves and flowers to stick into the prickly holder in the low brown-black bowl.

 

I love hearing you talk about your friends now, about your chamber music adventures. I’m in awe of your family history, the 500-page gift that you wrote during the pandemic and shared with everyone in the family while I was busy trying to write a halfway intelligible dissertation proposal.

 

Thank you for your patience with me while I was throwing tantrums about practicing. Thank you for cooking the delicious “concoctions” that I complained about, every day after wrangling your high school orchestra students, after getting up at four to pack all of our lunches, after going to bed at midnight because you’d been preparing for the next day’s work.

 

Thank you for taking me to lessons every week, writing reams of notes like the Suzuki mom you helped your students’ mothers emulate, staying up even later to sew gorgeous recital dresses while I fell asleep to the whirr of your sewing machine.

 

Thank you for taking me to countless doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, weird quack doctors, physical therapists, and that lady in Pennsylvania who got teary-eyed about the beauty of her German shepherd humping the pillow while we talked about how to heal my arms. For worrying about me and putting up with my annoyance about how worried you always seemed.

 

Thank you for framing all of my paintings, clearing the same table you used to massage my back with those electric wands that other doctor recommended, setting up the mat-cutter and the point gun so that it wouldn’t cost as much as it would to take them in to the framer.

 

Your love awes me.

 

What I lay here is the fear that made it so hard for me to relax when ---- yelled at me to; the smallness that our inherited perfectionism knit our bodies into when we tried something new. Forgive my public self-therapizing here; I want to say that these habits of fear and smallness are remnants of a strategy adopted in the context of a racist country, cultivated by another mother who loved her daughter deeply too.

 

Beside these, in the rich dark soil, I lay my love for playing, the dancing ecstatically around the dining room table to Shostakovich, the eyes-closed-in-the-practice-room Bach Chaconnes, the closeness with my body-mind-soul that years and years of supervised practice allowed me to experience. These are not dead, just tender; growing new forms outside the shells that no longer fit them.

 

Thank you. I love you.

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Grief and gratitude intertwine.

 

I recently listened to the poet Ross Gay narrate his latest book of essays, Inciting Joy, [30] and he gave definitions for gratitude and for grief that I had to rewind and listen to eight or ten times because I found them so beautiful. For grief, wrapped in the label of a “working definition . . . which in all likelihood I’ve cribbed from someone else, and to whom, wherever you are, I offer thanks,”  Ross Gay writes: “Grief is the metabolization of change” [31]. For gratitude, I’d like to share an extended quotation, because the context is the heart of the definition. Ross Gay is writing about masculinity, about his reluctance to affix a definition or qualities to ideas of femininity as something non-masculine, because the long litany of stereotypically feminine things, “in addition to liking pink and pretty stuff maybe and flower earrings,” also includes

 

crying, being permeable, porous, tender, soft, gooey, yielding, leaky, mutable, amorphous, indiscreet, attached, polymorphous, relating, emotional, in flux, movable, bonkers, unfixed and unfixable, and in perpetual need of care, which sorry to tell you, are just the qualities of a creature, regardless of genitals or gender. It is called entangled life, which is also just called life, to which we are, regardless of any systems and stories to the contrary, or rage rage against it, subject. Or glass half full: in thrall to. Another word for which is gratitude: in thrall of our truly infinite entanglements. [32]

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I’m writing this while looking out a window at tiny, almost wilting purple flowers and fresh green branches. Images of student protesters being thrown to the ground replay in my mind. The world feels huge and fragile.

 

If grief is the metabolization of change, it’s also an opening, [33] a way into noticing the textures that intertwine with feelings that are more difficult to face. Audre Lorde's marvelous essay "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" [34] (let's be honest, all of her essays are marvelous  [35]; if you've not encountered them yet I hope this will inspire you to seek them out) fearlessly untangles the ways in which anger, fear, defensiveness, guilt, and grief intertwine. "We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty," she writes. [36]

 

Her insistence on openness to the wisdom of anger reminds me of the way Pema Chodron introduces the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen in The Places That Scare You. Tonglen is a meditation practice that involves the breathing in or reception of suffering and the breathing out or giving of relief  [37]. Chodron emphasizes the importance of a brief "flash on emptiness" at the outset of this practice, something that she likens to a cloudless sky or the open shock of unexpected silence. This openness makes Tonglen a practice of surrendering to interconnection, recognizing the space that extends beyond one's habitual and personal limitations, rather than trying to process a universe of pain within one's limited body. I was afraid of Tonglen because I sensed that the negative feelings would get caught somewhere in myself as I breathed them in. I felt that the knots in my shoulders and the tightness in my neck were catching points, and I think perhaps they still are. Audre Lorde helps me here again:

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I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings . . . Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. [38]​

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Defensiveness destructive of communication. My grandmother's voice in her nightmares lodges in my body; I feel myself bracing against a violence that I have trouble naming. Together these sensations meet in the ways my shoulders contract when I feel myself unseen in an orchestra rehearsal, when I sense myself pinned against a backdrop I disagree with (was I always wearing that chicken suit?); when I find myself grasping for legible words in a room full of confident white men; when the doctors tell me they can't find any reason for the daily migraines that are preventing me from going to classes and it really sounds like I don't have it so bad. My practiced response was a closing down, a deflection, laughter; throwing salon-style sharing parties and belittling my desires to play violin and be a nerdy critical thinker. Wrapped in this response was a complex of grief, shame, guilt, and anger. I pause and watch the nodding branches—have I ever noticed just how wild of a green spring green is, how shockingly bright it is?

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If grief is an opening, anger is also a grief, as Audre Lorde writes:

 

Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.  [39]

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Anger is the grief of finding places that you love that don't match up with the love you hold for them, that don't admit room for the reality of your reality.

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This honest, complex grief is an opening through which I can admit my own smallness without judgment, maybe even with love. It’s an opening through which I can look at myself lying in bed day after day, resisting the forces that pressed my experience into stillness, and I can also imagine resisting the defensive hardening that made me want to reject the linguistic carriers of my own intellectual and musical curiosity, the violin and the words and the urge to engage.

 

Admitting mistakes is hard and requires softness. Here, then, is an opening: let me try.

 

My grief has gotten tangled with my shame, and I’ve been afraid to untangle the ball in part because I’ve been afraid that the grief isn’t real, and in part because I’m a deeply social person and music is a deeply relational form of expression [40], and in the communities I found in the past seven years, I learned that the things I loved didn’t mean what I hoped to the people I felt closest to. As a result, since starting this degree, I’ve avoided the practices that were tangled both with my deepest joys and my deepest senses of alienation from myself. But this avoidance has inflated both the grief and the shame. Let me say it clearly: I love playing Bach. I get goosebumps and turn a little bit into sky when I listen to Sofia Gubaidulina. I just listened to the Chicago Symphony play Beethoven’s Ninth on my husband’s new speakers and felt like a child tasting snow. When I really feel the textures of the ball of yarn I’ve been holding, I recognize that the not-fit that I’ve noticed within my musical mother tongue, the cottony parts that make me feel like my voice isn’t mine—these are only conditionally related to the musical practices that form its core. It’s because of the collateral of context and presentation and hierarchies that were baked so thoroughly into my practice of musical selfhood that I couldn’t readily separate what I loved from what worked against that love. [41]

 

In the middle of my tangled hesitations, I want to call attention to the many, many performers and cultural activists who have kept moving in the midst of the complex realities in which they participate, and who lead me in the thoughtful and critical work of re-forming established performance cultures while in the messy beautiful thick of motion. [42] My personal work, the work that holds together this dissertation, consists of stitching back together the critical reflection to the action it both engenders and depends on: finding my way back into an integrated practice that reflects both my passion for movement and my values.

 

Embodied habits, practices, are so much more complex than a simple recognition of what can be kept and what can be let go, as I find every time I try to follow Pema Chodron’s advice to feel the feelings but drop the storyline. [43]. From years of musical practice, I have become familiar with the ways small daily acts of repetition become fully embodied identities. The ability to connect intention with action requires a constant practice of tiny acts of liberation from habitual tensions: of noticing, loving, and letting go.[44] So this is a trace of my bumpy and incomplete process both of letting go and also of learning how to reach toward change with curiosity. It's a prayer for my body’s capacity to metabolize change, entangled as I am fortunate to be in the support of communities that stretch far beyond what I can possibly hold.​​

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