The Clarity Of Dance Time
It's early in the morning here. Oak is sliding race cars across our dining room table, which is speckled with fuschia and white slime, green paint. Velvet chairs don years-old food stains and gorilla glue. Most of the boxes are unpacked. The desk in my studio (also my bedroom) is nearly where it should be. Art is not yet hung in the living room, because I’d like to paint it. But yesterday I hung a portrait of me beside my desk, painted by my friend Jenna Gribbon a few years ago. I used it as my author photo on the back of my first book, Woman Of Color. I also hung a framed pinboard that once belonged to R and O. It isn’t fancy. It does not have the clarity of care, of which my dear friend’s Erin’s homemade board does. However, by placing it on the wall behind my desk, a few inches away from my computer screen, I have announced the work I’m meant to be doing in this particular space, whether it be that same book, or an essay or two, or dreaming and designing a new space in some other time.
Pinned to the board: a photobooth strip of R and O. Then a photograph of a middle school friend and myself in our school hallway. My friend’s sister, J, and my sister (they were best friends) can be seen in the background. J, passed away in her early 20s many years ago during labor with her first child. Although I wasn’t as nearly close to her as my sister, as I’ve gone on to have two kids, and a healthy life myself, I think of her often. I think of the opacity of when, how, and why. I think of my penchant for capturing time, slowing it down, back then, with journals and disposable cameras developed at Walgreens.
My daughter is nearly the same age as I was in the photograph. After placing that curled photograph on the board, I grabbed a small polaroid photo my book editor took of my friend Katherine’s kids and my own in Berlin, perched upon a yellow railing at the park. Finally, a printed piece of paper with the title of my book, the second draft of which I handed in on Monday. The clarity of these timestamps—of these people. The clarity of the murkiness of indecision and at once, the resistance when you get there. I write to you so frequently about time that I fear that its impact escapes you.
Finding water in Saint Croix, 2017
Found water in Berlin, 2022
The weight of yesterday was wrapped in the birthdays of Audre Lorde and Toni Morrisson. It was Audre that brought me to Saint Croix in 2017. And to Berlin in 2022 with my children. It was, in large part, Toni, who brought The Mae House at the foot of the Hudson. Both of these women inspired millions of writers and artists during their tenure here on earth, and in the lives lived after theirs. In celebration, writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs invited us to party as Audre would have. Gumbs notes,
Lorde saved her sexiest poems for the end of poetry readings to segue into the erotic play of dancing all night. In her last year Audre even got out of her wheelchair to dance. Zami ends w/ a fantasy that moves from a dance floor to Afro-Caribbean-fruit-facilitated goddess sex…
So how do we dance with Audre today? I think we dance literally. We remember what movement is. We remember how to groove and feel each other across everything, despite everything, here "in the middle of life."
When we celebrate Toni, the invitation is the same: dance, keep dancing, write, and breathe. Love.
Here is her eulogy to James Baldwin.
You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. ''Our crown,'' you said, ''has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,'' you said, ''is wear it.''
And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.
Yesterday, when I was attempting to unpack my desk, I held different emotions in my chest. Part jubilation. Part commitment–a word I have had a hard time with as of late. Daring to set up this space, after so much uncertainty, felt brave. But then these efforts also felt small when thousands have perished at the hands of faulty infrastructure in Turkey and Syria. Setting up space in this time to write about what? To do what? To be what, exactly? It especially felt strange when I looked at the pinboard and traced the pins like a map, dissemenating where my heart has been, and the expanse of time and love.
In Al-Anon, we use the acronym PAUSE: Pause Action Until Serenity Enters. I think I am failing at serenity, but as my friend Karyn likes to say, serenity can be and then evaporate within seconds. But if you notice its presence in the moment, you’re not really failing at serenity. And so in the work of unpacking and resettling and writing and editing, I pause.
Although these Al-anon groups are 93% white, in them I have heard Toni’s and Audre’s voices as Black, feminists, and (in Lorde’s case) queer, individuals. Both bodies of work were rooted in liberation and sexualization. And I realized my own roots of liberation and feminine strength–which is to say: I danced, y’all. Music on. Papers skewed. If you’ve followed me on instagram, you’ve watched me dance many times over the years. Sometimes it’s just to pass the time. But recently, I am paying attention to the clarity I find, moving my body in the spirit of these literary heroes as I consider me then and now. Magical, marvelous, arithmetics of distance.
I am amazed at the long stretch of serenity in movement. It becomes vital to living, at least for me. And as I danced, tears arrived. Tears of release and exhaustion and pain, that transform into freedom and strength. This is what Audre and Toni wrote about. This is what we turn to when life–our own lives, the whole world–feels overwhelming.
With love,
L
Electric Slide Boogie, by Audre Lorde
New Year's Day 1:16 AM
and my body is weary beyond
time to withdraw and rest
ample room allowed me in everyone's head
but community calls
right over the threshold
drums beating through the walls
children playing their truck dramas
under the collapsible coatrack
in the narrow hallway outside my room
The TV lounge next door is wide open
it is midnight in Idaho
and the throb easy subtle spin
of the electric slide boogie
step-stepping
around the corner of the parlor
past the sweet clink
of dining room glasses
and the edged aroma of slightly overdone
dutch-apple pie
all laced together
with the rich dark laughter
of Gloria
and her higher-octave sisters
How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.
This one has me in tears this quiet morning while stella sleeps. Thank you