The bend of arm has never been like this, nor her face. Not your hands holding infinity in the palm, not these language letters making some kind of connected sense in their own kind of never before. Never particular burdens and wishes and desires held in brain or coming from elsewhere. Not you, not me, not us, not them, not any of it ever again, or since.
"with all due respect"
in INFLUENCERS
“With all due respect to those I’ve caused so much pain, if I were given a second chance I would do it all again.” From “Delighted” by @benjaminclementine
Ashley Thalman on Tent Talks Podcast
in APPEARANCES
do you miss it? of course I miss it.
in INFLUENCERS
Thoughts on exile and the things we outgrew by Alex Caldiero. Clipped edit from, “The Sonosopher” by Torben Bernhard and Travis Low. Watch it on YouTube if it resonates.
A poets answer to “Do you miss the fellowship of Mormonism?” Any past things outgrown or excommunicated from by choice or force can take the place of the specifics here and the pain of your loss is justified.
fossora- shadow worker
Everything vital of you works in absence of light; the electric animation, the central pump, all digestive parts ARE the darkness in you. We carry and are carried by darkness.
We flip the coin (incarnation within incarnation) to see the warm opening at the center of cold recoil, the predator in all your good deeds, the exile in your belonging. Claim it all, gather it in reconciliation, reason and madness as one, our dark giving shape to the light.
Footage created with body in 2016
predator
I dreamed it
sunlight bright
as lady hawk plucked
the wet winged hatchling
from mother-made nest.
I drank it
red hot and jaw clenching
in its timeless loop
of awful devouring
while there I too,
devoured.
I lay
as they cut the bulbous middle
(intestines set aside)
pulling soft screaming life from me
(hardening breasts by the minute)
to make a meal of me.
I bleed
a bucket tick tock, a clock
to cry myself dry
a crimson ridding
an inside, made out.
I tear
the skin flesh
of apple
of trout
and steal the calf’s milk for my cheese.
lidia's thrust
“Thrust”
Lidia Miles drowned the pages in a tidal wave of body, art, animal, element, futurepast, sex, friendship, and time, my my my my, my. 🌊
death
Death is the beginning, the cost, and the portal of rebirth 💀 📷 @themythopoetic
8/30 in the face of fuck
in EATING ASH
I’m v into flash at night in the garden right now. I’d like to invite everyone out in the garden to see- that’s part of my nature. I like to hold microphones up to the thrills and pains in life.
I am so lucky! I know and meet the most interesting people, I feel loved by them, I feel safe to share.
What a thing to feel!
What fortune!
In these most recent years I’ve become a kind of a devotee to “how it feels”, more than “how it looks” or “what I should do”. When I engage should and look, I find it useful to notice which aspects of me are in the drivers seat and where it takes me.
Some of my experience in this process has been unorthodox and strange and I’ve been very worried at times I would hurt people by not being what I thought I was, or what I wanted you to think I was. It’s embarrassing to be a person! So cringy to change! Heavy is the head that crowns itself in hyper-vigilance.
When I look through a technical (stay safe) or pathological (you’re not good enough, yet) lens I am not aware of this other “feel” thing. Feel is a different vibe, so now I am practicing feeling, which is goodhard.
A few weeks ago I was processing a core memory of being hit as a child and you know what I remember most? I most remember feeling in absolute awe that after the first punch you don’t feel it anymore.
What skill!
What a perfect mechanism!
And I was right. On one side of the coin our nervous system does something protective and evolved, but this dissociative state of not-feeling as a way of life got real deep on lack and deep on numb as it worked its programming for the last 40 years.
Learning to paint has taught me that I’ve done technique (stay safe) long enough to be burned out so now I am raising the energy of expression (I am safe, I feel safe). Sometimes “feel” is good looking and smooth but often it ain’t. But then again what the fuck is “good”?
The things about us, the ways we are and were brave in what @lidiamiles calls, “the face of fuck” may be called wounds, but wounds can also be voids, voids can be filled with whatever we put there to be amplified and materialized as our lens and life.
gifts of cringe
in EATING ASH
I spent 38+ years performing and playing out hierarchical roles. I created them inside myself and outside myself.
I internalized capitalism and binary thinking so deeply that when I saw it, it knocked me into the ashes. For many moons the idea of being perceived, sharing, reaching out to people, making photos, being part of anything, having friends, replying to texts, looking people in the eye or being looked at brought me physical and psychological pain.
I learned fast that I had to take my time eating the ashes. When I forced it I got physically sick and it took days to recover. So I called myself an introvert. I was embarrassed to be alive, to be flawed or to be anything at all. I yearned for death. I forced 1500 of my followers to unfollow me, I left groups, I buried a business.
I ate the ash, went to the river, to the kitchen, to books and bonfires and to the study of my own dreams. I made a private college of me, of what felt renewing where I studied and continue to entertain only what I feel “is” and can not be earned or easily subdivided into isms.
This unlearn-learning has been embarrassing and hardperfect. I am more genuine to myself in it, more made of magic and contradiction, a crone’s mess, a loss of gains, a non dualistic undulation. I’m not arrived at something I just am.
This so-called shadow work isn’t over either! It fucking happens when it does and like my period each month I’m like, “LOOK AT ALL THIS BLOOD! I FORGOT THIS HAPPENS!”
Like the season cycle itself, the expansive experience has a quality of feeling singular, no matter how acquainted I am with it it feels like the first time. It sheds and illuminates and brings me deeper to me, and to what’s on the other side of these embarrassing, miraculous gifts of cringe.
Hallelujah! 🌻
william blake on staying awake
“Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep”
– William Blake
the arrow goes where it will go
I’ve had some pretty cool experiences in my life but this one really stands out.
A group of close friends hired me, met me out at the Salt Flats and when we got there do you know what the Salt Flats looked like? Flooded. Water everywhere. One of our cars got stuck, we had to get towed. We pivoted together, making something out of the unexpected- beyond original vision.
I hold the ideas that initiate a creative work very lightly. Creative results aren’t beholden to the initiations that bring them into life, anymore than we live genuinely when beholden to what our parents think we should be.
We
steady the bow
and the arrow goes
where it will go.
And that’s good enough.
what weidermann saw
As above
so below.
Image- 1925, Magnus Weidermann
stein, god, there there
God, in the form of Gertrude Stein, said “There is no there there.” What a liberating and grief laden burden joy to be a human on earth and what wonderful wonders to frankly forgive “there” and “someday” or “then” and “nostalgia” and see now, now, and now as the only, only, and only.
to maintain it
To be the good guy is to create a bad guy
to rescue is to create a victim.
To wallow in the shame of what was not known then, is to not know what is known now.
As Ursula says, “to oppose something is to maintain it”.
Alex Caldiero, Winter 2020
GENEALOGIES of BECOMING
My friend Alex is getting old. A slow grey spreads as he slides down the banister of being. Defiant and knowing, he defines his work for the sake of art and, though weary, it feeds him.
He once told me that he does what he does, in the singular way he does it, "as a bird flies and sings". His assurance of self helped me see myself as a bird of my own making, meant to do as I do, meant to become what I am. For like him I live a legacy of self and I, "I am not a metaphor."
COLLABORATION // A Brief Waltz in a Little Room: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer
in THEATER, COLLABORATION
My continued partnership with Sackerson is a source of deep pride and pleasure. From the actors and artists to the organizers and minds behind each production, I am urged to go deeper and tell evermore true and important stories, more honestly.
Sackerson's upcoming immersive show "A Brief Walt: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer" has just been announced today and tickets are available beginning August 23rd. A Brief Waltz is a thought-provoking and intimate experience with heart, story, and feeling pulsing at the heart-center of this worthy cultural story written by the brilliant Morag Shepherd Alex Ungerman Shawn Francis Saunders and Matthew Ivan Bennett.
Images and art direction by Ashley Thalman Photography
Painted Backdrop by Matthew Peterson
Actor/Character with Robert Scott Smith
Studio Ultraviolet Studios
Song of the Week // Into the Mystic by Van Morrison
Song of the Week // Everybody's Coming to My House by David Byrne with the Detroit School of Arts
Watch this:
Now watch this:
Song of the Week // Human by Molly Sarlé
This has been on repeat. The video is delicious.
“Well, who hasn't talked to God like he's a man?
I do it all the time on accident
Sometimes I talk to you that way and I'm sorry baby
'Cause it's me
I leave you with my image and if I ask you to understand”
Check out Molly Sarlé HERE and in a fabulous Vanity Fair article HERE