London
You can't always get what you want.
At least once a month, someone reminds me of the experiment I once did, and wrote about in my memoir. Then, I wanted to follow my wants. Every day I practiced sitting in a chair until I knew what I wanted. When that became clear, I tried to fulfill that want. I got up to make myself a sandwich. I went for long walks. I said no a lot. There were roadblocks, rejections. There was doubt and disappointment. I’m sure that there were denials and delusions. I became painfully aware that not every want can be satisfied, and when it is, it may not bring the desired emotion or condition. This went on for years.
Now I have a more precise instruction—In every moment do exactly what you feel or think to do, knowing there’s nobody doing anything. This practice comes from two nondual mentors1 whose notion eventually led me to a place of a real, trustworthy desire. I wanted to take a break from teaching and focus on healing from a complicated and sometimes disabling disorder. In the time away from my work, I redefined what I needed, and what my roles in life were. I discovered that what I was mostly looking for was love, and that my psychological self, a very fine but occasionally tormenting character, had a definition of what love was. This love was sometimes masked as appreciation, respect, politeness, adventure, understanding, surety, comfort, and so on. Had I been looking for love in all the wrong places? I learned that my conditions for love weren’t the same as full-on love—that kind of love when you trippingly realize that everything is in the hands of god (or source or consciousness, or as I call her, the vast wilderness.)
These wants seemed authentic, but they were often a kind of seeking for things to be different than what they were. I wanted something to get to something else. I wanted love so I could feel better about myself. I often wanted love less than I wanted to be right. I wanted love so I could feel beautiful. This malcontent scheme of looking for love to acquire another state made me think about what Byron Katie has said—"Skip the middleman and be happy from here!”
Built into American culture and its capitalistic design is an extractive pursuit of things and conditions. We want steady states of joy. We want others to be better. We want loved ones to see the world the same way that we do. The desire impulse is hard to resist, especially in relationship with kin and partners and friends. After a few years of playing with my wants and longings, I began to notice that love isn’t for anyone. Love, like consciousness, might be embedded in everything. My life had certainly become more oriented to freedom. What fell away then, and continues to fall away now, are all the things that society wanted me to have.
Acceptance didn’t really bring about this change. The practice of recognizing wants and where they led brought me to realizing (once again, lovable fool) that I can’t keep being a nice girl at the sacrifice to being true to myself. There were standard issue vehicles of intimacy—skills I used in the past for connection, like story-sharing, agreements-as-bonds, helping others when I didn’t want to—that collapsed like silly stand-ins for love. Being an elder and an artist meant learning to give myself permission to be in my imagination a lot of the time and if that read as self-centered, so be it. Living in this scrape of raw vulnerability could occasionally be threatening to other people. Open-heartedness can lead to a stripping away of identity, and a kind of empowering mind-fuck where what people think is none of our business.
Enter the journey to London.
All along I knew that I wanted to return to London, a city that captured my heart, as I wrote about in one of my previous posts. At first, I thought we could afford to spend over a week here, but then I started to look at ticket prices for theatre and art, and realized that five days would be the max. My intention was to explore exhibits, bookstores, and shows in a way that might inspire and restore me. My partner is always game to take in the eclectic art that I love, and if not, he wanders to the nearest pub for a pint, a pie, and a good read. After two months living in villages in Greece, Italy, and France, London would be the last city on the journey. We wanted to soak up all it had to offer.
We bought tickets for four theatre performances—two musicals and two new plays.2 We booked four restaurants where we wanted to try both new and favorite foods. I booked tickets for changing exhibitions every day, except for the day I spent walking to bookstores around Bloomsbury, and the day we spent marching with a million people to Free Palestine. After two months of making our own meals, hiking the seashore, and swimming in the sea, we felt ready to walk incessant cobblestones to see what we hadn’t living in a small town in Europe, as well as in the seven years we spent making home in the Canadian Rockies.
At the Tate Modern, I signed up to view three changing exhibitions, all with timed entries. The middle of the day we entered the middle exhibit, which included sculptural works, an early documentary film, a biographical exhibit, and “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” created by Yayoi Kusama. First, we went to The Universe as Seen from the Stairway to Heaven (2022). Then, Chandelier of Grief (2016/2018.) Then, Filled with the Brilliance of Life (2011/2017.) By the time I exited the last mirrored room, something had shifted.
You may want to avoid reading about my experience below if you haven’t been to one of her exhibits and want to preserve the uniqueness for yourself.
I had seen an image made of our eldest child in an infinity room, one that ended up on our Yule card, but I never really knew about Kusama’s life, career, and art. There are times that I can register the overwhelming popularity of a thing, but don’t get drawn into knowing it. Maybe I’d seen an image or two on social media over the years (I know, Kusama is the most Instagrammable artist ever, but I also think of my own psychological scotoma as a tradeoff for having a rigorous focus on my own work and where it leads.)
So, when I first peeked into the sculpture of a mirrored box, the shimmering expanse was a pure, unadulterated delight. I was aware of the surge of public visibility the artist had accrued, but I hadn’t read anything about her powerful work. I didn’t have ideas for how the art should be perceived. I didn’t know that Kusama experienced hallucinations, and that she had lived voluntarily for decades in a psychiatric hospital in Japan and went to work each day in a studio across the street. I hadn’t watched Kusama: Infinity on Netflix. I hadn’t looked at the images of her on the walls of the Tate, including the one where she appears like a shift of light, until Richard took my arm and led me there, Look.
This lack of information about the artist ended up being the luckiest because there were no preconceptions to get in the way of what was about to happen to my body when it entered Filled with the Brilliance of Life. Minutes before, at Chandelier of Grief, I’d had to negotiate with the staff to have the door open just a sliver to accommodate a claustrophobia that can follow me into novel, closed spaces. We were the two of us in a space inside the illusion of a boundless universe of rotating Swarovski crystal lights. We had four minutes. We roamed and played, took some images, sidled up to splits of ourselves, kissed just to see the peripheral splinters dance across forever. In half an hour, we were in line for the final installation.
I hadn’t read reviews or profiles about Kusama, so I didn’t experience what critics often called whimsical in her work. Instead, when I entered that space, the desire to live in my body beyond what I know as a character or narrator of life took off. The one who claimed to be the subject and center of existence filtered into, well, brilliance.
I didn’t ask my intellect to debate the “conditions of seeing” the artist might have queried, whether the number of “likes” discounted the perceptions possible, whether the artist should be concerned about a popularity which comes from the technology used to amplify the identity. Instead, I had a flash of anxiety as the door closed behind me, and I followed the four others ahead. I tried to remember what the instructions were about not falling into the ponds of water on either side of my body. I let go of allowing anyone to lead me. We stepped into the starlight panorama. I counted the times the lights changed colors because there would be exactly four of them before the scene turned to absolute black and we would have to hold still there in the dark, dark for interminable seconds. I crouched to the cool floor like a baby feeling my way along the vast wilderness of god that children live inside. I raised my camera to see differently, to see outside of the terror of becoming nothing. I pointed the iPhone at my face in the moment when the subject cascaded into a blithe light, and the stories of wanting disappeared, and then I laughed.
The laughing continued through a day, and then a night. I woke myself up laughing at the possibility of living in a world where everything was imagination. Though we want and want, nobody was doing anything. I would later read that Kusama calls her hallucinations “depersonalisations.” Later, when I had turned to narrating my story again, I told Richard that I was sure the art world had mobilized Kusama’s work into a selfie craze, but that what we had entered might instead be a self-eroding space. He nodded. He had been there too.
For more on the Kusama exhibits at the Tate, go here.
WRITING EVENTS
Here’s what I’m teaching soon. Please sign up early as the class space is limited.
Liberating Narratives with Sonya Lea
Four Wednesdays in May of 2024 over Zoom from 6-8PM PST (5/8, 5/15, 5/22, 5/29)
All classes will be recorded for any who can’t attend live.
This four-week online program creates a way to liberate our narratives through asking questions about our writing and the ways we experience our stories. We’ll give ourselves a relaxed space in which to bring awareness to our narratives. We will write beyond the ways we’ve told a story to ourselves and others.
This is a generative course to learn to blend our writing with philosophy, magic, timelessness, and other otherworldly practices of one’s imagination. For writers of a ‘personal’ narrative, inquiry into communal liberation can move a personal story beyond the self, situating it within a relational landscape. For fiction writers, this is the time to develop awarenesses of the philosophic backgrounds of your characters, and to explore the ancient or historic lines that inhabit your story. We will look at models of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction writing that embrace liberation through noticing neglected and abandoned stories, and an inquiry into the nature of identity and where the self might exist.
The word ‘liberation’ comes from the French liberacion, the act of freeing or of being freed, and from the Latin, līberātiō, the act of setting free, release, deliverance, acquittal, discharge, or release from debt. In this class, we will self-define liberation for our stories as well as discuss liberation as an act of reclamation and recovery, including freedom from restrictive socio-political and systemic conventions that would absent parts of our stories.
THIS IS FOR YOU IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO : Write a story or an essay; work on a newsletter, podcast, or reportage; reconfigure a piece of writing; write a novel or short story; write or think or be with others.
In four sessions we will create/re-create a narrative through four gateways. The form will focus on talks and generative writing that allow us places of entry and study to:
• Cultivate curiosity about our writing and life.
• Reclaim family and communal history through examining stories of political and social worlds, stories of class and power, stories of chosen and other-than-human family, stories outside of the binary, shadow stories and so on.
• Write the mystical stories and the mystery in our life/writing process.
• Explore the philosophy evident and hidden in our stories.
As is usual in my classes, you can choose your own assignment rather than follow the ones that I provide. No one is obligated to share, and we create a container for the writer to share in the most supportive way for their work. There will be a small optional reading assignment for each class. The class will open and conclude with a sound ritual featuring our writing.
Two-hour class meetings will be held over video chat, using Zoom. Optional material to read in preparation for the class. No one is required to share or receive comments. Max: 13 students.
MORE OF WHAT I’VE BEEN READING & THINKING ABOUT:
The terrible starvation catastrophe of Gaza.
Writers Isabella Hammad and Sally Rooney have a thoughtful conversation about Israel and Palestine.
Huberman Labs can be a bit of a testosterone fest, but this podcast with Rick Rubin about his protocols for creativity made me curious about coping as a sensitive human in a harsh world. There are no hacks, good listening from both men, and a masterful sense of living to facilitate art.
You can find Sonya at~
The podcast I did with my kid.
Roger Castillo, course on Critical Thinking, and Lisa Cairns, mentor and friend.
The performances were Cabaret because Richard hadn’t seen it yet; a kind of meh Hamnet in the West End; a new work at the innovative Park Theatre in diverse Finsbury Park; and a radical reworking of Sunset Boulevard with the incomparable Nicole Scherzinger, an experience I hope to write about here.
Lots to digest here. Thanks, Sonya!
Exquisite and exactly something I needed to read today. Thank you.