49. public feeling
in defense of crying at events
*If you’re in St.Louis, we’re gonna gather in Tower Grove Park Sunday for a birthday celebration for Noah’s birthday! Let me know if you want to come and I can send you the deets!*
Yesterday was Noah’s 37th birthday. His mom posted about it and said, “Noah would be 37, in his prime”, which is a speculation that I totally agree with. Envisioning Noah if he hadn’t gotten sick again when he did, he would be in his prime. He’d have a banging illustrator career, having finished his MFA at SVA, illustrated a USPS women’s soccer stamp, and starting his professor career. I’m pretty certain we’d have a kid, too, especially if COVID hadn’t happened. I think we could have had a kid that is around the same age as my oldest nephew.
I’ve been forced to envision futures that are not really what I’m wanting to envision. Having my own apartment. Finding a job in a new city. Making friends with new people who don’t know Noah at all. I didn’t think I was the type of person who daydreams about the future, like a kid who knows what kind of wedding dress they’d wear or the type of house they’d live in, but when the path I thought I’d follow got cut off so thoroughly, I am realizing that I had been envisioning. A lot.
I haven’t posted here in a long time, and it might be because: 1. I was in a depression pit around Noah’s death anniversary (July 31st) this year 2. As a way to get out of said depression established care with a primary care doctor and got referrals for therapists, and started seeing a new therapist! 3. Chicago, where I live and work, have been inundated with militarized oppressive terror, and 4. I got my own apartment and have decision paralysis about buying all of these items that I need to sleep, cook, and live functionally in my own space, which I haven’t had since spring of 2020, right before COVID. Have you ever written down all the things that’s making it difficult for you to come up for air? I think it makes me feel like a little more at peace at how furiously I’m paddling underwater while trying to look like a functioning duck above water.
It seems as though every session I have with my therapist ends with us bemoaning the emotional burden we all carry because we live in a society where capitalist work is prioritized over emotional expression and collective support. I think generally I’m disgruntled at how our world is right now, and I refuse to be part of it in some ways. Which is a very Hitomi path to take, in that as a kid, if I liked my teacher, I’d work extra hard and be happy to problem solve and have a good attitude. If I didn’t like my teacher, I’d make everything harder than it is, and my work was shit. Basically if “can’t tell me nothing” was a person. So of course I’d be stubborn and unable to pivot now that the best situation I had in my life (being with Noah) has been taken away, I can’t envision something good, because what would be better than what we had made?
My current roomies who are extremely thoughtful invited me to not one but TWO author talks in one week, and it was very nourishing and encouraging, especially for my stunted envisioning abilities. The first one was Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about her new book Theory of Water. The thing that I loved was her explanation of one of the power of artists, musicians, and children was that they are able to envision a different future than what we can see right now. And imagination is needed to get out of problems we’re stuck in. At some point during the talk, she said, “World making is struggle.” We can envision all we want, but getting there, it’s going to take lots and lots of work, and it will probably take a long time. She also looked to the professor (Dr. Uahikea Maile, who is Kanaka Maoli from Hawaii) she was having the conversation with and said something like, isn’t it amazing that the two of us are having this conversation right now, after all that’s happened to our ancestors in the last 400 years? And to think about what we want to pass down, teach, and preserve.
The second one was Ross Gay, who is one of my all time recommended authors for everyone (I mean everyone). I was so excited, and Terese had never read Ross Gay, so I was blabbering on about how he’s gonna make you laugh and cry and he’s got such a wide emotional range, especially for a man, and he’s into gardens and basketball and babies, all the good things. That he finds delights but also can talk grief in a super powerful way. And he delivered, all that and more! It was so awesome, like seeing Messi in person. He had a series of “plays” about a dog (his dog) and the owner (him) that were so goofy and silly, he was cracking himself up. He also read some poems that made me start crying instantly, thank goodness Rachel had tissues in her bag. My favorite thing he said was that the dearth of public feeling is fucking us up as a society. He said that we don’t all need to be feeling the same way, but to be feeling emotions with other people is so important. He also said that he wants to undistinguish the individual and acknowledge the collective, as a philosophy around his teaching. He also said teaching is how to notice things, which is straight up a Noah MacMillan proverb.
I’ve spent a large portion of some concerts in the last few months crying, the type where tears are just rolling and rolling down and my voice is cracking as I sing along. At the TV on the Radio show a concerned looking younger woman offered her spot so I could see the stage better. I got to see Mannequin Pussy, a band that makes music that I can directly channel my rage through, and it was magical to hear all of these ladies chant-singing “Loud, bark, deep, bite” and screaming against fascism. It must be said that my work day involves public feeling in a contained space–we’re not quite public, because we know each other so well (some of the kids have known each other, basically 80% of their lives) and expressive emotion is the default at this age–but either way, I’m exposed to feelings. If you’re in a touring band, your job is to elicit public feeling with your art and energy. Not everyone’s day is suffuse with public feeling, weirdly. (See what I mean, I avoid things I don’t want to do, like getting a desk job.) But the two talks were good to remind myself that there is something meaningful about what I’m doing, even if I feel 100% lost. The other day, one of the dads stopped in the middle of our chat recounting his kid’s day and thanked me and my co-teacher for working so hard to come up with interesting activities for the kids, changing their diapers, that it’s really hard work. It felt like such genuine gratitude, I think I even pulled out the “Thank you for saying so.” Little does he know that I’m learning so much from the kiddos, how we can keep working on this world when it feels so slow moving, or even backwards moving, if we can have their vast imagination and the determination that only babies learning to walk have.
For the equinox, I baked this carrot orange olive oil cake that was a big hit with my co-workers, and it reminds me of Noah, a big carrot cake guy. I also said that witchcraft must be perpetuated during astronomical events, and baking is kind of a witchcraft. I’m grateful for people who realized you can raise some batter and it be sweet and that will bring lots of people joy.
Let me know if you want a postcard/address change announcement from me, I’ll send one if you send me your address.
Happy birthday Noah, miss you desperately.
Love, Hitomi
And a Ross Gay poem to close:
To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian
Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the tree they
flutter in the air and
she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the step-ladder against
the wall to
mean more but
I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what remained of her
teeth and soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
and I am tall and so
good for these things
and a bald man even
told me so
when I grabbed three
or four for
him reaching into the
giddy throngs of
yellow-jackets sugar
stoned which he only
pointed to smiling and
rubbing his stomach
I mean he was really rubbing his stomach
like there was a baby
in there
it was hot his
head shone while he
offered recipes to the
group using words which
I couldn’t understand and besides
I was a little
tipsy on the dance
of the velvety heart rolling
in my mouth
pulling me down and
down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country
by swimming through the night
and maybe
never said more than
five words to me
at once but gave me
figs and a man on his way
to work hops twice
to reach at last his
fig which he smiles at and calls
baby, c’mere baby,
he says and blows a kiss
to the tree which everyone knows
cannot grow this far north
being Mediterranean
and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
of Jordan and Sicily
but no one told the fig tree
or the immigrants
there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty
forearm into someone else’s
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own
people
this is true
we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.
Something about your writing helps me accept my own sadness. And accept the unbelievable reality that it's not getting easier. This life is hard and your voice is so beautiful.
Loving you and your words from right over here