Infinities

[the photo above is today's addition to my 100 days of illustrated journal entries. It is a black and white line-drawing self portrait of me with my hands kind of opening around a grey circle in front of my chest. There is swirling yellow/orange/red watercolor bleeding out of the ball and across the page. There is also a very faint purple-blue outline around my body. Higher quality versions of these (with full transcripts of the writing) will be available when I have scanner access].

I finally changed the title for this little corner of the internet! “In the Moment” has been a kind of placeholder name since a few weeks into this project, when I realized that it's super overused in relation to improv, to the point that it's become more of a buzz-phrase than anything else. And it doesn't quite get at what I personally find most meaningful and bewildering about improvisation, which is the way it can unsettle our understandings of “self” such that we discover unfamiliar worlds in us; the way it can momentarily reveal both our unimaginable vulnerability (if we can't fully know ourselves, what can we know?) and our absolute INFINITY (if we can't fully know ourselves, the possibilities of what we might contain and become are boundless).

I've been thinking about why engaging creativity is such a process of overcoming fear. Often we're afraid to be creative because we worry we will go through the painful risk of cracking open our hearts and opening ourselves up to find … nothing. We fear we are empty. But I wonder if our fear of emptiness is actually a numbing cloud-cover to our fear of infinity. If we move to accept our infinity, we have to accept that we will encounter places in us that we don't know, don't like, or can't explain – places in us where the ground is not solid, where we lose what we thought we were. We lose our self. That is utterly terrifying; perhaps its own kind of emptiness.

There are so many aspects of life which naturally cause us to lose or loosen what we had thought of as our “self”: perhaps entering a new community, falling in love, moving homes, becoming disabled, raising a child, losing a loved one, making a big mistake or experiencing an unprecedented joy... these moments rewrite us, rewire us. And even on a more micro-level, this happens in everyday moments: in each time we get lost in a story, each time we experience empathy, each time something breaks our expectations. We give ourselves over to these experiences, we let the hard edges of how we had defined ourselves and the world soften, and when we do that, our infinities seep out: watercolor brilliance on tissue-paper-bodies.

I think our infinity is also our humanity. Sometimes (often) we don't feel our infinity. Perhaps it would be too intense to feel fully all the time. Maybe it's too big for our fragile bodies to hold. On the rare occasion that I can feel even a fraction of my infinities, it feels like I'm too big for myself, uncontainable – as though I am going to explode out of my body at any given moment. It's bewildering, terrifying, and magnificent.

What happens when we start making space for the unknowable parts of ourselves, for the enormity inside us, and move to accept our own infinities – including the bits we can't rationalize or understand? Does it break something down, break something open? Can it help us recognize the infinities in others?

Recently I had the privilege of attending Arika's Episode 7 here in Glasgow: “We Can't Live Without Our Lives” – a 5-day exploration of care and empathy. One of the speakers, literary critic and Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers, said something that has been resonating in me ever since. This is a paraphrase because I was feverishly taking notes:

“Recognizing the multiplicity of selves that converge on a name is probably the most difficult thing we have to learn. […] Dominant populations are living in a state of oblivion […] a reduction of the multiplicity […]. As people trying to live as thoughtfully and creatively as we can, it is our job to sound the alarm […]. There are transgenerational ghosts haunting us, troubling our sleep, keeping us up at night. We have to be mindful of that. The arrogance of certainty, singularity, individuality is dangerous.”

-- Hortense Spillers

Each of us is infinite, and infinitely unknowable. When we recognize that we give up the comforting confines of this illusion that we know and understand what we are, and we arrive in a place of boundless uncertainty, total vulnerability. And I can see why that feels scary and dangerous. But perhaps it's more dangerous not to.

The world is so full of chaos and pain and desperate need for justice and change that I can't even wrap my head around it all. I'm honestly not even sure where to start. So I'll do the only thing I know how to do which is start where I am. In this moment, today, I'm starting with infinity.