You go.
No, go ahead.
No, you go.
Go ahead, Ronaldo.
You were sharing.
You go.
Go.
Oh, I just--
[LAUGHING]
No, I mean, it's a translation from your question
of translation, right?
I mean, for me, because I played competitive tennis
and I started playing tennis at four.
And I think I also have had very open shoulders,
so I can hit inside out serve.
At a very early age, I could do these things,
so I'm really interested in sort of grip.
And so it translates into all these activities like swimming,
or the stroke in swimming, the tennis stroke.
You know, it's all this kind of thing,
that this thing can always turn out.
My body can rotate in a particular way,
or I can hit this serve and move in this way.
And so-- I mean, writing is that translation
or in dance and also addresses what level are you moving out?
Are you moving forward?
Is my weight into the ball?
Is my weight into the shot of the line?
Am I going to leap?
And I'm sort of interested in those activities in writing.
But also, I'm really attentive to the kinds of conver--
my father's a golf person.
And because I practiced yoga for so long, when
I took golf lessons just really quickly, I was able to--
they're called the sort of smaller motors--
the micro motor skills.
I don't know.
I'm good at that thing, and I love thinking about
those, managing them, and what's going
to happen if I move a particular way, if my leg bends
into this way.
I just love that, and I like thinking about the language
to it.
So it's always this translation for me,
and it's always pointing back to a kind of,
to language at the same time, and marking it at the same time
as the body's moving.
Agreed.
I should have gone first.
I should have gone.
I know.
I love your body.
Thank you.
And he assists me with my body at times.
Yeah, this is a difficult question
because my first answer is kind of like I don't know.
And then I started thinking, well, it feels like it begins--
and I would not say just writing--
It's more like composition or kind of creative impulse
is in the cell.
And it feels like it's in the spaces between the structures.
It's in the subatomic, right?
So we're mostly ghostly, so it's in those spaces,
and in the spaces between the particles.
And it feels like, and some kind of way, it's in the skin
because it's so systemic.
And I was thinking about what you were saying before we
started, Douglas, about being--
it's almost to me, I translate it
as saying like, I kind of cohere in front of an audience, right?
And so that's a way for me to kind of understand
how the composition of at once, kind of things that I present
as writing, or songs, or whatever they're called,
performances, and then the performance of myself,
right, cohering kind of in these spaces,
kind of becoming these concrete somethings, seemingly solid.
And then I think--
though, particularly with my writing--
there's a kind of not writing that happens.
And that I feel like I can locate
with the tensions in my body.
So the not writing happens kind of more in the pelvis
and in the gut.
It happens to me in the lungs.
I hold my breath often.
I'm often not breathing, and it's really
a problematic thing.
When you realize, they're like, oh, you
don't get to, relax, your meditation,
breathe into, the science of breath,
and I'm finding out that I'm walking around--
in part, I think, because of trauma--
and I'm just not breathing at all,
and then also resistance in the throat, too.
Huh, that's pretty great stuff, right?
And I just want to say what's coming clear to me in this way,
that sometimes when I teach, I wonder
why we all are so particular.
I mean, it's obvious because of our experiences,
but it always feels like the different writings
that people come to comes out of something deeper.
And the variety of those answers is so satisfying to me,
to be like well, right, it's out of the body, of course.
So here's another question which I
don't know if you'll want to just look at it as I, so
that you can think about.
My next question, my next hard question is, where in the body
do you keep any failures or empty moments?
When you go blank, you could have had a chance to be a star.
Or you got that thing published and it was still not right.
Where do you keep that?
Do you keep that in the body?
Do you keep that in the brain?
Do you have a room for it?
Do you, does it burn?
Anything in response to that?
What was the question?
Because I didn't get the questions..
Where, where in the-- oh, here, here.
Here's another one.
Do you need another one?
I got mine.
OK, so where in the body-- it's the fourth one
down-- where in the body do you keep
any failures or empty moments?
Right at the base of my throat, failure
is everything I taste when I swallow.
Failure is everything that happens when I exhale.
In some ways, failure, and it's why sometimes I'm
prone to insomnia, So it's the quiet and the breathing that
makes me remember all of the failures,
to the point where I've tried to make failure
a kind of an aesthetic goal because otherwise it's
just kind of a miserable thing.
But, yeah, I mean, damn, I had to eat.
You know, I mean, that kind of thing.
I did not have enough will to not eat.
So that's a failure, you know, and having
to let go of the breath that I've been holding,
that becomes a kind of a failure.
So for me, it's kind of like, I guess,
you call that your craw, or something like that,
in your craw, so failure's in my craw.
So when stuff gets really bad, and I'm really
in a pit of a kind of failure, it's
unfortunate that it oftentimes happens at night
because the one time I can't just kind of gah.
But you know, it's great to be-- it's California car
culture is awesome for failure in your throat
because you just wind up your windows, and go ah,
and everybody thinks your just like singing along
to like a Queens of the Stone Age song or something.
Who would like it?
Anybody else?
Failure's so fun to talk about.
I'll just hand this to you and look at this whole runway.
No, I just--
No, no.
Um, I thought a lot about shame.
Danielle was talking about shame and this desire
for shamelessness, but I have a different definition
of shame, which I got, which I didn't make up.
But I got from Eve Sedgwick which
is shame is the emotion that makes identity form.
It's the experience of rejection from some social relationship.
And she talks about that as a very early emotion
for an infant experiencing shame when their mother
or caregiver turns away from them, so the sense of like ugh.
And that rather than seeing that only as
like a negative thing or we have to like reject shame,
we take it as a way of claiming an I am, right?
So like if I am not you and you didn't
allow me to be part of you, then I'll just
find a way to be me then separate from you.
And then that creates a possibility
for a different kind of relation between I and you,
but based on a kind of groundedness of the I. So I
think that she like--
I experienced failure as a kind of shame
like not just as a rejection, like oh, they didn't want me,
but rather like I didn't want me or something like I'm
ashamed that I wasn't able to make
that connection with somebody.
That's what failure is.
And so try to feel that as a possibility to create
like to rise into a boundary, and then
like try again to make that social,
make that social bridge.
So where in the body is that?
I'm not quite sure.
I think it's in the face.
I think it's like a blegh, downward in the face,
and like in the down in the chest,
and then you have to build it back up.
Thinking again about writing out of a kind of fragmented state
or a fragmented body-- somebody used the word cohere--
I thought dissociation, dissembling.
And so when I think about the kind of connection
between language in the body, success or failure,
and the body, it's kind of always multiple.
And so it's kind of always failure too,
not as a sought aesthetic, but kind of as the only possibility
for me.
I think the things that are rising to the surface
as things that want to be said over and over
and over again are the same things.
And so if I were able to say them in some ways,
I wouldn't be attempting to write them.
I'm curious about the empty moment
and what that means because I actively attempt
to be as empty as possible.
And you know, I'm really not concerned
or I think about every day just like sweating a lot,
there's no toxins, moving, just actively trying to push any--
I mean, not necessarily failure, but as I also
have had a pretty tough couple of years,
and I'm sort of used to how do you just begin to move
and your pace is slower, but to accept
that that movement is still--
but I don't know if that's, I'm not certain how
to market in terms of writing.
But just as a kind of survival mode,
it's just actively not wanting to have any--
because I think it's cancerous to kind of hold on
to that kind of thing.
So I just try to figure out-- so I just sweat.
I go to Bikram Yoga every day, most days,
and just really try to push, and push, and push.
So that's, I don't know, I relate
to that, the empty moment.
Maria, you want to talk?
No.
I like this idea of a cell, of holding
what I bring into the world, as well
as what I need in the world, and what I want to aspire
to be in the world, that are--
we're called, we're said to be hardwired in our DNA,
and so like we're kind of limited in what's
possible in our lives.
But if I enter my cell, and those subatomic waves,
or subcellular possibilities of what I hold,
it's in the spaces between the cell and the cell environment,
the membrane, and so that whatever enters or exits
my cell, there's a decision made in that membrane,
in that boundary.
In the bound of what I have, I hold this experience
and what I'm encountering as my new moment.
And that transitions aren't so much
the passing from one thing to another,
but there's something in themselves
that if I can widen that space of transition,
it's actually something that is a place to be
in, rather than just a bridge.
And it really differentiates for me
between the idea of what is failure
and what is an empty moment because a failure,
I'll hold myself in that membrane, that it is the thing.
But if I open up to the empty moment, that it's inside of,
there's a lot of choice.
And then I'm not controlled by what
I think I'm doing in relationship
to my past or my future, but there's
a lot-- it's bringing me to a struggle that's
creating more of me.
There's a whole genre in performance about failure.
Certain theater companies like Elevator Repair Service,
there's a company that's based in Brussels, whose name I can't
remember right now, but they inject into the performance
this failure.
So they're actually working with it
to cohere something in the live moment.
So rather than we're trying to avoid it,
we're actually working with it.
So I think it's really in, again, the emptiness of,
there's a lot more going on in the spaces
between than just trying to get somewhere.
I think that that's a complex question.
Grief typically would be in the heart.
Anger-- I do vent--
my spleen, feel it in my side, my liver.
That's my personal sense.
But I think I died a few years ago or several years ago,
and I'm not sure where and what my body is.
And I would say I hold those things in tears, and then
in the clouds, and push them up, up, up, out, and beyond.
My cats probably take most of it, rubbing.
[INAUDIBLE] they think they know when
I had an accident some years ago,
and I was caught in the doors of a train.
And as soon as I came back to New York
from this incident in Paris, my cat
started sleeping around my head and my neck, just all over it.
Whatever, wherever that stuff is they come and get it--
So great.
--in a strange way.
but also, I think that I love mistakes in the same way.
So like last night after the performance,
I'm always frustrated that I spend--
most of the performance is spent before the performance.
And the real performance is stressing about--
(SINGING) --what am I going to do for you?
No, what am I going to make of this option to create something
in the moment and to take from the space, and the place,
and the people that I meet, and give it back.
And so the writing comes out of the failures or the successes
of that incident on this stage.
So yesterday, as soon as I finished, I was like,
damn, I didn't read the poem that would have been--
is a poem that was done some years ago, but it applied.
And it would have been my ground,
but I was caught up in the drone, and the sound,
and Cecilia, and this energy that was
on the east side of the stage.
So when I sat down, it was like, immediately,
I just went like, oh.
But as soon as that they do like, oh shoot,
I'm like five months ahead or a year ahead to the next one
because turning it into another possibility.
So I pump it out.
You give it to the cats.
You give it to the clouds.