I am currently in a PhD program, exploring how language creates geographic and geologic space. How this can happen in shared conversation, with shared sound and vibration, with beings of all sorts, not just humans. This involves non-standard realities and ways of understanding how one can research the unseen and the known. I shy away from saying ‘believed’ because, well why? To know is to know, to believe is to be doubted.

Early when I started — last fall — a friend recommended I read Orsi, on presence. Orsi is a religious scholar. This lead me to Pasulka and Woodbine, others in the religious scholar realm who write about belief in the unseen, or unagreed upon. One thing said friend, Stephen Prothero, recommended upon suggesting these readings, is that I have an opinion, rather than write as though I am objective. Woodbine goes all in on this, and it is interesting to read a scholar who does indeed believe that the woman he is writing about experiences Jesus in her trance states, and is willing to say so. Presence, in Orsi, has to do in the simplest with the body of christ being in the wafer, being the wafer, not simply a figure of speech, and the ways in which saints are in their statues. Pasulka studies those who believe in UFOs, and while she has many an interesting experience, she does not say what she believes. There are other UFO specialists I have read, scholars, such as Vallée, and Kripal, who say that there is a real phenomenon but cannot say if it is a UFO. They do not deny that things occur, they are wise enough to not attempt to explain them in a language that may not be adequate to hold them, or our minds, which are not fully capable of a perception we can translate into words.

As I began, in the construct of the PhD, to explore how we can travel to other places and build worlds through trance state, in trance state, I returned to the many lineages of thought in the history of humans as to how this happens. This is not the correct phrasing. There are many ways to go about this, and a rich history of those who have, who does it, in what position in community, in different forms, tools, modes and so on. As I have worked to understand this breadth of knowledge, I am also learning to use a specific set of these tools myself, to see how I can use language and sound to create, and how it is, perhaps, specific to the place I am sitting at an exact moment, versus a general sense of earth-ness, separate from the here and now.

Many paths seems to have brought me here, decades of yoga asana, a long term sound meditation practice with a northern Shaivist, a love of language, and of nature and the spaces of expansion one finds when alone for extended periods of time. When deep in long meditation practice at two different times in my life, I pulled back because I wanted to go to so deep. Into the cave, into the desert, into the forest, into the interiority that expands to all ends of consciousness, and perhaps beyond. As a child, I used to travel, as I called it. Walk worlds, at night, under the guidance of an older man, who explained the ways to do it, to be safe, and how to make sure I could return. What to make of such things? In my monotheistic science-based upbringing, one could be sure I did not mention this. Yet I have extraordinary and visceral memories of things that would not be considered possible, of ways of moving and flying, of weaving worlds through song.

Yesterday I had a question and I went off to ask it to the netherworld. One aspect of this is why I am writing today, as I sit here this morning in the quiet of my London flat, far from earth and sea, and listening to a podcast (The Emerald) about the long, long history of human trance states, so lost in the past few hundred years, by most humans, for reasons I won’t expound on, but you could go listen to Josh, he is enjoyable. Yesterday, I sat on the narrow bottom bunk in a cabin on a lake in a place that looked tundra like in its flatness and vegetation. The bunk had a beautiful had sewn quilt in dark rich colours. Across from me, on a rickety wooden chair, sat the person I was speaking to, though we were not using words, but rather thoughts. In answer to my questions, she nodded to the east wall, which was now glowing yellow and had a brighter light in a center slit, which I understood was a portal I was to pass through. And so I did.

I found myself on a sea, enormous, expansive, the pale blue grey of the far north, the clouds reflective, and on edges, reflective trees, but no visible trees they were reflecting from. I looked in all directions and the water, flat and calm, continued across the space. I looked down, having a moment of wondering if I were standing on a secret plexiglass box under the water, faking the ability to walk on water, only to realize that I was slighting above the water, standing on it with a gap between me and it, almost as though I was a maglev water walker. I leaned down, tilted forward as a shape, rather than bent as a human, and put my hand in the water. It was cool, cold, even, exquisite. I stood there for a bit, looking in all directions, and feeling ease and calm.

I have spent enough time on ferries, in the northern seas, long nights of dark with wind and diesel hum, that I can drop into the bliss state that these inspire very quickly. Whatever it is that I seek in those places, standing here on this sea, I realize that this, this sea, the ferries, the ways I travel, these are all liminal states of such beauty and easy, that I feel home when I am there, I lose the grasping sense of being choked, when only in the 3d/real world. I don’t want to loiter though, as there is more to ask, and I dip my head in the sea, then am back on the bunk, continuing.

It feels strange, at times, to have all this practice in my body, in memory packets, in the way that clouds can form over the river that runs inside me, at a diagonal from my left shoulder to my right hip. On a good day, I can look to the pale blues and the darker ones of depth and see upon its still surface the reflection of light and clouds, and now that I hold this within me, and that should I wish, I could dive below the surface and explore other worlds.

It feels strange, at times, to try to explain these things in an academic manner, to think about how the academy wants western knowledge as its sources, not embodied felt knowledge or ancestral knowledge or the gods or plants or stones speaking in and through one.

I do not get answers, I get suggestions, visions of possibilities, ways of seeing, ways of feeling. The expansiveness of the liminality suggested I share this with others, that I find a way to write into existence what it is like to live across space the way I do, when things are at their best. That I let you know how that perfect chill water feels if you dangle your finger tips, moving slowly, unclear if it is you or the water who ebbs and flows.

In some way, this is my former life, my ferries, the Adelphi Project, and my current explorations all rolled in to one, enormous, tearful beautiful space, within and without, that wishes to speak to you, if you wish to listen.

Mark, several years ago, asked me to write paragraphs describing art I had seen. This becomes a very interesting exercise in a world so used to the visual. To take the time to describe the angle of rock, the colour, the pressure of the stylus, the depth of language embedded across the many-panelled skirt.There is the physical description of what I see, with my particular eyes, and the interpretation of what I see, with my particular history and culture. I would add a third, which would be what I see with my hands or my body or my ears, seeing not requiring eyes, in my world.

I never did send him these descriptions, but I would take polaroids and try to formulate the phrases that would describe the square image in my hand. I can imagine a visual game of telephone, can you draw what I have described? Could you pick it out from a line-up? Would we be as poor at this as we are picking out a person from a police line-up? Is describing in this way a skill lost to the visual era we live in?

My PhD program is ‘practice-based’ if I wish it. Instead of producing only the massive word based document that is a dissertation, one can produce as well art of whatever form is warranted. The written words and the practice must weave together, these are not two parallel lines, but one narrative which is ideally greater than the sum of its parts. In my program, now and before, there have been artists who have a practice and come to do their PhD. There are emerging artists come to combine their philosophy with their practice. And there is me. What am I?

One of the post-docs, an artists who did her PhD here as well, made a comment that if you aren’t practicing, it is not a practice. Interesting to ponder. What makes an artist, then, is a question. As a writer, this is also an interesting question. “I write.” Yes, ok. But are you a writer? Hard to say. I would never say I am an artist, but why is an interesting question.

In 2017 I had my first ‘visiting artists and scholars’ residency at the American Academy in Rome. At the time I was living in New York City. Two interesting things happened in Rome. First, no one questioned whether or not I was an artist. I talked about what I was working on and what I was interested in, and the accepted at face value that I was who I said I was. This had never happened to me before and it was a strange experience. Second, I was there as a visiting artist though I would have said visiting scholar was more applicable. At the time I was working on The Adelphi Project, and even though it did have a visual output — enormous chalkboard walls created and photographed, as well as collage and other visual artifacts of knowledge, it felt philosophical and scholarly to me. I remember sitting at dinner one night with the classicist Mary Beard and the intellectual historian Hussein Fancy (is work is fantastic, I recommend reading him). I was explaining that I could not appear at the Academy as a scholar because I did not have a PhD, and the concept of ‘independent scholar’ was not acceptable, to which they were both agog and kept saying, but clearly you are a scholar, to which I shrugged. Yet here again, was no doubt that I was a thing, yes, I said thing, something, someone who could be classified as artist or scholar or both, without doubt in the minds of the people I was speaking with.

Words, research, theory, these bits are not hard for me, after a life time of training, the ritual of them is part of who I am. As Flora noted in her comment about practice, and as I pondered it, I did realise that unless I am engaged in something definable as art, as loose as that may be, that aspect of my program will atrophy and it will not be an option for me. My answer to this was to engage in the practice of practice. I decided that for the remainder of 2022 I would dedicate Thursday to this, in whatever form was suitable. Reading about, viewing, experiencing, writing, creating. One day a week, dedicated to being present, physically, in the world of art.

I spoke to Mark about this and his response was that I already had a practice, and an art. That the walls that I create, full of ideas and connections, the way in which I see the world, created in space, the photos that come from them, is a practice, and one that is so very compelling. I thought about this. When I was working on Adelphi and would take a photo a day, sometimes I would post them, so people could wander around inside my head with me. I’ve never thought of them as more than the way in which I map the four or five dimensions of space and thought and language. Of how I restructure the world, visually, so that I can experience and live it — mostly inside my head, in a way that it is not currently formed.

My studio in Long Island City had a Vera Wang black gown in it. Sometimes in the mornings I would get to the studio, put on the dress leaving the back unzipped as there was something about the precarity and the flow that was pleasing, something slightly broken that made it better. It had a long train, and undertrain, and I would put on my ballet slippers and put on assorted Malian guitar musicians, and dance. The first hour of working through what would be done that day was often explored through the physicality of a half worn gown, the metal strings of a guitar, and the sun slowly rising.

In Los Angeles, shortly before moving to London, I pulled out a different gown one day, on a day when work wasn’t flowing well. I hung it on the wall and photographed it, then put it on, and flowed around. It was gunmetal silk with woven leather straps, toga style in design, always precarious, and lacked the glory of the weighted Wang, but it’s light simplicity still held some promise of otherworldliness. It was late, that night, and this isn’t a dress to dance wildly in, so as an experiment, not particularly successful, except in the reminder that part of the way in which my walls get created is with physical abandon, motion, fluidity and grace.

Art days, London. Dispatches and discursions. Intent. As I grow wiser, I begin to think that intent is the most important aspect of anything I do, without intention, I don’t do. Even if the intention is curiosity, if the intention is failure, finding it shifts the ways I work and the ways I find. This is not my Thursday art day output today, merely a preamble to what I hope will be more output of what this brings, more discussion, more missing the point or not seeing what others see or not understanding. More weight, I suppose, is what I am trying to say. Something I can hold in my hand, metaphorical or not, to feel what it is, the rub my fingers along the textures, to see with my hands not my eyes, to speak with my body not my mouth.

I was struck this morning, walking from the flat to the library, via a book store, a Greek restaurant, past the British Museum, and with a small side-trip to the London Review Bookshop to peer inside and see if they had chocolate guinness cake, in case I needed it later, by the lack of shared words in my life.

My flat is in King’s Cross and with the current heat wave in London and the apparent disregard for filth, it smells terrible, the streets are covered with sticky liquids, actual shit, trash, and other undefinable things I don’t believe I want to be able to define. The filth, though, surprises me. It feels like a disregard for those around oneself, to throw chicken bones, trash, empties, and all manners of plastic in to a street, in the expectation, or perhaps not, that some other person might tidy it up.

It is less bad than Los Angeles in one way though, it does actually rain here. I remember living in Little Ethiopia in LA, one steamy hot summer (eight months of that year), and watching a tomato slice not rot, just become desiccated and stuck. I moved away before it did. Nothing washed away, no one washed the sidewalks, as they did in other cities I’ve lived in, NY, Boston. London could use a good power storm, but we may have to wait until the heat wave breaks, and by then, the stench may have floated up to my top floor flat.

But while my mind watches the filth as I walk to avoid stepping in it, this is not the musing I was having this morning. This morning I was pondering how much I miss writing … somewhere. When Tumblr was still tumbling, so many of my friends wrote, shared, and pondered. It hasn’t really been the same since it shifted policies and crashed out of the center of the world. With the algorithms of Instagram, it too is an invalid place for the joys of writing, because I cannot make it show me the people I want to see. Some how it just chooses a few people of the many. Sometime it tells me I’ve seen all the posts, and I know this cannot be true. The words or missing. Or we’ve all gone mute.

The isolation of the pandemic left me with all my words, to myself. I did not write almost the entire time, I barely spoke, I didn’t read. As a human who usually does write all the time, in retrospect, this is all a bit strange. So many things unsaid, unshared, unexposed. It’s not that I want to tell you how my day was, or that I haven’t managed to finish a book, or that I don’t know what to eat for dinner. (These are things I seem to say these days, which often make me think I have become a shell of my former self.)

To return to the ramble that resulted in these musings, my route to my library cubbyhole today took me first to the Waterstones on Gower to buy Tom Jeffreys book, The White Birch. Somewhere in the beginning or near beginning of pandemic time, we’d exchange some emails about me writing a ferry story for his magazine, while he was off to train across Siberia, and we’d be in touch later. This was probably slightly pre-pandemic, when I was living in Rome for a bit, and drowning, to be honest, in indecision and self-generated complexity. The emails and possibilities fell apart, but my desire to read his book was simply stuffed in an internal storage box of the mind. Every now and then since arriving in London in January, I have peered in shops for the book but not seen it. The post he made, of its photo, is three minutes from the cubby, and so I stopped to buy it.

Looping across Montague by the back entrance of the British Museum, in search of water after the Senate House cafe appeared mysteriously empty of all goods today, the line was surprisingly long for the backside. But also, it is destined to be hot today, and all that marble does stay cool. Failure to attain water so, unwisely perhaps, I traveled south to the LRB Bookshop, to see what shop on that street would sell me water and to investigate the cake holdings of the day. At the first table I am stopped by a Jarman collection, introduction by Tilda Swinton. I pick it up, I read the first bits, and then on to more musing. Where does art happen, she asks. But for me, where does writing happen? I write and walk, quite a bit. The words tumble and move, relocate, wrestle, play musical chairs, and sometimes, if I am greatly inspired by a particular set of words, I pull out one of these damned small devices and put them in it. Mostly I just let them dance because, it seems, I have no where to put those words, no Tumblr, no blog (yes, I know), no publishing desires, of the moment. No newsletter, no desire for twitter, no love of the photo bits or the algos on Insta. So what now? These words?

They do, in fact, go in files in my computer, now and again. I started keeping two journals on arrival in London, one a project journal (for my PhD), and one in a file called Evalicious, which is all the deep and dark, the dreams, fantasies, frustrations and amusements of my life. I have started keeping a third one which is called Glump, into which semi-essays get written, but with no desired output. Or maybe I do desire output, but you’d have to check Evalicious for that.

My musings this morning, about all these words, the conversations I am not having, the friends I haven’t seen in years, the dislocation that comes from not having places to share words– and not the rushed words of a text message, or a quick comment on some media, but the kinds that can take hours, to share or to make, whichever. Sometimes I catch glimpses of people’s lives, like in Kevin’s Lily conversations, which are just beautiful, but which require me to open Facebook to read and I rarely remember to do that either. All these places are ads and ‘sponsored’ and full of noise, or hate. I’ve never had a dinner party where every third comment is some one yelling out BUY THIS, or where someone melts down into a stream of jibberish and the irreality of truth and the absence of trust are larger than the humans themselves.

Words. I love words. I bought a dictionary the other evening, and it was so delicious I posted pictures on instagram and twitter, sent screen shots to friends, and laughed aloud sitting on the floor, not only at the words and definitions, but the juxtapositions, the worldview, and the promise that it was ‘self-pronouncing’ and from 1932. So I self-pronounced, in American English, British English, and with assorted other accents, rolling the words around in my mouth savouring them, and remembering how good it feels as well, to suck on small stones from a clean cool river in the height of a hot summer.

Suck rocks, I recall, seems to have been an insult from my childhood, now that I think of it, but clearly, not from someone who had ever done such a thing as a lazy summer child, before they were watched all the time, and had rules in the summer. And what now? Perhaps I shall watch my words, and seek a river, not just this one that flows within, but something crisp and clean, with stones to lick and light to ponder, and I shall share my words with that river, and await a future with different spaces.