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coasting on the amtrak in the “quiet car” through the
northeast from providence, rhode island back to brooklyn through the autumnal
landscape. finally found a place
of peace and quiet within after what’s felt like a lot of hustling and movement
over the last couple of weeks (or months or years for that matter). i have my headphones in with no music,
maybe that’s helping to psychologically drown a lot of the noise inside and out
without adding any more stuff, ha!
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talking with dj boo who so deflty dj’ed the asian american
arts alliance gala two weeks ago, he told me that some times he just sits with
his noise-canceling headphones on no music. to kinda cleanse the palate, cleanse the system. sometimes i’m so full of words,
bursting with them, and sometimes they are sulky and tired and hang around
lazily inside of my mouth – they actually clamp my lips shut and say, alright
already, enough.
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one of my friends who dropped by a performance i did in
brooklyn in the spring sat back and observed as i chatted away post-show, and
he said, “damn, you did more talking in that 15 minutes than i do between
breakfast and lunch.” i think it’s
true that a lot of performers are introverts at heart. in some ways being a performer takes
the pressure off the individual to break the ice at all through the attention-grabbing
nature of the stage, the mandate/sanction/invitation to be everything that you
are (and in some cases aren’t) in that circumscribed space – it’s no wonder
that so many of us post-show slink right back into our shells....
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so direct from the edge of my shell – cars, trains, and
planes these two weeks alllll over the place. driving from brooklyn to watertown, new york (yes, indeed, i
drove – which is typically a biannual occurrence – the 6-7 hour stretch since
it’s still a bit hard to get there by train) and got that intense sense, that
intense feeling of learning about america. when i think about all the different kinds of people that i
meet in a given week – it’s pretty extraordinary. places that i maybe never would have gone to, life experiences
that i would have known nothing about – it’s such a wonder to me that these
delicate yet sturdy arrangements of words can be reason and purpose enough to
bring so many people together and bring me to so many places – it is a blessing
even if the act of traveling itself sometimes feels like a curse, ha!
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i feel blessed that throughout my life i’ve had significant
living experiences in rural, urban, and surburban areas in the u.s. and abroad,
that i’ve been able to get a sense of what life is like in these places full of
diverse tempos, rhythms, values, concerns, cultures, issues. this is one of the greatest gifts of
being an independent artist – this kind of close proximity to people’s lives,
the welcoming into their known, your unknown and vice versa.
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watertown up by the canadian border is a manufacturing town,
a military town on the canadian border.
i was talking with folks there about the impact of having fort drum and
the 10th mountain division in watertown (which is a combat division
training many of the young soldiers who are being deployed in iraq and
afghanistan). one of the
organizers for my performance at jefferson community college who was born and
raised in the area said that she is thankful that the 10th mountain
division is there and hopes that there are more, since the area has so few
jobs. she mentioned that even if
young people want to – it often is too difficult to stay in watertown due to
lack of work.
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then flip that to last night’s performance at brown university’s asian/asian american
history month convocation where we got into lots of heavy convo’s about asian
pacific islander american identity and social movements – like really really
understanding the diversity and unique challenges of galvanizing a community
without a shared language, a shared history, or shared cultures whether in our
home countries or here – or reaching back to learn and know more about asian
pacific islander american history so we don’t always feel like we the first
goddamn ones to be doing anything – all of this wrapped inside the most liberal
of the ivy league campuses, which all have their own cultures of elitism and
struggle against that elitism within themselves.
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and between all of this – long stretches of dark highway in
the mountains, long tracks of railroad through the fluttering woods...and one
poet traversing all of these pathways, trying to make sense in syllable sounds
of it all...
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thanks so much to mary, frank, michael, karynn (i hope you
feel better soon!), kenji, helen, the whole steering committee, word!,
arkipelaga –
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i think we’ve all gotten our blessing and our warning –
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i listened to jack kerouac’s on the road on cd for a
little bit while i was driving – and stopped listening to it after the 3rd
cd – enough to remember what captivated me about it when i first read it as a
distraction from mid-terms when i was 18 (in addition to suddenly taking up
knitting) and more than enough to know that it doesn’t nearly encompass even a
fraction of the life stories that need to be written and told about living life
on the road, especially in our vastly evolving america today.
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off to vancouver, washington – early early early flight
tomorrow morning...
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blessings,
kelly