Good morning, everyone. It really is such a pleasure to be with you all this morning, bright and early and bleary-eyed. I am not a morning person, but when Under the Radar calls, I answer the call. A huge thanks to everyone at the festival for organizing this symposium and for having me.
You know, there was a time when I used to get really excited about opportunities like these: opportunities to say something. Because I felt like I had some thing to say—some solid, significant thing. There was a kind of giddiness I used to get from saying things, like if I raised my hand in class and said something smart. Or at a family gathering, if I managed to throw my voice into the chaos of the debate. I remember the feeling of listening to a conversation, but what I was listening for was an opportunity to speak, like: I was sitting there preparing my take in my head and then waiting for a gap in the flow that I could slip through. And oftentimes, I didn’t even know exactly what I was going to say before I was saying it, but then somehow, in the saying of it, the speaking itself sort of congealed into an idea, into a kind of conviction. And suddenly I was saying something forcefully, and I believed what I was saying, and there was a kind of pleasure in that. And if people nodded or they laughed, this kind of buzzy adrenaline would course through me, like I’d scored a point or something. And it was addictive. I used to really value my ability to inspire through speaking.
And clearly there’s a part of me that still values that, because here I am, speaking to you, but I do feel less…sure of myself now. I feel less certain of what I want to say. I think we get very good at telling coherent stories about ourselves, to make it in this field. We get very good at self-narrating, like: What does this moment want from me? What should I be making in this political climate? What do I have to say? And being able to wield words in response to questions like those was valuable currency I had in an economy that delights in and trades in the good stories we tell about ourselves. But a teacher of mine always used to say: “That’s the good story. What’s the real story?”
So, I thought what I would attempt to do is tell you a real story about me trying to make something. Here we go:
So, before the pandemic, I was applying to everything I could possibly apply for. And in 2019, I applied to HARP, HERE Arts Center’s Residency Program, pitching a collaboration between me and my mom. And my mom is a physicist who studies the physics of sand. Both of my parents are physicists, they’re academics, which is probably a big part of why I became so fluent in writing grant proposals and applications. Anyway, here are two sentences from my application to HARP:
“RHEOLOGY”—which is what I was calling the project—“is an attempt at interdisciplinary, intergenerational translation. In it, I am reaching toward the continuity between human and geological time: the quick, drastic brushstrokes of life bleeding into the slow canvas of erosion and sedimentation.”
