This Strange Body, This Restless Heart
Writings and musings while in NYC
A few weeks ago I found myself in the dark, showering after another long day of exploring this wild city of New York. I had turned off all the lights, feeling a need to remove anything visual and to allow my thoughts to roam across a quieter landscape.
Back home in Japan, I would eliminate the light often, sitting in dark rooms or walking through forests without a flashlight. A feeling similar to entering the murkiness of a cave. The mind can be further illuminated once bathed in darkness.
There was something a bit different about this evening. Struck with a flashback, I came down to the bottom of the bathtub, sitting crosslegged as the warm water streamed down my face and ran down my body. My brain replayed everything my eyes had taken in over the past few days and I began to gag. This city seems to have that effect on people.
These past three months I have been in the U.S. Since I’ve been in this country, I have found myself hit with tidal wave after tidal wave of emotion, trying to understand this strange body, this restless heart.
I cannot encapsulate how much I have learned and experienced in such a short time, and the amount of mental shifts I’ve needed to do have tested my cognitive gears.
I weave through periods of emotional indulgence, of disassociating, and then frustration. Once I step away I can see that in some way my brain is protecting itself. If I allowed myself to truly be present I may flair into a wild panic. I imagine a similar feeling would be to be stuck treading water in the middle of the ocean.
Despite it all, I have constantly chosen to float, not swim, and I have found myself down a stream of the most wonderful, fascinating, and invigorating experiences.
The people I have encountered here are like no other. They are brave, fascinating, driven, and focused. Everything that I wish I was and strive every day to be. They have survived this American culture, New York in particular, with all of this capitalism, and choking materialism, and have come to a place where they have found themselves. They have chosen who they want to be.
This, of course, doesn’t encompass each person I have met, but it remains in the marrow of the culture. They do not waver from who they are and always emphasize the conversation. To dialogue, to discuss. Everyone is always trying to talk, to mend, discuss, to confirm. And then, if they are self-aware, to hopefully change and to be better.
It has also left me in a strange place with my work. Experience is the stem that feeds into the bud of art, and I am trying to dissect everything that has been happening and how it can be fully applied to my practices. I have yet to fully categorize and decode all that is going on around me, and feel distant from applying it to artistic endeavors.
Here, being far away from home, I have no choice but to be brave and welcome the discomfort of uncertainty. To stand at the mouth of the cave, shout into it, to enter it, and to explore it as if it were illuminated. This is the role of the artist: To give this cave shape and to understand it, in all of its twists and turns and rocky surfaces.
Perhaps with it, we can not only find our way through it, but we can also learn to find peace in the quiet darkness of the stony walls, and keep returning to the cave to see more of what there is to discover.