"black" by Min Song


Dear Jonas,

Last Saturday, for a change, I didn’t have to go to work. Your Dad and I took you out for brunch in the early afternoon, which seems to be your favorite time of day for adventures. I wrapped you in all of your layers and carried you in the sling, and you waved to the air with your mittens and grunted when the wind got too invasive. We rode the train to Bedford, and then walked to the restaurant, and soon afterwards I pulled you onto my lap and gave you a bottle. While you were eating you stared at the photograph on the wall just at your eye level and the tin tiles on the ceiling. Afterwards you actually sat on my lap while I ate, which you have never done before. You are three months old this week. There were other babies in the restaurant, but you weren’t interested. You didn’t cry when they cried or give them a nod of baby recognition when they bounced by on a parent’s shoulder. You focused on the light fixtures, and their shadows, and the glass in the windows, and the decorative lace on the walls.

Later that night, just before you fell asleep, I left to go see your Auntie Beth’s dance performance. Beth came to the hospital when you were just one day old and held you, and we like to go and visit her when she’s at work, too. She’s pretty like Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe she’ll teach you about dancing some day. This weekend she had her first solo show at a place called The Kitchen, and it was called “what it looks like, what it feels like.” The performance didn’t start until 8pm, which is when you usually go to bed, so you stayed home with Daddy, but I wish you both could’ve come, too. The piece was a consideration of this word “like,” and whether or not it is possible. In the context of this title, “what it looks like, what it feels like,” like indicates a similarity or resemblance. In other words, the dancers’ movements are showing the audience how “it” looks and how “it” feels. Part of the challenge of interpreting the performance is to consider what “it” is intended to modify. “It” is a strange word that means nothing on its own—it is a way of referring back to something that has already been described; however, in the case of Beth’s performance, it is a non sequitur. We begin in the middle without a direct point of reference, and so we are left to imagine what it is that corresponds to what we see.

Or not. We might take a different route and understand the performance as a meditation on the impossibility of ever showing exactly what something is “like.” For the first portion of the performance, the dancers move across squares of mirrored glass, which fit together like a tic tac toe board. Two women almost double each other’s movements as they ignore and engage another woman moving alone in the center of the stage. Women crawl, sometimes slither, across the surface. Dancers come close, envelop each other’s bodies with rounded arms, one woman slumps onto the back of another, the woman underneath balances the other’s weight just slightly off the ground. The glass is somehow opaque and imperfectly reflective, creating the sensation that the mirrored foundation for the dancers’ confident movements could also, without warning, swallow them whole. Transparency is certainly on trial, and when each square is removed during the performance by groups of two—dancers and stage hands—each upturned mirror briefly reflects the audience as it is carried away, returning an image more like a funhouse distortion than a recognizable twin. At this point, the “it” itself is doubled. Audience and performer, self and other, are projected onto each other just as the dancers have at different points mimicked, but not mirrored, each other’s movements.

As the mirrors are carried offstage, the line between performers and spectators as well as the designation of any particular space as stage—reminding us that stage or no stage, we are always performing—is relaxed. During the next sequence, the shadows cast on the walls replace the reflections from the mirrors. In a series of stunningly complex variations, the dancers perform the same smooth gestures, each at slightly different times, enacting a continuum of variation within the restraint of a single move, offering yet another possibility of what it looks like to always, in some sense, be an other to one’s self. Using the body to make visible the complex workings of subjectivity, the limitations of self-knowledge are rigorously yet honestly conveyed. All of these different movements around a single “it” have taken the cohesive, self-same “I” and shown “it” to be an enterprise that is always already collective.

You, Jonas, are only three months old, but so many places and people have already contributed to what you will be “like.” You have a whole slew of aunties and uncles who will help you understand ideas like performance, me, you, self, and other. You are just now beginning to notice that when you wave your hands,when you circle your fingers around an object, you can make something happen. Hopefully this is an idea you will never tire of considering.

Dear Jonas,

“B” is for beets, Bolaño fever, Bildungsroman, and for brisk, too, because it is cold outside now. We went into the city today to run an errand and you wore layers of clothes beneath an anorak. As usual, you weren’t displeased with the bulk of the clothing. When I faced you toward the mirror as I folded you into the sling, you mugged big smiles. Only when i wrapped my long black scarf over your face to block the wind did you begin to protest. You like to see where you’re going.

I finished Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives last week, so now I can return to reading Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. I’m resisting jumping into Bolaño’s 2666, the translation of which just came out last week. I tell myself that the last thing I need is a 912 page detour from the dissertation, especially since I just indulged in a 648 page one; nonetheless, the pull is strong indeed. I suppose if I purchase it now but read the entire thing while we are out of the city at your grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving, I won’t really be disturbing my work. What I mean is that I anyway won’t work on the dissertation while we are away from home, so it would be nice to finish something next week. Maybe if I make it into a challenge, I won’t feel guilty. "Thanksgiving" always makes me feel guilty enough on its own.

Truth be told, I spent almost as much time making a beet salad as I did writing today. We walked to the vegetable shop up on Graham Avenue and picked out the beets and other ingredients. When we came home I rinsed clumps of dirt from their leaves and bulbs. I shaved each beet with a vegetable peeler and chopped them all in the little food processor. I stained my fingers and the corners of my mouth with their juice, and somehow splattered the wooden floor with fuschia droplets, too. Then I washed, chopped and shaved fennel and carrots. I mixed them all together with olive oil and pistachios and we ate it over sautéed kale. I joke to myself that pleasurable exercises like this one illustrate the general rebellion against the Bildungsroman the dissertation is meant to invoke. In other words, if a Bildungsroman is supposed to illustrate its hero’s collaboration with adulthood, my reticence to ever actually finish my dissertation is a small act of discomfort with the fantasy of adulthood my written argument has yet to produce.

Thanksgiving will mark your first visit to the country, and knowing how much you like the noise of the streets and the trains here and dislike the quiet of the parks, I am curious to see how you will react to the silence. I hope the leaves are still on the trees and that you will tolerate a few long walks in your stroller. I am anticipating that you will enjoy the shiny colors and the shadows made by the fireplace. Hopefully you will be able to see the deer that come into the yard at sunset.

From Auntie Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself:

"An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not 'mirror' one's own constitution."


Dear Jonas,

Today’s word is “affirm.” We’ve been out walking a lot over the past two days because I am too excited to stay home. For some reason Obama’s electoral landslide makes me want to be around people. I want to see how everyone else is taking it, and I guess I’m craving some sort of recognition from our neighbors. I turn normal interactions into gestures loaded with meaning; commonplace body language becomes knowing winks and nods and sparkling eyes saying: Obama. Saying: it’s okay that you had that baby. Hegemonic alterations of power really happen. It’s good that you’re here in Brooklyn. It matters that you are right here in your skanky precious gorgeous neighborhood. For all of its utter ridiculousness, Williamsburg understands that the devil is in the details.

I’m thinking about the little shops with owners who seem more concerned with process than profit, the food, the obsession with style, Spoonbill & Sugartown—my favorite bookstore—where we bought a copy of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch during their “All Hail Obama” sale, bicycles chained to everything, seriously hot trannies, Desert Island—the carefully curated comics store, assiduously prepared coffee at Oslo or Gimme Coffee, warehouses, woodshops, a mister softee on every corner and Ben Van Leeuwen’s artisanal ice cream truck driving past us on Metropolitan Ave on his way into Soho, slices of Manhattan viewable from almost anywhere, morning glories trellised around streetfront gates, rooftop honey, grassfed beef at Diner, dog parks, record shops, locally brewed beer, babies, hipster milliners, green markets, paper thanksgiving decorations in half of the windows in my neighborhood, alleyways, locally made Salvatore lesbian ricotta, Polish newspapers, Italian street festivals, skylights, neighborhood gardens, the lesbian couple I met the other night and their little guy a few months older than you who invited us to the mom’s group at the Greenpoint Church, and running into friends from Gainesville on the train. This is a very, very small sampling of what makes our neighborhood so special.

The point is that I am feeling a correlation between the way I was nervous of investing myself in the current election and the way I have been reticent to connect to my neighborhood since I moved here a year and a half ago. I’ve spent my entire life being disappointed by American electoral politics. (I still remember my middle school gifted teacher, Mrs. Weimer who rode her bike to school every day, with her Dukakis button on election day telling me: “it doesn’t look good.”) And I’ve spent the last year here at a critical distance from my surroundings because it just seemed too good to be true. But this election has reminded me that it just doesn’t matter. Barack’s administration might turn out to be a total failure, but at least he, and we, have decided to try. Likewise, all of the creative world-making that goes on around here might be a total waste of time, but I doubt it. These examples I’m giving you are tiny, careful gestures of hope that are collectively producing a kind of localized alteration of the possible. In short, maybe politics looks different than we thought it did, but it starts with an affirmation that other worlds are possible. And affirmation involves understanding that we can’t stop because we don’t know exactly what change will look like; embracing that opacity is what makes affirmation exciting.

Dear Jonas,

This is a quote from Uncle John Berger, who might argue that this election has produced a new "way of seeing": "Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."

Little guy, you were born in the year of Obama. Now it is our job to teach you what that means. When Jesse Jackson described what happened yesterday as "ecstasy," he was pointing to the transformation of "what is and what it not desirable" this election has inaugurated. Si se puede. Yes we can. We are winning.