. different ways of counting

newsletter newness and meditations on grief

Hey, its been a while! I was starting to feel in a rut with this newsletter. As social media feels more and more like a reactive hellscape, it is not a place I want to hang out or share personal photos/ musings/ etc. I see its usefulness for memes, mutual aid, and peddling projects and events. As far as sharing anything personal, it has been feeling truly bad and flattening. I may feel differently at some point. But I feel pretty strongly that I don’t want to give my photos and words to Meta. Instagram feels uncanny and fucked up. The texture of it. Like going to the mall. Anyway, like so many of us, I am trying to slow down and be a little more conscious about my media use.

I love spending time online. It feels like contact with a synthetic sublime. What a treat for a voyeur to any degree, for a writer. Infinite windows into the lives of others. Patterns. But getting caught in the scroll feels like breathing from the top of the chest only.

I intended to bundle these monthly missives again, and the longer I waited the more resistance I felt. For months, the phrase “to what end this flowering abyss” was knocking around in my head, and I thought that it was going to be the title of the next missive. But as a concept it feels bigger than that, and so I decided I’ll be renaming this newsletter to reflect what I’ve been driving towards in my own creative practices.

Formerly big moods//disquietude, for the last almost four years (!!), this has been such a beautiful space to connect with you all and archive external and internal weathers.

I began to realize that in these missives, I’ve been circling the same poles, coming back to them again and again. As a placeholder, I’ll call them grief and pleasure. Francis Weller writes, “We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation,” which is a far more eloquent description of something I have identified in my own life as the boohoo woohoo continuum. I am endlessly fascinated by bereavement and its attendant collage of muck. So I’m shifting the focus of this space to pay closer attention to grief and what it’s teaching me. Small altars, endings, beginnings, despair, eros. My own apprenticeship with patience, and the things that come up when we are deeply quiet and unstructured and not trying to optimize, hack, and be “better” in every aspect of our lives.

I have had many conversations recently about the lack of adequate technologies for grieving and connections between grief and eroticism.

As I write this, it’s a fiery full moon in Leo and we are in the shoulder season just past Imbolc, or Saint Brigid's Day, which was on February 1st—the Gaelic festival welcoming spring and February 2nd’s Feast Day of Iemanjá, honoring the Candomblé goddess of the sea. Both of these days carry potency within my own lineages. Both represent rejuvenation and fertile new beginnings. And, perhaps, the promise of potential after loss.

For a large part of this year, I’ve been numbed out and frozen. The vibrancy of the self that speaks and writes relegated to the proverbial corner. Trying to “lock in” failing to “lock in” realizing that the whole concept of “locking in” is patriarchal and wed to capitalism. And besides, if I’m going to lock in I need to know where to. For a while, I haven’t felt sure.

As a first gesture in the new direction of this newsletter, I want to offer you three fragments. A memory, a ritual, and a loss. I want to look more closely at where grief happens, what it is shaped like. I am interested in dancing with the more nonsensical and “irrational” aspects of the grieving and erotic self— two currents that surprise me in the way that they move. Unseen forces that contain their own invisible logic.

A memory: dedicating lap dances to dead loved ones

I lost a close friend in my early 20s to a senseless act of violence. The news of her passing took all the breath from my lungs and spun the earth underneath me. Recently, it was the anniversary of her passing.

The day I found out she had passed, I worked at the club. It was Super Bowl Sunday, 2017. I was in a very new relationship, and this sudden rupture pushed us closer together. Before my night shift, my partner drove us down a winding mountain path, deeper into the mountain as the sun set as I struggled to reassemble my reality.

Weeks later, my friend appeared to me in a dream, wearing a backpack. She was in line for a train. All of this is a performance, she told me, conspiratorially and with a smile. A circus marching band saw her out, and I was left feeling simultaneously comforted and ripped to pieces.

Over the years, the strip club has become kind of a fertile ground for transforming my own grief. A subtle alchemy of loss and despair through performance and movement. The darkness and charge of the environment has allowed me to wordlessly move through breakups and deaths and sometimes even meet others in their own ruptures and transitions.

Less poetically, in practice this has looked like sobbing quickly in the bathroom and wiping snot off my face before going on stage. Wearing red lips and no mascara so I can cry less noticeably. Chirping and fake smiling my way into a happier character. At times, dissociating tremendously. And other times, allowing cruelty to become a part of the persona.

ritual: failing to let go

This summer, at the lip of the ocean, with a candle crying wax down my hands, I asked for courage. I told the sea, I will need more courage to go where I’m going. I will need courage to face what’s next.

A few months later, with another, differently colored candle by the ocean, I asked for release… to move on and from, away from a lingering hurt that continued to haunt me.

Even my spells are sputtering. Often, I feel neither locked in or courageous, and I still get taunting dream visitations from situations I wanted to release.

But maybe courage looks different than I thought it would. I imagined one day I would wake up and no longer be so afraid to participate in my own life. To be present for what’s already here. But every day I wake up to a new flavor of fear clamoring for my attention. A kind of terror that blossoms in my throat, wrapping petals and stems around what I once knew as my voice.

Each year, during the feast of Iemanjá, people offer flowers, beauty products, and mirrors to the goddess. Queen of the sea, protector of women and children. Her power exists in tandem with her vanity, her pettiness, her femininity.

Whenever I am lost I find a piece of myself in the horizon line to call back. My prayers have always been made more potent through salt water—my own tears or treading water in the ocean. I am a strong swimmer, and the sea terrifies me.

A loss

I lost my beautiful Irish grandmother in December. I’ve been thinking about our manicures. She was generous and fierce and beloved.

The process of losing and acclimation to loss begins much earlier. Family system static amplified as she slipped further into dementia and non-remembering. I had the opportunity to visit with her a final time while she was earthside. We held hands and drank whiskey. We toasted to my cousin’s birthday. We sat, watched TV. Dreamed in the same house. Her blue eyes flickered with recognition at each visitor. She reached towards us sometimes and pulled her hand away at others.

I want to share here a poem I wrote after she passed. I wasn’t able to be present for the funeral, but one of my brilliant cousins wrote the poem down to place in her coffin.

Tell the bees

You conjured with your wrist in the air

Mischief smile on your face

A blade, a knowing, a laugh

all swimming together in the blue of your Irish eyes

Your hands tended to all manner of wounds

And nourished with folds of dough

Spirals of meat and cheese

Baileys over ice in front of the television

Dinner rolls shoved in grocery bags

Turkey sandwiches

surplus for the miles ahead

Your power ring and perfect red nails

swirled in boundless generosity

the evocative tones of your birthplace

still flicker in the eyes of your children and your grandchildren

tell stories of earth and sky

A live, creative current vibrates in each of us—a family that thinks in metaphors

moves in swarms

Your courage animates the hive

sharp like wind to a wound

A live nerve

This legacy

This magic

A subaudible hum that sways and moves

roads rise to meet us

tell the bees

what a glistening dance this has been

~

poem tonics for the grieving heart

“the cure for grief is motion” by Shauna Barbosa

Gyrate so close I’d misstep thinking about marriage. I cannot marry someone who works on an empty stomach. Using men to avoid swaying in front of non-dancers is the new I swear I’m not here to use your body to measure the misfortune of time.

“Dear Birmingham” by Gabrielle Bates

I was once so terrified of my own contentment

I bit my shoulder

and drew blood there

“Too Alone” by Rainer Marie Rilke trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy¹

~

Creative Happenings

Working Girls Press Updates

Thank you so much to everyone who donated to the Kickstarter for I Hate My Job edited by adrie rose. We are fully funded and in development! This book is going to be beautiful, bombastic, and critical for our times. Stay tuned for launch details and other exciting news!! If you missed out on the first round of preorders, you can sign up for the waitlist here.

I Hate My Job is also going to be an incredible print companion to The Holy Hour—first edition copies of which are still available. In honor of the day of love (and Molly’s birthday!) this weekend take 33% off the book and everything in our store (including totes!) using the code: VDAYBABY

On a personal note, I love making books with WGP and distributing them. The learning curve of indie press life has been challenging life-affirming. Tending to this imprint and working alongside Molly and so many amazing writers has felt like true north in my compass rose. It’s amazing to look back and see what we’ve done in a year, and how much further we have yet to go.

January 17th at Well Read bookstore in Lisbon!

A Recent Workshop

As the burnout from teaching in higher ed slowly leaves my body, I’ve been feeling more open to facilitating workshops. I had the wonderful opportunity in December to lead a writing workshop on the topic of nostalgia as a companion to the closing of an installation “Time Sensed/ Tempo Sentido” by Rita Ravasco at Casa do Comum. You can access our curatorial note on the piece (co-written with the incredible Amadea Kovič and Miriam Thaler) and learn more about its journey here.

In the workshop, we explored sensory dimensions of nostalgia through found/ brought objects. The workshop was followed by an open mic, which was incredibly moving and sweet. <3

Thank you to everyone who came out, wrote, and read!

I’ll leave you with this animus-healing masterpiece, which has been revisited and on repeat in my household. The comments section is full of nostalgia.

~

Thank you for reading this first foray into slightly different territory. This newsletter has been, and continues to be, a beloved incubator for my writing and one of my favorite ways of communicating with you all. I appreciate you choosing to spend a little slice of your day here. If you want to further support my work, you can subscribe to my paid tier or send me a tip on Venmo @duffylala. <3 <3 <3

1. Note: there is an earlier and widely-shared English version of this poem that translates the second line as “to truly consecrate the hour,” which I like a LOT less.