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dearjacobwren · 6 years ago

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Dearest Dragha,

Thanks a lot for your last letter. I've just re-read it. You know that you are the last one that still sends me real letters? Jaap either stopped, or keeps sending them to the wrong address. Probably he lost count of numerous address changes in my recent nomadic past :)

It's a beautiful thing – seeing that there is a proper letter waiting for me in the mailbox. Usually I postpone the moment of opening the envelope until later in the day, until I feel like it's the right time. What that means is that I carry the unopened letter in my pocket (that I think about all day long), and I masochistically wait to be in an appropriate space and in the right state of mind so I could really dedicate myself to it and read it properly. As if the letter were a gift. Christmas or a birthday present.

Which reminds me

As a kid I was suuuper hyperactive, one of the most impatient kids ever. I'd often get these crazy outbursts of energy - I didn't know what to do with my body, so I'd usually do a crazy energetic dance or hang from the top of the wardrobe whilst singing my favorite pop song (my mother used to call these moments 'žuta minuta'). When I look back at it, it seems quite pathological to the extent at which I wasn't able to harness my excitement :)

On Christmas eve I usually couldn't get to sleep. I’d be shaking and sweating in my bed hoping that Christmas morning would happen IMMEDIATELY, and after a couple exhausting hours, I'd finally enter theizbrisi 'the' pliz dream land, but not for too long. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, get up, run to the living room, stand in front of the Christmas tree and marvel at the presents underneath it. I'd cover myself with a blanket and wait until my mother woke up and start her morning routine. She'd see me, tell me off because I didn't sleep at all, but then she'd allow me to open my present.

Christmas presents were always a downer, because my parents are those who think that they should be of use. Meaning, no toys ('you have enough Lego bricks to play with'), no candies ('bad for your teeth'), no new clothes ('your brother's pants fit you well'). Literally everything that I liked at the moment of growing up (music, books, films etc.) was off the list ('your taste changes rapidly from year to year, we don't plan to satisfy every capricious wish of yours').

Still, that never made my Christmas orgasm less intense – after the manic act of tearing the wrapping paper and excitedly admiring what I'd gotten (usually a pack of socks, a pair of underwear or a pack of empty video cassettes plus a chocolate), I'd pass out on the sofa in the living room cause the exhaustion of not having slept for more than an hour the night before was just too much for my tiny body.

And look how far I've got. I resisted my desire to open your letter immediately, kept it in my pocket for almost the whole day until I found the right moment. I even enjoyed procrastinating this crazy letter ceremony.

I know how to harness my excitement, I'm all grown up now. My mother would be so proud. If she only knew.

* * *

'What's on your big mind right now?', Charlie asks me sometimes. Actually, he poses this question every time he sees me fading away, when he notices I stopped perceiving the outside world. It's happened quite often lately.

He knows that there is something on my mind all the time – even whilst I'm brushing my teeth, peeling the potatoes, cleaning the toilet or having my daily tea ceremony. He also knows that these silent conversations are playing out very loud in my head. Sometimes I argue with people, sometimes I'm analyzing an argument I've just read in the newspaper, and sometimes I'm trying to unpack what's behind apparently benign comments creepy posh guests say all the time in the hotel where I work.

Charlie says that it looks fun my little performance. I make faces, I do small gestures with my hands, I nod and shake my head, I sigh and laugh. Usually this imaginary conversing is happening in complete silence, I don't say a word, but sometimes a part of the sentence unawarely slips out of my mouth. These are his favorite moments.

He can be funny too. Often I see his hands moving, his fingers flying over an imaginary piano, even when his mind is occupied with another activity. 'What's the tune?', I ask him in the same manner he asks me what's on my mind. He looks at me with his big eyes, as if he was caught stealing, then smiles, relaxes and sings out the tune that was stuck in his ear. Together we come across like two weirdos, him with his inaudible excercises, me with my invisible conversations. If our friends only knew.

I'd like to share one of the things that happened not so long ago, that I have been coming back to ever since it unfolded. It was one of those Dragha situations, I immediately thought of you the second it happened, instinctively I knew you'd be excited to hear about it.

You remember that amazing flea market next to our old house, right? Well, on the same square there's a swimming pool. Building from the sixties, public showers are on the ground floor, swimming pool is on the third floor. I go there once a week, usually sometime in the early afternoon, just before lunch. At that time of the day two out of six lanes of this 25meter long pool are reserved for swimming courses for preschoolers and kids not older than 10.

I hate kids in swimming pools, especially where the rules are not strict. And of course that in this one pool guards just don't give a fuck. So the kids are allowed to constantly switch between the lanes or jump on other people whilst they are swimming. I get super annoyed cause I have to stop, change the technique and my breathing routine, talk to them and ask them to go to the part of the pool designated to their class if they don't want to be attentive to the rest of the crowd.

So one day I was doing my swimming routine and realized it was getting impossible to swim because the waves were bigger than usual. I stopped and saw a group of at least 25 preschoolers jumping in the water in the most absurd way possible, I guess they had a competition who could do the funniest jump. They were screaming all in the same voice plus throwing all the swimming accessories at each other (boards, fins, paddles, caps, goggles and various other items). But what I found shocking was that the instigator of this infernal pool carnival was their own coach, a thirtysomething straight white guy who was acting as if he was 10 again and it seemed like he was enjoying himself big time.

It all lasted 15-20 minutes, and at first I was shocked. 'The rules have to exist, how on earth can I finish my routine if this is how you teach kids to behave in a pool?' a small nazi in me was already silently arguing with the guy responsible for this bacchanalia.

But then I went to the side, took a small break and remembered one eerie moment I experienced a couple of years before in a public swimming pool in Amsterdam. The situation was almost the same - it was the same part of the day, late morning or early afternoon, 25 meter pool, 2 lanes reserved for preschool swimming classes. It's just that this pool was taken care of - recently built on one of the canals close to centre, everything new, sleek Dutch design, lots of windows, natural light etc. The parents were even allowed to sit next to the pool (they had to were these special shoe covers that surgeons wear in operating rooms) so their kids would be more assured during their first swimming lessons.

Since kids were dressed up normally (meaning outside clothes, they weren't wearing swimsuits), I thought it was one of their first classes where teachers are just giving a preparatory 'theoretical' introduction. But what happened after the presentation was super strange. Kids had to jump in the pool with their clothes on. It was a really weird moment – a group of ten completely dressed six and seven year-olds (wearing pants, shirts, jackets, even sneakers!) struggling to repeat movements they'd just learned from their coach, but this time in the water. After a couple of minutes of struggling, the instructors had to help get them out of the pool because their clothes were wet and heavy, poor kids couldn't carry their weight all by themselves.

I approached one of the parents and asked them what type of course that was and why kids were obliged to swim with their clothes on. I got an answer that it is a non-swimmers course and that the point of the lesson is that kids need to learn what to do if they fall off a boat into the sea.

I kind of got it, but I wasn't convinced. I tried to put myself in their skin – you're six, you don't swim, you are probably afraid of water, it's your first time at the swimming pool, it's a completely new setting, semi-naked people wandering around doing silly exercises in and out of water, and then your teacher tells you to jump in the pool, move your limbs in the manner he showed just a minute ago even though you're wearing heavy wet clothes and you have no idea how to move your hands and legs to keep your head above the water. I was trying to imagine how it must have felt for those poor kids struggling to swim wearing jeans and sneakers.

I mean, it's not a drama, it's not like I'm describing a domestic violence situation. A group of ten six-year-old non-swimmers trying to cope in the water with their clothes on, ça va. Still, what bothered me is that I intuitively realized that none of those kids are ever going to return to the swimming pool after they've finished with their swimming course. They will learn how to swim properly, they will master the technique and what to do in an emergency situation, but they will hate swimming forever, or at least until they decide to fight off their childhood water trauma.

That was the Amsterdam memory that came back to my mind whilst I was on my short break in the pool and looking at the first group of kids, this time 25 six- to ten-year-old going completely wild whilst[izbrisi ovaj whilst pliz] doing whatever they wanted on one of their first swimming classes. Goggles, boards, fins and other swimming accessories were being thrown everywhere, in and out of water, 10 tiny girls were trying to submerge their coach, and a couple of them were trying to undress him. He was fighting them off, laughing super loud. The rest of the kids were running around, uttering screams I never thought human beings were able to produce, and jumping in the water in the most unimaginable ways. One preschooler even took his swimming trunks off, was parading around completely naked and proudly showing his butt to his friends.

(Btw I remembered one of my colleagues at work telling me that the problem with kids these days is the diet. You can't expect they'd act normal if you feed them with chocolate and Haribo candies all the time. She said of course all the kids are crazy these days, they're sweating sugar, and they have this manic sugar rushes all day long).

Looking at those kids I realized that I'm not going to swimming pool because I want to learn how to react if I fall off a boat into the water, nor because I think it's an useful activity that could help save other people's lives. There's nothing pragmatical pragmatic about it - I just like swimming because it makes me feel good. As simple as that.

If swimming teacher that was having fun whilst fighting off the oversugared over sweetened hyperactive girls that were trying to undress him was by any chance trying to do the same thing any of the existing swimming pools in Amsterdam, he would be fired in less than a week. His teaching skills just wouldn't be appreciated there. The number of concerned parents who were present on their kids' first swimming class in the swimming pool in Amsterdam was quite astonishing, and lets me think that the class of people who think overparenting is the only way of raising their kids is not growing, but it has become a new normal.

On the contrary, these kids here were just having fun, as simple as that. And I'm sure that at least half of them will come back to the swimming pool on weekends or on their school break. And if only half of those succeed in developing a healthy approach to their bodies, it's a lot already.

At the same time, what they managed to learn during this completely anarchic swimming class is a feeling, one might even say a skill, that their Amsterdam peers will probably never acquire in their whole life. They learned how to overcome their fear of water. The method used might have been completely un-methodical and unreflected, but it was successful. And i'm sure that in the situation of 'emergency' (in case a kid falls off a sailing boat or off a cruise ship, as one of the parents in Amsterdam told me), a child without fears stands better chance of surviving than the one who got the knowledge in the 'proper' way.

As I have already said, the swimming teacher that lets his THEIR pupils run around a swimming pool naked whilst throwing swimming accessories at random visitors would have been fired anywhere else but here. Here nobody cares.

2011 was Amsterdam, 2019 is Brussels. It's by no means heaven here. But on that day on my short break in the swimming pool on Place du Jeu de Balle whilst I was watching the most anarchic swimming lesson I've ever seen in my life, a strange, but pleasant feeling got over me. I felt like I know why I'm here and not there.

* * *

I don't enjoy art anymore. I really don't. And it's not like I don't try – I go to theatre and galleries as religiously as before, sometimes even a couple of times a week. But it really doesn't work for me as it used to.

It's not a new thing this art disdain, it has been growing in me for awhile now, and I have become aware of it ever since I moved to Brussels. I tried to unpack this aversion in conversations with Charlie. Once he told me that I have to become bourgeois in order to enjoy art again.

I have been coming back to this thought quite often recently. Three weeks ago I saw this piece performed by members of an art organization from Brussels, a safe space where refugees and recent immigrants to the city can work on their artistic ideas and develop them with the help of settled (legally speaking) Belgian citizens. The majority of 15 performers in the show were people of color that are active as artists and participants of various workshops that take place there.

I would love to be able to say that they were performing. It seemed more like they were puppeteering. The thing is, most of the credit for their work went to a white straight Western European guy that usually works as a scenographer (that's what Wikipedia says), but in this piece he was responsible for 'artistic direction'. The show got standing ovation, almost every night apparently. Audiences were praising how daring this piece was, both artistically and politically.

Unfortunately after the piece not a single person that I talked to and that was smitten by its profound political, ecological, and social commitment (this is an actual quote from a panegyric published in one daily newspaper) seemed to be concerned with the fact that performers were paid merely 10 euros for a show.

A couple of months before, I'm not so far from the place where I recently saw this piece, this time it's a smaller scale program,program; 4 young writers in a relatively unknown studio space are reading excepts excerpts of their work. It was an evening organized by writers themselves, big institutions weren't involved, so I didn't fear that I was going to be confronted with a work of a yet another young Western European maker that was going to change the world with His radical take on art and politics that involves unpaid immigrant labour.

The event went well. Writers seemed humble, well aware of their vulnerability, especially in a situation where they needed to perform in front of an audience, no matter the fact that there were no more than 20 people in the room and that they knew most of the faces that came to their reading.

There was this guy, in his late 20s, curtain haircut straight from the 90s, tiny round glasses, acute level of social awkwardness. I could barely hear him even though he was using a microphone. Before he started reading he gave out a couple of copies of his publication so we could follow his poem in written form. Thin books he shared with us looked a bit like anarchist zines I used to read when I was a teenager.

His poem was long and senseless, and in the book he was playing with different fonts and typefaces. It was fun hearing his timid voice and at the same time following it in written form, realizing how he graphically organized his text.

I didn't dislike the show, it didn't make me angry or sad. But during and after it, I had only one question on my mind. As much as I wanted, I just I couldn't get it out of my head all night long. 'How do you pay your bills?', I wanted to ask him. 'Do you poems cover your rent?', was on repeat on my mind after every sentence he uttered. I went home thinking about the connection between the amount of money on artist's bank accounts and the type of art they're putting out in the world.

Fuck, I'm becoming really bitter, my mind is corrupted with these sinister ideas, I thought the next day. Fuck, I thought the next day, that I'm becoming really bitter, that my mind is corrupted with these sinister ideas. But then, I gave it a second thought and I realized that there was something in his lecture that made me think of this guy's bank account. There was something present in his voice, a specific quality of his behaviour, the way he was holding himself, his pronunciation, that made me think that this guy has never spent one single day of his life having a job outside of claustrophobic art world. Not a single day spent serving people behind the bar, counting money at the till, sorting products on the shelves in a supermarket, or chopping onions in the restaurant. Not a single day of experience that marks the last 10 years of my life, ever since I left my uni.

Let me be clear, I am not cynical. I'm not retreating to irony. This is not where my mind's at now. Nor I would like to personally attack this guy for what he is or how much money he has. I'm more trying to understand how am I supposed to connect to his work having in mind all the differences that structure and organize our everyday life? How to empathize with his poetic abstraction, how to enjoy in his imagination knowing that the way he makes use of his own time bears no resemblance to how my daily schedule looks like?

Polyamorous Love Song, the book I'm sending with this letter, didn't drastically change my opinions on art. It didn't make me a believer again nor did it give me reasons to fight off my lapse from art grace. Why is it here in the same package as this letter (aside from the fact that it's a part of Jasna's project :)) is that there's this thought by the end of the book that might help me in formulating why I feel what I feel recently.

Pop songs that we know of are all monogamous, no matter how open-minded the artist is. Serge Gainsbourg and Britney Spears have one thing in common: the both wrote songs (yes, it might be hard for you to believe, but Britney was involved in the process of creation of her own music) whose addressee is one single person. 'Love songs are propaganda for monogamy', as Mr. Wren (better said, one of the narrators in the book) would say.

Imagine a world were where love songs are not monogamous, I read a couple of pages later. Envisage an universe where pop songs are dedicated to various individuals. How would that change our perception of reality? If we lived in a possible world where pop songs we hear on the radio, sing in our showers, stream and share are not dedicated to one single person, but to a lot of different people at the same time, would our feelings be shaped differently because we'd have a language for something that exists outside of daily perceptions of the contemporary reality we are living in at the moment?

I remember well, in 2012 I saw a movie Weekend by Andrew Haigh. Have you seen it? The main characters are two guys, late 20s, early 30s, one is artist, other pool lifeguard, they hook up one night in a gay bar, start hanging out. The plot is set in England (I can't remember where), and doesn't cover a long stretch of time, only a couple of days. It mostly consists of their conversations about love, life, sex, coming out, gay marriages etc and their unimportant everyday life rituals like drinking coffee or cycling around.

I didn't experience a massive catharsis during the film, but I can still recall that a deep feeling of sadness hit me after I came back home from the cinema. The morning after the feeling was still there. It wasn't suffocating, but for the whole week after seeing the film whatever I was up to I could sense a feeling of soft and profound fragility that permeated all my actions. A type of vulnerable sensitivity impregnated my whole being.

I knew what instigated this state, and I was aware that it started after I've seen the film. But I didn't feel like it was one of the top ten films I've ever seen. I tried to analyze why I'd been so moody and realized that that was probably the first time in my life that on big screen I've seen a queer film where one of the gay characters doesn't die, isn't beaten up, castrated or raped, isn't ostracised by their community and where gay relationship isn't portrayed like a fucking war zone. The story of Weekend is simple – two gay guys hook up and spend couple of days together, eating, fucking, cooking, drinking coffee, chatting. Of course that there are consequences to my emotional wellbeing if gay reality in every film I'd seen until 2012 is depicted as tragedy.

Imagination is a powerful tool. And I'm not talking just about the under- and mis-representation of sexual and gender minorities on big screens. It's also about the fact that in 2019 I find absolutely necessary that we start treating art spaces as safe(r) spaces. Violent imagination in art works i'm seeing lately reproduces and reinforces the same power logic that exists outside of art world. The more time I spend finding the examples of an influential nature of aesthetic experience, and its complicity in the formation of how we perceive the world, how impregnated our minds are with what we've seen on TV and heard on the radio, the more I find non-negotiable the idea that artists should be accountable for the artistic universe that they present, and that only in safe(r) spaces a different type of creative imagination has the potential to emerge.

I don't think my art disdain will merely disappear once I become bourgeois (though I am glad to announce that this might finally happen quite soon). Even with more money on my bank account I will think that there are theatre makers and choreographers whose works are producing serious damage to our collective imagination, who don't recognize that this sacred ideal of Western European romantic tradition called freedom of artistic expression has it's its clear borders.

This idea from the last chapter of the book that pop songs not only depict but they also create is one I find truly revolutionary. Yes, we do need polyamorous love songs to change our boring monogamous reality :) But it's not just about non-monogamous pop songs, it's about the all forms of possible lives and existences that we sometimes successfully, sometimes tragically, but definitely very intuitively, are trying to articulate in our charged 2019.

Read the book and pass it on please. I'm sure you'll find someone interesting to share your thoughts with.

What about the swimming pool lesson? I don't know. I had a thought about the alternative ways of fighting my own fears of becoming creative being again and another thought about my new bank card, and another one about the updating the definition of the working class and another one on the different shades of whiteness and Western European wannabe radicals, but then I totally lost the connection with the rest of the letter :) Next time, I promise.

How's your new cyborg life? I want to hear everything. Come for a visit please, it's about time.

I love you, hope to see you soon XX p

ps Jasna's explanation is here! More on http://dearjacobwren.tumblr.com/

'So, I am giving this book to you, as a present. I am giving it to you, but on one condition. Or actually two. The first one is that you read it. The second is that, upon reading it, you do the same as I did: you think of a friend who you think might like it, who you think will be a nice addition to our small community, you give it to him/her as a present and along with it, write a letter to explain why you think this person and this book might go so well along. Then you give them the letter and the book, and you forward the letter to me, so I could publish it here.

You decide on the length of the letter, I am just asking for the language to be English so that more people could understand it… and, of course, at the end of the letter you make a small note about this principle so that when your friend is done with reading, he or she can send it to the next person, including a personalized letter, so that this circle could go on expanding…'

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