Life is always more than you can imagine. I need many different ways of thinking about life, from a palimpsest of experience, from music, poetry and cinema and philosophy and whatever, whoever if I am to do this job of mine: psychotherapist. Lately I have become so frustrated with the narrowness of writing, thinking and all of that, which says it is directly related to this thing, psychotherapy. It’s like trying to watch a film on an iPhone.
This week I have found Elizabeth Bowen, Will Alexander, Resmaa Menakem, Fred Moten, Laura Dern and David Lynch helping me out.
Miles Davis’ advice to keyboard player Kei Akagi reminds me of something about reading certain kinds of writing, like Fred Moten’s poetry, or in psychotherapy sessions listening to people speak. I sometimes manage to read, to hear ‘it’. I’m not trying to work out what ‘it’ means. I’ve no idea what ‘it’ means, but if I notice ‘it’ things happen, for sure.
I find myself getting somewhere with whoever, or whatever (a book, a poem) I am supposed to be with. An emphasis. Something comes across, and I get it. So when someone like Miles Davis tells you to mean it, what do you do? You’d better be listening, looking out, sensing what’s coming to you.
Freud’s id, the unconscious, sounds like Miles Davis’s it. Or Kei Agaki’s, which would need to be together with but not get lost in Miles Davis’. I read things about ‘change in psychotherapy’ that seem so unmusical, so unresponsive. You can’t write about this stuff, and you won’t be able to do your job (musician, psychotherapist, writer) if you don’t get
it.
There’s also silence. You’ll find it there, too.
Kei Agaki also said this: ‘Early on, Miles came over and grabbed my left hand and put it behind my back. Piano players tend to play a phrase and use the left hand to fill in.’
Daydreaming can be the present plus: a promise of immensity without having to go anywhere, buy anything else, do anything more. More of the impossible dream of absolute presence. Life can expand and feel a crazy kind of freedom.
Daydreaming can be a movement into possibility, an experiment in space and time.
There’s a relationship with improvisation. If you improvise, in a band maybe, you can play something cool without changing the chords, while sticking with the rhythm.
Presence plus means not escaping into a daydream but remaining with what’s going on like you would with the chords, the rhythm.
I was so sad, last year, to hear that Christian Boltanski had died.
Like a couple of other artists his work seems to have punctuated my life in surprising ways. Agnes Varda is the same: I have found myself walking in a park in Paris from a film of hers, and remembered the film as the park without the strange runner who kept circling us that afternoon. If it hadn’t been for the film how would I remember the park without the runner? The film: an exclamation mark for the park. Boltanski shows are where I have ended up more than once by accident while at a loose end in Paris.
Whatever punctuates our lives, it’s worth noticing. Someone was telling me about the way their cat relates to space. It made me think how space affects us. Attachment. Attachment theory is so incomplete it makes me anxious and avoidant. Attachment doesn’t happen out of space, or time. Where on earth do people think attachment happens?
So here’s a picture I find beautiful of children moving across space, brought to you from a Boltanski show that ended on the same day as my birthday in 1980.
