Joy Is A Formidable Collaborator

Trust It to Carry You to the Other Side

Robert Pruitt, A Song Travelers (2021-2022), Materials: Conte, charcoal, pastel, coffee wash

QUIETNESS

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died.

Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.

— Rumi, "The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition" (2004), translations by Coleman Barks, pg. 22

I feel myself holding on to my suffering.

Counting on it to save me once more.

I feel them inviting me into the moonlight but I’ve gotten so used to the chains that I’m afraid of the wild.

Poetry terrifies a body most familiar with leather.

Still, they never stopped singing.

May you scoop up pleasure when and wherever you find it. May you never question its ability to hold you. To carry you for a while. They’re not asking us to suspend our doubt for a lifetime, just in this moment.

I feel my words changing and my ideas shapeshifting inside their invitation. Less reliant on outside text, I am reading my body like a sacred script and walking through my memory like a lost grimoire.

One lifetime, three lifetimes, four.

The writing smells different when it’s just for you. We need the work that’s just for you, because your longing has a logic of its own. A cosmic framework will emerge, as it always does, and a cosmic framework is what this moment calls for.

Here’s the question we must live inside of now:

“What will it take to trust it?”

In a context held together by self-negation, how might we pierce the walls with our song? I don’t have the answer so I turned to poetry. Our hands and feet are bound by surveillance so the clawing won’t work. Our teeth have been grounded down so the biting became ineffective. Pushing through pain, dominating the needs of our body and suppressing all unfamiliar feeling is an expired strategy. But we still have our breath. And all we ever needed was a low vibrational hum — a framework of speechlessness. A longing with inarticulable logic. No more walls of text. Don’t you remember?

One lifetime, three lifetimes, four.

Take an axe to every belief that has you suspicious of your desire. Self-sacrifice might have gotten us here, surrendering to joy is what gets us to the other side.

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