Welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m incredibly grateful that people are liking Surfacing, and honestly, struggling a little to manage all the things I’ve been feeling. It’s wonderful, but it also fills me with dread.
Wonder, to me, is an uneasy feeling. It’s beautiful but also uncomfortable. You tell yourself to relax and enjoy it, but part of your brain is saying, “Last time you felt good about something it blew up in your face,” and another part is saying “Are you sure everyone isn’t lying? It won’t last.” It sucks to feel that way when something nice happens. Roald Dahl kind of gets to it when he describes the Golden Ticket winners entering the chocolate factory for the first time:
The children and their parents were too flabbergasted to speak. They were staggered. They were dumfounded. They were bewildered and dazzled. They were completely bowled over by the hugeness of the thing. They simply stood and stared.
Wonka keeps telling them how great the factory is, but they can’t comprehend it. When you enter unknown territory, as wonderful as it may seem, there’s also a sense of dread. Maybe the adults feel it more than the children in that scene—and it turns out they were right to feel it—but it’s there. It’s also telling that Charlie and Grandpa Joe, who’ve been through the most, are the most wary. The rich people quickly shrug off any doubts and dig right in.
A friend texted me from San Francisco and said things that I knew were nice but I couldn’t really read what she wrote. I kept looking at my phone and then looking away like my cat does when I try to get him to look at himself in the mirror. His brain has simply decided it is not going to go there.
I was trying to remember when happiness and newness felt comfortable. I’m incredibly nearsighted. When I got my first pair of glasses at age five, a whole new world opened up, one I had literally never seen before. I remember driving home from the doctor and looking out the window, amazed at all the things I could see.
When you’re young I guess you just don’t know. At least for a little while. But eventually, for a lot of us, dread and wonder get linked. I’m calling this wonderful dreadful feeling “wonder dread.” And that’s what it’s been like when people say nice things about this newsletter.
I’m definitely not going to be all personal very often, but I figured I would share this. If someone had told me a few months ago or a few years ago that I would be able to type something out twice a week that was lucid and comprehensible, I would not have believed them. I would have pointed out that I had daily panic attacks that left me nearly catatonic at the mere thought of doing something I’d done nearly every day of my life up until them. I would have scratched the rashes I still get from the months of dark days, bad hygiene, and undiagnosed PTSD.
And now I’ve been doing it for over a month?! It’s still very rough, there’s a long way to go, but it’s a start. One of the things that has helped is this post it.
It comes from something a great therapist I had once said, and it lives on my kitchen cabinet. I’ve used it several times today!
The day after my friend texted me I thought about how I would handle a compliment if I believed in myself. I would at least read it, I figured, and try to take it to heart. I went for a walk, and when I got to my favorite spot by the river I got out my phone and read over what she said. Then I copied it into my notebook a few times until it didn’t feel incomprehensible any more. I might have even started to believe it.
Anyway, now I feel like I’ve come perilously close to writing something called “On Wonder,” which makes me want to die pf embarrassment. Let’s close out of this introspective spiral section and get on to Wednesdays Are For Sharing! Or whatever it’s called!
Movie of the week
SUTURE!
This movie is so wild and evil and clever. It’s about two identical twins who learn about each other’s existence and meet for the first time when their father dies. One of them is Vincent, a wealthy white playboy; the other is Clay, a Black man who never knew his father. Clay is injured in an accident and mistakenly identified as his brother, who has disappeared. He struggles to regain his memories and identity as everyone around him insists he is Vincent—the chief suspect in their father’s murder. It’s audacious and brilliant, if uneven, and I want to hear what everyone thinks about it.
It’s on Tubi for free and also on Amazon Prime and some other places for money.
Current art obsession
This 1967 Lygia Clark piece called "Eu e o Tu" (“I and You”) is what I think about when I am not struggling to accept a compliment.
Clark was a Brazilian artist active from the 1950s through the 1980s. She made paintings and installations and was involved in art therapy and lots of things, but her series of these hazmat performance pieces is my favorite. They’re listed on her site under “Non-Art,” which is exquisite in and of itself, but her overarching title for the series is “Fantasmática do Corpo” which usually gets translated to “Nostalgia for the Body.” She described the works as “propositions,” saying, “They are not a work of art; it is the moment of the act of feeling that is important.”
They are magical but also really dark and fucked up. In “Cesariano,” the subject puts on one of the hazmat suits and a balloon is placed in the belly pouch. They then must get the balloon out without popping or damaging it. Are we allowed to do emojis on Substack? Because 🥹.
The one I’m really obsessed with is “Eu e o Tu,” though. Here’s Clark’s description:
“Proposal designed for a wedding, in which the man and the woman are dressed with a plastic macacao. The macacões have an inner lining made with various materials (plastic bag filled with water, vegetable foam, borracha, etc.), which gives the man a feminine sensation and the woman a masculine sensation. A hood, made of the same plastic material covered with fabric, covers the other two participants, and a drinking tube, like an umbilical cord, unites the two macacões.
Touching each other, the participants discover small openings in the macacões (6 eclair dates) that give access to the inner lining, translating the sensations experienced by others. In this way, the man meets the woman and she discovers the body of the man.”
For! A! Wedding!!! I’m intrigued by the photo where there are multiple people on a beach performing “Eu e o Tu,” and there is an image on Clark’s site of a family suiting up, so I don’t think she was that strict about the matrimonial part, but imagine if we, as a culture, all agreed to do this for weddings and other events.
Your perception of the piece really changes depending on which pictures you look at. The beach one is like an outtake from a Man or Astro-Man? rehearsal, whereas there are others that look like surveillance videos or snuff films.
It’s worth noting that these obviously are the worst hazmat suits ever—big open spaces for fumes to get in, no coverings for hands, slits, easily opened zippers, etc. Lots of vulnerabilities to exploit or explore.
There’s a 2012 reenactment on YouTube that I had to stop about 30 times because it made me wildly giddy and uncomfortable and I just realized we’ve come back to wonder dread. GODDAMN IT! I did not plan that. But it’s true.
I maintain there is no way to predict what anyone would do once they put those suits on, which is what makes it brilliant. It’s too bad “Eu e o Tu” only lives on via still images and the preserved suits, because other than the Earth Room and the fur teacup, I can’t think of any other art work that I would look at every single day if I could.
Links
Last week I mentioned how the sentence “Black women experience more intense symptoms than white women but are less likely to be treated for them” is informative, but ultimately still centers white women as a point of comparison. This tweet from Efe Osaren, an abolitionist midwife, is about yet another area where Black women experience medical racism, and she puts it with brutal clarity:
When we lead with disparity data porn ("BW are 3x more likely to die in pregnancy"), it misses the behavior of the workforce that is killing Black pregnant people. "Why are we not saying physicians are more likely to kill pregnant ppl w/o accountability?"It’s worth reading her whole thread, where she goes through and rewrites headlines from the National Library of Medicine to make the medical profession accountable for Black women dying in their care.
This essay, “Mount Fear Diary,” by Joshua Hunt, is extraordinary.
I enjoyed This Barbie Hates Cops and Flash Flood Emergency Barbie.
The family of Henrietta Lacks got a small measure of reparations this week. The Oprah movie about her is not bad.
A request
Going to do the cringiest thing possible and make a direct appeal here—I need paying subscribers! A few more would mean I can stop holding my breath all the time, at least for a little while. I might even get to the point where I can breathe in and out on a regular basis. If you can subscribe, please do. If you can’t, believe me I understand!! I can’t afford to be a paying subscriber to anyone right now, which is extremely messed up. So I get it.
Thanks for the personal share, so relatable and inspiring.