Project Prologue: A Brief History of Listening

Note: This prologue was completed during a performance workshop conducted by Ernesto Pujol, social choreographer, that he facilitates annually for second year School of Visual Arts, Art Practice graduate students. Since it was the basis of thinking about the material of my life as a starting point for considering the direction of this project, I offer it here as a form of personal introduction and context. 

I have one memory as a baby. In that memory I can hear my mother and father disagreeing about something to do with me. My dad is holding me in the dark in our living room. My mom stands in the light of the entrance to the hallway. She doesn’t like that I’m up so late, or the way he is holding me, or feeding me…something of that nature. He responds with short, mildly annoyed disagreement. She does not like what he says, but she does not prolong the argument. Whatever my dad is doing, he keeps doing. The ordinariness of this conflict, its lack of resolution, satisfaction, or drama stays with me to this day. Its possible presence as an unnoticed agitator along with the thousands that likely accompanied it leading up to my parent’s divorce are a subtle itch I can’t scratch. Life goes on while these moments tear away at the threads of whatever fabric holds a family together. No one notices the small unravelings until the hole seems too big to repair. Things fall apart.

When I get pregnant with our daughter at thirty years old, my husband and best friend since high school decides he can’t do our life anymore and leaves. It is sudden, painful, and disorienting. I spend most of my pregnancy trying to regain my footing so I can be a parent in the wake of our divorce. At every doctor appointment and on every baby blog I see warnings about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, letting me know that life under my care can die…suddenly without notice. It’s a terrifying thought for anyone, but the fear hits me in a certain way because I am in the middle of this other turbulence. I research in order to mitigate every risk I can, then I wait and listen. Like many parents, I listen to my child breathe every night. I don’t think I entered REM for 18 months. She breathes arrhythmically. Apparently, it’s normal. Either way, an offbeat pause feels like an eternity. I practice waiting in these eternities. I try to find my sanity as my new known universe hangs in the balance, and I wait powerless until her next inhalation confirms she hasn’t stopped breathing. I know that if I allow this listening to make me insane, I will miss out on much of the joy of her life. It is a nightly exercise in humility that oscillates between questioning and acceptance. Motherhood constantly challenges me to face the simultaneity of my ability to influence, protect, impress upon another…and also my complete powerlessness, the ease at which my efforts can come to an end, and the potential for the disastrous effects of my mistakes. 

At twenty-three years old I get hired to listen to people in crisis, people who have experienced demeaning and private violence. I get trained in active listening skills. I am told to listen without judgment. I am told to listen without investigating the truth, because that’s the job of the police; our job is to not assume women are lying. I am told to listen as an act of support, as a place of release for someone who is on the edge and may have no one else to listen to them. I might question my worthiness or ability to fulfil this important role, but it is made clear that the need is so great, and the pay is so low that remaining in that questioning isn’t productive. I sit behind a desk at twenty-three and because I am sitting behind this desk, in an office, people tell me the most intimate details of their lives. I feel like a fraud. I move out from behind the misleading desk. I sit on the couch with them. I fill out the forms I am required to fill out so that the shelter keeps getting funding. I try not to stop the flow of their stories, to prioritize the humanity of their stories over using the information they are giving me to complete the intake form. That is my act of resistance in an underfunded system that swallows up any genuine desire to be of help. Sometimes all of the stories can feel the same. Sometimes I feel the cynicism of being able to predict what happens next, and hearing the predictability of my response. Sometimes I resent the endless and nauseating wave of violence that gets spewed into my ears and into my brain day after day. One day there was one story I didn’t hear. My brain knew it was too much and just shut itself down. But what did that do for this woman with the worst story of all, to have no one to listen? Did she notice? Who do these women think I am? Who does this job think I am? I am not without feeling, without limits. Being in this job means giving what they take, not what I want to give. Or can give. Of course, then I remember that no one person is designing this difficulty for me. It just is. Working in the shelter and hearing those stories allowed me to see the darkest and brightest spots of life. It forced me to admit how disgusting people can be. The violence existed and it would have existed whether I heard about it or not. Ultimately, I decided I would rather have heard it, but what does it say about our society when we fear that just the recounting of our daily violence is, in itself, damaging? I also listened to a lot of comments about me from the women who told me their stories – was I helpful, was I not, was I personable, was I not, were my words helpful, were they not – lots of daily feedback from people who didn’t have the luxury of glossing over the truth because I was the gatekeeper of information and resources and if they were there, we were their last option. This was a very decentralizing experience for me because their feedback wasn’t to gain an advantage over me, it wasn’t to win, it was so they could survive. 

I also heard so many experiences – women who worked in offices, women who did exotic dancing, women who wanted to stay home, women who were forced to stay home, women who were girls. Stepdaughters, so many stepdaughters. Teenage girl friends of stepdaughters. Women whose children were their main lifeline, women who lost their children and who carried an ocean of grief threatening to spill over the edges at any moment and sometimes did. Articulate women, women in puddles of tears on the floor, articulate women in puddles of tears on the floor. Women with addictions. Women so different from me who blew my world wide open. Women who taught me things – how to do all kinds of things – in the middle of their own crises. In all the differences, I heard themes, like threads stitching together the whole quilted mess of experiences. Patterns of strength and resilience. Survival. Even among the angriest, most “difficult” people…survival. 

I listen to music and over the years (many years) have learned to allow my body to listen to the music without passing through the filter of my brain. If my brain doesn’t interrupt, the music talks to my feet, my hands, arms, hips, head, and every part of my body. My heart can connect to the drumbeat. There is a message for every part of my body if I will only allow it. I stand in the way with my analyzing and my doubt and unhelpful questioning. I stand in the way of my own movement, and my own taking up of space. I stand in the way of my own expression that isn’t overly filtered. And for good reason. People can be horrible to one another. We judge arbitrarily. We create scarcity where there is none and deny people entrance. Dance is teaching me how to survive that – just me in my body as I am in this moment, without hanging the validity of my existence on a set of cerebral justifications of my every move.

At 26 years old I take a job with the State of Oklahoma that allows me to take a temporary break from the crisis intervention world of domestic violence and focus on the prevention of social problems. In other words, instead of helping drowning people pull themselves out of a river, my job becomes figuring out how and why people are falling into the river. My first assignment is to work with four rural Oklahoma communities, all experiencing high rates of methamphetamine use. Each community puts together a task force of people who represent their community. My job is to listen to their experiences and help them organize what they know into an actionable plan. I am the loom and they are the threads. If we organize those threads, we can create a bigger picture and find the patterns. And there are definite patterns. If you think of those four community assessments that we did as four tapestries – they would look like they were from the same series – four rural Oklahoma communities with a meth problem, but each tapestry would also be distinct in important ways. The same, but different. Universal trends, but with local specificities. 

I think from the time I was an infant, I’ve been listening for and flagging moments of fracture, brokenness, disconnection and searching for the patterns so that I can at least try and help prevent or heal the wounds. I listen to try to find out what led to a person’s divorce, their addiction, the violence, their depression, and self-doubt? What caused the fractures in my own life? Along the way, I figured out that not everything can be prevented or fixed, but often the broken pieces can be used to create something new, something even more beautiful, something more resilient. I realized that I’ve been listening to people interact – my parents, the women in the shelter, the community members, myself with others, myself with myself. I’ve been listening to us relate. These interactions are a fundamental, actually an inescapable, part of the human experience, but we are left to use the tools we have in our toolbox to relate with one another. I’ve noticed some of these tools tend to be destructive, at least in certain applications, but again, we don’t have the option of not interacting even if we don’t have the right tool for the job. Like a sledgehammer to a nail, we will carry on in our destruction until we have better tools. But even when you get a better tool, you must practice using it. I started to wonder, what if art could help us practice using different tools? Could my role as an artist be to help envision what better worlds we could build with better tools? What if art practices provided a method of experimenting with what we could build together, if we went about it a little differently? Who is already doing this work?