Hi - I’m behind on writing about the books I read last year, but instead I’m sending a little rambling essay I wrote for an event I curated and hosted last Thursday called Love Letters. Every year around Valentine’s Day, my friend Mon and I get a group of artists to read letters that are meaningful to them. Some of the letters are ones they’ve written, some are from friends and family members, some are new epistolary works they composed just for the event. After the reading, the audience writes Valentine’s Day postcards of solidarity and support to people who are incarcerated.
This year the event was held at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. To introduce the reading, I wrote a little letter to the audience. I wrote it in the style of all my letters and in the style of this newsletter: lots of jumping around in thought based on what’s been on my mind, descriptions of movies and music that have been flitting around my mind. So I thought it made sense for me to share it here. (Oh, and — spoilers for the movie End of Evangelion?)
Dear Audience,
I’m so glad we have this opportunity to be together. I thought about that first sentence for a while; There are a lot of ways to greet a group of people. Some of my favorite ways to greet a group of people are saying, “well here we all are,” or the classic, “looks like the gang’s all here!” I’m also fond of Tim Curry’s line to the gathered attendees in the classic 1985 movie Clue, “I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today.”
We’re all gathered here today because in 2020, I texted my friend Monica and asked her if she wanted to host a reading for Valentines Day where a bunch of people would read letters and then close the night out writing Valentine postcards to incarcerated people. It would, I thought, be a joyful way to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a holiday that I personally find insane, whether or not you are in love.
Your mileage may vary, but I’m not sure I enjoy the idea of celebrating love; if love exists; its persistence is a celebration. But I like the idea of setting aside a day to cultivate love; generosity, connection.
When I write letters, I typically convey a snapshot of what I have been thinking about or feeling or listening to. Which is why I want to talk to you about murmurations; which are having a real moment! People keep sharing videos of starling murmurations on Instagram and tiktok, often with no captions or explanation, the best kind of share. The birds form a wavy gestalt, a single body curving in on itself and breaking, cracking into smaller pieces and reforming. These amoebic cyclings, dispersals and reconstitutions, thousands of birds becoming a single oscillating soundwave, are soothing, inscrutable, breathtaking. In some of the videos, they look like gigantic ghosts fighting or dancing in the air; in one video, a flock of sheep below them encircle each other, then jet in amoebic waves to the right, zig zagging down and back up a slight incline on a damp green hill as the ghost birds waltz chaotically above them.
There is a common trope where someone tries to comment on something in the zeitgeist by telling you why it is popular, and in doing so really just conveys their own thinly veiled projections of their feelings, and that’s what I am going to do right now. People like to watch starling murmurations because they are dumbfounding, but dumbfounding in the way religious experience or love is dumbfounding. Is all this really here? For free? For everyone? These stars, these birds, these people, this world I do not understand but would die to save.
I watch possibly less glorious but no less hypnotic pigeon murmurations on my daily walk up 37th Avenue and down 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights. I like to watch the way pigeons scatter, object and agree with each other as they hop between rooftops on top of Indian grocery stores, a cafe, a post office, a Duane Reade. Their lifting and setting provides a rhythm to my day, a frenetic score that underpins the more controlled meridian of my walk.
I always imagined that murmurations were the result of some latent telepathy or unexplained sense that birds have and humans do not, but the explanation is less sexy: when one bird moves, a group of birds next to it reacts in concert, almost immediately, so that one movement multiplies exponentially.
With pigeons, this sometimes results in frantic disagreements, as birds flutter in opposite directions, then correct themselves, sometimes meeting mid-air, seeming to either apologize or to divorce themselves from the group. What we’re witnessing is often the battle between individualization & synchronization, the interrogations that build love.
Which brings me to some of the movies I’ve been watching. I recently saw End of Evangelion for the first time, the unhinged and beautiful conclusion of Hideaki Anno’s 90’s anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which a group of children pilot gigantic monsters to fight godlike aliens called Angels. In the final film, the protagonist Shinji is struggling with the decision to let the entirety of humanity become one being by losing group differentiation. The climax of the film suddenly shifts to live action and we see train tracks, electrical grids and birds, then an audience of young people seated in a theater, presumably watching End of Evangelion, as the protagonists exhort them to go forth and create art rather than just consume it. We never find out exactly what happens to Shinji, but in the last second of the film, Shinji’s crush, who has taunted him throughout their adolescence but dies earlier in the film, moves her eyes, signaling life, then taunts him one more time, calling him disgusting, her mockery the purest distilment of individualization, a necessary precondition of love.
A song I’ve been listening to lately is a Rosalía cover of Will Oldham’s 1999 dark ballad I See A Darkness, a heartbreaking song about suicidal ideation held back by a male friendship that is all-consuming, redemptive, hopeful, something that Rosalìa conveys in flickers of desperation between a stripped-down acoustic guitar.
Anyway I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today. A theme emerging in the videos and readings today is grief; the capacity for grief, the necessity of grief, and love; the vibrancy of love, the sense of wonder at discovery and the wonder that remains, still, when we lose someone. Were we all really here? At the end of this world we do not understand but would die to save.
I hope you will stick around after the show to write some postcards - more on that later - if not today, then when we meet again, in whatever form we take.
love,
me
I hope you enjoyed the letter.
Here’s some albums I’ve been listening to:
Mongo Santamaria - Afro Roots (1958/1959)
Laraaji - Karimba (2023)
Rosalía - Los Angeles (2017)
Kaho Matsui - NO MORE LOSSES (2023)
Seeming To - Dust Gatherers (2023)
Kelela - Raven (2023)
Taylor Deupree - Small Winters (2022)
Here’s some books I’m currently reading, according to my Italic Type profile:
Until next time!
-R