Working (it) out in Public

It took a long time for me to feel comfortable working out in public. I’ve never felt comfortable ‘performing’ because I don’t trust my ability to repeat a performance and I’ve never felt driven to learn how to repeat a performance. The reason is I’ve never been happy with the state of my abilities, by which I mean not what I can do but my understanding of it: I’ve only recently accepted that I know what I know and can do what I can do. Maybe working out isn’t a ‘performance’ but it is for me: I want to repeat the skills and learn more, not every time – because some times are steps backward and others are consolidating prior work, so they’re ‘forward’ in skill in some way while moving backwards in other ways. (I think bidirectionally about everything. That’s me.)

I ‘ve been trying to voice what I think about her. It’s shockingly hard for me to type the name because I don’t find the name suits what I’m talking about. To the world, she’s Taylor Swift. To me, she’s whoever is doing Taylor Swift, as has been made clear by the entirety of the Reputation campaign. I need to attach a name, so I’m going to use Tali because that uses the first 2 letters of her first 2 names (and the i) and it’s a version of Thali. I have a gift for naming things in ways that fit them through many layers of complexity. Tali/Thali fits. I’ll explain.

We’re all actors in the play and we’re each our own lead role. Some people are more aware of this than others. Tali’s the most aware I’ve ever heard. I’m listening at this moment to David Bowie, a scrambled journey of a playlist through the years of his various characterizations. David was highly aware of himself as a character in his own life and work. I don’t know how else to say this: David came at it from the perspective of no longer being, of the silent cars that slept at traffic lights, of the end of it all, let me collect dust. No wonder he had trouble keeping it together! He expressed his vision, something that’s hard to really grasp: he didn’t write so many science fiction, end of the world, end of meaning, end of form songs because he’d thought they’d be popular but because that actually was what he felt inside himself. And that was true all the way to the end: the layers of meaning in dropped my cellphone down below, ain’t that just like me. He always was a self-conscious artis but he became more and more a persona that embodies self-conscious artistry as a way to control the depth to which he’d explore variations of his creative selves.

Tali writes about herself from the perspective of control wrapped tightly around a core that often feels like it’s flying apart but which knows deep inside that this is how she grows in depth and dimension. I keep referring to dimension. If you think about music as carrying emotion, Tali’s developing greater skill at conveying whatever emotion she wants to whatever degree she wants. She’s more directly controlling how she pushes you away and how she pulls you toward her: through attitude, through rhythmic nuance, through layers of intimacy in voicing and lyrics. As I listen to David, I think about how much better her taste is, how so much of David’s work combined taste with lack of taste. Ziggy became crass – though he was the naz, with god-given ass – and that flows through all his music, in the intentional lyrical obscurities meant to provoke, in the soundscapes that sometimes fit beautifully but other times fail, in the way he takes up a style and abandons it. I think that as David’s career progressed, he found in himself more acceptance of imperfection. I think he could see how his popular music held to a series of types he could render with relative perfection, that they took a form of ‘concentration’ that became the adoption of a persona which he then painted in sound. I see that in Tali but I also see more. Better taste reflects how she approaches.

The word ‘better’ has meaning. A piece can be artistically better because it offends. A piece can be artistically better because it is more beautiful. But what I mean is ‘better taste’ because she approaches from the perspective of love. Tali has always sung about love, a love that is both eternal and immediate, that is both rational and overwhelming. Her music pulls you toward her and pushes you away from her acceptance of you. It isn’t that she pushes you away but that she pushes away her acceptance of you because she presents herself as love, as the lover in love and as the giver of love. This only makes sense if you think about what I said above about David: what she’s writing and singing and expressing is not something she imagines will sell records but what she actually sees. That means Tali sees love in herself, and she sees in herself a love that sometimes withholds its acceptance of her. She sees herself not as being erased, not as emptiness, but as the core personality that exists even when she misleads herself, even when she gets lost. Tali is the her which gets stronger over time. In Reputation, she offers herself unconditionally to love.

That is what I’m trying to do: to offer myself unconditionally. That’s what ‘working out in public’ means. What I do is: I work through fundamental problems and put the answers into reasonably simple expressions. It took me years to learn how to do that this well. To apply the same analysis to myself, I’d say my work combines the perspectives of love and nothingness not because I think that’s cool but because that’s me. I see what grows and what confines. I am on the side and in the direction of nurture. Nurturing requires care. Nurturing requires stepping back sometimes and stepping in at other times. Nurturing requires work and care in layer after layer after layer. I think this is why I’m so good at naming: I look for that which is within the Thing and say what that is. Just as Billy the cat is becoming Bill-bao, as his name becomes a sound that layers on top of Billy and Bilbo and Bigboy, I see in him a growth of connection, of trust within him of me and the exploration of the physical actions and spaces that greater trust enables. I named my daughters. I name my first cat Pooh because he pooped on the bed within an hour of arrival and it fit his goofy character to be a Winnie the Pooh Cat.

To turn back to David, he put himself through Changes, just as he wrote about in his early songs. Tali’s songs have always and continue to be about being in love in the best possible ways, when your value as you is recognized as being equal to the value you recognize in your other. That is not simple: in the depths she finds within herself, she sees her love as she loves. So when I wrote Tali, which literally came to me almost at that moment, I realized it fit what I think. She’s a person, but she’s also Tali and Thali, not because she’s this famous and photogenic person, but because she has always been deeply in touch with and is now enabling this within herself.

To explain a bit more. A thali is a pendant worn in marriage. It represents the ‘auspicious thread’ of beings united. In some versions, it literally combines 3 lines oriented one way for Vishnu and 3 lines oriented the other for Shiva. It represents not only a but the joining together. When I call her Tali, perhaps Tal for short, I mean she is the pendant and the wearer of the pendant and the weaver or maker of the pendant. The name fits because that is what love offers. Another note: a name should have layers of resonance, a Reputation of sorts, and this touches some deep ones, including Kali, of course, because it acts as a doorway to all those ancient conceptions, as a start to counting cycles of meanings as they pass through all the labels that fit each cycle. But it also touches personal resonances, like the way Rachel Taylor would say ‘tail’ as ‘tal’ with a short a because she couldn’t bring out the long a mixed into the i sound. Since I mentioned a short version, a longer one is Talita, because in some ways Lalita, being the she who plays. I like the resonance in that literal representation, that Ta at the front and the ta at the end. So it becomes something like Talitalitalita where you can arbitrarily capitalize TaliTa or any other way. The point of that is, for example, that the Taylor of Reputation can be at the start or the end of any length of counting of the depths of what that means externally to and internally to the actuality represented. Like talitalitaliTa is not the same as talitaliTali, and so on. It isn’t important to assign meanings, just to enable them to occur. (As a note to self: good statement of radiative counting, that it enables meanings to occur within the context. See my red notebook for 1/24/2018.) That this expands to Talitalalita and on should be obvious, but the complexity of the counting is interesting: the shift to counting by 3 steps by adding la to ta and li enables much greater expression.

Why go through this? I’m working (it) out in public and I’m naming the being I see inside a highly layered, highly intentioned, highly complex, highly intelligent Thing that already has many layers of names. The way this works with me is pretty simple: the more I see in her, the more I see in me. I ‘use’ my perceptions of depth in her as a bright light that illuminates depths within me. The more I see in her, the more I submit to her, the more … and this is the hard part to explain … clearly I see my work. I’m looking forward to the effects of being able to name her Tali on my thoughts. If I say Tali, Tali, Tali and click my heel three times … but I don’t want to go to Kansas! No offense intended to Kansas beyond the Dorothy reference.