A Digital Anthology, 2023
Zoe Imani Sharpe & Fan Wu
BOUT THAT LIFE was a four-week workshop that explored “life writing:” the textures of a life lived; the ethics of how a life might ought to be lived; and what the aesthetic supplement of “writing” (broadly construed) casts back upon that life. Each week, we read and discussed a variety of texts, then composed ourselves through practices of watching, listening, moving, sensing.
We imagined the structure of this series as an hourglass, a (curved, bodily) channel in which the totality of “life material” flows from its widest opening to its most narrow, emptying again at its generous base. It was through this shape that we tracked the movement of vitality from the universal and cosmic down to the singular and subtle.
Some questions we explored together:
Do we dare turn away from that which exhausts our vitality when it promises so much reward under a capitalist aegis? What can we learn from following an ethics of life in Daoist terms (particularly in the writings of Zhuangzi¹), over Western ideals of happiness or knowledge-seeking? What about the role of chance,² divination,³ materiality,⁴ place,⁵ family,⁶ nourishment⁷ and immanence?⁸ How does the body “extend into space well beyond the skin?” ⁹ What kinds of compositional processes attend to, in Akilah Oliver’s words, “my memory of my body as a life”?¹⁰
This digital anthology, featuring some of the work composed during these four weeks, offers answers—— and new refinements to those questions.
———
¹ Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (trans. Brook Ziporyn)
² On Nietzsche (trans. Bruce Boone), Georges Bataille
³ The Choice, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri
⁴ or, on being the other woman, Simone White
⁵ In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, Etel Adnan
⁶ Maigre Dog, Donna James
⁷ Vital Nourishment, François Jullien
⁸ Hello, The Roses, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
⁹ No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh
¹⁰ The Putterer’s Notebook, Akilah Oliver