Piece (2) ~
CELESTIAL DRIFTWOOD
On March 5th 2021, Rachika Nayar released her debut album, Our Hands Against the Dusk, and this work touches me on a visceral level. I was around in her Brooklyn apartment while she was working on this album in 2016 and 2017 and we would have many conversation about death, queerness, love, and transience—themes that are especially salient in this work.
When talking about her own work, Rachika shares an experience she had while reading Bhanu Khapil’s book, Ban en Banlieue. In the book, Khapil recounts how her friend Petra Kuppers, a disability activist, said this regarding her novel, “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in your story. I’m not interested in where you are from … I am not interested in disclosure, I am interested in discharge.” This resonated with Rachika in the same way it resonates with me and for these reasons, I can only write about this work in a vulnerable and honest way; I am implicated in this work so I must discharge.
In the summer of 2016, I crashed on Rachika’s couch and wrote about dying almost every day until everything was collected into a small collection titled Conversations with Death. Death laid on the couch with me and breathed down the nape of my neck as I slept at night. When I woke up at noon, death would sit with me as we sipped warm wine from last evening and we talked about nothing. Death smiled at me with lidless eyes from every reflection and wherever I went, the distant cacophony of death’s hooves hitting the pavement followed me through hot, sunny, Brooklyn days.
I wanted to run headfirst into the loving embrace of death and when I wasn’t doing that, I was drunk, or writing, or talking to Rachika about love and the loneliness it engenders when it’s withheld or not received. These conversations, for me, were always balanced on a fulcrum of melancholy that I later came to understand was fed by our feeling of transience in this world. We had eyes, we had ears, and we could feel—ironically—that all around us, we were being squeezed out of our bodies into a dissociative mist and the only way we could survive was to run into each other’s arms and affirm each other.
The first track of her album,“The Trembling of Glass,” is built on a repetitious guitar loop that she reworks into the foundation for the rest of the album. The song moves from this minimalist, looping guitar sequence to a distorted and warbled wail at around the 30 second mark—as if something expansive can no longer be held back and, in the words of James Baldwin, “my dungeon shook.” From there, the music crescendos into a layering of pianos, cellos, and synths to create a liminal space where the shackles fall away from my spirit and I feel, deeply.
As I listen, I imagine eyes turned towards the evening sky and leaking up motes of light to join a torrent of celestial bodies rushing into the farthest corners of the ether. I hear my good friend YATTA’s voice on the track, “Losing Too is Still Ours” and feel the ephemeral wail of my ancestors lifting my spirit out of my body and into a river of stars where my ego dissolves into something unfathomable. This melancholia, this yearning, this hope translates into the somatic as tears and shaking. It reminds me of my dearly departed friend, Mariana, appearing to me in dreams as an oceanic spirit residing in the delta of a celestial river while she prepares to infuse her essence deeply into the currents of the universe. Rachika speaks to me of liminality—something that’s always been on our minds and bodies as we fashion our transience into something deep, knowing, sensual, and in-between realities.
Rachika devotes the song, “Aurobindo” to a departed family member’s moment of darshan at Sri Aurobindo’s Pondicherry ashram. I chose this song as the final track to accompany Sointu and I in my own choreographic work, evening.haiku. The lilting synths seemed to pine for something celestial and inspired in me a far reaching desire that reverberated with every single beat of my heart, as if within every second of that song there was infinite possibility for every experience to manifest and make my body tremble. Dancing to it was like moving through lifetime after lifetime—a relentless and gentle sequence lifting my body into the sublime, exhaustion and sweat invoking a dignified divinity.
I am offered a deep reading of José Esteban Muñoz’s utopian impulses: as I sit here in my body, as my heart clenches, and as my fingers extend out wide to grab handfuls of air only to ball them up into fists, I can’t help but look around at how impoverished our present is. How distance has robbed us of physical intimacy with our loved ones. How the lockdown has exacerbated absence to the point of immediate physical pain. And from this vantage point, I can only grieve and hope for something soothing to fill my heart.
One day that I will always remember is us climbing up to Rachika’s roof during the evening with two Four Locos and my laptop. Rachika is playing her music and I’m sitting on top the attic with my laptop in my lap. To the east of me is the Manhattan skyline and a silver sliver of the moon hangs in the sky at dusk in startling contrast to the purple hue of a cool sunset. I take a big swig of the Four Loco, look at Rachika, and write:
“22. a beautiful exchange with death
A sliver of moon winking closed at dusk. Silver eyelashes curling down a cityscape of glimmering lights, waving in-between existence out distant windows; a mirage of heavenly bodies earthbound within steel and concrete. A wail—celestial, ephemeral, unearthly—hums along with the radiators on top of the roof. Open event horizon and let her through. Let the lights blink and scatter throughout the universe.”