mug diary

life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage is an Anaïs Nin quote I twirl 'round in my head from time to time after spending whole years, specifically 2015 to 2017, and also in 2018 and 2019, staring at it on a poster every week as a doctor injected gel through the nodes of my mesh qEEG cap...waiting for our sessions to begin. I would say I am only now consciously alighting on the courage Nin refers to, even as I do believe it has always been with me, part of my character, the very thing that helped me to endure those sessions; the poster was there to corroborate it. but in recent years, as I have come to define my makeup more deliberately, and qualities I once considered inherent seem increasingly controvertible, subject to choice, courage must be a stance of intention—a costume that I wear with purpose, in what is called "sacred adornment". 

Nin's courage is, like that of the performer Loie Fuller, a voluminous garment in which to dance towards freedom...with which to embrace the world. funny, too, because I have often confused the axiom of courage that Nin formulates here with another adage from her stereotypically more serious contemporary, Eleanor Roosevelt: the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. this quote emanates from the outer center of a pink mug I have had for ages, its surface so faded that the text has all but disappeared. my uncles Mark and Avi bought it for me when I couldn’t have been more than six years old and I remember its handle being uncomfortably large for my child hands. when I did resort to using it, I was compelled to ruminate a bit on potential dreams and fledgling beauty, and how a relation between them, according to Roosevelt, syllogistically guarantees futurity. 

Nin, by contrast, starts with the question of future, with the proportions of a life for which a person works, and then traces its source back to courage. courage spills from present over into future as, in Roosevelt's American tradition, dream becomes destination. I have a pack of First Lady playing cards focusing on her, while people are always telling me, like Emily of Emily in Paris, to read Nin's diaries; at this point, I've only read Collages (I think). Mark and Avi used to live in Gramercy Park but now they live in Fort Lauderdale, in a house by the beach with cold tile flooring and an Alexanduhh Kaldaah sculpture they commissioned for the pool deck from a guy in New Jersey. the first occasion—that I know of—when I received a message in a mug via coffee grounds was when I visited the then brand-new house. 

the message was inscribed in the Biblical script that filled my youth, abstracted to suggest not only letters from an arcane language but, according to one interpretation I was offered, a life of international travel as I was about to embark on, leaving for school in London. I would be migratory, like Anaïs Nin, like a bird, I would set up miniature pillars of stability, and then roam between their caverns. after moving from Havana to Paris to New York, from one husband to another, and back again, Nin finally decided to live and die in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, in a mauve-tinged cabin built for her by Eric Wright, Frank Lloyd's grandson and the step-sibling of her ultimate companion. now Eric's son resides there with his family. wherever I come to live, wherever I culminate or find a future, I hope it is expansive, right-sized and beautiful. and that later, where and when I find an end—though, as is the nature of this age, we might then be dealing with infinities—I hope to do so with courage and in dream.

picture: (top) my first set of revelatory coffee grounds; (bottom) from Emily in Paris season 3, as captured by my friend Patrick.