a guest column by Tyler Watts ’25
creative director
How have I been living?
Frankly I don’t know. I don’t live in routines, but I have rituals that shift around temporally. Regardless of when they occur: they always get done. My habituals are: eat-sleep-read-write-phone-coffee-singanddance-halfearnestprayer-burnincense-callfamily-seefriendsandacquaintances-plustimetimealone-lone-lone.
How do I live my life? Ask the sun how it rises! I don’t know, I live on my axis just like you do, like how a rotisserie chicken spins.
But I suppose, here is a little bit of how I live:
I own this book called The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich. From the “Twenty One Love Poems” there is a quote in number XVIII that reads:
“The more i live the more i think
two people together is a miracle.”
I thought quietly about this miracle when lying in bed this morning. I had woken up on my own at about 8:19, and then I went back to sleep until alarms began to accost me. 9:00, 9:10, 9:22. It was a dark gray morning. Last night I had pulled back the curtains so that sunlight would pour in and wake me up earlier than 8:19, but it was raining, and the clouds were so opaque. In the soft grainy darkness of my room I turned to face the blankness of my wall. I wanted to be zapped into the top corner where two of those walls came together with the ceiling. I wanted to be a lost, finite point in the crevice of that intersection, among the bugs who can hide that impossibly, because they don’t have vertebrae.
In my head I made the effort to tell myself you want coffee and I responded I guess I want some coffee but I didn’t get up to make it. Instead, I rolled over to my diary to record some details about the end of my dream. Stella ate a frog (Stella is my dog). I thought I pried her mouth open in time to fish it out, but she had gulped him down so fast that it was too late. Then we kept on walking down the sidewalk and she was fine, happier, even.
Then I went on my phone. My mom had texted me a video of the lizard that got into my cousin’s dorm room in California, and my Spanish teacher had emailed me and my project partner about the unsatisfactory revisions we’d made to our proposal. I immediately shut off my phone, petrified and unprepared to even think of work. I turned it back on to look at Instagram, maybe for about 15 minutes. I don’t remember anything that I saw. I went onto YouTube, and I opened up this tarot reading titled “What’s your life purpose?”. Once I picked the pile that I thought contained my message, the reader began to say something about how self expression is a part of my calling, and again I shut off my phone. I got up, to fill the water kettle, to make my coffee.
final scene: reclining on a couch, resting my best mug atop my navel.
A list: Ten things I must do before I graduate college:
- Meet a famous alum/attend a notable talk
- Go to Coney Island over labor day weekend
- Learn how to DJ
- Learn how to sew
- Learn how to swim
- [REDACTED] in the stacks
- Coordinate or at least perform in a cross campus flash mob, ideally to a Lady Gaga song
- Act in another play (or two)
- Take a semester-long dance/fitness class at PWG
- Summer in Europe on Yale’s dime
Music: A playlist for you
On Spotify here – https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6JQgBHi6DF1us2OIOYyIJH?si=afc61153da494749
“Dangerously in Love” by Beyoncé “MODERN JAM” by Travis Scott
“Machines” by jonatan leandoer96 “I Think Of You” by Little annie
“O’Sailor” by Fiona Apple. “Angry Johnny” by Poe
“You Can Have It All” by Yo La Tengo “This Life” by Mandalay “Silly Things” by Antena
“Louise” by TV Girl “Fumemos un cigarrillo” by Piero
“Los Estrellas” by Deux Filles “City Moon” by Love Spirals Downwards
“Nutshell” by Alice in Chains “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” by Beck
“The Western” by Woo “Oral” by Björk and ROSALÍA
“Wish” by Blood Orange “(dream)” by salvia plath “She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5
A book: That was then, this is now by S.E. Hinton.
Over the summer I picked up this novela published in 1971 from a free book pile at Hyde Park Records. It’s about boys growing into young men–a blonde and a brunette who were brought up like brothers. It’s about the trouble that they get up to and get out of in their teenage years in the 1960s. Narrated by Byron (the brunette), it’s about how people change. The past is a thing that happened, but now is what still exists. In college I think about this often, but I find it challenging for us to talk about time like this–which is fair, it’d probably feel unnatural to talk about what is happening and how we are changing while we are in the change. Imagine watching your train pass by while you’re still a passenger. You simply can not do that! How we feel about each other inevitably changes: throughout a year, or sooner in some eye-opening months, weeks, or overnight.
Even though I read this book in July, I began to think about it again this November while cutting a green bean on my dinner plate in Berkeley. At a different table, I recognized a girl with a rosy face who used to have blonde hair that matched the rosy faces and blonde heads of the girls I’d always see her with–they were friends that came in a set. But that was then. On this evening, her hair was an auburn-toned brown and there were different girls that she came in a set with, all of whom had brown hair. This is now.
Recent affirmation: – I know who I am –
Working from the crown chakra to the root, I am coming home to myself in this sentence. I keep saying this because the more complicated life gets, I get tricked into thinking that I don’t know who I am. But I do. Here is a diagram of how I know that I know who I am, even when I let myself think that I do not know:
Suppose that life is a window: a pristine pane of glass installed at birth. The eye that looks through the window is your consciousness, and the act of looking is the act of being alive. What sits beyond the pane of glass is the unfolded path, your utmost truth in the brightest light, which leads you, looking, beholden to another eye, which is that of your soul. Your consciousness and your soul can see each other across the glass, and this is what I consider happiness. Is this window a mirror? Maybe, but that’s not the question. Continue:
As we live, the glass gets dirty. Ideally it is never caked with grime to a bleak opacity, but things happen that make us forget what can never be truly forgotten. But when life brings about whatever it will to make it difficult to see through the glass, even harder to be seen by our souls which are beyond where we stand, in the present, looking. I keep saying I know who I am. It doesn’t resolve anything immediately, but I think it strengthens the eye that is my consciousness to be able to see the eye that is my soul through the dirty glass. I know who I am.
I know who I am.
