Fish Eye Lens- from Oaxaca to Mexico City, Atlanta to Amsterdam, Salamanca to Madrid, and back…

Lavapiès- from my bedroom window- Madrid, Spain July 2021

I’m not that smart, not naturally anyway. It takes me a long time to process an experience, to research, to consider inspiration, to see where it all leads. Prior to each departure this summer, to Oaxaca, then Mexico City, Atlanta, Amsterdam and finally Madrid, I searched for ways out. Each time. I didn’t want to go. (Link here to my May 2021 blog https://jennchase.com/blog/rejection-rinse-repeat-371 ) I struggled with self-doubt on all fronts, awkwardness in my “new” older skin, doubts about my artistic voice, linguistic challenges, my academic limitations, and the heavy intellectual lifting that would be required during my residency. Then there was unexpected, loneliness, and a borderline unhealthy embrace of nostalgia.

But James Baldwin said you have, “…to say yes to life.” And for that, I’m always going to be in. I’m always going to go…and “find out,” even if I think I don’t feel like it.  Baldwin also was eventually able to artistically make sense of the experiences in the themes of his novels, essays, and plays. That part isn’t clearly rising to the surface yet.  I get immersed in a thing then transported to a pandora’s box of other questions. Art, music, philosophy, politics, religion, food, language, all collide. I go down curious paths of reading and research about people, events, places, that are seemingly unrelated --but I know they are-- and I can’t stop. It’s a messy process, undisciplined and erratic. I follow my intuition. It takes even longer for me to create whatever it is I’m supposed to create. I’m still in all that now. It’s going to take time to sift through these last extraordinary months from my Oaxaca residency and all the looming questions, my assigned scholarly readings, and excursions, to the people I encountered there and later in Mexico City, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Salamanca, and Madrid.

Arriving in Madrid 15 years exactly since I arrived for the first time for my summer graduate program, I felt “home.”  Before this summer’s work abroad, I don’t think I could have fully realized the calm appreciation of the familiarity and love found in mother in law’s kitchen window, my husband’s arm around me on the metro, the all-night sounds of music, people, languages, and smells from three stories below in Lavapiès. I’m embraced by the present. I’m surprised by the ease with which it arrived. Over the next month, I’ll reflect on my travels and artistic work and write about it. I think that will be a necessary step before working further on the play, essays, and songs that I began as a result. I’m still finding many intersections to keep, consider, or toss.

  I’ll begin with Oaxaca…