First English Assignment

Bayyinah C. Pierre
Prof. Sacha Frey

Intro Lit/Crit Arch I

September 5^th 2012.

Spoken Language in My Studio Space.

What is my bodily experience in studio? To be honest, studio becomes my second world. It separates itself from the real world. It is the foreign land I visit when I need to get my work done, the territory I realize I want to become something. It is a place where I ask myself a lot of questions, mainly when my brain needs a rest from the word accuracy.  It is the domicile I occupy when I am not in my small room on campus.

The ten minute walk to Higgins has long been my planner, the walk I remind myself what I need to do for the day. I have without a doubt walked that walk so many times. Approximately thirty times, but I have never added up the number of times I strolled through Dekalb to Lafayette. I would be interesting the take note of it, I going to try to do it every day. But I’ll forget, just like Acker forgets to write about her experiences in the gym, I will probably forget to mark down every single walk.

How amazing would it be to find out I walked from my dormitory to Higgins Hall a thousand times, at the end of my freshman year? That really awesome and cool to me, however I don’t want to have to set myself out for failure, just like Acker failed to write her experiences, hmm?, just like I failed to learn how to whistle this summer.  I still can’t make a sound when I blow air out of my mouth, quite tragic.

Acker, in her writing, talks about her commencing to learn about a new language, just before understanding, you begin to forget your own. She talks about the gym becoming a foreign country to her, but a foreign country I which she has to learn the language to familiarize herself more.  I admire the way Acker described the gym has a foreign country, in this past couple of weeks studio has become more or less a foreign soil. How? In a sense, my journey to get to the studio tricks into thinking it is actually further away than what it really is. Another reason might lie in the fact that people know where to find me if I am not in my dorm-if I’m not in Paris, I’m in Spain! You travel to an unknown land to explore, to learn or maybe, to remember why you call your home, home.

Repetitiveness, ah, the word receptiveness, Acker mentions repeating the same controlled gestures with the same weights, the same reps, and the same breath pattern, but one day something happened she couldn’t manage the last rep of her normal warm-up which she had been doing for a while now. She hadn’t changed anything about her daily routine but the weather did and her unexpected failure at the sixth rep was allowing to see inside her body to its workings. In my studio, I go through a lot of receptiveness in the studio. I have to do a drawing over and over again until I decide which has perfect line weight and which one is very neat. I don’t want if one day, I won’t be able to pick up my lead holder. That’s what life is about? You never know when you are going to be able to do something that you have done a lot before.

After reading this passage, I have reminded myself of why I am here in studio, writing this essay, why I want to be here, and how I should appreciate more the things I do that others are not able to accomplish themselves.  I think everyone should read this book, not just read and soak in the context that’s in in black and white in front of you, but their own meaning to the passage, how it relates to their lives.