Crushing Season

Emergence, June Jordan, Spring in NYC

Can we crush on what we already have? I’ve been preoccupied with this question since completing imogen xtian smith’s remarkable “Poetics of Crushing” seminar at Brooklyn Poets last month. In the five-week-class, we discussed how “crushing” is often relegated to the realm of adolescence in our cultural milieu, as it’s a mode of relating that’s aspirational, non-transactional, and imaginative. Crushing is all about possibilities of affiliation and becoming, which stand in contrast to the cultural imperatives of adulthood: to “settle down” and “be practical” in our interpersonal relations and professional aspirations.

Crushing, as a space of perpetually unfinished emergence, need not be romantic. We can crush on someone’s aesthetic vision. We can crush on a colleague at work, if only for the brief rush of feeling it brings to an otherwise tedious environment. We can crush on a political ideology, an athlete’s physical capabilities, or the way someone’s handwriting slopes and slants across a page. We can crush on our friends and we can crush on ourselves.

Indeed, one of my favorite aspects of imogen’s class was that it got me to think about “crushing” in a far more multidimensional way, and to see its utility for capturing a range of feelings that are not easily indexed with the vocabulary we usually gravitate towards. It’s so much warmer than “like.” It’s a bit more playful and provocative than “admire.” It has a lightness that “attracted” does not. Its articulation most naturally resides in the continuous, present-participle conjugation, which allows the word to carry a sense of agency, activeness, on-going-ness – personal investment – that can be lost when we use adjectives to describe our feelings about something (e.g. we often say “That show was great,” but we would never say “That show was crushed” – but what about, “I’m crushing on that show”?)

The yearning and dreaming that accompany crushing of all sorts strike me as deeply human. We need to desire to get on with life and to get out of bed each morning. It’s why, in Jungian psychoanalysis, the word “libido” is used to connote one’s whole field of psychic energy, the life force that compels us to want something, to strive for anything at all despite the absurdity, randomness, and fleetingness of existence.

Although crushing occupies this fantastical space, I was often left wondering if it is always non-transactional. Its connotative field can suggest a repetitive cycle of aspiration, acquisition, and dissatisfaction as we habituate to the pleasures we know. In this way, is crushing not simply a veiled instantiation of our capitalist discontent with with what we already have, and our impulse to try acquire ever-more-objects, be ever-more-things, and to think that happiness always resides “over there” – wherever that thing we don’t have, that thing we are crushing on, is – as a result?

My skepticism about the utility of crushing was intensified when I remembered a passage from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic that I listened to during the depths of quarantine a few years ago. I’m generally allergic to most self-help creativity advice – it’s often mute on structural/institutionalized forces, places the pedagogical onus entirely on the individual, and has little to say on actual matters of craft and skill development – and regrettably this book produced a serious reaction. In a particularly notable passage, Gilbert encourages her readers to “view your creativity with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover” and think about their relationship with art not as an “unhappy marriage” but as an extramarital affair, exhorting us to “be hot for your vocation” and to “go hide in the stairwell and make out with your art” (lololol – see pages 360-364 here if you don’t believe me).

Intuitively, this idea is appealing, and I’m in support of reflecting on our affective relationship to whatever it is we make. But I wonder: is Gilbert expecting too much of creativity/developing a craft? And is the “stairway make-out sesh” really the position we want to inhabit to produce meaningful work? Tedium, monotony, banality, boredom, nothingness – these are all integral parts of the creative process and actually developing a skill at something. Expecting every moment of creativity to feel like passion-filled ecstasy is a recipe for personal dissatisfaction and professional disrepute. Those moments do occasionally arrive – and are important to “keep us going” – but often only as the by-product of toil, repetition, failure, and experimentation.

In Gilbert’s formulation, “crush” is a noun – something (in this case, our creative practice) that we turn to to reliably get good feels. The more fruitful conception I got from imogen’s class was to think of “crush” as a verb, as a process – an imperfect zone of striving and tinkering, of dreaming about what a more fulfilling future might look like. In this capacity, we can crush on those seemingly “negatively-valenced” qualities – boredom, frustration, repetition – inherent to the creative process with as much intensity as we do those fleeting moments of flow, immersion, and awe.

Perhaps the answer, then, is not to simply wield the word “crush” uncritically, and instead to think about when its use might activate a range of affective and behavioral capacities that move us towards a fulfilling state of becoming. In this framework, crushing and commitment are not antithetical. We need not surrender to Gilbert’s binary of an “unhappy marriage” or a “passionate affair.” No one knew that better than Bed Stuy’s June Jordan, who gracefully negotiates questions of desire in so many of her texts. This poem, which we read in one of our workshops’s earlier classes, stopped me in my tracks:

When I or Else
by June Jordan

when I or else when you
and I or we
deliberate I lose I
cannot choose if you if
we then near or where
unless I stand as loser
of that losing possibility
that something that I have
or always want more than much
more at
least to have as less and
yes directed by desire

The poem is at once chaotic – a scramble of pronouns and conjunctions, often left hanging – and crystalline: a rigorous distillation of relational poetics. In the space of just a few lines, Jordan captures the emotional slipperiness of losing yourself in another, becoming disillusioned, attempting to disentangle yourself, and of still wanting something when you come out on the other side. The poem’s piercing affective charge is all the more impressive given that it contains very few words, and the words it does contain are quite simple. Indeed, I would venture that all of the words used in this poem would be in a 5th-graders vocabulary. It’s the way Jordan plays with them – arranging, aligning, breaking, combining – that allows a complicated positionality to emerge. The answer wasn’t “more” or “elsewhere” – no academic jargon, multisyllabic soliloquy on subjectivities, or discursive ramblings on ancient philosophers was needed. Rather, Jordan looked at some of the English language’s most basic vocabulary – words she knew well, and had used many times before – anew, attentive and curious towards the expressive possibilities they might still hold. She was still dreaming: of liberation, of self-determination, of dismantling systems of oppression and violence. But, linguistically, she was also crushing hard on what she already had.

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Spring brings more gigs. I’m excited to support projects led by many people I admire and finish the month with a gig with my band in Vermont.

Tuesday, April 9: with Rob Papacica, Matei Predescu & Paul Pandit at Anything
Thursday, April 11: Miguel Alonso-Lubell at Pink Frog Café
Monday, April 15: Matei Predescu & Charlie Lincoln at Filthy Diamond
Tuesday, April 16: Hudson Freeman at Arlene’s Grocery
Sunday, April 21: Miguel Alonso-Lubell at Bowery Electric
Tuesday, April 23: Talia Fuchs & Ethan Cohn at Scholes St. Studios
Sunday, April 28: Matei Predescu & Paul Pandit at Fiction
Monday, April 29: Max Bessesen & Ben Cruz at Sugar Monk
Tuesday, April 30: Perennials (with Danielle Wertz, Yvonne Rogers, & Paul Pandit) at Bennington College (Vermont)

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My new album Have, Know, Want is coming out in May. The music explores a lot of the themes I discussed in this essay. I’ve organized an album release show on Saturday, May 18 at Public Records in Brooklyn. It will also feature sets by the incredible Pemi Aguda and Catherine Brookman. Buying a ticket in advance really helps us convince the venue that we’ll put on a successful show. If you think you might like to come, you can do that here.

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