“psychic practice” emerged during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and continues as an ongoing collaborative practice. In a psychic practice session, two or more practitioners start by having a check in via text message or phone call focused on what each practice partner is tending creatively, emotionally, spiritually, politically etc. We then determine the schedule for the session, which includes some length and ordering of:
periods of spontaneously composed dancing loosely informed by the content of our check in
periods of psychically witnessing one another
periods of writing
occasional image/video making
After the initial check in, there is no digital interface used during a psychic practice session. Often, the sessions take place outdoors in our respective locations. My psychic practice partners have been Tomislav Feller (Amsterdam, NL), Erica Dawn Lyle (New York City, New Lebanon, Florida), Lailye Weidman (Northampton, MA), Julia Handschuh (Turners Falls, MA), and taisha paggett (Riverside, CA), some of whom have gone on to do different versions of the practice with other friends and collaborators.
more about psychic practice
Each psychic practice is collaboratively produced by those practicing. It is a simple proposal, but something enough to hold us to one another and gently proliferate between us in different ways without being owned or fixed. Throughout a session we don’t worry about if we are psychically connected to one another and are not researching the viability of relating psychically, though uncanny alignments frequently emerge in the remnants (images, words) of practice that we share with each other. Instead, we presume relation, lean into our existing bond and the connection made possible through the format of the practice, and notice what arises when we attend to/through our bodies in/as place.
psychic practice is a way to acknowledge the longing for otherwise without succumbing to an anxious urgency to know what that is or how to arrive there. Rather, the practice embodies a pressing commitment to deepen relationship with ourselves, one another, and place—thereby aiding one another in interrupting the known; thereby opening up more possibilities in the present. It is a way to make breathing room for ourselves and one another; to have faith in poetry; to be recognized by ourselves and each other outside the grind of production and profit; and perhaps to become conduits for a tenderness we have yet to know.
There is a utopic longing at the core of psychic practice for sustained and embodied freedom and interconnection. Mourning lurks beneath this longing; a mourning for dreams of creative togetherness and planetary thriving that have been and continue to be disappointed every day.[1] The project is both propelled by and addresses the fundamental restlessness in this longing/mourning. We refuse to be isolated: by the pandemic, by economic limitations, by the failure for virtual engagement to stand in for being-to-being contact, by the nuclear family construct and individualized careerism, by the speed and ever-insistent demands of surviving under late capitalism, by the violence of categorical distinctions so characteristic of white supremacist and human-centric modernity.[2] The capacity to sustain this generative refusal could be called “utopia’s stamina,” which Bernadette Mayer articulated and claims “must be addressed to or based on or written by or for someone you love.”[3] Through psychic practice, we acknowledge our love for each other and the desire to grow more love between us and for the places where we practice, against a culture that confines or commodifies love in myriad ways. There is a fundamental queerness in this love—not necessarily because we are queer people in the limited sense of the word, though we all are—but because the intimacy proposed by the practice challenges what we think our bodies are capable of and invites a queer relation of humans in/as place. When we practice, we assume the audacious and hopeful possibility that we have the capacity to affect and be intimate with one another over distance and with the land where we practice, and that in doing so we are deepening our networks of creativity and support and so too, our possible futures.
In addition to love, there is also usually a history between the pairs who do a psychic practice together; kinesthetic memory of touching and holding and seeing and hearing one another over many hours in homes, studios, stages, forests and streets. When we practice, we are remembering one another, connecting to the lived archive of our past encounters and unfolding new encounters inseparable from this ephemeral past and possible futures. In loving, remembering, archiving one another, the places where we practice and their non-human inhabitants, we are called into presence. Our actions are authored by this attention to the assemblage of traces, relations and feelings. Even while “psychic practice” doesn’t concern itself with success—does not wish to construct a new fortress of truth against old ones—it does call for a recognition of the limits of human knowledge and the fundamentally spiritual nature of that acknowledgement.
I was sitting quietly this morning and was with the tree you described lounging on the other day, and I was thinking about beginnings of conversations around a subject, like erosion, and when friends find they have been thinking about similar things and speak those things to each other and they start to weave into something. But of course, they've already been weaving. And I was with you circling around that tree in the park in Philly and thinking about Bernadette and Tjalling, my elder friend who I lost a year ago who showed me when I was a kid that family could mean friends and dogs and neighbors and ponds and the early signs of spring. And I was thinking about the question of what to do with our grief and rage. And I was thinking about how I came in and out of dreams near Julia the other day while they did a psychic practice with Anna. And I was thinking about Midnight saying to me the other day: "I want to dance with you for a very longtime," and a video SJ sent me of another tree, carved up with hundreds of initials and how she went to a garden the other day because her feelings were overwhelming, and she touched plants. And I was thinking about how my back hurt less yesterday after being near the willow here and with you. And I was thinking about how we do something, us and the trees, make a gauzy web of almost nothing, but something. Inside me this web is somewhere that's nowhere and in darkness—illuminated the way ghost pipe seems to glow.[4]
[1] I’m in conversation here with Erica Dawn Lyle and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who in their published voicemail exchange name trends of gentrification (and with it the normalizing, homogenizing, and commodifying of every corner of American cities) and the failure of the American government to respond to the pandemic in ways that could actually address core issues of some Americans being consistently much more vulnerable than others as two core ways that activist dreams are being disappointed on a daily basis. I would add daily threats to democracy, climate denial, and the persistence of sexist, transphobic and racist policies in America to the immediate list of devastating realities. Erica Dawn Lyle, “The Voicemail Interview: Erica Dawn Lyle and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on the Phone,” Momus, June 3, 2021.
[2] In Blackpentacostal Breath, Ashon Crawley identifies categorical thinking, categorical distinction, as core to the violence of white supremacist modernity. Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath.
[3] Bernadette Mayer, Utopia.
[4] Email to Erica Dawn Lyle