Leading up to JJJJJerome Ellis’ performance of Aster of Ceremonies at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s (PICA) 2024 Time Based Art festival (TBA), I had the pleasure of speaking with the multi-modal artist. Ellis is the author of two books, The Clearing (Wendy’s Subway, 2021) and Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed, 2023), both of which mesmerizingly weave together themes of spirituality, Black time, dysfluency, and remembrance.
Their hybrid work lingers with ideas seemingly in direct opposition to one another—opacity and openness, self-possession and collectivity, healing and harm. They simmer together and mutually reconstitute each other’s meanings. Ellis invites us into this profound ambivalence. In this interview, we discussed finding home in writing fragments, the illusions of permanence, and living with unanswerable questions.
Ellis is an artist who stutters. This is represented in our conversation as [clearing], which is Ellis’s way of translating the multi-dimensionality of the stutter into written form. This is a condensed version of a longer conversation. —Kaya Noteboom
Kaya Noteboom: Can you talk about your writing practice? Is it a different relationship from the one you have with music?
JJJJJerome Ellis: The most consistent part of my writing practice has been keeping a notebook. When I was younger, I often tried to keep a notebook and it really never took until 2015 when my closest friend James recommended [clearing] Joan Didion’s essay on [clearing] keeping a notebook.
Since then, in [clearing] keeping one, it feels like a garden. It can grow slowly and I can experience pleasure reading back through the notebook. It feels like a slowly built space where I feel at home. Lately, I haven’t been much in the habit of reading my physical notes, but I’ve been keeping notes on my phone. I feel in some ways most drawn to [clearing] the fragments. Another big part of my practice is learning to honor the fragments.
When I write three or four words it will feel good. Then, I’ll read back over it when I’m trying to prepare some text for a publication and I’ll be like, “Oh, this is too fragmented. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s too incomplete.”
I find it very hard to honor that play. When I encounter what I might refer to as a fragment in other people’s writing, I love it and I so easily honor it. It is part of a longer journey. Honoring my brain and further honoring my body. Certainly my relationship with my stutter is a big part of that journey in taking seriously the question: What if my body has nothing wrong with it?
This form of writing is perfectly honorable. Which is not to say that I can’t hone, grow, evolve, and make the writing better, whatever better might mean. [Music and writing] are very intertwined. I like to write in a way that feels like I’m translating the music that I’m feeling in my body and hearing in my head.
I worked for a time as a translator. I like to think about translation as a method. I like thinking of music and writing as two very related but different languages, the practice of moving back and forth between them, and the things that can be lost as well as gained in translation.
KN: I was listening to the album version of The Clearing yesterday. You’re reading and then in those spaces when you’re in a stutter, the music fills that space. It was such a beautiful translation of what “the clearing” is, or another dimension to it. I could hear the music being like data points mapping that space and filling it. Did that feel like a project of translation for you?
JE: Oh, yes, absolutely. I love that—data points and plotting and mapping. That’s so beautiful. I never thought of it like that. I absolutely feel like that. The glottal block, the stutter, feels to me [clearing] very vast and mysterious within my body and my life. I think of it in terms of like a cloud or an ocean, manifestations of nature that contain a lot.
I really like thinking of the music and musical notes on a score as exactly as you said, like data points, so you have ways of navigating that ocean. That is very much how music feels for me in relation to the stutter. So thank you.
And yes, the whole project felt to me like a translation and so joyous in multiple aspects of translation. One beginning of the project was an essay that then got translated from an essay into musical recordings, and then got translated back onto the printed page in the form of the book. Then the printed page was enriched with color through working with Rissa Hochberger who did such an incredible job on the design of the book. It felt like multiple acts of translation. Each stage of the translation was so fun and it felt so playful.
KN: All the processes that went into it, being able to play in all of these different aspects in its becoming, it sounds like a loop. Did you have a similar process with Aster of Ceremonies?
JE: I hadn’t thought of it like that. When I returned to the written word, it felt like the page was a very different place in a way that was lovely. As for Aster of Ceremonies, yes, it did feel similar in some ways. I think what was challenging with Aster of Ceremonies was the timeline. I felt a bit rushed in making it, which was no one’s fault, but I struggled with the deadline. This kind of breathing room—the breathing space of the translation, I had a harder time accessing it. I was still able to in certain ways. There’s no album that goes with Aster of Ceremonies, but a lot of the writing was made parallel to music that I was making. Some of it appears on the audiobook. Some of it appears when I present Aster of Ceremonies live, like I’ll do next week [at PICA for TBA].
That was a more private or secret musical counterpart for a while. Each piece of music that I was making while writing [Aster of Ceremonies] is sort of like a room. They were like different rooms that I wrote the text in. A lot of this music you might call ambient. You can put it on and dwell inside of it in a certain way. Sometimes I would literally do that while working on the text. A lot of the time I would work on the text to hear the music in my head or feel it in my body. There was then the translation of making the little scores and alt text descriptions of music that appear in the book. Aster of Ceremonies feels to me like a continuation of The Clearing and a continuation of the translation practices.
KN: I wanted to talk more about “the clearing.” It’s such a capacious term in that initial essay. One could literally dwell inside of it and the music counterpart too. I love thinking about music as a dwelling. How are you thinking about “the clearing” today?
JE: I was having a conversation with Rachel Valinsky who runs Wendy’s Subway and published The Clearing. Rachel is someone that I admire so deeply as a writer, translator, and culture worker. The Clearing simply would not exist without her. I’m really grateful to her. We were talking and she told me that Wendy’s Subway is developing a teaching guide for The Clearing and there are people who [clearing] teach it, including a high school in [clearing] in California. That made me feel so good. I have many moments when I doubt the value of what I spend my time doing. In those moments, I think about her sharing that with me.
KN: That is so beautiful.
JE: Thank you. It gives me so much joy and gratification hearing that the work is of some use in an educational setting. Sharing this with you now, I’m realizing that part of why it felt so good is that I take education so seriously. My mom is a teacher and my grandma was a teacher. I have taught a little bit but I often feel that I don’t have the vocation of being a teacher, which I maybe feel some grief about because I value it so much. I have been able to participate in education via the book.
The work as an extension of me is able to move through these classrooms and it makes me feel really good. I feel a lot of pride in the work. It’s the creation of a team of people.
KN: While reading it, there’s a beautiful gathering of voices: Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Édouard Glissant appear in the essay. Your ideas in conversation with theirs are a major contribution to that lineage. I could see a high school class reading it and I would love to be taught this text in my graduate studies. I’m really glad to have found it and I keep learning from it each time I come back. So thank you.
JE: I really appreciate that. One other thing I wanted to say about my relationship with it now is I [clearing] have learned and grown since I made it. One of the things that I regret and wish I could change—and I do change when I perform it live—is that all the enslaved ancestors’ names that I sing at the beginning, they’re all enslaved men who stuttered, which I then carried forth and further in Aster of Ceremonies.
But it was sexist of me to restrict it to men because there were women who stuttered too who are named in these advertisements [for the recapture of escaped enslaved folk]. That’s one thing I think about when I’m reflecting on the work [clearing]. When I’m presenting it live, I change that. It’s a reminder to me of all the growth that I need to do.
KN: Does writing feel fluid to you? Dao Strom has written about the act of writing as the meeting of an ocean and the shoreline. It’s always reiterating and renegotiating permanence. The publication of this book as a material object feels so solid and permanent, but your performance allows it to be fluid and renegotiate its meaning.
JE: I find the seeming solidity of the written word, the ways in which it is unalterable, it is both solid and fluid.
The ways that feel solid to me, I feel a lot of anxiety about them. I remember when we were mixing the album of The Clearing, I was working with [clearing] a wonderful engineer, David Rogers-Berry. On track 8 I think, I would say words that started with a “P” and there would be a pop on the microphone. I was recording it in my bedroom and I don’t know very much about recording. We were about to send the album in and I was really struggling with hearing these pops.
I asked if there was any way we could change it. I remember having a really hard time sleeping. I was really worried about it. It was such a small thing. I was worried someone would hear it and think it was unprofessional or sloppy. He very kindly changed it. I remember I was feeling so embarrassed about how anxious I was. We ended up delaying the publication of Aster of Ceremonies by 6 months because I had a bit of a breakdown. There were a lot of things going on with my health and I was also wrestling with serious questions of how to write ethically about slavery. It’s still an ongoing question for me.
Milkweed was super supportive and they kindly pushed back the deadline. I really struggle with [clearing] feeling permanent. I try to remind myself that anything I create and anything that is imperfect is always going to be a work in progress. Fred Moten has this talk about [clearing] the carceral nature of a work of art. He’s talking about the way a work of art can be framed as a singular finished entity, drawing relations between that and the prison cell. I think about that talk a lot because it teaches me about how deep-seeded these ideas are about the object and the work of art. Permanence, perfection, excellence, and accuracy.
Writing is fluid and the objectness of the book is to me in some ways an illusion. It’s hard to shake certain feelings about that.
KN: I so appreciate you sharing your experience with releasing Aster of Ceremonies. There’s so much pressure for a written object to perform an arrival, arriving at an idea that’s finished. The work of writing to ancestors and enslaved ancestors, trying to hold them the best way we can but also acknowledging that there are aspects of them that we can’t know, that opacity is mourned.
I have family from the Philippines and there’s so much colonial rewriting and forgetting. I know through oral history about an ancestor who was a village healer. She was both revered and feared. The people who lived in the village weren’t allowed to say her name. I don’t know her name but I think about her all the time. It helps me to think of that irretrievable information as something that will always belong to them and can never be stolen, even if it means that I can’t have access to it.
JE: Mm. Yeah, thank you for sharing. It reminds me of this film that my wife Luísa and I watched—and I have to say also, as we’re talking about these things including writing and opacity and ancestry, my teacher in so many of these things is my wife Luísa who is [clearing] the love of my life and is among many things a poet. She’s my favorite poet and I learn from her all the time, how to write ethically and in attunement to my spiritual values. We watched a movie called Before the Volcanoes Sing (dir. Clarissa Tossin, 2022). Have you seen this movie?
KN: I haven’t.
JE: One of the parts of the movie takes place with a collective of Indigenous weavers in [clearing] Central America. One of the weavers says something along the lines of, “Our textiles are the books that the colonizers were not able to burn.”
KN: Does music have a similar sentiment to you?
JE: I do feel that way about music. Music teaches me a lot about what cannot be destroyed, what is protected, transmitted, passed down, and hidden within music. I have such an ambivalent relationship to musical recordings. I’m grateful for them but I also find the process of making them and listening to other people’s recordings to be fraught. I’ll think about what the music people were playing in ancient Egypt sounded like—how, as far as I know, unanswerable that question is. We have hints and there is some musical notation that survives. When I try to imagine what it sounded like, I find the silence of the answer to be very powerful. It teaches me a lot about death and I feel like some of my anxieties about permanence have to do with death. The paradox that music can be so intangible and ephemeral and at the same time so resilient and [clearing] undestroyable—all those things feel true. That to me is [clearing] very powerful.
JJJJJerome Ellis: Aster of Ceremonies
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
Presented for PICA’s annual Time Based Arts Festival on September 14, 2024
This interview was made possible by generous support from Critical Conversations, The University of Oregon Center for Art Research (CFAR), and The Ford Family Foundation.