I suppose now is where and when I contemplate the larger indications of having caught my first case of the plague outside, in a cramped group of a hundred on a sidewalk corner, stood under relentless orange darkness for almost two hours at a mass burial of children’s names in the air.
I suppose now is where and when I should contemplate it because, as with everything wholesale and small fry alike, connective tissues wreak havoc on circumstances. Eleven days into my contagion, I stare down another week or so because of the immunocompromised risks I was always rightly petrified of. Speed and a mirthful inability to hold out through pain, sombreness, and pleading grief towards transformation—our world says yes to leaps and bounds of the numb agility of routine, only for the same problems to rubber bounce in its own face again some years later. Smack.
In the weeks leading up to this event I also did not pay attention to the craters despair made in my defenses. I was evacuated of appetite and desire and any will to write much at all: a three-pronged thinness. My carefulness—my fear, my holding down of a body with a compromised stance—became dilapidated by inattention to the self. By the idea that a hollowness manufactured through overlord overwhelm is unworthy of noticing or mending. By the damning charge that a powerless individual’s job is static, forever undone.
This came to a head through an event that, even while there, I struggled to understand. Before any doubt roots, let me attest: I do not regret attending this vigil; even in this clumped way which is not enough, martyrs should be held. The organizer concluded with a poem of hope, vitality, and seizing of life’s beauty. And when I woke up the day after throwing up on the silver line—impending isolation’s first note—it was Sunday morning, and even the dreaded domain of the grocery store had this overwhelming clarity: I made it through the night. At that time, it seemed not only restorative—under the heroic adrenaline the body sends to itself in reward for exiling bad actors—but the only adequate punctuation: to now, to several weeks, to the new drop of a stomach realizing how long each chapter of identified Palestinian future’s bodies takes to call.
What I write some days after:
On Thursday I attend a vigil for children massacred. On Thursday I close my eyes in the dark and stand for hours; a toddler next to me is serene and joyful, bats my pants with the long stem of a flower. There is a wrenching thing in the request to mom, to dad: Stay here! Stay here! Stay here! Stay here! Stay here! Stay here!
I pop into a nearby restaurant and put down double what I would anywhere else for a bottle of water because what I am paying for is potable proximity. Under these circumstances this seems an especial warning sign.
There is a person (me) before standing for one hundred minutes it takes to read out names of children 0-15 thus far found. And there is a person after. I am not the first woman to be besieged by 5pm darkness, but I imagined last night some very blue things. Such as: how will they know among the pages of binder including 13 year-olds where to pick up from left-off. Is this an endurance sport of our future? Crouching, I saw many limbs bouncing, ankles stretching. Silent footwork of grief.
What I struggled to understand at that site is crude, reflective of personal flailing. Because obviously concentrated masses of grief become a place, change a system of energies; obviously it goes beyond the literalness of the thing. To seek to be as efficacious as possible—to streamline all of one’s intentions and outputs into a rubric of worthwhile or wasteful—elides what the body demands to have known.
To say “I do not understand how this changes anything; or demonstrates the extent of my rage and what I wish I could do with it in a lawless world; or accomplishes what we all so desperately desire”. This is to fall in line with the idea of proof, constant, merciless, unassailable. Is sadness not enough to bowl over? Art, letters, and emotion—are these forces I secretly disrespect, scoff at, when they are all I have to cling to, and all I can make myself know?
For is it not art and letters and emotion that constitute the delivery of our collective disdain? Plutocracy and authoritarian regimes: these seal off hopes I have for critical longterm interjections. No holes to be poked in the foul fourth dimension that Bezos et al. wrap over us, bereft of humane imagination, suffocating of atmosphere. I have long since soured on contacting representatives because repeated requests get treated like spam and public sentiment is no unknown thing; not in good faith can anyone in the hall of horrors claim ambiguity, forgetfulness, or waffling on account of needing more data. What they are doing is enriching themselves on material producing cadavers’ bloat, prospecting for oil, and removing any trace of the lingering façade—already long in tatters—that this country is not too big for its britches. What they are doing is reminding us that the toxic idea of endless growth necessitates continuous removal: you cannot expand in what is already matured and autonomous.
I admire the young organizers effecting what I see as, frankly, the chief measures towards resistance—blocking war ships, staging mass civil disobedience, creating spaces for millions to show the biliousness that capitalism, nationalism, and miseducation flies in its flags. Beyond withholding our vote, what we have is grief, tenderness, and shell-shock. In other words: the castles of our own physicality.
What do we want to build, and by way of what power has developed through its own value system, what are we forced to build?
What is it to be afloat with no end in sight? Nothing new in global history but everything confounding now.