Maybe my collection of useless and overall boring, uninformed “portraits” of my apartment—and myself within it—inflates because there are and have been for several months plenty of occasions suiting this present set of circumstances: no other manner to reset rogue and relentless blankness.
If you believe yourself arbitrary and timeless (without time), art embodies reaching—it is the only feasible thing, it is the only lasting answer, which at the very least says “This is a something-done”. And the impetus is to do something: communicate because minds over there will draw nearer and meld with the flip of tongues; shout and be received; work in some manner of direction towards purpose.
Laura Marling says I Speak Because I Can; Joan Didion says “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade”. And it is this latter which hooks the bluing evening around the several dozen of us gathered to make noise in front of a federal office.
I turn my eyes up in the first five minutes because I will start crying, because her sentence pops of its own accord on top of our sound waves, as if steam from a ready stove. I will scream END THE SIEGE ON GAZA NOW with parents whose babies are in strollers and with activists across coalitions and with the folks hanging in back having a cigarette. I will look at the utter praxis of care that comes from a father giving bite-sized snacks to two small children throughout this speaking of truth to power. But I will go to that united front without faith. What else is one to make of the sight of a Frederick Douglass portrait inside the polished glass lobby behind Palestinian diaspora youth—whose screaming for years makes them prematurely hoarse, vocally wizened—with a list that grows to 7,000 dead people’s names in under four weeks?
Asking for a friend. Asking for to prepare myself for the sight, waiting to be developed, of a frying pan and big wood spoon against this building.
Crossing the road gifts me exemplary scenes of masculinity. Neon jacket police claps the back of a soccer player: “They call it football where you’re from, don’t they? You’re trying to fool me!”. Jocose. Points him and the red-sweats to their beckoning field.
Of the direction I am sourfacedly steering towards—this gurgle of people pleading for officials to quit jobs abetting genocide—neon jacket reassures the unruffled team: “It’s just a peaceful protest, you’re fine”. He wishes them best of luck and, to my utmost humor, receives silence on the other end of his request that they produce a throatily cheered “GOOOOAL”.
Adding to a sense that I am surrounded by blunt walls of thwarted forward motion, I waste time. Literally: my third roll of film expired 12/1965 arrives in a blink, passes more hands than strictly usual, and has scans which live on my computer labeled as “kodak 1965-3 (bunk, alas)”. Because lately I find utility in categorizing to the eye of a needle. Its bleak and unappetizing aesthetic existence is mostly a twofold lesson:
Do not believe in the rapid urgency of encounters you are too scared to hunger for.
Do not expect something like progress from sequence. Do not fall into the trap that first is worst, and third thrice improved.