(March 14)
Getting a strong sense of overwhelm and confusion from so much daylight unearned. I suspect it has almost all to do with Gaza, with the period of concentrated darkness I thought would store all the concentrated darkness.
I am accustomed to a night that makes me really earn my waking rays; now, sun arrives before I know what to do with it and stays much longer than really I need it. For what is it to luxuriate into stretching hours without deadline, when turmoil of five months’ depth—when that which longer nights absorbed, enveloped, respected the sombreness of—only compounds, unabated?
Entry into florescence this year feels questionable on several accounts. Of course there is the matter of 78°F today, a Thursday with a square of trees already welcomed into flower. There is no incongruence of dismay and continuity, expansion: normally January and February are trying months, or at least blocks of clouded cold that operate at a remove from desires. So that when mid(dle)march comes there is a rectified sense of readiness, of seizing—so much have we all been held back from!
Perhaps I should chalk more of it up to quick-flowing intrigue. Perhaps I simply did a better than usual job of filling my time. (A weak and irritating read).
I am concerned at the inclination to rewind, because days are only going to overtake nights for the next seven-odd months. I cannot burrow or recede, I cannot ask for a later-when-I’m-ready-for-it. How do I put this? It’s past 3pm and the sun is almost grandiosely high. Meanwhile I recall—am in some ways still stationed within—the November regiment keeping me from falling off balance entirely, getting in my George Eliot pages before my apartment’s cheerless shading. The upset towers personal and worldly, weeks and months to recover from COVID while archives crumbled under artificial intelligence persevering in novel ways to make death. Am I dumb for thinking it surely would have been left in the place and time it came from?
Now the United States airdrops “aid” that kills, too. Now our marches are at a more reasonable dusk. Now the year is more or less officially growing and we cannot contain its background stains. Now there is the chance for vile operators to point to springtime and hope we dip into its ready opiates. Now I feel like nature herself has been welded against me, us.
Put it back, it’s undeserved.
(March 19)
There is so much light and it’s all the better to view your stasis in. Maybe I don’t learn something new each time but fall into what I need to see. I didn’t get out of bed before usual; I also had an extra defeated sense to stay removed from activities of daily living: UN reports mass death by starvation come May. (Come now, really). What does one do after reading that? Knowing, as one does, the cruelly asinine world-fabricating of the prior 5 months rendered without concern nor abatement? It takes 31,000 deaths, of a population 47% children, for Canada to stop selling weaponry to the genocidal detonators. What opprobrium talks to the blithely shameless?
We talk in two separate overhead channels, parallel contradictions, winds creating farther and farther tunnels.
The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal.
(“Political Pornography,” Didion)
This is not the last tendrils of democracy but the opening willows of that other d-word, dictatorship: wherein the few select for the many (a 5.5% voter turnout in the 2020 New York stronghold party’s primary); the check-signers pass by government balances; rationality, curiosity, and imagination are vilely redacted; and arrests are the solution to not providing your information for a citation written up over skipping metro fare.
It occurred to me that a patent (but not immediately dawned) reason to dissuade this season of the modern and refreshed lies amidst all this loss of life. How dare it show its face now, again, ruthless?
(Or do I fear the second-take of last year’s flip, with early replenishment and swift removals. Can I not bear that cowping again, nor what it means for the rest of the year’s track).
I am watching spring open its envelope ripely as if inch by uncontested inch; the first year I’ve ever noticed the thickness and significance, import, of buds over leaves fully unwrinkled. I’m not ready for a summer that will try to cover up wiping 50% of a population by argumentative tactics: “overcount”, “stalled negotiations”, “noncompliant”, the language of Didion’s ouroboros1 which exists to hype itself up. But also desperately needs its own shadow.
Political Fiction’s “Insider Baseball,” two quotes:
“This was, at a [Democratic] convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory goal of ‘unity,’ demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”
“During those eight summer evenings in 1988…when roughly eighty percent of the television sets ‘out there’ were tuned somewhere else, the entire attention of those inside the process was directed toward the invention of this story in which they themselves were the principal players, and for which they themselves were the principal audience…On the television screens in the press section the images reappeared, but from another angle: [NBC and CNN] again, broadcasting not just above us but also to us, the circle closed.”