15. December Digest/Digress
no tingling new year promise but something else: new shapes, new grooves, a viral-style rupture to replace enclosure
“She was appalled by my level of gloom. But I’m sort of appalled by her resilience”
- Lucy Ellman
I’ve worn the same pair of hand-me-down pleat-front plaid trousers from my grandmother nearly every day since March. The seat is wearing thin. In them I feel supremely comfortable but in them I also sense the supreme aesthetic degradation of my very being. I sewed myself a new pair of trousers - I even told the internet about them - but I feel no need to wear them. What would be the point.
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This time last year I was on a flight from Auckland to London via Los Angeles, my hair still salt-crusted from the last quick swim down at Home Bay. I can say it any which way but I cannot seem to hide the implied self-pity in that simple narrative, the why me, the why did I uproot my already root-troubled life at precisely the wrong time, why did I willingly submit to a deracinated existence before we were all compelled to. And so I’ll let it slide.
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The New Year’s Eve before last I had no plane to catch. I had no plan at all. I hopped on a ferry to the city, dined on downtown yakitori, found some friends at a friend of a friend’s split portion of a Grey Lynn villa, and, as a new patchwork many-headed thing, made our way along the ridge to Karangahape Road, up to someone else’s flat overlooking the Sky Tower for the fireworks, then down into the belly of Whammy Bar. Such spontaneity now seems possible only for a different species, surely not for the lumpen body that I inhabit today.
*
Almost never before have I felt so reluctant to commit words to the record. Any of these possible openings would have done the job today, but I feel the need to leave them there, all asterisked and provisional, opening only to close them down. All living sorrows seem sheepish next to the day’s death rate. And to wake up merely limp is better than waking to find one’s body a viral host (though that may still come, Britain being Plague Island after all). Then again, the states of alive and dead are not as mutually exclusive as we make out. Rather than push away our own whatever-sized griefs in shame, it must be better to feel them, really feel them. I never want to get to the point of shrugging at the losses all around, but disavowing our own griefs - numbing ourselves - might be the quickest ticket to numbing ourselves to all those lost individual lives and lost collective imaginings. It might be kinder for everyone for you to lay down beside your big-little grief. Stroke it’s cool, flinty cheek and see if a tear might let it soften into a tributary and join the others.
It was sometime around July that I started to lay down next to it and feel the weight of this isolated life, finally accepting that it would be over no time soon, slipping off my skeich persona (Scots adj. in high spirits, animated, daft, skittish) and sinking into a depressive kind of knowledge. Or maybe a depressive realism: things really are bad, and feeling bad about bad things is entirely rational. What I had previously assumed to be an innate high-as-a-kite personality was more likely some response to being in the world. The skittishness was one part social energy - Han being a ham - and another part internalised marketing logic, switching and swivelling at break-neck pace, working out how to sell myself, buying and swallowing desirable pieces of others. There is no need to fetishise a depressive state - no doubt I will look back on today’s tone and find it too romanticised and interior - too serious! - and too devoid of a funny bone, but I’m okay with this over-corrective state of sanctioned sadness right now. None of us is close to claiming that we have reached a steady, surveying plateau. We’re still in the thick of it, whether we’re in a grim lockdown or in a crowded hospital or even those back home (‘home’?) in summertime New Zealand, suspended in the sterile paradise made possible by the enforcement of a hard border.
This is the first year that I have felt no tingle of coming newness for a new year, simply on account of the missing spell of an occasion. What are we meant to do in times when nothing seems to be happening, in the arrested space-time of our cities under lockdown? The virus itself knows how to connect temporalities - through bodies and through time. Maybe we can learn something from the virus, as perverse a project as that sounds. Ancestry and whakapapa and genealogy will never not be important for appreciating the placing of people and lands and beings in related layers of blood and bone and obligation. But the virus is anti-genealogical, spreading in any direction, without familial loyalty or overarching logic. Imagination is not only a human domain. These other lifeforms insert themselves into us and bravely rupture their cellular homes in life-death revolt, giving birth before we can finish asking after their classification, still asking whether they are even alive.
The virus favours rupture over enclosure. Diane di Prima knew that the revolutionary must always rupture themselves. Enclosure has only brought us property - the chattelising of people and resources. Enclosure has only brought us whiteness and extraction and hoarding and catastrophe. This year we saw viral-style refusals of police terror and racial capitalism: the containable model of the town-square protest replaced by whole cities as many pockets of inextinguishable revolt. Many small crowds are harder to control than one large one. Many acts of refusal are harder to refuse. This model might be the answer to the unfinished thought about accepting depressive realism over apolitical, sugar-coated optimism. That things really are bad, that feeling bad about bad things is entirely rational and— we allow ourselves to be animated by that pain. Not a heroic call so much as accepting that the humming and vibrating sense of wrong - the one we all feel - means that rupture is inevitable, that the only possible outcome is a burst of refusal. There is no unifying policy answer (though policies do help). There is no ultimate community - no perfect inclusivity or representation (though connection and visibility and care all count). There is only the decidedly non-exclusive breaking free of the catastrophic, in many raucous pockets.
Not having the tingling promise of an occasion this New Year’s Eve is probably fitting. Change doesn’t come in a one-night-sized package. So this year I thank the many any-sized losses for making new shapes possible in the imagination - for offering an uninvited apprenticeship in living with the hum of wrong, for thoroughly soiling the status of property, for teaching us more about remaining impure and confused - more open to the groove of rupture than the old shapes of paranoid enclosure. I also have to thank this year for the astonishing moments of tenderness and grace: the lap of the Atlantic Ocean on my skin, the frantic and generous conversations and forgivenesses, the ways I came to know London on foot, this newsletter as an arbitrary end-of-month date with myself to work out what I think and feel on a given day (for proving that I was not mute and wordless after all), the routines and repetitions that turned into a sort of prayer, the sensitivity to surprise after all the sameness. Last night I stepped out of the shower to find fat flakes of snow swirling outside the open window. I leaned out and blinked hard, startled by the bright new blanket.
Sending my love and a wish that 2021 might make you a scholar of rest and play,
H xxx
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Aw Han, sometimes you're able to articulate percolating thoughts I have with such sensitivity and honesty. Often this year I have said to myself that my own woes pale in contrast to growing death rates, job and food insecurity faced by many -- so I have swallowed even the most painful feelings, allowing them residence within me. This year I aim to be aware of the situation, and yet, take care of my own mental health and happiness more attentively. Every day is anew, something to be grateful for. I trust you have had a perfectly wonderful Christmas season with J+R, complete with snow! X