Who is being born tonight into this?
- Em Strang
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible
- Kierkegaard
You know the truism that says celebrities become developmentally frozen in time at the age at which they became famous? Sometimes I fear that I became frozen in time at the point at which the pandemic began. It is uncanny to look back at the end-of-month letter from our last February 29th, in 2020. This day four years ago I was at a crossroads, having just handed in my masters thesis and arrived in a new city, I was stringing myself along on freelance work while thinking about what could come next. Last Leap Day I felt that I had fallen out of place and time. The sense of a hiatus or a limbo or a suspended reality has never really left. But maybe it always was and ever will be so.
Even before I knew how stultifying the coming years would be, last Leap Day I intuited that I was in no position to enrol in a PhD programme: “Me - the magpie with the manifold interests - committing to one niche for three to four years seems anathema. Everything is moving so fast: pandemic spread, the rise (again) of nationalism, the gamification of politics, the tragedy of the environmental commons, the calcification of white supremacy - it all feels too big and urgent to focus on one, small thing. But such grandiose thinking is a warning sign; I need this limbo period to come back down to earth and settle into the idea of my next small thing. Small things are all we’ve got.”
The tug of big and small is as unbearable as ever. Caring about big things is not grandiose — certainly not virtuous, but pure no-other-choice utility. The big things matter only because we want everyone to get to live the small things. The normal suffering of living a human life is quite enough (and even then often too much) for our big-small consciousness to bear. Bombing and sniping and starvation and exile and mass murders all blow up the human heart, and the shared heart of humanity. No one gets to live the small things while this obliteration of humanity reigns, not without dissociation and suppression. But then dissociating and suppressing is not truly living the small things, is it.
Trying to make sense of the senseless now, through the words of others:
Joshua Cohen, in conversation with Sam Jaffe Goldstein. Revenge Has Always Been a Fundamental Literary Pretext; an interview with Joshua Cohen, The End of The World Review Substack, 3 June 2021 (found in my stash when I was looking for something else, just as apt for today):
“And here we have Netanyahu: not a religious zealot, but an ideological zealot, for whom every moment is an existential emergency — whose claims deny the real emergencies of Palestinians.”
- Joshua Cohen
Yanis Varoufakis, in conversation with Aaron Bastani at EartH Hackney, Novara Media (on Europe taking responsibility for the origins of the existential emergency that enables the genocidal emergency, as hurriedly transcribed from video by me):
“It is very important that we [outside of Palestine, Israel] do not pontificate … our job is to maintain the kind of narrative and political campaign which constantly supports universal human rights. That is our job. As Europeans I feel we have a duty to accept 100% responsibility for all the crimes that are being perpetrated today. We Europeans are to blame — not Hamas, not Israeli settlers, not even Netanyahu. For centuries we have been hounding Jews, from one pogrom to the next. Europeans — not just Nazis but the British, the Croats, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Greeks, the Italians — we have been persecuting Jews for centuries. And then, of course, this series of pogroms and executions ended with a Holocaust … And then, when it was no longer ‘fashionable’ to be antisemitic after 1945, Europeans adopted Zionism.
Now what is Zionism? It’s not just that it is ultra-nationalist and right-wing. Zionism is summarised in the slogan invented in the early part of the 20th Century: a land without a people for a people without a land. Now that is white supremacism. When the British embarked in New South Wales in Australia, immediately they declared the land of Australia to be terra nullius: an empty land, a land without a people. So the five and a half million Aborigines were simply not people. And that was the beginning of genocide, because the moment you say that five million people are not people, that’s license to kill. That’s license to massacre. That’s license to genocide. [Zionism] does not recognise that the Palestinians existed or exist today. They talk about Arabs, [as though] from some other country, and the land as people-less. So you have the greatest, most toxic alliance between antisemitism and white supremacism.”
- Yanis Varoufakis
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, The Fantasy of Healing, The Cut, Dec 10, 2021 (another one from my 2021 stash! Oh, that year split the spirit in so many ways, so many loops back and around and around to try to understand and avenge it all):
“Perhaps this is my generational curse. Migration is an abandonment wound that tears families apart, erodes ties, severs connections, erases memory … curses [are lifted] not just by exposing hidden truths through their telling but through a collective remembering that corrects the historical record, undoes a knot of violence, accounts for hidden evidence, believes the unbelieved.”
- Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Most special read of February:
Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie (Canongate, 2020)
I didn’t read it when it was released (I couldn’t read much of anything in 2020), but I stumbled upon this anthology at the Orewa Library in Auckland this month. ‘Nature writing’ as a titular genre stokes avoidant feelings in me. I think listening to Sia Figiel’s The Daffodils from a Native’s Perspective as a teen disabused the genre of any straightforward romance (whose nature is prioritised, and at at whose expense; whose rehearsal of wonder gets rammed down the throat of a place that should be left to itself). But Antlers of Water surprised me. A decidedly anti-conquest, anti-interventionist thread runs throughout. “I wondered if the best way to love a place was to not go there at all” writes Chitra Ramaswamy (p. 67). “I’ve never been to Foula,” says Jen Hadfield, “I have somehow chosen to keep it that way. Visible, but just out of reach” (p. 136).
Most special read ahead for March:
Here After, by Amy Lin (out March 5th 2024 from Zibby Books)
In Amy’s own words, “if you are wondering if you would like to read this book, some useful questions to help you decide would include: Do you keep pressing a bruise even when it hurts? Are you feeling impossible? How do you know when to stop?”
And in the words of Lauren Groff, “it has been years since I have been so rocked, so moved, by any book, as I have been by Here After by the earthquaking new talent Amy Lin. Lin invites us into this place of exquisite pain and beauty; what a great gift she has given us.”
I have read Amy’s incredible newsletter At The Bottom of Everything since the beginning of the rupture that would constitute the after. I can’t wait for this special book mail.
Sensorily notable: Celine Dion and The Bloom
After the Grammy Awards ceremony early in February I went straight to Celine Dion’s catalogue and listened through, album by album. I spread my gleeful enjoyment around, I couldn’t help myself. One day, when he was working, Ryan sent me his live-reactions during his first full listen-through for The Colour of My Love (1993):
“There are so many times in this album I just have to close my eyes and groan with pained enjoyment. I am shaking my head. I am looking to the sky. The pure concentration of FEELING is unmatched. I am MOVED.”
I listened to the album on the train to town to meet Grace and some of her parenting group friends. We were at a repurposed photography studio to watch The Bloom, a dance work by Jessie McCall staged as part of Auckland Pride. (Imagine being a fig wasp - born pregnant. Imagine the sex of mould. Imagine intimacies outside of the gaze of the nation state. Imagine mothering as a botanical project that broke its banks. I was MOVED.)
One propagative act was choreographed to Celine Dion’s The Power of Love, the opening track to the album I had been listening to on the train. After the show we didn’t have a lot of good words by way of debrief, and that seemed right. Our vacant and occupied body parts, and the sorts of homes we had to go back to, seemed to know more about what we’d just seen.
I boarded a bus down to Victoria Park then hopped off and crossed the plane-fringed green to make my next connection. Dusk cast the day’s brash office buildings (an airline, a dairy conglomeration) in a more pathetic light: layers of concrete atop reclaimed land, not far from one of the city’s patched sinkholes — the original coastline ever-seeking the sea.
I felt my old wrongness about living in this place, and I wondered if this short evening walk after a beautiful show with beautiful people was forming part of a long goodbye. But I had Celine and I had the high camp schmaltz of The Power of Love once more. The music more than matched the long and the short of my indulgence. We're heading for something / Somewhere I've never been / Sometimes I am frightened / But I'm ready to learn / Of the power of love. (The pure concentration of FEELING is unmatched. I am MOVED.)
Until next month may we constantly support human rights, may we believe the unbelieved, may we be care about the big things so that we can live the small things, whatever it takes,
H x
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p.s. correspondence is [even] slower than usual right now, but rest assured replies/emails are utterly treasured!
I love Kathleen Jamie. I wrote about her when I first found her, here: https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/a-rock-in-the-ocean
Thank you, I always so enjoy reading your words and going on the journey with you.