I’m immoderately
in love with you,
knocked out by
all your new
white hair
- Eileen Myles
Welcome back to Think Club, the newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere. I write to you from England, where the Chief Science Advisor has just today announced that “data suggests we have reached the limits of what we can do in terms of opening things up in society”. I am glad to hear it (prudence, always, when it comes to this pandemic) but these press conferences always have their way with my sense of stability. What is this all about? What does it mean to miss human touch - to meet someone outdoors and only have unfeeling elbows as recourse for embodied greeting? What does it mean for us to live in fear of a microbe? How is it that someone can live a perfectly normal or normally perfect life then veer so suddenly from their expected course? How is it that someone can live an already marginal life then veer so suddenly into sheer disposability? How is it possible to cope and how do we go on and make meaning in a world in which meaning can be so swiftly derailed? How can we hope to grieve for living losses (plans, jobs, homes, live music, the sea) when so many haven’t even been able to properly farewell the dead? The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Grief seems a different story. I’m glad to be in it, though - my current kind of living grief, anyway. Grief tenderises the sinews of certainty. Grief makes previously palatable fictions (perfectly normal; normally perfect) feel metallic in the mouth. Stifled political imaginations and punitive visions of ‘justice’ can no longer look natural or inevitable.
It has been okay, though, sticking to our neighbourhood in East London. Squirrels, foxes, pigeons, and crows have been the animal companions of my urban confinement. I can sit still for long periods of time and watch them with an otherwise illusive calm. My sister told me that looking at a dog’s face does wonders for trauma lodged in the vagus nerve. If it is true then it must apply to looking at the furtive faces of these wily scavengers and collectors, too. Ryan and I often take our dinner to a local park and sit in the same spot near an overgrown flower border and hope to see (what we like to think of as) the same mouse each time. The mouse’s body is so slight that it can climb individual husks of grass that only bend at the very last moment, bringing it back down to earth with a gentle swoop. Perhaps the mouse likes the sensation of flying. I know I would. I have dreams of flying home, like a migratory bird, but the season is not quite right. Besides, I like being here in this place just fine - not exploring it so much as it just being there, just as I am there in it. It is not only animals but machines I take as imagined companions. The passing buses most often pause for the traffic light outside our window. Their applied breaks sing out softly, like mechanical cooing doves. And the air conditioning unit outside the kebab shop on our road makes a bassy rumble, like the opening to Nick Cave’s ‘Jesus Alone’. Summer waxes and wanes, off-kilter days of chills followed by days of sweats. Today has been the kind of day where the breeze blows hot. Still the neighbourhood characters insist on their floor-length puffer coats or million layered silk scarves, no matter the weather. Some days I feel the euphoria of absolute here-and-now thinking and other days I feel as though my face is a dinner plate with all of its offerings sliding off. We’ve been staying up later and later at night, rising just in time for the morning’s two-second commute to the other side of the room. But this morning I was awoken just before sunrise by a far-from-home seagull. Its cry made me cry, the familiarity filling an unknown hole somewhere near my sternum.
Zadie Smith says that reading is as hard as writing and I am no where near as qualified but I have to agree. In fact, during the attention-fracturing pandemic, writing might even be easier than reading. At its citation-avoidant worst, writing can be a one-way monologue with no interlocutor in sight: a blurt, an expression, a HEAR ME, NOW. Writing is often a case of if-you-can-initiate-it-it-will-come. The starting is the hard part but sometimes you don’t even have a choice about what comes out. Reading is so demandingly active, a to and fro between the page and the reader: not only literal marginalia, but mental notes and replies and yeses and nos and maybes and just-like-thats and not-like-thises. Writing is the organising technology to reading’s anti-organisational impetus: active reading is an unwieldy mega-explosion of impressions, half-thoughts, and gut feelings that may or may not, one day, make up part of a new iteration of the organising technology of writing. But that’s the thing - reading may not yield anything, or at least not anything that looks like a product or a credit or a byline or a promotion. It might do only as little and as much as change your life. That’s why reading is ‘harder’ than writing, under capitalism - there is no product or tangible, bankable output.
I have picked up and put down so many books this month. The problem is still the fractured attention span, but it is not an arbitrary fracture. It’s that little life-changing factor, and my hunger for it. I have a renewed sense of the edges of what I don’t know, which means that my reading fracture is a 2020 intolerance for that which is not overtly political. The personal is political, of course, of course, but I’ll give you an example of my current problem. My grandmother Joanie sent me Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry after she had read it for one of her courses. I could give myself over to a lot of the selected poems, but at one point I snapped. It was nothing major, just a whole poem dedicated to the subject of a beloved house owned and occupied over many years, with all its flowers, and all of the other growth therein. I threw the book on the floor (a gesture only worth something if someone is there to see it, but now I’m telling you that I did it). Who can write about owning a house as though it’s the easiest thing in the world when most people live in such precarity? I am all for everyday loveliness, it’s just that generational and class chasms feel more acute right now. Maybe England has done it to me. Around the time of the poem-throwing incident the English writer Olivia Laing posted an Instagram update about buying a house previously owned by a garden designer. Cool cool, I thought (or maybe it was time to get off Instagram (again)).
I attended some great online events this month: a Feminist Library Association zoom screening of Hauntings in the Archive (only acceptable use of zoom, I’d say), the launch of Nina Mingya Powles’ poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 (a hushed and gentle evening, like being on the mat at school), the launch of Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s Big Friendship (poppy and light and a good expansion of the ‘significant other’ discourse), a BAFTAs Q&A with the creators of Fleabag (which involved an indulgent digress on the simply wretched womanly horror of bad haircuts and made me think the show might not stand up like it did when I first watched it), and a poetry workshop with Kate Clanchy of Very Quiet Foreign Girls poetry group fame. I watched all of Normal People (BBC) and I watched all of I May Destroy You (BBC) and let’s just say I’m not here to talk about the former (though this review from Lorrie Moore had me writhing, in a good way: “Rooney throws small, surmountable obstacles in the lovers’ path, but they are too young to realize that a little gravel is not a wall”). Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You is twelve parts of candy-coloured kaleidoscopic layers of and responses to abuse. But it is more than that, of course. I recognised a lot of beloved people in the by turns detached and obsessive behaviour of our lead Arabella (played by Coel). My favourite scenes depicted family and friend relationships, and all the unsaid forgivenesses (though some things really could have been said - like an acknowledgement from Arabella on her homo/bi-phobic take on Kwame’s actions). I wasn’t sure about the final episode and its Groundhog Day slash meta writing conceit. The episode rehearses ways to respond, as a victim, to an abuser. It’s important to think about beyond-carceral answers to addressing harm but I felt as though the show was only willing to operate at the level of the individual. Maybe that owes something to the model of its construction. I am all for story sovereignty but, like Fleabag, the entire show was largely created, written and produced by one person - the star. Is it a case of a growing fetishisation of the genius of the lone creator, or is it just the many-hatted scrappiness required of the misfit wanting their fair share of representation? Watch it and tell me.
Three lucky dips:
Lauren Michele Jackson on What’s Missing from “White Fragility”:
"What good is a workshop? What good is a workshop without sounding foolish? What good is a workshop without any work? … In a borderlands e-journal article published 15 years ago, Sara Ahmed asked, “Is a whiteness that is anxious about itself—its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its self-centeredness—better?” Explicitly concerned with a whiteness studies that says all the right things, Ahmed argues that “putting whiteness into speech … however critically, is not an anti-racist action.” Declaring that whiteness exists—for others or oneself—does not, itself, do anything.”Josie Sparrow with reflections on academia as abuse culture:
“what happens when all of your reading and thinking and talking and writing brings you to the conclusion that the life-path to which you’d harnessed your hopes — the only thing you feel you can do well enough to almost live on — is a neoliberalised competition-machine that thrives by grinding you down, chewing you up, and then demanding from you vast amounts of labour, the results of which will be measured in order to prove your worth (or lack thereof)?”Fobazi Ettarh on the concept of vocational awe:
"vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. But creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. If the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession.”
Wishing you days that are kind and playful; warm and alive.
Until next time, thinkers..
x Hannah
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That One Art poem cracked me open this morning. Thank you for sharing it.