“What am I ready to lose in this advancing summer?”
— Audre Lorde, from her poem “Seasoning”
The complexity fails us —
over identifying as an outsider.
Maybe we can be simple
and want to understand
or admit we don’t know and
sometimes mistakes get made;
I miss you,
sincere sinecure.
Which phase is martyr culture
after the kingdom falls?
Is it when conscription
feels like collaboration or
knowing the rules of engagement?
Optics of war are intimate operations.
I exchange my life for words.
Weak, uncertain currency.
—Anna Kamienska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook,” translated by Clare Cavanagh Poetry (March 1st, 2011)
Every day since March 13th, I have written something. Some days only a string of words, bursts of breath, or an image find their way through and out. It is my commitment to pay attention.
On March 22nd I wrote that almost 400 people had died from COVID-19, and started to track the pace of American death on April 2nd (over 5,100). I stopped consistently tracking on May 31st (105,000 dead), an arbitrary deadline because the notebook I started on March 13th ended there. I was also experiencing cognitive dissonance between my values around attention as action and my writing practice which centers curiosity. I could only integrate this morbid number on a jagged graph as an abstracted affect of weight, like the moon’s gravitational pull on Earth or the resonance of unmasked grief. I had been lying to myself that I was curious about death, in this quantified way.
Yesterday my source [google: “covid 19 us deaths”] told me 142,000+ were gone.
Risk assessments are strategic investments: four walls and one door to escape. Subtext is its own elegy. Sometimes only metaphors can help me decipher a world where death is sold as the inevitable cost of doing business, which has been conflated to mean the only way to have a life. Metaphors are a clever method to take up space and complicate our mutual knowing. How might I displace our assumed common language and still connect to you?
If I’m feeling lucky, I might be able to translate my curiosities to you beyond the distance of pencil to paper. I recognize energy lost in between contact eventually fades like a bruise found but not remembering its source. William Stafford might name this felt experience.
Long ago, I replaced god with something bigger — an awareness there’s no precision in the prescriptive phrase “let go of the past.” For now, I reclaim there’s pleasure and possibility in waking up to an anticipatory life. Otherwise, a paranoid reading would lead us to believe that depravation is the norm or something far worse, complacency as impulse.
I don’t think I have said enough about the splintered disorder of June, July & August. — Virginia Woolf, The Complete Works: The Diary
Sustained turbulence becomes gentle mania.
Where violence shapes, hope shelters.
Redwoods may represent us more than we know.
But it’s the love you don’t give
yourself that’s got me worried.
If skin is cut off from oxygen, it will die.
It’s also true the last part of the body
to burn when cremated is your belly button.
A finality to an already severed attachment.
By gathering this evidence as a way to signal
private grief, I reckon these traces of darkness
will eventually find you brave.
“For greed, the entire world is too little.” — Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius
Will the past be unobstructed
when the observed become intervisible narrators?
Culture is cancelled. Culture has been cancelled.
Only blue this morning.
The cat’s fur fades in the summer light.
Time [redacted].
We remain virtual until we go outside.
Hashtag: nature, grass, sky.
