field notes; week of august 6, 2018
one hundred and eighty-three.
i miss you like a home.
-- allen ginsberg, letter to peter orlovsky, 1958
yes, allen ginsberg was a tool; yes, this line hit me square in the chest, anyway. i came across it in the manuscript of my friend casey mcquiston’s upcoming novel, red, white, and royal blue, which is a total delight, coming to a bookstore near you in april 2019.
one hundred and eighty-four.
the lamb knows all it knows through awareness of the patterns embedded in a generalized state of risk. the lamb’s way of sensing is a clear-minded sensing of the world as it aligns against it: demystified, dependent, and with brutality intact.
the lamb -- like all prey, and unlike any predator -- is a scholar of the all, but the bird of prey flying overhead mistakes its expertise in corpses as proof of a general acuity. the bird of prey may have talons, but these only insure it conceives of the world in an eye-to-claw-to-beak relation. the bird of prey makes only acquisitions: its knowledge is a series of kills. the bird of prey understands a kill to be the world in its entirety when, in fact, a kill is only dinner, and dinner is not the entire world.
the bird of prey knows what it knows only in a system built from desire’s instances, maintained in the expectation of desire’s satiation: a hawk-eye sees with the arrogance of only the particular of what it wants, not the whole of what is.
-- anne boyer, when the lambs rise up against the bird of prey, 2014
since trump’s election, we’ve had so many tedious discussions about the ethics of resistance. is it okay to punch nazis? is it okay to yell “shame” at the department of homeland security after she rips thousands of babies out of the hands of their mothers? is it okay to kneel while a piece of music is being played, or is that an act of treason that disqualifies one from citizenship?
in a more personal sense, the question of when and how to fight back has weighed heavy on my mind this year. when faced with a person who only wants to do harm to you and the people you love, when you’ve exhausted all avenues for reconciliation, when their wrongdoing is so clear and unambiguous that it cannot be ignored — what do you do? there is always the fear that in resisting abuse, you are just as bad as the abuser. remember the look on luke’s face when he strikes down darth vader, the way he stares in horror at the hand that did it? how do you resist violence without becoming violent?
anne boyer’s essay, when the lambs rise up against the bird of prey, quoted above, is just… it almost made me cry, because of how clearly it articulated this problem, and how clearly it identified the strength of lambs. if we try to fight the way hawks fight, if we subscribe to their “stupid logic of dinner,” we’ll never win. we win by never mistaking dinner for the totality.
one hundred and eighty-five.
that which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing.
-- jeff vandermeer, annihilation, 2014
i read this book from cover-to-cover while coming down from an accidental caffeine overdose during an overnight hospital stay and i absorbed very little of it. i do remember that it was better than the movie, though. anyway, “that which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten” is a profoundly comforting thought.
one hundred and eighty-six.
so intriguing how rebuilding your identity involves flirting with destruction and rebirth and how difficult it must be to know that power and be expected to wield it once and only once in prescribed, understood circumstances. a specific filter of trans experience is prescribed, accepted by cis people. but transness is an inflection on a world. on all identity. on all possibilities. on all selves. it dips into the world within that demands manifestation. and that world may as well be total darkness. i feel like we hold a lot of power. not structurally, not like, institutionally, but internally. in self-actualisation. i feel like a lot of it is spent self-effacing that the flirtation with magic was at most a necessary risk for re-establishing normality.
-- sophia park, 2018
i’ve been on T for about four months now and i’m not really ready to talk about it publicly, but this, from my old college friend sophia, resonated.
one hundred and eighty-seven.
love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
-- james baldwin, in search of a majority, 1960
in related news, fedex dropped off my snoogle pillow today and it’s the best thing i’ve ever spent money on and i’m very proud of myself for giving up on love and investing in groundbreaking pillow tech to simulate the feeling of being little-spooned. love is a battle, love is a war, and i’m walking off the battlefield to go be cozy as hell. thank you.
one hundred and eighty-eight.
but in my own life, i know i generally feel very alive and emancipated when i choose to walk out of something. after all, you walk out when you realize that whatever it is that you’re watching, for whatever reason, simply isn’t worth it. walking out reminds you that while submission can at times be a pleasure, a risk worth taking, you don’t have to manufacture consent whenever or wherever it is nominally in demand. ...the fact that the exit door isn’t barred, the feel of the fresh air on your face when you open it -- all of this serves to remind you of how good it feels to angle the full force of your body and attention toward that which seems to you a good use of your short time on the planet, and to practice aversion toward that which does not. these are freedoms that life does not always grant; god help us if we would prefer an art that further whittled down the choices.
-- maggie nelson, the art of cruelty, 2011
maggie’s so right, but the difficulty here is in the word choosing. so often it seems like the choice is made for you. so often there are good reasons to stay, and those reasons weigh heavy on you even as you feel the fresh air on your face. if only ever leaving was this sweet and uncomplicated.
one hundred and eighty-nine.
love is a language, she thinks, and when one of us dies, we will be the last speaker of a dead language. the ability for one other person to understand you in this world. to be known.
-- porpentine charity heartscape, psycho nymph exile, 2017
what i’ve learned this year is that real love is part and parcel with real loss. to really love someone is to accept the risk of losing them, the risk of feeling pain when they go, however they go. there’s love inside of that loss, too; love in the act of being able to let go, to relinquish control. it’s hard. it’s the hardest thing there is. and the way porpentine puts it here is the clearest, most devastating expression of that feeling.
i think you can find love again after losing it (hello, phil elverum and michelle williams!), and there are always new languages to learn. new possibilities for not being alone. but the language you forged with this other person, the one you shared before you lost them — there’s simply no replacement for it.
one hundred and ninety.
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear. may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back. may you open your eyes to water, water waving forever, and may you in your innocence sail through this to that.
-- lucille clifton, blessing the boats, 2001
let’s end this week’s edition on a hopeful note, though.
and remember, if you have any thoughts about this week’s field notes, or anything you want to say to me, you can feel free to reply to this e-mail! i can’t promise i’ll respond, but i do read everything.