a fragile connection

Street in Exarcheai, Athens

‘A break can be how a body comes up against an expectation; how a body can fall, trip, stumble, how a pot can shatter against a hard stone.’
 

‘So much is, so many are, involved in a breakage.’
 

– Sara Ahmed, ‘Feminism & Fragility’
 

March 12, 2016
 

I got a letter from Z., and in it was a word I didn’t know. ‘Ilinx’, she said, ‘is this the right word? … seized by the desire to overturn, just do something weird, and disruptive.’ I look it up: ‘Ilinx is a kind of play, described by Roger Caillois, in game studies … creates a temporary disruption of perception, as with vertigo, dizziness, or disorienting changes in direction of movement.’ Caillois: ‘an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.’ It sounds like why people take drugs: an attempt to fuck up the game of adulthood for a bit, purposefully derail. Ilinx is the Greek for whirlpool but I think it has less to do with descent than with joyous upswirl. It is not a blind spinning.
 
I’ve been needing breakthroughs, or needing to break through something, don’t know what... hard exercise and sex, fast writing on paper, bass in the ovaries... bring temporary breakthroughs. But right now, safe highs (see also, handstand practice, first coffee, chili) don’t last long. I don’t want to take drugs, I don’t see life as a game (life will only play with you if you play with it, that albatross phrase), but I do want to do something.
 
Fifteen years later, I’m still formed by reading Anaïs Nin as a teenager, her single experience of LSD: ‘It was very interesting as a writer, because I found I had exactly the same images. So I found that this was not an inaccessible realm and it was better to have access to it naturally, rather than through chemicals.’ Pious. She called her diary her ‘opium pipe’, an inward-looking channel intoxicated with life and death, through which physical sensations and psychological insights might break through.
 
There’s also actually breaking things, the shock after the rupture, and how that feels (good). Shattered glass, surprise at the sight of the change of state from whole to splinters on the floor. Sharp and eager to draw blood from the fingertips that must now pick it up. Here’s a reason to be an artist not a writer, to break things, rather than having to piece things together in order, with too much control. I go for a night walk in the drizzle down the street, which is flat and unmoving, and when I get back sweep up the glass, leaving it in the pan to contemplate the next morning. 

March 23, 2016
 

On the news: another bomb, and then another. In the airport, that brash affront of flowing capitalism and bodies with permits for movement, navigating the questions of border officials or dodging the perfume aisle. The ceiling tiles have fallen down in chunks before the friendly font of ‘check-in’, bright electricity still on. In Istanbul, blue flashing lights beneath red flags with white crescents, and a sluggish official explaining a situation fast becoming status quo. A football stadium outside of Baghdad.* Mosques and markets in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Other explosions, many others. A chart of all the explosions everywhere in the course of any day. The chart would be a violence. Ordering is a violence. Acknowledging the disorder, without charts.
 

Extreme breakages occur closer and closer to each person’s doorstep, more and more frequently. Once again, a resistance of all narrative – since after Hiroshima, only fragments – along with a craving for it, for reassurance, the idea of continuation, running together words. I write in a piece that takes me the first four months of the year: ‘a diminished sense of forward direction but a heightened sense of time.’ I write about blood, thick and carmine, but not that of wounds, that of the womb, a different kind of smarting. Blood and alienation. 

later that night
I held an atlas in my lap 
ran my fingers
across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere

everywhere

– Warshan Shire

June 24, 2016

An anti-immigration poster with the words ‘Breaking Point’ arouses an ugly other side to breakage. I returned to the capital two weeks ago to lies marked on flyers in black and red inkjet and the red arrows plunging through the tense sky. The British psyche is at breaking point. Beneath the dry cracks of austerity the shallowly repressed logic of empire (madness of empire); the bruised pride of what an English man believes he deserves. A destructive blow, to self and others, triggering a series of further destructive blows. Regression to a false idea of land-dwelling continuity. Excavation of the structural deficiency of everything.

Relieved to escape the shouty E1 streets, I board the blue-and-yellow 737 with a feeling of alert dread. The lightness of being in the air and the liberty of landing without being noticed. It is quiet here.

We begin to watch the results in a corner-bar in Kreuzberg whose Polish proprietor we ask to put on the BBC ballot-calling. We are a British passport holder of Indian and Spanish parents, an American writer of Syrian descent, and a South London-raised woman with a Polish father, who remembers Soviet rule, the formation of the EU as a peace-keeping entity, an earlier sweep of fascism. The Netherlands, Germany, and ancestral Ireland are also sat at the table.

By Salford, after Kettering, the margins are bad enough, small enough, that I know to watch this called out place by rainy place is a masochism I don’t need: better to sleep in hope, to sleep. In my dream a short white man standing on the porch roof of a municipal building is firing a machine gun into the town square, and I am hiding crouched in the back of small Fiat. A few times a day this week, I find myself back there. 
I am not the one in danger.

*On the day of sending, a shopping district in the centre of Baghdad.