of artificial fire and fog
Sunrise in Beijing
No one knew how to mark the end of that year, but the fireworks banged on every horizon oblivious. I knew that I didn't want to be among strangers. A certain impulse that whatever it was would have to be warm and small and maybe that would mean being only with prime numbers 2, 3, 5… in the end, an un-prime but balanced 8. I put on a purple silk dress then a sweater and trainers to hide it. On the roof there was gunpowder and surround-sound bangs and some kind of enacted primal survival (from this sheltered corner of Berlin). Jesse mentions Yalda, a Persian tradition of reading poems on the winter solstice into the night. The idea gets lost in the preparations but on the first I open books read in 2016 at places where I had folded down the corners.
Bhanu Kapil: I want to write the worlds that vanish almost as soon as they are made.
Claudia Rankine: The conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing.
Cherríe Moraga: I’m not talking about skyscrapers / merely structures that can support us / of trembling.
R. Erica Doyle:
It was a year of revelations of the persistence of or worsening of various tyrannies,* especially for those who had or still have the luxury of ignoring them. Of questions as to what to do about the revelations, questions which have to propel action. A resolution, not to wait, to dwell or sit on things (writing, desire, will) for too long. Even though the dwelling is not static but a mobile state, where thought happens.
January has since been more like another folded page from Kapil: I want to write a novel that feels like lying down, except I don’t write fiction and I am trying to find some spurs. Many times last year I thought I did not want to write anything else (publicly) until I had read more, and I am still reading, and will still be reading, for all of life, and cannot always remain silent. So instead a kind of writing that admits its insufficiency and comes from a place of doubt.
I wrote a script to read in an art institute in Norway about getting beyond the blind alley of the impasse, after Lauren Berlant – a delaying, ‘treading water’ state that comes after ‘the good life’; that is, with the decaying of post-war narratives of improvement and upward mobility in Europe and America.** Berlant’s Cruel Optimism describes with quite shattering accuracy, at least for me, the destabilization of the late capitalist subject, the normalization of insecurity and precarity. Learning to live as lightly as possible, agile and adaptive; earning money for the month not even for the year. The impasse relates to a situation that is absorbed in the movements of the present, without a sense of advance in direction.
‘How long have people thought about the present as having weight,’ Berlant asks, ‘as being a thing disconnected from other things, as an obstacle to living?’
The impasse is a stretched-out hesitation, ‘a state of animated suspension.’ The usual phrase, ‘suspended animation’, before her reversal, refers to the slowing or temporary stopping of vital functions, like breathing and heart beat, without death, as in hibernation. It conjures the image of a figure hanging in space or the frozen time of a photograph. ‘Animated suspension’, in everyday terms, is rather the fact of doing many things without the impression of getting anywhere. In political terms, it’s the fact of making protests or actions with potential gains but little change in overarching structures.
In the original Zoroastrian tradition of Yalda, on the longest and darkest day of the year, people stayed up all through the night, reading these poems, so that they could remain alert against evil and misfortune. The impasse’s reality of always switched-on but not-quite awake (while trying to stay woke) can feel equally exhausting.
Berlant writes that impasses occur ‘when the relation of living to a fantasy of life has to be reinvented.’ In poetic or artistic terms, more positively, the impasse can make for a practice of tentative repetition in service of survival. The delay – which allows then for creation – is itself a coping mechanism, within the world in flux: ‘the delay enables us to develop gestures of composure, of being-in-the-world.’ The processes of writing or making things or plotting paths and actions, however slow and resistant, are a contribution to this reinvention of, at least one’s own, life.
I thought about this impasse in terms of the fog that comes before production – hazy mind to be navigated through before the work comes – but wondered, if this is not the residual fog that I am living in, [we] are living in, which when parted by a slash of cruel lightning looks more like… horror. But next, the cloud is cut by a line of words or an IRL smile, or a hand or a nod or a brushing-against, and what’s behind the fog looks more like… beauty. The best that can be made of such a perpetual fog is when occasionally experienced with the atmosphere of a smoke machine in a club, accompanied by music and coloured lights and friends. I’m not talking about escapism, which according to the truth-rooted superstition of staying aware of danger now feels irresponsible, if at moments necessary. Just ways of living through it.
* Berger: ‘It’s not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny for its power structure (...) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless.’
** The good life still seemed pretty secure at 60°N.
I received two other Tinyletters this past week with the phrase 'treading water', having drafted this, and was going to take the phrase out, but no, it's indicative of the impasse in the air I'm talking about. All quotes here from Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011.