(finally scanning some negatives)
People around the world have been reporting extraordinarily vivid dreams; I've certainly had some myself. There is a certain dream-like quality to waking life as well, approaching lucidity in the sense that there is heightened awareness of individual agency in the present moment. What was once on autopilot is no longer automatic; there is no more "going through the motions," as all those motions are socially irresponsible, and we are even calling into question the legitimacy those "old normal" motions; while some choices are no longer options, a new range of choices has opened up, especially in the realm of imagined futures. Lucid waking.
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A psychologist explained in some think-piece that humans rely on significant events to mark the passage of time: heuristics providing the imagination something to look forward to and the memory something on which to reminisce. Hence the birthdays, relationship anniversaries, religious holidays, graduation ceremonies. These are also opportunities to celebrate, to break from the norm, moments we collectively, and somewhat arbitrarily, decide are special. There's nothing wrong with finding an excuse to party. This goes as well for major historic moments, which flatten the messy historical process into one state-sanctioned day, something bite-sized for us mere mortals to be able to grasp. On July 4th, the United States celebrates Independence Day. The signing of the Declaration of Independence may be one of those "before and after" moments, but isn't every moment? In order for some moments to be special, the rest—the vast majority—must be banal. Anyway, all this to say, I'm finding it helpful to establish some loose routines to help nail down this time soup before it all slips through my fingers.
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After watching the 1996 movie "Traffic," about the "war on drugs," my mom shows me this video of a man reading a bed-time story to his kids, telling the tale of pre-coronavirus society. Poignantly, the young people, who are growing up in an era after a "Great Realisation" (presumably taking place in the midst of a collapse of neoliberal capitalism), ask how humanity could have become so estranged from its present utopian egalitarianism. The gist of this story is that we didn't return to "business as usual," that we were able to come out the other side and establish a better "new normal." My initial reaction is incredulity—will people watch this video (some 3.3 million have, moderate internet virality) and reflect down to their cores about their consumption habits, travel expectations, self-sufficiency, and community involvement, or will it be just another FaceBook feed feel-good palliative, forgotten as it passes out of frame? I fear the latter and hope for the former. A "Great Realisation" is only possible if it happens on a mass scale, and if there is some way to harness and direct the energy in a collective movement.
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Part of my utopian vision for the future is one in which I don't feel so diametrically opposed to people whose views differ from my own. In the podcast "Dolly Parton's America," the interviewer asks Dolly about her thoughts on President Trump. Rather than denouncing him or voicing her support, she simply says she prays for him. One take on this would be that this is a thoughtful, with the ulterior motive of not wanting to alienate the conservatives among her fanbase. Shouldn't a person with such a platform use it to denounce evil, to throw her weight behind the right side of history? There is certainly a difference between my own outraged uproars at the TV in my living room, and a beloved celebrity making or withholding an endorsement on the air. And it may be easy for Dolly to take this seemingly neutral road, as she may not be as directly victimized by Trump's policies (all the more reason for her to advocate for those who do not have a platform). But I think that the statement she is making, and has the privilege to make, is that our public denouncement of such a toxic and harmful person, while personally edifying, goes nowhere, beyond the possible momentary respite from stewing over his incompetency. Trump is certainly responsible for some wicked and irreversible acts that have harmed and even ended people's lives forever (separating migrant children from their families and locking them in cages). He must own this. It may be next to impossible to forgive him, especially when he may go to his grave without assuming any responsibility or feeling any guilt. But I am inspired by Dolly's willingness to hold out hope for him. I try to remember that Donald is a human like anyone, and that he must have suffered some serious trauma growing up. I do not seek to defend him due to "affluenza," as the Stanford swim team rapist's defense lawyers successfully pleaded on his behalf a couple years ago. I just want to maintain a nuanced understanding. Viewing Trump as "pure evil" only plays into his stark ideological division of the world into the "good us" and the "bad them." He is a person using his power to do evil, inexcusable things. But people can learn and change, and often do. And yet, just as no one can change the past, no amount of learning and changing can ever make up for one's mistakes.
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Tejal Rao, a restaurant critic for the NY Times, has been following the rekindled "Victory Garden" movement. Beginning in WW1/Spanish Flu era at the urging of the US government, with the slogan "War Gardens in 1918 for Victory in 1919," it is estimated that at the height of the movement, independent small-scale farmers were producing up to 40% of the nation's produce. Now, with widespread anxiety over our blatantly fragile food supply systems, many are finding inspiration in this idea of self-sufficiency, which can start with something as easy as placing scallions in a mason jar on the window sill. With meat packing plants shutting down, my hope is that a generation will be forced to reckon with the necessity of vegetarianism, and come around to it. Alas, I share Rao's skepticism of the depth and longevity of this movement: will enough people shift their consumption/production balance to usher in a new era of sustainable healthy food production? How can we ensure that those living in urban food deserts have access to farming space and skills?
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Every night before bed, I follow a stretching routine that I learned from a YouTube yogi. I think of the character in the Murakami novel who is stuck in her house for years, decades, who takes this ample alone time to venture inward: through stretching, she familiarizes herself with every single muscle, ligament, tendon in her body. A material form of self-knowledge.
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I celebrate the cycles of the moon with some friends via zoom. On Thursday, for the full moon, my friend C set an intention to limit his use of the word "I" to twenty times total on Saturday, his effort at bringing awareness to where his ego unconsciously takes hold, asserts itself as the primary lens of experience. This seems a valiant aim. I wonder, is there a self outside of or underneath the ego? A self devoid of self-centeredness?
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I’m more flattered when someone says “you were in my dream” than when they say “I was thinking about you.” It is one thing for some external stimulus to trigger a memory related to their idea of me; it is quite another for their unconscious, unprompted, to incorporate its idea of me into its elaborate nocturnal machinations. More intimate, from the public sphere to the private interior; I am a part of the other, sustained in external para-life. An alternate universe that I will never know.
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Now that I'm back in my adolescent room, many of my dreams are set in high school—my unconscious picking up my environment, and all of the memories associated with it. The narrator in Olga Tokarczuk's Flights claims that memories may not be stored exclusively in the brain, as common knowledge would have it, but in neural networks that extend throughout the whole body. So perhaps it is not solely the unconscious that is responsible for these reimaginings, but my non-conscious, my physical responses to the sounds and smells, the barometric pressure, the magnetic field, the longitude and latitude, the plants in the yard, my parents and cats downstairs.
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I found my old GameBoy Color in the closet and have been playing through Pokemon Crystal, my favorite in a video game series I played obsessively throughout elementary and middle school (the first generation of games came out in 2000 and sold over 23 million copies worldwide). A common suggestion is to reread your favorite books—not to see how they've changed (they haven't) but how the reader has (likely quite a bit). What captivated me about the Pokemon games was their immersive stories in which I got to be the main character, strategize in choosing which adventure companions to take along in my party, see them grow through battles with other trainers and gym leaders, and explore a contained world beautifully rendered in two dimensions with a comfortingly logical and finite set of physical laws (you can jump over these cliffs in one direction, you can surf on this water, you can only walk so fast in the four cardinal directions).
I did not realize all those years ago just how thoroughly imbued these games are with ecocentric ideas, strongly influenced by Japanese Shintoism: the world is a beautiful place and each living thing deserves respect, legendary Pokemon act as spirits of certain places or living things and have a hand in the overall wellbeing of the land. Maybe Pokemon themselves are kami, spirits. The main story line in Pokemon Crystal has the player take down Team Rocket, evildoers exploiting Pokemon to dominate the world and become rich. The player is guided by elders to the "higher" path of humility, justice, integrity, respecting and protecting Pokemon and nature more generally—even undertones of opposing resource extraction. Of course, that opening line of the song—"I wanna be the very best"—sets a pretty capitalist tone, and the journey advances through successive competitive battles, but somehow, the values that stuck with me were respect and strategy, not winning at all costs.
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Last week, at a so-called "American Patriot Rally," protestors armed with automatic assault rifles paced the gallery of the Michigan legislature to intimidate representatives to end the stay-at-home order. Image of a democratic system under siege by an ideology of frontier-cowboy-individualism and anti-"socialism" (protestors are actually invoking authoritarian communism, à la Stalin).
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David Harvey, in this article for Jacobin, clarifies the distinction between this idea of rugged individualism, largely a ruse, and the emancipatory individualism that is the real aim of socialism: "This is the point that Marx is making again and again and again: that the root of real individualism and freedom and emancipation, as opposed to the fake one that is constantly preached in bourgeois ideology, is a situation where all of our needs are taken care of through collective action, so that we only have to work six hours a day, and we can use the rest of the time exactly as we please." Instead of returning to the status quo, getting those jobs back which we lost, let's "look to expand some of the things that are already going on, such as the organization of collective provision."
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I enjoyed (with some Schadenfreude) James Ball's short article for the Guardian about how the "disruption" of markets by venture capitalists has led to the self-sabotaging of those same startups, as optimistic investors looking forward to future dividends retract funding due to the present economic collapse.
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A few days ago, protestors packed into the plaza outside the capitol building in Boston. One speaker claimed that “It’s not a pandemic! The reason why they’re doing this ... is to turn the United States of America into the United Socialist States of America.” An inversion of reality and reaction: the virus as fear-concept created by some "they" driven by a desire to implement some horrible authoritarian "communism," rather than the virus as impetus for our society to alter or discard broken systems and establish new ones that better serve the people.
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The Center for Strategic & International Studies recently released a study of recent global trends in mass protests. Some takeaways:- 2019 was a historical high water mark around the world, with record increases in protest sizes, frequency, and percentage of population demonstrating—trends that are accelerating.
- Contributing factors: internet access and social media communication, youth un(der)employment, education leading to greater political awareness, increasing inequality (the greatest indicator of political instability), and perception of corruption and loss of faith in political leadership.
- Intensifying drivers to monitor: global economic slowdown, mounting environmental pressures (food/water access & migration), meddling in internal politics by foreign states, protestor/government technological competition especially regarding internet censorship and sophisticated surveillance
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Here is an excerpt from April Zhu's excellent piece on anti-black racism and the dynamics of pro-nationalist censorship in China: "This is how China’s censored discourse flywheel works. This nationalism—of which the particularly virulent online anti-black racism we’ve seen recently is a strain—though highly motivating and thus politically useful, once it gains momentum, is difficult to moderate. It is also a paradox of itself. Nationalists, argues Chenchen Zhang, an assistant professor of politics and international relations at Queen’s University Belfast, orient themselves in such diametric opposition to the West—here, they assign it the liberal values of the “white left,” or what those in the US might call the “libs”—that they end up employing much of the same language and ideas as right-wing populist movements of North America and Europe. The racism we see directed toward black people, immigrants, and Muslims, as well as the misogyny, that have their source in far-right Western groups, is replicated in the rhetoric of China’s digital nationalists. No question, China has its own, specific history of racisms. But the modern form that Zhang highlights, which lives on the Internet, permitted in effect by the 'nationalism filter' insofar as it is anti-Western, is distinct and new for how fast these images and words can travel."
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Scholar and activist Glen Couthard on how colonialism figures and operates in the present-day North America: "What I do is elevate dispossession not as some backdrop or some historical starting point but as an ongoing feature of the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in our present."
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Talking with a friend, we acknowledge the patent absurdity of the moment. To be absurd, a concept or occurrence must be something entirely new and incomprehensible—"un-reasonable" in the sense that no reason can be determined, that it cannot be understood through logic. There is certainly a logic behind the absurdity of the present moment, but has believability ever been so strained? Is the absurd necessarily a fictive rhetorical device, or can it transgress the boundary into the real? Watching "Tiger King" with the understanding that it is a documentary, and thus nonfiction, seems congruent with the overall atmosphere of "is this really happening?" And the terrifying answer, "Oh yes it is, whether you are watching or not." Which begs the question: what other absurdities are extant in reality, just unknown to me? [Post-publishing update: Elon Musk & Grimes announce that they will name their child "X Æ A-12." I am not opposed to odd names in principle, but the fact that it is Elon Musk makes me angry.]
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I've been thinking a lot about "org org," the centralized organization of existing local organizations to streamline mutual aid and avoid redundancy. At the beginning of the quarantine, we saw the proliferation of new resources and circulation of existing ones. What if part of the job of the government were to be that centralized facilitator of mutual aid?
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On that note, here are some good places to donate:- You may have heard that the Navajo community is especially hard-hit by this pandemic. Here is a link to donate; money will be distributed directly to people in need or in the form of much-needed supplies.
- Here is the link to the the Texas undocu worker $60,000 emergency fund/fondo de emergencía para trabajadores indocumentados de Texas
- Here is a compendium of mutual aid resources around North America—find one near you to get involved.
