Tag: life

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan

546: “Your Grandma Made That Quilt” (R. Kikuo Johnson)

                “Hold on, bud, your grandma made that quilt…” – R. Kikuo Johnson, No One Else, p. 96

                What work did I do today?
                Some emails, yes. There are always more of those. Some writing toward one research project, some reading toward another. A couple phone calls. More emails. Teaching a long seminar, and last preparations before it, and notes afterward on how I might lead it differently next time. Follow up emails from participants’ questions. And washing an apple, cutting it for my beloved on the cutting board they got me, arranging the slices in a wave around some peanut butter. A snack for partway through a busy afternoon.
                The systems around me keep insisting that work is what I do for payment. In the face of that noise, R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else paints with all the hidden, submerged work of families, communities, overlapping lives. At the heart of the book is all the years a woman spends caretaking her elderly father. After the first page, we never see that. Not directly. We feel it: a kind of haunting inside the pages, inside the house’s walls. We hear it mentioned once. We see so little of the grandmother’s and grandfather’s work in shaping the world their family lives in, so little of the kid’s work in trying to care for his mother as she cares for her father. It hurts, all this work that goes unread. And it lifts up lives like sap lifts the leaves of a tree the kid stares into, searching for his lost cat. 
                He finds the cat. It snuggles in his lap. No One Else turns me toward all the work that goes into an ongoing moment, and suggests that seeing might mean opening to what’s outside the frame.

by Azlan

543: “Willful Forgetting” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Of course we all engage in willful forgetting all the time […] If we get a new phone number, for example, the old phone number must be forgotten or else its retention will keep rewriting the new one. Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 83

                Two days ago my love and I were at the coast, listening to the water on the rocks, the murmur and wash of the waves. Long slow dances of gravity, motion, erosion. My love said, “I love the sound,” and we stood waist deep, listening.
                Earlier that day we played Pokémon Go. It’s a game of accumulation: just now my character’s carrying 2,780 pokémon. It’s a game that, like so many of the capitalist productivity narratives I’m enmeshed in, keeps promising more, and better, and hold onto this. One of the reasons Pokémon Go keeps appealing to me is that it promises that you can catch everything, have everything, hold onto everything, level everything up. Though of course, that isn’t really what I want at all. Or rather that’s one way I’ve been taught to want, but it’s not the only one, or even the one I most often choose.
                The light played in the water. The water washed among the rocks. Of course learning—being—loving—take time. I usually think they take time because of the hours that go into love unfolding. Into learning sinking in, like water into earth. Into being. Re-reading Halberstam, I think they also take time because of the uncounted ebb/flow in which ideas wash away, get lost, mingle back into subconscious and beyond before rising up in different patterns. A wave. A sound of rock and water. I let myself forget to post this yesterday, as I sat and laughed and talked with the part of my family that is close by. This morning I sit and forget the distance between me and other parts of my family who are far off, and for a moment I forget all the miles between, like we’re looking at the clouds together. I wonder: how often do we find our way to our loves and our families, in part, by letting some things slip away?

by Azlan

537: “A Live Fish?!” (Badell, Rebottaro, & Bender)

“Bunker: ‘A live fish?!’
The Wraith: ‘The true crimefighter always carries everything she needs in her utility belt, Tyler.’”
                -Flavor text for The Wraith’s Utility Belt card in Sentinels of the Multiverse by Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro, and Paul Bender

                I don’t love this quote just because I love the image. A Batman style utility belt, and inside a live fish—maybe a little dace—of course in water because otherwise it won’t stay alive for long. And I don’t love it just because my friends and I were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse yesterday, and Hannah stopped us, saying: “Wait. This card’s actually pretty funny.” Though maybe in part this post is a you had to be there moment. So much of language is, isn’t it? A connection in a place and time. A hand holding a fish. You had to be there, and it all made sense.
                There’s also something ridiculous about that superhero trope of carrying everything you need. Of somehow being fully independent of context and situation, as though prepared enough could keep you dry in a rainstorm, cool in a heatwave, could help you chat with friends around a board game, cure your cancer, ready you for a loved one’s death or an old friend’s return, or the pipes freezing, or your joints aging, or life, or death. Could be ready for all the endless perhapses and certainties of a changing world. For that you really would need a live fish. Or maybe, instead, you could let the fish go back in the river, where it would rather be. Swimming along. Not helplessly, not mindlessly. Not ready for anything but responding to this. These changing currents of river and world. You had to be there, but luckily, you are.

by Azlan

536: What “I’m Asking” (Tochi Onyebuchi)

“Hell yeah, I’m lost. More lost than I’ve ever been in my damn life.”
“I don’t have the answer you’re looking for.”
“Answer? I don’t even know what question I’m asking anymore.”
“But you’re still asking it. That is the important part. That is always the most important part.”
                -Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, p. 178

                I just got back from a walk with my mom. Well, my mom’s some thousands of miles away, actually, so what I had with me as today’s 68 degrees dropped toward tonight’s 36 was my jacket and my phone and her voice, walking along with me. And the blowing leaves. And the shadows of someone else at the park, also talking to someone on their phone. And the trees, the clear skies, the moon. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.
                I’ve lived far away from my family since I was seventeen. For whatever reason, this year’s been especially hard. There are probably several good reasons for that, but instead of trying to lay them out, I’m thinking about the leaves that swirled by with our voices on the evening wind, and the little chill in my fingers, almost pleasant, that’s drifting away now that I’m warming up inside. I think years ago I started wondering what happens if I turn less toward answers. (I know I miss you). I think, these days, I’m also letting go of questions. (What can we say to connect?). Or some of them, at least. There are still the questions that we can’t put into words, and whatever is between and through the questions. The rustling leaves. The wind. Someone else on the phone, talking to their loved one. The branches drawing pictures in the sky. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.

by Azlan

535: “This Is How” (Layli Long Soldier)

                “This is how you see me the space in which to place me”
                -Layli Long Soldier, Whereas, p. 8

                Just now I’m loving reading Layli Long Soldier’s poems as instructions. Or maybe, better, as a kind of script or choreography: an invitation to move through the world in certain ways and then see what’s changed. What’s growing. This is how you see me. I’m walking these steps, steps suggested by her words.
                I think this is one of my favorite approaches to language. Well, that’s hard to say. I have so many favorites. (1. The way I called “Jarrett!” to a friend, and she heard me, and then instead of walking apart we were walking together. 2. The way Anya told me “I usually harvest the seedpods and then kind of crinkle them on a cookie tray,” and now we’ve gathered arugula seeds from the garden to plant next spring. 3. The way my partner calls “Hello honey bunches!” and I call back “of oats!” and then maybe one of us invites us out for a walk. And that’s just getting started). I think I mean that I keep hearing language described as communication, the shuttling of information—“gather the seeds this way”—and while I love that, I also love them as a path to walk. I’m not telling you what you’ll see. I’m saying, look at this space you’re in, look at it this way. “This is how you see me the space in which to place me.” What do you see?
                A script. A piece of choreography. An invitation. A reminder. A walk.

by Azlan

534: “Much Together” (D’Arcy McNickle)

                “Even then, it seemed, they said but little to each other, yet nothing went unsaid that needed saying.
                In those days they were much together.”
                -D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded

                My sibling’s visiting for a week. In the kitchen just now, actually, baking bread. Ten minutes ago we were lounging on the couch together. Earlier today we were walking beneath sycamores. (I love sycamores: the patterned bark, the broad leaves, the nobby branches like fairytale walking sticks or heretale hands waving hello). I think I feel a pressure, when I get to see a loved one again after a long time apart, to try and say everything. To talk it all out: the catching up, the reorienting, the worrying, hoping, planning, sharing. And I really do like talking. I am, I think most of my loved ones would agree, a talker. But I’ve also been sitting—or walking—with the limitations of all that saying. The saying (for me) can be a way of trying to undo the distance we also live in, our lives growing in different places. It works in some ways, and in some ways it doesn’t. More than words, what I want is our connections. And when we also live far apart, when we are together, I want that time together. Here is still a distance, not undone but not all-doing. And here’s our closeness. And here are these walks beneath the sycamores, shared steps, shared stillnesses. We are much together.

by Azlan

533: “Casting About In Bed” (Ross Gay)

                “…neglects the fact that one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body.” -Ross Gay, in “43. Some Stupid Shit,” The Book of Delights, p. 127

                I think about this two page essayette often, usually because Ross Gay does something a lot like magic in bringing delight and joy and sunbright power to turn and face horror, and this time because today I tried to take a nap. At the time I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to take a nap. I realize, now, that I’m pretty sure it was during my first bout of covid. “Tried to take a nap” is pretty off the mark for what I felt in that exhausted falling apart, but that’s the last time I was asleep at 2 or 3 pm. Lying in bed at 2 or 3 pm, today, “trying to nap,” as I put it, I thought about Gay because I realized that drifting in and out of dream is a kind of thing I could practice. A kind of thing like drifting in a river, a current-thing, pathless and gently gravity-guided, wandering through depths and reflections and shadows known and unknown. A letting go, if I’m otherwise clutching at somethings. Which I was, because in “trying to nap” today my mind kept turning back to my to-do list, the one I was too exhausted to keep at, and to the ways I should do pieces of it better. I’m thinking about Gay because all that is something I practice too, of course. That busy mindedness, that assumption that rush and press is the performance of importance. Which is something I absolutely do not believe is true. I want to go about learning to nap the same way you go about planting a kale patch. Water. Soil. Time. And someday leaves.
                Which is to say: the blankets? Stretched out. The window? Open. The breeze? Mischievous. Tonight’s sleep isn’t napping, it’s sleeping—we could I’m sure discuss the differences—but I mean for this to be a kind of gardening toward future nappings when all I’ll hold if anything is the gentle being held by sunlight and dream.

by Azlan

531: “Undermine Your Own Authority” (Stacey Waite)

                “17. Undermine your own authority, be certain in your uncertainty, develop a voice that can be trusted even as it is subjective, unreliable, and impossibly to pin down, unless of course, you want to be pinned down in a sexy way.” -Stacey Waite, “How (And Why) To Write Queer,” Re/Orienting Writing Studies p. 45

                Stacey Waite develops a wonderful, poetic list of 63 rules for writing queer, which can mean many things including (for me, at least) write against the ways you were told it had to be written, and write into the ways you need. Which means part of the joy of Waite’s rules is that you can’t follow them, or can’t get to where they point by following them. And part of the joy is that it’s a delight to pick them up like dance steps you’re trying to learn by watching someone across the crowd. In these last weeks as I write cover letters for job applications—so many “Dear So-and-So’s,” so many “Sincerelys,” so many “my experiences”—I’ve thinking back to Waite’s rules. Imagining a few more to go with them.
                64. Write without getting to the point, and then when you realize you’ve meandered off just go back to what you meant to start saying, or as close as you can get to it, by which I mean this is a post about how exhausted and overwhelmed I was at about 3:32 today (and 3:25, I suppose; it doesn’t happen all in a minute). Even with everything—especially with everything—my family has patterns for speaking the things we need to say, so that with my brother I say I’ve just been reading Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season, it’s so good, and with my dad I say I’m out for a walk just saying hi, and with my mom I say I hope you slept well last night, and with me my partner says do you want to sit and breathe together for a few minutes, and maybe none of those are exactly where we meant to end up, but they’re where we make space to remind ourselves to start.
                65. Start every sentence with “so.” So we can see you thinking. So you can keep thinking. So the train of your thought can puff its steam as it gets going. So we can hear the steam. So you can mix metaphors willy-nilly. So words are a dance and even if we’re out of step we hear the steps, hear the music, hear how we’re lagging or catching up and dancing.
                66. Forget where you were going. Do you need to be going? Did you want to be coming back?

by Azlan

529: “Evaluation: Erratic” (Pandemic Legacy)

                “Evaluation: Erratic.”
                –Pandemic Legacy (Season 0)

                I have an older brother, so I knew about Yoda long before I first watched the movie. I knew he was a teacher, silly and wise. Even if I didn’t know, I think the story—its shape, and the tropes it plays with—tells me to pay attention to this little figure in a little hut. His performance of unimportance is important. His power is just beneath the surface of the swamp, ready to rise. In that respect Yoda is different from almost all the other little creatures we see throughout Star Wars. His difference, his distinctness, is highlighted in everything from the camera’s attention to the precision of his character design to his humor.
                All the video and board games I’ve played build with something like this signaling. A game (by one definition) is about what I can do, and can’t do. It’s important for me to understand why landing on someone else’s Monopoly property led to me losing money. Playing the game (by this definition) is understanding, and pushing the rules around. Even in social deduction games where the point is that everyone doesn’t know the rules, the goal is to figure them out. To learn the limits of my doing, and to use my doings toward a goal. The game is about our agency.
                Which is why it stuck out to me last night when, playing the excellent Pandemic Legacy (Season 0), I had no idea why our team spies received the psychological evaluation: “Erratic.” I’m sure there was a reason. I bet it makes sense. But in this post I’m not really looking for it. I’m interested in the consistency with which I’ve learned that games are about my actions. I’m interested in how much of my life happens for bewildering reasons I can never sort out. How much of my engagement with the world unfolds beyond and outside my ability to control events. And here I am, walking through the rain I didn’t expect, trying to fix the doorknob that I didn’t know was broken. Making friends with someone who happened to say hello. What would a game be like if it celebrated the way that things go unpredictably, without any reference to my plan? Does anyone know a game like that?

by Azlan