25: My sadness comes in seasons and cataclysms.
This season of sadness started on a trip home to see my family. In my journals I found:
I arrived to a heat wave and a positive COVID test. It was unpleasant but mild and at first made my thoughts and the world seem softer, with more inertia, resistance, drag. Heavier, slower and more impressionistic. There were strands of web glistening all around me, from spiders and small larval beings, like saliva in the mouth of spring. I wrote some strange correspondence. One night I slept 12 hours and was awakened by a large mosquito-eater touching my neck and mouth. I gently removed them by the leg and closed the screenless window. I had a vivid and technically specific dream about a multipart artwork depicting a pool and the impositions on nondualism by our hegemonic media culture. I recorded it in my half sleep as follows:
A piece of a pool rendered in 3D and moving. The ledge of the pool produces an interesting feeling of precarious balance. Being on the edge produces an awareness of being in space, while moving through space. A 3D rendering of a piece of pool with ledge and water and some verticality rotating in virtual space like an oblong stele. It gets at the tendency in virtual space to violently sever things into falsely or impossibly discrete units. Glasses with everything but the shape of the pool painted black and the pool transparent so one is left with pool vision.
A entered a period of deep distress and went into a feverish hibernation, as if the virus had slowed me down enough for everything chasing me and dormant to catch up and overtake me. It wasn’t the virus but rather the culmination. I was waking up every morning before the sun with fractured sleep and trembling anxiety coursing through me. Unable to catch up to my thoughts and breath, shooting pains in my insides. Unable to retain simple thoughts with any cohesion. Unable to make sense of the world. Just a rush of painful feelings, images and words. After a week like this I am able to organize these words and it occurs to me that this practice or these rituals are largely about sifting through the ruins of the world in the ruins of my mind. I also wonder if these moments don’t afford some kind of greater clarity. Like when you're injured how you can become filled with a great concern and empathy for the world. These familiar states seem to come on like storms and then pass so I don’t know what to invest them with. Its like the ocean, how there is no more truth to the ocean when it froths and churns than when it's calm and glassy. And that these states are not good or bad, illuminating and tortuous, fleeting.
The Bay Area has become even more oppressively unlivable. The price of everything, already the highest in the country, has gone up even more. Housing is nearly impossible except for the super rich. The class gulf is staggering. Many in my small village look like they just witnessed a war, exhausted and frightened, what little sociality present before feels extinguished.
The spring winds scatter my thoughts and make the mesa quiver with unease. They discourage and confuse me.
Dear Rachel and every name in history,
I apologize if my last message came across as glib, and perhaps it was presumptuous of me to request an advanced copy of your book. I’ve become interested in open letters and more-than-parasociality. This has become something like an art practice. As Jalal Toufic offers in a passage in Postscripts about Derrida’s Envois:
‘When the omission of the letters of the presumed addressee was the writer’s choice rather than the editor’s and/or publisher’s, the effect of the omission is radical: the position of the addressee becomes structurally open to anyone who cares to assume it by writing a letter of response to the writer’s letter. Indeed for a writer not to include the addressee’s letters in a published correspondence would be to invite letters from some other person who would assume the vacant position of addressee.” She asked him, “Will you one day publish your letters to me? If you do, you have to publish mine alongside yours, otherwise by responding to your published letters someone could rightly assume the position of their addressee,” and then she objected the following to what he had advised her: “How can I write to Derrida when he’s already dead?!” In response, he read to her these lines from Deleuze’s book Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: “Kafka distinguished two equally modern technological pedigrees: on the one hand the means of communication-translation, which ensure our insertion and our conquests in space and time (boat, car, train, aeroplane ...); on the other hand the means of communication-expression which summon up phantoms on our route and turn us off course towards affects which are uncoordinated, outside co-ordinates (letters, the telephone, the radio, all the imaginable ‘gramophones’ and cinematographs ...). This was not a theory, but Kafka’s daily experience: each time one writes a letter, a phantom consumes its kisses before it arrives, perhaps before it leaves, so that it is already necessary to write another one,” then mused, “If a ghost/vampire is bound to intercept the letters, should one short-circuit the intended, initial addressee and write, from the outset, to the ghost/ vampire—indeed write letters only to ghosts and vampires? Paradoxically, then, a letter addressed to a ghost has the best chance of reaching its destination. If letters, as a mode of telecommunication, have structurally something spectral about them, at least in the sense that they have every chance of being intercepted if not also diverted or replaced with other letters by ghosts, then it is valid for letters to continue to be written even after their explicit addressee has died, if not begin to be written only once the addressee has died. But would the letters then be intercepted ... by another ghost than the one to whom they were addressed explicitly, or reach the other addressee of every letter, the dead-as-undead, who assumes every name in history?” and then predicted: “Once it is done, it will feel strange that nobody explicitly answered Derrida’s letters in The Post Card—or for that matter any writer’s letters that are ostensibly addressed to someone whose own part of the correspondence is not included, in accordance with the wishes of the author or with his or her consent, in the published compilation of the writer’s letters. Published letters that imply that they were answered but are not accompanied by the epistolary response are awaiting the reader who proves to be their addressee by writing letters in response to them.”
I am both anticipating and dreading your forthcoming book as I have come to view your work as some of the most significant explorations of the madness-inducing conditions of contemporary relations, the fragility of our sense of identity, and the uncertainty of our means of apprehending the world. The terrifying contours of a western anomie and the highest stakes. As someone with a personal and family history of mental suffering I find your work resonant, illuminating, skillfully heartbreaking and maddeningly rendered. With many subjects that intersect with my own experiences. I became aware and started following your work in 2014 with the devastating prescription for disaster piece. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/05/prescription-for-disaster
The term I’ve come to associate with your work is abyssal. Though perhaps it is the clear-eyed starting place for a reckoning with the world as it appears to be.
My daughter recently participated in a production of Bye Bye Birdie with her drama class. This is a good-enough specimen of the kind of toxic drama that we continue school our children in and rehearse until they have fully internalized it and form the cosmology we use to determine the world. This is a story of class, capital, celebrity, betrayal and people generally treating each other in instrumental and ruinous ways. It’s militaristic, patriotic, violent, cruel, manipulative and deceitful towards family, friends and life companions. This particular story is quite unremarkable, it will likely be forgotten and exists as one of the immeasurable variations on a suite of terrible archetypical dynamics reproduced endlessly through the extent of our media history. A torrent of like variations on these tragic themes unrelentingly saturates our consciousness from beginning to end. A collective drive towards ruination that unless counteracted with a hypervigilant commitment to the otherwise, will carry us away in its currents.
And many of these tragic variations feel quaint, or the domain of bourgeois ennui, when compared with the story of Nelson Kargbo, who you chronicled in The Refugee Dilemma. Though important to hold together because the stage set for these kinds of bourgeois or celebrity interpersonal romantic dramas has been built by sweeping colonial violence that structurally and institutionally continues to oppress and immiserate much of the world.
I wonder why it’s so difficult to create other stories? Why this collective insistence on condemning ourselves to the same tragedies? Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capital relations? Why are we not content with simply loving, respecting and caring for each other? Is there a politics of drama and tragedy at work that forecloses on a sense of collective emancipation? Or are we stuck on loop? Why has the rendering of dramatic tragedy become such a dominant form of entertainment? Does this degree of ritualized dramatic tragedy become naturalizing? How do we ritualize the otherwise? I feel like I’m getting closer to the questions I would like to be asking.
Living mostly in the Bay Area of San Francisco over the last 15 years has exhibited, with an extreme and unabating clarity, some of the most ugly and insidious trends in socioeconomic relations. The gap between the working class and the financial and tech elite has created almost two different realities. One class who shuttles itself around in artificially intelligent luxury vehicles to bastions of superwealth, and a desperate class of houseless and becoming-houseless people who live in tent cities, vehicles and wherever they can find a place for provisional survival. Many of whom, reasonably, would rather have their time—that is their life—in a state of inhospitable precarity, than suffer the indignity of a wage slavery that ensures they will be doing meaningless work for someone else’s benefit with the best hours of their life—and still not afford comfort, rest, security and happiness in what little that remains. As far as I can measure, this seems like a faustian bargain to begin with and a life with dignity requires as its precondition, ones life-time to be available to be with those they love, pursuing vocation without coercion.
On a recent trip to the Bay Area, I went to see a program of short films in the SF Film Festival when one in particular about a diasporic Yemeni community caught my eye. Afterwards I wanted to eat, and began walking up the gentrified corridor towards the outskirts of the city. Each place to eat seemed more inhospitable than the last one. Desperate people, clearly unwell, unwelcome, sick, talking to themselves, exhausted and begging for help, appeared every hundred paces. The restaurants were filled with trivial conversations and a masterful performance of indifference to this ubiquitous misery. It’s a kind of generally accepted sociopathy. The elite slip into Teslas and Airpods and fortify themselves in other spaces that are hard to access. Places with no public transportation and spaces for gathering. Places where the cost of living create another kind of fortification. I walked into a restaurant called Foreign Cinema on Mission street. It was an impressive indoor/outdoor space organized around a wall size projection of European films. Across from the projection, where a projector might have been found, was a large, domed, open kitchen with a hundred indigenous Americans rushing around to serve the seated diners. The dress code among the seated, was athleisure and heritage brands and the food was that seductive Californian blend of Mediterranean and Japanese inflected everything else. It all made me sick to my stomach. I kept walking until I reached the outskirts of the mission and to a small familiar Nepalese restaurant on an inhospitable thoroughfare. When I walked in, the owner apologized for the boarded-up door saying this was the 5th time since the start of the pandemic that the window has been smashed and he woke up at 3’clock in the morning to come begin repairing it again. I apologized and said how much I appreciated the restaurant and rested my eyes on the beautiful green, blue, white and brown Himalayan range pictured on the cover of the menu.
I’ve had all your magazine stories open on a browser window for months now. I’ve been trying to get to them to respond, but somehow can’t. I feel like that way, madness lies.
There are many resonances with facets of your stories. I was sent to one of those violent rehabilitation centers, my first love was a pharmacological causality and suicide, time in psychiatric clinics, drug addictions, my wife’s undocumented status, my creative partner’s vocation advocating for incarcerated people, my friend Harmony deciding on her right to die at the start of the pandemic, and so on.
With the pair of glasses that I sometimes carry around, the whole world can look like the constituent elements of one of your stories.
In How a Young Woman Loses Her Identity you offer this idea of the dissociative fugue.
She was given a diagnosis of dissociative fugue, a rare condition in which people lose access to their autobiographical memory and personal identity, occasionally adopting a new one, and may abruptly embark on a long journey. The state is typically triggered by trauma—often sexual or physical abuse, a combat experience, or exposure to a natural disaster—or by an unbearable internal conflict. Philippe Tissié, one of the first psychiatrists to study fugue, characterized it as a kind of self-exile. In 1901, he wrote, “The legend of the Wandering Jew has become a reality, proved by numerous observations of patients or unbalanced persons who suffer from an imperious need to walk, on and on.”
This might be something like what I’m experiencing. As a child in a stroller, in New York City in the eighties, I would cover my head with a blanket. It was simply too much for me. I found other ways of chemically covering my head with a blanket as I grew older and when my mother got diagnosed with cancer and subsequently deteriorated over the next 4 years of my adolescence, I became overmedicated and unmoored. Estranged from my father and unable to live in the city I grew up in, and increasingly priced out of the other places I’ve tried to live, I feel as though I have been in a state of dissociative fugue. I’m prone to long aimless, anxious perambulations and without an adequate blanket to find comfort in, I just keep walking, making pictures and writing things down.
The other interesting thing—for which I don’t have a name, much language or precedents—is that I cannot access a single memory from the time my mother was alive through the rehabilitation period that followed her death, which I’m perhaps still in. My memory only gradually resolves towards a slightly less traumatic present, though I’ve learned trauma is recursive and accumulates in overlapping phases. When I try to conjure memory, I can usually only think of images and moving images that I’ve made or procured—and sometimes, the memories are not even related to my family. I’ll imagine, for example, a photograph I bought in the Marché des Enfants Rouges of a man with one hand holding a child and the other on a captive elephant who is fading towards oblivion.
I strangely feel as though the memories reside inside my earthly body, while my mind has turned away, and that when I die, I should be buried in a simple cloth, not embalmed and crated, and they will return as thorns on the flowers that grow from my resting place.
Mostly estranged from my surviving family, I have little understanding of my histories, apart from the knowledge that there were many coerced migrations on both sides. I think this relates to my inclination towards collecting other peoples discarded family snapshots and traveling to places to learn about cultures that I may have descended from.
I’ve noticed a recourse in your writing to this idea of depersonalization, which is a curious thing to me at this particularly situated moment in history. While these extreme instances of this sort of impulse makes for compelling stories, there seems as though there is an abiding need to decenter the disproportionate sense of possessive individualism that characterizes the western liberal subject—in all of its many intersectional relations to class, race, gender and so on. I suppose I also wonder about this genre of abyssal journalism and what it actually produces. It seems as though many of these stories function as a reverse indictment of oppressive systems and structural violence. I would like to think they read self-evidently as a call for policy reform and reimagined social relations.
Does this lead you towards actionable items, positions, policies or ways of being? Do you get the sense, which I do myself sometimes, that you’re making the same work over and over again? Are you concerned that this story is becoming your livelihood? About the industries for this kind of genre? About your entanglements and responsibilities to the subjects, living and dead?
I listened to a long form podcast with you and thought I could detect something like a jouissance, almost as though you like and seek out these stories. I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the technical banter and light tenor between the host and yourself. The combination of the most horrific stories and the canny navigation of attentional economies, and how to succeed in them, is plunging me further into the abyss…https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-69-rachel-aviv
I’m interested in the post-abyme, how we might move towards better relations.
And I’m concerned, sometimes, I might be trapped in the poetic-abyme.
Sincerely,
Perry
