I have spent a long time in places where late summer is the worst time of year. Houston in September, and even October, was routinely 100 degrees. My friends in other places, with their “sweater weather” and apples and pumpkins and leaves made it, somehow, feel worse than August. We had already been so hot since May.

This year in New England, a place where summer can be surprisingly hard for me to gauge, we were determined to “seize the moment.” We have been to every regional Sheep and Wool Show (and New England is great at Sheep and Wool Shows). We have camped four weekends, maybe six, and on the other weekends we are at the farmer’s market early, racing to buy both local tomatoes and the best soft cheese before one or the other sells out. Tomato season is short here.

My chores are mostly undone. I do laundry what feels like every weekday to catch up. Half of the time on Thursday I spend all of my work breaks packing, as fast as I can, from a list that lives perpetually in my to-dos. It has been fun, but also exhausting. Late July’s camping trip was rough and for a while I wasn’t sure I was ever going to recover.

I am tired.

The point of this is that we believe we can live like this all the time, at this kind of maximum intensity. We cannot. I am not glad that winter is arriving soon in the same way I was glad in a different climate. But I am still glad to see summer go.

This post is largely a test of WordPress’s app interface. I wrote a longer preamble that did not, it seems, pass said test.

I wrote in my notebook this morning: “Where is there room to both resist and to build better practices?”

Perhaps that place is here, and has been here all along.

I have found myself, this spring, circling back in way that feels very often like failure. Not only have I moved back, against my own will, to a physical place that I left quite deliberately, but I also find myself in a mental place that I revisit all too often. That is, I have been wrestling with exactly the same set of habits and tendencies that I always wrestle with. I write the same goals, the same desirable new habits, the same lists with the same items on them. But perhaps there is something here to learn.

When I think about iteration, I think about Maggie Nelson’s alternatives to being distant and disengaged, from The Argonauts:

The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margins, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book, over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

We work in cycles and patterns, and this is not a flaw but proof of humanity. It is against the grain of our own nature that we have been taught to exclusively value novelty, change, sudden acts of genius, flashes of spontaneous will. Can we relearn how to look on the cycle itself as a pleasure? Can we remember how to say, “Aha! Here I am again! What can I see this time?” Can we delight in the same old thing, not despite its sameness but because of it?

In 2012, the post Susan Howe, then in her mid-70s, concluded her Paris Review interview by observing that “when I say I’ve broken everything open, maybe I’ve been moving in a circle.” But the circle she observes is a joyous one—of trying to say the same thing, but now having the skills to say it better, to actually make the point. Repetition allows us to grow, even if that seems paradoxical.

In his own Paris Review interview (I’ve been reading a lot of interviews with poets lately) Mark Strand notes that “We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.” The circle is not a trap. The circle teaches us to be better at our lives, to connect more deeply to our experiences. You cannot both forge expertise and see the circle as a failure.

II.

We don’t, perhaps, live in a good moment for relearning the value of repetition. It is difficult work to appreciate the constant, the frequent, the homely, when one has no chance to do anything else. The value of our routines is mostly taught to us by interruption. For many of us right now, our same-old-life is almost aggressively omnipresent.

Nor do our habits and connections allow the space to inhabit sameness. If we, truthfully, told our social media audiences that 99% of what we do today is exactly what we did yesterday and will do again tomorrow, the entire phenomenon would collapse. Who would addictively read such things? One learns, instead, to highlight the linear, the changing.

Iteration and repetition are not capitalist values. Novelty makes money, novelty drives what brands consider to be “engagement.” But what advertisers see as engagement is the exact opposite of intellectual and spiritual engagement, which require—-demand-—return.

In his tap-essay “Fish” Robin Sloan draws the distinction between “liking” something on the internet (click a button, resume scrolling) and “loving” something on the internet (reading, saving, referencing). Love is a circular act, in which we come back again and again.

Luke Kruger-Howard of GOES books notes that capitalism is an inherently “unimaginative framework” for art, in part because monetary value and its close kin internet likes are falsely posited as the only driving force of creation. Personal satisfaction, mental health, and human connection are not included in the ways we value art in a capitalist system, and in order to re-prioritize those values we will need to reinvent the system itself.

From the other side, too, when one is a “consumer” of art, capitalist models are less useful than the framework of circularity. We get immeasurable benefit from paying attention to things, from looking at them closely. They enter into our consciousness, they jump start our thinking. But that isn’t how our world primes us to act, in the content we produce, as discussed above, or in the content we consume. Read a book, then immediately read a new one. (Or just buy them; nobody cares if you read them.) Watch the entire series in one sitting. Everything swallowed, nothing tasted.

The world moves quickly, we are told, and we need to keep up. But keeping up is only, ever, treading water. There is no end, and the only outcome is fatigue. Human life involves more novelty now than it ever has, and the purpose of that novelty is mostly for us to produce and consume as many products as possible. The last hold out, our attention, is increasingly bound into this same system. And these habits, too, this franticness, are what split us away from our own lived experience. No one makes money from our wholeness.

I do not always find it easy to embrace the phenomenon of “THIS AGAIN?!” Seeing the system for what it is does not get one out of the system, and so much of what we consume, in our quest for linear novelty, is, genuinely, so good. (Much of it is, needless to say, not.) There is no prize, though, for doing the most, for reading every book, for watching all of Netflix. There is no prize for having a flash of understanding and never needing to have it again. The prize for slowing down, for returning, might be love.

I remember it so clearly, the moment in which I remembered that I could think, that I was allowed to be interested in things.

When my mother got sick, I was driven back to writing because nothing else made any sense. (I refuse to write a dead mother memoir, but my goodness do I understand why people do it.) And in that moment, when my life was wildly upside down, and my tenuous strings of words were the only thing keeping my sanity together, I remembered myself. The self who had wanted to go to graduate school in the first place. The self who knew things and who cared about ideas. I re-learned how to think, when it wasn’t for a conference paper or to impress some students or to frantically demonstrate that I belonged in a graduate seminar.

There is magic in a certain kind of thinking. Something that reminds you of something, which reminds you of something else, and then you understand something that you didn’t understand before. The stars become a constellation, the constellations adhere into a galaxy. It is wildly heady stuff.

And I have lost it.

I would blame the pandemic, but it was already gone. I don’t know why, or how. There are a few posts here from 2019 that still have it, but by mid-year my notebook entries were starting to fret. And the pandemic certainly didn’t bring it back.

I can make the case that I have outgrown it. It is, after all, a legacy of academia; a fancy version of the three part enumeration. Perhaps that version of my self no longer applies; I have moved beyond connect-the-dots.

Or, perhaps I have merely outgrown the novelty of it. It was, for a long time, so remarkable as a phenomenon that I dropped everything to write down whatever I noticed, and I noticed a lot. Now I’m more likely to simply pause the TV to explain to my irritated spouse what a “Damascene conversion” is or to talk about how Arnold Bennett’s book of advice on how to live more fully included instructions to make one’s own tea. (Bennett also said that one should not waste one’s train journey on the newspaper; one should use that valuable time to consider the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I think about that a lot.)

That is, maybe I simply stopped being so impressed with myself. There was a time when your every step was applauded; now they (probably) aren’t. The standards of being change. We habituate. In that context, it is difficult to understand what has truly changed–the facts, or the observations of the facts?

I titled this post with a question I don’t know how to answer. I still write every day–I wonder, sometimes, if that sheer dedication to habit hasn’t, in part, obscured the keen edge of why I write–but that writing is mostly about the structures of life and being. It doesn’t feel like thinking, which I miss dreadfully. Maybe it is thinking, anyway. Maybe if I rediscovered the habit of writing more things down, I would realize that nothing had actually changed at all. Or maybe somehow I will synthesize something new, in a new direction, and this tiresome doldrum will turn out to have been generative.

Sometimes the difficulty of a moment is that we don’t, and can’t, have the tools to interpret it, until the moment is gone.

In the world of quarantine and lockdown, where everyone seems to be frantic, I am not busy. Instead, I drift, ghostly.

I reread a few days ago a quotation that I had saved from Thom Van Dooren’s book Flight Ways:

In this time of extinctions, perhaps we might best understand caring for others as a task of gardening in the ruins–that is, a practice of care that aims to nourish and sustain species and their living participants in far-from-ideal conditions, where the most desirable options simply are not available. This is undeniably a difficult space to inhabit, one without the luxury of any perfect solutions or easy fixes.

 

Some other things that have been on my mind in the last few months.

Walt Whitman on public mourning

Jerry Saltz ostensibly on eating during lockdown, but also on living with purpose

Agnes Denes on the future of humanity

Aleksandar Hemon on catastrophe

Richard Skelton on landscape and loss and liminal states

Alicia Kennedy on love as socio-ecological praxis, here, but also all of her newsletters

 

See also:

Joan Mitchell

Mona Hatoum

Adrienne Rich

 

What are you gardening, in your ruins?

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, “The Year 1905.”

[I borrow the phrase “think with” from Donna Haraway, specifically in Staying With The Trouble, where it stands as something distinct from, and distinctly more collaborative than, “think about” or “think of.” Thinking-with positions us as points along a web of ideas, which are then both tools and sites of revolution. We think with ideas, but we also think alongside them. My favorite construction of Haraway’s is that “it matters what thoughts think thoughts.” That is, our intellectual frameworks inevitably direct our intellectual outcomes. I find it an increasingly urgent problem that the with-ness (if you will) of our ideas has been so compromised. Our premises have been reduced. What concepts, what vocabulary, what wonders, do we have available to think with? In what directions can we expand?]

Every day I scatter seeds across the lawn for the birds. I imagine my landlord disapproving, but, perhaps not. This house seems largely forgotten, the greenhouse choked with weeds and the lawnmower abandoned under the lilacs.

I probably should have drawn the line at pigeons.

The pigeons didn’t arrive for a year, but now a handful of the ordinary city variety mingle with their bigger country cousins, the wood pigeons, whose plump slowness tantalizes the dog. Along with the magpies and jackdaws, they rule the yard. Whenever the bigger birds take a break or get their fill, the little ones come: Blue Tits, little English Robins, the punk rock spectacle of European Goldfinches at their special nyger seed. It took me weeks to identify the perfectly anonymized Dunnock that darts through the thorny hawthorn tree, where I hung the suet feeder to keep away the neighbor’s cat.

My favorite pigeon is a genetic anomaly: a stark white body and head with the usual grey pigeon wings.

The neighbor feeds the birds, too, but they run a tighter operation. There are no pigeons, or magpies, or jackdaws, next door. Their feeders are enclosed in tidy wire mesh cages. It is advertised as squirrel proofing, but I’ve never seen a squirrel here. The native red squirrel was replaced in many areas with the invasive American grey, but I haven’t seen either. The squirrel cages mean that a bigger bird can’t reach the seeds. The neighbors also have artificial trees in their garden, luridly green from my upstairs window. They prefer their nature tidied.

I love the magpies, in their little tuxedos, but perhaps the neighbor is right to be suspicious. They plucked my entire crop of onions right out of the ground, and then left them to dry in the sun. I would have been less annoyed if they had eaten them. Sometimes I find marbles that they drop in the yard. Maybe they are a repayment for my onions. The real mystery is where they find marbles; surely no child has owned them for a decade.

The original owners of this house left, along with their geodesic greenhouse and rotting lawnmower, a bird bath not quite in the middle of the yard. This house sits on what must be a triple lot; in satellite view we take up a quarter of the block. Surely there was a garden here, once, to justify the space. All that remains now are some very old fashioned shrubs and the roses, one every ten feet down the fence line. I waited anxiously for them to bloom in the summer. Every one was hideously neon pink, just like every bulb was a daffodil. Everything else, except the lawn, has gone to nettles, against which I wage a half-hearted and entirely futile battle. The exterior of this house is as illegible as its strange interior rooms, each of which required a debate before we could put in the furniture.

The bird bath is presided over by a cement Cupid, staring eyelessly into the void. After decades of water splashes, he leans at an unsteady angle. The magpies and jackdaws shit on his head while they wait for their turn in the water. I try to remember my Mary Poppins. Wasn’t feeding the birds somehow the gateway drug to flying a kite, and thus to subverting capitalism in favor of love? Birds aren’t much for metaphors, and feeding the birds isn’t subverting capitalism, unless throwing money into the sky counts as sticking it to the man. Birdseed is expensive.

Yesterday a hawk killed my favorite pigeon. I felt, briefly, like a murderer, luring that poor creature to its death. Then I read that hawks single out the odd pigeons in a flock with ruthless efficiency. Genetic freaks don’t last long in the bird world.

The magpies staged an angry intervention, but too late, leaving a mass of bloody feathers and an abandoned lifeless body on the lawn. For the rest of the evening they screamed, chasing away not only the hawk but also a mass of circling gulls. I like to think they were staging a memorial for their fallen comrade, but it’s a foolish sentimentality. Magpies are determined omnivores. In the morning, only a few feathers remained. I don’t know who removed the corpse; it’s probably better that way.

I refilled the bird feeders in the rain, and scattered another handful of seeds.

I’ve written a lot here about our social media habits. (See almost everything on this page, including here, here and here.)

So I wanted to touch on two related conversations that have pinged on my radar this week. The first is Adrienne Matei’s piece about screen time in the Guardian. Notably, she’s working on this piece after Apple’s Screen Time roll out, which gives her a few interesting perspectives among a lot of the standard arguments.

Most basically, with math we can really up the horror from “I spend too much time doing this” to “[expletive of choice] I spend HOW LONG doing WHAT?” Matai’s own observation is that “my daily habits amount to me spending 35 days a year, or over five (five!) years of my remaining life, on my phone.” I pulled out my calculator, and did my own math. Four hours a day, my very own number from last week (which, in my defense, includes an entire e-book), is 1,460 hours. (Compare your number to the Foreign Service Institute’s Language Learning chart.)

Despite our shock at our screen time numbers, Matei also astutely notes that providing us with time data is not industry benevolence: “To big tech, your screen time anxiety is just another data point to collect, not to mention an opportunity to capitalize on the marketing value of providing ostensibly altruistic “digital wellness” functions while simultaneously escalating their software’s addictiveness – keeping the responsibility to resist squarely on you.” (The link is original to the quote, but it’s worth a read if this is a topic close to your heart.)

I’ve read several books this year that share a joyful excitement about changing our socio-political thinking. What if we turn everything we accept as true slightly on edge? What if we could get a different perspective? What if we could see progress as a myth, and community as the future? This list includes Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at The End of the World, Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, and, the subject of today’s review, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

Like most able-bodied people, I came very late to any nuanced sense of disability justice. (I think many of us share a collective moment of reckoning when we begin care-taking for our parents.) As part of my growing awareness, I realized that the basic provisions that affect disabled people the most, and by far the most crucially, are also a bedrock of our fully shared human condition. When disability justice activists held a “die in” in the capitol building during the 2017 ACA repeal vote, they were acting from a place of great urgency for themselves, as the people most harmed by things like pre-existing conditions clauses, but their activism helped save us all. In our daily lives, trains and buses that can accommodate wheel chairs are also easier for people with strollers or suitcases or cranky knees. Not having to go down three flights of creepy back stairs to use a restaurant restroom (I’m looking at you, England) would make everyone happier.

Which brings us to a fine line in this conversation. I’m going to highlight several revolutionary threads of Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work, but these things are not for able-bodied people to take outside of their context. White feminism has a history of co-opting other movements that must change as we become more truly intersectional. Instead, we need to learn, to consider, and to ally ourselves with the people who are already doing this work. Disabled people are not here to teach us, except to the extent that (like Piepzna-Samarasinha in this book) they choose to, and they are definitely, definitely, not here to “inspire.”

With that framework in mind, rather than attempting to comprehensively depict the wide range of topics covered in Care Work, I want to highlight two particular clusters of ideas that I found to be especially powerful for shifting my thinking.

First, the ways we think about the health of our bodies, especially about the health of disabled bodies, need to change. Imagining “sick and healed” as two polarities is harmful. That dualism, that belief that “you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind” is both ableist and an obfuscation of healing possibility. Instead, “bodies don’t need to be cured or fixed into normalcy to be valuable.” Our ideas of healing need to shift “away from being fixed and toward being autonomously and beautifully imperfect.”

The sick/healed binary also impacts our model of care, leading to a harmful, unrealistic expectation of one (tireless, enthusiastic, able-bodied) giver and one (grateful, pleasant) receiver. But nor is the communal care sometimes constructed as an alternative always a better answer. Piepzna-Samarasinha quotes her wheelchair-using friend: “I don’t ever want to depend on being liked or loved by the community for the right to shit in my toilet when I want to.” Everyone, Piepzna-Samarasinha notes, should get “access to many kinds of care—from friends and internet strangers, from disabled community centers, and from some kind of non-fucked-up non-state state that would pay caregivers well and give them health benefits and time off and enshrine sick and disabled autonomy and choice.” When people have value outside of their health status, we can imagine more radical alternatives for care.

Dualism also leaves us with an insufficient model for the future. Are there disabled people in the future you imagine, or have they all been “healed”? Instead of wiping out the lived experiences of a vast number of people, “we could create visions of revolutionary futures that don’t replicate eugenics—where disabled people exist and are thriving, not, as often happens in abled revolutionary imaginations, revolutionary futures where winning the rev means we don’t exist anymore because everyone has health care.” Disabled people are not “a fault to be cured.” Our vision of long-term thriving can include everyone, can be anti-ableist, must be anti-ableist.

Secondly, social justice movements are more powerful when they are deeply anti-ableist. Disability justice, because it is built from access needs up, centers “sustainability, slowness, and building for the long haul.” Those are exactly the skills that most social justice organizing has historically lacked, thriving instead on burnout, pushing past boundaries, and urgency: “Our movements are so burnout-paced, with little to no room for grief, anger, trauma, spirituality, disability, aging, parenting, or sickness, that many people leave them when we age, have kids, get sick(er) or more disabled, or just can’t make it to twelve meetings a week anymore.” Instead, movements can be recreated as spaces “where building in many pauses, where building in healing, where building in space for grief and trauma to be held makes [them] more flexible and longer lasting.”

It seems like we need so much urgency, that the world is falling apart and we need to act MORE and FASTER, not less and slower. But MORE and FASTER are not our values; they’re capitalism’s values, and their use recreates all of the systems of oppression that we are supposedly working against. Instead, in a paragraph that I’m going to quote in full, Piepzna-Samarasinha proposes a new model:

“And this innovation, this persistence, this commitment to not leaving each other behind, the power of a march where you move as slowly as the slowest member and put us in front, the power of a lockdown of scooter users in front of police headquarters, the power of movements that know how to bring each other food and medicine and organize from tired without apology and with a sense that tired people catch things people moving fast miss—all of these are skills we have. I want us to know that—abled and disabled.”

I do, too.