cathection

Note: I wrote this last night after reading a particularly realistic and therefore painful assessment of the world’s economic situation. This is the experience of late capitalism writ both eye-level and so large we can’t comprehend it fully.

Cracked riverbeds; pale adobe dust.

I have no more. At this point

it’s all dry heaving, sugar-bile

staining the back of my throat.

I can’t sing. I’ve got bad habits.

Maybe this will make me beautiful.

Maybe if I just own this I’ll be

mirrors, refracted, instead of tethered

to this awkward lumbering seething

pile of gristle, fat and bone. Maybe

you’ll want me. Want me for what?

Batteries improperly disposed of

are leaking into the groundwater.

I have no more. Maybe you won’t

get close enough to the facade.

Maybe we’ll be evicted. Maybe

we will remember. Maybe there is

worth in the scraps. Maybe we are home,

constantly grasping.

ourobouros

Even as someone who’s been involved in lifelong social and political activism (from the ‘kids’ rights’ newsletter I drafted in elementary school on upward), it’s surreal being able to see the impact you have as an individual on national politics. I spent the last three days of the campaign on the ground in Indiana, and though there was a considerable amount of groundwork already laid, obviously (some of which I’d helped with), standing at that poll on Tuesday talking to one of the lawyers about how 86% of our precinct had voted had a very visceral, emotional impact on me. Yes, the country was headed in this direction; yes, it was a bad year for any GOP candidate (go read that Newsweek 7-part series about the election, by the way). The accidental intersection of time and space and personal whirlwinds is a very strange place indeed.

The other defining moment that will stick out to me from this past weekend is the afternoon I spent talking to a 41-year-old (black) man (one of my fellow canvassers) at length about his job (working the night shift at UPS) and how it plays into his sense of self and about his participation in politics (“This is the first election I’ve registered to vote in because this is the first time I feel like I’ve had a representative candidate to vote for”). His story is where the heart is for me. People who felt isolated/disenfranchised from and disengaged with civic action (for good reason) are becoming active – that is a huge, huge step in the right direction.

We live in a liminal country now. We have made history, but we also have a long way to go (after all, California passed Prop 8; it looks like the legal challenges have merit, which gives me some hope, but still). I will stubbornly never understand how the continuing struggle for human rights is not equally important in all cases, though I do understand choosing one’s battles.

A and I were talking today about process vs. product, the theme that (as many of you who have known me a long time) has ghosted so many of my moves and thoughts for the last fifteen or so years. Has capital so hollowed us out that we can only see ourselves in terms of what we can produce and how we relate to others?

I’ve been feeling like it’s time to revisit “Minima Moralia” for quite a while now; I’ve always meant to read it in tandem with Aristotle’s “Magna Moralia,” which it was written as a semi-response to.

For intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.