fifty-six and three quarters: lives outside crisis (the American politics mini-edition)
(Yes! It’s a fraction! This does not get the dignity of a whole number! Down with having to waste brain cycles on this bullshit at all, really!)
So as you can probably tell, survey said we’re going with a passive opt-out and separate edition — in the sense that this was actually the most stringent accommodation people asked for, and it’s easy to do the most stringent thing in this case, so we’ve all got a little of what we needed, thanks, guys.
literature review
So the reason this came up in the first place: There are a few paragraphs I’m using to head off the next newsletter, one strand of which is a quote from Paul Farmer plucked out of Ed Yong’s XOXO talk (early spoiler, it’s good). And I realized that what I’d taken from this lovely talk and quote about dedication and the balance between responsiveness to outside and inner imperatives and all sorts of stuff on long problems, cathedral time, the inhale and exhale of working on them, that terrible-wonderful space where the limits of bodies and the infinity of the possible touch — which I wrote two and a half weeks before the U.S. Election — was now very, very alarmingly over-readable as a petty desperate stereotype about American political conflict.
If it’s not already obvious, I resent this like whoa: When people in trauma individually, or all at once like we’re doing this month, narrow all conversation down to a point. When a person only understands (acknowledges, maybe?) one topic of conversation, three possible emotional responses, and one hundred words about it, all about which side you’re on, and all words are read through that pinched lens. Nothing you say or do tends to have any meaning; they can only hear the hundred words about the violence, so no conversation can ever escape orbit. You’re there mostly to be overwritten: a prop, a doll.
The thing with communicative acts that I’ve been toying with a long time is that — I sincerely think they’re a topping-from-the-bottom situation. There’s a lot of belief that the person speaking holds the power. But communication can only really go so far as the willingness to listen: by which I don’t mean obey, but to admit the neutral existence of a concept that isn’t already in their heap of known things. You get a faceful of this workshopping poetry: The limits of the communicative universe are the limits of the reader’s good-faith engagement. When it comes to actual, equitable, generative communication, it’s not having the microphone that drives it; it’s the person who understands the least or is the least willing to learn, engage, and mirror in response. They establish the ceiling of what’s possible in that conversation. Without that, the speaker’s just yowling in the dark.
So it’s basically impossible to communicate with someone who’s rewriting everything they don’t understand into something (worse, pettier, more malevolent) they already recognize or a new active threat, and closes their ears to any other signals. And public space is fairly flooded with this right now, as the standard reaction to American political crises.
As someone who mostly does communicating for business and pleasure and who actually does give a shit about the other people in my life as they are, not as hosts for my ghosts (!), it leaves me bad choices: You humour it, you give it space, you try sometimes to remind it there are other words out there and other ideas and other feelings, you set boundaries as gently as you can, you curtail or preemptively guard your speech against the people who only speak a hundred words and are violent all the time, and all of a sudden what you’ve got is this degraded VHS version of your own life and thoughts — and, because other people are doing the same to dodge that constant well of crisis, everybody else's too. You don’t know each other anymore; your defaults for communication become hostage negotiations. You can sort of care yourself into a poverty of speech, a lack of actual social trust and friendship. It’s basically Junji Ito’s Amigara Fault, a comic I am not linking because it actively gives me nightmares and while it’s great art, it’s actually criminal under the Geneva Convention.
And that’s basically a description of my 2016-2022. And my 2001-2004, for that matter (there’s a reason why this played on repeat for weeks in my head this month). And every day since last October in some parts of my life. And — yeah. We’ve been doing this a long time, haven’t we, guys?
study design
So right now, I’m working to find ways to step out of the halo of collective reaction, the place where there is only one thing that signifies, American politics, and everything is either an overt or a sly reference to it or an active and malicious choice to ignore it that probably should be punished somehow. I plan to step out of the crisis for good. Without doing the other approved response, mass social abandonment. (Hey, Rocky.)
I was actually in a rather wonderful place for contradiction and nuance and the flow of weirdo life and everyday strange attractors and the affective wild before the United States of America crashed howling through the ceiling, and I’m getting back into that at earliest opportunity. Everything I’ve chewed on here for the past few years isn’t a provisional or contingent situation; it’s infrastructure, it’s a spine of a saner, kinder, funnier way of living, because it’s me building my bridge to the world I actually want one moment at a time, like reverse Bastion.
The work I do, the things I care about, the relationships I actually want to have — and the ways I want to have them — don’t fit inside that narrow, cramped, rigid idea of a world. They’re not expressible in the tiny fucko famine vocabulary, so there’s no habitable zone in it for me that doesn’t require extensive personality mutilation. I took all the best of me into private for a lot of years to square this problem, to the point where I think more than a few people believe the edited, lopped-down, bowdlerized, Safe Mode version is who I actually am, and not a compromise I made between actively marketing young adult novels, keeping relationships with immensely traumatized friends and colleagues, ducking public stochastic violence, and the desire to have a life. So yeah, man, I don’t want to do it anymore; it didn’t make anything good happen.
So, um, for one. I plan to show a lot more of the goofy, campy, sometimes biting, sometimes Mae Westian, sometimes deeply uncertain, calculatedly sweary, messy, unrestrained side of myself I stashed away when everyone started playing tag with their fists. (If you didn’t know me pre-2016 I will be very interested to know how much of this surprises you. For science.) We’re getting this lexicon back to fifty thousand words, my inherent amount of words, the actual size and range of my expression, so we can have fucking thoughts.
And what I’m going to start messing with, in the months to come, is ways to work without reference to crisis despite its memetic persistence.
(And we mean: Crisis as a state of being, crisis as a lens being applied broadly, crisis as a method of reading the world, crisis as a communicable social disease, crisis as a resting-state neurology, crisis as an expectation and backdrop for our relationships, crisis as a language, crisis as an arcology. Yes, that’s the word I want. You can be in objectively dangerous states or situations without inhabiting crisis as an arcology. I’m not doing the crisis arcology this time around. Fuck this entire process of parsing information and being.)
This is the spirit in which I’m going to try to communicate in this space. In terms of the stuff we actually like and value and choose (I mean, I assume you’re sticking around because you’re interested in some of it); in ways I’d actually like to be spoken with. In fifty thousand words, across at least five languages at this count, plus a few nobody’s invented yet and I had to make up myself to get the thing across. I want to work up a little more anti-poverty of thought: How big of an existential habitat do we want, no, add a few servings, that too, throw in a swimming pool, don’t be shy, c’mon, bubbeleh, eat.
experimental method
Well, that’s the project, innit?
Let’s say there’s a reason every novel manuscript I’ve worked on since 2017 is about trying to find functional relations with trauma — where pain can have its space without wiping out everyone else’s space in the process — and why they all got stuck in the same place. It’s a work in progress, let’s say. (Hey, maybe I’ll get close to 600,000 words of fiction unstuck. Seriously. I counted the other week. Those manuscripts I talk about occasionally haven’t disappeared, they’re just circling the same subset of wicked problems.)
But I am fairly sure the shape of relations I want here — and the shape I’m going to move with in this space — builds on consent, habitual consideration, maintaining social generosity and reciprocation, speaking honestly, pushing the edges out, the Laws of Improv (yes/and), and fun. (North American political panics are amazingly stifling and joyless places.) The fun’s important. Some things are too serious to take yourself too seriously, y’know?
And — I’m gonna say this separately: Good faith and grace. The kind that cuts in all directions. Me being bigger doesn’t ask others to be smaller; I’m keen on people being bigger together like flocks of roving Gundams (another book-in-progress stuck on the same principle, Christ). But if I say something that steps on your toes, just tell me like I’m a person who cares about your good time and can make repairs, or at least figure out what works better for both of us and how our needs and boundaries interlock? Come at me with fists and I’m not going to like you very much, mostly because you didn’t value me enough to use the human being setting, and have you noticed how I feel about violence? Yeah? But show up like we’re both people, extend the experiment some grace, and you will find me amazingly amenable to working a thing out. It’s a small list around here; we can manage to not douche it up, and that’s a good foundation for working societies.
in summary
1) Fuck this crisis mindset thing for a game of soldiers.
2) I am basically never talking about or subtweeting foreign American culture wars, and won’t be. And from looking back over the last twenty-three years of Internet action, I seriously don’t think that’ll ever change. So if you ever wonder — nah. It’s about something I liked better.
3) Relations are a team sport. This is kind of a broadcast medium by nature but I always think of it as correspondence for interested parties and friends of household, not advertising, which is why it’s acres of shit I thought was interesting or funny or worthwhile, and then just that little bit of publishing stuff at the end. I am happy to hear from people. Nothing more satisfying than jamming on a thing, seriously, I’m leaving bait all over the place.
4) If I piss you off while figuring out how to move in this context, with this big a gap between what I deeply suspect a lot of other people are going to be doing and what I’m going to be doing, seriously just be cool and let me know and we’ll sort it out like adults. I’m not actually an asshole; I just don’t like being treated like one, turns out?
5) In retrospect I guess none of this was surprising.
6) So, yeah. This might get interesting. >.>
Aaaaand — go.