forty-three: widen your moral fantasy / widen your sense of time

This month's title from an article I finally got around to reading late August, on coping with climate everything.  It's all the stuff I like in a meal (Weimar philosophy! Climate action! Swedish antifascists!) and a rather marvelous piece of -- let's say affective reasoning? The kind of thing I was sorry to have not had sooner, and glad to have now. Doubly so when I hit this:
I read that out loud to myself, tasted all the vowels, and promptly felt a wild, shit-eating grin on my face. I know how to do all that stuff! I am going to make this saving throw! Seriously: There are real echoes here of a person I wanted very badly to be once, put work into becoming, halfway am. It might just be the hangover of August and its strange chronology, but there's something wild and delicious and holy about it, the kind of holy you do secretly in the woods: widen your moral fantasy. widen your sense of time. Nom nom nom. Crunch. :)

In more seriousness (I mean, I am serious about nom crunch too, but), this paragraph keeps sticking with me:

It's reaching out tendrils to Clay Shirky's 2008 talk "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", a longstanding fave in my Interesting Stuff folder, and this blog from early August, "Energy Makes Time" -- which walks right up to the question of when what's there outstrips our ability to apprehend it and the persistent bad problem of Scarcity Head.

For myself, I've been trying to reframe this all as a question of cognitive capacity, because in some ways cognitive capacity makes energy -- or maybe they're kind of the same thing? How much can the twined systems of our squishy bodies handle, and how does that shape our collective responses; how does that shape those moments when our imagination has to catch up with what's in front of us and whoops, everybody's drinking?

I'm thinking hard (heh) about that one, partially because -- we're collectively ass-deep in the kinds of problems where you want to borrow a bit of thinking, but everyone's running dry lately. It's become so visible how tackling that problem is one of those things we use society for: a place to string up our extended cognition. I know more than a few people who very much rely on those extended structures to get through the day. They are losing their whole minds right now, and it is not nice or interesting to watch; it just hurts.

So I've been wondering how we start that small: the take a penny, leave a penny of extended cognition, of executive function, of social support. Yes, this is a fancy way of talking about rebuilding society with baling twine and teeth. Girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do?

time reasserts itself (a bit)

And in the nick of, well, time, too. I was not coping well with the balance of the world by the end of August. Shoveling mountains of submissions, applications, contest entries, emails, and volunteer work commitments out the door for weeks, while everyone in publishing is on vacation, is an incredibly effective recipe for feeling unheard and unreciprocated. No, nobody was answering my emails, mostly because nobody was at the office. But even knowing that, all that effort going out every day and so little coming back was starting to leave teeth marks on my soul.

This year's ranking amongst the latest I've ever put a structure down for my autumn, because the ambient chaos has been extreme and my ability to deal with it just face first on the ground, but finally, finally, the structure started shaping up in early September: Hands-on climate work, a deep-dive poetry class, a few small and reasonably paced multi-author events, Urban Agriculture week, writing letters about prosecraft to incarcerated people, cute corduroy overalls with stripy shirts, fresh knitwear, a commitment to not go rigid in the space of entropy but cleanse all that static and crackle into steady, iterative, generative motion. (Tangent: So we all know the Wheel of Time dealie about cleansing the One Power was a straight-line allegory for finding ways out of toxic masculinity, finding literally clean power, right? We all know that? Okay, cool. Good meeting.)

Literally the day after Labour Day replies started coming back in, starting with an opportunity to make a more meaningful climate impact -- time-bound but dense  -- coming back a slightly shocking yes. I'd applied on an off chance, expecting a polite nope, but who knew? Surprise! Not me! So one of the little structures of my autumn is jurying neighbourhood climate project grants for a City of Toronto committee (!) this autumn and getting a small honorarium to do it, aka making physical impacts in the systems of my city through official channels. You know what's thrilling? Taking something you care about from abstraction to action. We have escaped Solarpunk Theory into Solarpunk Praxis, and I'm delighted to be making something real. Widen your moral fantasy indeed. :)

My biggest brush with external structure this month was one and a half whole days of jury duty mid-September. (Not grant jury duty; crimes jury duty.)

I've never actually done jury duty, which I've on one level vaguely resented (what do you mean you don't want me to solve crimes in the municipality? do you know how many Agatha Christies I've read?), but it turned out to be a rather strange and sobering experience: going from talking knitting projects with the person beside you to being briefed on a murder trial within the space of twenty minutes (I was thankfully not empanelled for said murder trial). It's violence and the trivial, side by side. I got a shocking amount of work done in the jury waiting room, between when they trooped us up to court to be empanelled. Apparently all it takes is being outside the apartment (that I've spent too much time in for three years solid) and the presence of other human bodies.

I didn't know how my reaction to this would break, and was sort of waiting and watching to find out. And a thing I abruptly learned about myself in the five minutes of that case's summary and charge: I have no desire for the power to impact a stranger's life like that. It's too big and in some ways too personal; I don't know them or their nuances, and there's not nearly enough context to make choices like that for others, not knowing or caring for them, not being around to see the consequences through. Without that follow-through it's not responsibility, it's power, and the offer felt straight-up obscene.

Luckily I didn't have to make the decision: We were taken to two arraignments, my name was not picked for either, and after a morning of general confusion the next day, we were dismissed. I'm left with that shocking little understanding, one solid workday, and the drive to find a co-working space soon, not later, because yeah, wow, I get a lot more done just in the presence of other breathing bodies.

But it was a strange and slightly on-the-nose pair of experiences: which jury I'd actually like to be on. What feels too personal, and what feels like the right kind of impact.

ritual time reasserts itself (a bit)

September is also Rosh Hashanah / the Jewish New Year, so metaphysically, time rejigged somewhere around the 15th. Metaphysical Inbox Zero!

Coincidentally, I lucked into two rare and amazing apples from my CSA that week, from a tree which apparently usually doesn't bear well but just went at it this year, and cut them up for the apples and honey situation on Erev Rosh Hashanah. I had about an hour's temptation to use the smoked honey for it, just in general recognition of where we all are in life (here's the air quality, and here's the sweet, and here's the ashes, and we hold both things at once) but it felt a little too much like summoning yet more bullshit down upon us, so I just decided: use the regular honey, best not to get cocky. If you're going to bother to do ritual stuff, you should probably handle it with appropriate PPE and take its implications seriously, and sometimes we work for the place we're aimed at, not the place we are.

craft (a bit)

This month's mostly been spent hopping projects (see: September), but most of the consistent time went to drafting a short story that had mumbled and marinated itself along for months, and then finally announced that yes, but now.

I'm realizing what three or four years of really solid focus on poetrycraft has done for my prose: rebuilt it around the faith that concision is a power. There's a kind of needlepoint precision that can make a whole poem work -- the right word in the right place, the sidelong tip over a tumbling ledge of context (A.S. Byatt is really good at this, come to think of it) -- and if you get that into prose, it looks lean on top, still, quiet, but goes so deep. The kind of deep someone leans into almost by reflex, and I think that's what I've wanted for a long time: prose with gravity. I want people to tip themselves toward me at the slightest provocation.

It was funny, realizing that one of the eleventy million answers to "Why haven't you published a novel in a while?" (some deliberate, some waving my hands around at all this chaos around me) is, turns out, that not one project I care about could work until I learned concision. I was thinking of this in 2015-16 as how do I write silences with words? and when I look back on the project where I identified that problem, I can see myself circling the tools like scratches around a keyhole -- so long I forgot what I was working the problem for. My imagination outstripped my tools a while back, apparently, so: pick up an entire new skillset I guess.

So, business as usual? Take monstrous unchewable bite, grow big enough to chew it. Make the daring attempt to make yourself as big as you actually are. But -- right. Remember why you were doing it in the first place.

things read

I started the month with Rainesford Stauffer's All The Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, a rec I think I picked up from Culture Study. It didn't quite set my world on fire? A lot of what it has to say about the particular traps of self-defining around work on the teetering edge of capitalist meltdown is very much true, but I'm not personally much for reflexive self-deprecation -- there's a school of things we sort of decide as a society are funny, and therefore okay to say, but turn that lens into ha ha only serious and they're really rather cutting, and I don't like watching people cut themselves. I really prefer my people whole.

Rose Macaulay's Keeping Up Appearances was a great -- and surprisingly on-topic -- antidote: a funny, largely friendly, in many ways deeply chilling novel about the gaps between the people we perform and the parts of ourselves we hide -- staffed by a sensation novelist, an absent-minded biologist, a compulsive human rights campaigner, some very cozy lower middle class people in East Sheen, some extremely obvious yet unstated lesbians, the kind of young teenager you'd expect to find in Swallows and Amazons, and all their furtive, messy shadow-selves.

 

Asking the right questions since 1928 apparently
 

Macaulay's quite witty and quite observant about human beings, but as of yet not cruel with it. For something which is fundamentally a circa-1928 treatise on shame, that felt like rather an achievement, this kind of grace, and having it there for the characters who were able to recognize it in each other. A bit like if a Connie Willis novel wasn't so wall-to-wall, but took its time and took deep breaths. Highly recommended.

And I don't normally include interviews in this section, but this one with M. John Harrison, ostensibly around his newest release Wish I Was Here, is basically for you if you wish your mind blown every five minutes for a total of fifty. He's thinking very deeply about the seams between experience and concreteness, in ways that felt delightfully familiar to some of the stuff we've batted around here, except he is smarter than me by a few country miles. "Fantasy as an episteme" made me sit up the most, but the whole thing is incredibly worthwhile. I have spent the three weeks since listening to it thinking about what else is an episteme, and making little crowing noises when those thoughts pay off.

things to read

The Deadlands: Year One released at the beginning of September, including in it my haunted house poem "Rows of Houses" (title via Dan Mangan who got it from Stephen King). It's got everything from the first year of the magazine, and is available from Psychopomp's eshop.

opportunities to be read at

The WORD Vancouver launch/reading for the Muriel's Journey Poetry Prize went off September 9th, and it was fun as expected: those poems leapt off the page. If you'd like to watch it, the YouTube link is here. I have only five lines to read (see: concision) but I think they're good ones.
 

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your moment of zen

This got a little bit wordy, so we'll end off with something more practical. Look who had too many farm tomatoes! Look who owns salsa now! It is a nutritious punch of lime to the face and we're gonna have huevos rancheros for weeks.
See you in October. :)