The Gym No. 13: Fugue instinct
On stopping, going, and tentacles
By early June, I’d stopped thinking about the future. Summers are short, but sending our kids back to school on the other end wasn’t plausible. And yet we’ve been here before. What is real? Our pain, our empathy, or our knowing that we’ll go back, as before, and keep doing the same things, until once again we are mourning kids killed at school—either our kids or someone else’s. Until once again we arrive here, arrested for a moment by the trauma we’re all shouldering, the moment grabbing our face like a toddler who hasn’t been listened to, physically turning our gaze to their eyes and saying Mama. You. Look.
This is fake, I messaged a trusted colleague during a seemingly futile conference. This meeting, this project, this work. Look. It felt, for a time, like I could no longer kid myself into working on anything else but trying to shield kids from bullets. But a thing about children is that they keep moving regardless. Birthdays, new interests, new words, new jokes, new longer legs, new voices, new friends, new realizations. A thing about how we view children in america is that we believe they need things: swimming gear, lessons, games, earbuds. And a thing about parenting in america is that we all have to pay. We have to pay for their sneakers and their hoodies and at the very least for their home and for their organic strawberries or their chicken nuggets or their fake-healthy Cheetos or their Takis or their paletas or their blue sour candy. And so the things that keep our checking accounts or our bitcoin or our cash fluid—product roadmaps or shift schedules or financial quarters or market speculation—propel us forward, too.
I am predisposed to the fugue. From the stock of gentle and sensitive people, I feel the polyphony of the world and its entry points. I don’t expect anything to stop for me. I am not unused to scrambling to keep up and gleeful to prance alongside for a bit when I do. Fugue is from the same Latin root as refugee—flee, run. I am not a refugee, but aplomb and stillness are things I am only learning to practice, with varying success. Nevertheless, at the start of summer, I could not imagine scrambling into fall. We would have to stage at minimum a caesura, perhaps a sabotage. A strike. A grabbing. Look.
My work in human-centered design has taught me, first, that we shouldn’t settle. That things can be made better. We needn’t limit our thinking to the current state. Second, that the systems already in place are formidable. The biggest work isn’t in coming up with the next idea to make things better. It’s in understanding how to make it happen given the humans and dependencies and consequences that make up these deeply settled systems. Their tentacles have far reach.
(The octopus has neurons throughout its tentacles—it’s its own fugue. What if everything we are were less like an org chart and more like an octopus?)
A design colleague introduced me to the etymology of sabotage: saboter, to botch. A last resort, a wrench in the machine that halts a system, sending springs and gears flying in all directions. Look. But a thing about children is that you don’t want to botch it for them. You don’t want to stop them from moving. A thing about children in america is that they’ve experienced enough of that over the past two-and-a-half years. In our house, there hasn’t been a moment since April 2020 when someone wasn’t struggling academically or socially, when someone wasn’t unenrolling from one school, attempting homeschooling, searching for a new school, or reenrolling. Despite the heroic efforts and best doings of many, I remain bitter at the botchedness that marks these spaces in their lives.
And so here we are at the end of summer, both looking down the barrel of the school year and hoping with all our hearts that we’ll get swept back into the fugue. Because the thing about children and families is that we’ve grown to rely on our botched institutions. Our kids love their public school friends, with whom they’ve tried out nicknames and personas, created identities and languages. I've glimpsed the proud toughness they’ve sprouted as they weave through crowds and pass the school security guard and shrug off the teachers they don’t respect. I hear the glee in their voices when they tell of the teachers they connect with.
So, tentatively, we take our marks, ready to scramble. They’ve registered for art and band and Spanish and math and science. They’ll put on their new sneakers and do something with their hair. We’ll walk by our Vote for Gun Sense yard signs as we leave the house. We’ll drop them off, see them begin to merge into the flow, streams of precious hooligans, our future, and somehow not panic. We’ve done this before. We never do.
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Please don't forget ~
Austinites, vote in favor of the AISD bond in November. The funding is desperately needed and is a step toward more equitable funding across the district.
Texas, you already know that Governor Abbott terrorizes families and children, including trans people, migrants, anyone who is or could become pregnant, and any child who goes to school. Non-Texans, make sure your Texan friends vote and that they vote for Beto.
Also ~
Madame Simone—La Saboteuse
