The Gym No. 22: Arcs & eras
Nothing to do with Taylor Swift
A couple weeks ago, I was talking with my daughter about the language of arcs and eras. (Warning that everything I write about the delightfully fast-moving lexicon of her baby-adult cohort is half-informed and already out of date, and has nothing to do with Taylor Swift.)
Arc, my daughter said, has a straight masculine vibe. An arc, it seems, is linear and reliant on the rules that surround us—on Earth, if you throw the ball, it must come down. “A continuous progression,” says Merriam-Webster, definition 5. Arcs are individual, connected by their rules. They may be connected somewhat loosely by canon events, those archetypal occurrences, often initiated by a greater or unknown power, that bend all trajectories.
A more feminine and queer expression, my daughter told me, is in terms of the era, as in, I’m in my ____ era. More traditionally, an era is shared, but this au courant usage suggests the bigness of individual experience (I contain multitudes); a person can encompass a whole era, within which may be arcs and all sorts of other geometries and happenings. The era is not linear but morphic, broad, and inclusive. Its beginning and end points aren’t defined by gravity or force but by the shape of itself. It may have many rises and falls, or none, depending on the altitude from which you’re viewing it. An era doesn’t have speeds or, necessarily, progress. It describes a period of existence.
In Deborah Levy’s short story “Migrations to Elsewhere and Other Pains,” Alice has a strange encounter with the White Rabbit, who holds Elsewhere in the space between his ears. He tells Alice:
You should know that I have inner immensity because I have gathered all my passions and longings into myself and with them I have built Elsewhere.
As the story ends, Alice, with the rabbit’s help, escapes to another actual place. The rabbit doesn’t escape to an actual Elsewhere, but, donning the shiny shoes that Alice has left behind, he seems to enter a new era. Era is a salve when Elsewhere isn’t tangible.
I suppose I’m writing all this because I feel, and sense more broadly, a resistance to being prescribed, or supposed, or assumed an arc. Arcs are tired. The arc is ego. And as poet Andrea Gibson writes, “When we allow our egos to do our heart’s work, what needs to get done doesn’t get done.” What many of us need to do is keep doing, multitudinously. An arc expected of us is a distraction.
We step over the slow-lumbering rat kings of fear-based systems, mere gum on the sidewalk. We continue to exist in and shape our eras, individually and in community. Thank you. You’re amazing. You’re multitudes.
—Jonelle
P.S. Thanks to my dear friend Maree for sharing the Gibson piece. ✨
