There’s a deeper malaise going on, physically and spiritually, in the air, maybe long covid or long lyme, microplastics. Point five percent of what we now eat is plastic, they say. An alarm I’ve been sounding for about twenty years: from the Bahamas, its protected beaches strewn with plastic. In Chicago, in the aughts, I have a distinct and virtuous memory of using a carbon calculator. At a yoga studio in Mattapoisett, more recently, where a shiny-legged woman wrinkled her face at the hand and foot stains on my long-used and not-replaced mat, to which boat paint still adhered.
The physical pain I think sometimes is the pain of giving up writing, as sometimes I fear I am doing. I go days without penning a word, not even in my journal. Maybe that is what is accumulating in my gut. Or maybe instead I am an overwrought effete dilettante and the pain comes from giving up the idea that something will rescue us, that if I string the right combination of syllables together the world will unfold like origami, and all will be saved. The pain is my body’s realization that it is too late to be saved.
I am grieving the world we have lost, a world that is dead. Half of earth’s creatures have died in my lifetime, as I have watched, as I have tromped in Chicago boots and exhaled in Cape Cod yoga. It is ongoing. We accelerate over the cliff, blindfolded. In Crudo, Olivia Laing writes:
We all see it coming, we are all sick, me and everyone else, the first casualties of the oil wars.
So the physical pain and the spiritual trauma are one: the flayed flesh of fish perches on my fridge rack. Bought with someone else’s money. Bought with this green fiction that shapes our ends while life goes on around us, life goes on around me. I watch the weeds grow in the garden, unable to pull them up. The wind builds. I watch the neighbor’s house rot.
In her exegesis of Joan Didion, Elisa Gabbert says writing finds grammar for the pictures that haunt our minds. As Didion says, "The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement." Then, Delillo—"sentence by sentence into the breach." I align that hunting for the grammar of the idea with George Orwell's third reason for writing, the historical impulse. It is not enough merely to have the idea, the shimmer of an image or a story, but the story must be recorded, to the best of one's ability. The cave painters of Lascaux imprinting the record of their consciousness on the walls of caves.
Gabbert continues:
"Writing isn’t hard the way physical labor, or recovery from surgery, is hard; it’s hard the way math or physics is hard, the way chess is hard. What’s hard about art is getting any good—and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain."
Does sharing the ideas itself help? Help purge the ideas? And if so is that a good thing, or is it just palliative? Allowing me to buy a new yoga mat, a new pair of boots.
trigger warning—
In this episode of the Moth, a survivor retells the story of her assault and says that in telling it, it is the telling of it that is saving her, allowing her to continue to live with the thing that could have killed her, was intended to kill her. Maybe we don’t listen to rape survivors because they have so much to teach us. But we can’t listen to them, or we would need to impeach Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, the rapey men currently deciding, again, for the insides of women’s bodies and also the constitution's future. (One thing I think gets lost in this discussion is that medicinal termination of pregnancy was the legal province of midwives and women until the enlightenment, one more thing noble men took upon themselves to colonize.)
