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.)
Why write? Is it just to shape the thing into words? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe making them into glossy perfect imitations of reality, one word following another, helps. To move bytes around in a digital space, one that exists not at all in the world but instead in some alternate alternative fictive reality.
Even the words that exist on paper are noumenous as a dream, a flicker in our neural net.
Is shaping the thing into words enough? Being a parent now is a bizarre mix of giddy bliss—there is no time for anything, there is time enough for everything—and dread terror. The terror of realizing that the world we’ve built for our children is a spiderweb over a lava pit. An utter clarity about our own values at the moment when we’re worst positioned to act on them. We’re leading our children down a garden path over a cliff, and we all know it, so we bury our faces deep in our phones, and our liquor. We cannot see it, because if we do, we would have to feel our own powerlessness. A feeling that in itself is a fiction. Three-point-five percent of us can change the world. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was in convincing us he doesn’t exist. Paying the mortgage, the yuppie Nuremburg defense.
Sometimes I notice, when I'm driving around, that there are no people. I wonder where all the humans are, even though I know—they're cocooned in their plastic cubes, tethered to their devices.
"Dead souls, in metal boxes," as Bodhi in "Point Break" puts it.
Then, when I finally catch sight of one of them, there, homo sapiens outdoors, in the wild, its face is bent to its phone. An alien would surely judge our screens shackles. We tell our daughter no screen time and then use our own for endless hypocritical hours.
Or this clip from "The Matrix" in 1999, literally forecasting the 21st century. This is us now. What runs their machines is our attention.
An excuse I give myself sometimes is that I cannot take more time with the written word in this digital cubicle, moving these bytes around in digital space. A friend who works at Target is promoted to executive. She used to do stuff, move objects through space. Now she answers emails. I worked as a server: I know how to bring food and drink to those well-compensated for the answering of emails. I want to bring things, objects, physical entities into the world, not merely ideas, although it has taken almost four decades for this lesson to imprint.
Sigrid Nunez writes:
But yet; but yet.
Can words alone assuage my loneliness? Only you, dear reader: are you fictive or true? Is it enough merely to string the words together, to know they exist in order, to know that Itself itself sees? If my mind works this way, chewing on its own green guts, surely yours out there must too. I cannot be alone. Am I alone? I cannot be.
Someday, in this universe or another, Melissa will welcome you to zer Adult Montessori, from behind a battered wooden desk. There, cubes of shelving will await you, with sharpened pencils, thick paper, squat typewriters, gleaming sewing machines. You will bring your clutter, your detritus, your trash. We will pour it out on bare tables and you will sort. You will unstitch. You will cut. There we will salvage from the ruin.
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