Teenage dirtbag

Hello,

I have been sitting at my computer this morning, looking at shoes I should not buy and listening to Belle & Sebastian's "Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying" and "Sleep the Clock Around" and of course "The Boy With the Arab Strap," each of which appeared on precisely every mixtape I made between 2002-2008. YouTube led me in its calculated way from Belle & Sebastian to my favorite Tiny Desk Concert (Stromae), and then from my second favorite Alice Smith cover ("I Put a Spell on You") to my absolute favorite Alice Smith cover ("Lover You Should've Come Over"), to rewatching Flying Lotus's "Never Catch Me" and then rewatching Childish Gambino's "This is America" and then I got off YouTube. Fine, I watched this again and then got off.

I almost never listen to Belle & Sebastian anymore, because it feels too exactly like being sixteen and miserable (it feels too exactly like being sixteen), but the other day–I am just making this connection now–I learned that my high school Spanish teacher died. It could be that I miss being physically present in that time a couple decades ago when we were both–me and that teacher–still in existence, even if I (and maybe she, I don't know, she never seemed sad, she seemed hyper competent, she was a lawyer and a teacher and she used to ride her bicycle from Cape Code to New York, I think, which detail I have not actively thought of once since the early 2000s, but which popped into my head with so much clarity yesterday–I can see her sitting on top of a desk in the corner of a dim classroom, holding court, kind of laughing off our incredulity in her hard ass no nonsense way, "it's not hard") was sad. Or maybe I want to go into that sadness–which from here still feels painful, yes, but also maybe lives inside of a larger context that I understand and that is part of the, shall we say, natural course of things–as a way to get out of this current profound destabilization of profound violence.

In the past month I've read Ursula K. LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea (book four in my chronological UKLG reading series), Tana French's The Hunter (then I re-read The Searcher and The Secret Place), and Stephen King's The Institute and Holly, and am halfway through If It Bleeds (I am firmly back in my Stephen King Girl Summer). There is no other literature here and no criticism or history, I'll be reading enough of that as I prepare for my master's exam later this summer (here's that reading list). There is only pleasure, which is not the opposite of sadness but probably its mother. In the sense that the pleasure of these stories is in their upfront sense-making, their ability to structure a coherent emotion, for example, sadness, out of incoherent sensation.

Someone else who has been giving me unexpected pleasure this season is Hanif Abdurraqib, poet, writer, long suffering Timberwolves fan, and instagram user. An interesting thing (it's not interesting, it's bad) is that before the genocide in Gaza, I had not used instagram in maybe four years. Now, and for the past 240 days, my eyeballs are stuck inside of the internet for many minutes per hour–seeing videos of burned, or dead, or dying, or decapitated babies and children and teenagers and adults, or of alive and suffering people, or of a private chef named Rob who does time lapse videos of the amazing meals he prepares for his clients in the Hamptons, or...yes, yes, everyone knows what instagram is. The most, or only, truly pleasurable of its contents are @nifmuhammed's stories about music and vintage t-shirts and poetry and how much he loves his dog, and Palestine and genocide, and basketball, and a place called Dairy Whip that apparently closed but is now, again, open. Reading his stories feels like reading a Stephen King book, which is to say, feels like being for a small moment part of a universe made of specific talismans that will keep you safe because they matter. For example, this story highlight about Tracy Chapman or this one about Kate Bush.

Stephen King novels and Hanif Abdurraqib's instagram stories feel like the opposite of what the inside of my head feels like, and it is nice to visit them inasmuch as they are pleasurable escapes. (They are more than pleasurable escapes, but this is getting too longwinded already. Maybe next time). My love shared a poem with me last week, Brenda Shaughnessy's "Is There Something I Should Know?" that is about fifteen pages long and not online, so I'll have to direct you to your nearest bookstore or library to get that book of poems, So Much Synth, to get the gist of what I am talking about. Sorry. There is a kind of order and sense-making to that poem, but it also feels like being inside of a teenage brain. Through the long-ish course of trying to write this newsletter (it's now tomorrow), I've realized that I feel like I am inside of a teenage brain. Which is not to disparage teenage brains. It is to say that I feel angry at sense-making–I see the lie in sense-making–and, also, I really want things to make sense. Instead of lying in bed listening to Belle & Sebastian on repeat, asking someone (who?) to get me away from here, I'm dying, I am reading Stephen King novels and scrolling until my eyes fall out. It is embarrassing to feel this way, not only because I am an adult. It was embarrassing to feel it when I was sixteen. It is embarrassing because it feels childish, which is to say, it feels powerless. And the great motive will of adulthood–of being fully human–is power, the will to move the world, to make it make sense.

To be a teenager is to be moved upon, to have sense put upon you, and to feel, often, very angry at the impositions upon your own nascent will–which is not always the will to power and action, is perhaps just as often the will to resist (and yes, we see this in the portrayal of political protest as childish and adolescent, the failure to mature and accept). Resistance is embarrassing, it is difficult and incoherent, requiring as it often does our departure from common sense, which is a portal through which power flows, and away from which we may feel, perhaps, a little or a lot foolish. Tell me something more effective at disciplining people into adult humans than embarrassment. Oh, get me away from here I'm dying!!

This is such a long way of saying that I feel so angry at trying to make sense of this long moment of violence, and I feel so bad (embarrassed) about not being able to make a kind of sense that is proactive–in fact, my resistance to exactly this kind of sense. To succumb to despair, I think, is truly not good, but who says I am good?

Until next time,

Endria

PS: A great poem that is online is Shaughnessy's "I Have a Time Machine"

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,
 
which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
 
But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next
moment and to the next.
 
Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead—
well not zipping—And if I try
 
to get out of this time machine, open the latch,
I'll fall into space, unconscious,
 
then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that.
So I stay inside.
 
There's a window, though. It shows the past.
It's like a television or fish tank.
 
But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim
in backward circles.
 
Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance
to see what I'm leaving behind,
 
and sometimes like blackout, all that time
wasted sleeping.
 
Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment
at having lost a library book.
 
Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting
to be found charming.
 
Me holding a rose though I want to put it down
so I can smoke.
 
Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me
because the explosion
 
of some dark star all the way back struck hard
at mother's mother's mother.
 
I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow.
I thought I'd find myself
 
an old woman by now, traveling so light in time.
But I haven't gotten far at all.
 
Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like;
the past is so horribly fast.