1. All the bridges that you burn

Hello,

These are supposed to be monthly. Instead, I have not written for three months. I'll write three short post(ette)s to make up for three absent months. Three snipettes over three days. So, here, one.

This week I wrote and gave a long lecture to first and second year college students. It was on ideology, and race, and speculative futures. Or ideology, and rituals, and language. Or Octavia Butler and Louis Althusser. My brain is still so tired from writing and thinking and trying to put together words and meanings to explain the relationship between words and meanings, and words and our bodies, which are and aren't in the world in ways that words decide. And are and aren't in the world in ways that words can't decide.

There is nothing we can do in the world without bodies. We can do anything we want to bodies while still telling ourselves and everyone else we are good and whole people as long as we do not require language to be in real relationship, as much as possible, to real bodies. I think it is scarier for some people to use the word genocide for what Israel is doing in Palestine than to live in a world where language is not something that is in relationship, as much as possible, to real bodies. I don't know what else to say, because my brain is so tired of words and the way in which they do and don't mean what I feel about the world.

This week, I read Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class. And Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. And Toni Morrison's God Help the Child. And I am re-reading, one essayette before bed each night, Ross Gay's Book of Delights. And also, two or three pages at a time, China Mieville's The City and The City. And this essay about fascism.

And how to make these all–dealing in some way with violence and domination and the human–connect into something that feels like meaning? I want to understand how to be a human. I want to understand how to be. Looking for meaning in words seems so foolish. You have to be so okay to write words. What can they ever say about burning?

Until tomorrow,

Endria