Mar 17, 2025 4 min read

Show some Emotion

The corner of a mostly empty room. A wall of windows lets in early afternoon light, white. Against the back cream-colored wall: a framed poster, close-up of Joan Armatrading's face. In the right-hand corner a tall, leafy plant leans. In the foreground a smaller blue pot on a wood and ceramic table, a rubber plant, two stems leaning in opposite directions, leaves big, oval, shining.

Hello,

It is halfway through March. Are you following the news? Happy St. Patrick's Day.

I was rewatching Season 1 of Game of Thrones yesterday, while in a can't-get-myself-to-do-anything stupor (I started taking folate again, and folate might make me feel terrible, I couldn't do much with myself besides googling "folate and comt polymorphism depression nih," because if you add "nih" to the end of your google health queries you will find, in addition to all of the answers medical reddit provides, peer-reviewed medical journal articles, not everyone's cup of tea, but it's good to diversify your sources, a little reddit, a little PubMed Central, these things are nice to have, but we can't have nice things, uh oh, here I go sliding into despair, maybe it's not the folate bringing me down after all, maybe it's the quick trip to fascist hell.)

Anyways, I was watching GOT like it was the early 2010s (Season 1, Episode 2 "The Kingsroad") and our only cares are devastating natural disasters and global political turmoil. Jon Snow is joining the Night's Watch, Tyrion tags along to see the Wall. At some point, Jon Snow asks Tyrion why he reads so many books. And Tyrion says that knowledge is how he serves his family, since he can't fight like his brother Jamie. Should I mention that I am also re-reading The Dark Tower? I finished The Gunslinger on a flight home from Miami last weekend, am almost through The Drawing of the Three. And look, to make it through the Odetta/Detta split–in his/my/our defense I will say, King loves a split character, not only in this hyper-trope of a black woman, but still, yikes–you must set aside your critical thinking, and too, you must set aside your critical thinking to watch this scene with Tyrion and Jon Snow and feel, as I did, a sentimental identification with the pursuit of knowledge as weapon, the defense of the meaningfulness of books within a context of physical, bodily war. Allow yourself these moments of indulgence. But soon enough you'll remember, like me, that there is the fuller context: I am the terrain on which this battle is waged, for my imaginative loyalty, to these men who love to write about war and battle and quest, the truth and power of their words and visions, who believe that knowledge is a weapon we can wield. If GOT is the book to my Tyrion, then the knowledge I wield to win the war is George RR Martin's real pleasure in hurting women? I may still be in a folate fog.

But. There are other words than these. Hanif Abdurraqib shared excerpts yesterday from Rachel Corrie's email home to her parents, written while she was in Palestine, less than a month before she was killed:

Anyway, I’m rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside.

I had never read this letter before, and it made me so, so sad. I read Rachel Corrie's words, and I immediately imagine her death, and I feel so horrified that it feels as though her words have done something. And this is the battle waged on the terrain of our imaginations, too: that the violence a state and a person enacts on another person's body can be transmuted both backward and forward in time into symbols, discourse, that give those acts a meaning other than that immediate, physical sentence. The real cutting violence of a bulldozer crushing a body to death, an end to meaning, which takes place in life.

She didn't write these words knowing that she would be killed. But I can not read them not knowing that she was killed. We cannot choose the meanings we are able to make. We are always participating, in other words. Knowledge and its words wield us, I mean. They make their ways in the world through us, our bodies, sitting and reading and feeling.

The world works on us and the world moves on. If it's bad let those tears roll down.

Until next time,

Endria