Good afternoon, beloved -
One of the difficulties I'm contending with at the moment is not being able to do more to help my good friends in the States, particularly all the lovely people with roots in the Midwest I met over the summer in the course of my Lifehouse tour.
Just about everyone I know who lives in the broad arc between Chicago and Charlotte is flat-out exhausted, running on the proverbial fumes. They were still doing everything in their power to respond to the conditions of pogrom so cavalierly wished upon the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, by no less powerful figures than the Republican candidates for president and vice president of the United States, when Hurricane Helene made landfall. And if it's been genuinely inspiring to see the instinctual (and, by now, well-practiced) turn toward mutual aid once again acting to preserve lives and dignity, it's also clear that many of the folks involved in those efforts are pressed to their limits. This latest crisis has come crashing in on their already-overextended lives, cascading onto and compounding all the other troubles they were in the process of attending to, before anyone involved seems to have had so much as the time it takes to catch a breath.
If this is you, the main thing I want to say is that I see you — that we see you, and the extraordinary things you're doing to defend your communities and the most vulnerable people in them. Hopefully you can feel the support being sent your way, psychically as well as materially. I hope, as well, that layered in with the deep-down sense of depletion I know you're bearing up under, you're also experiencing some of the upwelling "purpose, power and possibility" we empirically know mutual-aid efforts tend to entrain in their participants, and that you're able to make use of those in the difficult weeks and months ahead.
There are two lessons I think the rest of us might learn from what you're experiencing in this moment. One is simply the banal observation that if an Atlantic hurricane can wreak this kind of havoc in upland Appalachia, 250 miles from the nearest shoreline, the idea that much of anywhere on Earth constitutes a safe haven from the destructive effects of climate-system collapse becomes radically open to question. This is something I understood well enough intellectually in doing the research for Lifehouse, but I confess that I didn't really get it viscerally until I spent a few hours sitting with the images coming in from North Carolina.
And if it's only in the wake of Helene that I'm truly internalizing this set of facts, I think it's a decent bet that most of the people responsible for official "resilience" policy haven't really wrapped their heads around it either. (I still see planning based on linear projections of warming and drying in Wales and the west of England, for example, as though the AMOC might not collapse at any moment.) The truth is that "nonlinear" means nonlinear: that neither the historical climate record nor straight-line extrapolations from it will suffice to help us understand the thing that's now upon us, and that the wisest thing any one of us can assume is that the storm will find its way to us in some form, wherever we may live and however high the walls we've built to keep it out.
The other thing has to do with tempo, and the cadence with which one catastrophe arrives on the heels of another you're still digging out from under. It isn't so much that it's going to be this way for the rest of our lives. It already is and has been this way. So the next thing we need to learn how to do together — beyond the recourse to mutual aid that, for better or worse, feels like it's starting to become a matter of ingrained habit in the culture — is restore, or better yet, continuously renew, our capacity to undertake the tasks mutual aid requires of us. And again: renew psychically as well as materially. We will need to find ways of resuscitating people when the rigors of showing up for others have leached them down to sinew and a sour feeling in the pit of the stomach. New rituals, new networks, new institutions. We have to understand ourselves, now, as people embedded in a process that appears in our lives as a cycle of discrete events, which means attending closely to the rhythms of that process, and especially any regularities we may be able to discern within them. Perhaps, if there is any shelter from the storm to be had at all, it will be time moreso than space that offers it.
§ Speaking of cycles: tomorrow is, of course, the first anniversary of the Hamas incursion into Israel — both an atrocity in its own right, and the trigger or pretext for what I think we have to regard as the far graver atrocity that followed, Israel's functionally genocidal (and still unfolding) assault on Gaza.
Words fail, words will always fail, to account the grief and the seemingly unending horror of what has been and is even now being done to the people of Gaza. There are states of the body that approximate honesty — racking sobs, thin drawn-out keening, inchoate preverbal howling that sears the throat — but as anyone who's reckoned with loss can tell you, even those states cannot be sustained indefinitely. The thousand-yard silence that follows, when the chemicals that make grief in the brain have been depleted, and must replenish themselves before you feel much of anything at all? Well, that feels like a betrayal, too.
Words, then. Words that taste like ash, poetry-after-Auschwitz words that arrive all tarred with falseness and inadequacy. You say something, because you cannot see and feel without being moved to say something, and you hope that what you have to say lands somehow in the space between pious rote formula and the kind of awful over-studied posturing that mars a graceless funeral speech. You try and give voice to the rage, the shame, the undoing sense of helplessness. You want, impossibly, to offer succor or solace or at least an apology to those who have suffered so much, whose suffering will shade the rest of their mortal lives. You hope your words can somehow acquit the silence of others. You fail in every aspect of this, and you know you fail.
And even that failure is better, is infinitely more dignified and righteous, than whatever this is. There are any number of valid reflections on the events of the past year, and the burdens and obligations placed upon those of us who have witnessed them by historical memory — of course there are. But this is not nearly one of them. No: how intolerable, how obscene it is to center Jewish "hurt" at this moment when a Jewish state is prosecuting agony on an entire people, in a way that every Jew knows will surely be remembered for a thousand years to come because, hey, guess what!, we remember all the times it was done to us. (I was going to prepend that with, "As a Jewish person myself, I feel that...," because that kind of preemptive positionality statement feels de rigeur these days. But you know what? Fuck that, too.) If nothing I write here can remotely speak adequately to the greater, enclosing disgrace of the moment, I at least have the right words for this: shame on you, Howard Jacobson, and shame too on the Guardian for choosing this piece to run over the others it might have. Your fear of what might happen is not the story here, not when there are bombs falling and bodies being torn tonight.
So far as tomorrow goes, and all the days and nights that follow, I cling to the idea that their history is as yet unwritten. That there is some force gathering in the world, even now, that can put an end to the suffering, and bring its architects to justice. I don't have the slightest clue what would constitute such a force, though, and if we're being honest I don't think anyone else does either, and that's surely as difficult to bear as anything else we've learned in the course of this terrible year.
§ OK, 'nuff said. Let me switch gears a little, so I don't leave you like that. At the moment, I'm gleefully anticipating reading Jeff VanderMeer's new book Absolution, which I've atypically pre-ordered in hardcover to semi-match the omnibus volume of Area X I have; listening, yes, to the new GY!BE, as always with Godspeed half-hoping it will be brilliant and half wondering why they still bother; and watching James Burke's 1978 show Connections, which put the zap on my head for good at the age of ten, and which can be viewed for free on YouTube. (There is scarcely a moment of that first episode's first ten minutes that does not kick me straight in the teeth, by the way, starting as it does in the plaza between the Twin Towers, and unfolding a story shot in the now-lost mid-century Manhattan I remember in every fiber of my being.)
Oh, and before I forget: if you should happen to be in or around London next Thursday evening the 10th of October, I'll be giving a Lifehouse talk at Mayday Rooms (88 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1DH), hosted by my FWs of the local IWW branch. The talk is free, but you've got to register for it. See you there?
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 133 of Sunday, 6 October 2024, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊