Good evening, beloved —
The year’s down to its guttering embers now, and if your 2018 was anything like the one I had, I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing it extinguished entirely.
You’ll forgive me, I’m not going to go into the granular specifics. We all come to know grief and loss, and while the details of that experience as it reaches each of us are no doubt definitive of who we understand ourselves to be, I rarely find that they make much sense to anyone perceiving them from a distance.
Suffice to say: I experienced loss, and the slow contraction of the world that attends it. People and places I loved dearly disappeared from my life, in some cases slowly and in others suddenly. I had to stand by, more or less helplessly, as the ones I care about most deeply suffered from infirmity, pain and fear. I’ve fallen victim to the carelessness and incompetence of others, while at other times my own foolish actions boomeranged back to damage my prospects and foreclose some of the paths forward that might otherwise have been available to me. I didn’t write a single word I was proud of. And all the while the world continued to rain down its horrors upon the vulnerable and the defenseless — even the flickering, redemptive hope of Rojava now seems bound to be snuffed out by the cockfisted fuckery of a man with a room-temperature IQ and a ravening nullity where his self ought to be.
What made any of this endurable?
Well. There’s the love, fellowship, patience and support of my partner, my family, my friends and farflung comrades; Ursula LeGuin surely had it right. (I hope you have your share of this, by the way, or know how to ask for it if and when you need to — it’s rough times for all of us, and surpassingly difficult to get by on your own. Remember particularly that if you’re reading this, you are always welcome to reach out to me.)
There’s always that one shred of wisdom I retain from the Jewish tradition, the bit about it not being incumbent upon me to finish the Great Work of healing the world, but that neither am I at liberty to desist from it. I always find that thought simultaneously bracing and comforting, and have held it close all during this time.
There is hot black coffee (every got-damn day) and ice-cold Stolichnaya (rather less often, but still a fair amount).
There have been movies, and books, and well-loved books that became equally well-loved movies. And then some more books.
Beyond that there has been an oddly-articulated series of pursuits, pleasures and commitments that have come at me over the horizon, as it were: sustaining but distinctly indirect fire, arcing in at me from some unexpected quarter. For the most part, the things that have brought me life and joy this year bear very little resemblance to any I’ve known before.
They’re for the most part kind of spare and sere, and interestingly (or interestingly to me, anyway) many of them require contestation with people who would claim them for the most reactionary of traditions. I do not know what it means that so much of what has set my soul to rights this past difficult year has also brought me into contact with that which is repellent to me, and while I suspect a good Freudian might have a thing or two to say about that, for now it will have to remain a question for a different day. These are some of the things that have sustained me and kept me propped vaguely upright:
— I do yoga whenever I can — Do.om Yoga, to be precise, which is basically a gently reflective vinyasa sequence practiced to an utterly massive soundtrack. I strap a yoga mat to the front of my bike and ride across Hackney in the rain — it always seems to be raining on yoga nights — and for the next ninety minutes immerse myself in breath and posture and sound.
I’m crap at it. Just the way my body works, biomechanically. There are some things it just. will. not. do, and if this was true at twenty or thirty-five it is still truer at fifty. Doesn’t matter. From a cello-based sounding of the inmost depths to a particularly well-chosen classic Floyd cut, the accompaniment is invariably on point, and I live for the moment each week when our instructor Kamellia brings every session to its close with a long sequence that starts with guided mediation in corpse-pose and eventually drifts off into the soft static of a mostly stilled inner voice. ‘Nuff said.
— I have and cherish a little Penguin hardcover edition of Marcus Aurelius, which I consult whenever I feel like my resolve needs reinforcement. Yes, Marcus Aurelius. Do not @ me, I will fite you IRL. We 100% cannot abandon the Stoics to the kind of Soylent-swilling, growth-hacking, woman-hating Jordan Peterson fanboi who simultaneously thrills to and denies and absolutely does not perceive the sweaty homoeroticism of the 300 poster he has tacked up in his dormroom/cubicle/coliving space.
Yes, in some sense it’s much less work to retrieve functional wisdom from, say, Lao Tzu. There just isn’t as much baggage; as Stephen Mitchell’s always-luminous translation demonstrates, the Tao Te Ching can sustain a gender-neutral reading pleasing to the contemporary ear in a way that you’re really gonna have to work to extract from MA. And yes, the Meditations can be repetitive. If you’re willing to make the investment of energy, though, they do carry and deliver a payload.
— Musicwise, I’ve been listening to rather a lot of neofolk of late, much of which similarly needs to be prised from the grip of occult fascists and other wannabe-übermenschen who cleave to the dark mystique of blood and soil. (We all know perfectly well what happens when one gazes overlong into the abyss, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Walk these paths with me, and you too will know tfw you Google a band whose song you’ve stumbled across, and liked, on an algorithmic playlist, and it turns out to have precisely the politics you’d expect of a band called Blood Axis. Fuck you, Spotify.)
There is so much stark, wintry beauty to be found here, but again, there’s that question of doing the work it takes to flense away everything awful that seems to be bound up with it, and which was probably inevitable the moment anyone uttered the words “inspired by traditional European” anything-at-all. Beyond the lethal trans-Odinist politics of a few of these cats — and it is admittedly very, very hard to get beyond that — this genre will bring you face to face with nature tropes that were played-out and dusty when Dead Can Dance deployed them, fangless teen-goth High Spookyness, a healthy leavening of twee, and the precise flavor of portentous bullshit I recall from Bay Area OTO circles of the early 1990s. Surely there must be easier ways of getting one’s musickal kicks. For the moment, though, this seems to be my row, and it looks like I’m gonna hoe it.
FWIW: try Birch Book on for size if you find yourself in any way curious about this current, but want to dodge most of the above infelicities and hazards. So far as I can tell, their (well: his) music is free of the taint of ugly politics, and in any event it’s a little more…grounded.
— The other great balm of my year, and it’s woven in with all the above, has been spending a great deal of time outdoors, in the elements, in my body, on my own, as far as I can get from roads and lights and other networks.
Those of you who know me well probably find this as surprising and unexpected as I do. I’m, at heart, a city kid. I’ve always needed the ambient pressure of a certain urban density to feel comfortable. The city was a vast concrete hugbox, its various frictions and constraints a source of reassurance, and the void beyond its walls uncanny and somehow intolerably abyssal.
Or so I thought, anyway. And this naturally had consequences for my enjoyment of the world outside. For a quarter-century now, anytime anyone’s asked me to go on a multiday hike or similar I’ve begged off, with what was at the time the manifestly true statement that I’d had quite enough of that in the Army, thank you very much.
I’m not entirely sure what changed, but something’s sure as hell shifted inside me. Maybe it’s that I’ve been having a very hard time using words, either as working tools or in the everyday communication that knits me to everyone else on the planet, and that this aphasia is extraordinarily painful. Maybe it’s my serial disappointment, over what is now three decades, in the liberatory or emancipatory efficacy of all the subcultures I’ve ever invested in and identified with. Maybe it’s simply that I’m sick to death of my own bullshit. Whatever it is, being out, alone and walking in silence for a good long stretch of space and time is the only thing that seems to make this particular epoch of existence feel in any way tolerable — and not like an anesthetic would, either, but more like a tonic and a fundamental recoupling to the source of all power.
Nurri always cautions me about getting too close to the cliff-edge of what she calls “the male sublime,” and I think her point is well taken. It’s all too easy to fetishize solitude and silence and so on, especially at middle age, and for folks with my particular mix of predilections to drift into a precious and overly dramatic renunciation of the things of this world. Worse: get that far even once and it’s not at all hard to slide from there straight into the strain of no-kidding nihilist misanthropy that’s capable of rationalizing or even celebrating “the cleansing flame.” That way lies a field comprehensively riven by the sort of crevasses for the soul one never can quite crawl out of again, and I have no desire to traverse it. I just want to go walking.
Oh: I’m not going to get into anything as crass as a packing list here, but by necessity my preparation for long solo walks has brought me into the outer folds of the ultralight hiking community, and you betcha but I have opinions about what works and what does not. HMU privately if you want to talk ultralight gear, or for that matter the attendant philosophy.
— Finally, I’ve been giving a couple of nights a month to doing labor organizing with the local branch of the IWW. I’m a card-carrying Wob!
After literally decades of looking on in admiration, but thinking that they had little enough to do with my life, I finally joined, after noting that it was none other than the One Big Union that seemed to be organizing the most effective direct action against ICE; I thought that deserved recognition, and support, and commitment in kind. But there’s a selfish aspect to this, as well. Between the cruelties of Tory austerity here and the low evil shit happening on the other side of the pond, I desperately needed to feel like I was doing something about it, anything at all, and contributing to a solidarity-based organization like the IWW lets me feel that I am, in some wise or way.
That’s it. That is what keeps me getting out of bed every morning, and standing up to face the truth that neither these hard times nor their sorrows have somehow evaporated during the hours of darkness. It’s not a lot, in fact it’s not very much at all. But it’s enough, and it will have to be enough. Maybe you’ll get something out of this list of tactics, and maybe you’ll share your own with me, and maybe that too will be enough.
As far as New Year’s resolutions go, I do have a few. The one that’s germane here: I’m going to try to write to you more often. I find that when I don’t, the pressure to say something Meaningful builds up to a stupid degree…and then, lacking much of anything that feels worth breaking the silence over, I wind up not saying anything at all.
Until next dispatch, then: take care of yourselves. Take care of one another. Let yourselves be taken care of. You have all my faith
ag
ldn
And the world is so wrong that I hope that we’ll be strong enough
For we are on our own and the only thing known is our love
- Pete Shelley, 1955-2018
This is Dispatch from London No. 82 of Monday, 31 December 2018, 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.