Unending vulnerabilities

The Future Is Like Pie #29

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
July 06, 2022

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences…Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

—Consolations, David Whyte

Lately I feel surrounded by disaster and by mourning, by a meticulous dismantling both inside and out. It’s been three months and seven days since my mother died, and while I’ve been relearning the very stupid work of living, the country around me has been an endless slurry of violence and scorn and fear. Gutted, that’s the word to reach for. Safety and sovereignty and agency, gutted. The present, the future. All gutted.

Most days, everything feels a little useless, a little pointless. It’s hard to do, to want, to act, in the face of such overwhelming sadness and rage and powerlessness. It’s horrifically tempting to shut down. I suppose that is what despair is.

But despite everything, I don’t feel as ready to give into it as I used to. Maybe I’m just so tired I’ve punched through to the other side. Or maybe newfound resilience is a fun aftereffect of grief. Or maybe this is just what it is to be a person in the universe—cyclical, mundane, not special, alive.

I don’t have any more answers than you do, so here’s what I’ve been reading lately.

  • I recently finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (on audiobook). Though it initially struck me as a bit heavy-handed (and goes into more detail on economic policy than I would have expected in a fantasy novel), seeing it through was rewarding: thorough world-building, clear and deliberate language, complicated characters struggling to understand themselves and their power under the warping yoke of imperialism. It is ultimately, like all of my favorite books, a story about the inescapability of systems.
     

  • I’ve nearly finished Boys for Pele, the 33 1/3 book by Amy Gentry on the Tori Amos album of the same name. I bought it because it’s one of my favorite albums of all time, but my expectations were lukewarm—I’m wary of music fandom, particularly around Amos, whose fandom is easily ridiculed by others (and by fandom I mean me, and by others I mean straight men). So it’s been legitimately shocking to discover that this extended essay is no mere love letter to the album; it’s a brilliant, richly written, rigorously researched, airtight condemnation of the deep-running well of misogyny inherent to music criticism. Come for the deconstructed arpeggios, stay for the Kantian philosophy and patriarchal bonfires. (I can’t promise all 33 1/3 books accomplish such feats, but I can tell you that the 170+ book series covers artists like David Bowie, Janelle Monae, Fugazi, Miles Davis, etc. I’ve already ordered more.)

When you live in a country that doesn’t help you care for your neighbors and doesn’t ensure that your neighbors truly care for you, it isn’t irrational to believe in the only promises which are guaranteed, even if they’re lies. If your country doesn’t care whether or not you have access to a dignified job or can receive medical care when you’re sick or if your kids can follow their dreams, and that doesn’t tell you the truth about how we are all responsible for loving one another, then it isn’t irrational to adopt a very narrow-minded worldview. If your country has always told you that other people are a threat, but that no matter what happens you will be allowed to fight that threat off yourself, then of course it’s easier to believe in yourself as The Good Guy With The Gun, instead of as a member of The Good Community That Takes Care Of Each Other.

  • This newsletter from Ijeoma Oluo reflects on the lessons we have (or mostly haven’t) learned in the two years since George Floyd’s murder:

If you recognize that the brutality of racism in the United States is at its core a systemic issue, then it doesn’t make much sense to ask what the legacy of our collective outrage, heartbreak, and fear will be when the only change we’d been able to experience to a measurable degree in such a short amount of time was an increase in awareness and our collective increase in outrage, heartbreak, and fear. Unless we’re talking about open revolution in the streets, you won’t be able to measure the lasting impact of social movements for change on our systems in a few months or even a few years.

  • With similar themes, this hopeful comic helps break down the systemic steps at play in our current political struggles (also starring Captain America and the Winter Soldier):

It only feels like so little because the task is so big and the results aren’t instant…Take it one day at a time. And one state at a time.

And a few quick links:

  • I’ve been appreciating the Instagram posts from The Slow Factory, an org grounded in climate justice, collective action, and design.
     

  • Also on Instagram, Kathy Sierra’s posts about horse training, movement, and motivation are—well, they’re much more broadly applicable, and always seem to say what I need to hear. “No outside help is coming. We are all we’ve got. Let’s get back to being in service to: Ourselves. Our community. One another.”
     

  • For my witch friends, here’s a tarot spread for dealing with rage (/ht Amanda Costello).
     

  • A beautifully sardonic poem: “Self-Care” by Solmaz Sharif, as featured on The Slowdown.

I know we’re all donating to our local abortion funds right now, so let’s take a quick detour into another worthy cause: the Signals Network, which supports whistleblowers and helps guide media attention to corporate wrongdoing. You can donate to the Whistleblower Protection Program or the Tech Accountability Project (which produces the Tech Worker Handbook, a guide to whistleblowing in tech).

Wear a mask, treat yourself gently, and practice adaptability. <3