Snippets of life
Though content of death is within, life persists
I could feel these words before I started writing them. Literally could feel them taking shape around themselves, beginning to sound inside my head both quickly enough and in enough quantity that I knew I would come here and have something to say that I would actually share. (*stares at plentiful unpublished drafts*)
I stood in the shower last night and prayed as images popped into my brain, a kind of mental coming to the altar: for specific friends by name and the struggles they carry. For casual friends and the battles I don’t know. For people I never want to see again in this life to both be well and be kept away from me. For former friends, the same. For people I love and for those I long to see. For a world facing both the pointlessness and seeming endlessness of violence. For the children. For the mothers. I wept then, thinking of mothers everywhere, of how fucking hard it is, of how much harder it must be when you are literally fleeing war or grieving children stolen from you, from this life. The order of things is that you should not have to put your children in the ground. The order of things is that missiles and bombs should not splinter the world around you, should not crack the ground and make it rise to meet you, should not swallow all you knew.
nihilism is a word I learned in the International Baccalaureate program, a program I spell out instead of just saying the I.B. Program because I still believe in its honor, even if that extends only as far as my own vanity. The vapors of elitism are slow dancing in the burning room containing the narratives I was taught. My ego attempts to clutch at silhouettes. Anyway, nihilism is, according to Merrian-Webster, a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless. I remind myself that I reject nihilism. There is so much pain, so much trauma in the world, but I don’t believe in the -less. I refuse.
I do not remember how old I was when I watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day, only that the image of the world’s destruction in Sarah Connor’s dream was terrifying, and it has stayed with me. (I can see that scene in my mind right now.) I also remember that I did not share this terror with anyone, having already deduced, I imagine, that my feelings were not safe to be expressed without filter, in an attempt to avoid ridicule for sensitivity. I absorbed this fear, almost all fears, into myself. I say this not to even talk about that fear, but to talk about what my young brain took from that film: be mindful. Unrepentant dependence on technology maybe isn’t a good thing and could even cause a demise of the society you imagine you value so much. Taking that away from the film at such a young age only to turn around and be living in a time with unrepentant depedence on technology is a mindfuck1. When I watched that film, a product of the 90s, while living in the 90s, the shiny steel and dark blues and blacks of the movie’s future felt so starkly separate from my reality. Now, the scenes of 90s Los Angeles are merely aesthetic, a sundrenched memory.
I walk over to my bookshelf, intuitively pulled to grab 1984 from its perch. I open the yellowed pages, scanning for nothing in particular, but knowing I’ll settle on something soon. The text has something to say. This is an old paperback, one I purchased from a used bookshop that no longer exists. I can still remember quite possibly the only time I went in there, the day I would have purchased this 1960s printing of Orwell’s classic. The shelving was tight in the tiny shop; I remember the odor of acrylic from the nail shop next door piercing the stagnant air. The book, however, smells as old books do. The pages are soft and buttery, and unbearably thin under my fingertips.
Page 173 has spoken:
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain worldview and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
Also:
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians2 nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than what it is.
When I was younger, I saw the lack of imagination as a moral failing. I hope you can only imagine the harms of being given a narrative that codes everything as moral or immoral, mixed with the liberty of consuming literature and art freely and without adult help to parse what was being consumed (like Terminator 2, wherein “immorality” had world-ending potential). I hope you can only imagine.
When I was younger, grappling with ideas of immorality and puritanism that had me by the neck even as a non-churchgoing Black3 kid, I felt like the proletariat, as I understood them then, were lazy and unmotivated. It was giving very much pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps respectability/being-raised-by-a-Boomer shit. I say this as a statement of fact, not as self-or-Boomer-criticism. As an adult, I understand that what I once perceived as “immoral” is actually a kind of power all its own. In the face of the kind of life factors that can drain the bandwidth from the best of us, folks get to the work of accepting.
It is, miraculously, a repudiation of nihilism. It does not give up and say all this shit is worth nothing, but says, despite this bullshit, I will create meaning where I’m at. Even if I cannot change the world or change my reality, I will make my sliver of reality matter. And that, Reader, is as valuable a use of the imaginative power as anything else.
I end these thoughts with one of my favorite things in the world, something that makes life worth living: bread. But first, a rumination on time:
I have started watching the news again, after many years of eschewing doing so. (eschew: to avoid habitually on moral or practical grounds; shun.) By doing so, I learned yesterday that Red Lobster decided to “temporarily” close a number of restaurants here (re: all the ones within proximity to where I have lived and do currently live). The limited nature of “temporary” seemed in question as news crews filmed movers lifting furniture out of a restaurant. Of course, I thought of the strangeness of life and of adulthood, of how fucking strange it is to feel the same as you have always felt on the inside and to also already be old enough for your childhood to have become an aesthetic a new generation can try on, eviscerate, grow bored of. It is strange that a restaurant that features so prominently in my childhood memories now will no longer exist in the places that I was used to it existing; stranger still to recognize the ways in which I am truly human, taking things for granted despite understanding that to live is to dwell within impermanence.
But more so than anything, I am truly pissed that they didn’t even give anyone any warning, so I could at least go get my damn Cheddar Bay biscuits.
prepared for another, bigger mindfuck? The dystopian future of the film was set in 2029, which felt so futuristic at the time that I didn’t even register it, a time that is now literally just five years to the north. I’m going to lie down and watch Bluey.
a member of the proletariat, which means, “a member of the laboring class, esp. the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live; the lowest social or economic class of a community.”
imagine my surprise as a non-churchgoing Black, to discover the church’s long reach. Black religiosity is something that has intrigued me, isolated me, enraged me, wounded me… I could go on, but that would be a whole different essay.