Editor
to Me
Re: ‘Crisis’
Amanda,
Carry the child-like wonder of possibility on your left hip, graze fingertips upon a melting, egregious split your lips are capable of — that which holds back weathered teeth and a home to hold laughter.
Imitate the dictionary upon your dresser — be malleable and forget the definition of a monster and the act of surrendering; become corrosive or generous, watch how the sun falls first, then decide. Capture a big word, then use it, like a header or a new name. Don’t carry it in your sodden wallet, let the syllables shatter amongst the[ir] cheeks. Smother. Recollect. Strategize. Become abbrasive.
Then, define “‘Crisis’”.
Trace the freckles, drowsy in winter sun, until an opening gives. Fit the body between the slim carving of wasting vessels, seep between the bone, re-define oxygen, carbon, the blood from your mother. Sleep deliciously, past noon, till dinner must hold the stomach accountable, breath then, I suppose.
Return back to your arbitrary question. Simmer, dwell, practice hand gestures and whimsical movements of your hips, align your back, breath, send an email to your therapist.
Leave the answer for tomorrow morning.
Best,
Editor
—
I contemplated the subjection of my mind / my teenage years / the pressure behind my eyes / the swell of my stomach / the political atrophy of global governments / starvation and homeless populations / the plummeting of human rights / coral reefs succumbing to bleaching / the metal detectors at the school entrances / my first period / the right to love / carry the fetus / hold the blood in your hands / eighteen with five credit cards / tasers, rape whistles, pepper spray, the word fire / how expensive plan B is / productivity to guilt to profit to neglect to capitalism / modern slavery and child labour / rampant ecological devastation / food deserts / carbon emissions / therapy cost / the wealth divide / femicide / death.
The skin has stretched from the crushed liquid of my spine to the gruesome perspiration upon fingertips — I had no control, the weather was harsh, annual blood test have become far to weekly. [I could not exist without crisis, or disaster and the far too many lists that developed from anxiety-riddled midnight catastrophes. Here would be the proper time to imagine, dedicate a paragraph, the journal four years old and barely reputable in terms of cohesiveness. I did this to spare your imagination and my blood pressure levels, but might you read this and insert your own crises, laid bare, as you remember to unclench your hands.]
Your crisis will continue through flying spaceships, snow-covered summers, a ferocious PMC, the awkward conversations of paper straws, an incarcerated womb, everyone starving – furiously, desperately, unconsciously. Crises cannot be wretched from you — for this, you must make this a positive, generous, even holy belief.
Doubt. Become your own religion. Demand crisis to submit to your uncertainty. Re-name the holy practice of ‘Crisis’, to begin with.
Breath.
—
“We are here and we have to do something nurturing, that we respect before we go. We must. It is more interesting. More complicated. More intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody. To take care of somebody. To make one other person feel good. Now the dangers of that are the dangers of setting up as a marytr or as you know the one who without whom it would not be done. That is the problem of the human mind and the soul but we have to try that. We have to try that. We have to do that, and not doing it is so poor for the self. It’s so poor for the mind. It’s so uninteresting to live without that and it has no risk. There’s no risk involved, and that just seems to make life not just livable but a gallant, gallant event. If you want to hang onto your sanity or hang onto yourself, don’t live anything, it’ll hurt… It’s so risky. People don’t want to get hurt, they don’t want to be left out, they don’t want to be abandoned, you see? It’s though love is always some present you’re giving somebody else and it’s really a present you’re giving yourself.”
Toni Morrison
It felt realistic, at least once the morning meditation, coffee, teeth-brushing, mind-numbing warmth of a second-hand turtleneck — would provoke a decency among me, should I have forgotten it the night before, slumped upon wilted sheets and questionable philosophies toward lust. I became attracted to the possibility of love without the necessary lesion of trauma. It was intellectually stimulating to demand more, to perform heartbreak ritually (each six-month job, friendships constructed around an hour each week, forgetting the take the trash out before Friday morning), to be unrealistic.
There is the prosperity of fantasy, the out-of-date requests copied over by generations, the odd cliché of brushing your teeth each morning lest you both stare into the mirror at the same time(?). I could use love to explain my failures, dilemmas, sorrows, pleasures, lack of writing in my journal (as Ha Jin wrote best…)
My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.
Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning --
when I am gone, let other say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.
Ha Jin, Missed Time
Yet, yet, yet. […]
I should become the easy assurance produced by love. (I could) Submit to the individuality the connection offers, allow it to re-define its bruising meaning, and as (I)/you turn to arbitrary paths of drugs and lust, might someone provide sufficient evidence (I)/you can one day embroider on a pillow or smoother across your lips.
DEBTS AND LESSONS: (taken from Zadie Smith’s Intimations, Six Essays)
CONTIGENCY:
“That my mother had no hatred for her own skin, hair, nose. backside, nor any part of her… That I was considered ‘ugly’ young and ‘beautiful’ later. That by the time the external opinion changed it was too late to create any real change in me… That I met a human whose love has allowed me not to apply got love too often through my work — even when we’ve hurt each other desperately”
Within these parts of Zadie Smith, I wish to reconcile love with crisis and love with stimulation — that of the present and future events. A brief moment where the application of style, in which this reference is subjected to the style of ones existence, their youth, the presentation which is of ‘little protection against catastrophe’ and therefore can wilt if caressed enough. Such style works through the mechanisms of love, the defiance birthed from mechanical list of attributes and baby names, a vacuum of desperation, of despair, with the hopeful nature that your crisis of a lover is synonymous with a crisis amongst yourself, your intellect. Now, realistically, I am using the same language of ‘Crisis’ I mention later, yet it is valuable when you are also situated in this vacuum of society, and so, I prefer to be liminal and harsh.
So, here must I must lay out some ground rules if you are to love amongst crisis.
- Redefine desperation to a characteristically holy adventure rather than the submission of despair.
- Respect the ability to nurture, and only nurture. Love does not need to follow this sentiment. It is simply okay to hold.
- Present yourself to risk (and while you are at it, redefine the cautious nature of this word, or someone else will do it for you.)
—
Carrying multiple conversations between intellects alike, The Voices: Writers and Politics offer differing opinions to establish a multi-perspective narrative, as the fluid line of questioning sparks debates on the many central crises arising socio-economically and politically. I aim to include four brilliant writers in this segment: Umberto Eco, Stuart Hall, Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag.
Crisis no longer cuts the hands or bruises the shins. It became fluid, capable of a literary construction, and a necessity that must punish the blood that hides under your fingertips. It matched your breath, and therefore it must be here, in text, on paper, carried upon the skin as it pushes the air around you. It is “biologically, physically, culturally speaking, a permanent state”. By such details, you might want to conclude your own sovereignty, barren of complex governments and contesting relationships, but what if the acceptance one arguably grasps is necessary. What if this grey, liminal space, where the detriment of such definitions, does not need to solve, coddle, simmer as brilliantly as you deem it to be worth?
“And that is what I mean by crisis, the incapability of a society to recognise the real historical process and movement. My interpretation doesn’t solve your problem.”
I appreciate the candour, how inflexible the mouth can be when you expand upon personal uncertainty — (a constriction a father imposed on your sixth birthday). Is it a problem then? If we relinquish our crisis of identity, of belief, of love, to satisfy a rectification on its our own language? Then malleability must rest upon tone, mood, to the proper insert for quotations, instead. It is no longer a crisis nor a division of circumstances, but character with enough weight for enunciation and storytelling.
“Something is dying, and what we’re seeing is that something, the new that we hoped for, doesn’t seem to be being born”
It is a dying act. Reconstructing, trusting, forgetting. Historically, the alteration of language was made to be simplistic, louder, held. Yet, its lack of success birthed our own crisis to be heard. Our own genesis, an origin of longing, a consequences of urges — we become creators with enough sustenance to breath life into movements with enough action, that reaction is our plight. Should this revelation spark empathic urges to nurture your words, learn to reinforce, to modify your sensibilities, to enlarge your sympathies. The stretch you fear, (of doubt, of forceable expansion) does not render the lung deficient. The skin will fold, the bones will shift, what has crisis ever shaped between your breastbone?
“[…] but I realize that my writing comes out of a deep pessimism and I think that we do live in a time that we all experience in some way as a time of crisis, as a time in which much has been destroyed and much has been lost and much more is going to be lost”
I am not fond of conclusions, nor summaries. My expansions are sacrificial enough and I prefer to not situation such meaning to broad, social understandings. I believe I have bared enough words for now.
Allow your poor mind to re-define crisis, quickly enough, that sleep does not have to keep waiting.
References:
Zadie Smith, Imitations: Six Essays (2020)
Channel 4 Series, The Voices: Writers and Politics
Toni Morrison, On Love and Writing: Bill Moyers Interview (1990)
Ha Jin, Missed Time
The Olive Press Review 