“Sometimes the quake goes on for longer than usual”: The Air of December
All afternoon we talked about our journals, the stories we write, the diaries we read, the universe in a grain of sand, the things we hide, the first drafts of history the journalists offer us, Cheever's diaries from the 1940’s to the 1980’s, Warhol'slists and repetitions, the times we don't feel like ourselves, the confessions, the trains we miss, the stories marking our lives, the life writing, the horrible subway rides, the nausea we feel, that Sartre wrote about, the short stories, the internal conflicts, internal relations between dreams and days, inner worlds and external demons.
“For several months in 2010 I suffered from anxiety induced nausea while riding the subway,” wrote Nora, sounding like Cheever. “It was a peculiar kind of subterranean panic. It came in waves. It was associated with the sound of the doors closing. The automated lady’s voice.”
“The Nausea is not inside me. I am the one who is within it. —Jean-Paul Sartre.”
Cheever seems to paraphrase William Blake’s line, "To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea."
All week I went backward and forward through that moment, greeting FLY and talking about Peops we know, in our East Village collective daydreams, reading those journals, between “the long street roars.”
I’d spend the afternoon at the Center, where my friend Anne Christine greeted us with an overview of Project 2025.
“The radical right has released an extremist electoral playbook for a soft coup, an 877-page document called Project 2025, backed by now-75 conservative groups and Koch family money. It openly calls for the dismantling of the federal government and giving special ‘supreme’ powers to a President – a step toward autocracy, and Christian theocracy. They hope to elect Donald Trump to enact their vision. Project 2025 also calls for complete erasure of gender and LGBTQ+ identity from all federal rules and
regulations. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of
legislation that exists,” it states.
“Project 2025 calls for rolling back recent LGTBQ+ gains in civil rights, including gay marriage and protection from discrimination, and gender reform of the military. It criminalizes transgender identity as predatory to children, and on the par with pornography. The full conservative report is at: www.project2025.org.
“The Solution: The Stop the Coup 2025 initiative has been launched as an action tank and initiative to counter Project 2025’s agenda and address the urgent need to spread the word to LGBTQ+ and progressive communities about its dangerous threat to our democracy and lives. The project will address the burning question many ask when they learn of Project 2025: what can we do to fight back? Where is a progressive blueprint for action? What steps can we take? Most importantly, what works? What are effective strategies?”
“They tipped their hands,” says Jay. We have a year to organize and win, not two days after the election like last time.
Alexis reminds us of nonviolent principles. We are a community of people willing to build the community we want to see.
“Struggle and conflict are essential for confronting and overcoming injustice. We honor and emulate the successes of international and home-grown movements for democracy by adhering to nonviolence in our strategies and tactics. State power is maintained through oppression with the tacit compliance of the majority of the governed; our withdrawal of compliance diminishes governmental control and emboldens others to consider their compliance. In rejecting the violence of the state, we refuse to use the same tools that uphold repressive social systems. In working toward a functioning democracy, we reject as fundamentally anti-democratic all forms of state-sanctioned violence, bigotry, and systemic discrimination, especially discrimination directed at people because of their perceived disability, immigration status, race, religion, financial/employment status, gender identity/expression, sex, and sexuality. Nonviolent struggle is not "easy" or "safe;" nonviolence doesn't appeal to the "morality" or "compassion" of oppressors. Nonviolence is a tactic in the service of the democratic values we hold. Its methods are steadfast refusal to accept state violence, and the pressure of collective action. The core strengths of nonviolence are largely unavailable to those who wield violence in service of the state: in our willingness to take personal risks together -- openly and collectively -- without threatening violence to other people; and in encouraging everyone to actively participate regardless of ability, status, or age: we are a movement of people committed to building the democracy we want to bring about. (see Chenowith, Erica: The success of nonviolent civil resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulder, 2013; Nonviolent resistance proves potent weapon, from 2019.”
Project 2025 is a major vision statement, taking cues from Viktor Mihály Orbán in Hungary. It's time to organize against this. The majority of the country is with us. Project 2025 is an evangelical project, built of religious outreach, school boards out there, priests doing organizing, appealing to cultural conservatism, into a fascism... people are looking for protection... gotta remind them they are at risk too... fear is they take over and over we lose our democracy.... “Stopthecoup,” my friendsinsist.
Between war and the end of the year parties, the whirlwind of December sends us there. The teenger arrived on Thursday. By way of Los Angeles, I think of the universe like a puzzle, a jolt, upward, with a tilt, pieces flying about, the plane with the college kid lands at JFK. The kid emerges from the night, and we drive back home.
And winter vacations begins, a few lunches and greetings.
Nicholas, the cat, and the college kid compare food recipies in the Times.
Mom and I look at pictures from Columbus in the 1930s. Mom and I talked about flowers and being in touch with nature and feeling a part of it all. She just likes to sit and look at them, at me, at us, at the trees in the garden.
The kids run into Savitri on the Brooklyn Bridge, water below, on a Saturday full of life, dancing and late night adventures.
On we walked through the holiday lights, looking at the Manhattan skyline, on our way to St Ann's Warehouse to see The Life and Times of Michael K, reading about Giuliani’s legal woes, still in New York with mon amour, history churning forward, dancing the night away.
Hellos, goodbyes, sometimes you meet one of the good ones, a colleague there for the students, for her colleagues, and for the union.
"Listening is the most important part. Let others feel heard," said Cindy, saying goodbye, Always a counselor. No goodbyes, see you soon.
Finishing, we meet Andrew at the baths, talking about our world, in between the hot and cold saunas and tubs on Tenth Street.
Boyd “did an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on the /r/collapse reddit thread. Folks asked a lot of interesting questions… …here’s an excerpt:
“How do you deal with the feeling that it's all over but the screaming?”
My response: Yes; a lot of us are feeling that. And given most trend lines and headlines, understandably, so. Hell, I feel that way every other day. But, I’m still in there plugging away, doing what I can, and I know you are, too. [I see you.]
But we have to step back from that feeling and ask ourselves what is this “all over” we’re speaking/feeling of.
Because, as Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hines famously said, “the end of the world as we know it, is not the end of the world full stop.” Or as we say at the Climate Clock, “we will never run out of time to act in defense of people and the planet.” Yes, we have missed many of our key targets to keep warming below 1.5℃. …I think a lot of people are either in a ‘we can still fix this - and keep the world we know’ mode or they're in doom mode. People switch from one to the other. But the truth is somewhere in between, and we need to live in that liminal middle; we need to “stay with the trouble’ as they say. Yes, we're in for catastrophe – so what is the best catastrophe that is still available to us? That’s the question we must ask. And then we need to train ourselves philosophically, morally, and spiritually to work towards that better catastrophe. …It’s a rough awakening, but we have some options for oddly positive, darkly hopeful, resilient approaches… it’s up to us to do all that we can to achieve the best catastrophe that’s still available to us.”
And so Andrew Boyd concludes… inviting us all, with our ambivalences.
It all feels very dialectical. The metabolic rift between humans and nature, its state of things is still vexxing, ever tilting and crumbling, erroding and polluting, cleansing and renewing, expiring and shifting, moving beyond us. Some of us retreat, others revolt.
Brother Ron is reading migrations, dialectically, looking at them within the operating system, ever perpetuating inequalities, climate crisis, and still more migrations.
Why not imagine what Marshal would have said about his imigrant students, think about them inside and outside, in their contradicting gazes, safe and unsafe, legal, illegal. No one is illegal. Still the world system creates borders and fences.
“There is no individual reversal of the metabolic rift,” says John Bellamy Foster. “We can personally find some temporary refuge and solace. Still, as social beings concerned with humanity as a whole, we cannot close our eyes to the fate of the hundreds of millions and even billions of people whose lives will be detrimentally affected, in many cases their lives cut short, by the planetary rift.”
Still, few of us really know. We know. But we don’t know. So we write journal entries, vascillating between possibility and despair, to remind ourselves we were here, that we exist, we thought what we thought, we think, we feel, we dream. Slavic Soul Party still plays at Barbes every Tuesday. We draft scripts, plays about what is and could be.
I teach students and recall the year that passed, participating in the rituals of December, singing old carols and hymns, meeting friends, going to the living to the Theater for the New City, where Bread and Puppet is holding its annual residency. Peter Schulmann, founder the theater, is up there dancing with one of the performers. Jim Eigo, my act up hero in the front row. He seems downtrodden. The show begins.The idiots of the world unite against the idiot system on a moody rainy afternoon biking to Judson, grabbing a bite with irwin.
Your story matters, says the Graffiti on the wall, word on the street in Brooklyn. Growing up is never easy. But everyone has a story, worth telling, worth living.
At least that was how it felt over the last few weekend, dancing late into the night, at Physical Therapy Residency with HAAi – at Nowadays in Queens. Its not quite Berlin, but its something, New York lost and found in Ridgewood, where the music and bodies still merge and shake.
3 pm in Princeton with Mom, ever exploring secret lives of plants, memories of a life well spent, catching up with Berlin buddies in town, comparing cities and ideas, reflecting on the art shows and sunsets…
Day after day, December passed, one gorgeous day after another visiting a friend in the the Bronx, looking at art with my favorite high school student in Manhattan, and grabbing a meal back in holy Brooklyn, even if they dont like the Beatles. RiP John. I still remember when you left in December 1980, seeing mom crying watching the today show. Happiness is still a warm gun. Irony. Been gone too long. Fun to hear about your days with May Pang. Glad to share my life in the same town you grew to call your own.
Darby was gone earlier in the week.
And this December Paul’s 1970’s bandmate, Denny openned up his Wings and flew. My mind rushed back to that greatest hits album. That was the moment when i first loved Paul's music, before finding out he was in another band before Wings. “We've already said Goodbye” Denny sang “go now” every set of the Wings shows, fantastic. RIP Denny.
On Monday, the teenager and I strolled through East Village magic hour, looking for spices on 1st Ave, below at Pannah, knishes at Yonah Schimmel, recalling meeting dad there, after a morning at the Chelsea Hotel, thinking about a strange moment in time.
And a friend of the college kid, dropped by.
“What are you reading right now?” I ask the literature major with yellow eyeliner. “What was your favorite novel this year?”
“Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector,” she says, putting on more makeup, looking like a cast member from Cabaret.
“When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright,” writes Lispector. “I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself… I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget … I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”
There is so much beyond me that is not known.
C was already feeling scratchy.
We all have our limits. Not much COVID consciousness after a year without masks in Berlin and countless boosters.
Another holiday, another covid round, two positives on the top floor, third holiday in a row. At least I have By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño and Nicho and Nigel to keep us company. Nicho seems to have taken interest in the notes in my office. Oh NYC, I love you, your messy theaters and subways and bars, where we meet indoors, creating our own lives and dreams, blue demons which tap us on the shoulder as one of my students told me, our own symphonies and struggles.
The wind howls, covid grasps, forcing coughing and wheezing. As I sit in bed, a few friends grabbed a pint in the East Village, sending me a snap shot and a get well card. Madam Bovary and I sat for a date. JK sang to the solstice. Chuck and Brad and I howled at the moon on shortest day of the year. And a crack opened and fo a second we were all together again.
I read final papers all afternoon, thinking about my students who wrote about the traumas of birth, the anguish women feel, the struggles of migrants, the challenges of grief, of living, the joy of travel, the ways people connect in groups, and find ways to trust each other, the ways social workers learn to meet students where they are at in school settings, the ways we can make our learning settings more trauma-informed. I think about how lucky i am to be learning from the students at City University, who are working, taking care of kids, dealing with post partem depression as single moms, trying to make it work, and making it work, laughing and sharing their stories every week. Some weeks it's a struggle, others they surprise me, with reflections about our readings, helping me reimagine everything I was ever taught about the mind. Lucky to be here
At night, I find myself desperately seeking susan in bed with ricard, hanging with the teenager. Its our favorite.
And I think about where we were a year ago, where we are now, last year in Berlin. This year with another wrinkle, another war.
“Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there,” says Masha in the essay of the month. “How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today… Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass….As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”
But is there something in us that lets this happen again and again. Its happening again in Gaza.
We see it, the accusations, the bombs, the lack of common ground, unable to see the dreams, the hopes of the youth bombed below.
The violence is everywhere. We’re all trying to duck it. But its debris seems to by flying with the wind, through teh streets, car horns blaring, protests everynight, remiding us of an unresolved wound, a trauma none of us seem to immune from. Silence is deadly. But so is speech. The December winds howl.
In bed, I sit reading, By Night in Chile:
“Sometimes I feel dizzy,” writes Bolaño. “Sometimes the quake goes on for longer than usual and people take shelter in doorways or under stairs…. [E]verything stops for a moment. And then i ask myself, where is the wizened youth…. And that poor wizened youth whose cries no one can hear…. [I]s me? And then faced flash before my eyes at vertiginous speed, the faces i admired, those i loved, hated, envied, and despised. The faces i protected, those i attacked, the faces i hardened myself again and those i sought in vain…”
longer than usual and people take shelter in doorways or under stairs…. [E]verything stops for a moment. And then i ask myself, where is the wizened youth…. And that poor wizened youth whose cries no one can hear…. [I]s me? And then faced flash before my eyes at vertiginous speed, the faces i admired, those i loved, hated, envied, and despised. The faces i protected, those i attacked, the faces i hardened myself again and those i sought in vain…”
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