slick nude mindflesh
Hello hello hello! It’s the anniversary of the Panorama, the Panopticon, the Pandabear (I don't know why people/we/I started saying Panorama, etc., but it feels satisfying to do it in a way that is completely illegible to me).
I'm really feeling the heavy 365 of this past year. But, even though I feel a level of unhinged and feral and strange that is unprecedented (a word trademarked by covid now) and thus somehow inarticulable, even though I'm crying all the time and going legit catatonic on the semi-reg, I also am pandemic-fine, pandemic-grateful even, and it just makes me marvel at all of our weird resilience. And wonder, too, at the cost of it, the cost of adapting to the outsizing loss of the past year.
I took myself to the beach this past weekend for a writing retreat, or to celebrate, I guess? Most of the weekend, I did the staring at the wall thing and felt exhausted and overwhelmed.
But, one time, on the beach, the sun came out after a tremendous rainstorm and beamed right on my face. I stood about 20 feet away from a couple and their copper dog, who was shiny like a penny in the sun. Lone men parasailed in the glittery water, their sails like two crescent moons in the sky, I thought: I am part of humanity! I felt just overwhelming joy, to remember it, to feel near to people doing people things, and to feel the rising hope that I would get to do a whole lot more of that soon. 💉
So this week, I'm focusing on
Things That Make Me Feel Close to Other Humans!
This Atlantic article: It’s been helpful this past year for me to try to constantly remind myself that my brain is being messed so I feel less alone, less alien, so this article, about how much people are forgetting in the pandemic and how much it's messing with our brains, felt like another helpful reminder. I read it while sitting on the toilet + hiding from the 10-year-old who wanted to tell me again in eye-gouging detail about her virtual-world game because we're the only fleshpeople she sees for days on end. The article talks about smooth brain — evokes a raw piece of chicken, slick nude mindflesh, no unsightly wrinkles — an aspirational state that has become an internet meme: "Cant think=no sad ❤️.” I read the article feeling simultaneous like I'm not forgetting as much as the author, who can’t remember what time parties end (6 pm at the lastest for sure) or how much movie popcorn was (that shit is $93, right?), and like I'm pretty sure I'm just not remembering all I'm forgetting (sometimes Bry and I will be like, remember sitting in Stella Taco after having therapy in a room with your therapist? remember watching movies with friends in a building built for watching movies with friends?). Cushing gets bonus points for saying she feels like a Sim, which is one way I understand my pandemic self, too.
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout: This is the continuation of Olive Kitteridge, that searing collection of short stories (I guess?) held together by Olive Kitteridge, a complex, badass, weird, painfully honest — narcissist, lots of characters call her, but I find her delightful. I've been gulping Olive, Again, (though it’s the first time reading a book that I was worried about characters standing too close together in a restaurant), and one of the chapters ("Motherless Child") stopped me in my tracks. It did that thing where, after reading, you have to just stop everything and let it ring in you like a bell until you regain the ability to function. This is an odd connection, maybe, but it reminded me of "Jordan Lint" by Chris Ware, which also gave me kind of a healing crisis, and which, come to think of it, I also read during a sad rainy getaway to the beach. Both pieces really seem to capture a terrifying sense of end-of-life regret that feels like very bitter medicine for any human who might not see themselves with 100% clarity (i.e., any human).
And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.
“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: This may feel like a strange addition to a list of things that make me feel closer to humanity. But I was just talking to a friend about how going outside these days makes you remember that there’s a real world off the internet — how you sort of blink into the sun and notice trees you can’t zoom in on and extricate yourself from the endless ways to there are to spend your soul like cryptocurrency. There’s a sense of grounding, of remembering purpose. Rereading this article was like going outside after being lost in the gravitylessness of the internet, where time and words and actions are so cheap. It reminded me of the tremendous weight of our history, the staggering debt we white people owe Black Americans, and of how much work there is to do.
I really felt Coates’ metaphor here, connecting racial reckoning and getting sober. It helped me understand the work to be antiracist in a new way, one that takes as a given that I will always be a recovering white supremacist, and my privilege, apathy, and fragility will always be tempting escapes:
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: In rereading Funny Weather, Olivia Laing's brilliant meditation on (mostly) queer artists and loneliness (as ever) and surviving capitalism, I fell for this gender-nonconforming artist who was at work in the 1920s, Claude Cahun, and their collaborator, lover, and stepsibling Marcel Moore. Cahun and Moore fought against the Nazis by dressing up as old ladies and slipping anti-war propaganda into parked cars and cigarette packages. Signed “The Soldier with No Name,” their flyers used the language of Nazi propaganda, funhouse-mirrored through their surrealist sensibility, to sow doubt in the soldiers and point out the idiocy of war. They were imprisoned, attempted suicide together in prison (and fell into “a coma,” one source said, like it was a shared state, and I like to imagine them rebelling in the ether together), and were spared being put to death for fear of public outrage.
Before the war (or in between wars, really), they also created these self-portraits of Cahun together that make me absolutely want to crawl out of my skin, and I'm not exactly sure why, but I keep coming back to them and worrying them like a loose tooth (which gives me an image of running my tongue over them, or trying to push them away/out of me with my tongue, which seems somehow exactly right).
This one, I can’t breathe when I look at it:
And this one, fuck. It reminds me of this scene in Infinite Jest that has haunted me forever where a character has his mother’s face sewn to his own face in a dream*:
And this one at first is just hot but then looking at the reflection makes me feel that wonky falling-through-space feeling I used to get as a kid right before sleep:
They make me feel intensely, every time I look at them, no positive or negative, just uncomfortable and compelled. (What is it that Lynda Barry says? Something about, whether you like it or not, there the drawing sits — what is it? What is it outside of whether or not you like it? Maybe I'll look it up or leave you with my sloppy thoughts. EDIT: cannot find it, sloppy it is.)
*Fun fact about Infinite Jest, Bry lied and told me that she’d read it during our courtship so that she wouldn’t have to hear me talk about David Foster Wallace and kill the romance, which: 100% valid.
THINGS THAT ARE HELPING ME COPE
Musicals I used to listen to in high school, including:
Rocky Horror Picture Show (such fond memories of scream-singing/air-humping along to the “Time Warp” at 1 am at The Clinton Street Theater — which apparently people are going to start doing again, just in masks, without touching each other, next month)
Jesus Christ Superstar (is it just me, or was Jesus kind of whiny and insufferable? He seems passive-aggressive about the fact that he has to die while his 12 dumb friends get to live and that no one except Mary Magdalene is paying attention to him — maybe she doesn’t know how to love him because he’s just a manchild)
Evita (which I didn’t know is truly truly terrible, just really cringing awful, until *this weekend,* which I blame on my crippling teenage obsession with Madonna).
Scream-singing Little Earthquakes in the shower
Obsessively playing Tetris, which weirdly makes me have all these random memories that feel like dreams? Like about this one random sushi dinner where nothing really happened or this hike I took with my friend and then thought about going kayaking but didn’t? Also, I assume I now have superpowers when it comes to fitting things into the freezer or trunk.
OTHER THINGS THAT I’VE CONSUMED ON THE INTERNET
Brene Brown’s podcast episode with Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, which is pretty much just a detailed account of how they met and fell in love, which I was there for, and of their complex relationship with their pets, which, same — they also all talk about how hard it is to find time to create in between all the obligations, all they find it so hard to say no to, which from these badass artists/thinkers, was both comforting (we’re all in this together) and dispiriting (it never stops).
For people trying to get lonely anxious kiddos to sleep: Bliss is obsessed with these cat meditations. At first, I hated them: the narrator’s voice is grating, one of the cats has terrible grammar, another has long hyper soliloquies, they made vision boards to manifest cat boyfriends and talked about “cat pecs,” which really stressed me out. But, over months of listening to them every night, and probably overanalyzing them, I’ve developed a theory that they actually perform the act of quieting down the monkey mind in a way that helps kids do it, too. They work like gangbusters, and now Bliss can’t make it 10 minutes into one without passing out.
THINGS I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO:
💉💉💉
Reading Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time for the first time.
Melissa Febos’s book launch for GIRLHOOD on March 30th! I’m trying not to think about how much I wish I could celebrate GIRLHOOD in person (#smoothbrain), but the good news is now we can all attend, get dressed up, and celebrate in our very homes.
The Portland Art Museum reopening for timed visits on April 10th! Tickets go on sale next Thursday.
Jules Ohman's forthcoming BODY GRAMMAR, which I cannot wait to hold in my hands — we're all going to have to wait a long time for, but maybe we’ll get to celebrate it in person!
BONUS LEZ CONTENT:
Check out this school board meeting, featuring a steamy reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s Dream House, with props 💦!