At times it’s as if I’m reaching deep into the recesses of my tiny, constrained, adult human mind and rifling around, a long hand in a deep tight dark hole, desperately looking for something, bringing forward nothing. Logic cannot explain it. Emotion is unable to comprehend it. It is sort of like I have been turned into a child, I am being kept in a room, and someone has closed the door. They stand at the edge, rapidly flicking the lights on and off to initiate a seizure. A ghoul drifts through the ceiling and hijacks my nervous system; when it exits, it leaves its horrible residue. I soon start on anti-convulsants, or mood stabilisers for depression, initially designed to treat the same thing. I find it hard to get lost in conversations. I am rarely present in my own life, and feel unreal unless I am around others who feel the same. I think, increasingly, of Jenny Holzer’s truisms.
I know what you must be thinking. Is this bitch really weaponising their own suffering to relate it to the global suffering of others? What is the point? I’m discovering something through this lineage of thoughts, that to weaponise everything might be the point: to do so is not to make a comparison, it is to make an example out of one’s circumstances. Very little, outside of language, remains at our disposal. I used to think language was more than just symbolic, but of profound legislative meaning. Transformative? Possibly. I am not so sure anymore. Or is it, as Ursula K. Le Guin argued, being overwhelmingly used to go in the opposite direction of the truth, and justice? Let me immediately answer my own question with an example. Yesterday I read an article arguing that it is “possible to kill children legally”.
It is not impossible, however, to use this language to describe something phenomenal and simplistic, to look at a sliver of light peeking out from a slit in the corrugated rural fence and think, in the face of all this death cult bullshit, that this is not a miracle. If you see it vanish for a second and then reappear, same thing.
Javelins of light pierce the afternoon, making phenomena seem all at once totally unbearable and also necessary, deeply so for our continued peace. But actually the light is not exceptional or sculptural, now having dispersed, so far from its origin. (Underneath the sun we stray, we forge materials, we replicate, we let time pass by and our skin has shrunken, then we are on our deathbed battling for life, and even then, you count yourself one of the lucky ones.)
I’m in the country standing in my grandmother’s driveway again, depersonalising somewhat, after the quickness of events that lead to her death, and the shock of my own emotions being delayed, going into autopilot as I am wont to do, trying to think no thoughts, as I am not my mind, nor do I care to identify (at least right now) with the chaos that charges it. I often feel like I’m a spectre no one can see, standing beside my real self: occasionally reaching out and making contact, but managing the relationship improperly.
Say you try to adjust to its brightness, even as such an attempt seems near impossible. Your own vision becomes blurred before you snap into action. One of my friends said something to me which reminded me of this memory, in a conversation about short sightedness and long sightedness, mentioning her condition was different. Where other people had a clear view of the centre of their vision, knowing what phenomena comprised it, with her vision there was absolutely nothing.
She could have had reason to believe she saw, interpreted, understood, processed, differently. Her brain had split the difference: it had come up with a clever trick to rearrange the optics, bringing her closer to the representation of reality that her loved ones, and in fact many across the world, experienced—she saw clearly. It is your job to do the same, to put in that extra effort to take in the awe, accumulating it in times of scarcity to draw upon, to know it really happened. Many millions of potentialities will try to draw you away from it, and they have been monetised, but it still falls on your shoulders to go on and bare your chest, to wipe your brow and do it. We have much work to do, here, suspended in a galaxy of heavens, neighboured by a million others. They say it gets easier to do it. Still, this demand will not grow less necessary as you age.
Javelins of light are ours; they are our responsibility to throw and pierce the body of merriment that makes up men, they become crucifixes pointed by our sacred love, ready to be parsed by allies and planted in the crux of cupid’s bow. I speak in strict terms though, so take these javelins as an invitation to mean something beyond liturgical ideas, not just literal ones, representing anything that is urgent, violence, arresting, breaking, instituting, abundant, a person in distress, a feeling that could be sharpened, a whole idea, an entire fucking continent. It only takes one seismic impact for it to break.
Javelins of light can be assessed, determining their relative shape, length and heft. The force they take is up to us. We are not necessarily always in a prison of our own making, which is not to rule out how we play a hand in our own downfall. We can carry them hand in hand to the river and let them go.
You are in the passenger seat one day as a five-year-old and then, the other, 30 years old, and your hometown looks the same, and it could calm you or cause unexpected tension at how time has lapsed. Still you persist. You open up cards written to you ten years ago, but it feels like four. Will you ever get over it, the way life ends?
