Be a Chemist

“Last month, when a Twitter thread by a woman who sent her neighbors homemade chili went viral, the woman was accused of being a “white savior” and inconsiderate to autistic people (the woman who wrote the thread is autistic). It’s just one example of how high the stakes seem to be for interpersonal encounters that are objectively nobody’s business, and how so often our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment. Because none of these encounters matter. It literally doesn’t matter that someone made chili for their neighbors because you were never meant to know about it in the first place. It’s not your business. To demand retribution against someone who says they enjoy coffee with their husband or makes surprise chili for strangers — or even someone who complains about these things! — reflects something far more disturbing than humblebrags or being a presumptuous neighbor. It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring. Of course people are going to freak out about someone’s misguided problematic author spreadsheet even though it has zero bearing on the real world whatsoever, and of course people are going to accuse a beloved indie rocker of ableism for being annoyed by constant flash photography. It doesn’t have to be this way! People in their regular lives don’t react this way to things. It’s only on platforms where controversy and drama are prioritized for driving engagement where we’re rewarded for despising each other.”

“One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore.”

I’m working on an audio transcript using voice recognition technology, and this gentleman has a very nice accent, but when he says “got” the word is often noted down as “God”.

poetry recommendations for december