ordinary failure

How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung & swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, & to know that tangled among them & terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

In the echo of such brutality, what can be said to young trans people who feel the weight of the gavel pounding them into dust? I’m not sure. Yet what does remain is our commitment to keeping each other alive and the truth that trans people of all ages, against the supremacy of the court, will always exist.

There is a way out. The only way out there has ever been: to simply stop. To stop calling on higher powers alone, but to drive a friend to and from the hospital. Not just to ask if there’s anything you can do for your neighbor or friend or relative but simply to do it. To learn interdependence rather than individualism, to believe coalitions are more important than being right all the time. 

While these objects have a referential quality, they are still unable to fully function as a comprehensive archive and narrative of that crushing and transformative era. Much of that time, those people, objects and acts, are gone. And so these ephemera stand in for all that is fleeting, marginalized, and in doing so, obligate us to try and remember.

My friend Robin Simpson […] told me about his father’s renovation of his family’s unfinished basement into a rec room in the late 1980s. Dad asked Robin what color to paint the walls and Robin said to paint it “like Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Robin’s father interpreted this request as beige, which, to be fair, is a color that appears on some playhouse walls, though always as the background to a loud wallpaper pattern. The painting gesture meant something to Robin, even in its failure, and says something about basements as their own kind of off-space where clandestine things can happen. Talking with Robin, I got to recount [Paul] Reubens’s own story, told in several media interviews, of his dad building a basement cabaret stage for him when he was small.

…TV and movies advertise killing as a very easy thing—how simple to blow somebody away. If it is that easy it shouldn’t be, and I didn’t want my character to be someone who felt the need to murder somebody.

Apophatic derives from the Greek for “other than” (apo-) and “to speak” (phanai). It has been employed widely in theology to describe a thing only in terms of what may not be said about it. Applied often to discuss conceptions of God, the term describes a verbal strategy that helps us to make sense of the ineffable, unapproachable, or unknowable. While I’ve not yet begun to reconcile this vocabulary with my own Catholic upbringing (that’s for the next book), it has been incredibly clarifying to embrace this new terminology, to come to understand my writing and, indeed, myself in a different way. It now feels empowering to admit that there will be aspects of my own heritage and parentage that I will not be able to express. That these great gaps in knowledge and the lingering questions of my experience are not deficits but new pathways rich with potential. In naming the apophatic I’ve found another way in, a new means for building on the foundation laid by my ancestors, that Guaraní and Spanish and English might intermingle and generate something new. It remains to be seen exactly what comes next, what these languages can bring into being. But they can, and they will, continue to combine in new ways unique to this poetics of not knowing.

...if a starfish finds itself under attack, it’ll break off its own arms to escape. It’s less of a loss than it sounds. Within a year, it will regenerate new limbs to replace the ones it lost. I imagine the way they might accomplish this—the breaking, the losing—is by stiffening. That there might be a snap, like a child bending a pretzel stick in two. But that’s not how it happens at all. It’s less a breaking than it is a detaching. The way they lose their arms, the way they save themselves, is by going soft.

From you and Mom, I learned that love was not about exchanging proclamations of feelings for one another, but the ability to live through pain—war, underpaid work, predatory loans, working-class jobs—to protect your family. In lieu of “I love you,” I learned there was always dinner. You and Mom always provided a four-course dinner consisting of rice, a clear broth soup, a meat, and a sautéed vegetable. We were short on money, but never short on food. Rather than verbal discussions, I could always depend on you picking me up from school activities well past midnight or mom appearing on the sidelines of a basketball game after her rotation of work and school. You were always there on time with a weary expression. Now I know how powerful that was because there are people who say “I love you” and never show up.

Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist at Woods Hole […] speculated that the whale might be malformed or miswired, ‘broadcasting on the wrong frequency but listening on the right one.’ Or it could be the offspring of a blue whale and another species - and hence truly alone of its kind. News of the unanswered song provoked a host of e-mail messages to the Woods Hole research team […] Many came from deaf people, who wondered if the whale shared their disability.

“As an expression of love as radical responsibility, mutual comradeship guides activism and organizing in the Black radical tradition and helps to bridge strategic unity and productive conflict. It does all this in specifically political circumstances, with a specific political goal: the process of envisioning and striving to build a world beyond racial capitalism and imperialism—and of weathering the inevitable backlash for doing so. Moving beyond shared ideology, mutual comradeship is simultaneously an ethical, epistemological, and political practice of solidarity. Ethically, it emanates from the guiding principle of courage—the willingness to place oneself at risk for the betterment of others and shared values of cooperative social activity, a common conception of social transformation rooted in the eradication of racial capitalism, and the establishment and maintenance of expectations and standards through consistent struggle, debate, criticism, and self-criticism. These ethics are in the service of protecting, preserving, and valuing not only movements and organizations, but also each other.”

Although we tend to think of earnestness as a kind of naïveté, naïveté is nowhere among its definitions. Instead, earnest is defined as, at once, a form of potency and a portent, as ‘showing sincere and intense conviction’ and ‘a thing intended or regarded as a sign or promise of what is to come.’

“Were it so that we only took an eye for an eye, a life for a life, a death for a death. In the setting apart that governs the mathematics of death, we might proceed to a more important, a more just, recount, one in which taking a life for a life, a death for a death, only increases the speed — exponentially magnified already — to which we add to the death counts.” 

They knew, as we so often forget in ordinary life, that our lives are inherently porous projects, and that perseverance and ongoingness require the merged threads of connectivity instead of their severance.

You can burn us, but you can’t take us; before I give up, you will see my ashes scattered on the earth.

My father has promised to haunt me, which is how we like it. We warm under the glow of our ancestors’ attention.