the anatomy letter

We are currently witnessing perhaps the most widespread collective human action and experience, at least in our lifetimes, and the alone-ness of the past several months that’s slowly started to thaw in many parts of the world has reconfigured how we make connections, how we create intimacy, how we form friendships and relationships bridge gaps of communications. Our generation has, for the most part, always been familiar with conveying expression and sentiment online, in universally understood jargon (yes, I’m referring to memes as jargon, because they’re often completely indecipherable to anyone outside of specific communities on the internet). The experience of quarantine has been no different.

It’s been more important than ever to stave off loneliness, not only because community and connection are such fundamental human needs, not only because we’ve never had to undergo their absence on such a scale for such a prolonged period, but often because closeness to those existing alongside us is often necessary for people to be safe. With government structures failing (or refusing) to meet challenges that it was never built for, mutual aid networks have strengthened all over the world, with people ensuring their neighbours’, friends’, community members’ needs are met one way or another, by delivering groceries and medicines or cooking food or creating community in other ways. It’s become starkly evident that our previous methods of socialising had everything to do with capital — community was realised in restaurants, at brunch, at parties, and there is now a notable absence of wealth-dictated paradigms that used to dictate who could participate, that is, who could access community. The fantasy of cottagecore, an existence removed from capital, from the state, tied closely to the earth and its resources and devoid of the exploitation of other peoples has become less of a joke and more of a serious aspiration for people. We are increasingly exhausted by the world we used to live in, and the centre of life is increasingly community, not capital.

Without sounding too gauche, there’s perhaps no ethical community under capitalism. We stay in touch through Zoom or Facebook or Twitter, we share poems online, we discover art online, on our smartphones or our laptops. It’s everywhere. But within this superstructure, there is a new method of care. There is a prizing of and softness to things that were previously considered superficial or trivial: the love react, the retweet, the story emoji reply.

Hearing your friend’s voice is now a revelation, which is fascinating given that the ability to speak is perhaps the most central facet of the development of community in the first place. Something so fundamental is now a rarity, something often scheduled, crackling through bad internet connections. Everything is contained in little screens, but somehow means more than ever, not less. We see intimate parts of each other’s houses on Zoom, in the backgrounds of our faces: a morbid performance of the exercise of entering someone’s house for the first time. We send each other pictures of wine glasses, wishing we could pour them together. But there is an even greater intimacy in this new action: it says, I’m thinking of you, I wish I could do this with you, I want you here. The want, perhaps, is the most volatile and powerful part of community. It supersedes its own realisation.

Right so like 3 days ago once everyone found out a couple weeks too late that the literal amazon rainforest is on fire I went into a sort of anxiety/depressive spiral and it was terrifying!!! I was scared and shocked out of doing anything and kept thinking of all the bad things that are happening and how we are all going 2 die and kept thinking of how to make more ppl understand that climate destruction is part of the same racist project as white imperialism and I’m !!! Stressed !! And I was scared and freaked out!!! I remember as a kid one of my favourite things ever was the book Journey To The River Sea by Eva Ibbotson and I s2g that book made me a person it taught me so many things about what it means to love a place and to be alive in the world and how to sustain a sense of self and community in meaningful connection with that it means to be alive and here and breathing and it’s a book about the rainforest and the river and so I’ve just been,, thinking of it a lot, little blue butterfly from the cover floating thru my brain and all that. It’s hard!!! I thought I was afraid of not saving/earning enough money to do a masters next year but I was actually afraid of the consequences of the climate emergency. Pay more attention to your emotions and honour them for what they are and figure out what is at stake for you, what does it make you feel that the world is in crisis. I think that’s important

Depressing chat aside after I panicked and felt radicalised (what does that even mean?) I found this twitter thread which was basically like these are all the terrible things that can happen and here is how we stop them and at first I felt SO SCARED because there’s NO WAY we can actually organise mass strikes at this scale!!!! We have never had to organise at this scale before, I panicked and got really scared and went on a rant about how we have to use existing structures to fix things because we don’t have the time or resources to organise at this scale but like. I now think we actually do, I found this resource for organising strikes globally from 20TH TO 27TH SEPTEMBER and like, we have the Internet and we have a month to plan and prepare and if you are able to strike you absolutely should !!!!!! There are people smarter than me speaking to the urgency of this, I’m just having some feelings and writing this on my phone notes, but like. Read about strikes in your area. If there aren’t any, find resources to help organise one. Text your friends your colleagues your family whatsapp group the people you went to school with, spread the word and organise how you will sustain your community in that time

As a side note after I went on panic rants all over my social media I think I realised that terrifying people into frenzied action won’t work because it’ll often just scare them into inaction (that’s what it did to me) and I felt better only once I found that resource for actual organisation, the mass general strike felt like an impossible project until I found out it’s already being planned. So like, don’t be helplessly scared, we have multiple years to fix things, and I think this is important: REMEMBER TO BE ALIVE AND HERE AND BREATHING, it’s important to actually feel the absolute miracle that is consciousness otherwise all of the saving the world will have been for nothing. Take photos of your friends and give hugs to your pets and get drunk and go dancing and remember that what matters is that feeling of being so achingly alive and aware of your existence in the world when you look at the sky and feel dizzy with how small you are and how yet the whole universe is inside of your brain, remember to breathe and feel glorious and loud and bright and reckless.

On that note, I was having a hard time giving a shit about much but I copped on a bit after I talked to my friend Naoise Dolan (buy her book it is out soon !!!) I felt like calmer and more like I was allowed to enjoy things and write things (that’s why I finally pulled it together enough to do this) and so I LISTENED TO THE NEW TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM ON REPEAT and I’ve decided I love it, here is my ranking of all its songs from worst to best, I have so many thoughts, the lyrics are golden, I’m so happy to be alive in the world at a time we can make things better and listen to music like this that’s tailor made (sorry) for us to forget about any guilt we may feel from bopping to boardroom produced songs about corporate feminism

18. Miss Americana and whoever the fuck

Idk what this obsession is with high school motifs (shout out Mike Dolan for pointing this out) like it’s just weird for a 29 yr old to use school as a metaphor for her love life. The “you win stupid prizes” bit sounds nice though. It’s like a low-key creepy obsessive song like why is she doing that funny voice? Is it meant to sound vaguely haunted? What’s going on

I’m also just tired of “America” (the white kind) as a cultural construct and it being used as an expression of identity in popular culture like we get it you built a nationalism out of “gas stations” and “hallways” and “whatever” but you’re still racist, Stop. Like it’s just an inherently violent construct and nobody white is reckoning with it responsibly so at least maybe stop romanticising it or just shut up. Heck yea I’m reading too much into this. I do what I want

17. You Need to Calm Down

This song is bad. It’s so bad. The lyrics are pointless, the ohoHHHH is annoying, her voice is irritating, it’s also just gross and patronising and tries to do twelve things at once (are we leading a parade to pat ourselves on the back for telling homophobes to “take several seats” or are we saying we “all have crowns” wtv that means?)

This song is actually just gross and it doesnt even SOUND GOOD

16. ME

It’s less problematic than you need to calm down and that’s the only reason it’s slightly less bad. It’s a garbage song idk why it exists i’m so mad at it

15. Paper rings

IM SORRY tHe mOoN is HIGH like your friends were the night that we first met I’m sorry WHAT miss swift we get it you have been near drugs, Jesus CHRIST this song is a juvenile childish self important mess. The lyrics r awful and her voice is sneaky and weird and she does weird noises and the chorus is dumb like the “uhuh that’s right” makes me want to give CHITTAR. Also she says darling WAY too much in this album like we get it you’re dating a Brit. It’s not The Worst song because if you pay zero attention to the lyrics or her voice it’s kind of fine sounding? It’s so bad tho lol, I remember when she wrote Mine and the video came out I was like wow wild this is weird and adult and why are you pregnant but this one is even MORE weird. I also HATE every time she says dreary mondays and “baby boy” (GROSS) and I hate that she keeps repeating it lol. The I hate accidents line is kind of fine

14. I forgot that you existed

I hate the lyrics and I hate the premise (we get it you’re indifferent that’s why you wrote a whole song about it) BUT it’s such a bop, it’s very /this feels like a perfect night to make fun of our exes/ vibes and I would be LYING if I said I didn’t enjoy that. Yes we exists

We are pretending her fake laughter and starting to talk in the middle of songs things isn’t real though. It wasn’t cute in we are never ever etc and isn’t cute now

13. I think he knows

I love the 16th avenue bit, it fills me with giddy happiness, the rest of the song is shit, and also lazy. Also stop being obsessed with being 17, it was weird in starlight and is weird now

The bridge is also sort of nice but not nice enough to redeem the rest of it

12. London Boy

Im sorry I promise I know this song is bad. It is bad. I hope it’s ironic? But it’s bad. It’s a weird colonialism complex fetishisation of posh brit whiteness and its even more gross when it’s like “btw IM american, DOUBLE whiteness”, it’s icky and bad. It is a bad song. I apologise for enjoying it and I promise I am ashamed but also u know what, if you ignore the lyrics entirely and pretend you’re 15 and un-enlightened about the violence inherent to the fetishisation of an english identity……….maybe a fun tune. I know. I know. I am sorry. I promise I enjoy it only ironically

11. The man

Corporate white lady feminism? With the word HUSTLE in it? In this economy? Yes obviously

The lyrics are a bit ehhhh but some of them are quite clever and I think she’s quite honest in this song in a rare sort of way without trying to exaggerate it for shock value and it’s a very like, this is my life, here you go, sort of tune, it doesn’t do anything for women’s rights but I think it sounds nice and is probably fun to dance to, and “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man” and “if I were a man, I’d be the man” are fUN lines !!! Idk how wild this comparison is but like, I feel this song is trying to deal with similar things as I know places (a very privileged rant, if you will, without much self awareness) but I think The Man does it better because it’s less self important and has less ambition about it solving or expressing the world’s worst problems.

10. False God

Ok, so, what is it with the religious motifs in this album, i don’t get it, though it kinda works a lot in this song? I wanted to rank this higher but after a few listens it got slightly grating, the beginning is a bit unecessary too? Like it’s trying to create this weirdly artificial aura of glamour and sophistication, it’s quite an unnerving and haunting song and I quite like that about it and it makes me a bit surprised and startled. This thing she’s doing with like slow, building, repeating tunes i think has worked the best in this song (we might just, get away with this, religion’s in your lips e-,ven if its a False gOd) also, THE ALTAR’S IN MY HIPS, OOF, the chorus does the trick honestly and i love when she’s like slightly laughing but in a wry sort of way. Love it tbh, something about it just makes me a bit stressed though and not in an intentional way (i think)

9. It’s Nice To Have a Friend

Miss taylor who gave you the RIGHT, to shove your hand into my chest and grab my heart and step all over it. I love it and it makes me cry and it’s so soft and sweet. Zero complaints abt it it’s a beautiful song. There r just MULTIPLE EXTREMELY GOOD SONGS that’s why it’s not like my absolute fav and im confused too as to why it’s so low but like. Idk. it is a very soft and sweet song. I love it. If anything maybe it’s a bit uncreative n lazy but i think that’s slightly on purpose so doesn’t rlly constitute a criticism

8. Death by a thousand cuts

I like this song a lot a lot. The lyrics are SO GOOD IM SO HAPPY SHES DOING GOOD LYRICS AGAIN. I love the “one for the agEs” line and i’m generally a slut for any mention of chandeliers in music or poetry (dont ask), her voice is delicate but proud and wild and i’m a fan, honestly, cannot wait to bop to this. The My my my bit is annoying tho

7. The archer

I HATE the bit where she says CoMbAt but otherwise this song is soft and lovely and gentle and I love it !!!!! I love the lyrics and I love her gentle restraint of how she slowly unfurls them and then let’s go in “help me hold onto you”, there is such a commanding frankness to it, it’s an ask for collaboration, an ask for honesty, an ask for I want to do this with you

I think it’s one of the strongest tracks lyrically and she also shows like great skill vocally which has been annoyingly missing from so much of what she’s recently produced. I feel like there’s a bunch of annoying stylistic choices (the they see right thru me bit is grating) but like the song overall is lovely, I think you can feel in her voice she knows she’s created something good and it’s not the usually insufferable IM A GENIUS vibe. WHO COULD EVER LEAVE ME DARLING, BUT WHO COULD STAY !!!

6. Soon you’ll get better

Made me cry. We’re not talking about this one

5. Lover

This song is soft loving, slow whispers, careful realisations that you can build a life with whatever you like and love will save everything, I love it, I love it I love it I love it, “can I go where you go?” moves me to tEARS it is such a soft and gentle expression of care, it is such a kindness, it’s such surrendering, such reckless care, I love it so much, it’s so hopeful and also sure, it’s so frightful but also unafraid. I think this is one of Taylor’s most earnest songs ever and it does the thing of combining that earnestness with brazen daring that doesn’t turn into embarrassment only because she commands her lyrics with such certainty, and that’s rare and often I think that daring has ended badly for her (LOL most of reputation) but here it’s done so beautifully and w so much happiness and LOVE, this song is truly just a beautiful lil piece of art with so much happiness dripping thru it

4. Cornelia Street

This song. This SONG. It builds up so beautifully with this ever so slightly hesitant fascination with its own emotions, i’m so obsessed with it, the lyrics are lovely and perfect, i was expecting it to feel slightly forced and oddly specific because wtf is a cornelia street anyway, but it WORKS. I think it wants me to think of like a glowy streetlighty street and it DOES THAT, “filling in the blanks as we gooooo” sounds so gorgeous and does that thing with her voice which literally is just showing off that Yes She Does Know How To Sing and it’s so certain and sure and restrained and open and bare (again in “i thought you were leading me onnnnn”). Also, “the city screams your name” should be a tired cliche but its just an excited expression of abandon im,, in love. The song is so shaky and uncertain but completely confident and relaxed at the same time and it FEELS EXACTLY LIKE COMING TO TERMS WITH BEING IN LOVE AND WANTING IT TO LAST FOREVER, also like, when did she learn how to write good bridges again because yEs

3. Daylight

Solely for the lines “i’ll tell you the truth, but never goodbye // i don’t want to look at anything else now that i saw you” she deserves a grammy it actually pierces my emotions and makes me want 2 explode, this song is sooooo lovely and it has the vibe that makes me feel like i’ve already heard it years ago (but maybe thats because ive had the album on repeat 2 days straight) but it’s just,,, very good and it feels like sunset and glitter and i think is a perfect ending to a great album i love how it builds intensity and then strips it down and just,,, love it.

2. Afterglow

This is i think, one of the most beautiful things this woman has ever produced, one of the loveliest and most powerful songs ever made, i love it so very much. She finally learnt how to do autotune properly lol, this song is like, a crescendo of emotion, everything is falling down around it and it’s like a little haven of bare, frank honesty and complete surrender, of complete vulnerability, the whole song sounds like an act of care and an act of expressing pure emotion, it’s so gorgeous. It moves so softly and doubles in on itself and she’s sorry and sad but so proud of this love and so certain of its importance, “i’m the one who burnt us down”, it’s such a zooming in on a very specific emotion and it’s done so well, i love it

1. Cruel summer

I LOVE THIS SONG. I LOVE THIS SONG. The lyrics are flighty and exciting and shivery, WHAT DOESNT KILL ME MAKES ME WANT YOU MORE- plug that shit into my VEINS. This song makes me feel like it’s 2015 and nothing is real yet and I’m living inside a YA novel and my biggest problem is my crush being mean to me and I’m RELISHING in that freedom and indulging every last drop of emotion because being alive and paying attention to it is incredible and Extremely Cool Actually (I DONT WANT TO KEEP SECRETS JUST TO KEEP YOU, dead right gal)

I’ve always had a strange fascination with ~~abstract art & what that abstraction means & what it is trying to achieve. I think two of the most common metrics for whether art is “good” are 1. Does it make me feel things? and 2. Is it doing what it set out to do? While the two overlap, the second gets tricky when you’re trying to wrestle with whether the intentions of art are valuable or not, not just whether they are achieved. How does intention create expectation? And what the hELL do u do with art that does so much more than it intended or knows? To whom do u ascribe that achievement? Is art still “good” if it doesn’t even know about most of its goodness? And then does that get “credited” to the artist, or the weird kind of amorphous idea of the “art” itself? Idk tbh.

Anyway the thing with Rothko is he went so much further than just wanting his art to do certain things, he described and necessitated and created environments and essentially instructions for what his paintings were meant to do and !!!! I think it is really incredible that they do those things!!!!!! He’s said he wants his paintings to make the viewer feel like they want to bang their head against a wall, he wanted windowless-ness, oppressive walls and big, scary colours, emotion distilled into weirdly soft edges where one colour not so much as bleeds but rather shuffles onto the next with strokes that resemble nothing but just, art. It is a movement and a pattern reminiscent of itself -- of the art and form and act of painting, of the modernity of the painter and their audience and the strange embodiment of pure emotion that is created within the intentional manipulation of colour, a goal that was so strange in its newness and so brave and reckless with breaking conceptions of what art is meant for and what it can do. Rothko’s time was tinged with a self awareness of people attaching to movements and schools and endeavours of creativity, working towards self defined goals of what art could and was meant to achieve. Is it a valuable intention then, to make the viewer want to bang their head against a wall? What is so fascinating and compelling about the Rothko Chapel, a place where people feel god, or Rothko’s room in the Tate, where he insisted on darkness and gloom and separation and wanted the viewer to feel trapped, even afraid?

I’m not saying that that is in any way a dishonourable goal, and the 20th century certainly had room for a reckoning with art beyond what feels good. I wonder simply about the strangeness and specific desire for him not only to want his art to do something, and not only asking the viewer to comply, but creating an atmosphere of oppressiveness (physical, almost) within which the viewing must take place and insisting on compliance, bending the rules a bit about what a “painting” is allowed to do. The art, then, stops remaining confined to its object, and invades the space in which we breathe, exist, walk, see. It’s a sort of encroachment that happens entirely on the artist’s terms. It is difficult to look at a Rothko and then just look away, it is a hypnotising, compelling, magnetic, fascinating experience, because everything is blurry but simultaneously sharp, and every colour seems to know something you don’t and you are at the mercy of a force (created by a man who is now dead, crucially) of manipulation, essentially, and a weird sense of (culturally, socially enforced? conditioned? confused?) enjoyment in that feeling. It’s messy and weird to be drawn to something that essentially just gives you a bit of a headache and makes you want to be able to focus your eyes on something that won’t keep slipping in and out of blurry sharpness.

Here are some photos from a time I went and sat in my favourite café for a couple hours and drank some iced tea and did some writing. The thing is, I was able to do that because I was in a mentally stable and healthy place. I’m doing the exact same thing right now. And I’m doing it because I’m able — because my brain is in a good place and I can think about poems and writing and blogs and creativity because I am not hindered by Big Issues and big problems and essentially I have the privilege to be able to spend this time and mental energy doing this thing I love so very much and I am able to create art. I’ve always found that when I’m deep in a depressive episode or scared that something is going to go terribly wrong or worried about an external source of distress that might mess up my life really badly — I can’t write. I can’t create, I don’t have it in me. This is a bit melodramatic, but bear with me. I’ve found when I have an existential threat in my life, it doesn’t allow any room for the luxury of creativity. And obviously “existential threat” is a very big exaggeration, but I mean it to describe situations like when I wasn’t leaving my bed for days and would find myself staring at a wall wondering when the last time I felt a feeling was (depression is fun lollll) or the time when my catastrophic thinking brain decided that I’d be deported and wouldn’t be able to finish my degree or the time someone I love more than the world was sick and eating food made me feel so helpless and useless that there wasn’t even a question of whether writing is a thing I should do. I feel I can go back to these moments and write something out of them sometimes but mostly I just find that when I am truly, truly emotionally hurting or distressed there is no room for art. Which is very different from the odd moment of sadness or stress about something small.

In class recently we talked about whether political upheaval stimulates or suppresses artistic creativity. My immediate answer was no, due to all of my aforementioned fancy analysis about art and existential threats. But I don’t know if I’m right. I don’t know if politics functions the same way as personal lives. I don’t know if there’s a way to separate the two. Instinctively I’d say if your country is on fire and your government is broken and you are facing real threats to your life then there would be very little room for creativity. But I am extremely extremely privileged in that I’ve never had to be anywhere near a situation like that, my safety is something I’ve always had, so it is very likely I’m dismissing some of the ways in which art and creativity can exist against or despite or within political upheaval and chaos and war. After all there is so much art that comes out of times like this! There’s so many war poems and political cartoons and movies with stunning social commentary and a lot of this comes from people who are directly in the line of fire. And art undoubtedly has the undeniable capability of acting as a safe haven against bad things in the world and it can definitely draw on chaos and threats to create good things but. I don’t want to go so far as to romanticize that trouble, the same way I don’t want to romanticize depression and go like “all the best artists are depressed uwu” or whatever because they’re not. I can talk about Van Gogh for ages here but we’ve all heard that story. If you haven’t, seriously, watch Nannette. What are you doing.

"Denial of self expression is like death.. Section 377 is irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary." - Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra

[Photograph by Harnidh Kaur]

I have always found a peacefulness in the silence of galleries and museums, imposing structures sheltering little pockets of stillness – of time, of movement, of the mind, a pause button for the outside world, akin to church. Some of my most overwhelming memories are set among art that many claim is not art at all – not good enough, not difficult enough, not meaningful enough to be art. I have always, always loved modern art. My oldest explanation for this, I remember, is that a piece of conceptual, abstract art means something different to everyone. It is a beautiful thing that what is sometimes just a singular object can lead to an internal interrogation of how we perceive things, a struggle to untangle the complexities of perspective and understanding, an shattering realization of the limitations that govern our articulation of our world.

What often distinguishes modern art from what came before it, I find, is that it represents a shift of value from the object and into the process, away from the artist and towards the idea. Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit shows us that art can be replicated, recreated, dismantled, reestablished, personalized. It says that everything is art. It says that I can breathe and make that art if I pay attention, or perhaps even if I don’t. She takes it a step further even from the ‘ennobling’ of objects and materials that has come to be recognized as the process behind art. She separates it entirely from the physical and places it inside our heads. The way we think, the way we question, understand, perceive, starts to constitute art. I can do it anywhere and it is art, and that necessarily takes away from this ancient idea that art lives in singular objects that are valuable for their uniqueness, for the physical effort and skill it took to make them.  We value old masters and renaissance arts and classical sculpture and Mughal architecture, in part, because they represent something we cannot replicate, a lost skill from the past that we no longer have access to. The disdain that people have for modern art is that it can be done over and over again.

Conceptual art is often an inquiry into the institution of art itself, what constitutes it, what enables it, who enables it, “what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to” [Andrea Fraser] – art has the capability to bring into question everything. All bets are off and it can genuinely, truly, seriously, change the world. When Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven conceptualized and created Fountain (misattributed to Marcel Duchamp), she questioned the establishment. She offered an inquiry into why something is art and why it isn’t. After the piece’s success, Duchamp commissioned replicas. Since the sculpture had been anonymous, its authorship was attributed to him.

Were these replicas different from the original? In what way? Were they emulations? What is changed when a thing is no longer simply an object being art (being ennobled) and then instead becomes a replicated mechanism for Freytag-Loringhoven’s test? This adds an additional layer to our perception of the replicas individually. Not only are they not the work of the original artist, they are also not credited to her, and are in fact a separated mechanism for the acquisition of appreciation rather than for the test envisaged by Freytag-Loringhoven. Perhaps the replicas are essentially plagiarism, given the misattribution, but do they retain the value of the original, the conversation it created, or is that an entity distinct from the object? Does this dimension exist in the original as well? Does the distinction matter? By the time the replicas were sanctioned and created, the piece was already well known and widely accepted, debated, criticized, ridiculed – Freytag-Loringhoven’s test was already in motion. Perhaps the replica is a recreation of its original physicality divorced from its original context. Was it still art when Duchamp hadn’t created what he was commissioning?

“how particular my fondness of you” - savannah brown, loving like an existentialist