Complicated Feelings: Imagination and Peace
Good afternoon or evening, I have no idea when I’m going to hit ‘send’ on this! I’ve been reviewing my Substack stats and am thrilled that my subscribers represent 20 states in the U.S. and 5 countries – Mexico, Ireland, Australia, and Poland in addition to the United States. It is a thrilling thought that the words I write can touch someplace my feet have not yet been, and every day I grow more and more comfortable letting them travel ahead of me. With that being said, please feel free to share this post if you find reading it worthwhile. I’m going to try something slightly different this week by; when I touch on a familiar theme, sharing a link to a previous entry from this newsletter.
I stepped off the bus this morning on my way into the office with “As” by Stevie Wonder blaring in my headphones. I’ve been reading a lot and recently finished “My Friends” by Hisham Matar, “Minor Detail” by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), and “The Book of Disappearance” by Ibtisam Azem (translated by Sinan Antoon). I’ve just cracked open “When I Sing, Mountains Dance” by Irene Solà (translated by Mara Faye Lethem) and have Elie Wiesel’s “Night” trilogy up next (translated by Marion Weisel).
A friend I have known since childhood was in town last week for a quick visit as she is considering moving to D.C. On the first night I showed her a couple of my favorite spots in town, which primarily consist of bars that make a person feel like they are enjoying a cocktail or mocktail in a wealthy gay man’s living room. At around lunchtime the next day I texted her my suggestion for her second and final night in town – why don’t I just show you my neighborhood; a little glimpse into my life as I currently live it? We grabbed a quick and cheap dinner at a local spot and swung by a hole-in-the-wall bar before taking a short walk around. I showed her my favorite places: my local coffee shop, the park I went to every day when my body wasn’t well, the local cherry blossom trees that feel simultaneously out of place and right at home in this little sliver of the city.
As the sun began its final cry for eyes we sat on my front porch and chatted as I fed the local alley cat (Debra) and she made sure to get a picture. I asked her to proofread last week’s newsletter and let me know if it seems ready or if I come across as self-absorbed and pithy, though it can be all of those things at once. It was wonderful to see her in person for what was, upon reflection, the first time in nearly ten years, despite feeling like very little time had passed.
To know someone for an entire lifetime is uniquely profound; to evolve together and separately and have those evolutions converge and branch off again and again… To be shaped by the same winds at first before finding new ones of our own. As we said our goodbyes I felt a rush of calm. “I have a wonderful life”, I said. “There are certainly things I wish I could change. I wish I didn’t have to think about money as frequently as I do, and that the world was different from the way it is… but I love this life I am building.”
On reflection there’s a cruel cognitive dissonance between feeling this way and being pragmatic about the world as it currently is. The president is rock hard at the prospect of sending dissidents to notoriously brutal overseas prisons, and every time I take a long enough break from typing to think, Google suggests that I ask AI to help me and I can’t tell it to stop suggesting that. It feels as though every part of the world wants me to forget how to think critically. We are rapidly veering towards the criminalization of unapproved speech. We are already there if that unapproved speech is coming from an asylum seeker, an international student, a Black person, a trans person… Perhaps it is the people who are unapproved.
Overwhelm (Debra’s Introduction)
My optimistic disposition is in vicious battle with my pragmatism; I keep writing and re-writing the thought that “world peace” is a tidy, idealistic phrase for which humans possess enough imagination to utter but never realize… It keeps nipping the back of my legs, trying to pester me into believing it. Between the brazen flouting of due process and the suggestion that “home-growns are next”, billionaires flying millionaires into shallow space, I feel that pessimistic refrain grow louder every day. We have more than enough imagination to achieve peace. We just apply it incorrectly.
Re-Entry, a poem about space travel
Nearly a year ago I had to take some time off work. I tried my best to imagine what exactly I wanted in my career, what I would do if I had all of the time and the money in the world, or even just five figures worth. I wrote in a handwoven notebook I had bought at my local farmer’s market that I wanted to explore the art of the essay, having just re-read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”. I scrawled out some topics, closed the notebook, and left it on my bedside table for half a year (more to come on this in a couple of weeks). When I decided to start writing this newsletter, it didn’t fully register to me that I was fulfilling what was once a haphazard handwritten suggestion. I imagined this process before I was ready to make it happen. Sometimes it takes some extra time, but, while we are doing the best that we can, we tend to get around to what matters to us eventually.
When I write I write from the inside out, like a messier version of outlining. The skeleton comes with viscera attached. It is often beautiful, more frequently grotesque – but it is always striking. Each of these disembodied limbs I scrawl out in the dead of night is subject to change; to decay, to find broader purpose, to modify the very function of its body. As I have reflected, I realized that that is how I think of the future – it is the inevitable and unknowable result of following what is strewn all over and within the present.
Of all the paths and all the ends and all of the worlds I can see, I struggle to imagine peace because it has only ever been a fleeting part of the world in my lifetime. And I am one of the luckiest in the world for my worries to still be mainly conceptual. My life and my understanding of the world is scaffolded by war – by 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, by the war on drugs and mass incarceration – effectively the war on the impoverished – by Sandy Hook and the solemn realization that there is no mass killing depraved enough to merit gun control. I imagine it is worse for those younger than I am, in a time full of doxxing and swatting and instant outrage. That 95% of humanity is unmoored and at the mercy of the unimaginative minority is a tragedy, that they have duped so many into laying their bodies down in defense is darkly comedic. War, poverty, and oppression are the moral failings of cruel and unimaginative men. That to write it as plainly as I have done is considered violent or hysterical is a calculated product of those failures. I am grateful for the privileges this country has afforded me, and I am imaginative enough to believe in a better world, and I am not alone in being so.
I want to talk about the complexity and the tragedy of our cultural reaction to Luigi Mangione but fear this specific post is not the right home for it – I plan to explore this in two weeks.
I have not yet given in to despair. I am continuing to build a life worth living. Yesterday I sat on my front porch after getting home from work and watched the world beneath the warming weather. I typed a short paragraph in my notes app and drew as much mid-April air as I could muster to my worried lungs:
“A thorny vine winds its way around the column and overhead. Several times per year it blooms with vibrant ivory roses that reflect the rising sun. A bird is building her nest among those vines that overlook the street, beside which insects perch and scurry, beneath which I have been feeding Debra. Spring’s explosion of life is desperately trying to burgeon. There is a veritable orgy of color in the air at any moment and we are granted instances of seeing it through voyeuristic eyes when we least expect it. We should all strive to be brave enough to let ourselves be changed as witnesses.”
We should all demand more imaginative leadership. It is Spring and life is supposed to be abundant. It is Spring and I keep seeing that persistent light in passersby, that screaming glimmer aching to be recognized, and those who lack the imagination to reflect it keep trying to snuff it out. I am tired of waiting for heaven. My conception of heaven does not depend on an overcast sky; angels have no need to walk on clouds because they exist in every earthly sigh, in every timid greeting and in every warm goodbye.
Take care of yourselves. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.
With Sincerity,
J.K.
I love so many things here. Our conceptions of heaven are similar. Carry on.