It’s dark outside now and she’s reading a monologue from a movie about how it’s all destined to end (the forgetting, the sun imploding, the universe collapsing) and yet we go on as if it always will, on and on and on.
‘Don’t you think if survival was a given we’d all just kill ourselves?’ I say, ‘like if there was nothing to do but think about things, wouldn’t the inevitable conclusion be self-destruction?’
‘We’d definitely stop having kids, like some reverse Darwinism.’
I don’t care that we say like a lot. I don’t care that we think we’re saying things no one ever has before, or that we know we aren’t. We had Vietnamese for dinner and the ICJ livestream is on the TV. We’re talking about Palestine and trying to contend with alternate realities by opening a black hole in my living room. There is no lion to outrun and so we make one, we as in you and I, we as in the sentient animals whose need to exist is contingent on, quietly and irrationally, our own demise.
An older white man is presenting part of South Africa’s case. He is speaking of justice and not vengeance, and I value above his intellect his composure. The steadiness of hand required to firmly point a finger. I wonder if part of that comes from being personally, historically, unaffected. When being “on the right side” not by necessity but by choice means the work already feels halfway done.
It makes me think of the Phoebe Bridgers cover of Tom Waits’ Day After Tomorrow. A part of it was trending a while ago, but as a joke, the snippet (and it’s so hard and it’s cold here) so removed from its source that you wouldn’t think it was about a soldier shivering in the trenches, cursing the war. I listened to it all through the Christmas season, thinking of Gazans especially with the lyrics:
I’m not fighting for justice
I’m not fighting for freedom
I’m fighting for my life
And another day in the world here
‘This is going to be history,’ I say.
‘Maybe,’ she says, ‘depends on who will tell it,’ and of course she is right. Because the human, lucid and with eyes open, is the one who would choose nothingness over the remembering; the one unlucky enough to be unable to stop telling it.
I’m tired for many days. I’m tired until the night that is almost morning and then the words come. I think of that Dorianne Laux poem, “that’s how it is sometimes – God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you’re just too tired to open it” and so I kneel beneath my lamp and write. You see, I’m always trying to balance the books. Turn a sleepless night into a revelation.
I watch a video that’s meant to mimic falling asleep in the backseat of a car on a rainy night. Windscreen wipers and streetlights skimming across your face, the silence that comes with heading homeward. I think that’s probably what faith feels like. But I wasn’t meant to be a follower or a leader; I can’t see either man or other through to any end. So this is one of my revelations, that even if someone was to tell me what I’m supposed to do I wouldn’t listen.
I switch over to a video about the history of royal inbreeding and time feels endless and infallible and hilarious. Folding over and over itself like the royal bloodlines, multiplying and splitting and never becoming “more” or “less”, just stacking in different combinations that do and don’t make sense. When I was eight I watched Click at the movies with a friend and we both cried at the prospect of lost time. The scene of an old Adam Sandler, sick and alone on the ground in the rain, no one to love him, no way to go back to when somebody did. My mother thought we were silly and I adored her for it. Two little girls crying in a cinema, not knowing lost time was just a thing of the movies.
I don’t want to talk about it then how I’ve felt time jump when I’m Outside, hurdle over my head, things going on and on and on without me. Because I know that’s a sign of my living too. It’s the dead, after all, who have no such contemplations. I also know that when Clarice Lispector says “life isn’t a joke because in the middle of the day you die” she means to make you laugh and not cry.
What are you supposed to do in a world that could end mid-sentence? I suppose, just keep talking, as though it is us and not time that will last forever.
“Folding over and over itself like the royal bloodlines” i loled