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[sovay]

Because it is lashing rain against our windows even as we speak, the contractors have not been drilling and hammering our porch since daybreak and in consequence I slept and dreamed of the late discovery of an extra novel in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, newly published and illustrated in the style of Evaline Ness. (I had no idea she had taken her surname from her second marriage, to Eliot Ness.) In the way of dreams, it melted into a kind of AU remix by the time I was a few chapters in. The WWII echoes are always easier to see in Westmark, but they're all throughout Prydain far beyond the inspiring geography of Wales where Alexander was briefly stationed on his way to France; I assume someone has mapped them like the ghosts of the Western Front through Middle-Earth. There is presumably a larger project here about fantasy and war literature, crystallizing and changing shape throughout the twentieth century. Query: Susan Cooper and the childhood imprint of WWII, but also the cold white flame of the Light whose calculations and sacrifices would not turn a hair in John le Carré? "It is a cold world you live in, bachgen . . . I would take the one human being over the principle, all the time."

I feel as though I have stopped writing about almost anything that matters: I know that part of it is that the move and then injury and illness ate the month and concomitantly my concentration and my physical health is ground down beyond the question of reserves and has been since well before this time last year, but some of it is also feeling that there is nothing I should be talking about. I had a terrible time walking around Davis Square last night and feeling that I was surrounded by people playacting at 2019. As far as I know, I will never eat inside a restaurant again. I can't hang out all night in movie theaters or all afternoon in museums and I interact with bookstores in quick careful dives and it's no one's problem but mine, why can't I get with the program and pretend I have no medical factors that did not just evaporate when the economy needed to get back on track and ignore how much of the infrastructure around me has disintegrated in the last three years and everyone I know has been scraped past the bone. I don't think this country I live in understands grief.

On the other hand, I just fixed my twenty-six-year-old sound system by stripping and re-cutting the wires of the leads so that the speakers plug in more cleanly than their previous frazzled state and now it makes noise again and I feel a lot more competent than I did an hour ago when I had unscrewed everything and dust was obviously not the issue.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

We definitely don't understand grief. Our cultural practice is to dodge coping with it, and then try to forget all about it.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, the continual nagging to move on is a blockage against grief.

I wonder what kinds of fiction and poetry and essays Reason's half-generation will write from this--old enough to be bone-certain that there was a before, but perhaps not to understand it very clearly. Seems a bit like the Pew divide between Xers and older millennials, which meanders due to Cold War or no--perhaps family history and awareness more than age (a bunch of my classmates didn't care when the Berlin Wall came down, but I sure did, in high school).

[radiantfracture]

Me, I have never had much to say at the best of times, but I have faith that you will.

I am so impressed by the speaker re-wiring.

(May it be emblematic, or something.)

(You call up what I keep folded in my pocket like a moth, quietly chewing holes.)

[eta]

*I want to say something lucider than this, though it's my end of day -- but I think this is the reason this has been the hardest term for so many students and instructors where I am -- no transition, no acknowledgement, no genuine recovery.

Everyone you see on campus is either ill or drifting like an eager ghost, earnest and hapless.

[gwynnega]

Today someone on NPR was going on about how important it is that people go see films in movie theaters, and I kept yelling "Covid!" at the radio. The way so many people willfully pretend things have gone back to normal feels like a horror movie.

[kathmandu]

Congratulations on the re-wiring and on having written up some movies recently, in the face of everything else going on. Moving house is frequently known to eat people's energy for multiple months, even if there are no other big problems at the time.

"As far as I know, I will never eat inside a restaurant again. I can't hang out all night in movie theaters or all afternoon in museums and I interact with bookstores in quick careful dives and it's no one's problem but mine, why can't I get with the program and pretend I have no medical factors that did not just evaporate when the economy needed to get back on track and ignore how much of the infrastructure around me has disintegrated in the last three years and everyone I know has been scraped past the bone."

I'm with you on all of that, except I do hold out hope that in a decade or two the need for drastically improved indoor-air hygiene will have reached public consciousness, and some buildings will start being safe again. I was hoping it would happen a lot sooner, but here we are.

It is indeed hard and sad and disheartening and alienating. And a secondary effect of being scraped bare / sucked dry is that many of us with good hearts have no spare energy / time /resources to band together to oppose the oppressor. But we're not alone.

[aurumcalendula]

feeling that I was surrounded by people playacting at 2019.

It's so disheartening.

*hugs*

Yay for fixing the sound system!

[rachelmanija]

Avoiding grief, yes, but even more so avoiding fear (for oneself) and compassion (for others).

[minoanmiss]

The US has a horrific time with grief. But it means something that your competence brought back your music.

Also you write so meaningfully all the time omg.

[asakiyume]

That lashing rain was really something.

You say that you feel as if you have stopped writing about anything that matters, but I'm thinking I need to read behind those words to understand that you're talking about grief and fury at the current reality--the general one, but also your particular one. And man, I stand in wordless agreement with you on that.

... But I want to say that you never have stopped writing about things that matter. Sometimes you write about yourself, your anguish. This matters. You matter. When you write these things, you're writing about things that matter. And maybe you say, Okay, fine, but I mean--- and then in that space you have other topics you'd put in ... but really I want to politely suggest that you continue to write those things too. Poems, reviews, reflections, stories. You've never stopped. Don't let Little Wittgenstein start saying things about optimal levels of production or "but fanfiction doesn't count." Art is art, Little Witt!

But anger and grief over your situation, our nation's situation, the world's situation. That I assent to.

And way to go on stripping and recutting those wires! Practical skills like that, used to revivify something that was apparently dead? THE BEST.

[jreynoldsward]

I have been grieving the reality that I will probably never be able to go to an in-person convention again. My doctor has told me to avoid indoor large gatherings--over 65, asthmatic, couple of other health conditions.

But of course, the vast majority of people MUST larp that it's 2019....

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, well done on fixing the sound system! It sounds very impressive to me. <3

For the rest - barring of course the interesting dreams and some sleep for a change - I am sorry. <3