open loops & lemons & other others 🐚🫧🔁🍋🪞
nov 2022 / feb 2023; beginning with the end: ontological humility, notes on lemons, vaccine skeptics, "NPCs," scarecrows, penpals;
« february 11th, 2023 editor’s note; I found this incredible passage via A, that encapsulates a lot of what I wanted to say, so I’ll preface the rest of this windy thinking with that here»
Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks: "I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”
God, this passage is so eloquently devastating! The liberatory (& ecstatic) and objectifying phenomenon of visibility; the intoxicating nature of newfound degrees of so-called freedom that are contingent upon instrumentalization of the subject.
« drafted november 21, 2022; published february 02, 2023 »
The impulse to start a Substack in earnest intensifies for me when I find myself experiencing some sort of Loss Of Meaning, however momentary it might be. Oop.
I’ve been mourning Twitter, where I’ve clickety-clacked silly little thoughts since 2011 (editor’s note, especially so with the potential end of many beloved bots (haha, jk, unless…we find some creative ways to pool resources?)). It’s the place where, alongside the notes app on my phone, I’ve written the most freely and consistently for friends and acquaintances, and find inspiration from artists and writers, of past and present (in the first week of a poetry hangout-workshop I’m running, I shared out a doc mainly composed of tweets of poems that have shaken me over the last few months).
All we have is each other — my notion of the “other” expands and contracts depending on how online I am or not. In the last three years San Francisco (I moved there October 2019), it’s contracted, because I found a sense of ease and comfort grounded in a physical place, something I hadn’t experienced before. In turn I learned what being present with the people I am in physical proximity to could be like (maybe that’s an unwieldy way to say, I’m finally learning what physical places — at apartment, convent, city scales — can feel like when they feel like home).
And at the same time, I think the ways people find and connect with one another online to be life-affirming and changing, and something I want to continue to reach toward and experience, over and over and over.
🍋📃🤖🧱🪞
Can you believe, for those of us lucky enough to have accessed the vaccine, we’re in our “““sophomore””” year of post-vaccine COVID? In November, I accepted some lemons and a copy of the U.S. Constitution from vaccine skeptics. Walking through a dog park, I approached what I thought was an art print sale next to some picnic benches by two folks who had set up a table, their backs turned from me.
I started a research fellowship last October that has me reading more philosophy than ever before, and I’m learning a lot about the intellectual lineages of concepts that I’ve taken for granted, as atemporal / ahistorical.
In learning about an intellectual lineage, it is pretty funny to me that one of my takeaways from learning about how one of the earliest constructions of a universal human was built upon a notion of the non-white, non-European other, who were yet to be considered fully human, was that the concept of the interiority of a person, the concept of a self, had to be constructed and refined across different moments in time.
And in some weird, möbius strip-like logical operation, it still feels profound to circle and arrive at the same endpoint, with a new lens. These constructions we navigate the world with are often all we got, so why not do what is within our power to shape them? Noodling away at writing fiction and being in community with people who shape the systems who in turn shape us has shifted how I view my life and work - all we have are our stories, our constructions of reality, and in turn, there is so much we can do to shape those stories and constructions.
These skeptics were so compelling in their earnestness, which is why I lingered, which is how I heard more about what informed the worldview that brought them to that day, with materials they said they paid for and printed out to share with passerby likely to rebuff them on a beautiful sunny late-afternoon in San Francisco.
🦈🚩🤝⚖️🪢
At the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, I saw this (truly) goofy painting of a shark attack, and the corresponding museum placard surprised me with its note on how the favorable portrayal of the African American slave was “exceptional” for its time. My attachment to interiority is most directly shaped by witnessing the ways mass media can perpetuate negative stereotypes and cause material harm; it shapes my view that the failure to recognize someone’s interiority can be a failure to recognize their humanity.
Some things I’m grappling with: how to disentangle the institutional nonrecognition of interiority from the interpersonal? Fiction from personal life? When do I find myself hoping to be seen more attentively by people I want to see me back? When might I be materially disadvantaged or harmed by someone’s view of me? And when might others’ constructions of people like me contribute to harm?
In an age of the Bechdel Test and the Murakami Red Flag (though I love Sputnik Sweetheart), I wonder (and worry about) what kinds of misportrayals (or lack thereof) can contribute to broader norms of reducing someone to an object of instrumentalization (of labor potential, of sexual gratification, etc). It’s never possible to cleanly trace these big, abstract things to particular or recurring moments when someone’s autonomy/potential is circumscribed, something that might be the result of systemic, institutional oppression.
I’m also thinking about one of the comments in the Murakami thread: “…but most people don't see others as complete people. Certainly not consistently. They have functions in our personal stories.”
Which is to say, when should I, with ontological humility, make peace with the fact that sometimes I am just an NPC, a background character, in others’ lives as others can be in mine? (Oh, ego.)
👽🦠🏛🧟♀️🏡
Or, not “just” — NPCness, or recurring loose ties, can make for healthy social fabrics. I wonder how the decline of loose social ties might have contributed to vaccine skeptism/infodemic, in the way that social isolation has pushed people toward online conspiracy groups like QAnon. And, how the same mechanisms of the internet that enable the creating and inhabiting of immersive new realities shared by groups of people across timescales, geographies, interests, and experiences, lead to new social worlds, beautiful and terrifying alike.
In thinking about:
How we’re each operating with our overlapping, interlinked, nested constructions (read: realities), and
How I want to lean toward connection whenever I can, and
How the internet reconfigures connections & constructions in all kinds of wonky ways),
I don’t want to write off people who are vaccine skeptics as crazed tin-foil hat wearers when we’re face-to-face. I felt the disenfranchisement they expressed feeling from a government they had expected to protect them. Why wasn’t there space for people to ask questions, obtain more informed consent on the potential risks to their health? It reminded me of other conversations with friends who felt let down by their government for the first time in 2020, or even 2016, and how profound of a disappointment that feeling is upon feeling it for the first time.
(And the thing that remains unsaid, but I’ll say here, is how many other groups of historically marginalized people have to orient to survive their government neglecting or actively harming them, how Rebecca Roanhorse writes that the apocalypse has already arrived for some people; William Gibson: that the future is unevenly distributed.)
COVID has exposed the fragility of public welfare infrastructures, making it harder to ignore the lack of access to healthy, affordable food, or basic healthcare. What could public health become like if maintenance care services were as well-funded as bandaid solutions? If it was easier to access government-sponsored housing than government-assisted deaths? (The article is about Canada, but just as well applies to the U.S.)
💌📚🕊☎️📑
Email…that shit is crazy.
I reached out to someone after reading an excerpt of their speculative writing on designing robots at the Fondazione Brava’s “Human Brains,” and they shared a rough translation of one of their works, which felt like such a generous gift.
In an anticipatory, prefigurative post-Twitter act, at an event for Ryan Lee Wong’s “Whose Side Are You On?” (which is an incredible work of documentary fiction that I hope paves way for the entry of more memories in The Archive, and you should read, by the way), I, S, myself, and the writers we met there, started a little email chain to share our work with one another.
After that I wondered, Why don’t I do this more often when I meet people I’d want to talk more with? Why don’t I send more long emails and schedule more catchups with the people in my life? Wouldn’t I want to find ways to be more present with them, even as we’re physically apart?
🪶🧸🪁💭🛌
The compression asked of tweet writing can often lead to a loss of nuance, fuel context collapse, but, also, can offer a poetic potential, a liminal, sensory state that reminds me of Rilke's notion of non-identity, and a notion of poetry in which things could be different from what they are, could be otherwise from themselves.
When I was younger, my worlds were smaller, perhaps because my days were more structured, perhaps because I had accumulated fewer contradictions, perhaps I didn’t know how to scrutinize them as much. Sense-making now feels like the collaged vignettes of fever dreams, of DALL-E, the melting of boundaries I didn’t recognize until they dissolved into something else altogether.
An example, from a journal entry:
In a half-hearted Halloween costume, I wore my most scarecrow-like clothes, and thought it would be funny to be an incompetent scarecrow who loves birds. At a cohortmate's birthday after the first week of lectures, we saw a hummingbird perched in the backyard -- she looked so wondrous that even if I had seen something like that before, it felt like I was witnessing a hummingbird take pause for the first time, ever. My phone runs out of storage often because I have 20gb of iMessages I haven't figured out how to backup to the Cloud because I am a hoarder ("collector," "archivist," so to speak, and so on, and so forth,) of digital ephemera.
Have you ever seen a hummingbird dive bomb the earth? Me neither, but A mentioned it, and then I saw some photographs of the sequence on Twitter later that week. A project group presents on falling, reminds us that it's relative, that skydivers often orient themselves amid the hurtle by holding hands. My group hauls in a bunch of IKEA furniture, disassembled, and instructs the class to Assemble The Parts. Good, fun chaos emerges.
In class, I'm lectured on the danger of ontological commitments, and at the same time, this makes me think about how commitment offers constraints offers form offers possibilities in the concrete, rather than superpositional limbo. I'm moved by a definition of poetry offered by a teacher (who they may have gotten from someone else?) -- that which is not quite itself. May we be able to assume and actualize forms, but remain fluid enough to shapeshift and transform, maybe?
Now, compressed:
A notion of writing poetry as crafting trinkets, things that could be otherwise from themselves, for future selves. Future souvenirs from past selves.
Thank you for reading magpie mirror. It’s where I piece together assemblages of thought-fragments that don’t quite make sense yet.
My distributed self lives across are.na and assorted twitters (porously delineated between media & technology, art & writing, experiments).
At the moment, I’m wondering a lot about poetechnics. 💫
ahhh! i love these fragments that weave together and showing your transformation of journal entry to poem!