Sing About Me,I’m Dying of Thirst.

***

I am finding that, always, there is a time in the writing process when the object, or more importantly, the subject of writing must be clear or somewhat concrete. I think, though, my understanding of clarity, in every sense of the word, leans towards the a priori. (I cannot seem to provide an ‘a priori’ reading/solution/engagement for what I know to be an ‘a posteriori’ dilemma… thank you A-level philosophy).

My tendency towards abstraction, or my abstract tendency towards understanding the human problem (plural) through complexities of the inner workings of a Self (singular), produces great anxiety and frustration when applied to the global and international mechanism of dispossession and mass genocide. I fear, sometimes, most times, that my scope may not be wide enough, and therefore, the venture becomes quite redundant. That being said, I cannot write beyond what I know, which comes in conflict with a scientific-technical system that purchases an omniscience of thought.

“The unscientific character of these ideas fatally weakens the opposition to the established reality; the ideas become mere ideals, and their concrete, critical content evaporates into the ethical or metaphysical atmosphere…

Modern scientific philosophy may well begin with the notion of the two substances, res cogitans and res extensa-but as the extended matter becomes comprehensible in mathematical equations which, translated into technology, "remake" this matter, the res extensa loses its character as independent substance.” – Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.

I find this to be the generational conundrum that the Humanities, or Human Sciences, struggles to reconcile. Over-determined and trivialized, favouring what has been called the ‘utopian,’ there exist this antagonistic relationship between the materiality of matter, and the suspension of nature to consciousness.

What is our role in the Humanities when abstract and conceptual experiential modalities seem useless to the realities of death and dismemberment?

When does the Human in the Sciences emerge as a valid theoretical entry point into the dire phenomenological consequences of the algebraized systems that haunt the everydayness of life?

How the hell is my pondering on the Human experience supposed to matter when bodies are piling up in Gaza, Congo, Ethiopia, South Africa, Ukraine, Egypt, Iran…?

Nevertheless, I have come to understand through the work of Herbert Marcuse and Avery Gordon, that possibilities of imagining these “alternatives to history” find themselves “in between that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place where an unrememberable past and an unimaginable future force us to sit day after day.” To experience the everydayness of life has become a luxury. To peruse the rolodex of human emotion, or to even own a rolodex of human emotion, is the everydayness of life. In the statistics, the conferences, the charts, the figures, are those very real lives that groan under the sheer weight of their own existence, constantly deciding what it means to live a life.

***

Grief can be invasive.

I am reminded, often, by grief, that something is lost. And in turn, the painful oscillation between remembering and forgetting creates those spasms which suggest that I am here, and you, are not. Or, something was here, and no longer isn’t, and I cannot seem to find a way to retrieve it. The material and very object(ive) physical world creaks under the footprints of its ghosts in purgatory.

A terrible price we pay for this grace of aliveness.

These ghostly matters have come to populate the world around me: a trail of torn flesh and sinew dripping from the beast’s mouth as it erects on my altar. (am I worth it? have I put enough work in?) Phantoms demanding penance for an existence cut short, snuffed out too quickly, or have been forgotten – mnemic echoes. Perhaps, as the premise of all organized religion insists, in the end, a just compensation is received by those that demand an explanation for the lack of agency in their finality.

The ghost…is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention. Haunting and the appearance of Specters or ghosts is one way…we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us. – Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters.

So indexed to death, the spectral, presupposed by an experiential modality of haunting, reminds us of those dark crevices of the psyche where something which ought to have been kept concealed comes to light – a repression that recurs.

I find these ghosts in the conflicts that materialize every generation as a consequence of abusive systems of power that continue to make themselves known as ‘generational trauma.’ Our ghosts are getting younger and younger, in age, in time, in space. Those false demarcations of the personal and political, the social and individual, descend with such sinister violence on our youth.

The bodies of three children lie on a steel tray inside what appears to be a Gaza hospital morgue. One leg of their trousers pushed up to reveal writing in black ink on their skin.

…. Names written on Palestinian children’s limbs speaks to the fears of Gazan parents amid the Israel-Hama war…

I am experiencing grief, that is, loss, without agency. A disappearance that leaves behind a ghostly matter, spread thin across my now blank-canvas, once animated, and gave way to what I now know –knew—was a face.

Grief can be possessive:

It inhabits space, time, and the curves in-between. Visceral: it breaks bodies, rips muscles, extracts organs, and crushes bones; leaving in its place specters to be exorcised. And those days when we cry ourselves to sleep; experience that sharp pain of heartbreak; or that nauseating feeling of cringe that flashes in the dilation of pupils: these ghostly matters demand (y)our attention for a rite of passage. An un-mourned innocence makes terrifying how easily the human mind can stomach the dismemberment of its own limbs, literal and metaphorical; a severed head placed precisely on a severed neck. It is a type of haunting, this grief, that reminds me, often.

But, I must now offer my ego the inducement of continuing to live: that complex personhood which blends with perfect synchronicity the straightforward and enormously subtle workings of a Self that every person possesses. I confer with great respect the possibilities that the everydayness of our lives enable in the process of building new worlds, and revere those in the grueling process of understating their own point of reference as a point to reference.

It is our responsibility, to sing about us, even if the world around us seems to be dying of thirst; it is our responsibility to excavate and exhume those bodies, those lives, too often silenced by bureaucracy or the fallacy of mediocrity so that we can know, truly, where we live; the inside of home. For when we understand where we are, we can imagine living elsewhere.

The truth will set you free, so to me be completely honest. Hop in that water, and my God, pray that it works. – e.