From "Thinking about feeling historical", Lauren Berlant. 2009. ‘‘These are not ordinary times.’’1 If this essay were a polemic, it would argue that our current view of the communication of affect and emotion is too often simply mimetic and literalizing, seeing their transmission as performative rather than as an opening to all sorts of consequences, including none at all. It would aim to counter the unfortunate tendency in much contemporary affect theory to elide the difference between the structure of an affect and the experience we associate with a typical emotional event. If one determines that an event or a relation is traumatic--that is, endowed with the capacity to produce trauma--does it follow that it communicates trauma to anyone who encounters it? If one determines that an event or a relation is shameful, must it produce shame in the subjects it impacts? Is the absence of this transmission a sign of some distorting or unethical defense? Is the presence of this transmission evidence that a subject or a society knows itself profoundly? Of course not. To impute a mirroring relation between affective activity and emotional states underdescribes the incoherence of subjects--their capacity to hold irreconcilable attachments and investments, the complexity of motives for disavowal and defense--and the work of the normative in apprehending, sensing, tracking, and being with, the event. So, where trauma and shame are concerned, many states can be engendered when the elastic snaps back on the subject who no longer finds traction in the ways of being that had provided continuity and optimism for her (that’s the structure). Maybe the subject stops, just to let things sink in. Or to query: ‘‘What just happened?’’ Maybe the event disorganizes her, which means that she may feel strongly or messy or distractedly about it. The structure of an affect has no inevitable relation to the penumbra of emotions that may cluster in the wake of its activity, nor should it. To adapt Jean-Luc Nancy’s version of love: I may desire to break my own heart to become open to your capacity to repair it to a state better than what it was when I met you. But as I experience that relation, I may sense it as love, desperation, bitterness, ambivalence, a drive to competence, anxiety, spaciness, and/or simply as a pressure in my body that I need to discharge.2 What follows is another way of tracking affective intensities politically without presuming their status as dramatic or, indeed, as events. It imagines the affectivity of the social in registers alongside melodrama: it rethinks the sensing of history, and of the historic. [...] Hicok’s ‘‘A Primer’’ also tells the story of the present organized by flatness: the atmosphere and tone of his US Midwest is so gray that you want to ‘‘kill the sky’’ when you look around for and receive no relief from the landscape of ‘‘corn corn corn.’’ But, overwhelmed by finding itself amidst the multiple middles of so many emerging, ongoing histories, this poem sees resignation to flatness as a ‘‘backup plan.’’ Plan A: to reroute the present situation, where ‘‘we’’ move along without getting along, into a condition of ongoing collective liveness fueled by riding the wave of collectively recycled affective knowledge. This new pathocartography uses emotional mapping to tap into the exuberance, the non-mereness, which radiates from the activity of surviving. It rides the release of energy in sociality that comes from finding someone and telling her what happened. It may be a low bar, but it’s humming. I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go to be in Michigan. The right hand of America waving from maps or the left pressing into clay a mold to take home from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan forty-three years. The state bird is a chained factory gate. The state flower is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical though it is merely cold and deep as truth. A Midwesterner can use the word ‘‘truth,’’ can sincerely use the word ‘‘sincere.’’ In truth the Midwest is not mid or west. When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio. There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam, which we’re not getting along with on account of the Towers as I pass. Then Ohio goes corn corn corn billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan. It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing. The Upper Peninsula is a spare state in case Michigan goes flat. I live now in Virginia, which has no backup plan but is named the same as my mother, I live in my mother again, which is creepy but so is what the skin under my chin is doing, suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials are needed. The state joy is spring. ‘‘Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball’’ is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April, when February hasn’t ended. February is thirteen months long in Michigan. We are a people who by February want to kill the sky for being so gray and angry at us. ‘‘What did we do?’’ is the state motto. There’s a day in May when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics is everywhere, and daffodils are asked by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes with a daffodil, you know where he’s from. In this way I have given you a primer. Let us all be from somewhere. Let us tell each other everything we can. ‘‘A Primer’’ is both a lesson book and what makes paint more likely to adhere to a wall. The whole poem primes us for the final couplet ‘‘Let us all be from somewhere./Let us tell each other everything we can.’’ This is a couplet because of how the line begins (‘‘Let us’’) and not how it ends, and so too it is a poem about where to begin, now, making connections. We learn to begin being in the life through which we are already moving by absorbing new phrases into our stock observations: ‘‘When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio./There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life/goes.’’ Life goes when events change things. This reconception of a seriality that cannot be taken for granted but is crucial to catching up to the historical present has been forced on us ‘‘on account of the Towers.’’ On account of the Towers the corn is newly punctuated and the landscape intimacy of ‘‘we’’ with ‘‘Islam’’ is just technical, a statement about proximity. The landscape absorbs what he has not yet. ‘‘There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque’’ is accordingly all grammatically unsubordinated, for the American English speaker. It is not a harmonious time, as ‘‘we’re not getting along.’’ But while not getting along, we are still moving along. Now the old landscape is new as we pass through it, ‘‘Then Ohio goes corn corn corn/billboard, goodbye, Islam.’’ It is impossible to read the tone of this list. Goodbye Islam? Goodbye Ohio? The politics of the plural ‘‘we’’ is not left unsaid, and for the better. But it is changing as and because we speak: we have the US produced by the Towers, the ‘‘we’’ produced by association with Islam; the ‘‘we’’ produced by pooling and spooling what we have seen and what we know; the ‘‘we’’ of the speed of movement; the ‘‘we’’ of trying to catch up with life as it is happening. By the end the poem reveals its desire for the ‘‘we’’ to be other things than the effect of an event, enjambment turning each phrase from the referent to a fishing line. We used to know how to live as well as we knew the landscape. Yet on reconsideration, what did we know? Some version of that ‘‘we’’ was from Michigan. We carry deep bodily knowledge of how to fish, too. The weather made us so regularly crazy, though, that when it released us from just getting by, we became all kinds of disregulated, ruled by whim and whimsy. But that crazy man-daffodil love spurred by the sudden sun is continuously supplemented and transformed in the new post-traumatic landscape that forces us constantly to re-find and re-tell the story of where we are from. Meeting the present is like meeting a new lover: telling the story of how you got to be this way in the present moment suddenly changes its usual cadences because of the occasion of the telling. Where you are from is suddenly a different ‘‘somewhere’’ else, underdescribed or even hidden by the idiom of nation or state: the state’s name becomes a ridiculous sound that reminds you of where you were ridiculous and unsound. It is a handle on something historical barely yet experienced. It used to matter, where you came from, because you felt akin to the other people who lived there, since they knew what you knew---the landscape that the highway skims and random facts associated with patriotism. But now the enmeshing of global power and ordinary life has turned the scenic route into a situation. However, unlike Simic, Hicok refuses to see the gathering of the old and new knowledges as regression, attrition, or a flat recitation of ongoing losses. The view seems to be that the social never made sense, that the cycles of the seasons were always affectively laden by crazy magical thinking and elated interruption of the exhaustion produced by the atmosphere of the present we live in that is the sum of history and the weather. The right hand did not know what the left hand was doing, which was both uncanny and ok. He sees a potential solidarity wrought from narrating the confusions and stacking the irreconcilables. The solidarity of talking and listening requires only affective consonance with the mere contract to show up and participate in the couplet or coupling that ends and begins. ‘‘Let us.’’ Is ‘‘Let us’’ an order in the imperative or something softer, like a plea? Is it the desperate good manners of ‘‘Let us go then, you and I?’’ Let us now tell something: we don’t have to think about it, we don’t have to feel anything, we don’t have to express our deepest self and wait for a recognizing response. This nascent solidarity is solipsistic first, and not performative. Telling is a state of bodily practice whose performance opens intuition to surprising rehabituations, though, by making where you are from into something you can rely on only if you tell about it to someone who hears it and produces your thereness as a warmth of presence in the historical present. Solidarity happens prior to intimacy or the contents of your auditor’s subjectivity. This is not about recognition, letting in the other, etc. But in fantasy there will be transactions of telling and hearing, in the genre of sound, streaming. ‘‘A Primer’’ teaches a history of the present that is in the idiom of normative bodily and factual life recast as a mode of tourism and curiosity that acknowledges how out of our native element ‘‘we’’ all now are. ‘‘The state joy is spring,’’ aspiring to sprung rhyme. The present is all mixed-up and intense; its emotional map is lightly manic and surreal; it does the best it can to narrate what it doesn’t comprehend while sensing so much that’s coursing through it. But this is the new realism that absorbs grief not into wars of emotion or the imaginary end of sexual self-abandon or flat seriality but into love and fishing and daffodils and the register of an affective optimism about the sharing of whatever. It’s post-event. ‘‘A Primer’’ is a dreamy poem, performing affectively a world as a magnetic space ruled by a reliable absentminded rhythm. It is as though the fact of circulation can produce a present that interrupts the atomizing flatness of mass not mattering by gently folding the political words into the other ones without the intensities of sentimental transmission that have for so long provided refuge for scoundrels and their wounded. From "What our contagion fables are really about", Jill Lepore. 2020. Reading is an infection, a burrowing into the brain: books contaminate, metaphorically, and even microbiologically. In the eighteenth century, ships’ captains arriving at port pledged that they had disinfected their ships by swearing on Bibles that had been dipped in seawater. During tuberculosis scares, public libraries fumigated books by sealing them in steel vats filled with formaldehyde gas. These days, you can find out how to disinfect books on a librarians’ thread on Reddit. Your best bet appears to be either denatured-alcohol swipes or kitchen disinfectant in a mist-spray bottle, although if you stick books in a little oven and heat them to a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit there’s a bonus: you also kill bedbugs. (“Doesn’t harm the books!”) Or, as has happened during the coronavirus closures, libraries can shut their doors, and bookstores, too. But, of course, books are also a salve and a consolation. In the long centuries during which the plague ravaged Europe, the quarantined, if they were lucky enough to have books, read them. If not, and if they were well enough, they told stories. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, from the fourteenth century, seven women and three men take turns telling stories for ten days while hiding from the Black Death—that “last Pestilentiall mortality universally hurtfull to all that beheld it”—a plague so infamous that Boccaccio begged his readers not to put down his book as too hideous to hold: “I desire it may not be so dreadfull to you, to hinder your further proceeding in reading.” The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man,” in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute. But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is also—in its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plague—an antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite. From "Love One Another or Die", Amy Hoffman. 2020. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot in June 2019, I received all sorts of invitations to speak—on panels, as a keynote. Suddenly I was the 2,000-year-old lesbian. But I was seventeen in 1969, still in high school, not out, not even considering it, just figuring I was a freak. Like most people, I never heard of the Stonewall riots until years later. Even ten years on, and despite editing a special issue about them, I was still not entirely certain whether they constituted the key moment in queer liberation that they have come to signify. Nevertheless, thanks to what I have experienced and written over the decades, it seems I am now an expert. Often, having AIDS was seen as a crime. When I started to visit weekly with a sick friend, our mutual friend warned me, “If you have to call an ambulance, don’t tell them what he has or they won’t come.” Strangely, or perhaps not, during all of the celebrations of Stonewall 50, there was little discussion of the most crucial, and traumatic, event to befall the queer community since the riots: the AIDS epidemic among gay men during the 1980s and ’90s. In hindsight, and with regret, I was guilty of this myself in my remarks at various commemorations, even though I had written an entire book (Hospital Time, 1997) about the epidemic and what it meant to me and those around me. I spoke about the LGBTQ movement as though it started in 1969 and then sort of jumped into the twenty-first century. But if we want to understand where we are today and how we got here, of course we need to talk about the epidemic. As a community, we lost a generation. As individuals, we lost partners, friends, colleagues, and comrades. I’m not sure why the Stonewall 50 celebrations so often left out AIDS. Maybe it was all just too painful. Perhaps it was because they were meant to be joyful. Balloons, parties, parades—AIDS does not fit easily into all that. Instead of cute pictures of long-haired men and women smiling, fists raised, it evokes images of young men disfigured by lesions, gasping for breath, emaciated, vomiting, while we who loved and cared for them attended two or more funerals in one day, day after day. We demonstrated too, of course. We had die-ins. Unlike earlier commemorations of Stonewall—the tenth, and even the twenty-fifth—Stonewall 50 grabbed the attention of the general public, well beyond the queer community. News anchors reported it; magazines ran features; my parents knew about it. Were the organizers too young to remember or, aware of their audience, reluctant to dwell on those terrible days? After all, straight people did not acquit themselves particularly well during the crisis (with, of course, exceptions, including Mathilde Krim, founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who became an outspoken fundraiser). Often, having AIDS was seen as a crime: people with HIV/AIDS were accused of spreading their disease to “innocent” citizens and arrested—by police wearing bright yellow protective gloves. Even some health care personnel would not touch people with AIDS—originally called GRID, “gay-realted immune deficiency”—if they treated them at all. When I started to visit weekly with a sick friend, Gay Community News staffer and AIDS Action Committee founder Bob Andrews, our mutual friend Roberta Stone (now my wife) warned me, “If you have to call an ambulance, don’t tell them what he has or they won’t come.” Some sufferers had to sue dentists and doctors in order to receive care. People with AIDS were evicted from apartments, fired from jobs, ejected from their families, expelled from schools, and ostracized by their communities. Friends and lovers were excluded from family funerals. Never mind, we created our own. At Bob’s, his tricks extolled him at an open mic. A cliché about the AIDS epidemic is that it finally brought gay men and lesbians back together after they parted ways after Stonewall, as lesbians cared for their dying gay brothers. I suppose this is true to some extent, but at least in Boston—where Gay Community News, equally women and men (at least aspirationally) shaped much of the organizing—LGBTQ folks had been working together and caring for each other for years. We already knew how to do it. And many of us lesbians had considerable expertise in community-led health initiatives from years of being involved in the women’s health movement. We had learned that we could not always trust our doctors and that we had to fight for decent care. When gay men awoke to the horror that the medical system didn’t care about them, they drew on our expertise in making trouble, and creating alternative avenues to care. Many lesbians had expertise in community-led health initiatives from being involved in the women’s health movement. We knew we had to fight for decent care. When gay men awoke to the horror that the medical system didn’t care about them, they turned to us. Perhaps more significantly, though, is the way the AIDS crisis vindicated and reinforced the insights of the liberationist wing of the movement. AIDS simply could not be contained within a narrow “gay” focus. Because AIDS was defined early as a disease of homosexuals, Haitians, and junkies, nobody in the political, medical, or social service establishments felt obligated to do anything about it. We had no choice but to do all of it ourselves—the caregiving, the treatment, the research, the public education. Our organizing, to be effective, had to take on the epidemic from all sides: the racist, homophobic way it was framed; the challenge it posed to the health care system; the indifference of politicians; the scientists who saw people with AIDS as juicy experimental subjects; the religious leaders who saw the disease as divine retribution for sin, a blessing in disguise. At the same time, as the disease disastrously spread to additional populations, treatments eventually emerged that made the disease chronic and survivable—at least for those who could gain access to and afford them. And it occurs to me that at that point the traumatized LGBTQ movement went into a kind of retreat, focusing more and more narrowly on the single goal of same-sex marriage, which it fought for in statehouses and courts. Many liberationists—myself included—criticized this focus as an accommodationist attempt to join an oppressive institution that had only harmed us. What had happened to the feminist critique of marriage as a foundation of patriarchy? What had the family ever done for queer people except condemn and reject us? Yet, as the movement for same-sex marriage had victories in the courts and legislatures, and finally became the law of the land, things began to look a little different. For one thing, even some of the most outspoken queer critics of same-sex marriage got married. Myself included. I still want to reject the regulation by the state of our intimate relationships—but marriage afforded protections that we’d never dreamed of. We could keep our kids and be recognized as their parents. We could be covered by our spouse’s health insurance. We could inherit a deceased partner’s pension and Social Security. We could visit our loved ones in the hospital and demand information from their doctors: I never used the word “wife” so much as when Roberta was hospitalized with a stroke. Some people were welcomed back into their families, sinners no longer. Even marriage turns out to be intersectional, with implications for family, health care, labor, and many other aspects of daily life. So here we are, “socially isolated” in our homes, if we are lucky enough to have homes and health, washing our hands and our groceries. Worrying. My own parents are in their nineties, frail and confused—I hope they are still alive when this article appears and not dying for the lack of services or ventilators. Meanwhile, our country’s leaders are running around like chickens without heads, while squawking daily that everything is fine, great. Perfect! Along with a distressingly substantial proportion of our fellow Americans, they trample and reject the humanity of ever-expanding categories of people—including immigrants, people of color, transfolk, disabled people, Muslims, Jews, women. More than ever, the lessons of queer liberation over the past fifty years are crucial. Stonewall demonstrates the power—the necessity—of creative rebellion against oppressive structures and of working together for justice and peace. Without that, we and our planet won’t survive. As queer poet W.H. Auden wrote, on the eve of another disaster, in “September 1, 1939”: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. From "Moving from Abstinence to Harm Reduction in the Age of Physical Distancing", Amanda Wilson. 2020. But, at a certain point I think we need to shift from a discourse of “don’t go outside and interact with others” to a discourse of “how can we interact with people in a way that minimizes risk and potential harm?” I’m not suggesting we throw caution to the wind and hold that dance party fundraiser or march as normal on May Day; but that we start to re-think and re-imagine how we can organize together, build and sustain community, support one another, in addition to (not instead of) internet-based interactions. An abstinence-based approach to physical distancing says here is a list of things you shouldn’t do; if you are doing those things you are bad, the only way to be good is to not do those things. A harm-reduction approach to physical distancing asks what are the things that are important to us, and how can we conceive of doing those things in ways that minimizes the harm and risk. The idea that we should abstain from a long list of activities needs to evolve to a set of guidelines, practices, and adaptations that enable us to live together while reducing the potential for risk and harm. This doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do all the things we used to, but it acknowledges that people have different needs and different circumstances and we need to find a way to work with those. Only interacting with people in your household is easy (or perhaps easier) if you live with someone else (whom you like spending time, and who is healthy and safe for you to be interacting with), and if you live in a situation that has enough space for those interactions to be comfortable. If you live alone, if you live in a cramped or unsafe household, that becomes much more difficult, and potentially much unhealthier. Similarly, interacting online with friends and family is easy if you have access to the right technology, a strong internet connection, and if the people you are seeking to connect with also have those things. All of us need to do different things to maintain our mental and physical health – exercise, meditation, eating particular foods, accessing certain services and support. Our ability to do these things under the current protocols varies greatly, and we need to think of ways of living, collectively, that enable all of us to do those things.
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