Diarist D-50
Entry for 22 October 2021
I’ll admit from the start that I’m writing this entry more from a place of grudging civic responsibility than one of joy. Goddamn, these are grim times. But, as Osip Mandelshtam wrote, in an equally dark time,
And if they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor,
I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,
But shall write what I am free to write,
My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,
And in a corner of the ominous dark
I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice
And move my hand in the darkness like a plough.
Of course, Mandelshtam’s ten-oxen voice didn’t save him from Stalin in the end, as he himself predicted.
A propos, looking back I realize that my last entry was three days before the insurrection of 1/6. How much things have changed since then, and how much remains unchanged despite all that’s come to light. What I want you to know about how being alive now is this: There is the sick vertiginous lurch in the gut when a 9/11/2001 happens, or an 11/9/2016, or a 1/6/2021. You know everything in your world is now completely different, and you fear the changes that will come. There is a different kind of nausea that often overcomes you for long afterward, when you know everything in your world is still completely the same and nothing is going to happen despite everything, just a slow drift into certain doom.
Thus, in what is sure to be the most pressing news of the day from your perspective, dear Reader of the Future, we’re coming up on Cop26 in about a week, and the US has nothing to bring to the table. This is because the Senate Democratic majority can’t get their shit together enough even to quite literally save the fucking planet, or to maintain their own majority status in Congress by guaranteeing every eligible citizen’s right to vote, or to rebuild our pitiable infrastructure in a less carbon-intensive way, or to provide a social safety net for all, or to purge the fascists from our body politic (like, can we finally agree these guys are bad and treat them accordingly?). I’m not positioned to know precisely when we became a failed state, but we seem to have crossed that line.
Do I sound angry? Bitter? I’m surely no more bitter than you.
But because we are a species that represses fear and indulges feelings of hope, we continue to have children and plant gardens and make art and think well of ourselves. Or, in our case, plant gardens and make art and put solar panels on the roof of our house. We’ve just signed a contract to have them installed, and I feel like I’m expiating some ancestral guilt. Not excited, exactly, but proud, almost defiant. Like I’m finally doing something concrete to make your world a little less bad besides recycling bottles or some other absurd make-work. You don’t have to thank or congratulate us; it’s literally the least we can do.
There seems to be a societal shift underway these days; in our understanding of how we perceive global warming, in labor-capital relations, even in demographics. It’s too early to tell where these trends are heading, but I’m beginning to feel guardedly optimistic about your chances of existing and even enjoying a decent quality of life. My biggest fear, of course, is that it’s too little, too late. Here in low-wage Muncie, the usual suspects are still humming that tired Richard Florida “creative-class” tune whereby a thriving arts scene will flourish and trickle down good tidings through the whole economy if only we build a “maker space” where artists pay money to rent a studio or workshop to make and sell their wares to all the moneyed tourists who will inevitably be drawn thereto (LOL, OK sure)—because after 40 years of neoliberalism we’re still suckers for any economic theory that promises to trickle down any benefit to those of us whose net worth stubbornly remains under a billion dollars. In fact, most of the artists and “makers” and “small entrepreneurs” I know in Muncie are suffering financially. Some have even succumbed to the deadening effect of 18 months of pandemic lockdown and restrictions. And yet, just as the Muncie summertime market in lawn care—wherein half of Muncie mows the other half’s lawns—is unsustainable in the long term, those of us who have a little spare cash to spread around can only buy so many vases, letterpress posters, gag T-shirts, and chocolate truffles.
Meanwhile, the labor movement has finally grown restive, feeling its new strength, flexing its muscle with strikes and walkouts and sickouts to protest decades of low wages, instability, overwork, poor benefits, high rent, and otherwise getting generally fucked over by capital. This has prompted the usual ignorant right-wing talking points and gripes from my father’s blessed generation: “nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe BeCaUsE tEh GoVeRnMeNt GiVeS tHeM tOo MaNy HaNdOuTs!” being my personal favorite, with the double-chocolate-buttercream-rich implication that they, living their lives in the postwar boom, have never gotten anything from the government (and my riposte that the very people who complain that working-class people are comfortably sponging off some notional government dole would be the first to exploit such handouts if they in fact existed). All power to the workers’ soviets! is all I have to offer on the subject.
The garden is basically done for the season; I’ve planted the garlic, and all that remains to harvest are the frost-hardy leeks and beets under their beds of straw. My wife spent the summer making new flowerbeds in the front yard and planting bulbs. My winter project is finishing this assemblage I’ve been working on, reinventing the wheel at every step because I find it impossible to stick to a single artistic medium—or even two or three!—but have to learn a new one from scratch every couple of years. Thus, finding myself bored with writing, cooking, and photography, I have been learning about working with ceramics and electrical wiring and painting and even a little structural engineering. This one is a gift for a friend who was diagnosed with MS this year; it’s a bust representing neuropathic pain. I do this so as not to gaze (directly) into the Abyss.
So I got my Covid-19 booster shot and flu shot today—because we seem to have defaulted into being fine with over a thousand people a day dying from this thing—and I’m starting to feel a bit ill. I also had physical therapy this morning—because biopolitics is real and our health insurers refuse to permit us a simple MRI until we submit to a regimen of exercise and surveillance to make sure we’re not malingering, faking our pain—and I’m already sore. Until next time.