“It is equally vain,” she thought, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I can’t stop reading the news. I can’t stop reading the news.
It travels, I travel from my optic nerve, through unmoving vocal chords,
past the lump, gut deep.
Can’t stop reading the news and.
It wants to travel back out as vomit and rage.
Hillary tweets in Spanish.
Trump tweets in grunts.
I watch Father Obama while
I make a salad.
The wind is raging.
Think of his affect after Sandy Hook.
(I don’t want to think about it.)
(I can’t stop thinking about it.)
I know what’s coming, as a U.S.–Ameri-kan:
As Americans…
Brutal murder…
Massacre…
Pray for families…
Attack…
We know enough to say that this was an act of terror and an act of hate…
FBI…
All the facts…No definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer…
As an act of terror…
What, if any…
Filled with hatred…
We will go wherever the facts lead us…
This could have been any one of our communities…As a country…
Carnage…
Law enforcement…Sacrifice, courage…
Especially heartbreaking for all of our friends, our fellow Americans who are
lesbian.
gay.
bisexual.
or transgender…A nightclub…
Be with friends, to dance, to sing, to live…
More than a nightclub…
Solidarity, empowerment, awareness, civil rights…Sobering reminder…
Attacks on any American…
regardless…
an attack on all of us…Dignity, equality…
Country…
Hate…
Terror…
Values…The most deadly shooting in American history…
Handgun…
Assault rifle…Further reminder…
Weapon:
School, house of worship, movie theater, nightclub…We have to decide…
To do nothing is a decision…Victims…
Names…
Faces…Who they were…
Joy to families, friends…Difference to this world…
Prayer…
Prayer for family…
God…Strength…
Bear the un-bearable…
Strength…
Strength and courage to change…As a country…
Heroic, selfless…Friends who helped friends…
Hate violence…
Love…United as Americans, protect our people, defend our nation, take action against threats…
God…
Families…
God…
This country.
God, this country.
This fucked up
family.
Attack!
Living in ellipses:
“No definitive judgment…”
Living for ellipses:
“This could have been any one of our communities…”
Thinking of ellipses:
The only way to slow down,
what is said too fast,
what is said is not enough,
Also all wrong, too much.
Can’t speak out every meaning.
Thinking with ellipses:
Going in circles.
On a Sunday.
How is it supposed to make you feel?
Don’t care
How you feel.
Can you feel any other way than wrong?
Don’t care
How you feel.
What are you supposed to do?
Just you wait.
[For Lauren Berlant, “to live elliptically” is to ask a question rather than formulate an answer; a “shrug” is a rhetorical response to a non-rhetorical question of the body – an embodied letting go of future promises in favor of life in the durative present. Revisiting a conceptual grammar drawn from psychoanalysis, Berlant is using “dissociation” to understand it not as a symptom of an underlying abnormality but as a practice of attaching to life. Berlant is dialing back the multiple intersections of subjectivities and pondering what doesn’t add up in social worlds. She is thinking about the content of “being proximate” but not “in community.”
In “Culture@Large,” the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s signature event at the 2012 AAA meetings, Berlant and her interlocutors thought through the sensorium which overcomes “affective stuckness” but does not jump immediately (as is our social science instinct) to discursive symbolization. For these scholars, this is work that is trained at scenes of social abandonment and lostness, the precariousness of life at large. Drawing from Claudia Rankine’s poem Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and the film based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, Berlant spoke of the way that quick and slow death by racism and homophobia inspires a sociality of not caring, of deciding to be stubborn.
––from http://production.culanth.org/fieldsights/32-walking-around-in-lauren-berlant-s-elliptical-life]
Queer Urban Ecologies 