Hi friends,
It’s been an unintentional month-long hiatus, oops, but I’m happy to report—for those of you who haven’t heard me shouting the news from the rooftops—that I’ve handed in my master’s thesis. And after a week and a half of behaving like a koala (i.e. doing nothing but sleeping, eating plants, and basking in sunshine), I’m finding myself newly excited to write again. I don’t know yet going forward what my posting schedule on here will be, but I tentatively think I’ll stick to mostly fortnightly with a dispatch every week if I’m feeling notably verbose, delusional, and/or clever.
Anyway! Today I have a lot to say about a variety of things, all of which (at least in my mind) make sense in conversation together…
Whenever I hear the song Don’t Look Back In Anger by Oasis, I feel tender, despite the fact that Oasis sucks. The song is a totem drawing me back to a specific place and time: Edinburgh on a sunny day in late May 2017, one of those prime Scottish summer days that gleams brilliant in its rarity. It was less than a week after the Manchester terror attack, which had rattled the nation, even some 350km and a border away. To be in a large crowd, to be joyful, to be active and alive in community with masses of others, felt significant in an inarticulable way.
That day, I ran the Edinburgh half-marathon with a friend, the first time since school that I had put in sustained and targeted effort for weeks at a time to train for a specific athletic pursuit. At the end, exhausted and relieved, we had pizza and beer from a pop-up food stall on an astroturf lawn that had sprung up for the summer near Waverley Station. There was music playing through speakers. At some point Don’t Look Back In Anger came on, which in the few days since the attack had become a sort of anthem for Mancunian unity and spirit, and the whole crowd started singing along. The mood went from joyful and boisterous to something bittersweet, verging on reverent (an adjective I for one wouldn’t normally associate with Oasis). The moment itself wasn’t notable but for the memorability of the feeling that arose.
I thought of that moment this week after reading a piece in the New York Times Magazine, ‘Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief’. That physical tug toward a communal catharsis, something that has been in short supply since the pandemic began, is what writer Carina del Valle Schorske refers to as despojo. In her family’s Boricua brand of Spanish, she writes, the word implies:
A register already worked through by ritual, by generations of people who’ve had to scavenge something good from the many losses of forced migration. The “despojo” I’ve desired articulates a paradox. In order to repossess the body, it’s necessary to dispossess it; in order to feel alive, it’s necessary to get in touch with what’s already dead. But when I say “despojo,” I don’t always mean to sound so serious. Sometimes I mean that I want very badly to pin somebody to the club wall with my butt.
On Twitter the other day I saw an exchange between pop star Maggie Rogers and a fan. ‘Hey @maggierogers where have you been?’ asked a man whose profile photo depicted him standing in a swimming pool beside an inflatable float, ‘Ya boy is ready for some music’. Rogers replied succinctly with a photo of a Harvard University student ID card bearing her image and a pithy caption: ‘lol I’m in grad school.’ In a later tweet, she elaborated: new music is indeed coming, but—surprise!—she’s also enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, ‘studying the spirituality of public gatherings and the ethics of power in pop culture’. I’m always intrigued by people who marry their artistic and academic inclinations, or perhaps supplement the former with the latter. Moreover, though, I’m interested in this idea of the spirituality of public gatherings, and of concerts falling into that category. I wonder: is the spirituality inherent to the gathering, is it cultivated, or both?
None of these are new ideas by any means, of course; even the most cursory glance at social and political movements, or organised religion, will exemplify the central role that the communal, the gathering, plays in spiritual practice. But what feels fresh—or at least re-contextualised—at this particular juncture is a collective longing for redemption in a wholly secular sense. This is less straightforward than it may sound. Redemption and anxiety are tightly intertwined, neither solely the purview of religion. The pleasures of the flesh are magnified after 18 months of pandemic, but so too are the anxieties of gathering. This is, after all, the era of a plague which has now had more iterations than Noel and Liam Gallagher have had feuds.
‘Bourgeois propriety,’ Schorske writes, ‘often seems to prefer a clear distinction between grief and jubilation.’ So what exists in the space between? Dignity, most likely: a balm for nihilism, a panacea amid a swirl of situational factors—resolutely selfish anti-vaxxers, escalating climate collapse, etc—that feel frustratingly out of our control even as their adverse effects impact us. The option to improvise, to be spontaneous, to connect, to iterate, is the opposite of that feeling of impotence. Schorske’s essay sees her following the expansive scene of Latinx social dancing across New York’s boroughs during the city’s brief, tumultuous Hot Girl Summer that never fully materialised. The act of dancing, she writes:
Activates the pleasure in this roiling field of possibilities, makes it feel as if there will always be another chance to choose. To reset the connection. To find opportunity in error. Getting ready for her first night out in over a year, Corinna had wavered — “like, do I still got it?” Once she was back in the moment, she remembered that dancing is not something you’ve got. It’s something you have to let get you.
I just finished reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which touches on similar themes. As usual, Rooney’s central thesis is that the webs of our interpersonal lives matter even or especially as the larger world is troubling; that we can never fully know the interiority of the people around us, even those closest to us, but must give vulnerably unto them anyway, and allow them to reciprocate this intimacy; that it’s not frivolous to parse out the details of our human relationships, and to care and derive joy out of our small lives, even as humankind and the planet exists in the nexus of multiple extended crises; and that to do all of this is the whole point, really. ‘So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction,’ muses one character, an acclaimed novelist whose career echoes Rooney’s own, to another, ‘here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?’
Without totally spoiling things for those who haven’t yet read it, the book’s ending is surprising. The sticky threads of the central friendships and relationships get tied up in ways that many critics on the Internet seem to find preternaturally neat: an Austen-esque marriage plot for millennial Marxists. But I found myself unbothered by a happy ending. It didn’t cheapen the book for me. Is it a trite move on Rooney’s part, as this article suggests (definitely don’t click if you haven’t read the book! Big spoilers), and does my enjoyment of it therefore render me an unserious reader? I certainly hope not. And I also hope that me being in the minority on this doesn’t signal a larger literary trend of perceiving a happy conclusion as patronising or basic, and scepticism as the enlightened view, because frankly I thought we’d collectively moved past that. I’d like to believe that sometimes—improbable as it seems for a writer whose M.O. is ambiguous interpersonal dynamics, and for a world that is at best complicated and at worst heartbreaking—Occam’s Razor holds true. In other words, that sometimes the simplest, easiest, happiest story is the best one. Is the right one.
In conversation with Rosa Lyster for The Hazlitt, Rooney explains the book’s title, pulled from a Schiller poem:
Our present sense of a beautiful world passing away can feel quite new and unprecedented, because of our political moment and because of the climate crisis. But our cultural terminology for this experience long pre-exists our present circumstances. Obviously that isn’t to compare contemporary climate anxiety to (e.g.) medieval apocalypticism. The ability of our planet to support human life is very genuinely in serious danger. What interests me is that we have to find some way to express this anxiety using (at least to some extent) our existing vocabulary and cultural forms.
Not to be too on-the-nose but we know from the Decameron that communing in storytelling is an age-old response to extended crisis, to plague. Batten down the hatches, join ranks with friends, break out the wine, and wait out the storm. We’re all out here trying to understand things that don’t make sense, that are out of our hands. To comprehend the value of something is to feel its absence. To subtract down to its shadow. (If you’re Maggie Rogers, you spend 18 months aching to once again play music for the masses in rollicking live shows, so you ship yourself up to Boston to study exactly what that means.) We must find ways to harness the existing cultural lexicon for this moment, as Rooney writes, just as people have always done at various points in time in all manner of ways.
Perhaps that means bending the limits of utilitarianism, leaning into the spiritual sustenance of love, movement, a beat on a dance floor, despojo, a marriage plot, a crowd belting Britpop in off-key impromptu unison. ‘These years of social distancing have been long, but our dances have survived longer years, greater distances, more punishing prohibitions,’ Schorske writes. ‘I can feel even the dances I’ve never danced pulsing gently, as pure potential, in my ordinary movements.’ It’s magical realism, but it’s catharsis nonetheless. You have to let it get you.
No extra links today, since this has been long enough. But I will say I’ve recently been rereading Jane Austen novels (don’t @ me) and reading a couple of contemporary novels including but not limited to The Five Wounds by Kirsten Valdez Quade. I’ve been watching Ted Lasso on AppleTV. And I’ve been thoroughly enjoying waking up without an alarm.
Until next time,
Maddy