diamond-sharp sanctities*

it feels like time speeds up this time of year, as we hurtle toward winter, toward the election, toward the end of the year. time feels blurry, life feels unwieldy. i don’t actually know where we’re all rushing to but i know that we’re rushing.

i keep saying offhandedly that civilization is collapsing but it isn’t everywhere. i buy groceries, go to the doctor, go to school, log onto zoom, buy shoes, see beautiful art, see my friends and family with no trouble at all. it is strange, it is not fair.

the destruction feels loud, all consuming, altering. there is a lot of noise. underneath the shouting, fear and disappointment.1 there is real apocalypse. there is real, impossible grief. and, people seem to continue surviving apocalypse (we are the un/willing proof of this).

underneath the shouting, silence and verve, space and possibility.

in an interview about his book Be Holding that i keep returning to Ross Gay says:

“Before I forget this, [laughs] I just want to say the famous line of W. H. Auden saying, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” For years and years, I’ve thought it’s like a Sabbath thing, like it’s not that it doesn’t do anything, it’s that a poem interrupts time as we imagine it and a poem interrupts productivity as we imagine it. It stops time,”

what is sharp enough to puncture chaos, to poke us enough that we pay actual attention? what cuts through The Way Things Are and reaches me, reaches you? it’s a personal question.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs shares that phrases from Hortense Spillers’s work are what dialed her in as she wrote the first book of her poetic triptych, Spill “And it was these phrases of Hortense Spillers that could get me to have the level of stillness and listening to hear whatever it was. It was the technology for it.”2

how stunning.

poked on the shoulder, startled, and turned around. maybe you see who or what it was, maybe not. maybe you catch a glimpse of, a trace of it through the tiny hole that it left in the fabric of things.