I have been taken, lately, by the acknowledgment sections of books. To be given a look under the hood, to witness a slice of the people, the care, the web of relation that makes any work, any life, possible is steadying, somehow. I am reminded of my own indebtedness in witnessing others’. This essay functions in a similar, yet inverse way, RWG offers gratitude for what KM’s work has opened in her own work and life, publicly cherishing how it asks her to see.
I first encountered this essay down an internet rabbit hole, sitting at a sewing table turned desk in an attic room I was subletting from a friend. The ceiling sloped, I learned quickly how not to hit my head against it. I had just moved from Virginia to New York, was a few days into a month of no contact with my then partner, ostensibly jobless, and quite distraught. It was February in New York. Gray and dark. I felt myself at a crossroads, uncertain and exposed. One of my sparse convictions was the need to step out of our corrosive, warring loop.
After reading the essay, I was brimming with gratitude and resonance. I remember having the immediate urge to send the essay to my partner, to share my wonder and glee, and the small sadness of not being able to. I was struck by the social nature of astonishment; our being wired to reach out to others in moments of awe, of quickening.
The corrosive, warring loops I have found myself in are interpersonal but also structural – a range Gilmore deftly glides across, insisting on the otherwise. Gilmore salutes the regard that McKittrick offers in her book, naming that this type of witness and visioning are an abolitionist practice. Describing an encounter with her father’s friend, she writes, “One Sunday evening he stood over my tiny desk while everyone else was downstairs fighting about politics or outside laughing... Dr Kent watched for a while, for so long in fact that I cringed expecting to be told to do it again, again. Instead, in the gathering twilight, he kindly said that wonders waited on the far side of misery, some that he could tell me about but most that he’d never imagine but I might eventually come to know.” These moments of tenderness and encouragement, sustain us; that forecasting wonder is generative.
She continues, that McKittrick’s book’s feeling echoes Dr. Kent’s own work, which “...refreshed our capacity, again or for the first time, to notice slipstreams through what he perfectly named “the imprisoning blandishments of a neurotic culture” (Kent, 1972: 95). Dear Science also refreshes our capacity to travel those streams—of consciousness, catastrophe, citation, conviviality, care.” That the streams matter, the moments of rupture, opening, kindness. That the streams can be used, can make us different, can allow us to reshape our consciousnesses and lives; a perrenial reminder.
That no effort is negligible: Gilmore shares more slipstreams of multiple scales, Black Panthers at UCLA trying to create one of the first Black studies programs in the country, her cousin learning to draw a flower for someone he had a crush on. These vignettes articulated, consolidated maybe, the soothing, encouraging, perhaps even revolutionary properties of wonder and awe, they reminded me that my life depended on where I focused my attention.
Registering the slipstreams takes practice and openness. The slipstreams are found in unlikely places. Her cousin learned to draw nasturtiums—whose history is a lesson in this in itself. In the 18th century, people thought they lit up, "at dusk nasturtiums seem to flash. They seem to emit a light. They seem to generate light.” Later, scientists discovered that this trick is because “there is a perceptual gap that those of us who can use our eyes and can see at dusk experience. And an object like a nasturtium, which has such intense color in that shifting light, confuses our eyes—the rods and the cones—so the cones can see the red and the rods lose it. And in the movement or gap between the rod and the cone we perceive the appearance of light. The appearance of light. But what’s actually happening is that our eyes betray their own weaknesses and strengths all at once. For we who can use our eyes, as I said, the perceptual gap between rods and cones makes the nasturtiums appear to give off light. They don’t. We see it anyway. Which means the light is not not real.”
Gilmore asked what’s possible when I allow my own weaknesses and strengths to coexist more often. She clarified that what I see and what I think I see both matter, and that this yields flexibility. She asked what else I might be willing to see.
Of her friend, Gilmore writes, “Katherine’s voice, Katherine’s writing, Katherine’s impatient affection keeps us in motion.... I worry and I also see wonders.” Rigor, expression, and witness call me forward. Mirroring to me the urgency and tenderness I want out of my own voice, my own writing, my own looking.