Rest and Rememory

Lessons of witness and respite

Dearest readers.

I hope you’re doing okay, staying safe, and finding nourishment and pleasures to help sustain you.

I’m very sorry that I haven’t been here. A few months ago, after finding a lump and thinking I had cancer and getting poked and prodded and offered into a very loud magnet and having more blood drawn than I’d ever had before, I learned that I needed surgery. I went under in the middle of December, all went well, and I’m incredibly grateful to say that no cancer was found.

While many people are forced to go back to work a few days after surgery, my partner and I strategized so that we could button up our our growing year in time for me to be able to fully melt into the couch for the weeks it took my body to darn itself back together. During my convalescence I rested more than I had since 2015, the year I started my tiny farm.

The rest was wondrous. I was visited, over and over again, by friends bearing gifts and gentleness. I read “Little Women” and Louisa May Alcott’s journals and letters. I watched films. I rested, I rested, I rested.

A month and a half out of surgery I was amazed to find my mind bewilderingly clear, inhabiting an internal and external spaciousness and a resulting deep calm and awareness that felt magical to my typically frayed and overwhelmed soul. Suddenly I could see the way that anxieties usually fill my days and have begun accruing and using an array of tools to care for myself and pull my heart back up when it starts sinking below the surface.

Acquiring this skillset would be an incredible gift at any time, but it was especially invaluable during our January of terrors.

While I wasn’t ready for things to get as bad as they’ve become, I knew things were heading for a kind of apocalypse, a word that means an unveiling, a revelation of a new time. My education and preparation for the coming darkness began when I, like so many other white americans, began seeing through a new lens after George Floyd’s murder. Sorrow and rage and witness began cracking me open to truths unknown and unheard. I returned to and deepened the radicalism I met in my brief stint of college and the years I spent after, living and traveling with anarchists and socialists and artists. I read, I listened, I made mistakes, I apologized. I repeated and repeated again an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s essay “The site of Memory,” in which she writes of people who attempt to tame the Mississippi in order to “make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

We, too, are rivers longing to return to ourselves. I believe that much of the ignorance, bracing cruelty, and malaise found throughout so much of American citizenry is due to an innate desire to deepen our relationship with the truth and our twin and tremendous fear of facing it.

But we must remember, or, to paraphrase Morrison in yet another essay, we must reremember.

Morrison coined the concept of rememory, something that deeply informed her novel “Beloved.” She wrote of “history versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.” This is the essential work that must lay the foundation of both our collective survival and the making of a world that is built on honesty and a devotion to abundance. We must commit ourselves to the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer: “all flourishing is mutual.”

It is unbelievable that we live in a world where a boy on his way home from school is used to bait his father into being kidnapped while being kidnapped himself. It is unacceptable that a nurse can be shot in the back, again and again, while helping someone get up. And in our shared bewilderment, grief, and wild uncertainty we must allow the luminous parts of our humanity to shine, such as the mutual aid which has helped our species thrive for thousands of years and the billions and billions of tiny acts that kindle connection, resistance, and great movements.

As I come out of my hibernation I’ve been musing on the response Tressie McMillan Cottom gave Geoff Bennett on January 26th when he asked “what does renewal look like, when it’s not that people are apathetic? It’s just that people are tired. They’re worn out.”

McMillan replied:

Yes, there is a lot of exhaustion.

I would argue, though, that much in the way that we sort of have misconstrued the idea of taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other, as, you know, self-care, solve your problems with a bubble bath, we kind of have that problem writ large with politics, right, that if you are exhausted and overwhelmed by the onslaught of negative news, that you sort of need to retreat, right, and you need to withdraw.

When, in fact, everything from research to history to art will tell you it’s the exact opposite, that sometimes we aren’t exhausted because we are aware of too much. We are exhausted because we are doing too little.

The antidote, I think, to political exhaustion, the type that we are talking about is that we are getting so much passive information and we have so few opportunities to act. We are tired then not from doing too much, but from doing too little.

People who feel agentic aren’t as tired. They are not as easily overwhelmed. So, if you are exhausted by the onslaught of bad news, go to a protest. If you are exhausted by social policy that is demonizing children, start teaching children how to read.

The more time you spend doing something, whatever it is possible for you to do in your space in the world, the less exhausted you are by the onslaught of information that really wins when it can convince you that the only thing you can do is watch what is happening to you.

The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul are showing us that there are scores of different ways in which we can show up and show out. We can share ideas with our neighbors. We can blow whistles, we can question ICE agents, we can do laundry for and deliver groceries to people in hiding. We can teach children how to read, we can hold signs. In the most recent episode of Vibe Check, from which I first heard McMillan Cottom’s words, poet Saeed Jones tells us that “one of fascism’s most effective weapons is making us feel lonely, making us feel isolated.” This means that we can, and we must, also resist by connecting, by sharing meals and dreams, and by being imaginative enough to work toward a better world even if we, like Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado, and Chaofeng Ge, and Renee Macklin Good, and Alex Pretti, might not be here to see it.

Thanks, as always for being here. Take good care and I’ll see you again soon.

Helleboris viridis by Gherardo Cibo from Pedanius Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica