In my absence from writing (here and at all) I have had few thoughts, few thoughts that seem worth sharing, worth expanding on, worth performing the effort of sitting at my desk on the floor with a cup of coffee and pouring myself into because frankly, I have been numb (though I think I am thawing out with the spring). I spend the days reading to try to enter other people’s words and worlds and the nights I shake and stir and pour liquids into various containers while holding large pieces of myself to the side, acting as a mirror for the guests who sit at my bar. I become a kind of container for their stories, sitting at such an intimate bar can be a chaotic kind of drug therapy and I am the dealer/therapist.
Language is a container which when used to describe say the aroma of wine, the texture of it, the taste we are able to expand our palate. Each glass of wine I smell and taste, the time and mental effort of putting words to the scents, making synaptic connections between previous experiences and contexts and using words as the bridge, I increase my ability find pleasure in a multitude of flavors. I taste and smell more. I have come to describe wine for myself using words I would rarely use to describe the wine to a guest, but through “decomposition” and “petrichor” and “grain mustard” I slot the tastesmell into my own mind, expanding within the linguistic/sensory container what will be possible for me to describe and thus to taste and smell in the future. And I imagine myself, in committing pen to paper (pixels to pixels), rehearsing a theoretical and moral and linguistic and imaginative and maybe even a physical expansion.
I return to this multifaceted container: the page, the deadline, the audience (you). I return to explore the idea of containers, because they have been proliferating in my mind almost like I am walking through the most magnificent mental container store where everything can hold something, give it shape or suffocate it.
Our experience may expand within certain containers.
Through the physical space of the cinema in the era of streaming, I have found the possibility of encountering extremities of emotion and experience whilst containing it within a few hours in a dark room, crucially shared with strangers. I categorize for myself certain films into streaming and cinema and though it is occasionally possible to simulate the cinematic experience with a companion and a ban on pausing and phone use, I have rarely found a better way to see a difficult film than alone with strangers at a matinee. I saw the film Zone of Interest on one such afternoon in the Lincoln Center AMC, surrounded by pensioners most of us wearing KN95 masks and forgoing snacks (though one unfortunate man found himself a few minutes into the film unable to finish his popcorn I imagine because the film was so very quiet that his chomping was louder than the atmospheric sound design and people kept staring at him). After the film, to digest and bring it inside of myself and contextualize it, I walked up the frigid Broadway wind tunnel thinking about it, Hedwig Höss showing off her garden full of broccoli and kohlrabi growing feet from the walls of Auschwitz. Thinking about the justification, the containment of the designation of humanity to those with one religious, ethnic, and political background while Jewish people, disabled people, Roma people, trans people, gay people, communists and any of their allies were to be systematically worked to death or immediately murdered. And as I walked I thought of historical rhyming and ongoing contexts of systematic dehumanization and its justifications.1
I recall feeling entirely lost when I began reading political theory in undergrad, like there was so much I was missing that I may never be able to catch up on. So many references theorists would make to one another (subtweets) and I was still just beginning the process of learning how to read in depth and breadth (and by no means do I believe there is an end point to this learning). I recall too, a specific moment senior year when my synapses seemed to all fire at once, when the connections based on my literary and theoretical meandering suddenly came to be related. It was a moment when I knew my own mind, as it had surely been shaped by others, but which I then felt confident I had context enough to express clearly. I surely know I am often slow as well as impatient when it comes to comprehension, so this moment felt like a dam had broken and I was suddenly able (if only for a moment) to analyze a theoretical text and a historical moment because I knew it’s context and because I had context of my own to draw from, even as that context was acquired through observing and repeating the analytic style of my peers and professors until I came to a stylistic and theoretical ground I could call “my own.”
For a person to be known in a context is to have one’s opinions taken seriously, one benefit go undoubted and the benefit of the doubt consistently on offer. The “right context,” I believe, is the container which allows one to proffer ideas and theories, to throw things out to float in the air in front, without the certainty or the violence of them being immediately swatted down. It is the space in which one may not know (yet) and still be a part of the conversation without shame (and without shaming).
Context is a container, the situatedness of an event or idea within its surroundings (history, location, what has gone unsaid…etc). In the context of a rehearsal a performance can go from one note or one quality to a variety of phrasing – the singular can become texturized and multitudinous. And through this rehearsal towards complexity, a piece of dance, or a scene, or a song becomes affective – it does something to the audience who can feel the texture of the piece, who sense movement and sound through the context of stillness and silence. The audience enters with their own history, and if they are treated as complex contextual beings, they too are offered the opportunity to understand a piece of art, to add it to their own history and through it to understand more in the future. An analytic consulting room does something similar, allows analysand to wander through their history within the context of a room and a relationship with the analyst and expand what may be possible, to contain multitudes and do hard things.
Okay here is what I have loved reading thus far this 2024 and which has expanded my context and will allow me to fill some containers in new ways.
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
and as always, here is Walter asleep on his back being cute (alt text is broken for some reason, so below is a small but long dog sleeping on his back, nose to camera, paws to chest, legs fully splayed).
While defending the dehumanization of Palestinians and the murder of Palestinian children by the Israeli army through bombing and starvation and containment, a woman in a conversation with a friend online said that the genocide of Indigenous people in north America was “a long time ago.” And I thought, what different context we have. And I wondered what she could be seeing, what she could be reading, what her context had taught her about which people should live and thrive and which ought to die or if they are allowed to live, to only be allowed a kind of living death. And I wondered how should could not see that no one should be murdered and no murder (let alone mass murder) should be justified even and especially as we attempt to understand the contexts and power dynamics and inheritances of such atrocities (crucially so that we do not repeat them!).
Good to have you back; we (the audience) missed you.
Welcome back, Sarah.