pouring out, poring over: this spirit death, these spirits dying
stumbling on the sticky strings of loose anecdotes, readings and feelings revolving around a failure of (and resistance against) imagination.
Last night a video of an injured Palestinian girl whose house was bombed, asked the people attending to her injuries “Is this a dream or a reality?” to which someone replied “You are ok little girl don’t worry” and when she replied “I know I’m ok Uncle but tell me is this a dream or did they really bombed my house?” My broken heart blistering with this deep anger for her and all the other children who have lost their lives, their limbs, their homes, their dreams. How can we stop this as I swipe downwards out of habit and out comes a 2023 recap of summer vacations, laughing faces, pretty pretty scenes and micro sized happiness in a dreamy montage with a song that seem to have worm its way into my rotting mind “But I think I like this little life, this little life, this silly little life…” and I bring the volume down to mute and swipe down, this time a mother cradling the body of her dead child with the caption, something about going for multiple rounds of IVF to conceive this child only for her child to end up bombed to death, and the song still plays in my mind, as the video plays and I swipe again three videos down and then put my phone away. How did it get so bad, so fast? And I keep searching, for some kind of way, some words, something to make all this go away you know? To make it stop. But there’s nothing and everything all at once that it becomes incoherent, this dreamlike nightmare that I do no wish to be a part of and I checked out for a bit from the larger world and checked back into my inner world because maybe it’s better now but it’s not. Each day it is bad here, in my most immediate world but worse there where the world in power is decimating those in the way but it must still be good here especially when my child presses her face onto mine, her warm sunny face, really hard and tell me wake up for a while and be here with me mama and then that stupid song starts to play, “but i think I like this little life,” and I remember the girl and her destroyed hope-dream reality and the mother and her dead IVF miracle baby in her arms and this is how it goes, this diseased labyrinth in these many worlds, these many many little lives are ours and theirs, and their deaths are our dying and it tightens in my chest and makes me sick. Last night someone said maybe I do not want to feel uncomfortable because there’s nothing I can do. I did not ask for context because I was not ready for the answer. And last night someone is fighting with someone else on the platform I’ve been using to self-sooth, and relying on for information, and for access to the many other worlds elsewhere and this petty fight is about how one person is not speaking as loudly as the other and how the other was responding with what about the issues here and I wanted to scream that people are dying non-stop through my screen and can we do something more than this in-fighting and judging and you are either with us or against us but then I’d be petty too and this is just noise and I swipe for more noise and more noise to shut it out and shut it up you know? And last night is every day for months now this diseased labyrinth marked by my child’s sleep issues and her growing pains and these long, long walks, phone in hand doomscrolling through the dark, walking zombie, keeping awake just enough so we can fall back to sleep but I lie awake for the last eight months (maybe more) thinking that I wish the future never comes, I wish the future never comes, I wish the future never comes.
If we are users, and these are the side-effects of the drug of hyper connectivity then what is its alternative? No, ‘not the opposite of this binary alternative’, not disconnection BUT the outside of all this alternative, a different kind of connection? A different way to imagine? Is that even possible with how our minds are wired? In default mode network (DMN) the brain parts activate when the person is at rest and this can be likened to daydreaming, or imagining, different scenarios, situations, problems and realities, different worlds (let’s call them the dream event), an aside to your current world. However now, our DMN, in my opinion is being filled with things constantly that are already happening simultaneously when our brain and body is at rest. (The dream is no longer a dream, the dream is real and it’s a fucking nightmare) There is a lot happening in the DMN regions and this includes complex problem solving. What happens if rest is not possible, that the brain is not allowed to wander in places and dreams that do not exist, that it is constantly being filled up with cat videos, baby led weaning, some other tutorial about cloud mirrors or charcuterie boards, asmr or in-depth history of settler violence, knowledge is not power here, (or there) no, not in this current set-up, knowledge is just noise, surface deep and novel, with no function in its design. How many times do I catch myself recalling something I’ve watched and struggle to articulate what was it about, trying to scroll in the many bookmarked videos through many different platforms trying to find it. What parts of the brain light up then in the active non-active rest mode? What complex problem solving takes place here?
And then there’s the two networks of imagination: dorsal vs ventral streams. The dorsal default mode network (dorsal means toward the back of the body). That network respond to valence. If the dream event is positive, the dorsal stream is more active. But if the dream event is negative, it shows lower activity. Valence depicts the reactivity of what’s imagined, the impact of it and whether it is negative or positive whereas the ventral (towards the front of the body) stream is more about the vividness of what is imagined, and not influenced by positive/negative/good/bad dichotomy but rather the actions (and its details) within this constructed imagining. Think of it as dorsal as a stream of creation and ventral involves its evaluation, the value attached to its creation. So where am I now, drowning in the dorsal stream or floating in the many real worlds ventral stream? And where do I need to be?
I came across a text from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse- Parables for a Planet in Crisis in which he accounts for the start of land violence in which colonial white men have been pillaging, stealing and exploiting the lands (and its people) for centuries profiting from them and how this model have allowed for the triumphs of capitalism in the modern world and how their relationship with land as profit and as capital only and nothing more (evident with the genocide of the banda people for its nutmeg), an ancestral mirror of whats happening in Palestine, Tigray and Congo currently.
“The tree of the Bandas may have flourished in other lands but nowhere on Earth, other than Maluku, do people still sing about the nutmeg and weave it into their memories of their ancestors and lost homeland. Everywhere else the nutmeg is just a commodity, a resource; it has no meaning in its excess of its utility. Nobody sings songs about the nutmeg in Barbados or Conneticut.
In this too, the tiny planet-shaped nut has something to teach us about the earth. The nutmeg travels and its strange career perfectly illustrate the loss of meaning that is produced by the vision of world-as-resource. To see the world in this way requires not just the physical subjugation of people and territory but also specific idea of conquest as a process of extraction. There is another legacy of European expansion and particularly of the settling of North America, which produced metaphors and imagery on a scale to match it violence. “Settlers pursued natuare to her hiding places and as they did, they created a new set of commandments: Establish “power over this world, everywhere naturally a wilderness.’ ‘Subdue nature.’ ‘Go forth.’ ‘Conquer a wilderness.” “Take possession of the continent.’ ‘Overspread.’ ‘Increase.’ Multiply.’ ‘Scour.’ ‘Clear.’
Once conquest is achieved, the conquered object gives the the impression of being supine and inert. Having succumbed to mastery, it holds no more mysteries; the challenge it cone posed to the conqueror’s imagination is exhausted.
Exhaustion is a metaphor that occurs in science fiction stories about terraforming. Swarms of aliens go off to conquer another planet because their own is exhausted. It is the same presumption that impels billionaires to plan the conquest of Mars, now that the earth is “exhausted.”
But it bears asking: of what exactly is the Earth “exhausted”? The planet’s riches may be depleted, but they are very far from being completely spent. And in any case, the imagining of Earth’s exhaustion occured long before the absolute depletion of its resources; what it has lost is its meaning. Conquered, inert, supine, the Earth can no longer ennoble, nor delight, nor produce new aspirations. All it can inspire in its would be conqueror’s mind is the kind of contempt that arises from familiarity. Over time, this contempt has come to be planted so deep within cultures of modernity that is has become a part of its unseen foundations.
I resonated with this part so fucking much. A failure to ‘produce new aspirations’, to find meanings beyond those that matched the violence, you know, much deeper than these exhausted imaginings, this rotten diseased inner world I struggle to return to or rest in or find solace from. There is also this need to conquer my many, many worlds, to have control over it somehow and during times like this where control becomes slippery, everything becomes futile and meaningless.
Out of curiosity I looked up the etymology of imagination (n.)
"faculty of the mind which forms and manipulates images," mid-14c., ymaginacion, from Old French imaginacion "concept, mental picture; hallucination," from Latin imaginationem (nominative imaginatio) "imagination, a fancy," noun of action from past participle stem of imaginari "to form an image of, represent"), from imago "an image, a likeness," from stem of imitari "to copy, imitate" (from PIE root *aim- "to copy").
I think of Hawking’s imaginary time always. The perpendicular time that cuts across the horizontal. Although introduced as a mathematical concept to open up possibilities in special relativity and quantum physics, I think a lot about this imaginary time cutting through real time, which has a start and end, whereas imaginary time itself is continuous but not infinite.
One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there's another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time.
It takes very little reasoning to figure out that if the universe exists in an unseen way without beginning or end, at right angles to regular time, then that time is simply more elementary and even more real than ordinary clock time. Thus it seems the term imaginary applies more accurately to our time. If the universe exists in another time reference where conditions are permanent or static, suddenly it doesn't matter that we humans so convincingly observe a beginning and a possible future end to our ordinary clock time, since the other time reference applies regardless of our sense of where we are in time. The universe could be said to exist before our clock time began, and after time ends. The past and future can be said to exist now. Obviously imaginary time relates more directly than our own time to existence itself.
In real time there is a boundary (a beginning and an end) but in imaginary time there is no boundary...This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.
Hawking goes on to akin this no boundary imaginary time as an ordinary point in space. Elsewhere Stephen clearly describes an infinite, or a beginningless and endless time reference with the no boundary proposal.
The no boundary proposal, predicts that the universe would start at a single point, like the north pole of the Earth. But this point wouldn't be a singularity, like the Big Bang. Instead, it would be an ordinary point of space and time, like the north pole is an ordinary point on the Earth, or so I'm told. I have not been there myself.
Using the no boundary proposal, it is fun to imagine the universe of time from within a globe. Looking up one sees the north pole from the inside. Looking up is looking into the past, not as if it no longer exists, but instead one can reach up and touch the surface of time as it exists permanently in imaginary time. The north pole is just a single position upon the rounded surface. So one can reach up and touch the first moment, or reach down into the past to touch time in the future.
And so I imagine the universe of my imaginary time exists at the start of May this year when everything begin to fall apart, this spirit death. At home my child’s nightly refusal to sleep worsen and everything continues to fall apart in a continuous horizontal line upwards against real time and although it has been eight months in real time, it is still May in my imaginary time and it is as real as ever. Simultaneously, in October, another line appears in a space much more remote but as impactful and every night I feel myself reaching down into the past to try, not only to touch but alter the surface of that future where the faculty of the mind forms and attempts to, rather weakly, manipulate images time. There is no longer just moving forward towards an end or looking back at the start but there is also a simultaneous present there and here, inside and outside of myself and those around, and it is continuous and refuses to stop.
Hawking added that he felt that the no boundary proposal, implied that the universe had to be spatially closed, and finite in size. But using Neil Turok’s ideas of open inflation, they realized that the universe would still be closed and finite, in one way of looking at it. But in another, it would appear open and infinite.
And so I keep walking my child around that same field at odd hours on alternate nights so my partner and I can take turn getting uninterrupted sleep. We make small changes to the way we live (with the help and support of fam and friends), a cleaning lady that comes once a week, a daily check-in, a timeout whenever necessary, my mother-in-law coming in to help out every few days. We advocate a no boundary spacetime for our child by seeing specialists (feeding, sleeping and soon one that would check her digestive system), we hold gently to what works for now knowing that we need to let it go with ease when it suddenly stops working, we preserve our energies and give our bare minimum, treat ourselves with kindness and compassion. It still feels hopeless on some days, closed and finite BUT the ways in which we imagine hope can be open and infinite. This is something akin to what Mariame Kaba describes of hope as a discipline. It is cultivated and tended to, it is practiced daily and gently. It is breaking down in tears and wiping it dry before trying again, not belaboured and rushed but slowly and mindfully. Imaginatively.
Of course it’s so much harder to keep it together given all that is happening right now but I end with this chunk taken from Why Palestinian Liberation Is Disability Justice, beautifully written by Alice Wong in which I first encountered Mariame Kaba’s quote:
A report by Human Rights Watch documented the disproportionate impact on disabled Palestinians from hospital bombings, power and Internet outages, the trauma and mental health toll, and forced evacuations without access to transport, healthcare, communication, food, water, shelter or electricity. It was painful and distressing when I saw images of older people in wheelchairs pushed by family members as they fled, children and adults going through surgeries without anesthesia, and babies in ICUs left behind bombed hospitals. As a person dependent on electricity for my ventilator and numerous machines to keep me alive, it was particularly triggering when I saw a photo of a nurse manually ventilating a child because Israel cut off electricity and targeted attacks on entire regions in Gaza including numerous hospitals.
Solidarity isn’t transactional or conditional. While it’s clear that approximately 50,000 disabled Gazans face great danger, disabled people shouldn’t care because they can relate to what is happening. Cross-movement solidarity is another disability justice principle that I deeply believe in. We need to build relationships and show up for other movements because that’s a way to build power and it’s just the right thing to do….I’m no expert but I know what it means to be dehumanized, rendered disposable, and oppressed. I know that all people deserve freedom. I know that genocide is a mass disabling event and a form of eugenics. In a piece by Rabea Eghbariah that was rejected by the Harvard Law Review, “… does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy…which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice.” The fact that people are denying the genocide happening right before us and justifying it based on racial and religious superiority is difficult to fathom. If this isn’t genocide it is something far worse that is yet to be named…it’s hard to be hopeful in such bleak times. I’m reminded of Mariame Kaba’s quote, “Hope is a discipline.” Practicing hope and dreaming of liberation and justice keep me going. It’s what we all need to fight for a better world together.
Thank you for reading this far my loves. Till next time <3