Moxibustion

It had felt recently like I was having all these realizations about my life, like I had broken through something. There are moments like that, when you feel like suddenly achieve clarity and nothing that used to matter matters so much anymore. I was trying to write about some of it and then I went back and reread my old essays and saw that I had realized all of it before. I had just forgotten. There might be a therapeutic term for this. In lieu of that, I will call it delusion. That’s what it feels like. You know what’s good for you, you understand why things have hurt you, you can see your life for what it is. And then you backslide into wishful thinking, or self-doubt. Suddenly you are confused again.

It feels sometimes on a broader scale like the whole world is doing this. Like there are cycles of amnesia, a violent redux towards a worse state of being. Although abortion, which was until recently decriminalized, has been criminalized in much of the US now, it feels almost gauche to bring that up, to say, well, things are bad now in this country. There is always someone who will tell you you’re doing fine, things could be a lot worse. I read someone writing when Roe was overturned that losing a right is rare and scary, a glaring beacon of political decay. It seems at times that there must be a line in the sand, a place where the world will, for intents and purposes, stop. But it goes on instead, worse and worse for the wear. Grief can feel unbearable and then you recover and can’t really remember why you felt that way.

Which is part of the amnesia maybe. I like writing things down because I have a spotty memory and am inattentive. I tend to forget timelines, names, events, details. But it is also easy to forget a feeling, and especially that feeling of saturation, which comes when something really bad is happening in your life, or in the world at large. It’s too overwhelming to remember.

Anyway, the essay I was trying to rewrite (essentially) was this one. I wrote it at the beginning of the slow demise of a friendship that feels irrevocably broken now, and I was trying to puzzle through that and also to work through experiences of violence, callousness, misogyny. It feels like I worked it all out and then it just tangled again. Although for the record, I have felt very safe and cared for by the men in my life of late.

A few things I have read recently:

The inimitable Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote a very beautiful and very sad essay about grief. Among other things, she questions the mantra that “grief is love persevering,” a truism which has somehow become ubiquitous online, and which I saw embroidered on a very beautiful piece of fabric on my Instagram discover page the other day. “One day, apparently,” Rayne writes, "the sky cracks open and your love becomes grief, and all you can do to cope with this sudden and purportedly irreversible transformation is remind yourself that you used to have something better.” There is another admonishment going around, which I think is more profound, about how you shouldn’t borrow grief from the future. And it is true that if love is collapsed into grief, that all we can really expect to gain from intimacy is suffering, then what are we doing if not borrowing grief? We live on stolen time. We are always trying to take more than is allotted to us, to make it last longer, greedy with the world, hungry to make our lives meaningful. I become ravenous towards the end of a relationship, when I can sense it is slipping away. I want endlessly, demand reciprocity. We have so little time left.

I finally read Artless by Natasha Stagg, which published last year with Semiotext(e). I met her at a party in the fall and we had a very awkward conversation about shopping in Marseille. I really admire her as a writer and that felt like a really lame thing to say in the context of this party so instead I went for platitudes. Her books feel rare in that they succeed in being really thoughtful and creative cultural criticism which feels both precise and non-alienating. In an interview with LARB about Artless, she gestures at this very thing:

“I’m super fascinated by the idea that there’s some sort of a sweet spot with precision. I think when people are writing, there’s the style that tries to reach everyone. That’s maybe more the realm of genre fiction, or like mainstream airport novels—they’re not reaching a specific audience. It’s for all of us; we can all agree that love is something to aspire towards, you know what I mean? And then there’s this super-precise alt style of, like, “I worked at this store and wore these clothes” and it gets so precise that it isolates readers. People will think, Oh, well, I can’t relate because I have no idea what that person’s lifestyle is compared to mine. And then there are moments where the super precise feels universal.”

Anyway, in the book, she describes going to the Casey Legler x Rachel Comey fashion week dinner which was written up in NY Mag. I know a lot about this because another ex-friend of mine, who works at the UN, was obsessed with Casey Legler and their wife, Siri May, who used to work as a UN program coordinator. She wasn’t obsessed with them in an admiring kind of way. It was about how they tried to make UN work seem glamorous and high fashion. In Stagg’s retelling, Alex Auder (basically a Warhol factory nepo baby, if such a thing could exist) leads a “neoliberal meditation manifestation.” She guides the guest through visualization: “You are now dissolving into little bits of human capital.”

I’m really obsessed with this one poem by Alice Fulton, called “Claustrophilia.” I keep reading it over and over again.

“Moxibustion,” writes Alice Fulton in The New Yorker, “is an ancient Chinese medical treatment like acupuncture […] In moxibustion, an herb, traditionally mugwort, is burned very close to the skin as a means of relieving pain. The idea is to get as close as possible while carefully avoiding any painful contact.”