Inhabiting the Assembly
On soft fascination, emergent time, and everything else that makes its way in
“…how the heav’ns and earth / Rose out of chaos” (1.9-10, Paradise Lost)
It’s September (hi, hello). In June, I thought about writing, and in July, and in August. Then June, July, and August—the hottest summer on global record—came and went. I want to say anxiety or work got in the way of writing, something respectable and understandable, but the truth is that the summer was full of opportunities to be creative, most of which I took, none of which resulted in one of these.
Truthfully, writing these essays can sometimes take it out of me. I want to be diligent about my sources, so I do a lot of research. I want to reach people, so I spend a lot of time experimenting with different ways of sharing the essays with others (and vexing about the intersections between this effort and social media). In order for the writing to be any good at all, the world also has to exist, and I have to spend time in it, time which is rarely compensated in the monetary sense. Most importantly, I’m choosing to write about The Great Dread™, so I have to allow myself to experience it: the increasing frequency and severity of the effects of the climate crisis on our world and our psyches. I want to write to those who feel despair about the future and I want to write about the forces that are shaping and profiting off of that despair, not only to better understand them but to create, out of thin air, space to reimagine things entirely.
And I have a job. Two, actually. And I don’t get paid to do this. And I don’t know how I feel about having paid subscribers–the “occasional special posts exclusively for paid subscribers” kind at least–not because I really think it matters that much, but because it feels, on principle, at odds with the ethos of these essays. And even though these essays are a tiny blip in the universe, they’re my blip, and it matters to me how they exist.
July 15th. Everyone is cloistered / in their barns and sheds. I came out to the field / to write and watched birds instead.
First defined in the 1980s by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, professors of environmental psychology, soft fascination is a passive, open, effortless receptivity and awareness, similar in my mind to the meditative phrase “softening your gaze,” when you let your vision blur. Author Annie Murphy Paul describes it as “a loose associative state in which we’re not focused on any one particular task but are receptive to unexpected connections and insights.” According to the researchers, soft fascination occurs when attention is grabbed without extreme cognitive effort—the opposite of focusing your mental energy on a specific goal or stimulus. Compare taking a walk on a nature trail to walking to the subway to commute to work: one requires a lot of directed attention (traffic, crosswalks, e-bikes, can’t miss the train), and one does not.
Soft fascination is a decidedly anti-capitalist mode—not anti in stance, necessarily (in that it doesn’t take one), but anti by nature. Not only is there no single aim, no specific objective or purpose to build up towards, but it’s a pluralistic way of being in and of itself. It invites everything in, rather than attempting to sort observations into categories like “useful” and “useless.” This summer, in states of soft fascination, I noticed the shape and color of a clutch of grapes in the shade of a beach umbrella on Praia dos Estudantes and the sonic boom of a military helicopter flying low over the cornfields of rural Nebraska for no reason other than the fact that these images were there with me. Because I was on vacation or at an art residency, my task, if I had one in those moments, was simply to be there with these images in return—to notice, observe, and be present with them. The association is Zen-like—accept what’s in front of you and you will find inner peace—but there was anxiety too, an industrial-strength pull somewhere in my stomach that would hit out of nowhere, in the middle of a field or town square, and leave me feeling nauseated and disoriented, as if I had misplaced a very important to-do list.
“Knowing what really happened is more important than deciding who to punish. One suggestion was to ask the client: ‘Are you unsafe, or are you instead uncomfortable, angry, or hurt?’” (Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse)
h. and I talked this morning about the fact that, when asked for permission to miss work for some or another event or personal situation, an employer can tell you, without recourse, that you’re not allowed to take the time off. The infinite possibilities of what your day, as a human being on earth, might contain within it, and someone whose primary relationship to you is dictated by your value to them as a worker can tell you how you can use that time, the single most valuable and utterly finite resource that any of us have, with your only available responses being to accept, protest, or quit, despite the fact that being jobless makes you more or less ineligible for modern life. This fact has become a kind of law, although when considered in and of itself, it sounds, and is, insane. It assumes a mutuality between employer and employee that, in the context of 21st century American capitalism, doesn’t exist. I’ve had friends be refused time off to attend family weddings and students who didn’t even think to ask for it, just came to my 110 class the day their brother died.
The bureaucracy of grief. h. is writing a poem about it. I dream about it—dreams where I’m at a party, always a party, and I need to find someone and I’m searching for them, peering into empty rooms, running down hallways, and everyone around me is hanging out and having fun, no one seems to understand the urgency of the situation, and the person I’m looking for is always just a few steps ahead or not responding to my texts.
Soon, barring catastrophe, h. is going to have the rest of her student loans forgiven. She spent hours and hours on the application, contacting HR departments across the city, gathering the paperwork and necessary materials, working overtime to prove her status as a longtime “public servant,” even though it’s those same agencies and organizations that own all the information she needed, and no one compensated her for her effort, for the emotional and physical toll of forced and prolonged directed attention, beyond pointing at the repayment of what was already, by nature of the task, declared to be hers, anyway.
As with the writers’ strike, workers are told to believe that it's their withholding of labor that is the cause of the harm—loss of jobs related to the industry, the postponement of major movie premieres, breakdowns in healthcare and benefits, all because of what the workers are doing, as if what the workers are doing is happening in a vacuum, void of reason.
August 8th. What happens when I take my hand off / the top that spins the world?
A few days ago, L. used the phrase “emergent time” to describe an unordered, untasked way of being: sitting on the couch staring into space, gardening, stretching, playing with your hair, watching TV. One of the great downsides of living here and now is the cultural diminishment of this time. Just imagine trying to ask your boss for a day off to “emerge.”
The misalignment is: we don’t know how to exist like this, yet we’ve grown so good at it.
Before our red-eye to Germany, I drank a $25 glass of red wine at an airport bar and then, on the plane, I took two Benadryl and, amazingly, slept all the way until Europe. Increasingly, the older I get, the more unsettled I am on airplanes. I thought about this during the reading group last weekend. T. talked about how she’s not a nervous flyer because it’s one of the few situations where she knows she’s not in control at all—describing exactly the source, reason, and cornerstone of my anxiety about precisely the same situation. There’s irony in how I feel, I know, but it was as if we were each staring into the same body of still water and seeing only our own reflections there.
Soften the gaze.
Somehow, the future doesn’t actually exist as much as it is an assemblage of present moments coming to fruition, simultaneously and together, in the then, which is only different from the now when it comes to where we’re positioned on the timeline. But I was taught that the future was something I could mold, could shape, by planning it out in advance. Years later, I can’t remember the last day I spent fully, wholly immersed in a day’s own cues–a day without plans or forethought, without anxiety about direction, free of the gravity of other experiences, other potentials, other shoulds.
Softer.
We generally understand that the past, the long-ago one, was a time when human beings were wholly susceptible to the power of nature. Nothing we did, no evolution we were able to undergo, is graspable without accounting for nature’s influence on us. It also might be argued that the Western understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature in recent history—namely, since the explosion of capital and industry—has falsely assumed a mastery of, a power over: humans in control. What does the third age hold? In writing about precarity, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes “the condition of being vulnerable to others” as the true status of our time. Certain ideas, once fixed in our imagination, become fluid, mutable, affected, though in truth they were this way from the start. Current-day climate crises are described as unique events, but perhaps our memory, and our egos, are partly to blame for that perspective.
Softer.
Looking at one’s phone does feel purposeful, even though it’s almost always without reason at all.
“Like a giant bulldozer, capitalism appears to flatten the earth to its specifications. But all this only raises the stakes for asking what else is going on–not in some protected enclave, but rather everywhere, both inside and out” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World).
It’s cooling down now; the record-breaking heat of summer has dissipated, although it will undoubtedly show back up in unnaturally warm October days and frost-bitten magnolias in April. In June, Canadian wildfire smoke broke records here and across both countries. Yesterday, New York City experienced its wettest September day in recorded history. The language of records that we have used, historically, doesn’t have the capacity to describe, too, the perpetual undoing of them. That is something we must grow accustomed to.
h. and I went to the park at the height of the storm. The lake had flooded its banks. All the rentable kayaks and paddle boats, tied together for the season, were nearly adrift over the concrete platform at the east edge of the water. On the south side, mallards and swans swam over drowned grass and dirt, dunking under the water over and over, foraging for displaced greens, bugs, worms. A ruby-crowned kinglet—a migrating songbird on their way from Canada to Central America, who flew all night through the downpour to land, briefly, here in the city—hid under a patch of leaves and preened, shaking tiny drops of water from their feathers.
Writing prompt:
Go outside; go anywhere. Bring a notebook with you, and a pen. Write “field notes” on the top of the page. Once you land wherever it is you’re going to land, look around. Smell whatever is in the air, or smell the air itself, if you can. Hear what there is to hear. Really listen to it. Then write it all down. Let it all in. Put everything you sense into words, or as much as you can. Do this again the next day, and then do it the day after that. Do not hold back. Do not prejudge what kinds of observations “belong” or “fit” or “work” with the other observations you’re taking down. Do not decide in advance what to write. Do not “speak with your hand over your mouth” (Donna Masini, in workshop.) Whatever is there with you, whatever it is, belongs on the page. Put it there. Do not read what you wrote. For days, do not read it.
Then, one day, do. Read it all. This is your nature poem.
Speaking of nature poems, I’m teaching two nature writing workshops with the Hudson River Park next month—Thursday, October 12th and Thursday, October 19th, from 6:30-7:30 pm. The event description is here. No previous experience needed!
I’ll also be at the 462 Halsey Community Farm from 12-2 pm on Sunday, October 8th for a poems-in-the-garden event. The first half of is a community writing workshop, so bring your notebook; the second half will have an open mic and featured readings from Meagan Washington, Cat Wei, Jasmine Reid, and myself.
Hope to see you.
The “soft fascination” describes also wu wei of Taoism, experiencing dissociation from the surface self. It is a supreme action, which allows friction to flow away.