Meditation 58

14 May 2020

Out of sorts. All sorts. Sort of that and sort of this. Machine for sorting votes. If we vote by mail, he’ll lose, so he threatens the post office. Refers to tests as if they’re pass or fail. Because failure is when you get sick and die. American at the extremest edge, but without any way to let go, go west, go and sort it all out. Endogenous depression responds to medication, but the tearing of the social fabric does not. At some point, it responds only to further tearing. Brian uses “tear” to mean a tear in the screen but also his name. We shed tears, then sort them in affect machines, little concerned at what they mean except distress. Distress is abstract, but so many students experience it. Where is it in your body? I ask my students, and they begin to catalogue their organs, the topography of their faces. You can make a graph with two hands, but there aren’t any reference points, except air. That proves enough as gesture, but ill fits a works cited. All the bars in the state budget point down, a billion dollars down. He uses the word “it” to mean everything he cannot say, and cannot prove. “You know what it is,” he tells the reporter. “It’s been going on for years.” It’s a bad thing, apparently. Can a nation die of one man’s jealousy and rage? M said that the man with the one-eyed dog—S can never remember which of them has one eye—yelled at her as she turned from Hui Kelu onto Hui Iwa. Anger. I say I run into him from time to time, called him a racist once after he muttered about “rag heads.” S says he tries not to run into him, meaning in the car, and Radhika can’t fathom the joke. Most jokes in our house are about not getting them. To get a joke is to laugh now, not later. We sat with N and K and their unused amazon device, demanding that “she” tell us jokes. Then we laughed when R did not. B coaches her on the painting she made late last night of a mountain. It’s not a specific mountain, but there's snow at the top. The man who teaches painting on youtube is wholesome, she says, because he talks about happy houses. B asks me if all the keys are working, but he means on my laptop. Oh happy happy keys.