I had been writing this thot pudding installment on rereading my boy David Graeber in the midst of *waves arms around.* It was about, broadly, violence, imagination, structural power, Graeber himself, and “writing” “fiction.” But once I crossed the fifteen-hundred-word mark on it, I thought: nope. It was good and interesting. But I didn’t and don’t want to send something long and dense out into the world right now.
October passed for me in a blur of teaching, writing, travel, weddings, and returns to rapid-response organizing and its digital tools. Which is to say…I re-downloaded Slack and Signal and my brain is the worse for it 😔. The world being what it is, I spent a good amount of time feeling like that meme of the cow staring at the ocean. In a quest for serotonin, I ate a perfect cardamom-fig sticky bun, thrifted some sweaters, listened to this Ethel Cain cover of Britney about ninety times. Watched Killers of the Flower Moon (incredible, magisterial) and thought about it for days after, a reaction I haven’t had to seeing a film since Saint Omer. And I just finished Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt, and while I will not pretend it was an easy romp of a read— it was her doctoral thesis, and should def be no one’s introduction to Arendt— it gave me something valuable nonetheless.
I was especially struck by Arendt’s framing of a certain conception of love as originating, not from appetite or craving, but from what she calls memory — a state of pure consciousness and communion with the divine— and from our earliest memories of having been loved ourselves. The world being what it is, we don’t experientially know a true and perfect justice, Arendt explains, but we nonetheless have a deep instinct for what justice is. She (and Augustine) argue that this knowledge arises from pure consciousness, and it is our faculty of memory that allows us to access it. Our ideals of love and justice come from sensing the world as it could have been.
The book of Arendt’s that made a tremendous impression on me years ago was The Human Condition, which she’d first wished to title Amor Mundi — love of the world. Amor mundi was a phrase Arendt first encountered when reading Augustine, and her framing of it is not love in any sense we’re accustomed to. It is the challenge of what it means to first accurately see the world, with all its horrors and failings, and then commit ourselves to it, to care for it, nonetheless. It is a provocation to meet each other across chasms of difference, as human beings, to commit ourselves to the world with understanding, criticality, and steadfastness.
I paged through The Human Condition this morning and landed upon Arendt’s meditations on forgiveness and vengeance, which are too long to reproduce here, but haunted me. I was left turning this one passage over, like some strange and terrible koan:
It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.
Many of the artists and thinkers I admire have what I percieve to be amor mundi pulsating within their work, even as they wrote about real evil and degradation and alienation—Morrison, Roy, Brand, Baldwin, Oliver, Eliot, El Sadaawi, the list goes on.
Days ago, I walked around Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, feeling tired and so goth, and thought of this one Marie Howe poem, and felt something light up and glow in my ribcage. For me, my own relation to amor mundi, with each passing year, is more and more inflected by a certain kind of mourning, but one that deepens the love, and one with its own grace notes, nonetheless.
We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.
N.B.
I had an idea for a reproducible creative action / action for collective grieving of Palestinian life called We Carry Their Names and I wrote it up with my friend Dur e Aziz Amna. It’s here if you want to read it, or participate in its first activation in DC this weekend—feel free to pass on to people who will be in DC this Saturday.
Some good reading: what it takes to choose life over revenge from Ayman Odeh, Rashid Khalidi’s clear-eyed and somber evaluation of the Palestinian question, Astra Taylor’s incredible essay on automation aka how the reports of the takeover of the robots have been greatly exaggerated, and this piece on Margareta Magnusson that offers up three steps to “age exuberantly.”
A new first for me: I was on TV, lol. Thanks to the good people at The Tamron Hall Show for being so great and spotlighting All This Could Be Different.
For writers of color: there are a few spots left on the two online mini-seminars I’m teaching through Kundiman on writing intimacy aka writing sex, and on writing parental figures. Nov 4 and Nov 18 respectively, priced affordably, structured to be generative; come take a class with me!
My paperback book tour for All This Could Be Different ended a couple of weeks ago, with a dreamy sojourn at American Grammar in Philadelphia (go check them out if you’re local). In closing, I wanted to share this short and sweet interview with the lovely Anson Tong at The Millions from press tour; the last answer, perhaps, gestures towards how I (still) feel about the present time.
Take care of yourself and yours,
STM
I love your Millions interview, Sarah. It and this piece reminded me of that phrase from St. Paul, "in sorrow but always rejoicing." Thank you for sharing.