two months ago, i stopped reading. i went from reading several essays a day, a book a week, and who knows how much other random content on the internet an hour — to basically nothing. i even got off instagram. a weird thing for me, but i didn’t want to read hot takes or think about possible solutions to problems that seem cyclical, unsolvable, exhausting. i just wanted to process. buy time. be with myself and remember my body.
i started laying on the grass for fifteen minutes a day and staring at the sky. most of the time i couldn’t last more than five, but sometimes, it worked, and i would become entranced. time fell away. the trees and clouds reminded me of my smallness, and i felt a little bit okay.
in that smallness, i remembered that i don’t need to be stressed about producing and commissioning regular content for new archives, because the world is literally and metaphorically, systemically, spiritually, all the “-lys” on fire. and no one cares that much about a goddamn reading list. and this project just isn’t going to be what we envisioned when we started, because, well. everything. the least we can do is be kind to ourselves.
anyway. here’s a reading list i managed to make, only because i encountered some beautiful things that i was actually able to process the last couple of weeks. hope to get another one together soon, but you know. i’m not making any promises i can’t keep. —satpreet
1. author unknown.
A yellow bumpersticker in the rear window of a red car: “HOW AM I DRIVING? HOW DOES AN ENGINE EVEN WORK? HOW CAN A LOVING GOD CAUSE SUCH AGONY”2. Bettina Judd.
“what it sounds like is a bird breaking small bones against glass. the least of them, a sparrow, of course. you’re about to serve dinner and this is the scene. blame the bird, the impertinent windows, try not to think of the inconvenience of blood splattering violet in the dusk. how can you eat after this? do not think of whom to blame when the least of us hurdles into the next moment. a pane opening into another. the least of us spoiling your meal.”3. Jesmyne Ward.
“During the pandemic, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children, terrified of the lurch of their feet, the lurch that accompanies each press that restarts the heart, the jerk of their pale, tender soles, terrified of the frantic prayer without intention that keens through the mind, the prayer for life that one says in the doorway, the prayer I never want to say again, the prayer that dissolves midair when the hush-click-hush-click of the ventilator drowns it, terrified of the terrible commitment at the heart of me that reasons that if the person I love has to endure this, then the least I can do is stand there, the least I can do is witness, the least I can do is tell them over and over again, aloud, I love you. We love you. We ain’t going nowhere.”4. manuel arturo abreu.
“Institutional memory mines the personal funereal to justify dominant narratives in an ongoing violent revisionism. Tears become a kind of national discursive fuel, and mourning can engender both stasis (inactivity, quietism, equilibrium) and resistance (entropic tendencies, creative destruction, service to the ineffable). One can be paralyzed by sorrow or radicalized, faced by the ineffable void of time and the failure of language it engenders as we grieve the world as it is, what was lost, and what could be.”5. Adrienne Maree Brown.
“find the front lines of humanity inside your own life and system. advance them.”
