my idols are dead and my enemies are in power (but my faith in love is still devout)
Hi all. Look who the cat dragged in eh! I have decided that 2017 is, if nothing else, going to be the year I get back into livejournal and I don’t let go.
As you all already quite amply know, 2016 has been a shitfuck tyrefire needle ravine of a year. It seems like, in addition to the global political and environmental hellscape that’s unrolling into vision like a fucked scroll of the apocalypse, almost everyone I know has been beset by just gruellingly harsh life shit, and I’ve been no exception. There’s been a bunch of stuff (hey remember when I got mugged at gunpoint? haha that seems like a more innocent time now), but, the stand-outs have been being in the final stretches of my PhD leading up to handing my thesis in at the start of November, and, hardest of all, losing Kasper in August.
I’m gonna give you a bit of a round up of how things have been since then, and, my plans for the coming year:
Travelling to Bodø for his funeral and sharing that experience with Little Alex, Susie, Tukru and Baby Alex, and of course with Kasper’s fiancé Casey, was one of the hardest, saddest, most perversely joyful and loving, weirdly beautiful and profound experiences of my life, and, the whatsapp group we’ve kept up since has been a daily source of support and love - as well as, at times, an excoriating window straight into other people’s pain - and I’ve been so grateful for their continued friendship and guidance.
As for Kasper himself. I just, wish I had the words for what he meant to me, and to everyone he met, and to the world - and most of all just in of himself. Right from the moment I heard it’s been.. a feeling beyond words. I’ve seen other people’s beautiful messages and I have wanted to be able to offer something similar, but, every time I try it’s just, utterly unworthy. Nothing I could say about you Kasper would hold the faintest of candles to you (when it comes down to virtue and truth - or anything else). (I find myself taking refuge in the words of the songs, the references...)
The nearest I could get was the dedication in my thesis, when it was finally done..
I wish I could give you something about you Kasper, and not just what you were to me.
But even if I manage to say nothing else, I can stress the sheer scale of the difference you made to those around you, to those all across the world who felt alone, the queer the broken the mental kids, you were their saviour, you were always always there: the intimate best friend of a thousand diamond-bright weirdoes, never diminishing your love and understanding and personal wit no matter how far it spread.
As soon as I got back from Norway I went down to London to be with my best friend Dewi, for him to read my thesis and help me edit it, because we have a longstanding sort of mutual proofing deal, and because he is a truly humblingly wonderful friend. While I was there there was a little music festival on the heath right outside his flat, and Belle and Sebastian were playing, and they had always been one of mine and his’s main ‘us’ bands, so, naturally we went - and I had also been thinking of B&S again because of Kasper - remember the video of him dancing with them! It must have been just after Dear Catastrophe Waitress? He posted it on LJ. I wish I still could see that video. Oh! Remember his fucking LJ icons - and his tags! What a work of unparalleled art there was in each one. (Yet another bloody reason to drag this place back). Anyway, before we went Dewi finally put his foot down and insisted that I listen to Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance - he’d been telling me how good Nobody’s Empire was for months and months and months and I had kept putting it off. But when I listened, it was, a revelation, I ended up listening to it on repeat for weeks over and over.
Click to viewIt felt to me like everything about Kasper’s compassion and love and brave beautiful relentless soul; it felt like everything I wanted for him - for the world - but that would never happen now. It felt like all that was being ripped away as this horrible tarnished culture became darker and crueller by the day. Yet still this kind of love - this kind of understanding and caring for people and respecting the innate dignity and beauty of every human life - could shine through, could persist. I don’t know. Just, it was so important to have that revelation and then straight after to see it live: standing in the crowd (singing dirty and loud for the people’s emancipation) in the rain, with one beloved friend dancing by my side and another gone forever, tears streaming down my face, singing my heart out.
To a very great extent pushing on with the thesis was a lifeline for me, a way to run from my grief. If I was writing 8 hours or more every day I wasn’t wandering round the house picking up objects that he had touched - that had previously belonged to him even - in mute disbelief that his presence could be gone from the world forever. He was such a physically embodied person, the way he talked, the way he moved, his facial expressions and gestures, his tone of voice, his laugh - I can still hear and see these things now in my mind - and in those first days and weeks they were nearly constant. I miss these traces now they’re fainter and less often. Writing, and cutting, and rephrasing, it all was a way not to exist in reality. I didn’t have to mourn him, and, I didn’t have to pay attention to the awful scary shadowplay of politics, I could just keep my head down in that lonely silo and wear myself out. It felt awful, it felt like time itself was on fire, but it was better than the alternative. As soon as I handed in all of that was gone, in a flash, overnight - and it didn’t feel like a triumph, it felt like the most abject, ignominious defeat. And the deafening roar of the world came crashing back in in that instant. November and December were the hardest times, in terms of my mental health, in terms of deep sustained unrelenting despair and fear and shame, that I can remember - and I’m not being funny but I wasn’t exactly a stranger to those things before. When I handed in, everything I couldn't bear to face before came crashing down on me all at once.
I kept feeling like, time itself was this huge awful mouth, this devouring fire, underneath everything that you love, under the basics of bearable existence itself, consuming everything so fast before you can even reach for it, before you can blink, the rights you thought were yours forever, the friends you loved, life on earth as we know it, urgently desperately being chewed into nothing. By sheer chance a good friend of mine also recommended me the new Anohni album and the song 4 Degrees, and, it went straight to the core of me just like Nobody's Empire had: I listened to it on repeat all day every day, it wasn't just chiming with the world's state and my mental health: it was the world's state and my mental health.
Just days after I handed in Trump came to power and on the same day the sheer staggering scale of the environmental disaster unfolding was in the news - the Arctic is a net polluter of itself now! this is how scientists think Venus ended up being a literally unliveable hellscape! HAHAHAHA - and at the same time I was told my PhD Viva (like an oral exam on your thesis) would be really soon (on January the 5th) and I was supposed to sit an actual exam defending my revolting fiddling while Rome burns behaviour of lounging around writing about murderers for the last 4 years - and worst of all, to give a convincing impression of someone who thinks there will be a future and that that future will look the same as the past, and that I have a career plan for that future! AHAHAHAHAHAH HA HA HA. HA. I felt like I was losing my mind completely. At exactly the point my future was supposed to be beginning, stepping out into the ‘real’ world to forge my career, at last knowing what I wanted to do in life and able to say I’m quite good at it, all of that was rendered obsolete - worse than obsolete; rendered having always been a morally culpable folly - overnight. The world felt literally over.
But, I guess nothing lasts forever, not even the end of the world. On Christmas Eve Eve I was still full of panic and terror and this deep awful sense of urgent shame, like the boat was sinking and I was standing about NOT bailing it out. But on Christmas Eve itself something in my head changed and I began to feel different: I felt more insulated. I felt less raw. I had honestly been spending every day looking at everything around me - trains, litter on the street, strangers’ faces - as if it was all already gone but just didn’t know it, as if we were all already dead, as some kind of grotesque enchanted ghost ship, but also, as if this would be the last time I would ever see these things because surely any minute now it would all be snatched away. It was like that immediate grief feeling: picking up objects and being horrified by how they’re still there when everything is different, everything is over. It really has, in its latter half especially, been a year of grief upon grief upon grief - mourning everything you knew, mourning everything you wanted for the world and for those that you love and for your community, mourning the future, mourning decency, mourning hope. (And of guilt. The deep deep awful complicity.) It felt like all objects and methods were hollow, empty: the forms persisted but they were utterly drained of significance, and yet, no-one else seemed to know it yet. And yet someone on Christmas Eve I suddenly felt like a living person again. I can’t explain it. There’s no reason for it. I was fully set to have a damage-limitation Christmas of trying to be the least of a burden to Gareth as I possibly could, and instead, felt our Christmas together as the most important joyful little bubble of kindness. And it stopped. The world stopped. I mean, it didn't really, but, just for a little while, we all collectively agreed to pretend in peace and love and sharing and goodwill again - and to stop the onslaught of constant terrible terrible, harrowing news. Twitter was all about roast dinners for a change! Christmas is always a hard time for those without family, through death or estrangement, or those with family they find hard to be around, and, all the queer* and trans and mental and disabled people, and, many many others. But for me this year it finally felt like what I had been desperately needing for so long: a collective agreement to press pause on the world - a collective anything, in a world of weaponised individualism.
Idk. Since then, I’ve been trying to see things more in light of ‘what it takes to do a thing’. Ironically what I need was less perspective! Because, objectively, it’s true, life on earth is under threat in a totally unprecedented way, and, fucksake, aaaall of the fascism. But, if I feel I need to do something (as I do) then I need to make it possible for myself to actually do that. What things do I need to do in my own life to make me as functional as possible, and, to enable me to take the kinds of steps to undertake support and activism? My self-loathing about my thesis and the way I’ve spent the last 4 years has transmuted into something more accepting and constructive. I need to take the good parts of the way I was feeling (the urgent need to make the world better however I am able, to try and care for others, to try and reduce my negative impact) and add that to a realistic and kind understanding of what will be needed to do that instead of berating myself. Even if I still hate the bloody thesis, and, I wish I’d been making a material difference to those suffering instead, I can also see that, insofar as I was able to by writing and academically-organising I did some good rather than harm, and also, for me, writing and sharing ideas about crime is a huge part of who I now am and a thing that I need to allow myself to do in order to keep my brain working and my mental health on some kind of a reasonable keel. Not the 8+hrs a day working to exhaustion kind of writing, but the considering of ideas and sharing and discussing them with others. It doesn’t make me a bad person or an enemy to resistance that this is a part of me and a thing I need. It’s like, apart from in the crisis points, when you’re writing a thesis you need to take time out to do others things, or else your work will suffer. So too, I need to not try and throw myself 5000% into ~making a difference~ because I will burn out immediately. But, also like writing a thesis, it feels insurmountably big for so much of the time; likewise I was sunk in despair of being able to fight back against all the horror in the world at all. But, for the thesis, my supervisor said to me ‘just try and write 500 words a day most days’ and it will add up. Sometimes you wont be able to write even 5 words. Sometimes you wont write for weeks. Sometimes you will write way way more than 500. But if you just keep showing up and cracking on with that small thing every day you will end up with a thesis. And she was right - in fact I ended up with so much these I had to cut like 40,000 words which is like two masters dissertations or another half thesis. So, what I need to do is to find a way to show up day in day out in making a difference, and it will add up. I’m making some starting points already. It may not be much but it doesn’t have to be, it just has to keep on happening.
So far, I’ve joined a Marx reading group (HAHAHA lol lol lol I know, but I did it mostly to be able to regularly meet other leftists irl - a thing I have had a surprising amount of trouble with for some reason so far - not because sitting around discussing Capital is gonna save the world itself ok, cut me some slack), I spent advent donating small amounts of time or money most days to organisations doing good, I’ve been reading about and talking to others and attended a meeting about radical DIY education, I’ve been looking up volunteering opportunities and selected a couple to apply for, I’m doing Veganuary again this coming year and going to use this as a springboard to radically reduce the amount of animal products I consume going forward, I’m setting up a true crime reading group (that ones just for funs) and looking into writing letters to prisoners (and to more pals because I really want to connect with people more) - and of course continuing to maintain a postgrad fb group to share support advice and resources, which, I often take my own contribution to for granted and dismiss but is not nothing it is something - in fact apart from the (cursed challace of the) thesis itself it’s the thing I’ve done in the 4 years of my PhD that I’m the most proud of, and definitely the one that will have helped others the most. These are all small things but if I just keep it going and keep on trying and showing up and making mistakes but getting back up again then all hope is not lost forever.
(Just as I wrote that a very lovely friend of mine turned up in the café to meet me - perfect timing! She’s left now but as usual she has filled me with hope. I’m so happy that in spite of losing a truly titanically nourishing pal in Kasp, my life is still filled with people who enthuse me and inspire me and who give their care and kindness to the world unstintingly.)
As I said on the Postgrad group that I run:
Given the absolutely state of the world, sadly, the new year wont be peaceful, and, it wont have much goodwill towards all mankind, but I wish for you that it will be connected, comradely and compassionate, filled with companionship and love and discoveries and ideas and solidarity and cute animals and nice stationery and action and relaxation and friendship. ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️
I’m ending the year, not exactly by any means hopeful for the future, but more ready to defend it and more thankful than ever every bit of resilience and kindness that makes it through society’s fine mesh of cruelty.
(And grateful for Bob’s Burgers, my go-to soothing TV that has seen me through the worst of times.)SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave