from Amanda Goldblatt: The Figurative Comes of Use (November 6, 2024)

The Figurative Comes of Use (November 6, 2024)

Now when people died of casual fascist disease – by which I mean murder on purpose and murder by collateral – I wondered if it would feel like it did when people died of old age, as if it were their time, as if it was the order of things. If we would watch the loudest queerest crippest activists get put down and understand the sense it made in the world we’d made: that it followed its own internal logic; that it could be explained; you don't have to love something to understand it. In fact it is in my experience far simpler to understand the flatness and heat of hate. 

I did not feel anger anymore and I did not feel urgency; I simply felt that I would stay on the figurative road I had broached a while back. I had for a time sat down on its shoulder when I needed to. I had for a time found different manners of safe houses, rented with my excess advantage and at times with my loss of same. I understood that it was once more time to expose myself to the elements, that I needed to hear the gravel spit from tires, that I needed to get behind something and in front of someone and search with my dulling vision the horizon for any kind of promise or prognostication. It is always sunset when I'm here.

The day after the election, for quite some time, no one showed up to my fiction class. I was not pretending business as usual. Rather I was hoping to open up a hole we could all fall into for the duration, one with pillows to soften the plummet. But instead I sat writing this on my phone, sitting behind that dumb big desk at the front of the room. My thumbs percussing attempted meaning. I had already connected my laptop to the projector which in turn presented the day’s date. My pregnant student had said she would be late today. The bass player had promised he would be there following a pair of absences. The talkative lit scholar was still home sick. The student who smiled and was quiet and wrote about human trafficking—he was often late anyway. The student who was also an administrator was walking a job candidate around. The poet/burlesque performer came and then went. I talked for a time with the bass player once he showed up. He said he didn't want to make anything that wasn't perfect on the page. I asked him if he had ever wanted to be a concert pianist instead of a jazz musician. He smiled enough that I could see he understood. "Well," I said; he left soon after. My student writing about a woman crossing a beach covered in plastic, she arrived silently and worked silently and before leaving ate the candy I had brought from the large bag that we hadn't been able to give out to trick-or-treaters because something had gone wrong with the entry light at the new house which was, like an Invisible City, constantly being ripped apart and put back together, at times by our own hands. My pregnant student showed up. She was seven weeks out from her due date and once she ate a package of Sour Patch Kids she put her mask back on and got down to business. All semester I hadn't written with them. I'd graded or researched or conducted mundane correspondence. At time it was only the two of us and I walked her to the elevator, which was out of order, and then to the other, which was not; together we rode down one floor, sifting to find the smaller triumphs of the evening prior: abortion in Missouri, local support for a millionaire tax. At the elevator’s landing I left her to go to her next class, walked out into the night. I wondered what I had been doing, thinking anything but this could bring me back to the figurative road I had broached a while back, my face turned toward the gallows. I thought again, and also newly, how the Undercommons could accommodate us all.