Just a warning that this post contains mention of conflict, war and suicide. If you are feeling tender, this might not be the right essay for you.
Audio Version:
“Well, we deserved it,” the bearded man declared over his coffee mug. I was on the other side of the dark wood counter, the restaurant bustling with regulars who normally would have their head buried in the Sa
n Francisco Chronicle or the occasional Oakland Tribune. This day was different.
“I just moved from there a few days ago,” I mumbled, restraining my rising rage. I tried to adhere to one of the cardinal rules of waiting tables – avoid arguing with the customers. It wasn’t that I disagreed with him – a year or two later, I would be blocking the on-ramp to the Bay Bridge in protest of the so-called “War on Terror'' –but at that moment I thought 'take a beat, dude.'
Being a subpar waitress, I knew my tenure was limited, but a mix of grief and disbelief bit into my throat rendering me mute anyway, so I kept my mouth shut and poured the coffee as directed. I was the captive audience, expected to nod along.
But the elementary school maxim, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” rumbled in my head as the especially vocal man continued on with his analysis from his safe distance arguing to no one in particular that our Middle East foreign policy was at fault for the Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Later I would become fixated on the stories of the regular, everyday people, the smallfolk you might call them, who had little say in American foreign policy. Michael Richards, the young Black artist of Caribbean descent who decided to sleep over in his 92nd floor studio rather than trekking back to Queens or all the people who had stopped into Century 21, the discount department store, and survived because they were a few minutes late to work.
Earlier that day, my housemate roused me from sleep. “Wake up. You have to come see this,” she said softly. It was 9 a.m. Eastern, 6 a.m. Pacific Time. I had been living in her house a mere ten days, renting a room while my college friend was in Brazil. Shaking sleep from my eyes, it took me a minute to remember where I was and to understand what I was looking at, Flight 175, hitting the World Trade Center’s South Tower, just minutes after the first plane hit.
Near strangers, the two of us watched in silence, then she asked if I knew anyone who worked in the towers. “I don't think so,” I said.
In a state of shock, I boarded the 72R bus for my shift at a restaurant just north of Ashby Avenue. As I leaned my head against the window, the car dealerships and furniture stores lining San Pablo Avenue blurred to an indistinct haze.
Despite my aptitude for complex math, the infinite combinations of breakfast orders left me flustered. Even on a good day, I found it challenging to remember the minutiae of customer preferences, especially in Berkeley, where everyone seemed to have an absurd amount of them. This was the height of the Atkins diet where health-conscious people unironically ordered half-and-half lattes with their avocado omelets.
Earlier that year, the Columbia Space Shuttle had disintegrated upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and a massive earthquake killed over 20,000 people in the Indian state of Gujarat. But on this day, all other catastrophes were put aside as the breakfast regulars buzzed with caffeine and commentary digesting the morning’s events.
Mostly the restaurant was empty. Some of the regulars took absent-minded bites of toast while pontificating about foreign policy, while others stared blankly into space, periodically startling and shaking their heads.
I have read that using the sentence construction "I feel" followed by a noun or pronoun, as in "I feel like a failure," rather than "I feel" followed directly by an adjective, as in I feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, is a way of bypassing emotion. It is instead a description of thought or interpretation. That day I felt scared and confused.
The Human Heart
If you know me, you know I believe that Game of Thrones changed my life, or, more accurately A Song of Ice and Fire, the ongoing fantasy series by George R.R. Martin.
In my twenties through my mid-thirties, I rarely read fiction. When I did, it was solely for erudition, like the other no-fun time I only watched art films and documentaries. Now, I can laugh at myself, but back then, I didn't realize how much these virtuous media diets stemmed from a deep sense of social inadequacy. Like a lot of working-class kids who study at elite institutions, I always felt like I was playing catchup to my more affluent, worldly, cosmopolitan peers who were exposed to things like the names of classical composers at a young age. I can still picture my flushed face after a date corrected my pronunciation of Dvořák.
At 35, I had my first autistic burnout. I didn't know that was what was happening at the time--I would have avoided years of suffering if I had--only that my brain stopped working. It was like Mario Savio said in his infamous 1964 UC Berkeley Sit-In address: Sproul Hall Sit-in Address given on December 2, 1964:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.
In this case, it wasn't the proletariat, but my nervous system calling for a General Strike. I won't bore you with the details of the downward spiral that followed, but fast forward a year later, I found myself in Upstate New York working in the document vault of a pharmaceutical company. At the time, I harbored some aspiration I would become a librarian, but mostly I was just trying to keep my head above water and calm my jacked-up nervous system.
Most of my days were spent in a cold, windowless cement room filing and tracking work logs and procedural manuals, so they could be pulled in the case of a regulatory inspection. It was rule-based, methodical, and boring--and part of me loved it. My previous jobs all required mass amounts of creative energy, but this job only used part of my brain. With the rest of it, I gobbled up audiobooks.
It was likely the TV show that got me started with ASOIF (as it is lovingly called by its fandom), but soon I was all in, and what better distraction from a boring job than a story full of gritty politics, ice zombies, and, yes, dragons.
For those who haven't read the series, Game of Thrones is the first book, which establishes the low fantasy world of Planetos and, in it, the plight of our main characters -- Eddard (Ned), Jon, Dany, Bran, Tyrion, Sansa, and Arya, among others. Midway through the first book and the suspicious death of King Robert Baratheon, the continent of Westeros is facing a political succession crisis (again), plus the threat of some terrifying ice zombies to the North that few on the continent believe exist. By the end of book one, Ned (our seeming hero) is dead, magic has reawakened, and Winter is Coming…
A fervent pacifist and war resister, Martin says he uses graphic, gory depictions of war and violence, including murders, executions, torture, and sexual violence in his books because those things exist in the real world. Martin doesn't shy away from the brutality of war. Similarly, he allows good guys to die, because that too happens.
In the second and third books, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, five men fight for the Iron Thone, the titular and symbolic Westerosi seat of power. The fourth book, A Feast for Crows, references what happens after war; the land as carrion-covered corpse, with the smallfolk--peasants and commoners--displaced from their villages and holdfasts, trying to survive while being terrorized by broken, lawless men.
"Broken men," says Septon Meribald to Brienne, are the "simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house they were born until the day some lord came around to take them off to war...They've heard the songs and stories, and go off with eager hearts...”
Until one day...
They look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground...
(from Brienne V, A Feast for Crows)
Part of what I love so much about A Song of Ice and Fire is that it never reduces war to a Manichean parody with good guys on the right side of evil, monsters to the left (or vice-versa depending on your POV). Even within a single character, Martin presents conflicting motives. Jaime Lannister, for instance, a golden-haired, white-cloak-wearing knight who in the hands of a lesser writer would be the swaggering hero, begins his character arc by pushing a 7-year-old boy out a window.
Later we find out that Mad King he stabbed in the back was about to burn all the people of the capital alive. We come to understand that Jaime has been buried under the expectations of his father, his sister, and his conflicting vows all his life.
So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.
(from Catelyn VII, A Clash of Kings)
We see Jaime lose a hand and with it, what little pride he had left. This understanding doesn’t absolve Jaime of his crimes, it just makes him seem human.
Jaime is as Martin would say, grey, and is likely to remain so (the book series is notoriously incomplete). “I like grey characters, says Martin, “Fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains...And when I look around, I don't see pure white shining heroes and absolutely black villains, I see a lot of flawed human beings who have it in them to be heroes or villains; it's a matter of the choices that they make in crucial periods in their lives, in moments of stress and emotional turmoil."
I FEEL...
In my junior year of college, someone accidentally spilled boiling water on me. I can still picture the sight of my skin falling off in my hands. Luckily, I do not remember the pain of those second-degree burns, which was incredible, or much from the months-long recovery process. That's the way of most physical pain--you literally cannot remember it.
When members of the Hamas paramilitary group attacked and killed 1,200 Israeli concertgoers on October 7th, I was recovering from a shoulder injury, the second most physically painful experience of my life, overwhelmed by the kind of pain that blocks all sense.
In part because it hurt to scroll, I missed a lot in those initial days of the Israeli-Gaza conflict. By the time I did return to social media, after Israel had begun its Gaza offensive, the opprobrium had hit full tilt, with some people posting "From the River to the Sea," with others asking: “Do you even know what river and which sea you are talking about?”
Now, months later, with the daily sight of Palestinians massacred, starved, dismembered, shot, buried alive, denied aid, and otherwise treated in ways that lack all proportion to the events of October 7th (leaving aside whether or not Hamas's actions were justified), it's not only the conflict which horrifies me in every way possible, but the secondary conflicts arising among my neighbors, friends, and peers.
When Aaron Bushnell immolated himself, some were quick to call him a hero; others called him crazy. What I saw was an expression of helplessness. No space to mourn. No space for feelings. No space to process 30,000 Gazan deaths. A 24-hour news cycle that on the one hand can’t stop talking about a Trump-Biden rematch, and on the other hand, continues to remind US voters that because of our archaic electoral system, most of our votes don't count anyway.
I once had a successful poet tell me to stop trying to sound smart in my writing. It wasn't a kind thing to say; it also wasn't wrong. In time, I came to understand what she meant, or at least what I think she meant. My need to prove myself was blocking my ability to feel. All the social theory I studied in college and grad school had loaded my vocabulary with words ending in -ization and -ism, a false projection of mastery and a way of speaking about things at a distance.
I've come to call these words "zombie words" because of the way they flatten complex histories into mechanical, zombie-like processes. These days I try to use words that hew closer to lived reality, to tell complex stories of complicated humans and grey characters including my own complicated stories and the stories of other people who sometimes make good, sometimes bad, sometimes really, truly terrible choices. Zombie words have their place, but so often I see them used as a kind of pretense of control, the intellect overcompensating for what the heart cannot bear or acknowledge.
I don't have much more to say this week. Words fail me. I have no cogent analysis beyond ceasefire now and no idea what should happen the next day. What I do know is that I feel...
anxious
sad
&
scared
And if you feel those emotions too…I get you.
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