Greetings, dudes. I've been plugging away lately at my translations of Judith Teixeira, tinkering with a mystery novel, and submitting poems of my own to magazines, so I don't have much to offer you in that regard.
If you're like me, life during the twilight of the COVID-19 pandemic isn't a whole lot different than it was during its more brutal periods last year. When I say twilight, it's less that the pandemic is fading away— as much as everyone wants it to— than that we're living in a permanent half-light. I'm not as housebound as I was, but there's a heavy psychic weight still bearing down on me and everyone I know.
2020 pulled the waxen death mask off the twitching corpse of American society, only for us to find out that a whole lot of our countrymen consider that death mask an ideal reflection of themselves, and they desperately want to keep looking in the mirror. 2021 feels like we're shoveling dirt on the aforementioned corpse, but the knowledge that it's gonna spring out of the grave sooner or later—probably sooner, given the headlong retreat from democracy across the country— is embedded in our exhausted brains. There doesn't seem to be a break in sight from the struggle against fascism, ecological collapse, and generalized human awfulness. There's also a surreal quality to everything that makes day-to-day life even weirder than it has been. That, too, isn't going away anytime soon, if ever. Things are permaweird now.
As grim and circumscribed as things are, though, life is still here to be lived. While the fight to build a better world is endless and tiring, it can also be rewarding in its own right. And then there's 生死大事, the great matter of life and death, to be wrestled with, which is probably the most important task we have. "What is this?" is a question we have to try and answer in every minute of our existence, even when that existence is a total drag and the last thing we want is radical self-inquiry.
So I'll keep on truckin', trying to get to the bottom of things and pushing for a freer, less greedy, less delusional world. Reading the work of Rinzai Zen priest Cristina Moon, organizing with the Democratic Socialists of America, and digging through the Autodidact Project will help. And, since weirdness is (and really always has been) the name of the game, you can soundtrack it with the vast back catalogue of Kawabata Makoto or this rad collaboration between thisquietarmy and Voivod's Away. Whatever you do, don't despair. I can't say things are gonna get better, because they probably won't, but there's something to be said for giving it our best shot. After all, we're all on borrowed time, so we'd better use it well.
See y'all soon.
