To speak sweetly of warmth in 2024 means the speaker is remarkable. Remarkably lucky, remarkably jolly, remarkably luminous with the light of the glowworm which shows the matin to be near – remarkable in their ignorance; wilful or otherwise, to the coldness that pervades every attempt at accessing warmth the innate need for intimacy and connection arouses from us mere mortals; imperfect and inclined to error, stemming from the various sources of disconnection and alienation contemporary society presses upon us, which condition us to believe, intentionally or unintentionally, that the small things are insignificant, and that what we have is not enough.
Who is this brave speaker who dares to hope in spite of it all? Who rejects the cynicism of our age, not the necessary kind that is sceptical of state and government and the interests controlling them, but the kind that is suspicious of love and mistakes it for the thing that inhibits their freedom, loosening their tie with one hand as they hold a gun in the other? Who is it that holds those responsible to account as we are blamed for responding to the situation we’ve been dealt with what little resources we have, and refuses to purchase ideas about ourselves or accept the mysticism and preconceptions they contain as they are packaged to us without consent? It is you and it is me. Because I am still writing and you are still reading, and we haven't given up yet. We walk through the dark together and let ourselves remember we do not have to talk as if we were strangers, about the property market, or how your son and his girlfriend, who do not want to get married and you know it, are going to have a wedding soon; revealing through emotional deduction the guilt we suppress towards Aboriginal Australia while wearing a “Yes” shirt as you plan to buy another car, a better car, and a bigger and better house. This is a dinner table. Somehow the wires crossed and we thought we were at a convention for the short-sighted; a meeting held in a cold building in front of a cold man who sees his wife as an asset to the sum of his possessions. This is a carpenter’s table. Reliable, self-effacing, totally unclaiming to the service it provides for us everyday, so we can sit down and rest our tired elbows on its wooden face and pretend this table isn’t here as we sustain ourselves for the next one. Instead, if we can manage the thought, we can hold hands and share stories and laugh without pretence. We may even eat real food and have a real conversation about the way we feel about all the times we didn’t do this, and how much this hurts.
Did I really come here to have you reject me in my solid form? So you can watch Holokitsch on the 50 Inch in peace, or tell me about the time you went to Greece (again)? This time you change the colour of your husband's socks, and the price of your sunglasses is higher. This time death does not stop for you. Maybe one day you will realise the extent to which you rely on my presence, and how every day of your life, your body, including your brain, has required nourishment. The waste you excrete becomes part of the earth again, and we are all alike in the vulnerability of our nakedness. As easy as our urbanised plumbing system and chemical products let us pretend we are clean and acquit us from any charges of being an animal, because we think and therefore we are, or that we design such sophisticated machinery with the minerals in the ground, to feel someone’s pulse against our own is still fundamental. To accept that there is no real difference between you and the people originating from another place or continent, except for the amount of melanin in your skin and the arbitrary arrangement of one’s features on their face, requires you to acknowledge that everyone, including yourself, is a human being.
Perhaps, in the cool, blowing wind of our sanitised shell of a culture dominated by the values of parents who don’t hug their children, and believe they can make up for it in material recompense, we need to remind ourselves that holding each other’s bodies is how we survive; or have survived to get to where we are now, only to have the false luxury of claiming we no longer need the necessary aspects of life in order to live it well. It seems, in the advent of our corporatised, mechanised, highly-stylised, bureaucratic, unofficially technocratic society, we forgot we have all grown from a woman’s body (except when we wish to control women’s sexual expression and reproductive autonomy, of course). We have overlooked the genius and message of Mary Shelley, who would caution against the excited talk in ethics classrooms about the possibility of extracorporeal wombs, and the desires of self-removed men to clone themselves to produce mini-me robots without the inconvenience of a woman who has the ability to speak, or the horror of couvade syndrome. Our organic, visceral beginning is fundamental to how we understand and move through the world. For many months of our pre-existence, we share our mother’s immune system, and when we are born our life source is her breasts. To confront a woman's breasts honestly – that is, to recognise them less as advertising props to sell whatever it is that men buy to men, less “ornaments” women adorn themselves with to entice them into sin, and more of a natural occurrence of the female body essential to the quality and health of human life – means we are forced to see our lives as being coloured with shades of blood, and that some may still run through our veins.
At one time in history, it seems, talking to people was a form of muscle memory. Like staring out the window and identifying with the cloud that’s straying away from the magnitude of the storm below, or tying your shoes on the way out. Greeting each other did not produce the peculiar form of dread it engenders in us now. Now if I engage in a verbal interaction with a stranger, it feels as if it were an event neither of us were prepared for. It isn't that I don’t want to talk to you, or you to me. We both seem quite pleased, eager, even, to make each other's acquaintance, as we realise how lovely we both are. But still, we build a wall between each other for a reason we have yet to articulate except for identifying mild signs of discomfort and diagnosing ourselves with antisocial mental health conditions every media outlet tells us is ‘on the rise’, even though neither one of us has violated each other's rights or breached any code of unspoken trust. This unfamiliarity we both feel in our inclination to speak to one another, as if we were inaccessible to each other despite standing three feet apart, is a response we must not chastise before we understand why we feel it is a perfectly reasonable thing to impose on each other, discreetly, as if it were a secret from the other person that we’re both keeping at the same time. As well as the delusion that the other person isn’t feeling it too, as we both know we are, considering the conditions under which the forms of human sociality have been thwarted out of their organic shapes in recent decades, into perfect, geometric dimensions, wrapped with apt precision in a thin player of plastic gliding over the lens.
Before they used to send letters, a voice says in the distance. Now it's just bills and parking fines. Fines which are only a punishment for the people who cannot afford them. In this economy, we are all denied the privilege money gives our overlords to be depressed about the things that make life worth living. I prove my innocence by writing a letter to a man I wronged with good reason, and wonder if he'll respond. If not, maybe I'll get on his nerves. Maybe that's what I want. Maybe that's the highest compliment, and I should've taken it as such the first time. Those footnotes on your feed don't get on your nerves, do they? They don't make you think about anything that you don't think you should have to think about, and that's why you like them. You can't stand me and that's why I’m necessary. This is my toxic trait. I do not see moral categories in terms of flags of red or green, or that we ought to numericise desire by undermining and devaluing ourselves through an attempt to measure the ‘value’ of others by how well one fulfils the expectations of norms we did not create and yet perpetuate by reinforcing them in video-form for the world to see and accept blindly as if we have no choice. Watch me draw a line, watch me feel special and different. Like a whisper in a loud place, or a snowflake; bold, uncompromising. I see no reason to refer to the amount of people one has slept with as a “body count,” nor do I wish for someone to swipe to the right of me. I can safely say I would at least issue a warning before never speaking to a friend of eight years again, and I can most definitely recognise the difference between a Roomba and a human person. That my generation is sensitive to our detriment is a crude mischaracterisation of the truth. To what extent must we commodify ourselves in want of good company, or speak of relationships as if they were business transactions, dodging teeth and confrontations that impinge on the current, acceptable notion of what ought to be considered emotionally paradigmatic, before we realise that if anything, we have become desensitised to the dehumanising practices we’re encouraged to pursue through a contrived social training in diluted, artificial modes of communication that have come to replace the warmth of where love once stood?
Why do you hide behind your screen when I move closer to you? Why do I play along and pretend I don't recognise how much that means you wish to be saved? Maybe you feel your mobile, which is fiercely inert, is a better friend than your friends are; consistent as Jesus, accustomed to service, death, and resurrection. I rebel, and see the perturbed look in your eye as you refuse to meet mine, while you compare the look of your body to someone else's, thinking that’s what makes you exceptional. You read a caption under a post intended to subvert our expectations, deliberately allowing their stomach to make folds, and their legs sit in the sand like a crab taking in the sun before it journeys back to sea. You read the comments, of course, to see what other people think about this person’s stomach and legs. Some people agree with you, other people don’t. Crime. You feel inclined to heart the ones that best align with your heartfelt opinions on the state of this person’s limbs and relaxed abdomen, and to comment back on the ones that conjure in you a disproportionate amount of anger towards the absolute audacity of, or need for, this post’s existence in the first place. Wincing at its explicit, self-conscious attempt to be unassuming, and failure in its mission to combat the collective dysmorphia filtered imagery online has caused anyone under the age of twenty five, you stand in front of the mirror and position your back in the way that shows off best the contours of your muscles and the curve of your backside, and take a photo to secure yourself in this image. To preserve yourself as a thing you do not recognise anymore. You went to the beach once. You were happy and unbound then. It was the day you buried your brother and your mother told you not to go out so far. You didn’t notice things like people’s legs, except in the functional sense. The sense that people usually have two and yours carry you from your house to school each morning, so you can learn how to read and maybe make a difference in the world. You decide to go again, on a whim, but all you can think about is how others might be thinking of the way your body retires on your towel, exhausted from carrying around the burden of being better or worse looking than that person over there. And the salt from your tears causes you to dry out and recede into the sand before you ever get back to the water.
You shocked yourself tonight. You wanted a person who believes a superintelligence revolution is the answer to the void they enclose to wrap you tightly and feel sorry for you. The way you like to think of yourself softens against reality. You’re afraid of the unknown, because it’s what you want. If only you could un-become the person who puts their faith into how-tos and trusting the process, and simply accept that you did not come with an instruction manual. But you wouldn’t allow it. It’s not easy to commit oneself to a life where the distance between yourself and others is smaller than the gap between your foot and the platform. You just make it, every time. In a rare moment you sit alone with yourself. You watch Old Cat walk across the carpet and demand a pat as she plonks herself on your knee. Your mind slips under thoughts of self-criticism as your fingers sandwich between the fluff of her belly. She’s turned over now, like the lapse in your judgement telling you to not do the things you so long for (namely, to stop doing everything for a little while and just be), and you ask yourself, without recourse, why the magpie stares at you so intensely and it isn't even October. As if it wants something from you, something money can’t buy, like for someone to see us for who we are, or some solid advice. You’re lost, however, because you aren’t sure what constitutes the sentience of the tree that gives you oxygen in order to live, or why you see divinity in places where you’re told it should not be.
Expecting people you meet to be genuinely good as part of some kind of bare-minimum standard or normal way to be was your first mistake. To expect this is to delude oneself into thinking being a good person is at all normal or “only” ordinary, and to deprive oneself of the surprise when we are lucky enough to encounter it. You see, despite humanity’s attempts to evade itself throughout history, in order to reach some kind of external, eternally-true-truth, all we have is what we have between us on earth. There isn’t some greater thing than the need you feel to hold on. When you recognise yourself slipping back to a place you thought you had left long ago, notice the weight that lifts off your shoulders in the presence of human kindness. Pay attention to the tendons in your hands making it possible for you to reach out and take the apple you deserve off the branch that now moulds you as well as lets you breathe. If you encounter goodness in a person, that isn’t “to be expected,” that is special. Because for all the time we may spend ruminating on our faults and curating ways to shame ourselves for embodying them, perhaps we might afford ourselves a break; even for fifteen minutes, to recognise how wonderful it is to be alive. To be happening is not to be a thing in perpetual decay. It is to be sustainable and durable the older you get, because the harder it gets to trudge through the trenches of your lifelong effort towards a death you may feel at ease about; no lingering desire for immortality, no need to keep going when you’ve done it all.
