The Season of Losses

A bit over three years ago I had a nose bleed that turned into a life threatening loss of liters of blood and weeks in the hospital, and I have never entirely recovered my bearings in the aftermath of that event. I was diagnosed with a blood condition about which there is little understanding (the tell-tale "ideopathic" term was part of the diagnosis from the beginning and remains to this day) and for which there is little in the way of treatment (I don't drink alcohol anymore or take blood-thinning painkillers, which means all the painkillers, and I do yoga and take long walks with Eric and so on, which means I lost about a hundred twenty pounds over the last couple years and Eric and I are closer than ever after eighteen years, all of which has been great, but to this day I get my blood-tests and the doctors look at the results and do their double-takes and say something on the order of, well, my, my, your blood platelet count sure likes to run low, now, doesn't it? which inspires enormous confidence). To this day, I have panic attacks when the subway stalls and I start to imagine bleeding again confined in a train car in the tunnel beneath the waters of the Bay surrounded by panicky commuters as I bleed from the eyes, as happened in the emergency room that night. The 2016 primary fights were taking place at the time of my bleeding incident, and as I lay in my hospital bed, getting poked with needles for test after test hour after hour, I saw the rise of Trump and the idiotic undermining of the already-vulnerable HRC by fauxvolutionary fanboys as a clear preview of the hell we have been living through for the last few years. Those nights in the hospital bed were the first of the long insomnia nights that have plagued me ever since from time to time. You know, the US has always been a disgusting racist conformist money-grubbing anti-intellectual shithole, but I wanted to believe the experience of George W. Bush's idiocies and crimes had inspired a diverse ascendant Obama coalition ready to assume responsibility for the governing of the nation, push the Democratic party in more sustainable and equitable directions, and force a GOP ever more beholden to a diminishing straight white Christianist-authoritarian Base to abandon its post-Nixonian rush into authoritarianism and reactionary conspiracism. That's not at all what happened as we all know by now and the loss of hope for an embrace of nonviolent progressive change in the face of a diversifying population, climate catastrophe, and the palpable failure of market ideological pieties felt a lot like my loss of blood: the loss of the force that keeps me going. In the years since, I've lost a lot of my joy and passion for teaching as I wonder whether teaching theory really contributes to clarity about historical change when so many privileged students seem to spout theory to rationalize their complacency or provide their cynical opportunism a self-promotional self-congratulatory gloss and also as I observe so many of my best students struggling under conditions of extreme psychological distress and economic precarity... does anybody really need to be reading the lovely but esoteric Walter Benjamin or that scumbag Sigmund Freud to understand the threat posed by fossil fuel companies or Trump's Education Secretary or gun-toting bigots in this historical moment we are struggling through here and now? I have adapted my syllabi to reflect these lived urgencies (teaching theory surveys usually means at least half a term of a parade that is relentlessly stale, pale, and male as Rebecca Solnit once put it), but I am forever bedeviled by discouragement and anxiety where before teaching was a real consolation and fuel for me. During this difficult season I also lost first my beloved cat of sixteen years Sarah, then I lost my long-estranged father to early-onset Alzheimer's, then just yesterday my Mother also died, after a completely unexpected heart attack and period of nonresponsive nightmarishness on a ventilator over the last week. So much loss, of connections, of support, of standards, of hope. Mariame Kaba reminds me that "Hope Is A Discipline." I have a few weeks of winter break ahead of me in which to rest and recharge my batteries, read escapist entertainments and prepare for Spring's renewed efforts. I am reminded, as ever, of Donna Haraway's admonition that nobody knows all that is happening in the world, even the most knowledgeable, and that this means none of us knows enough to be fully justified in despair. I am despairing a bit right now, but I know that I don't know many things that would answer my despair if only I connect with them and I know the space of teaching is a space in which those connections are as well fostered as any. The art world remains a place of frivolous predation but actual artists and their actual art can be a far different story. After so much loss, I await a season of gains by rising generations in a world educated by intersectional feminism, environmental justice, and abolition democracy. We can only do our best. I wish you all the best for the coming struggles. And, you know, happy holidays.