This moment with its unsmooth contours, attention unfolding from the abyss

between given and received, or subject and object. We have to mostly agree

on the abyss, or at least agree to share it, but orientation matters. Reminisce 

about how we came to share this particular primordial chaos, to be deep-sea

edge or deep-earth bound, as if I didn’t return home from work and lose patience

with Coco and Desmond, as if I returned home from work to the beastly human pathos

of my family, could just tolerate my love, the legwork required for virtuous complacence.

Some arrivals unsettle. My arrival home from work. A refusal to parse where the chaos

comes from and how while creating more chaos, the mise-en-abîme of mise en abyme. 

I came home and was not on board with the moment’s particular iteration of the void,

could not vibe, could not parent, could not be a container for the mixed archaeology

of feelings, the way I fail to inhabit my various inheritances and the way I inhabit

them perfectly. So I remove the magnetic blocks from the bathtub that are scraping

the bathtub coating and tell Desmond, without humor or irony, that I will remove

his bed tent if he continues to do x, y, and z. Sad girlfriend, nagging wife, stern mother. 

I cannot believe I behave this way and yet I can and do behave this way, easily.

A queer genealogy seems like something I should have to earn, which is a very

unqueer way of thinking about inheritance. Lines do not always direct us, somehow.

Once settled and unsettled my ancestors did not return but instead turned toward

somewhere else, until the act of turning toward somewhere else became its own

line. Is the angel of history relevant here? I don’t think white people can refuse whiteness,

but we can refuse to follow its lines, refuse desire for domination, for

productivity, we could become collectively angry about whiteness and reorient. 

When Desmond wigs out I think of all the times I pick fights over the most minor

thing possible because the magnitude of rage or despair is too much.

I picture my late eighteenth century ancestors saying “dash my wig” to avoid

stronger imprecations. Do not avoid them. Scream, punch your pillow. Dream.

The state of the state. The opposite of Empire is ecosystem or flux;

Henri Chopin said “It is man’s [sic] body that is poetry, and the streets,”

those not-quite-right vibes, the poet’s tendency toward self destruction,

I appreciate that. High-level meetings with creditor nations bring no surcease. 

Any meeting with the flux or ecosystem would require a mental abruption

to release our persistent habit of adding more police every time crime

increases. I am good at experimental disassembly, I am not a body 

on the streets of the state, sometimes I am citizen, trying new root vegetables

like kohlrabi: why? Traders brought it to Italy in the sixteenth century,

but cabbage has been a thing in Europe for a while and my ancestors

probably ate various forms kale, which makes me feel I-don’t-know-what

when I crave a kale smoothie. Trevor says, “cabbage tastes delicious

if you cook it with other things” and Coco continues to ask about the number

of things in the world. Her world is abundance with precise sensory detail,

I write to remember anything, but my memory goals are ambitious. Somewhere 

between Empire and ecology are words like military, citizen, and their opposites.

I can’t see the moon or pluto but I believe in them, believe in this neck pain

that three days hence will be a migraine. I like the monotony of living. 

All creatures love a routine, even the ones that don’t. Non-combatants, civilians,

foreigners and aliens all crave at least occasional predictability: The sun,

the earth, the air. We don’t crave the stupid decisions of Columbia University’s

president but we can predict them. Liberation is not predictable: It wasn’t

inevitable that God would keep hardening Pharaoh’s heart, or that the Jew’s Egyptian

neighbors would give them supplies as they fled, or that Pharaoh would march

into the Red Sea. Narrative is full of disasters and inevitability. If you march in formation

you’re an army, but if you walk  a scraggly line you’re people, maybe refugees, 

There is no total pervasion of apathy. There is debate, dissent, if you march

in formation you might be hundreds of activists holding an emergency seder on

the Senate Majority Leader’s doorstep. In this era of misrule my country sends

billions of dollars to the Israeli military even after the discovery of a mass grave

with over 300 Palestinians uncovered at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan

Younis, some with their hands tied behind their backs. I can’t bear the star-spangled 

Irrationality, I won’t explain the difference between an Empire and an ecosystem. 

We’re in it. Them. Are it. Them. That’s us, ourselves, but collectively. We’re it.