TO:

“The ancient Greeks didn’t believe we looked into the future. This is a modern conception of time.” Hermann and Gertrude were walking through the stacks of the university archives, its orderly, numbered boxes stretching from wall to wall. “They thought that we faced the past because the past is known; we can see it, we can remember it, we can keep records of it. It is the future that falls behind us, is occluded to us.”

Gertrude imagined herself gazing upon history like the Greeks, unable to turn around. “So we’re all like, walking backwards into the future.”

Hermann chuckled. “Yes, you could say that.”

“So then how do you know if you’re going to walk off a cliff?”

“Ah, that is a very good question,” Hermann said. He opened a box and gestured to Gertrude to look inside.

The box was empty. “Because most people do not ask this until they are falling.” He didn’t have to explain. They’d confiscated everything.

 

MTL:

The Body Keeps the Gore

There’s a certainty in blunt force bruising that’s not simply about release or escape, but the irrefutable truth of physical contact. It’s difficult to describe the rush of a space where we’re all feeling super sad or angry or horny or drunk, or just too much shoved into giant muscular cords of flesh shoved back up against us, a miasma of cigarettes and weed clinging to our hair, our skin slick with our sweat while slipping off the sweat of strangers. Everybody stomping together in one massive, fitful gesture against everything wrong in the world.

In disorderly times, we found unity in disorder. There was something about the visceral impact of propelling my prone body toward a mad cluster of other projectile bodies and the resultant adrenaline rush of doing it over and over that made me feel like I was in a state of emergency, just like everything else around me. Not catharsis then, like we might expect, but calibration.

 

___________________