a heartening
My friend Katy came to visit me by the ocean. We lay a blanket out on a hill. The surface of the blanket undulated above a patch of wild strawberries. After dinner, Katy wanted to lay on our backs and watch the first stars and planets appear. At first, all I could see was the clear color of early evening. Do you see it? Katy whispered. She was so close to me, I could smell her hair. Slowly slowly, all the lights pulled forward. The first star was followed by many others. We relaxed against the ground.
The Star Festival
Even its eve leaving the
usual behind
The turbulent sea
Unfurling over Sado
the River of Stars
Bashō wrote these poems in 1689. He wrote them on an island called Sado, which at the time of the Tokugawa regime, was a place of banishment. Exile to Sado was extreme punishment, like a life sentence. Poets and politicians were sent there on charges of sedition. Bashō was there visiting his friend Tokoku. Andrew Fitzsimons explains:
that Bashō made great efforts to visit the banished in a remote village, says something about his compassion, about how important friendship was to him, but also about his attitude to the prevailing political conditions.
Which is funny because Bashō has always felt like a very good friend of mine. I’m not sure why I feel this way. When I see his name on the library shelf, I gasp, just the way I’d gasp if I ran into a friend. We live hundreds of years apart. He never knew me and never will. But his words make me feel better, just the way my friend’s words do. He illuminates my world by helping me leave the usual behind. So I get to wondering if I have to personally know someone in order to call them a friend.
-
It’s nearly winter now. I’m already driving to Katy’s house when I realize I’ve forgotten to put on socks or underwear. In the 4pm night, the road is winding beside the South River. I feel very cold and annoyed with myself for being so spaced out.
Katy lives in my hometown. This feels miraculous to me, because I grew up in the middle of nowhere. And when I really get to thinking about it, we met in a roundabout way, which is just the same way I meet anyone. She doesn’t know this but we became friends because a celebrity posted a photograph of eggs online. I clicked on the pic and saw that the eggs came from chickens who lived on a small farm down the road from my childhood home. I thought that was so random that I applied for a job there. And then I worked through that drought year there with Katy who was and continues to be a miracle.
Alice Walker referred to Angela Davis as a miracle. She did not call her a hero or a saint or a powerhouse or anything like this. But a miracle.
Miracle means object of wonder. My personal definition unfolds in two paths. The first is the spectacle. It’s the mysterious, magical appearance of a synchronicity that induces wonder in me. How can this possibly be? How can this possibly be connected, what are the odds? I ask this of every miracle. And then I remember, and Angela teaches me especially, that miracles, too, are inherently intersectional. Once the connection is observed, and the wonder is wondered about, that’s when the miracle really begins to happen. The miracle is not just witnessing, it’s living with and enjoying the connections. It’s friendship.
So when we say Angela Davis is a miracle, I think that means she’s a friend to all.
-
I get to Katy’s house and park on the dirt road. I dump my basket of clean laundry out onto the backseat, and push all the unfolded clothes around to find some socks and underwear. I find only one sock and one underwear, this will have to do. I change outside. My clothes are in a pile by my bare feet and for a moment I’m just wearing nothing in the cold. If Katy came outside right now, I know she’d laugh, because she loves me, including my dysfunctions.
Then Walter texts me a paragraph from an essay they are reading by Ruth Wilson Gilmore:
The violence of abstraction produces all kinds of fetishes: states, races, normative views of how people fit into and make places in the world. A geographical imperative lies at the heart of every struggle for justice; if justice is embodied, it is therefore always spatial, which is to say, part of a process of making a place.
And then they ask me, is friendship the antithesis of abstraction?
Yes. And I know this. Because the moment I walk into Katy’s house, she embraces me and notices that I am missing a sock. She doesn’t let me take even one more step on the cold floor. She runs and grabs a pair of wool things that are unrecognizable to me. She hands them over and says they are foot bags which is a made-up term for these exact two objects - not quite socks, not quite slippers. I put them on, there’s a big hole in the left one, I feel so welcome.
I walk into the kitchen, my feet are warm now except for that one spot. The room is steamy, it smells like bay leaves. Anna Tsing writes:
Smell… is a sign of the presence of another, to which we are already responding. Response always takes us somewhere new; we are not quite ourselves anymore— or at least the selves we were, but rather ourselves in encounter with another. Encounters are, by their nature, indeterminate; we are unpredictably transformed.
Bay leaves and lentils and onions all diced up and soft. Bay leaves remind me of kisses, because whenever I would find one in one of my mom’s soups, she’d say, it’s time to kiss the cook! I’d get up and kiss her. I could kiss the air. I am different now than I was outside in the cold. Less alone, significantly less alone. I ask Katy what I can do to help, she says, nothing, dinner is done! She points to a little pile of carrot sticks, grabs a spoon for the lentils, uncovers the lid of the rice. Hands me a bowl, asks me to serve myself.
We sit down and I love Katy so much. I love her so much, it’s so easy to love her. I feel like telling her, I love you, I freakin’ love you, but I stop myself because I’m embarrassed. So I bring the lentils to my lips and blow.
I imagine what it would be like to love everyone the way I love Katy. I don’t love her because she gives me lentils and foot bags. I just love her cause I love her, because she’s my friend. It starts to make a lot of sense that friendship is the real work of prison abolitionists. Friendship is the process of solidarity. Friend isn’t an identity but a method. In friendship, exploitation is impossible. There are no hierarchies. No one is superior.
But the state is our mirror and uses “the same tactics that people who cause harm in intimate relationships use: arbitrary authority, attribution of blame to justify punishment, and expulsion of those who are objectionable, threatening, or obsolete.” writes Davis. What’s the opposite?
Bay leaves, kisses, lentils, onions, steam, socks, stars. Intimacy that overrides abstraction.
I start to feel ridiculous, I daydream the entire world as friends.
Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that
Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our head
So I let myself dream.
One friendship illuminates one connection. When you love one thread, the others glow. The serendipity of that connection, all the intersections, looks like a miracle but the real miracle is the connection itself. Object of wonder.
This is what I mean. Having many friends has nothing to do with how good you are. It’s not about being popular or cool or climbing the ranks or gaining anything. It’s figuring out how much of the world you can befriend. What can you care about, who can you care about, and how deeply?
-
Suigaku please
provide us now with a boat
the River of Stars
I’m noticing that whenever Bashō writes about rivers of stars, he’s writing about Sado. In this poem, he’s speaking to Suigaku, who was a scholar and ship-builder who worked in the mines there. The river of stars is in reference to the milky way, which would be clear from Sado because the island of exile was so isolated and dark.
My friend Bashō wanted poetry in this world. He was a master poet, sure, but the poems came from the practice of renga, which was a collaborative poem, like a game.
But, in rebelling against the illusion of peace in the ultra-delineated hierarchical Tokugawa regime, Bashō wrote to his friend Ensui:
Amid thoughts of life and death, the subservience of the weak to the powerful, mutability and swift time… Such is the loneliness at the temple of Sumadera that I have composed no poetry.
No poetry. No poetry. No poetry. Did you read what Anne Boyer just wrote when she resigned as poetry editor from the New York Times?
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.
-
After dinner, after chocolates, after tea, Katy walks me to my car. She points out the stars, I wouldn’t have looked up otherwise. She tells me that she plans to wrap herself in a blanket, and look up for a while after I leave. We blow kisses. I drive away.
When I get home, my housemate is washing dishes. I lay on the couch and read the news. A poet has died. I’m getting into the habit of calling poets friends. So when I read that Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, I read that my friend Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. 18,600 people and counting. Within that death-count, what is lost is an incomprehensible number of friendships.
I watch the recording of his last televised interview. As I watch this, my housemate plays “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King while washing the dishes. I don’t know why my housemate decides to play this song at this very moment, but Carole sings:
Nothin’, nothin’ is going right
Close your eyes and think of me
And soon I will be there
To brighten up
Even your darkest night
This is what Dr. Refaat Alareer said:
If the Israelis invade, I am going to use that marker and throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that’s the last thing I will be able to do. And this is the feeling of everybody. We are helpless. We have nothing to lose.
-
Genocide, as exile, as abstraction, is the opposite of friendship. In genocide, if you aren’t banished to an island or another country, you are banished to an afterlife, if you believe in that sort of thing. I believe in that sort of thing.
The poets help me hope that in that place of banishment, wherever it is, the stars are still poetry.
So then what is friendship? Lentils, bay leaves, kisses, socks? Every time I believe I’ve figured that out, I forget it just as quickly. But if I’ve written it, I can return to my understanding and remember. Return to Bashō, return to Alareer. That’s the power of the marker. It’s not for nothing. The immortality of our connections, not our chains.
Bashō was old and sick when he traveled such a great distance to visit his buddy Tokoku. When they were hanging out in that near-death banished place, they heard the call of a hawk. Hawks, when they appeared in dreams, symbolized good fortune. A good fortune is hard to imagine when you are sentenced to death. But in the company of his friend, Bashō wrote:
Better than a dream
the hawk of reality
a heartening
I’m writing this now as I walk down the sidewalk. I just looked up and two hawks were flying overhead. Gloria Anzaldúa you were right, it happens first in the imagination. I can’t make this stuff up.
