Special Memories

The Autumn arrives, drawing its long dark coat over the yellow-grey days. I love it but, like everyone in the world, I am also tired.

Autumn is beautiful but I can’t take it with me.

Feeling nostalgic, I look back through the summer comics and decide to collect them here for posterity.

First, as Brexit continues to roll alongside and beneath a news cycle boiling with the government’s inadequate, incompetent and deadly handling of the pandemic, let us bow our heads and never forget:

Everyone should go and read Mindf*ck where I originally gleaned much of that information.

It is election time again in the US. How has it been four years since the curtain fell and the big orange, white-supremacist wizard was first revealed? Last week, after the terrifyingly pantomime-like Biden/Trump debate, the Predator in Chief calls in sick to work, allegedly testing positive for Covid-19. I can’t help but think of April. We’ve been here before and I wonder how my last vestiges of hope have aged since the Spring…

…when everyone supposedly in charge…

…got sick.

Back then, in the young, green days before summer, I went looking for tiny islands of sanity in the sea of chaos. And I found them.

We live in the age of podcasts, everyone speaking into a microphone if they have one.

Radio made with only music in mind is the rarest and most precious thing. WFMU has been a source of treasure for me for over a decade. Trouble and her Modern World have been constant sonic companions to me since my stuttering, early forays into freelance illustration. At first she was exclusively complemented by the Hound’s shows, archived from the ‘80s, but in the years following, my freeform radio world has expanded to include Sophisticated Boom Boom, Honky Tonk Radio Girl (both pictured) Gaylord Fields, Todd-o-Phonic Todd and Mr. Fine Wine, to name but a few.

WFMU and it’s DJs really hustled to fight the dead air and keep the sounds alive throughout the lockdown this summer, never failing to bring musical light into whatever political, planetary or existential darkness was consuming the world. This island is still a winking beacon of hope on the horizon of this lonely ocean and I’m eternally grateful for that.

For me, there will always be comfort around plague and death when it’s confronted unflinchingly through science, empathy, fascination and humour. I realise though, that I can’t honestly say I’ve still been listening to TPWKY as much since the summer. As the pandemic seeped into every aspect of reality I almost feel like my consciousness pushed it down to a base level, the same place where I know the dawn will come and an inhale will probably follow an exhale. At some point my thinking shifted from, ‘How do I confront and understand this thing that is happening?’ to ‘How do I live with the constant adjustments of this thing that has happened and will continue to happen indefinitely?’

I did consume the entire backlog of Ask a Mortician and her Good Death though, and it did make me look for places in Scotland that they’ll just bury you straight in the ground. They exist and I love them.

The New Jim Crow was one of the books I got quarantined with after the libraries closed and loans became indefinite. I wrote this panel after reading Ta-nehisi Coates’s We Were 8 Years in Power but before George Floyd’s murder ignited the summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests. On October 2nd one of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, was indicted for ‘wanton endangerment’ because, it seems, his actions put those (white people) in the neighboring apartment in danger. The other two police officers were not charged or fired, and protests continue to rage in Louisville, KT and beyond.

In the months since I have read a lot, including Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Colour by Andrea Ritchie and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, and read and reread the essay/open letter No Humans Involved which Sylvia Wynter wrote in the early ‘90s after the beating of Rodney King and the L.A Riots. It feels like the skin has been split open, the subtle mask of white supremacy torn and the great, racist machinery constructed beneath it has been revealed in a way that it never has before. It’s continuity and expansion from slavery, throughout abolition, Jim Crowe, civil rights, the War on Drugs, right up to this second, as it ticks and clicks towards the election has been laid bare. And I think, if it can be seen and understood, maybe it can finally be taken apart.

And this is just America.

In Western Europe racism, while prevalent everywhere, has solidified most tellingly into the so called Refugee Crisis. A crisis that should probably be renamed, ‘The world is fucked and People are having to move around it in extreme ways in order to stay alive and the countries that are currently a little less fucked should be working harder to accommodate that and fight it at it’s climate changing, resource exhausting, capitalism-capitulating core’…But it’s less catchy and the photo-ops are bad and the blame less easy to pin on black and brown foreigners (although Brexit has made sure white Europeans, predominantly those poor and with accents are now being actively included in the xenophobic fear-mongering).

Under lockdown we were united and much like the machinery of systemic-racism, the fact that it was the poorest paid work that was the most essential and most risky, appeared to finally have been revealed. But as the lockdowns have become localised the government can divide and conquer certain businesses, groups and people. We have resorted to fighting amongst ourselves and the stakes are very high. The early talk of revolution has been abandoned. The Chomskys, the Varoufakises, the voices of political change have slipped beneath the stream of Covid-related rhetoric in the popular press and the Villifying of the Other which often accompanies a good plague is everywhere.

But if I have gleaned anything from the activism and rage I’ve seen over the last few months, it is that these fights are long. They will outlive me. Generations can pass on torches of both hate and hope and it is the tireless seeking, rediscovery, re-contextualisation, preservation and passing on of the knowledge and experience that keeps the flame not only lit, but seen, held aloft. Alexander, Klein, Solnit and Davis among others, are lighthouse-keepers in the storm, guiding me to safety for a while and allowing me the time and space to heal, before setting back out on that treacherous ocean in search of more exhilarating trouble.

I read these quotes over and over and they never get old. As the US election looms these words remain haunting and powerful, potent and prescient. I repeat them to myself like a spell.

I have been in love with monsters and horrors for my whole life, and I’ve listened to Faculty of Horror for the seven years that Alex West and Andrea Subissati have been podcasting. When horror is bad it is conservative, misogynist, racist, schlocky bullshit. But even at it’s worst it reveals what we are afraid of at any given time, and knowing what frightens people says as much about society as who gets to name those fears and make work about them. When horror is good, I think it is one of the most eloquent genres, and by putting out the lights, by extinguishing the hope, it reveals the power of the darkness itself.

As well as reading this novel, Arundhati Roy’s essay The Pandemic is a Portal was one of the early defining Covid-19 moments for me. Far more articulately than I’ve done here, she found the potential of this moment for positive change but was able to express it’s fragility as well. I think if 2020 had a coat of arms it would be the words ‘Fragile Potential for Change’ emblazoned beneath images of apocalyptic destruction. One of the things I still feel when I think about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was how overwhelming and constant the traumatising, healing, connecting, retraumatising nature of humanity in it’s current form felt. How many moving parts it has; the necessity for reparations on so many fronts and the enormity of what that would mean. I don’t believe in Individualism, I know we are social at heart, but I can understand the appeal of it’s construction, only caring about the self and it’s immediate surroundings, when you stare into the chaotic sun of actual co-existence and try not to go blind.

One of the most upsetting things to happen over the summer in what otherwise seemed like a sea-change of positively focused rage, was J. K. Rowling doubling down on her transphobia. Her ideas persist in feminist/womanist thought, especially in the UK, and I feel lucky to have lived in Canada during the years that trans voices really began to gain traction in the popular consciousness, because they were so much more progressive over there. So much so, that my cis-privilege had left me unaware that transphobia and biological fundamentalism were so prevalent in my own communities. Since then I’ve tried to seek out and listen to as many trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming voices as I can. I’ll dedicate a separate post to highlighting some of these individuals because they deserve more of my time, but following Alok on instagram has broadened my understanding of the binary, it’s racist and colonial roots, the potential of bodies and beauty and a more general activism awareness, beyond sex and gender (it was on their recommendation that I read Mindf*ck). One of the protagonists in Roy’s novel is a hijra, or trans-woman, Anjum, and the themes of motherhood, identity, belonging and agency explored through her character are complex and beautiful. But I think it is the ability of trans people to finally tell there own stories, the wealth of knowledge and history they are able to reveal to an aggressively dominant cis-het world, that made Roy’s creation possible as well as vital.

Back in April, I remember returning to myself refreshed and energised at the end of this comic. I remind myself now that there is so much knowledge and experience to learn from in the world, even though it is often overwhelming and I feel that positive electricity again.

Trump has used his miraculous Covid-19 recovery to strengthen his voter base. I don’t want to slip into conspiracy theories but it’s hard not to feel like it’s a little bit rehearsed. A little convenient. But also, those feelings don’t really matter. The rules have changed. The gloves are off. People are desperate and afraid, and the desperate and afraid often succumb to an enigmatic leader who tells them what they want to hear.

In the timeless words of Karen Kilgariff, call you Dad America, you’re in a cult.

It’s hard to know how to go forward. But forward is going to happen whether you know how to negotiate it or not which is probably why it feels exhausting. We are not alone though, there are a billion hopeful lights out there if we look for them and if we choose to recognise it, we can be them too.

In the meantime though…

To continue this goblin journey you can

listen to and donate money to support WFMU and keep freeform radio alive: https://wfmu.org/

Read Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie, not only for the understanding of how the social infrastructure of the internet has been used for facist gains, but also how we might be able reclaim this vital and powerful tool .

This Podcast Will Kill You is here: https://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/

Ask A Mortician is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi5iiEyLwSLvlqnMi02u5gQ

Faculty of Horror is here: https://www.facultyofhorror.com/

Karen Kilgariff, along with Georgia Hardstark, hosts the podcast My Favorite Murder: https://myfavoritemurder.com/

During lockdown, all of the books I read were available via the Overdrive App through my public library. Download it. Support your local library! Vote! Wear a mask!