Utopia or neartopia or bettertopia: a then-and-there literature
I’m rarely in a food court because I’m rarely in a mall, however, when somehow I find myself there, I find it strangely comforting and a productive place to write. I feel enveloped by a coherent context but also feel like a still point, a hole in the context, surrounded.
Mark Strand writes:
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
I don’t feel that “I am what I missing,” but I instead like I’m wearing the context like a blanket around me. And amidst all this quotidian businessing, writing seems unbounded. It’s not that I feel better than or more serious or thoughtful than the denizens of the foodcourt or the “filthy lucre” of the mall and its capitalism—after all, whatever issues I have with the system, the people are just people having lives. We’re almost always inside of this larger system, despite what we might think about it. That is, in many, ways how such all-encompassing economic, epistemic systems work.
But I like the feeling of kindling a small flame in its middle. Writing what is only marginally saleable, what exists outside of the system. And I feel fellow-feeling with the people in the food court, eating, chatting, being humans.
I suppose I feel something of this all the time: the sense of writing outside systems (even though I know I’m inside it) and the sense of commonality with those also outside/inside. I’m here in the here-and-now, but I’m also in the there-and-then, the not-here and the not-now.
I just learned about José Esteban Muñoz (from Jimmy T Cahill’s chapbook, Bad Tempor) and about Queer temporality.
I just tried to copy a quote that I wanted and it resulted in this amazing queered translation:
We mu,t >tri,”“, in ,he f.¡ce of,he hero “”J now ‘. to,il- izing ronJ.ring of “,ilil)’, lo ,hin\; and feelal”’” ami th<rt, Sorne “,ill “”Y thit ill we hi...... the pie.”,,,,. of this moment, bul we must neve, ..ni< ro, t1ut minimil ‘’‘’”’P”rt; “’”“ must Jream anJ en.¡ct new and b.ne! ple»u”,., othe, ...”Y’ of l>eing in lhe orld, aud ultimate!)’ new キッイャ、セ Qu.em...
The quote I actually wanted was:
“We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately, new worlds.” (Cruising Utopia).
I know that Muñoz is speaking of queer experience, but I take inspiration from their vision for the utopia or perhaps the neartopia or bettertopia possible for everyone. For the worlds we invoke in writing.
Carl Andre says, “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.” We write inside but we’re also the hole inside the writing. Not an absence but a wormhole, an opening, a possibility. We’re another thing in another thing. A kind of Tennessee jar of alterity (viz. Wallace Stevens) organizing the world around us.
I imagine that language is a kind of food court and I’m sitting there in the middle, writing.
*
I recently read with Jimmy T. Cahill and the inimitable MLA Chernoff and Stuart Ross. I remixed a bit of Jimmy’s reading in this video as their reading was a remix of other texts.
I also made a video of MLA’s reading (captions courtesy of glitching.)