Dear ones,
At a rest stop about four hours from Cleveland, I tell Logan we should just push through. We have been driving for ten hours at this point, and had debated stopping at a motel instead of doing the drive all in one day. Because of Covid, and our two precious cats, and money, I was resistant to that idea, but we got a later start than we’d hoped, and so we were going to be driving in the dark. “Remember a few hours after the sun goes down is not the same as a few hours in the day,” Logan gently pressed. I insisted anyway, so we each got in our respective cars and kept driving.
I have driven through the long, flat highway stretches of the midwest nearly a hundred times. In my various living arrangements, I’ve done Chicago to Cleveland, Minneapolis to Chicago, Ann Arbor to Cleveland, and three times, Minneapolis to Cleveland (the longest of all the stretches). I know the farmland that borders 1-90 so well now. I recognize the particular decay of the chipped-blue-paint barn, I recognize the moment we switch from the shitty rest stop stretch to the nicer rest stop stretch, I recognize in my bones the way the corn fields change color when the sun starts to set. I’ve yet to do this drive and not be moved by the sky. It usually begins with a glowing shade of orange, but then sometimes turns pink or purple, and the corn stalks suddenly are coated in a muted and modest gold. It takes my breath; every time, it takes my breath.
*
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1994) describes affect as a “bodily background feeling.” It is, he goes on, what happens "between emotions” without conscious thought. Not quite thought and not quite emotion, affect gives us our “sense of being.” Greg Siegworth extends this to suggest that, even more accurately, it gives us “our sense of being alive.”
On this drive, the predominant affect is the kind that comes along with nostalgia and knowing, even (especially) a knowing that comes not from fact, but from a sort of phenomenological familiarity. The essence of what you know, even if it’s not exactly what you know, just close to it. The light on the corn stalks feels the same, but of course it is not the exact same. The last time I saw the gold on the field, it was a different field and a different gold, this sky carrying the remnants of more wildfires, this field a whole new birth. And it’s less my mind reacting than my organs. A slowed, calm heartbeat; an accidental breath held; goosebumps.
*
Shortly after the sunset, I am listening to a playlist my friend M made me, full of songs about Cleveland or leaving or coming home more generally. Songs: Ohia is on it of course, and I sing along with Jason Molina that, “I’m on my way home.” Loretta, my smallest girl cat starts to whimper again from her crate in the back seat, and suddenly I am feeling overwhelmingly tired.
We still have three hours to go. I tell myself I can drive the length of a graduate seminar, I have been sleepy in those too and made it through. But my eyelids are starting to get heavy in a way that scares me. Hey Siri, I verbally nudge my phone, text Logan: “I think I need us to find a motel.” With the help of L’s parents we track down a cheap, pet-friendly place to stay in Angola, Indiana. We realize we’ll need to buy a litter box (there’s one waiting for us at the new apartment, thanks to my mom). So a little before 10pm we’re in a Walmart parking lot off the freeway. Logan goes in and I stay with the cats.
Like the sunset over I-90 farmland, there is something very distinctive about the fluorescent lights of a big box superstore in the darkness of a Midwest town. Everything is bright, but the black sky holds you from either side; you know if you drove ten minutes this way or that, the stars would appear vibrant again, like a twinkling canopy. As I’m feeling the tender weight of this dark - even under and within the bright lit sign and parking lot lamps - Spotify has gone from M’s playlist to it’s own songs that the algorithm marks as related. “Hold on Magnolia” by Songs: Ohia come on, and now I’m thinking not of my own nostalgia, but a friend’s story of driving from a camping trip to an urgent care at midnight, his sick toddler in the back, and this song playing from the speakers in front. “Hold on magnolia/to that great highway moon.” I can’t listen to this song without thinking of his drive, his sweet little girl, and how my experience with this band compelled him to share his experience with this band, and how I felt so close to him in that moment. “No one has to be that strong,” Jason assures us.
*
I’ve been reading a lot of Hanif Abdurraqib lately. Hanif is a poet and cultural critic, and he also happens to be from Ohio. In his book They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif writes about music and its relationship to the goings on of the times. A Bruce Springsteen concert becomes the foundation for an essay about Black & Brown service workers; a Defiance, Ohio show becomes the stage for reflecting on the overdose crisis; and Marvin Gaye becomes a prophetic emblem for the way racist violence is constant, and as American as fireworks. But what’s most striking to me about the book is how often Hanif writes about the body. We read about the feeling of sweaty hugs and scream-singing in each other's ears in punk show basements, making out in concert arenas, and the encouragement or discouragement of kicking or throwing bodies in the pit. The book, to me, is about how music makes our thoughts and emotions more embodied.
Music heightens affect, it’s why it makes us dance, or cry at the end of a movie when the soundtrack hit begins - we are literally moved. For Hanif to use this as a vehicle to talk about race in America is brilliant; a well-trodden subject he forces us to feel in new ways, because as we’re reading about Eric Garner on the ground, we’re humming Marvin Gaye, and instead of shutting down or numbing out, our vagus nerve is calm enough to really be with it. In that way, music keeps us still, too.
Greg Siegworth again:
“You realize that the affective power of music lies in its ability to fold the space of lived contexts into temporal moments in your lived history. Music and this kind of involuntary/(in)corporeal memory don't interact to necessarily always deposit specific events or consciously perceived emotions into your mind and/or onto your body: such an occurrence is probably more rare than you'd think. But, instead, they gather up aspects of a particular context or duration ("a whole entire time of your life"), and, rather than anything especially specific or eventful, it is the "aura" of this lived space-time that is retained.”
Siegworth is describing why certain songs “feel like the Midwest” or “feel like autumn.” It’s why, after a concentrated occurrence of hearing crowds chant “Alright” at Black Lives Matter marches, Kendrick Lamar “feels like protest.”
*
It’s not lost on me that what “feels like the Midwest” to me is sad white men singing a variation of the blues that was once stolen from Black folks. It’s not lost on me that to Black midwesterners, the Midwest probably feels nothing like Songs: Ohia. When I drive through state borders, I always think about access. Listening to my twangy, sad white indie rock, I know my body is allowed to pass through without question, I know the music that makes me feel at home is partly because I’ve been conditioned to believe anything at all ‘belongs’ to me. It’s something I try to unlearn daily. I think about how music lives in our bodies and how maybe it’s a good example of how we can approach land, or at least home. Something ephemeral that makes us feel rooted, regardless of where we are, but not something we own. Instead, something that is shared with everyone. Anyone who has heard a song gets to keep their experience of it, but the song itself doesn’t belong to us.
“Affect is born in in-between-ness and resides as accumulative beside-ness,” Melissa Gregg writes,“[it] marks a body's belonging to a world of encounters or; a world's belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities.”
*
In the parking lot of Walmart, in between one ‘home’ and another, I stretch my hand back toward my whimpering girl cat while “Hold on Magnolia” finishes its last few chords. I feel a lump form in my throat. I’m thinking of my friend and his daughter, and I’m thinking of how these lights are like the lights I grew up with, and how the sky is too. My other hand, without my awareness, is now cupped over my heart. “I think it’s almost time/it’s almost time.”
love & solidarity,
Raechel
Read, Watch, Listen.
Saidiya Hartman on the abolition imaginary. Tributes, in memory of David Graeber. An excellent interview with Frank B. Wilderson III. A wonderful interview with Judith Butler, in which she has no patience for TERFs. The banality of living through collapse (and how that’s what we’re doing now), from a man who endured the Sri Lankan civil war. Why the Left must fight for disability liberation. And, a love letter & eulogy to María Lugones, from a former student and friend: “For you, coalition was curdled-separation: a decision made by multiplicitous and impure selves to come together in order to resist the splitting and fragmentation that occur when one is embedded in worlds that fetishize purity, and to further curdle through their intimacies with one another.”
Mutual Aid.
Y’all know I don’t spend much of my energy on electoral politics, but I do think voter suppression is a problem worth attention. Currently, a law in Florida requires formerly incarcerated people to pay a fine or fee in order to vote. This could dramatically impact the presidential election outcome, and, importantly, local election outcomes. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition is raising money to pay all fees and fines so nothing stands in the way of formerly imprisoned people getting the opportunity to vote. Wherever you stand on electoral politics, it’s important that the most marginalized people in our society have the opportunity to make a choice about their relationship to it.
Joy & Attention.
A beautiful final few weeks in Minneapolis, saying “see you again” to friends, and to the Dakota land. AUTUMN! Autumn leaves, autumn walks, autumn beverages, autumn sweaters, autumn songs. Making it safely to Cleveland. The pretty parts of the new apartment, including two (!) non-functional white brick fireplaces. Paul, Ruth, Fuzzy, and Iris (our plant family who also made it safely from MN to OH). Phoenix Coffee shop. Coventry Road. Safer Heights. Lovecraft Country! The Shaker farmer’s market. Seeing K & A on their screened in porch. Seeing M & meeting Z. M’s beautiful flowers. Time with my Nana. A nice phone call with S. Signing copies of Rust Belt Femme at Mac’s bookstore (an actual childhood dream come true)! Group text threads, full of warmth. Exciting work-related news. Guest lectures and invited talks to different classes, and getting to connect with students. The sunsets and what they do to the sky. Our new front porch. Warm coffee. Good sleep. Home.
&from the collective*
A huge stack of library books waiting to be read, the tomatoes that are still on the vine that I'm gonna turn into eggs in purgatory tomorrow, the delicatta squash that I just pulled off the vine (OMG these are my favorite squash of all time and they're impossible to find in the store!), the hat I'm knitting, homemade ice cream made by a friend, new art supplies that I invested into to help carry leo-season creativity forward, Maia Kobabe's memoir Genderqueer, working with Food Not Bombs, finally feeling financially secure enough to create a plan for making regular monetary donations instead of just doing it in a random way, and nail polish! reading Claire Comstock-Gay’s virgo section of the Guide to the Stars book. making a huge move and have so many people support me through it and listen to me stress. providing a loving and safe home for my cat, Bernadette. the bittersweetness or going near a place my previous partner and i went together and missing him deeply but being okay. the relief of finding a place to live and excitement to start anew near my family and with my best friends. Gluten free and vegan pizza. Do my own yoga practices. Being naked on a beach. Nature and birds. Seeing rainbows daily (through reflections/glass/perhaps, hallucinations ;-) Outgrowing my space, and falling more in love with it. Trying to get clear on where I am at; and where I want to be. The luxury to quit my job, and actually doing that.
*this list is a combined, edited version of lists that readers send with their own joy & attention. I invite you to send me yours and I’ll include some in an upcoming letter. <3