in being moved.

radical love note | lists, links, recommendations <3

Hello friends - I’m comping another week of the usually-paid Friday note/recommended links. The health issues we’re navigating are making the free Monday essay more and more inconsistent. My hope, actually, is to get back to writing those on things that have nothing to do with what’s happening in my and P’s life right now. Of course this newsletter is committed to insisting on the stakes and value of ‘the personal,’ but I think I just want to do some fun cultural criticism-ish stuff. P and I both need to be careful not to let this take over our every thought, and I think shifting the essays’ vibe for a bit will help that. Stay tuned, but in the meantime, a freebie for all subscribers, and a good sample of what the Note edition is usually like: personal reflection + link goodies and lists. Thanks for being here. <3 

look at what the light did now.

Dear ones, 

The hospital cafe is stark and sterile, just as I remembered from my last bout of time in the giant complex, about two years ago, visiting my mom during her recovery from hip surgery. Those visits felt nearly-traumatic – mom was stable, but deeply uncomfortable and legitimately neglected by an unfairly overworked nursing staff who simply could not tend well to all the patients. That was also in a period of Covid precaution that meant only one guest was allowed to visit, so I was alone, driving through the parking garage full of solo people with their own stories of care and illness, and undoubtedly, of love. 

I was hoping not to be back here for a long time, but I am, again, this time for P as we begin treatment for his tumor. We have updates on that — the initial surgery will take place hopefully the last week of June, there is both good and bad news, and we are swimming in the seas of deeply felt things — but I feel the need to keep some of that a bit closer to my chest at the moment. 

Instead, I want to write about the strangers with me here in this cafe, and the ones in the waiting room. It feels a little hollow and liberal to tell you how they come from “all walks of life,” but the truth is that they do, and we are all here in a room together. There is an Amish woman and her husband, two old white women with “fuck cancer” shirts and lots of bags and one with a missing tooth, people of various races, people who look sick and many who don’t; it might be a little diversity 101 but it’s also hard not to be moved by something that brings so many different kinds of people together. “We are moved by things,” says theorist Sara Ahmed, making concrete the phenomenological truth of the metaphor, “And in being moved, we make things.” 

Everyone in the hospital has been moved, physically to doctors and nurses and machines, and also to their loved ones, so many bodies touching here, so many bodies close. When I pass them or catch their eyes, especially those of us in the cafe, waiting, healthy and alone for someone who is not-so-healthy, I cannot help but wonder about their stories the way I used to do when I rode the el train in Chicago everyday, always imagining what was behind the stares of strangers. I am drawn to them, probably to feel less alone in the waiting. 

“Neither the object nor the body have integrity in the sense of being the same thing with and without each other,” says Ahmed, expanding Merleau-Ponty into a theory of, ultimately, interdependence. “Bodies as well as objects take shape through being oriented toward each other, as an orientation that may be experienced as the cohabitation or sharing of space.” 

When I get a text from P that the fMRI is done, I pack up my things and rush to meet him, passing through the lobby with the public piano in the center. Someone is there playing Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”; I see so many heads turn towards the music, and I know everyone understands. Not in some flat, monolithic way, but in the way that whatever their story is, they find a unique link to it. The linking to it is what is shared, not the particularities.  

On the drive home, P is battered to the point of incoherence from the two hour scan. When we get home, suddenly I am overwhelmingly exhausted and he finds an inexplicable burst of energy that allows him to complete some urgent paperwork and calls. “I think I did some tonglen without realizing it,” I say groggily from the floor where I nap in a sunspot with the cats, referring to the Buddhist practice of breathing in another’s suffering. As I drift off to sleep I think of the Andrea Gibson interview I cried my way through this week. Gibson, a queer poet I’ve loved for over a decade, is facing a now-incurable cancer diagnosis. She tells this story, after describing how chemo took every hair on her body, except: 

“I kept my eyebrows, but I didn’t tell anybody. I wasn’t talking about the fact that I still had my eyebrows, and then my mother called me up one morning and said, ‘You’ll never believe what happened this morning,’ and I said, ‘What,’ and she’s like, ‘Your father woke up with his right eyebrow missing,’ and my dad has been missing his right eyebrow ever since I started chemo and kept my eyebrows.” 

The phenomenologists are obsessed with how lines and divisions are formed between bodies and things. Ahmed tries to queer this by blurring and slanting the lines of orientation. And the Buddhists reject division altogether. I think our bodies in the waiting room tell some version of these theories in between: we are floors away from our loved one, but our thoughts are “with” them. We are moved, to sterile cafes or pianos or fatigue or hair loss. The waiting room reminds us somehow simultaneously of the weight of aloneness and also how, really, we are inseparable. 

I love you. 

love & solidarity,

raechel 

Reading 

Honestly, reading has been hard this week. But I managed a few non-brain-tumor-related things: I really enjoyed S. Brook Corfman’s piece on Barbara Streisand’s face in Yentl as the vehicle for exploring gender transition. The Embedded interview with Harron Walker was a delight. Martha Bayne (gorgeous writer and the editor of my book) on one year of marriage and cancer. Also, very slowly working through this wonderful collection of Black writers on nature. 

Watching

My version of comfort television is reality dating shows, but Peter was leaning more towards 90s rom-coms, so we picked You’ve Got Mail, since neither of us had seen it. What a trash movie! How is this so beloved? Not one centimeter of me was rooting for the creepy chain store millionaire to get with the boring, vapid independent bookstore owner. Not one centimeter! (Steve Zahn and Parker Posey were way too good for it, but they at least made it watchable.) 

Listening 

Nothing new. Do you have recs for me?

Joy & Attention. 

Doctors and nurses. All the love I got for the “Poppygoblin” essay. Oat milk lattes. Healthcare advocates. Disability justice movements past and present. Feel-good media. Newsletters. Andrea Gibson. Red clover in abundance. Red-wing blackbird friends. Heron friends. Baby ducks and baby geese. Kitten cuddles. A really lovely reading with fellow contributors of Gordon Square Review Issue 12. Seltzer. OTF. Work boundaries, and work good news. Nails. Farmer’s market ritual (and the farmers and the land). A balance of mostly health-conscious anti-inflammatory foods and also a bit of very indulgent comfort food. Cooler weather (....but also every movement fighting ecocidal initiatives, including things that are causing the forest fires in Quebec which are actually partly responsible for the cooler weather). Family. Speaking at Cleveland Pride about the intersections of anarchism, sex work, and queer liberation. Support. Community being real and showing up. Patience from friends waiting to hear back from me (thank you). Gardening, fingers in the earth. & you all, I’m so grateful to have you here. <3