Dear Bazzers
Image courtesy of Sebastian Moronell.
Chola,
Sorry for the late response — as you know, the virus thought my body an adequate host. I have now entered into the community of the initiated. I didn’t get it too badly, so I don’t know if I warrant the term ‘survivor;’ but here I am, alive.
Some folks use illnesses like this to reflect upon their life, or as a way to remain grateful for it. I didn’t manage either, but I did think about the nature, the aesthetics, of parasites. At home — because that is our subject — we have a parasitic plant that grows on the branches of another. Parasites are common on trees, but this one, the amyema miraculosa, gives a striking dark red colour that turns purple among the greenery. The result is a multicoloured canopy, a beautiful tribute to impurity. I guess the parasites that grow within us are slightly less charming, but I’d like to think that we’re equally impure. Therein lies the lesson of milky tea.
I wonder if we’ll ever have dinner parties like we once used to; there’s a certain hesitancy surrounding physical contact nowadays — the result of charmless public health officials. Although … I do think that sophisticates spewing Homer or Saint Aquinas or Marx were largely fictions of our imagination in the first place, the convenient inventions of writers who imagined the world as erudite as their thoughts. I cannot deny fiction for its distance from reality, for it is often closer to us than reality itself. Anyways, I do think there is something to committing large pieces of information to memory. I know it’s an unpopular pedagogical opinion, but I’d respect the chap who can recite chapters of verse to me from memory over almost anybody else.
Home is so tied up with memories of the past that returning home is like returning to my memories. Perhaps that is why I am so enamoured with the idea of preserving countless tracts of useless information in one’s memory — because it offers a stable sense of memory, and thus, home. Escaping home would mean escaping my memories. And maybe, to self-actualise, that’s exactly what we need to do — to abandon all traces of the past, to recreate ourselves in our own image. It seems the present is to exist in the gap between home, memories of it, and our ability to self-actualise.
This is how we pass through.
Bazzi.
***
Bazzers,
My days begin with dog shit now, which I'd like to say is nothing new but I'm not feeling quite so flip at the moment. I've spent three different days trying to get my second dose of the vaccine, roughly three weeks working some of the weekends and at least some of the nights, and I must now mind a 1-month old German Shepherd, mixed with something else, that has wrought revolution upon this house.
The first day, which I suppose any puppy spends yelping for its brood, was torture. It all taps into some weird orphan thing, into very uncomfortable memories, to hear any infantile creature presume it has been abandoned; and thus attempt to make sense of an environment that, in the moment, clearly isn't home. He was asleep on the carpet, when I flapped my hoodie over my head and told my people this was too much — I couldn't handle a dog right now. The moment itself broke my heart some more, that I am capable of casting a thing away, of deciding its destiny while it sleeps. In the morning, which began with shit, I decided I'd stick it out. I'd wait for him to become the large canine I can more easily relate to, and we will go on riotous runs, with punk rock in my ears and the wind in his. He serenades me when he sees me, with his massive paws and his busy tongue and with teeth he's so very anxious to plant into something.
When you do get home, you will (I think) get a sense of all the mortality that plagued my adoption of this dog, who I have (on-brand) christened 'Rookie'. Every day now someone loses someone, or knows someone who has, or at the very least has someone making do with symptoms in their household. We are at capacity, like all the countries we not long ago shook our heads for on the news. There are no more beds, no more oxygen, so very few second doses left somehow. I believe this is what bothered me most: that I am meant to look after a creature when there is so much death on the market, that any living thing is meant to depend on me when I can barely depend on myself. I am no flake, no — but I hope I am able to stash young Rookie in an appropriate travel compartment, as and when the time comes.
I don't know what 'home' is, besides the natural (and very welcome) benefits of the place where you rest your head, accept warm meals, stroll around looking your absolute worst, scrub the embers of dog shit off the carpet every morning. My family is ... home. It has never been this city, this country, I'm afraid.
CC.
Bazzi is hereabouts.
