Kelly At Large #140 The Lizzie Borden Edition

In which I announce a change of direction.

Hello from Paris,

Today the bang and flash of afternoon thunderstorms are supposed to end the September heatwave which arrived unexpectedly after a summer so chilly and wet we had to put a duvet back on the bed. 

I love weather, marvel at how buckets of water sometimes fall out of the sky with no faucet in sight. Or how air, which is usually so invisible, so tranquil, can transform itself into wind then bluster down our concrete canyons forcing us to bend and tremble and submit to its force.

Weather reminds me that it’s actually my usual (indoors) environment that’s remarkable for being so artificial, so controlled that even a single mosquito (or WHATTHEHELLISTHAT!) disturbs it. 

My body is likewise forgotten, ignored as nothing more than a self-displacing suitcase for my brain until, for instance, while lifting and twisting to pick something up, my organic carbon-based back collapses and I find myself grunting, “Damn, oh fucking fuck. Argh.”

Health is not a given. The world is always with us. And entropy is one of its laws—no matter that we spend more and more of our lives online as disembodied beings trapped in algorithmic bubbles that delude us with the scent of eternity. 

I actually spent my August staycation thinking about that. What’s real? What’s not? Do I want to keep writing the same kind of commentary I’ve been puzzling over for over 23 years, walking the tightrope of the personal and political, thinking about what it’s like for an individual to move through the physical world, act and be acted upon, perceive and be perceived, resist.

The project only works when there is a balance, a tug of war. Now it’s all merged, confused. Artifice has been turned into a kind of rock. And real things seem ephemeral. Instead of being one prism, counterbalancing the public and political, now the personal is often all there is in our hellscape of social media and its influencers who often have, and want, no other POV than their own.

Of course, the pronoun “I” has always been “performative,” fake, an illusion as surely as the authoritative and objective third-person. You can’t imagine that by reading an “I” narrated essay or memoir you get the whole truth of someone’s life. Every autobiography necessarily omits more than it includes. It leads you down a path, maybe a garden one, maybe a trail into an impenetrable forest. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own used the “I” but announced it was still a mask, maybe Mary Seton or Beton speaking behind it. And if you pay attention you can see Woolf holding a carved one up to her face, taking it off, putting it on, taking it off, now you see her now you don’t.

The playwright Brecht was a big one for having his actors step out of character and say, what amounts to, “Hey, I’m an actor.” Though of course those lines were written, too, and blocked and rehearsed. But it was a useful reminder. 

If we accepted it, it was because we understood that the goal of artifice was to get at something real. Much like we understood that the goal of identity was to understand one point of intersection. Fuel activism. It was a means, a tool, not the end. Certainly not the whole.

I’m a little lost now that the mask has become firmly welded to the face, indistinguishable. It even claims there is no face behind it. And each use of that tiny “I” feels not like an exploration but the promotion of a brand. A marketing strategy. Ugh. What a bear trap. I can’t stand it any more. Every act of communication feels a little bit gross. Like there’s something the matter with the medium itself. And maybe there is. Sometimes I wish I could take an axe to it. Like the old prohibitionists. Or maybe Lizzie Borden. Maybe I will.

All of which is to say, I need to try something different. I’m really grateful for your support, and I hope you stick around while I experiment—mostly in private because I need to remember what it’s like to work without imagining an audience. I’ll be in touch maybe once a month or so to let you know what I’m up to or to share thoughts, photos, recipes, dunno. What do you want?

In any case, since that isn’t what you signed up for, I’m going to end paid subscriptions which means Substack will return your money or at least some of it. 

Here’s hoping the rain comes soon.

Disgruntledly yours,

xoxo  Kelly