I Don't Know What to Say

The Flattening Effect of Living Under so Much Evil

(Photo: Dominique Mercy in “Nelken” by Pina Bausch)

I do not know what to say about any of this. You know what I’m talking about. This. The endless, pointless, vile, disgusting, quite frankly humiliating evil we are living through. It falls very low on the list of wrongs occurring in the world right now, but one thing I can’t seem to get past is how flattening and uninspiring a politics driven by cruelty and depravity is. I don’t have the words, I don’t think anyone else does, and guess that is all I can say.

For weeks now I’ve sat down to try to write about something topical. With so many evils in the world, there’s surely something to say about all of this, right? But that’s just the problem I keep running into. It turns out evil isn’t banal, per se, but it is impenetrable and cold, a solid wall with no crevices to crawl up or cracks to break apart. I hesitate to say it’s boring because that seems so dismissive, but as an artist, a writer, a person trying to metabolize all that is wrong right now I just do not have any other word for it but evil, and that is about as descriptive and yet non-precise as you can get.

(Photo: William Evian)

What do you call denying healthcare to millions in a country already sick as hell with no nationalized healthcare to begin with? Evil. What do you call an agency designed to enforce white supremacy and rip families apart? Evil. What do you call moves to eradicate trans people, eliminate queerness from the public eye, force us all back into talking about sexuality in shameful hushed tones? Evil. What do you call state-backed forced birth? Evil. What do you call bombing other countries and supporting a genocidal state to the hilt? Evil. It’s all pure evil top to bottom but that’s just the thing, there’s a flattening effect to all this. If everything is evil, what is there to contrast it, to give it shape? It’s like we are floating in a sensory deprivation tank with no hallucinations, just vast, formless darkness in all directions.

It feels like an added humiliation to live through all this and have it all feel so flat and meaningless. Everyday feels like an extended ritual exercise in how much barbaric cruelty can people take. It doesn’t just make resistance or moving on feel futile, it makes even naming it for what it is or calling it our feel pointless. Yes, this is all very bad…and? It feels like no one knows what to do next, or if they do they are afraid of saying what they think that next step should be.

It’s actually depraved, how stupid this all feels. Violence and cruelty at every level, directed at nearly every living thing on the planet, in a steady rhythm, every day. What is there to even say about it? Does calling it out make it better? Not really. Does naming it feel cathartic? I guess, but only insofar as naming can be a way to claim power at all.

Naming in magic is a famously important thing. The first thing Adam did once God breathed life into him was to name everything he saw. God might make reality, but our power as humans comes from the ability to name everything in it. In Egyptian myth, Isis is able to both poison and draw out poison from the sun by finding out the secret name of the god Ra.

Maybe calling what is happening all around us, from Palestine to LA, evil is a good thing because at least then we have the power of naming what it is we are witnessing, but it is a cold comfort. What is there to say? What difference does it make? Will anything ever change, or is this it?

I have a weird theory that one reason why Zohran Mamdani’s win in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor caused such a flood of excitement from around the country wasn’t just because it gave people hope, or stuck it to a political party that would rather prop up an alleged sex pest and certified moron than move even an inch to the left (although it is that, too). Mamdani’s win is just…something different. It’s not quite Obama, or Bernie, or AOC, although it has shades of all those previous victories. Who knows if the Demon-Rat party will let him win in the general, or if once in there he will be able to get done the things he wants to do, the hope he inspires, I think, is not just that things will be better in the future, it’s that the future will be different at all. Right now, the future looks like staring down a perfectly smooth, unlit, and never ending tunnel.

(Photo: Alex Prager)

This is a somewhat long essay about how I have nothing to say and feel creatively tapped out by staring into the face of pure evil for the past several months (years?) and I guess there is an irony and perhaps even hope in that. Maybe what needs to happen is we all just have to acknowledge how much everything sucks, how humiliating it is to live under these conditions, and then start moving on whether the freaks in charge want us to or not. Maybe that’s not the solution. Maybe there is none. I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.