I find myself seeking new worlds and imagined futures in the books I read and the TV I watch. The impossibility of the current conditions feels like a soil, fertile with possibility of flowers and fruits, if only we just tilled it well and raked away the current rubble. In January 2022, I think a lot of our daily lives feel rote, small, maybe even claustrophobic. But at the tectonic level, things are shifting, making room. I’ve been seeking media that stretches the edges of my own radical imagination; I believe we can build a better future but first we must imagine it.
Anyway, I thought with this post I’d round up a few of the things that have stretched my thinking and my dreaming lately.
Movement Memos
I read the transcript of a recent episode of the podcast Movement Memos where the conversation between the host, Kelly Hayes, and organizer and mobilizer Bree Newsome Bass explored, among other things, the need for capitalism to collapse. Kelly talks about the covid pandemic making millions available for future debilitation; Bree responds with naming some of the things we can do to orient ourselves in this context. She says:
“What do we do? How do we organize ourselves for that moment? And I mean, I think that’s where mutual aid has to come into play. I think that we have to think very seriously about who we are physically connected to on a local level where we can physically share resources.”
“We know that… the system is shutting down one way or the other. One way is that ecological disaster causes it to collapse in a chaotic way. Right? And the other way is that we shut it down in an organized fashion, which is what can happen if we mass mobilize.”
Bree Newsome Bass, Movement Memos, 1/20/2022
Bree and Kelly go into more about voting rights, the trauma and fear of this moment, and all the other battlefronts for injustice happening. Kelly has this beautiful thing to say where she imagines what’s possible in improbability:
“As activists and organizers, we are builders in an era of collapse. Our work is set against all probability – and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made, our joy will be found, and where our ingenuity will fashion ways of living and caring for each other, even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. Life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone.”
Kelly Hayes, Movement Memos, 1/20/2022
Both of these radical women help us contextualize the present as the foundation for whatever future we build and understand collapse as canvas for world-building. It’s an exciting time, if nothing else.
Grievers
I read Grievers, a debut fiction novella from adrienne maree brown, last week as well. amb is well-versed in apocalypse and her radical imagination muscles are lean and supple so I was expecting to be stretched by this book, described briefly as “a tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world”. Grievers, set in Detroit, explores the deep grief wounds of pandemic conditions and pre-existing poverty for Black residents. The book is about plague and grief and loss but it also imagines a world where the sick and disabled get the care they need, even in collapse conditions. This was the first fiction I’ve read in a long time that commits narrative time and literal word count on the page to describing the care the main character, Dune, provides to another character, her sick and disabled grandmother, Mama Vivian. Mama Vivian, withdrawn and silent in her old age and grief, though not struck by the H-8 syndrome, needs transferring, toileting, diaper changes, bedding changes, music, company, water and vodka to sip, food to be fed to her by the spoonful, and more. The book takes the time to provide all of this care for her and I was moved when I noticed it. I’m not saying it’s never happened that a disabled and sick person both 1) gets all the care they need and 2) is still treated as a whole and dignified person in a novel before but the rarity of it struck me hard. And it’s not just Mama Vivian, Dune cares physically and spiritually for the vacant bodies of grievers she finds around the city as well. I was glad to see a world imagined where this is true and valued.
This is also the first book I’ve read since the start of the pandemic that has actually care-fully touched pandemic wounds in a safe and accessible way. Much the way I don’t always realize I’ve been longing for physical affection until my partner touches my back and my body folds into his touch, Grievers made space to explore grief and wounds I didn’t know I was carrying. She teaches us there is room enough, actually, for all of us to be cared for in our grief. What an offering, full of possibility.
Station Eleven
Station Eleven. This show on HBO Max, based on the novel of the same name, is so hard for me to tidily summarize. I have not read the book, only watched the show, but I am *enchanted* by this world and there is so much to say. I have consumed a LOT of collapse and post-apocalyptic media in my life (Walking Dead and everything in that universe, Y: The Last Man, The 100, 3%, Jericho, fucking Zoo, Daybreak, Sweet Tooth, all those unimaginative OatStudios shorts on Netflix, Handmaid’s Tale, Snowpiercer, Train to Busan…) and I have never seen most of what the Station Eleven world has to offer us.
“Survival is insufficient.”
The traveling symphony, Station Eleven
I’m not going to even try to summarize the major plot points of Station Eleven; the story spans over 20 years of time leading up to and immediately following an apocalyptic flu and jumps fluidly across that time. But the story is built around theater and music, “because survival is insufficient”. Shakespeare, specifically, is the theater they perform, but they also spend time making things just to make things, creating and wearing whimsical costumes, and use performance as therapy. It’s the most creative apocalypse world I’ve ever encountered.
More than that, Station Eleven seems to reject and even subvert many many common tropes and stereotypes often seen in other post-apocalyptic media. There’s no patriarchal and gendered violence; there’s no colonial replications of land and resource hoarding and turf-warring; and disabled people are the keepers and the healers. Physical affection is generous and consensual across all kinds of relationships: parent-child, friendship, queer romance, director-actor. Crying and expressing emotions is normal and welcome. Many characters display evidence of what we might call severe mental illness, neurodivergence, physical impairment, disability, and trauma and yet all of those people are also healers, leaders, keepers, teachers, conductors, and directors. Weirdness, whimsy, and self-determination are encouraged but people routinely act for the collective good and with a principled value system.
Everything feels possible in the world of Station Eleven and it is a refreshing bit of television, a departure from the cynicism and doom that usually blankets the media I wade through. As adrienne maree brown says, “science [speculative] fiction” is “simply a way to practice the future together”. Station Eleven feels like that practice.
The more we can imagine possible futures, the more we will be equipped to turn over the soil of collapse and shape change toward those futures.
I keep trying to drag myself back to this space; keep making a practice of this experiment. It’s an exercise in stretching underused writing muscles and verbalizing the things that wordlessly connect and combine in my brain. Creative expression, or just expression, has value just for the practice of it- even when doubt and insecurity creep in. We have COVID in the house again after an exposure from a family member last week. The days pass by, mostly mundane and usually only slight variations on the day before. Thus, finding possibility, exploring our imaginations, and practicing at the future become all the more important. Thanks for engaging with these posts.