“I’m driving to D.C. to make my body useful,” a friend said
in advance of the protest on January 21....
“I’m driving to D.C. to make my body useful,” a friend said
in advance of the protest on January 21. I was grateful he put it this way – it
helped frame my thinking about what it means to object. Not everyone can be a
revolutionary, not everyone can lead a movement, but a lot of us can be bodies
in the street. There’s use in that, and power, a body added to a crowd of
bodies trying to make a point.
Bodies have been on the brain. About rights and choice and
freedom to move, about owning your own specific sack of flesh and what it is to
have what you can and cannot do with it, where you can and cannot go, dictated
by people in power who are racist and sexist, who are villainous, corrupt, and
moronic.
How to feel useful? It’s tricky. For me, here, in my small
life in Cambridge, carpentry work has reached its annual winter pause, much
later into the colder months than usual, and I’ve gone from using and moving my
body all day to being still at my desk, or piled on the couch under
blankets, computer on my lap, shifting into full-force writing mode. How to feel
useful, in body or in brain? These questions surge, more so now, maybe for many
of us, and they’re important, and they are tiring.
This epidemic of exhaustion. Part of it, I think, comes from
an inundation of meaning. In love and in crisis, everything has the potential
for metaphor. The bulb blowing in your nightstand lamp, the lean of trees in
the wind, a crowd of crows lifting from a rooftop like the shadow of clapping
hands. Falling in love is thrilling, and tiring, because there’s meaning in
your cereal bowl, your pair of socks. It’s an exhausting way to be, when meaning
is deepened and you don’t know what’s meant. The same, I think, is true in
moments of breakdown and crisis. There’s doom – or hope – in the pitch of a
lamp post, in the passing expression of a stranger on a train, in the maniacal
all-caps blasts from a tyrant. I guess in either it’s worth staying awake.
