morning / minnesota
this morning, i went to a dance workshop all about feeling and writhing and being seen. ten of us rolled around on the floor in the dark for ninety minutes with prompts like “imagine yourself as a bag of bones” and “make imperceptible movements”; we ended class in a circle, disheveled and heavy-eyed, taking turns dancing at one another. we thanked each other for being present and for witnessing.
on the quick walk to my car, i opened my phone to check my grocery list and clear my notifications –
we need rice and another observer was killed in minneapolis.
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maybe people are right that the world has always been at least this destructive, and that horrors only feel more prevalent because we have greater, faster access to information about them.
but they say it as if online is still a place we go, and not an inescapable condition.
it is not just that there are more headlines more often. it is all of the bad – or certainly enough of it – from the entire world, all of the time, ad nauseum, frame-by-frame, five different angles, a handheld infinity of terrible things, and all the while trolls and bots and your real-life neighbors and governments cycle through the narcissist’s prayer in comment sections and quote-tweets as your nervous system is milked by industrial-attention-farming sycophants.
so, okay, time to turn the phone off and get some air, except it’s too late because regularly ingesting gigabytes of data about how dangerous the world is makes it hard to go outside now!
we do not just have more access to information about brutality; we are steeped in it.
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i hope i don't come across flippant; there is a gulf of difference between the latent voyeurism of social media and actually experiencing or being the victim of violence and oppression.
at the same time, i worry how often our witness turns to consumption, even with the best intentions.
we do not have to gorge ourselves to honor others.
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among alex pretti’s last words were, “are you okay?”