In Preparation
19.07.2024 Kate Middeleer
19.07.2024 Kate Middeleer
1.
The world is an endless spread of recycled patterns. The mechanisms of cell structure assures us that light will always refract in a set direction. A drop of oil will disperse in its predestined path along the water, and the growth of a flower petal will follow course. Art, nature, and accidents, follow prediction. How the chips fall is dependent on the angles by which we tap the domino, the speed, the force. How we choose to knock it is our responsibility, and the subsequent chain reaction our lot.
I was five when my mother found me crying in my bed one evening.
“It was my fault,” I said. We’d received news that her close friend had died that day when the car she was riding in spun out of control, on a trip to Iraq as a war reporter.
“What do you mean, your fault?” my mom asked me.
“I didn’t do my chores, and she died.”
That a small child could hear the tragic news about a woman she’d never met, and claim responsibility, shows some misinformed belief that chain reactions are so far-reaching, they can cross oceans and cause calamities. A blind faith in patterns that extended to a five-year-old in Rhode Island, who neglected to feed the dog.
To take ownership of world events probably required a level of self-centered delusion, but I can hope it was more of a desperate desire to make some sense out of it all. It reflects the sentiments of Joan Didion, who not only attempted to define the 1960’s in her essay The White Album, but claimed them as her own; her LA house on Franklin Avenue with the constant knocks on its doors were in direct correlation to the paranoia of the time, Sharon Tate’s murder was a cog in a cyclical pattern inside which Didion was placed in the middle. She writes of attempting to understand the mess of happenings, to find “meaning” in each flashing image, each scene taking place.
“I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility,” she writes. “But to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical”.
The romanticism of attaching myself to a literary idol is all too tempting and all too romantic. And so I do but I won’t. I will admit only to the idealization of her mental affliction because there is nothing ideal about it: she did not believe in chance without pattern, which she cites as “dice theory”.
I read my astrology horoscope a few times a week. I put my crystals out to charge on the patio under a full moon, and when I’m really desperate, even under my pillow. I once paid close to $200 to get my tarot cards read, and before the age of twelve, I avoided every crack in the sidewalk, and held my breath while driving past every graveyard.
I put my faith into all the otherworldly powers I can get my hands on. With some vague hope that the dice theory and the weight of my decisions are nothing up against the almighty strings the universe is pulling.
Didion: “I remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura. I remember chatting with her about reasons why this might be so, paying her, opening all the French windows and going to sleep in the living room”.
2.
I was in a laundromat around the corner from DeKalb Avenue. It was during the height of masked mass COVID hysteria in New York City, and the small space buzzed. One television showing a Trump rally was pinned beside a poster of the Beatles, and Ringo Starr stared at me as the set on the opposite wall blared footage of California forest fires. The police were putting yellow tape alongside the street outside the laundromat in an investigation into a shooting that had taken place earlier that morning, and Creedence Clearwater belted in my earbuds as I stood five feet away from a person separating her white socks.
Three years prior I had been standing on the stoop of my apartment in Bed-Stuy when my neighbor invited me upstairs for a smoke and to listen to him rehearse his speech for a fundraising event for his nonprofit, which had the motto ‘Fuck a False Arrest’.
He’d been arrested three times growing up in the city. For law infringements that any young white male wouldn’t have to worry about twice.
“My mom had me write down on a piece of paper three things I wanted most in life. I wrote: 1. A family 2. A good job 3. A nice place to live,” he tells me, “and then she lit a match to it. She said to me, ‘This is going to be your life if you don’t change’”.
And so he worked instead to change the system, creating a company that helps those newly indicted, often people of color, get a good lawyer, and contact their family.
During my time in New York during COVID, I remember Black Lives Matter protests, I remember seeing his face pop up on social media while his company sought to aid those arrested during the marches, the first time I’d thought of him in years.
I remember seeing an old acquaintance post pictures of Trump on Instagram, with the caption “I love my president”. I hadn’t seen her since we’d scooped ice-cream at age fifteen. I saw someone else post a story saying, “If you support Trump, unfollow me”.
I remember sitting on the couch watching angry people storm the Capitol Building. I remember them hunting Nancy Pelosi and I remember thinking that the guy with the red white and blue face paint and the animal fur shawl looked comically like a bartender in Williamsburg I used to have a thing for. I remember everyone staring at the screen in horror, I remember Stephen Colbert writing jokes about it in his opening monologue the next day.
I remember sitting on the couch watching angry people storm the Capitol Building. I remember them hunting Nancy Pelosi and I remember thinking that the guy with the red white and blue face paint and the animal fur shawl looked comically like a bartender in Williamsburg I used to have a thing for. I remember everyone staring at the screen in horror, I remember Stephen Colbert writing jokes about it in his opening monologue the next day.
Said bartender and I caught up for drinks a few years later while I was back visiting the city. It had been ages since I’d seen him, and it felt like it should be a culminating moment—the man I’d pined for had finally noticed me (only took me moving to the other side of the world). We sat for a drink in the afternoon sun except he wasn’t drinking these days, and searched for things to say. A noise broke out across the street, and a group of about ten young teens started beating the shit out of each other. I remember noticing how everyone turned when one of the boys raised his knee to stomp on another’s head, and everyone looked ready to jump up, but no one did.
“How do we segue from that?” I ask as the sirens begin to wail and the crowd disperses.
“We don’t,” he says.
After Sharon Tate Polanski was murdered on Cielo Drive, Didion writes, “I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
“How do we segue from that?” I ask as the sirens begin to wail and the crowd disperses.
“We don’t,” he says.
After Sharon Tate Polanski was murdered on Cielo Drive, Didion writes, “I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
3.
Didion writes of packing for a work trip: “To Pack and Wear: 2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, cigarettes, bourbon, 2 legal pads and pens…This list enabled me to pack, without thinking,” she writes. “for any piece I was likely to do. A list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative”. And she would then arrive at the motel, only to realize she had forgotten a watch. To be prepared for everything except knowing the time of day.
Me, I rarely leave the house without a hair brush and water bottle, a phone charger and jacket—be it middle of January—lipstick, concealer. And then I rush out the door, jump into the car, only to arrive at the party, the grocery store, the pub, and look down and find that I’m barefoot. That I will arrive somewhere, prepped and polished for appearance’s sake, with no shoes. In my mind, almost identical to Didion’s watch: ready to arrive and be seen but stunted in action.
“This may be a parable,” Didion writes, “either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself”.
4.
There is a line in The White Album that is etched into my mind and I find myself repeating it every so often, when I’m walking, when I’m driving, when I want to step out of a conversation with my body still sitting in the chair. And partly because I just like the sound of the way the words string together on my tongue.
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five”.
I sat on the floor of the living room in April of 2013, watching on TV as a suburb of Boston had evacuated and taped off their streets. The live-screening of a manhunt. One brother responsible for the marathon bombing had been killed, and the other was reportedly injured, hiding somewhere in this neighborhood. The live-reporting was eerie, watching the police comb through the backyards of empty houses.
Eventually they found him, bleeding-out in someone’s landlocked motor boat. I remember crying, picturing him dying and alone—and what was awaiting him, nothing much better. And wondering if something was innately wrong with me, to spend even a moment in the hull of that boat with him. Boston was just an hour away. He killed people, and by some degrees however many times removed, I probably knew them.
I went to track and field practice after school as usual the next day. I laced my sneakers in the locker room with the other girls and Sarah explained that Coach K would be subbing in, as Coach Gill had been running the marathon the day before and was recovering emotionally with his family.
“He’s okay, though, he wasn’t hurt,” she assured us. We went about running our laps and ate granola bars with the other kids as the bus drove us home.
Didion writes, “During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window of the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind […] in this light all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless”.
5.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which.” Those are the leading lines of Didion’s essay.
To step back and see a story as it is—a beginning, a middle, a succession of chapters that gives us either a laugh or a lesson—this might relieve us of some authority over its ending.
I no longer believe that one innocent misstep or neglected childhood chore could have negative repercussions on the other side of the world. But I do believe that the ideas born from a man on one side of the city can effect change three years later on a march over the Williamsburg Bridge. I no longer hold my breath while driving past graveyards. But I spend the extra $9 on concert ticket insurance, with the comfort of knowing if I change my mind, I could get my money back. I met my co-editor behind the bar at a restaurant we both worked at and called it fate. I had a really rough few months a while back and blamed it on car troubles and a sinus infection.
“The production was never meant to be improvised,” Didion writes. “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it”.
I live some moments with a quiet prayer for more conviction, adamancy in my own choices. That I sometimes falter shows a part of me that still believes in the horror that might come from not feeding the dog.
I worry over the collapse of the dominos but haven’t yet ferreted out the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ that is pushing them over. If they’re all crashed down around us, I’m not sure it matters much anyway.