2024: Pickled Amygdalas
exposure and endurance in the telephone genocide
baby there’s ten hours left of 2024 and i’m not known for thinking ahead.
I’ve spent a lot of time on my telephone this year, and like you, am fundamentally changed by what I have seen. this newsletter is about that.
Briefly: I’m deeply heartened on the daily to know people make a note to listen to my radio programme. Since we last wrote I made a show on Nostalgia and another on Friendship. The last one was my return to the studio after a short spell of remote-radio, so I filled it with friends and we had so much to say / play.
November took as its inspiration a sixty-four part prose poem by Donna Stonecipher, a spiral as an analgesic trip into the doldrums, charity-shop hauntology, comfy jumpers, free association and forgetting what you came for, going the long way across the rickety bridge between past and present. In ancient Greek nostos means ‘a return home.’ Listen here | Tracklist here
Visiting guests from gadigal land discussing Sydney’s veteran radical community radio station Skid Row, and a guest report from newly founded Khora Radio in Athens, chatting about a refugee-led campaign to reinstate interpretation services in the camps around Athens, friendship as solidarity not charity and using radio to connect the people. Listen here | Tracklist here
A note: I don’t get time to listen to much new music these days so if you are making any please send it to me. I want it »» spiraltimes@proton.me
i’ve found it close to impossible to sit with my thoughts and studiously avoided writing, reflection and rumination this year. In interrogating why, i had to reckon with the paralysing shame i was confronted by anytime i experienced beauty, ease or joy, or took a photo and went to share it on social media, seeing it set against the reality of endless flapping toddlers, razed schools, mass graves, atrocities with names like the Flour Massacre.
A holocaust of our time is being perpetrated in Gaza, and you can tell the pearl clutchers we will stop using ‘incendiary language’ when they stop their organised campaign of incinerating people in hospitals and tents. At first glance this would seem to render daily life anywhere its own form of obscenity. 'No business as usual is as true as ever. But are you a business? And is it really giving ‘zone of interest’ to know that while you are preoccupied everyday with this, that to be in solidarity, to be useful, you must also live?
I’ve been circling around some half formed thoughts about this recently. There is a certain commonly broadcasted online piety, which I think, a projection of our own guilt, based on pushing others to “focus” based purely on an assessment that they are.. uh.. giving meta the publishing rights to insufficiently activating kinds of images.
But what if to be any kind of useful political actor with a laser focussed commitment for longer than a a few months tops, you also have a duty to maintain a well-rounded life, whether or not you always feel you deserve it? Hear. me out, maybe remaining a well-adjusted participant in any society you wish to change is the absolute baseline, and maybe this means being able to hold more than one reality at once. There is a contradiction here when the urge to burn the entire thing down is so, so seductive. We have to reckon, too, with the extent to which consuming snuff images (which is what they are for soldiers) can becomes a kind of stand in for political action, a daily dose of corpses to prove to ourselves (or others?) we have not forgotten. But did this martyr ask to be marshalled into your personal brand? We may need to reckion with the reflex action of putting a fucked up video in your stories as its own a form of affect. Words may claim to escape us but images stay captive. But what is the impact? ‘All eyes on Rafah’ ..ya3ni...? I will not be the only one who has thrown my phone across the bed in disgust, heart racing stomach churning at what i have watched… only to see myself leaning forward moments later to share it like I can cast it out from my soul by republishing the thing that has sickened me with some commentary, rejecting it publicly. Shortly after I notice I have resumed scrolling. Truly deeply freakish behaviour… yet we are wiring ourselves this way.
Principled solidarity cannot be allowed to become a staring into the abyss competition.
Too much of all this, without regular debriefing and processing room to help transform the sickness into the work, is sending a lot of people half mental. Lapses in political judgement and deeply asocial behaviour abound. The machine does very well to inspire reaction (in so far as it makes us create content) but always mollifies - you are still there, keeping your hands and feet in the same position. Trite, perhaps, but it remains true whether you are consuming videos of recipes or torture. We risk becoming robbed of our faculties, the inevitable pickled amygdalas from unmanaged exposure just when we most need to be able to loudly and without compromise differentiate between danger and discomfort.
All this is anything but an argument for ignoring Palestinian testimony.
It’s about what is needed to stay sane enough to be able to still hear it, really hear it, over the din of our own vicarious weeping.
The documentation, phone screens plastered with bloodied thumbprints, is holy work. And phone charge, see the image from Jenin, is quite often life or death. Blessed be the filmers, even while the debates flare on the ground in Gaza about when and to what end their personal hells are uploaded, and the archivers worlwide too. Still your thumbs are warm and do not have blood on them, complicit as you indeed may feel. This is why I have not used the ‘t’ or ‘T’ word in here. I will say that as part of my waged labour involves helping frontline workers to think about their own exposure to the suffering of others (vicarious traumatisation) impacts their ability to do their jobs and how to effectively manage this exposure (to things like infant death for midwives, abuse images for content moderators) in a principled effective way without cracking up entirely, I know a thing or two about this and I can see when it is playing out.
More and more I’ve concluded that to remain sharp, discerning and generally mentally well enough to act, also has to be mean attuning and noticing when too much phone is an act of self-harm. What I am saying is that you do not need to watch another prison rape video. The survivor does not need to you, either. I sit here with a lump in my throat trying to remember if the person I am thinking of even survived. I chose not to watch that video. You’re not ‘tuning out.’ There is tragedy inside that, but the old ways of the image war may not work as they once did. The road to the Hague is long. Do not mistake it. The work of caring for the ones who make it through the fire, beyond the bars, will take the rest of our lives and longer. We do what is asked of us by those on the ground without hesitation to the best of our ability, but ‘like and subscribe’ becomes the horizon of revolutionary duty at our extreme peril…
I read oral histories of worldwide solidarity movements for South Africa, Vietnam, Ireland and wonder idly the dimensions of their goading and scolding of each other which I’m sure happened, for not doing enough or doing too much of the wrong stuff. How might this have been different given that they existed in a time when the image-world could actually foment outrage and a sea change. I don’t have the answers but I want to know more. We are inurred, I fear. The trick, perhaps, as usual, is refusing the either/or here, and rejecting the strange contemporary truism that active solidarity is a constant tightrope walk towards either (allow be to be glib) burning out due to lack of support or getting cancelled for having an incorrect opinion: two terrible modes co-created horseshit that we by-and-large do to each other, under the bizarre illusion we are in the centre of this, when we could just as easily do differently. What would it mean to internalise our own commitments in a generative way, that does not require constant broadcast, especially for younger people? The Vietnam War lasted twenty years.
The impact of fear-flooded brains, hypervigilance and defeatism on the fractured hearts of too many of our supposed ‘movements’ in abayance is already evident, and that’s of course about much more than just our phones. Wreckage begets wreckage sure and the human instinct to ‘pick on someone our own size’ when the real advancing enemy feels so beyond our reach may be understandable, but at this conjuncture I’m not sure its forgiveable. When the option does exists to expand instead into something bigger and bigger to begin exerting the necessary pressure and help scramble the equation for good, no matter how fucked up you feel, to not take it feels like world historical levels of bag-fumbling.
Where to go with all this?
I was taught in Palestine, almost as lesson number one, that lingering too long on the contrasts between your own position and another (whether by dint of passport, well fed, no family members in prison, no wall encircling you, white skin and so on) quickly become its own form of vanity and a block on any equitable and productive solidarity. It’s also just frankly rude and weird to openly harp on in this way. Seeing the ways this fatally limiting analysis could not take a day off for those invested in it, even when it so obviously didn’t fit the context, was eye opening. We live in individuated times, but engaging in political work primarily to make your own feelings more bearable about what you do or don’t deserve is fundamentally a cul de sac back to the self. terminal navel drushti.
At the end of this year I got, miraculously, the opportunity to meet my friend who runs a solidarity summer camp in the West Bank. He shared in disbelief the extent and heat of truly vicious identity-based bickering between some recent visiting participants as to who was more or less privileged…. to the extent that the people living in the Refugee Camp had to break up the fight! There is no more fitting a metaphor for what must change in order for international solidarity to become the level of unified force it must be to meet this moment.
There are more cursed and tragic examples of this than bear repeating, at home, abroad, on the ground and beyond, that all speak to the ways that facing down those supporting this genocide (speaking to others like me who are not under bombs) requires a fundamental break with the internalised psychology, its own sort of religion, that can only think in the doomed unit of ‘I.’ We are of course none of us immune. But i know, and i have felt, on small occasion, the kind of ecstatic merging in submitting to something bigger, cocreated. the worlds biggest trust fall, a humbling. i want it for everyone. more critical and intentional use of our telephones could be a good starting point but will not of course be the only thing to transform the rot curious to hear thoughts contributions and counterthoughts on the above from anyone anywhere. let us continue to pull at the thread.
Months ago, speaking with one of several new friends in Gaza, the only reason I stay on instagram, I said in response to a note of thanks that I know he would do the same for me if I was the one in his position. He said ‘I hope you are always in the best condition and never reach the state we are living in.’ It is in this back and forth, our shared insistence on living, on joy, as well as we can, that we find the best fuel, alongside fury, yes, to multiply expand strenghten the possibility of universal freedom and life; which is to say, struggle itself.
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If you have read this far please do donate something to my new friends in Gaza: Karim and his dad Ahmed, Ola and her little ones Adel and Eman, and Ali and the rest of Hamdouna Family.
