ongoing thoughts on time and queerness

I lamented to a friend recently, that I felt like I had all these ideas for blog posts, but to do them right I needed more time to re-watch films, and browse through theory, and really think about the connections I wanted to make. We'd been having an ongoing conversation on embracing slowness when creating. Suddenly, though, she switched gears. "All this talk about slowness also makes me think about how fun it is to sometimes make work really fast." The idea of slowness was kind of eye-opening for me to begin with--I think I always want the finished product to arrive faster so projects that go too slow end up feeling like a failure, but also that's capitalism sucking the juices from my brain again. And the she hits me with the joy of working really fast. Speed feels like an artist thing, but maybe it can be a writer thing too. Really, it's a kind of shitty first draft tactic, perfection is the enemy of good and all that. Ever the realist, I imagine it's a kind of juggling of all of these, a mad scientist workshop full of levers and pulleys and mixtures and you have to constantly play with the controls to see what lets things flow toward creation. 

It's ever so fitting, then, that the ideas I was struggling to find time for and wondering whether they deserved leisure or speed, was just time itself. And queerness too. And queer time. So instead of the carefully thought out essay I hoped for, here's some quick ongoing thoughts. 

✵ At a lecture on indigenous speculative fiction, the speaker quoted the epigraph from Man Made Monsters by Andrea Rogers, which describes how Cherokee speakers understand time as circular rather than linear. It's an incredibly beautiful concept and one that it's pretty impossible for my Western/European educated mind to fully comprehend. I think Reservation Dogs does an excellent job of literalizing this idea, the scenes with Lily Gladstone especially where she kind of resists the directives of her ancestors. And also, I like the way the show interprets the ancestors as humorous and ironic and not just stoic and serious. It certainly changes your understanding of the world to imagine your ancestors and those who come after you in the same room. I am privileged by the fact that my ancestors carry so little pain and trauma with them compared to others, but I also have a hard time imagining the ancestors that come after me. I don't think that the Cherokee meant this concept to revolve around heteropatriarchal ideas of lineage, probably their understanding of ancestry did not depend on procreation and direct lines--it certainly goes agains the circular imagery here. But it's hard not to think about what this means when I probably won't have any generations to come. At my new job, I had to name a beneficiary for the life insurance policy I am automatically enrolled in. I had to call my mom to ask her for her social security number and I think she was a bit taken aback, probably at the horrific idea that I would die before her, but who else was I suppose to choose? This is where the "room" of Western/European society is too small, dictated by family structures rather than whole communities. How do I turn my linear narratives into circular ones when all I've ever been taught is to think along the line?

✵ I can't stop thinking about All of Us Strangers and Petite Maman and the episode "Loop" from Tales of the Loop, all of which involve a fabulist element of time travel or otherworldliness revolving around parents and children, in a spectrum of queer ways. Adam mystically visits his childhood home, meeting with his dead parents forever preserved at the age they died, the same age Adam is in the present. While staying at her dead grandmother's house, Nelly meets a young girl who turns out to be her mother as a child. A young boy befriends a young girl, who turns out to be his mother as a child. There's just something about both the concept of meeting your parents as children and getting to face your younger self that's just so fascinating. This kind of temporal dislocation seems queerly healing. I often used to wonder if my parents would have been my friend had we existed at this same age. Even though I am pretty close to them, the answer always seems to be no. And what would you say to your younger self if you actually met them? Or what would they say to you? I think the beauty of these three movies, is that they manage to elevate the mystical concept beyond the cheesy therapy scenarios that I just tried to articulate. These temporal moments bring clarity with very little transparency. There's no unloading or unpacking or laying it on the table. And yet there is some kind of kinship that comes from these encounters, some kind of peace knowing the connection happened. 

✵ In Anita De Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, a deceased woman artist's spirit is kept alive by a younger woman insisting on studying and showing her work. A similar kind of interpretation to the Cherokee concept of time. The book was due back to the library, and I didn't save the passage, but there's a moment where the artist realizes that her strength as a spirit is tied to this young woman's interest in her life and work. It was a beautiful moment of queer kinship--generational connections don't have to be about blood and lineage--as well as a really tangible defense of the kind of work I do. The thought of the spirits of the writers I study out there existing and even being strengthened by my love for their work moved me to tears. The next step is to imagine my own future readers keeping me alive by reading my work--but that kind of possibility feels like too much to hope for.