No Direction Is a Good Direction
A correspondence against the always failed state
Nico & Skye 
These letters span the months of March, April, and May: from the virus to quarantine to the beginning of the uprising. They were initially an archiving of a moment when isolation became our embodiment—an attempt to stay connected while we witnessed an abrupt disintegration of the idea that on- and off-line are separate. We had no idea where we would end up.
If this correspondence emerged out of a panic of the virtual, exchange also lent itself to statis. We may have learned the most through the days we could not write (meaning nothing drove us to write) to each other. At the cusp, writing felt pathetic; we craved the club, jokes at the dinner table, Nina Simone, fighting for and protecting each other.
Our letters remain anonymous. Ultimately, they are correspondences against the always failed state; a correspondence about narratives that fail before they’ve begun.
4/20 Skye
IDK what to write, so I’m sending these stanzas from a poem I’m going to read on Zoom next week (lol):
4/20 Nico
I believe in universalisms, but we’re melting
While I write this, I’m quite high and I am holding myself to the restriction and unerasure of twenty minutes—listening to Tracy Chapman. I don’t believe in universalisms. We’re melting. Tracy Chapman imagines melting in a car and usually I envision it as ice. I feel so much less fear than I used to.
I went to Ocean Beach to let go of some of my uncle’s ashes yesterday—they had been sitting under a desk for a year. They were AIDS ridden, Agent Orange ridden, San Francisco VA fucking Medical Center ridden….
As I released them this little girl made balls of sand next to me & sent them to the water. The ashes came back for me, of course. She probably thought I, too, was playing with sand.
Everything we release comes back to us, all the good and all the bad. Bad knows no guilt and good does.
My mom just stormed in and held up her gloves and yelled “I killed two more rats!”
4/22 Skye
I was supposed to write back yesterday—but spent the day sleeping and didn’t have enough energy to make the time. This is one of the big problems with people treating quarantine as a welcome writing retreat: it’s not that I never have time to write, but that my stamina runs out getting through each day. The other big problem being the absolute class-luxury that is treating quarantine as a welcome writing retreat. Engaging with literary institutions feels like clenching fists in the middle of the ocean!! !
Technically, I am at work right now; and, technically, I have been looking at this painting by Yu Youhan for the past 30 minutes.
Another one of his works (Abstract, 2016) arrived in Kimberly Rose Drew’s newsletter that I subscribed to at the beginning of the pandemic. The one that she sent has more reds and oranges and yellows and greens; more like a ball of worms than a globe with roads.
4/22 Nico
I love Yu Youhan’s art. I love the colors. The painting you sent makes me think of how much we attempt to compartmentalize environments and turn them into society, but that inevitably they are all feeding each other. These environmental lifelines, the roots under the trees, but also globalization—the expansion that kills. I have been talking with a friend about gift economies, this not-so-far-off horizon of the melting world.
4/23 Skye
Gift economies!! It’s so weird that plague and globalization—these separations—both depend on mobility. That sort of paradoxical freedom makes me think about the Road to Hana, this long and winding road built into cliffs overlooking Maui’s Pacific. Everything is so green your eyes hurt. When driving, you can’t help but feel that the road shouldn’t exist: a hologram, illuminating workers laying pavement on their ancestral land.
Forest and Kim Starr / CC BY 3.0
The road is infamous. At the big waterfalls in Huelo, tourist stands sell coconuts and smoothies next to t-shirts that say I SURVIVED THE ROAD TO HANA. The danger is mostly a myth, though: part of a story meant to sell the island to foreign capital. Plague stops the possibility of sale. This means immediate economic hell and, also, stopping is a matter of life and death. (If no one goes to Hana, then no one in Hana gets sick.)
I wonder what a continued stoppage might look like: long-term survival?? A shift away from dependency? A move to prevent crisis that also leads to repair???
I’m rambling. To circle back to your mom’s rat: I’m sitting here, trying to turn this pile of junk into something legible—trying to write—and there is a man pacing back and forth in front me, being slowly chased by a tall, white bird. He is on the phone, but just keeps yelling “It followed me from all the way down there,” grinning like a schoolboy.
4/24 Nico
I took care of my little cousin Ariela for a while today. She didn’t hold my hand because of “the virus.” It was bizarre, to say the least, to not be able to pick her up or help her balance on a skateboard. She was left to her own control as I cared from a distance—sharing the sensations of sprinkler water, ice cream on our tongues, banging the drums.
I have been watching a lot of videos of Nina Simone live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. If you haven’t seen them I really recommend watching here. Music—jazz especially— has so much to say about sinking into the encounter of no control, about a larger-ness taking over and fear not being its co-conspirator. About long-term survival.
4/27 Skye
Everyone should be free because if we ain’t we are murderous.
The days, my thoughts, are all mashed together. Mashed potato thoughts, ha! The most I can do is pull questions out of thin air, and then the questions don’t make much sense. I think I need to be around others to write?
Thinking—which is also making, which is also being a person—requires sociality. This also means that art (true art) is tied up in love (true love).
I’m trying to figure out how to love like Nina?
Nina makes me think that jazz—and art, and stories—might let us love again. Split us open so wide we have no choice but to take care of each other? I’m putting all my eggs in this basket. I miss dancing. I miss being tipsy, around strangers, the music hurting my ears. Coming home smelling like sweat. I miss being too anxious to make it to the dance floor.
I wonder what it would be like if we all loved the way Nina says we should? If we started seeing the world through the eyes of Ariela?
Friday night, I watched a friend cut a fish. It was an Ahi—three or four feet, maybe. We were standing on the grass, six feet from each other, the first time I’ve seen anyone other than my pod since quarantine began. These two kids, not my cousins but they could be, told me it was our job to dump the fish guts. They wanted to watch the eels grab the guts when they hit ocean water, but it was too dark to see anything so they lost interest.
Children might be so happy because they aren’t afraid of death; no fear.
4/27 Nico
I have been going on these long bike rides to the bay. I become this sweaty nothingness until I am in the water where I receive a coldness that feels something like openness, love, or not being so reliant on what is not real. I was listening to Nina and read what you wrote about bars and started to cry. I am trying to be more literal.
It made me think of a part of my favorite poem by Fred Moten.
My astrologer told me I should share more because, if I don’t, no one really knows. I think about dancing with strangers at the local bar, how it feels to share with those you do not see again. Freedom “alone” vs. freedom told?
Anyways, dancing blows writing off. I have always wondered why we’re not supposed to use two different metaphors in the same sentence? To write something that has multiple outcomes is my favorite thing about it all.
5/4 Skye
To borrow a concept from you: making things requires multiple directions, which is also to say no-direction is a good-direction.
5/4 Nico
I can only start writing something by beginning with observation (which is also coping and silence and nature and the untranslated and escapism). I’m thinking about this magic of making things—of staring into space— by which I also mean will/love/assuredness, and I am realizing that part of the reason I fail is because of self-obsession. All of these ants just began to pour out of the dirt.
5/5 Skye
Your description of observation is so true (the untranslatable! nothingness!). I’m also beginning to think of writing that prioritizes one’s surroundings as a literary tool that repositions nature as just as important (just as loud) as human subjectivity. What does a language look like that recognizes the life in all things? What does a poetics look like that troubles the human/non-human distinction altogether?
I want to write a poem that will let my grandkids imagine the exact place I’m sitting in: on May 5, 2020, with my hair buzzed to a six and four new pimples announcing their arrival, obsessed with the 27 coconuts propped under the table. Each coconut takes me about 22 minutes to open with the machete that we got at Lowe’s, and fat geckos watch suspiciously from the dirt as I hack away; the grass and the bougainvillea and the ginger plant and the four trees in front of me (whose names I don’t know—one with yellow flowers, one tall and bulky, one billowing, one sleek) all respond differently, familiarly, to the wind.
Wendell Berry sort of talks about this, when he analyzes poetry that he loves: he says that winding poetry, poetry with no home or point, poetry that describes each moss patch and tree root, is poetry that does the work that poetry is supposed to. Pointless poetry is the point.
But I also think this might be me avoiding real shit.
There is a certain genre of texts that succeed at talking about the trans experience without naming anything about gender. Texts that think through materiality and interdependency, that insist flesh is interwoven with the matter of the world. (Often: texts that have been described as trans memoirs by reviewers, but are only about “gender” insofar as a trans person is loosely writing about their experiences…. ) I am wondering why these texts lean on observation? What nature offers the trans body? And I’m also wondering how a turn to nature might allow some trans bodies—white ones, wealthy ones, ones that are allowed freedom/mobility despite (or because of) their transness—to escape the world that we are beholden to. Yes, I am interested in troubling the Human—the catastrophe of Enlightenment—but I’m also interested in admitting that we are of the earth, that we are the creatures responsible for this mess, and that we have a responsibility to see it through.
5/7 Nico
I woke up early yesterday and took a walk along the Snake River. I thought there was no one around because it was dark when we pulled over at night, but on my walk in the morning I saw another makeshift campsite, a pile of deer bones, some wild sunflowers. To read your correspondence was timely.
Observation—or as you say, repositioning nature as just as important (just as loud) as human subjectivity—seems so instinctual. In many ways, meaning making is some human scheme to bring us more into our brains and less into our bodies, to create more fissures. It is why words have edges in their ability to communicate. It is why I want to learn more about sound. I think a lot about my friend Jenny here, how she hums as a replacement of a verbal response when she has nothing to say. I do it now too. Humming has taught me that we are so afraid of not being able to prove ourselves in every sentence.
I’m thinking of the word nothing. Partly I just love the way it sounds. In so many ways, nothing is what constitutes ourselves—nothing as in the only thing that makes us something is that we hold the future and the past to be a measure of our somethingness. Nothingness—this pile of deer bones. Dunking my hair in the river and drying it before anyone sees. That kind of nothing.
Nothingness is also this generative quality. There is a birth/death we experience every day. Nature knows this. Rebirth—dying to create— is one of the most fundamental parts of the ecosystem. I know this through thinking about how I embellish my personhood. Through waking up. Through reading/writing. Through conversation. It makes me think of that Diane di Prima quote: even the poorest ones will have to give up something to live free.
I haven’t requested much from others around my gender—or details of who I am—to this point, which is why I spend half the time wanting nothingness and half the time wanting to dress up as the subject of my desires. Cities (the structures/this mess) don’t have much space for nothingness, but the moon is still in motion on the Hudson and I always feel something more when the sky turns pink in LA. We are of the earth and the city—I do not know if I have more to say.
5/8 Skye
This issue of non-existence/realness—imagination, really—is the core of everything we’ve been talking about. If you are not reifying a category each day, then how are you real? If you are not real, then what are you doing? What is your use?
This all makes me think about this essay about self-check out cams and what it means to look at ourselves. Some five years ago, friends started giving me shit for never looking up in pictures. I don’t usually find gender to be the most useful lens through which to understand my life—but my relationship to the camera, my existence as subject, is inextricable from all this.
How do you know what you look like? Vanity is wicked; so is self-excavation. Suspiciousness of artificiality, though, reifies essentialism. I remember a conversation we had once about staring at ourselves in mirrors. Your point was that we don’t observe ourselves because we’re vain—we turn to the mirror because we’re looking for something, trying to reposition ourselves, trying to alter our relationship to our exterior. In his diaries, when he’s writing basically as a young girl, Lou Sullivan says that he wants to be himself—to be “happy”—but he doesn’t know what someone like him looks like. Lou said all of my thoughts first.
I’m thinking about the term “dysphoria:” how the reality it attempts to describe determines my set of circumstances right now and also how an emphasis on that reality makes those circumstances worse. My experience of gender—one that is more like an onion than a butterfly—becomes less confusing when I give up on truth, the idea of a core self. That’s not to say gender isn’t an interior thing (it always is, first and foremost) but it is to ask: if gender is another word for who we are, then what does it do to begin thinking about self as a network of likes and dislikes, made new each day. How might more possibilities open up if we stop thinking about gender as a nothing—a lack, a void, a trap—and instead ask what brings joy/euphoria into our lives?
Ugh :/ I wanna smell the roses
5/11 Nico
For the last couple days I have been thinking about what you wrote and my only real record of it is from my phone notes.
It brought me to my grandparents, and to how I go against their wishes in order to subversively achieve them. The larger wishes—happiness and good health, the ones my grandfather wishes me over the phone. Some amount of transness (transit in general) has to do with old soulness, with ancestry, with the wisdom beyond what was given for free in the gates of the American Dream. I think about Lou’s Statement. I also think about paying homage. I owe a shit ton of respect to those who came before me, those who live through me in their multiplicities. I also owe a shit ton of respect to the labor of “leaving.” And, there is much hiddenness in this.
I shy away from the loftiness of admitting myself especially when it comes to unknotting elements of womanhood that are so intrinsic to the story of my family tree—some of which I still have so many questions about.
One way I attempt to connect to my family about where I am now is through learning about my great-grandfather’s profession as a mystic. This interrogation of ineffability that I feel quite drawn to. I am also drawn to these mystics, though, because they help me think about the times that nothing is visible but everything is out there; when words are the last thing I would resource to. My great grandfather and I have different reasons for being interested in these forces, maybe. Maybe not? Maybe nothingness comes in again here in my situation…the trying to escape something you are beholden to type of searching.
Until tomorrow.
5/15 Skye
Until tomorrow…. I had the weirdest dream last night. I was flirting with a fisherman? But also there was no flirting and we were at this beach in Hana called Red Sand.
I have spent so many years refusing my family, and now I find myself willingly back in their fold. Owe a shit ton of respect.
I am thinking about the nonbinary scammer: the white, upper/middle-class kid who goes to college and “contracts” gender. This trope is obviously a scam (most non-binary people are neither white nor wealthy, and college students have no claim to enlightenment). It is also a way that myths about scarcity economics are reiterated through affect (mass paranoia erupts because of the lie that people “choose” oppressed identities in order to hoard capital—capital, in this case, being attention). This is also just GOOFY logic? Because white, liberal arts queers aren’t really…..oppressed…..so the scam has already failed before it has begun.
I guess I am thinking about how the conservative/centrist suspicion of the nonbinary scammer comes from a place of fear. We know that the many conditions of our life—race, nation, class, education—shape who we are and what decisions we make much more than any isolated experience of “gender.” (A simple example is maybe US voting patterns in which white women vote in the interest of their race/class/nation over and over again, rather than in the interest of their gender. But of course this is a silly way to put it because those women are voting in the interest of their gender—a gender that is uniquely white and American). I wonder: if we understand gender as operating through race and class and nation, then how does our understanding of “choice” shift? If transness is a reimagining—a rehearsal—then what are the primary forces allowing us to remake the world in the ways that we want?
The problem with this line of thinking is that, according to the supposed trans grifters themselves, gender isn’t a refusal insomuch as people don’t choose to be queer: we just are. Maybe this makes me in cahoots with FOX (??). But I think this is also just another way of wondering what happens if we throw away our idea of a core self. I love what you say about mysticism. In my most gender-denied moments, I denied spirituality too. The language of the beyond takes many forms: transness, religiosity, the DSM-5. If transition is not an excavation, but a search for some unknown/beyond, then gender—in all of its raced and classed and nationalist manifestations—becomes about making decisions, and about agency. I may or may not have been born this way. I really don’t care. I do care, though, about the awful, awesome set of circumstances I was born into; and, about how they have let me unfurl more peaceful forms in which to inhabit this world.
We are so lucky to find ourselves.
5/19 Nico
We are so lucky to find ourselves.
It has been an insane past few days—I won’t go into all the detail in this correspondence, largely because now I am sitting in my bed with this wave of surrealism washing off and the realism sinking in, but I guess what I really learned is that these two ways of seeing are not so different from each other. I wish I could tell the story of driving back to California by just practicing “slowness”—somehow taking you to those places?? Now I know the breed of the spotted horse. All three men who helped us along the road wore shades of magenta.
This is a bad transition, but there is a section in Lou Sullivan’s diaries where he is talking about the end of the Vietnam War and he says “Now it’s over and I don’t know how it feels to not be at war. So many changes.” This sense of the cusp has been so on my mind recently—both in a terrifying way and a “fuck it this is all we have, get to work and convene with those you love” type of way. This sense of cusp also requires protection. I’ve been reading a lot of Samuel Delany this week, and he makes me think about how self-defense/defense in general is always this deep act of intimacy. “All violence is in defense of something,” Elaine Kahn says. I would say the same thing about love.
I am thinking about the diaries and remembered this line you referred to a couple notes back. In his diaries, when he’s writing essentially as a young girl, Lou Sullivan says that he wants to be himself—to be “happy”—but he doesn’t know what someone like him looks like. Lou said it first, as you said, and I also think about what it would mean if the word “happy” was replaced with “strong.” What is inside the beefy hand.
5/22 Skye
Sorry it’s been a minute—this week has been one of those fall apart weeks, another scene of that sense of cusp.
I’ve been practicing slowness, not even by choice, just by the wash of exhaustion that is trying to not dissociate through this moment. The pandemic is necessitating that we all be perceived online in order to feel connection, and often the former forecloses the latter.
Basically: My hands feel beef-less, but they still make it through each day. What is inside a beef-less hand? A beef cake! A rhubarb pie! I have this feeling that being around people will always feel hard after this. You’re right: the question isn’t about happiness, it never has been. (I have long subscribed to the theory that mania is just an extreme form of depression.) I’d like to know what I look like in the parallel universe. I’d like to drink morning coffee and not think about the rest of the day, or coming year, or the timetable of all of this.
There is a little place to perch on the rock wall that lines the driveway and I’ve been climbing up there, to sit next to the overgrown vines and rusted beer cans, counting the cars as they zoom by. Across the highway, I can see the beach too, filled with more people each day. When big trucks go by, the wind they rake up is so strong it makes me feel dizzy. This week I was thinking about emotions versus affect (when one becomes the other, why it matters?) and concluded that I need to learn how to downplay my nervous system. Maybe happiness is non-reaction? Sometimes, the engines and the waves are indistinguishable.
5/23 Nico
Practicing slowness, writing through chaotic shit, listening to the waves and the engines and then actually spending time to communicate even a sliver of it is labor. Thanks for your correspondence.
Speaking of slowness, I am listening right now to Ache of Victory by Zsela, a title that I guess refers to the fact that every victory is also a moment of collapse, or cusp. Now it’s over and I don’t know how it feels to not be at war. So many changes
I cleaned out my room yesterday. I found all these journals from when I was a kid. Besides the journals, everything from every year was in the same one box—the volvo hubcaps, the five headed dragon, american girl dolls, joints, a plug into the wall vibrator, ET, letters and letters and photos. It is rough seeing the seedlings of depression and all the places I wanted to be the thing I had no idea existed, but also gripping—wicked. I can only grieve my older self as much as I can thank her that I am still here, and that no-direction was enough to keep going.
I keep staring into space, not being funny at the dinner table. I feel sorry for what my silence does not explain. Everyone is sick on this globe.
I have a different feeling reading Lou Sullivan’s diaries now that I went through my own. The second part of what Lou says has a lot to do with what you were mentioning about happiness as some affective depression. There’s one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness. That’s what I am.
You’re right, emotion and affect are so different, but perceived to not be (I think that dissociation, when not coined by everyone in the world, is the opposite of affect). I guess happiness has rarely been affective for me because the times I am actually “happy” I am not speaking, or there is music, or some other sort of chaos. Words don’t suffice “happiness”—maybe because you’re right, it’s not real…there’s another concept for what we are aiming for.
5/24 Skye
OK, I have been looking for my own interpretation of happiness since I was five. A thing that is a non-thing; uncapturable, uncaught, uncaged. I guess that means happiness is some sort of carving out of freedom? Like Nina said.
Happiness as a “thing that is a non-thing” makes me think about what you say about happiness always arriving with chaos—when you are not speaking, or there is music…Happiness as collapse, a non-affective state. Happiness as unnameable because it manifests at the seams of the sensorium: those places where sound becomes touch and taste becomes sight.
I wonder if dissociation is the opposite of affect because dissociation is so centered on the self, and affect requires the collective experience of a thing. Can we affectively dissociate? Would we ever want to? Mostly, I’m just thinking about the extent to which emotions are tied to selfhood and culture—and the extent to which western subjectivity has really fucked that up.
That all makes me think of the universality of Lou’s words: right now, it feels like none of us know how to not be at war. Collapse is often how I feel after indulging my sadness, which means that depression is the cusp too; emotions are a break. I think this is where affect re-enters: if crises are affective breakdowns—mass shifts in feeling of the population, events that turn the world into something new—and if the break (the crisis) is the everyday, then the calm is always an after: a utopian dream, perpetually on the horizon. I keep thinking about what my emotions should be doing right now? This idea of trying to prove in small moments that I am actually devastated about this world. Proving that I, too, am pissed about the state of things. It feels like a betrayal to not insist on anger, strength, seriousness, sadness. To not mourn. And also many of my friends remind me that mourning is happiness and play, that we can’t ever get out of this if we can’t hold on to the good things; that moralizing emotions is a slippery slope.
I think I am saying that silence is communication too. Slowness, and whiteness, and neutrality: everything is an explanation in and of itself, if you find out the right way to see the thing. I’m also saying: we will never know what it feels like to not be at war if we can’t make jokes at the dinner table.
5/29 Nico
Slowness, and whiteness, and neutrality. So much has happened since I last could write. I have to start with this conflict. On a family zoom call this week my uncle said he couldn’t watch the video of George Floyd’s murder and a cousin became heated over his refusal, essentially about white people having to be triggered by the video to wake up. It was bad. If trauma is the only thing that makes people pay attention, then we have the wrong relationship to individual life & systems of domination. I am thinking about what Robin D.G. Kelley said: it is not police brutality that needs to end—it is the police.
I hear white people talk about doing non-profit work, prison-work, about helping release (mostly Black and brown) people from carceral systems—each time I hear this, I think about how much white relationship to Black life is constituted by a relationship to what is being threatened. It’s all so fucked.
I’m thinking about imperialism and emmigration—for one side of my family the lessons of anti-Blackness were taught through French colonization and religious factions in Morocco, while for another it manifested through the whiteness of the world of artists, musicians, runaways, and activists. Maybe this all comes back to lessons of love from two sides, how they meet and then live in us. Love was co-opted so long ago. We do not talk about this enough??? The two families that I have come from have different—but not so different—colonial relationships to love, reflection, and repair.
I am talking about my ancestral whiteness because it is the origin of my own whiteness, which is to say dealing with this is the work I think we all need to be doing right now—facing the ugly shit in our families, realizing it is brutal and cathartic. To learn how to love again. To not see learning as some juvenile, academic, imaginary endeavor. To commit to paying, on a calendar and for the rest of our lives. Maybe struggle begins with reciprocity, which begins with devotion. Every time I hear my grandma walk past my room as I write this, I feel this more and more.
Tonight there is a big gathering at Frank Ogawa in Oakland, and I have spent some time today reading about the Black revolutionaries who paved the way. Huey P. Newton says something like we steal the arms of the police because it is most powerful when the oppressors fund the revolution. I would think of looting as a similar act—as expansive as the word “oppressors” is, it’s true, the oppressors are the cause of this revolution, so yes, may Chase Bank be seized and used as an event space for the destruction/creation of a new world.
I loved those quotes about the London riots. It felt free… It felt like someone had just, something like someone was holding onto your shoulders in like a hug for a long time and then they just let go. To remember that all of this is rooted in the imagination of relief, while the very act of kneeling over, screaming, grieving, giving up your money is a grave act in letting go. Collective relief. This selfless fight.
Ok OOOF. Going to go pick up Ariela.
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