We created laptops so we could invent printers to set our texts on paper again.
We designed typefaces to mimic handwriting so that the printed text would look handwritten.
We founded the media to inform the public of the truth, in order to diffuse a new genre of truths: “false truths”.
We invented insurance to ensure that the worst can happen to people, just in case it doesn’t.
We made fountain pens and then ballpoint pens and then lunar pens (so that we could write on the moon… since we forgot about our old led pencils).
We replaced candles with gas lamps then incandescent light bulbs and finally LED lights so that years later the new vogue would be “mock-candles”: candle-shaped LED lights.
We had Christmas in December, which is Winter in half of the world, and concocted a “Christmas in July” so that the southern hemisphere might not get heatstroke from all the festivities.
We began to use money and created taxes and complex social-economic systems so that everyone would suffer equally.
We created a backwards world.
The sun revolves around the Earth which revolves around our moon and the twinkling little stars.
She leant back and let the blade of his shoulder frame the picture, for that’s how she would replay it in her head. And her finger drew concentric circles over the hole in his jumper, and he watched her and forgot the advice his father had given him about women. The answer to the question about time pushing on his teeth was unwelcome and his two fingers could wrap around her ankle and she could bite his thumb just hard enough to make his face contort with some deep emotion, but not hard enough for it to bleed. His right hand tickled her upper arm, she responded with a miniature kiss. He was pretty like a doll and had hair that fell perfectly, contracting like a shy animal back into ringlets when it got wet. His teeth were jagged and handsome, and his face flushed when he sat under his desk lamp for too long. She had harsh eyes, and soft hair and looked always in thought, for the top shelf of her mouth naturally perched open. Their hands squeezed like a ribcage and if she told him about the things she kept in her bedside table that reminded her of him it brought tears to some surface. He worried that she was too good for him, and that he wasn’t good enough to be with just one woman. He worried that this was something she also knew, and he worried that this was why she was crying. And they lay there, right in the skin of the moment, with hope not to break themselves.
As I wandered through midnight Oxford streets Shimmered gold from lamps and warm dorm room view Drizzle caught in an auric glow inspired Beaded crystals on absent cobweb: dew That should’ve collapsed the whole damn thing there Yet somehow it clung valiantly on Lost by an automatic step unplanned It still quivers in my mind’s morning song. It haunts me in its fragility that night Shivering against a Novembered torrent How many evenings has it weathered in golden light? To how many has it been forgotten? I wonder if the weaver will survive longer than its home? Immortality comes not in cobweb, but in gold tinged stone.
Today is a Sunday, and today is a beautiful day to be alive Wake up… sniffle and sneeze, wheeze, as your body wakes to the reality of dust inhalation A dusting across beds and throws, from heads on pillows It is a hazy start. The mind clear, but a mucus filled nose endlessly dripping
Yoga is next on your list Yoga is key, relax the body But it’s hard to feel free in positions like dog, or cat, or tree….. If the mucus inside makes it harder to breath
Yoga complete, what a feat, what a way to be starting your day Slide your hands downs your legs and then grab your big toes Before crouching in ways that resample a crow; your final, and favourite pose… And there’s not even any more snot in your nose!
Walk. Float. Past the hammock, down the stairs, and out onto the path. Perhaps a long route back past the old house Descend only slightly, and select an inefficient route through the olive trees Increase your changes of seeing a rabbit, or a mouse Perhaps that red breasted bird that perches fleetingly on the disused washing line
Enter the house, see who is there, only josh in his bed with his crazy new hair Its late. Its 9:36, and you normally eat just a little past 8, but wait… Today is a Sunday A day of rest! No work on a Sunday! The day of the Lord you might think to your self Hardly one’s fault to be raised in the throes of a dogmatic cult But… Today is a Sunday, and today is a beautiful day to be alive
Josh isn’t hungry and jack is asleep, so breakfast can wait Negra (the dog). Is. Hungry She whimpers and sings, with a gurgling moan, in the hope that you might have some food or a bone But you have set your sights on a lengthy pre-breakfast meditation… Negra can wait
It’s a cool morning breeze that brings you back Lost in thought This time woken by a peculiar song as a gust strikes the eucalyptus beams on the upstairs balcony Its now 10:38 and you think to yourself that you feel fucking great! So you walk to your room and remember that nug of your weed that you left in a mug on the side of your bed Do you need that weed?
Its less about need, and more about want An inkling that you should appease your desire to be higher than you currently are You smoke, a tiny, spliff
The day is young. The sun is warm but low You wait. Then you walk… Looking out onto the beach Searching for the signs of a mid-morning mother collecting stringy sea weed from the high-water mark But there is nobody there… Not a bike or a car or a quad so you talk to the air! And she sings back at you
Eyes dampening, corners fill with the beginnings of a tear drop, and you cry Cry because you can Cry with the tears that have waited to arrive Held back by a block that has been there too long, and a ceaseless prolonging of all that was wrong Tell it “cease and desist and be gone!” don’t let it persist The time has arrived to be strong and walk out of the mist, so you walk…
With music in your ears, and a distinctly stoned gate You climb your favourite rock Watch your favourite tree sway in the same wind And bask in the light as you dance with your favourite self
Is this the point that we set out to reach? And by we I mean me but accounting for each of the moments in time that we, have, been… I am the sum of the parts, all the me’s from the past have necessarily come together They stand here with me. And we cry. As we look upon beauty…
I was struggling with where to start this. The start seems a tad too conventional for something that is anything but conventional, so we are Tarantino styling this and going from then jumping back and then forwards again. For anyone who knows me the previous academic year was a weird one and not exactly the easiest but also probably my best yet and I would personally argue the most informative and important year of my life. Without being cliche I learned more about myself in the past year than I had in any of my time at school. That’s for one simple fact, I started my year at my version of rock bottom (when on a phone assessment for CBT I said life didn’t seem to have any meaning for me anymore and I was referred to high-intensity one to one CBT). I’ll always be grateful for the position I am in that my rock bottom was still living comfortably with family but mentally I was in a really bad place. In September of 2018, I had been told I was being kicked out of university for failing my first-year exams. First-year of university had not been easy and I can safely say my anxiety had never been worse than before my set of exams and over the summer before the subsequent resits. Yet despite all of this I didn’t speak out, I got up every day, put effort into how I looked and tried to be as smiley and friendly and “lit” as possible all in a vain attempt to make other people think I was coping. I somehow thought that if others thought I was doing well or there appeared to be someone struggling more openly than I was that I would be ok and I had nothing to worry about. This is something I’ve done for most of my life, and not something I’m proud of, to find someone who’s doing “worse” than me and take solace in the fact that, at least at face value, I’m not the biggest fuck up out there. Of course, neither of those things are true, someone else’s problems don’t minimise your own and more importantly, I should be as open as other people about how difficult life is. It does, however, extend to avoiding busy places (something I have thankfully been forceful and stopped myself doing), regularly thinking everyone (including close mates) hate me and that my accent is grating on everyone’s ears. If you’ve seen me around college or Oxford recently and stopped to ask me how I’m doing there’s a chance I’ve told you I’m not doing well. That’s not to say term is going badly or my mental health is deteriorating I’ve just taken to not putting up a facade anymore. If I am having a bad day I am going to tell you and have no shame about it. I won’t bore you all with the details of how anxiety affects me in everyday life, partly because I am aware just how trivial most of it is when written down, just like many things in life a bullet point list will never get across the experience of what life is like with it. I started suffering with anxiety around year 11 and my GCSE exams, I remember shaking with nerves (something I’d never done before) outside my English exam. I didn’t finish that exam but ignored what had happened as I still did ok. I now fully believe I have never had a really good experience with exams since that day, be it thoughts that I’ll fail to never fully achieving what I felt I could there has always been something off about exams since that day. It’s not just academically that anxiety affects me, I felt my mind cloud from anxious thoughts in my black belt karate grading (which I subsequently failed) and if you ask me to approach someone new on my own you’ll be met with a laugh and some choice words if you keep pushing. Growing up both gay and with undiagnosed dyspraxia I was unfortunately prone to developing mental health problems trying to navigate a world that isn’t always the friendliest place. Not feeling like a proper man because I used to play with my sister’s barbie dolls and couldn’t kick or catch a ball if my life depended on it is still something that quietly affects me to this day. But as you get older you do realize that is a problem with how masculinity is defined and not a problem with one’s self. It was this desire to be seen as a proper man that stopped me from speaking out earlier not wanting to be seen as weak and “attention-seeking” something I now realize was my own prejudices against mental health which rather ironically caused me a lot of harm. This past year I have realized it’s not bad to complain and vent and open up to lots of people, the more people who know you the more people you have to turn to. I am by no means at the end of my journey being as I only truly started it 6 months back when I started receiving CBT on the NHS (now discharged which is a strange feeling) and I am certainly not, or probably ever, living anxiety free. But I certainly much happier now than during my first year at uni and that’s all that matters. I still put too much effort into how I look on my bad days and the rule about me not approaching people I don’t know at mixers most definitely still stands. This is by no means a full life recount and anything left out has been done so for a reason (I’m probably not comfortable talking about it here). There is to many people to thank for making the past year so good from what should have been nothing (shoutout to the big sis though who has done more than she probably realizes) and I’ll leave this with the small fact that opening up and standing up for myself got me back to uni and if that’s not reason enough to seek help for your own worries and stresses I don’t know what is.
Wondering is the wandering of the mind, as Wandering is the wondering of the body. And so it is very fitting that Wandering is simply Wondering with an extra leg given to its second letter.
Walser died in the same style in which he wrote: he went on a lonely walk and never came back. His body was found lying in a field of snow.
His writing appears aimless – and, in fact, is – for he often goes on a tangent, and keeps straying further away from the point until he eventually ends the story, elegantly, after losing the plot entirely. It is worth noting, however, that he never strays entirely away from his original point – he becomes very close to doing so, yes, but never quite does so. Reading his stories, one feels as though one has somehow, unknowingly, been placed on a swing, swung back and forth until, suddenly again, one finds oneself quite far from Earth. Floating along in the abyss, amongst the moons and stardust, one orbit later we are more or less grounded, and find ourselves at the end of the chapter. We do occasionally find guidance in the novel, something like an usher with a voice resembling that of Walser, but with deliberate differences that blend it into the fiction of the story: this voice tells us not to worry, there is no need to be scared, and oh how he is ever so sorry for the narrator’s bursts of passion that quite carries him away at times. But he always writes with such self-conviction that one is often under the impression that he had not meant, perhaps, to have a reader at all, but had always written for himself — to himself — in a genial one-way conversation. It is rather like peeping into the most minute of pinholes, through which we gain a glimpse of a phantasmagoria of eccentricity, bursting to escape the confines of the pages.
To read Walser, one must be in just the right mood, and one must, naturally, be patient. The mood to accept the directionless path one follows in his stories, and the patience to wait for a meaning to become clear. It is rather like the process of inserting the thread into the needle before sewing; it is precise, requiring much patience, and a useful skill in life. One must not become anxious when the thread seems not to enter the tiny hole, but instead must find a way to make it thinner, sharpen it, steady one’s hand, and then try again. Eventually, the thread enters, to one’s greatest satisfaction, and the needlework can then recommence. Later on, the thread might be lost again, may unthread itself, but all one needs to do is simply persist, rethread, and carry on; in the end, all will be well. This is the way to read the works of Walser. Patience, that is all, and one will be rewarded with the beauty of the art.
We don’t talk you and me And it’s striking Really How your words no longer Light up my phone The lover bubble we burst through Now we go it alone While couples walk in worlds I’m not part of And I feign understanding As they talk about love
And I look on my life all thin and uneven With metaphors trying When no one believes them Redrafting a life with no object for feeling Relaying the foundations of my self esteem and
Refusing to act out the same old scenes Because I left all that in 2019
This week, I’ve been thinking about Karen. My interest was piqued when the Financial Times’ weekend supplement featured a piece about ‘Karen the pushy mom’, following a flood of Karen jokes on the popular video app ‘TikTok’. According to the author of the column, ‘what really marks out a Karen… is their capacity to complain and get their own way’. A Vox article from earlier this year takes the definition a little further, characterising Karen as ‘blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer. Karen has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, ‘superior attitude to go along with it’. The joke itself is perhaps best represented by a viral TikTok which depicts a mother at a fast food drive-thru who seemingly throws a tantrum when she doesn’t get her way – this is classic Karen behaviour.
Interestingly, the Karen meme has been floating around for quite a while. In June of 2019, Guardian columnist Grace Dent wrote about the Karen in all of us, ‘fostered by the I-Want-It-Now-Culture’. Back then, the trope was not so overtly racialised. – Karen was certainly a white suburban mom but use of the meme didn’t result in the kind of heated arguments witnessed online recently, with some white women branding the term a ‘slur’. The argument kicked off when journalist Julie Bindel took to Twitter earlier this week to ask ‘Does anyone else think the ‘Karen’ slur is woman hating and based on class prejudice?’. Soon after, the Editor of the conservative ‘Feminist Current’ published a piece in which she concluded ‘Of course “Karen” is a sex-based meme, and of course it exists to mock and dismiss women’. Other media outlets have also picked up on the debate, and as with all online arguments, Karen began trending on Twitter.
Those who deal with Karens generally work at what we are currently terming the ‘frontline’. Working-class service sector workers, particularly those in supermarkets, are often confronted with angry customers who are upset with a product or an in-store experience. On the most basic level, the Karen meme is about person to person interaction, and the racial and class-based structures that manifest in our everyday lives. White and middle-class, Karen is comfortable throwing her weight around in the store because she feels entitled in a space where she exists to be served. Crucially, she is not aware of the way in which she enacts the privileges afforded to her. This is where the joke often lies.
Of course, many of us fail to pause before each social interaction and pick apart the structural layers that form our identity. But Karens wield their privilege in a nasty manner, getting away with yelling at shop-floor workers and drive-thru employees, and then producing crocodile tears if held accountable for their actions. In a country such as America, where African-American women are twice as likely to be incarcerated as white women, it would make sense that the latter group feel more comfortable acting aggressively in public spaces.
When it comes to using privilege, the history of white womanhood (particularly within feminist movements) is riddled with contradiction. At times, white middle-class women have been powerful allies in anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. Catherine Impey was an English Quaker in the late 19th century who campaigned on an anti-racist platform. She launched the magazine ‘Anti-Caste’ in 1888. Anti-colonial activists include Ellen Wilkinson, a white British MP in the early 20th century who campaigned for self-rule in the Commonwealth.
At other times, however, white feminists have stepped on the backs of members of the working-class, and those in an ethnic minority (particularly Black Americans), in order to secure their own rights. In America, the early campaign for women’s suffrage openly allied itself with white supremacist sentiment, with many prominent suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton arguing that it would be preposterous for Black men to be given the right to vote before white women had it. In Britain, white middle-class women such as Violet Markham strategically supported social imperialism, advocating for eugenics-based policies and lauding social Darwinism, and boosted their own public profiles as a result.
These snippets of history may feel irrelevant to a 21st century meme, but collective memory is a powerful thing, and the social context to Internet discourse should not go ignored. Some of the most hard-hitting Karen tweets are those that reference historical or present-day injustice. One Twitter user responded to Julie Bindel saying ‘“Karen” was a term created *specifically by Black women* to talk about white women’s interpersonal + state violence against us and our communities: calling the police on us for getting coffee, threatening to have us fired, talking down to us at work (where we’re now ‘essential’)’. Another user suggested that the young white women yelling abuse at Black students when public high schools were integrated in Montgomery in 1963 were historical ‘Karens’.
Crucially then, Karen does not represent all white women, and though the meme feels reductive and may present offensively, it is a symbol more than it is anything else. Feminist movements in the West have been splintered along race lines from their inception, and people of colour are right to point to the ways in which white womanhood can be weaponised within the current system. And though it seems that every other thought-piece these days is about the way in which coronavirus has laid structural inequality bare, it is clear that this theme of unfairness is on people’s minds. Perhaps it is only natural that our memes feel more political than usual; the scaffolding our society rests on has been exposed as unbalanced, with the Karens of the world getting their way where others cannot (and often, because others cannot). No joke exists in a vacuum, and the memes and TikToks trending currently are capsules of the societal mood during this crisis – it would be wise to treat them as such.
All throughout the world, health professionals are facing some of the most disheartening scenes of our times. Their efforts are valiant, there’s no denying that. These men and women are on the front line of a conflict that has no precedent. They charge into battle each and every day. Some may be critical of the use of bellicose rhetoric, of this language of war. I will, however, be a contrarian. It is a necessity to adopt such an approach. This is, indeed, a war. We have seen a soul-crushing number of casualties, each and every single one of them a tragedy. However, fortunately, the vast majority of us have merely been passive witnesses to this calamity.
Healthcare providers have not been vested with such good fortunes. They have not only been real, active witnesses to this great human tragedy, but as well, they have found themselves playing the part of the Moirai. The Moirai, the Sisters of Fate to the Greeks in antiquity, controlled the thread of life from every mortal being from birth to death. When looking at the heart-wrenching stories that have come out from severely hit nations, such as Italy and Spain, where doctors and nurses have been forced into the horrible task of defining which patients get to live or die, such a comparison becomes palpably clear.
One thing needs to be made explicit: the fact that these men and women are being forced into such scenarios is beyond dreadful. As stated previously, they are already being forced to deal with the horrors which we’re fortunate enough to learn from through our televisions and phones. I understand that the dire nature of the circumstances is forcing such draconian pragmatism to become the order the day; I will not abdicate rationality for the sake of blind idealism. However, what I will do is make a case against this becoming a norm, for one cannot assign such value to one life over the other.
To do so would be to negate the potential of every single human life, regardless of caveats and descriptives. Thanks to equality of opportunity, one of the hallmarks of modern life throughout the global north, this has never been more pertinent. Every single individual, regardless of their background, age or identity is nowadays capable of attaining their full potential in life. Opportunities and ambitions are plentiful, and to seize them has never in human history been more possible. To artificially and arbitrarily define that some lives are in any way whatsoever more valuable than others, and then to act on these judgements, is a violation of this principle. Such a violation should never, under any circumstances, become ordinary and mundane.
However, and perhaps of far greater importance, to allow for these measures to become commonplace would be to allow for us all to be led astray from the path towards something we should as a society aim for now more than ever; sonder. To acknowledge that every single stranger we pass by as we make our way through a street has a deep, complex reality much like our own, something we cannot even begin to contemplate. Every single person enjoys a completely unique conscious experience. They have things that provide them with joy, they love and are loved. Every individual alive at this moment in time, or any other moment indeed, is or has been an entire cosmos we are not able to fathom. To pretend then that we can arbitrarily assign disparate values to individuals is folly.
I wholeheartedly understand the case for the measures being adopted by doctors and nurses throughout Europe in these challenging times. We should not be blinded by idealism amidst the crisis our world now faces. Our reality is what it is, and if such actions are necessary for the greater good, that of saving as many lives as it is possible, then we should indeed adopt them. However, let us not allow for them to erode our character. We ought to understand that these awful measures may just so happen to be the medicine needed to fight this plague, or to at least ensure that its toll is not as cruel as it could be. At the same time, though, let us not forget that to assign value to human life in such an arbitrary manner should not become a normalized aspect of life once we have won this war, whenever that may be.
The great cosmos that is every single living individual is invaluable. Let us not be ignorant to that, regardless of the violent and brutal tidings of circumstance. With our character untarnished, accepting that conscious experience is beyond the realm of value, we will see through these times of plague and dread. We will, together, weather out this storm.
