Unveilings

Welcome to the unveiling of this blog. I've been thinking of returning to blogging for a while now after about a long hiatus and the current coronavirus crisis and social uprisings have been inspiring me to return. There have been a number of articles published recently on keeping pandemic journals/diaries, including this NYTimes article on some reasons why readers should keep a "coronavirus diary," "plague journal," or some sort of ritualized jottings. I found some of the reasons pretty inspiring, including using it as an aid for organizing your thoughts and the possibility that your jottings, however informal and under-developed, may be of some small value some day (even if it's just for yourself). 

Not everyone wants to talk or hear about crisis-related things. I get it. I've been on multiple Zoom calls where some people can't help but talk about the coronaverse while others plead to talk about anything but. Some folks prefer carrying on as if nothing's really the matter, while others are compelled to carry on in this way out of necessity. Sometimes the same people who act like there's nothing wrong are also the ones privately stockpiling massive quantities of toilet paper. There's been an explosion of self-help pieces on how to manage the living of our personal lives even in the face of hundreds of thousands of global virus-related deaths (half a million so far as of this post and still growing). Our habitual orientations to time and to the future have been seriously disoriented, and this is something I'd like to explore via blogging and with other people who are also interested in doing so.

My default orientation, especially toward the early weeks of the pandemic, has been to think of it as a temporary interlude, but more and more these days, I'm wondering if there's even a normal or new normal state of affairs to return to. And I can't say that I even want to return to business as usual, especially given the pretty much dystopian state of affairs in the US where I live. These past several months, while feeling slow as molasses in some ways, have also brought about some precipitous changes. End times and apocalypse talk is on the rise, but then again, so is speculation about this time as a portal to something new. Is it possible to be both pessimistic and optimistic at the same time?

I'd like to see what would happen if some of us were to approach this time in terms of both endings and openings--to somehow imagine in the present chaos a utopian horizon without, of course, neglecting all that we have lost. I recently discovered that the original Greek word for apocalypse, apokalysis, means an unveiling or revelation. I find it fascinating that this term I used to associate with death and destruction also denotes an uncovering of what we may not have previously perceived. What is being unveiled in the current moment, how, and why? And how might we conduct ourselves differently if we didn't just think of this time as a fluke interruption of business as usual, but as one of the major unveilings of our lifetimes?

And I'm hoping also to connect unveilings with portals. As Robin D.G. Kelley put it in a great interview on The Intercept podcast, a portal is just an opening and "as an opening, nothing's guaranteed [...] The question is, what are we going to do with this portal?" Kelley believes that many portals don't open, but that this pandemic is providing us with an unprecedented opportunity: "this particular portal, I would argue, wasn't simply rendered open by Covid-19. It was rendered open by what Covid-19 revealed in terms of the contradictions of a society that claims to be a democracy and claims to care about people but actually cares more about property and wealth accumulation than the lives of the most vulnerable."  

So, for what it's worth, this blog will be full of sometimes undisciplined imaginings, from musings on the existential status of toilet paper hoarding to analyses of apocalyptic films. In the roil of things, perhaps it can be of some use.