Setting Off into the Dark

Notes on violence, and thoughts on the times.

The cops recently attacked a man in my neighborhood. It had been early afternoon, sunny and bright, full of waving cherry blossoms along the street, when suddenly a loud SMACK reverberated in the alleyway. I looked out the window. On the road stood a row of cops with their weapons drawn. On the ground was a man, sprawled face-first on the pavement. He was wearing a black hoodie with a cartoon pickle on the back. His dark hair was draped over the cement, different strands of dreadlocks twisted and strewn about.

A couple of the cops neared the body. The one tapped her boots against the man's rib cage. Another kneeled down, slid on blue medical gloves, and ran their hands up and down the man's legs, as if they were patting him down at airport security. The sirens grew louder. The red ambulance lights turned onto the street. A crowd amassed on the other side. They peeked over one another and lifted their phones. One of the cops guarded the alleyway with her assault rifle aimed. Across the street a film crew set up a tripod. A medic placed their hand on the man's neck. They turned over his body. Finally, his face was visible. There were no cuts, bruises, or traces of injury. His eyes were firmly shut, though he had a peaceful and almost dreamy expression. It was almost possible, without context, to believe that he was asleep.

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In the mornings I am routinely awoken by a seagull. It begins squawking at dawn, before flying over to the window ledge to peck at the mesh screen. This is why I cannot sleep well anymore. That and the constant screams in the neighborhood. The apartment is only a short walk from a Methadone clinic, and dozens if not hundreds of people set up their tents here, or unfurl their blankets and sleeping bags against the walls. Shattering glass bottles, screaming, all hours. Through the window waft the smells of saltwater and kelp, the sounds of car tires on wet roads. The dawn peeks through the blinds and casts shimmering lights on the dark ceiling. This is the stage and soundscape of my life. I am in some aquatic scene. Floating on a river, traveling somewhere dark.

If I had seen someone attacked by the police six or so years ago, I would have written a far different letter. It would have started with a retelling of the attack, as I did here. But then I would have pulled threads, maybe detailing how the cop’s arsenal was not dissimilar to that of American troops going door-to-door in Baghdad. I would have mentioned how, for decades, American police departments have traveled to Israel to learn about counterinsurgency tactics. Some part of the essay would have been an account of America, and how this country makes a pasttime of harassing and attacking people like the collapsed man on the street.

But when the attack happened this spring, a large share of my focus continuously drifted towards me. How did I feel about a man being beaten? How did it look from my vantage point, crouched behind the bedroom window? What was I thinking later that night, as I drank at the brewery with my head swirling with violent thoughts? I I I, me me me. Something terrible had happened, and I wanted to reach into my toolbelt and craft a thing that honestly portrayed the moment. But my tools at hand were turning me away from the world and back towards myself, which was the last place I wanted to be. I wanted to be with the man on the street corner struggling to stay alive, not trapped within myself behind a screen.

Over the last two and a half months I have written sixteen drafts and 35,000 words on everything from money, Karl Ove Knausgård, autofiction, to the Titanic. None of them have worked, because even when I was writing about thousands of people being killed for no reason, I was still, somehow, writing about myself. What's worse is that I was not even writing an 'I' that was honest. Instead, it was a character, a beaming yellow-light of a person. That Michael was completely phony, treacly, saccharine, eager to please. I hated him, because he was hollow and dishonest. It feels like a small crime to publish something fundamentally dishonest, especially now in this age of garbage and slop.

So over the last two months I have been trying to isolate this sappy, fickle, sentimental character, with the goal of slowly weeding him out of my writing life. He is fortunately very easy to spot.

He is so sad, so endlessly yearnful, though he is never all that interested in making small decisions that could improve his life, nor in living in a way that is communal or 'leftist'. He is a party and ideology of one. He is pure ego. He is also a worthless doom-scroller. One bad piece of news emerges, and he instinctively replies, 'lol shit sucks, world is over’ and then makes sad pathetic jokes. I have to drag him away from the phone and say,

'Listen, you piece of shit: you either buck up now, and make something of yourself, and show up for others, and live out your vaguely Socialist values, or just shut up and quit taking up space.'

He goes away. He keeps being miserable. He wants to drag me into purgatory with him. Then there is the other nasty version of Michael that I have been attempting to wrestle. He is positive and cheery no matter what happens. He smiles all the time. He wants 'everyone to get along.' He is banal. He is evil.

Recently I, the real me, watched a video of a girl in Gaza crying because she was so famished, and starving, that she could not brush her scalp without the hair falling out. The real me cried, dry heaving, so fucking over it, so tired of pretending that I do not have eyes or a brain or a working memory. But then the tears gave way to something: passion, desire, a need to do something, maybe call friends, expand beyond myself, do anything. But then the phony Michael touched my shoulder and said, softly,

'It's okay. It's terrible, but you must be happy. Joy is resistance after all'. He said the same thing, too, after the man was attacked by the police. 'After all, what can you do. You're only one person. It won't help anyone to be miserable. You're better off not thinking about it. Look out for yourself. Be careful. It will pass.'

He is my enemy. The enemy of all enemies. When he comes into my life I have to grab him, and threaten him, and say

'Listen; either you are a person that must do something after you see a dead child, or you do not care about anything. If you are unwilling to risk anything when the police attack your neighbors, why should I ever listen to you? Why should I ever care about a single thing you write if you are unable to come out and say that killing children is bad, or that it is wrong for the government to disappear people? So, take your cute little lines about 'joy', and 'beauty', and shove it up your ass. Be a serious person.’

He then waddles off, ashamed, until the next terrible thing happens.

This has been my mental struggle over the last two months. I am at war with different parts of myself. One half is flawed, and messy, and kind of fucked up, but terribly human. The other is a perfect do-gooder who doesn't make waves. He wants peace, he would never hurt a fly, he reads the right books, he says the right things without saying much of anything. The way he writes is full of what Yasmin Nair calls 'lyrical doughnuts':

“…little gems sparkling in the light of attention from readers who ooh and aah about how beautiful they are. But they are, ultimately, little more than lyrical doughnuts, combining a surface beauty and rhythm with the sweetness of an indifferently made pastry. It’s lovely the first time, but you can’t have too many.”

Everything he writes somehow magically loops back to himself and eases into a happy ending. He loves to flaunt his skills, so that everyone admits his soul is pretty. That's the real goal: pretty. Write things that everyone can agree are worthwhile and pleasing. Essays full of purple flourishes, lyrical donuts, and flowers. Flowers, after all, have never hurt anyone. But pretty is not enough anymore.

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Eventually the cops decided that the man was not going to die — at least not then in the alleyway. The scene completely changed. Call it a ‘vibe-shift’. The cop with the rifle holstered her gun. The medic probed less urgently. A few officers laughed as they mulled around the body. The crowd slowly tucked their phones away. The camera crew packed up their tripod into the van. A gurney was rolled out of the ambulance. A social worker leaned against one of the SUVs, tapping a clipboard, as if she had somewhere better to be.

But of everyone there, my focus narrowed in on one of the cops. The cop had walked up to the man, unzipped their backpack, and pulled out a laptop. As the other officers jostled the man, pulling his pants down, measuring the size of his paunch, the one with the computer diligently typed away on the laptop. Click clack click clack. I was transfixed! What was this person writing? Was it strictly a list of the facts; ‘Man. Black. So and so weight and height. Red sneakers. Welts on upper back.’ Or did they add narrative details to their report? Did they note the vague smell of cherry blossoms on the street? What was this cop thinking as they typed away? Did they care at all about the writing? Did they embellish the prose, measure the diction, and craft the report so that it was aesthetically pleasing? Did they know what would happen to their report? Would anyone read it? It would probably be buried and archived, since the man had not been publicly murdered by the police – did this disappoint the cop with the laptop? Was this cop bored of work? Did they secretly crave some excitement at the office? Did they dream of nabbing a good coding job a few blocks away at Amazon? What was this person like, really? Do they have a spouse? Are they abusive at home, like 40% of cops are? Do they go home at night with terrible visions of everything they had documented that day? Do they obsess over how they could have tweaked the syntax in their report? Are they happy? Is this what they always wanted to be? Will they ever again think about that man on the pavement? Or is that victim just a blank space to the cop – a place for them to project one’s desires, like the unfilled terra incognita of a map?

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'What is the point'? 'Why even do all this'? These questions get tossed around, especially among artists and other people who secretly love to spill ink about how essential their craft is. I don't like these questions, clearly. People should ask more outward-facing questions, like 'What should I be doing with my work now', or in another way, 'Where do I want my work to go?'

For a long time I wanted my work to float. Up into the clouds, along with St. Peter and John. I don't believe that's where words should go anymore. Not now, anyhow. They belong here, on Earth. Words should get muddy, and dirt-stained. I want more four-letter curses, with reams of violence, sex, and friction. I want the work to be fun and horrifying. But more than anything I want the work to be honest. There is only so honest that writing can be when it's lounging forever in endless sunshine. There is somewhere darker that the work needs to go.

“I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,” says a character named Marlow in an excellent novel about a river of darkness. But still Marlow tells the reader what happened to him anyways, because it is the only way to make sense of the darkness. There is a part in the novel where he is recounting his journey on the wide river into the heart of the continent. He stands on the deck, watching the land pass,

"Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you — smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out'.”

That is where I want this work to go. To that glittering enigma, wherever it is — the one that whispers, 'Come and find out'. That was where I tried to go, when the man was attacked by the police. I thought I had missed it. By the time I was able to get on the street, they had already whisked the man away. The crowds had gone. It was completely quiet, as if nothing had ever happened. But then I heard a loud roar in the alleyway. I turned and saw a large truck slowly crawling through. In front a figure in a full-body suit waved a large wand attached with a hose to the truck, releasing a deluge of water up the walls, over the pavement, clearing away the blood, piss, cigarettes, vials, foil-balls, cardboard homes, blankets piled in stacks. They marched in a column. The figure wore goggles that completely shielded their eyes. Once they were done and long-gone, I stood there for a moment. I looked around. The pink cherry blossoms were waving. The sun had broken through the clouds. I looked down at the spot where the man had been. There was a small puddle gathered in the broken cement. The sun shimmered along the surface. There it was, I thought, looking into it: the darkness.

Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled’, 1969, Photograph: Rothko Estate/Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, Courtesy of The Guardian