Our death drive

And where to go from here

I don’t have anything to say about this week’s U.S. election that hasn’t already been said. My initial reaction was perfectly summed up by Anne Helen Petersen, but that argument doesn’t quite go all the way.

Double exposure of a mausoleum in Green-Wood Cemetery, photographed by my kid in 2022

In an email to a friend on Wednesday, I mentioned this country’s death drive — by which I meant that the U.S. seems to currently be capitulating to its drive toward aggression, destruction, and death rather than sublimating those instincts and channeling that energy into creating a better world — and then I wondered if anyone has written about our current moment through this lens. Sure enough, Eric Reinhart has and he makes the excellent point that the task of government is to redirect our collective death drive toward creation, something the New Deal accomplished particularly well in the wake of the Great Depression.

The vital affective work that progressive policies can achieve is not like that of the massifying, homogenizing effects of fascism; it instead revolves around the beauty of our collective power to care for each singular individual among us and to provide each one of us with the resources to realize our own unique potential. It is only with visionary collective projects that we can address the discontent and disillusionment that Trump feeds with division and false promises.

I recommend reading the article, which was published before the election, in full.

This week in reading

I read and highly recommend Aruna D’Souza’s Imperfect Solidarities, which argues that empathy and love are distractions from the real work of care and justice.

Now I am reading Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard and Women by Chloé Caldwell and still listening to Motherhood by Sheila Heti. Are we sensing a theme?!

This week in writing

I’m jumping back and forth between the glass house novel and several essays-in-progress. All of it calls to me, all of it feels urgent. For the last few months, I have been rising at 4:30 to have more writing time. These hours (or this hour, depending on when my kid wakes up) feel precious and delicious and grounding.

Photo by Calvin Chai on Unsplash

Also grounding: this week I took the kid to the Museum of Natural History. Nothing like listening to Liam Neeson describe how the universe was formed 13 billion years ago to put our epoch into perspective; nothing like learning about the formation of minerals to remind one of the absolute miracle that is each human life. Holding these two truths.

This week in Leave news

We now have FOUR blurbs and you can read them all here and each one made me cry. Thank you thank you thank you to Lexi Kent-Monning,

Sue

Rainsford,

Carley Moore

, and

Lindsay Hunter

.

In the wake of this week, I am even more glad that I decided to write about my postpartum experience. Like I said last week, sometimes personal stories change minds and sometimes they don’t, and these days I tend to think that most of the time they don’t. But art made from one’s life isn’t necessarily meant to change minds. It isn’t meant to do anything, in fact, but it certainly can remind us how we are all connected, and it seems from the early reader reactions that Leave is doing that.

Reminder that you can preorder directly through Autofocus, from our distributor Asterism, or from Lofty Pigeon (this last option will get you a signed copy).

Alright. Let’s gather ourselves. Take care of our minds. Take care of each other.

Love,
Shayne