Ideal Glass

Such a state would exhibit “long-range amorphous order,” where each molecule feels and affects the position of every other, so that in order to move, they must move as one.

                                                                   -Natalie Wolchover, Quantamagazine, March 11, 2020

A phase state of matter, akin

to liquid or crystal, theorized

to exist but never seen. Durations

too long to witness, slow cooling

of eons, thermometer of infinity.

The lock and key of molecules

fixed between flux and totality.

vanishing point of entropy,

sinkhole of radiation,

stability redoubled

by everyday wormholes

surfing room temperature.

When nothing moves but the whole

nothing moves. Yet randomness

survives just this side of Plato’s dreams,

a morass of desire floundering

on its conceptual architecture,

divisiveness the guarantor

of unborn potential.

May we never gaze upon this glass

from which all entropy is banned,

neither here nor on it’s other side

whose shadows we may prove to be

though not yet embalmed by history

nor bled of dimensionality.

& now this

& now this drowning
in flags and whiteness
in sunlight and resentment
coagulating into vehemence

& now this jangle
of keys and bracelets
this smile of sunglasses
and sickly confidence

& now this fear contagious
this loss of driveways
creaturely pleasures
cementing kinship

& now this impoverished
infamy gloating
unabashed, emboldened
disgrace applauding itself

& now the land erased
by exponential amnesia
predictability's outposts
murdering horizons

& now every base inclination
amplified and licensed
chaos summoning chaos
the white seed finds purchase

& now this emergency
at the heart of difference
tearing itself apart
and every face compromised

& now the act
where moralizing falters
announcing limits
thought gleefully abandoned

& now this
& now this breaking
& breaking
until every heart
                              listens

Reckoning

Something unsustainable has obscured sustenance

and something ungovernable holds hostage governance.

Something uncontestable has stifled protestation

and something un-transmittable has hijacked every station.

Something lacking gratitude has grounded every grievance

while maverick maliciousness metastasized malfeasance.

Something so ungenerous feeds disparity

while something mean and pitiless preens precarity.

Sequestered in our silos, who dares to venture out

to where a neighbour might need help to irrigate the drought?

Something so unheeding it can watch the planet die

and believe itself immune to all the poisons in the sky.

Something uncontainable constrains every thought,

paving all alternatives beneath a parking lot.

Weed and feed the fantasy of sweet suburban home;

a little patch of nowhere that you can call your own.

With separation reinforced by an image stream

that fills in all the margins and overwrites your dreams.

The status of the symbol is now the referent.

The death of common culture is now the main event.

Epidemic formalizes what we have become:

the privileges of distance from factory and slum.

The continental hierarchies to fix the poor in place

while corridors of merchandise circulate through space.

From the parcel at your doorstep to the ghetto in the south;

from the monocrop plantations to the morsel in your mouth;

from the homelessness of millions in the flood and hurricane

to exhaust from the tail pipes we’re reluctant to contain,

a web of compromises silences dissent

by claiming we’re all implicated in the discontent.

Erasing differentials, enriching dividends

in a haze of risk assessments is how this world ends.

The box stores and the cinemas, the freeways and the cars

are like spatial amnesia to who we really are.

Beholden to the virtual that steers reality

with algorithms calculated by the bourgeoisie,

how much have we forgotten that past generations knew

of how to pull together to help each other through?

Something so predictable poaches novelty;

it’s not unprecedented, we just lost the memory.

When those devoid of decency deepen their disdain

harbouring resentments that lost their former names:

revolution, wildcat strike, shared triumphs and defeats,

replaced by driving round and round these same old dirty streets;

Replaced by sales on furniture, replaced by screens ablaze

with visions of apocalypse that reinforce malaise.

Revelations limited to whatever amuses,

obscuring larger systems of calamitous abuses

made seemingly so seamless through violence and art,

some never thought to see the day it starts to fall apart.

Until the silence breaks anew and suffocation speaks

and desolation grows new ears, and protest grows new feet.

Shaking codes of privilege with exponential force

that can’t be tamed by slander or stifled by remorse.

Unsettling complacency, the comfortless afflicted

set alight the parliaments from which they’ve been evicted.

These nights when sleep is difficult and troubled by strange visions,

when pressures from behind your mind erupt into collisions

of past and future, good and bad, rust and ruination

and lovers that you never knew offering salvation.

You wake up shaken, tired and sore, with joints all fused together.

It’s summer and beyond your door the trees sway with the weather.

Long familiar traffic noise is laced with a new sound,

a frequency you can’t ignore that moves beneath the ground.

All the wells of apathy and all sophistication

that tame the unpredictable with sly equivocation

are stunned, amazed and humbled by the mounting symphony

that organizes novel threads of possibility.

Like regaining a memory from years and years gone by,

Like the first time that an infant tries to understand the sky,

Like an unexpected letter, like a fresh beginner’s mind

or a door you never noticed in a fence you never climbed—

All at once the world has changed as if by happenstance

and all the struggles of the past resolve into a dance

where you and I were always free, and difference is the proof,

and us and them no longer holds the slightest bit of truth;

and everyone who ever lived is reborn in the clouds,

united by a promise where the future steers the now.

It all seems pretty meaningless and easily dismissed

until the day that Reckoning arrives in someone’s kiss.

© Simon Orpana 2020

Jacques Cousteau in the Negative Zone #1

When I made this collage, five years ago, I never dreamed it would capture the feeling of going to the grocery store in 2020. As a person with a history of lung ailments, bi-weekly trips to the grocery store put two of my basic, human drives at odds with each other: the need to eat versus the need to continue breathing. The anxiety over this conflict, alone, produces shortness of breath. Then, there is the added knowledge that so many workers are asked daily to spend eight-hour shifts in the same environment that causes me strife after ten minutes or so.

Do workers go home feeling, as I do, shaken, worried, anxious? Do they do this day in, day out, instead of every two weeks, like me? And what does this daily exposure to risk and anxiety do to them? My own anxiety is thus mixed with a deep feeling of humility, guilt and gratitude. Why do I get to stay home and they don't? My lizard brain encourages me not to ask these questions--attend to my organism's own survival needs. But my organism is part of a larger one, which it can't do without. Is my relationship to the larger whole a parasitic one? What are the systemic elements that might make it so, or that might, rather, mitigate and correct the kinds of parasitic relationships that keep contemporary, Canadian society running?

The severity of COVID-19's effects on a person are likely related, not just to the binary of exposure/non-exposure, but to the daily, recurring amount of exposures. It depends on viral load. But, workers in retail, health care, and other services deemed essential are daily exposed, not just to greater risks and levels of infection, but to greater doses of negative affect: anxiety, anger, resentment, fear. When I visit the grocery store, I afterwards enjoy a two-week interval during which my emotional health can regain equilibrium. Not so for front-line workers who, after a stressful shift, must wake up the next morning, or a day or two later, and go back to that place that I have come to dread. What are the protracted effects of the negative affective loads that workers are being exposed to? Does the celebratory culture that has sprung up, recognizing such workers as "heroes" compensate for the increased emotional load they must assume, or does it make it worse by covering over the realities of the experiences and systems of exploitation with which they must grapple?

Taking refuge in abstractions is a kind of comfort. Another comfort comes from cleaning the kitchen, sterilizing the access points between my apartment and the outside world: the doorknobs, the handrails, my clothing. Do these things reduce my chances of getting sick, of losing the ability to breathe? Maybe. Or maybe they help me feel better, and breath more easily, in the now.

But what would allow us all, collectively, to breathe a little easier? What kind of minimum distance from necessity is required so that grocery store and health care workers feel less disposable? The feel-good, "we're all in this together" commercials that sprung up, seemingly overnight just make me feel more upset, angry and nauseous. We are not all in this together. Our society is not designed that way. It is designed so that the comfort of one group is purchased at the expense of the lives and safety of others. This was going on long before COVID-19 hit, but the situation has exacerbated the fault lines, making them more immediately visible. The stridently saccharine TV ads from Apple and Tim Hortons are a response to these amplified signals, and an attempt to dampen them, so that a system of exploitation and inequity can persist a little longer.

So, rather than take refuge in empty affective platitudes, I try to embrace and nourish my anxiety, my guilt, indignation and my privatized and shared compensations, in the form of cleaning, blogging, making art. And breathing. I would like to live in a world where we could truly breath together, where the convenience and comfort of some do not steal away the ability to breath of others. As the nice spring weather hit, I started smelling a gas smell in my house. At first, I thought it was some weird haunting. Perhaps a can of WD40 I had just used to fix a door was leaking. At day two, I worried that the stale, feint gas smell was an early sign of COVID contraction, but I didn't want to feed this anxiety, so I resisted looking up the symptom on the Internet. If it was COVID, I would know soon enough.

Then, a few days later, as I sat on the porch watching the increased traffic go by, I realized I was just smelling the cars on Main Street. Two events had coincided: first, the nice weather, with a kind of Dionysian, spring euphoria had coaxed people out of isolation, virus be damned! This caused an increase in road traffic since, as my girlfriend pointed out, driving around is really the only collective activity we are currently allowed in public space. The second event is the beginning of the warm season, where air pollution is trapped ground-ward to a greater degree than in the winter, when the cool air allows it to disperse into the larger atmosphere faster.

Thus, what I initially misidentified, in my anxiety, as a possible sign of the respiratory disease COVID-19 was actually the parasitic, background pollution of a car culture that has made so many of us that much more susceptible to respiratory ailments. My misidentification of the symptom had a kind of deeper truth to it. Through social distancing, self-isolation, and the exposure of essential workers to the risks that the rest of us would like to avoid, we are managing to clear the air of a dangerous virus. But the larger, parasitic culture that has made us collectively susceptible to that virus remains, and is just beginning to kick into summer gear, with unpredictable results...

On the topic of parasites...

Some new music I've been working on...

The Virus and The Parasite

We are in the grips of a virus that has transformed life for people around the world. In a very brief time, facts that used to be abstract have become concrete and palpable: that we are intimately connected with distant lives and processes; that our casual, habitual actions can have serious, unexpected repercussions, from the local to the global level; that our lifestyles are fragile and unsustainable; that there is no “normal” to return to. Sites of everyday life have become charged with anxiety and tension, and relationships of care, support and exploitation that were formerly backstage have become foregrounded.

In the midst of destabilizing realizations and adjustments, as we struggle to keep our balance on a weekly, daily and hourly basis, we should remain focused on the knowledge that the current crisis has been developing for a long time—long before a virus migrated from bats to humans in the markets of Wuhan.  As we wait for a vaccine to return our sense of confidence in public space and sociality, we need to reflect upon the fact that the current crisis has not been caused by a virus, but by a virus coupled with a parasite.

The virus has put our lives on hold, made us fearful, anxious and possibly hopeful for a better world to emerge from the crisis. But this better world only has a chance if we focus attention on the parasite that has delivered us, collectively, to a place where a microorganism could wreak such havoc with our lives and societies.

Like the virus, the parasite is a-moral: it is indifferent to human values, except to the extent that they advance or hinder the parasite’s own survival. The parasite survives by draining our resources. It weakens us by pitting us against each other, and against the world that sustains us. For several decades, it has been steadily devouring the collective resources and institutions that people struggled, for many generations, to secure. Prolonged hosting of the parasite has left us collectively weakened, individually isolated, and forgetful of the values and skills that allowed us to work together in the past, towards a common good.

In our weakened and fearful state, the parasite has encouraged us to turn against each other and take refuge in whatever fantasies of exceptionalism offer some promise of survival. Yet the virus that has followed the parasite has shown us that such forms of tribalism are limited, that we are all vulnerable, and that we have lost the spaces that allowed us to come together and struggle for a better, more egalitarian and sustainable world. We lost these spaces first as an effect of the parasite, which hollowed them out, and then by the virus, which literally sequestered us in our homes.

The parasite and the virus are similar in that they both need to constantly expand to survive, but they are different in that our defensive response to the virus has gotten in the way of the parasites’ growth imperative. The virus is temporarily starving the parasite. And, while we are trapped in uncomfortable isolation, the virus is teaching us how to think and act collectively, once again. In a crafty and inexplicable way, the virus is encouraging us to remember skills the parasite would like us to forget.

Drawing by Junji Ito

We are remembering that ordinary, everyday workers are the backbone of society, even though they are the worst paid. We are remembering the amount of unpaid, care giving and support that women and minorities are most often made to provide to keep everyday life going. We are remembering the amount of unpaid personal work that goes into reproducing our ability to show up for work. We are remembering the kinds of exploitation that a managerial class exerts through forms of discourse and motivation that are now laid bare as control structures. We are remembering the aggressive individualization of risk that austerity forces upon us, even while collective resources are expropriated and privatized. We are remembering the amount of affluence and waste that our economic systems generates for a privileged few, even while the majority of us struggle with insecurity and need. We are remembering the way the poor and the old, the sick and injured, dedicated workers and the environment itself are equally treated as expendable by employers the moment it becomes advantageous for them to do so.  We are remembering the way a prolonged state of anxiety has become accepted as “normal,” making us ill in ways that have become simply a part of living. We are remembering the way our hope and belief that life could be different have become paralyzed by decades of rhetoric, disappointment and propaganda. And we are remembering that we can live and feel differently.

The virus has caused the most damage in the country where the parasite has the deepest hold, which also happens to be the wealthiest country in the world. There, the parasite has so weakened collective institutions and leadership that effectively responding to the virus has been very difficult, to devastating and tragic results.  Immunologist Anthony Fauci has pointed out that, to effectively respond to modern viruses we need, not merely vaccines that react to immediate threats, but a universal vaccine distributed to everyone in the world, that provides baseline immunity to whole families of disease. This is the kind of thinking that can address the underlying parasite, as well. Our recovery demands we begin exercising long-atrophied muscles, and to re-learn how to think in ways that have been systematically discredited, to the advantage of the parasite. The virus is simply a catalyst, a warning and a motivation.

Just like a universal vaccine would provide us, collectively and globally, with the kind of protection we need to stave off viruses, so too would institutions like socialized healthcare, a universal, guaranteed income, and truly collective management of energy and resources generate the kind of stamina and strength we need to tackle the challenges that face us as a species on planet Earth. Only global, socialized responses to inequality and need have the hope of rekindling our societies in a way that will allow us to respond more effectively the kinds of global crises that characterize our times. If we begin to cultivate and nourish these skills, institutions and relationships, we have a chance of surviving the coming challenges. If, however, we continue to allow the parasite to weaken our individual and collective resources, social systems and cultures, the next global crisis will arrive to find us that much less able to respond. I don’t think we can afford that risk. Do you?

Lost My Voice

I lost my voice

I searched the world

I saw how dreams are made

I earned some money, found my niche

It wasn’t a fair trade

My faith was just a bit too strong

To truly be secure

I had to lose it too, a while

To find it here and there

I had to lose my job, my mind,

My will to make it through

I had to lose my one true love

Before I could find you

There was so much I had to lose

To find out who I am—

I’m all the things you cannot touch

You’re all the things I can

But when you touch me, I forget

The calculated cost

And touch itself becomes the thing

That shares what we have lost

I search now out of habit

I search from sea to sea

For nothing in particular

And sing myself to sleep

I'm such a fool for searching

There isn’t much to see

I found what I was looking for

The day that you found me

© Simon Orpana 2020