It happened when I opened an email from a friend who was living in Manhattan at the time. The experience of breaking free of a rural COVID lockdown and joining into dizzying scenes of urban play.

After I wrote that I was going to bed, this incredibly energetic, creative woman I met in the laundry room with her daughter – they were giving each other rides in laundry carts and offered me one too and I took them up on it – called and asked if I wanted to go for a walk…

We walked to the Hudson and watched tug boats and she practiced her poetry on me because she’s performing in a church today. I got dizzy with all of it and was completely oblivious to a drug deal that went on above my head because I was bent over petting a cute Yorkie while the owner, a kid in the projects next door was selling and also giving stuff to a runner. Also completely missed that the homeless guy we walked by was masturbating. I can’t imagine what else I’ve missed in this neighborhood.

I might go to the church today to listen to the performances. It made me realise life is still going on all around and I’ve been missing it and have had enough of that. I had vivid dreams last night for the first time in ages.

*****

Photo Credit: Victoria Ebin

That a laundry room caper and two friends on a walk could feel transgressive was of course in part the pandemic’s doing. In a blink, a story could take a queer turn into view of a publicly masturbating man. Attention could stray to a little dog and away from a drug deal going down just overhead. Poetry could be rehearsed on spec that, notwithstanding a highly contagious virus, the poem would be performed the following day, inside a church. It was all so anti-programmatic, this positive social vertigo, this anti-gravity, that its anomalies were occluded.

It is a point that I feel will stay with me – how lightness of being can feel essential to survival of a sense of aliveness, ‘bare life’ aside (Agamben, 1995), and as it were, without thinking. I began to wonder if granting myself a temporary pass to be swept away or swept up more often might be crucial to what actually brings about, and possibly even binds, crisis relations (cf. Runia, 2010: 18, in Knight, 2021).

Overall, the breaktime from minding natural or cultural laws and borders – the active forgetting of these – now seems to me crucial for resisting any narrative casting of the pandemic as an event without end, especially for the most vulnerable.

*****

When Fred Moten’s In the Break was published in 2003, he was writing cultural theory out of the largely intractable social crisis of endemic racism and heteronormative supremacy in the U.S. For describing the capacity of creative action to spontaneously make a radical break from this lifeworld, he turns to the insights of poet and politically radical writer Amiri Baraka on being ‘in the break’ or ‘in the scene’ of a happening that revolves around Black sociality, sexuality, and music. In the break, Moten writes, ‘time falters … plac[ing] us in the systemic epistemological and ontological oscillation between sameness and difference … [hinging on] syncope: an absence of the self. A cerebral eclipse. [A state in which one is] at once internal and interstitial … [being at times] overcome with a slight vertigo’ (ibid.: 164).

Moten continues, ‘I’m after the way concern with perception and cognition … leads to the deconstruction of ontology … a ‘refusal of closure [which] is not a rejection but an ongoing and reconstructive improvisation’ (ibid.: 164, emphasis mine).

Here, I use boldface for words cut from Moten’s insights on experiencing what he terms the logic of interruption. I emphasise action that is collisive with normative boundaries and narrative arcs. Leaving racial and sexual identities at times unmarked is part of this experiment with Moten’s own writing, within a breaktime that concentrates the value of breaking loose. The paradox of the frame – a computer screen, a film screen, a dance floor – is that it limits-while-opening a portal to forgetting one’s emplacement, functioning as a device for eliciting positive vertigo out of crisis.

It follows that the iconic has no place in such a project as a ‘thing’: being happenstantial, the vertiginous is off-side of iconicity, a state out of nowhere that one can put a finger on. As Marilyn Strathern (1988) recognises for the anthropological project, relating this is a matter of description, rather than explanation. In the same vein Moten writes:

Something slips through the cracks or cuts of iconicity, likeness, metaphor, such that thinking operates in the absence of any real correspondent and translational manipulation of the concept of internal similarity or pictorial internal relation. In that absence or cut, in the space between expression and meaning or between meaning and reference, remains an experience of meaning that … [diagrammatic] iconicity doesn’t get to.

The question, then, is how to describe that experience, and bound up in this question is the assumption … that description, rather than explanation, is the task with which we must now be concerned.

He continues:

Perhaps it is the supplement of description that allows description; for description of the phenomenon or experience of ensemble [or happenstantial social connection] is only adequate if it is also itself the phenomenon or experience of ensemble [or happenstantial social connection]. (2003: 91-92)

*****

Daniel Knight’s ethnography of the ‘epoch of crisis’ in modern day Greece moves to the point, describing the experience people relate of social vertigo as they work to survive conditions of an externally imposed programme of austerity. Official narratives of progress and of economic certainty falter and blur in these crisis conditions, as visions of a viable future do likewise. Picking up on Susan Lepselter’s insights from her study of alien abduction experiencers, the two populations are conjoined in a ‘cluster of “free floating intense affects”’ – any predictable security a ‘forgotten something’ gone unmappably tilt; sometimes terminally interrupted. (Knight, 2021)

By way of illustration, Daniel Knight and Charles Stewart reference a scene from the classic Hollywood racing film Le Mans (1971):

The car careening, skidding and crashing into the guardrail is shot in a mixture of slow motion and regular speed, flashing back and forth to close-ups of McQueen’s face. Lying stunned, in a state of shock and spiralling confusion, his mind flits back and forth from the present to the moment he first perceived danger, through all the stages of the event. At this point, the past, present and future are simultaneously caught in processes of re-evaluation and projection, a dizziness of swimming, perhaps drowning, in the fluidity of time (Knight and Stewart, 2016: 3).

But not every such state is a seriously bad trip. The abductee genre, for example, is rich with accounts of miraculous rescues from falling to one’s death – of being transported aloft, somehow, to safety, or into realms of out-of-this-world adventure and promise. (Lepselter, 2016)

It is the time of Carnival in the film Black Orpheus (1959). The first scene bursts open to percussive music, young men dancing their way along a steep favela path. High above the grid of Rio De Janeiro they whirl in circles, performing off-balance moves of feigned falling, while passing in the opposite direction, young women walk the same path silently, sure-footed and graceful. Balancing salvaged oil cans of water on their heads, they are paced to the routines of heavy labour. From time to time, a woman watching from a doorway breaks spontaneously into dance, returning to her work just as suddenly. Being in the scene offers release from routinisation and poverty’s grind. The film’s aesthetic is documentary, positive vertigo playing out in ethnographic scenes of frenzied sensuality. A demure Eurydice is told, ‘No one can resist the madness of carnival’ although she has come here to escape a man who is ‘trying to kill her’. Yet there is no respite from Death. Eurydice faints at the sight of her pursuer, now in his Carnival costume.

*****

I return to the email scenarios that transported me, like a freak whirlwind, into a carnivalesque Manhattan. Looking at the photograph, I can almost see myself standing at the edge of a highrise rooftop. Oblivious to any other world, I am watching Black Orpheus through a window of someone’s apartment, across the gap between buildings. Perhaps the channel changes to the crash scene from Les Mans. . . . or a UFO carries me off. . . .

Somehow, I have begun dreaming again.

References

About the author(s)