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FEELING DOWN: ANXIOUS NOTES TOWARDS THE END OF THE WORLD The “Funk” We must commit “productive suicide.” This statement rings in my ear as I settle into my last few weeks of the Fall quarter at UC Santa Barbara. It was weeks ago that I found myself in a state of unwillingness or being in a constant unmotivated composure as I struggled to complete professional tasks or teaching work. I called this lapse of time a “funk” to my friends, of not desiring the repetitious production of immaterial labor—of not doing my job or committing fully to my “vocation” as a graduate student-worker. I hardly read in the past weeks, barely itching to write again. I hardly wrote or read books/articles—and now I am consumed by reading novels or creative non-fiction, refusing to read an academic text. The soul-crushing labor of university-based work paralyzed me, holding my throat, and asphyxiating me. I desired mindlessness—or maybe the stillness of my life without stimulus. I adopted old habits, addictions, and distractions. My hyper-productivity and focus dwindled. I felt burnout. The deep depression loomed over my body and spirit, as I coped with trying to find joy again, some sense of pleasure in tasks or labor that genuinely enjoyed. The pressures to sacrifice my authentic self, to destroy any remnant of who I want to be or become, or how I would will it into my existence—all this lost to my own confrontation with “becoming-academic.” Loneliness is not the word, nor is it the conditions I speak to. To “be alone” is merely a physical, if not a material or visible, description—I cannot describe the metaphysics of feeling down. Yet, the concept and practice of being “alone” conjures its own metaphysics and social psychology of being-alone-together or being-alone-in-public, something I do feel describes this grief. Spinoza calls it “sadness,” but it is more about incapacity or passivity to the perpetual motions of my own world. José Esteban Muñoz called it feeling brown, and perhaps this is what I struggled with. Muñoz describes “brown feelings” as “chronicl[ing] a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.” My own “object relation” and “performativity” is riddled with a non-desire, that disaffects my longing for joy. Feeling down is a difficult thing to discuss, to construct an image for others to feel too, as I am afraid to “dump” things onto the other—a practice I hesitate to reproduce. I don’t feel like writing about it, giving it sensorial nouns or active verbs. I’d rather just write and unfeel my way through it, hoping my reader rejects me, burns these words, and reads between the lines. But this rejects my own sense of feeling down, or perhaps feeling-down-together so that we might feel-down-together-in-utopia. So, I struggle through it, despite my unwillingness to engage, my own burgeoning, dwindling fire so that I can feel otherwise toward my re-affection toward the world that holds me together. The “funk” of my own human sensibility within the ivory towers of academe prevents me to note how writing gives me pleasure, makes me feel whole, when I know that I lack that completeness. Yet it’s in writing that my incompleteness stands out, edging my desire to find its way back again. I take the needle off the depressing record and turn the vinyl to the B-side. Like the anarchist English band Chumbawamba, my record has the back-and-forth rhythms of love/hate. Or so I hope in this gesture…this incomplete record. Cosmic Alienation? The thought of an infinite multiverse of spacetime terrifies me, makes me panic as I grasp the meaninglessness of life on Earth in the face of an expanding dark energy. I call this feeling the dissonance of unfeeling. The music of the cosmos drift endlessly into the void, the nothingness. Will the songs of our homo sapient cultures be heard? Perhaps it’s the science fiction I’ve been imagining or the negative philosophies I’ve been close reading that orient me to this dwelling of human “funk.” I’ve never felt so alienated, so deep into a feeling that my existence on Earth is a blink in the cosmos. The star dust that creates me, from my flesh to the microcosmos of my matter, understates the significance of my existence—disoriented by human laws, hermeneutics, and perception that distorts the realities of the dimensions of non-knowledge of the cosmos that vibrate beyond our comprehension. A tangential writing, I am forever drawn to the void, an ancient darkness of wisdom. The infinite nothingness that forges me, my body, my senses. The human songs of our ancestors are thus still vibrating at a frequency called memory, or that singular yet pluralistic word we call the sacred spirit—that non-language of being that dwells in the fabric of our human matter. Aliveness Eugene Thacker, alongside a range of philosophers, speculates what or how Thought would be created when humans are extinct. A question without answer, or so we might think when we embark on the road of human cognition as the center of “Thought.” Life/death is not the body of knowledge as we know it—but perhaps here I am speaking a different language to make sense of the unknowable, where language cannot take us yet. For as long as I can remember, I was close to death, of non-being at the most precise use of the concept without metaphor or human-invented structures of sociality. Yet, it’s not just me—its life as we know it on our planet, the “end of the world.” It’s life as that organic kind of matter that Western biologists empirically make sense of in their “evidence-based” studies. The “aliveness” of our Earth reduced to a description of an organic/non-organic divide. The romance to make sense of forests as alive, or fungi as alive and so vibrant with culture, yet the failure to understand deserts as full of “aliveness” as our descriptive perception renders them barren and inhospitable—anthropomorphic renderings that ignore “life/death” in its most significant capacity to include all. This is and was the consequence of the West, whose desire for life is a mirror of their own geographies, their customary cultures, and their image of a world that “breathes” life. These legacies neglect desert peoples, mountainous cultures, and horizons of activity that exceed the flattened desires of Western thinking whose image and mode of production envisions a world outside this planet after they have made it into a wasteland of plastic wilderness. The end of the world is not the correct configuration or analysis to describe the death-drive of the West, or better yet, the civilizations whose eco-social relations reproduce violence against the body of the Earth, that pronounces this material catastrophe of destitution. It’s the end of life/death. Artificial, plastic ecologies will inherit the Earth of white supremacist magnitudes. As Black prophetic intellectuals and rebels have shouted from their precious breath in dissent: the end of the world, of antiblackness, is the reciprocity of life/death re-vitalized for a future where we might survive. It is to unnaturalize the conditions of human and other-than-human suffering at the hand of the human world that produces it. My human “funk” emerges as an anxiety that our “human” ruins of fabrication will bring with it an insulation that engenders the destruction of this planet, to suffocate it of all relationality so that we might survive. Fascism is the practice so that this vicious image of the Earth will smooth out any vestige of protest and rebellion to create life/death again. As I return to the university classroom, I dread that I don’t do enough. I don’t do enough for these students that might not see nor feel their human emancipation from such a fascist desire. Radical Imaginations In my search for a balance between professionalization and de-professionalization, or between the entropy of academic “lifestyle” against the refusal to become-academic, I find myself continually in and from a “funk” whose excess spills over into the realities of my search for a politics of emancipation worth struggling toward. In all my ramblings toward the impossibility to articulate myself in language-writing, I fumble towards the hope that we find joy in our search toward an ineffable feeling of freedom. As Chela Sandoval eloquently portrays in the classroom, usually by way of Tracy Chapman or Gloria E. Anzaldúa, in her own performance of philosophical excess, she says, in my paraphrasing: “we must uncover the social physics of love through our mind/body/emotions matrix.” In my own unruly acts of feeling brown, by way of Muñoz, I write this musing of anxious notes with the hope I unearth, maybe reveal, a desire beyond my waystation of depression—a site of being or becoming—a stationary form of alertness to catastrophe but made unable to move—what Anzaldúa calls the Coatlicue state. As a ritual of negative Xicanidades I am in search for a practice of joy, writing my way through the “funk” of human sensibilities that snare me in a body of negative emotions and affects related to my own Mexicanized social conditions but exceeds them by way of the planetary human condition. My social media is polluted by debates that numb my body, disorganize my brain, and debilitate my emotions. I slowly pulled away from sites such as Instagram to learn that I no longer yearn for its images. I have tracked my same disappearing from Facebook, where virtual antagonism produces itself. I am slowly deflecting my screen time from Twitter where most people’s “discourse” is undergirded by the combative register to dominate and defeat. At the heart of those virtual spaces is the unspoken gratification of unfiltered and occasionally anonymous angst, where the hopes, desires, and pleasure of “being human” are artificially woven and unraveled. My own de-virtualization has had immediate affects, but sometimes I ask myself at what cost? It’s here, at the last stretching of my writing, where I dream of a radical imagination that pulls away from the expectations of normative society. If for me a negative Xicanidades is an act of heretical becoming, so too must our imagination procure a heresy worth representing. I speak here of being okay with feeling down, feeling brown, feeling alienated. For those shifts of alienation are now happening when we “return” back and into to “the Real” when we’ve become so accustomed to the virtual. I have felt this at the level of social disconnection by way of the Internet, where it becomes so difficult to connect without it. These connections are worth everything, and I write this musing so that I can be received. I end here: How might we summon with our heretical alchemy a new radical imagination that demystifies and yet mystifies our sacred purpose in the politics of emancipation? I leave you, reader, to feel brown. From the California central coast, Anisq’oyo. White Mountain Rabbit
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November 2022
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