Ruby T – January 9 – 16, 2024
1/14
Today I got over-caffeinated and went on an hours-long cleaning spree, listening to two different teach-ins via the Red Nation Podcast linking indigenous anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles from the so-called US to the African continent, to Palestine. They were super uplifting and informative, with lots of quoting of early zionists hertzl (who I am more familiar with) and jabotinsky, who I am less familiar with. Stuff like hertzl writing to cecil rhodes (mining colonizer of south africa) for advice, and jabotinsky’s “the iron wall,” a gross and revealing piece of writing from 1923 which basically says that the only way to colonize Palestine is by force, because the native population will never agree to being colonized.
I fantasize about citing these documents with precision to my family members who insist israel is not a settler colonial state. I have inherited this imaginary-arguing trait from my father, who has been arguing with people in his head (but out loud) my whole life. Probably pretty common. What does it say about us? I think for me, it is a hopeful fantasy; a way of imagining my loved ones out of their position, which so often feels to me like a racist betrayal of what I thought were our shared values.
The uplifting element in these teach-ins is the sharp and principled analysis combined with the insistence that we are winning– that land back will become a reality, and that this blooming fascism is the last gasp of western empire. Also, some speakers, when asked what sustains their hope, speak in refreshing terms both about their ancestors having fought for them, and about being a future ancestor. I was originally introduced to the time traveling/ visionary exercise of seeing myself as a spiritual ancestor by Dr. Pascale Ife Williams, who visited a class I was co-teaching a while back and guided us through this exercise. I still have the picture I drew of myself as a crone somewhere, and meditate on its image sometimes.
Later, my father comes by to bring us some mail and toilet paper. He visits for a while, and talks about lots of people from his younger life– people he shared office space with, people he was in bands with, some he’s reconnected with– intricate connections in a web that I’m aware of but can’t follow. He says, “You must remember Tommy so-and-so!” I don’t, because I was a baby when I met him. I feel kind of surprised or annoyed by his recitation of these intricacies. I’m not sure why. I ask him why he is fixated on these people (but hopefully not in such rude words– I can’t remember), and he says it’s because he has no friends in town. But then together we think of some people who count as friends, including me and Al. We also talk about how strange it is to have been involved with so many projects and people and to then feel those worlds drop away and narrow as you age. This is something I can very much feel too. Now I am sorry for being irritated in the first place.
1/14 (remembering 1/13)
The next day (yesterday) we drove to osterville, a suburban seaside republican-seeming town I’ve never been to so that Alex could get a vitamin / antioxidant infusion at a med spa. I was unwashed, exhausted, gay-looking, and felt out of place. It was in a depressing pavilion that I said smelled like a very upscale retirement home, even though I’ve never been in one. Alex said I was right, it smelled just like their sister’s ex-husband’s parents’ fancy boomer condo complex.
The med spa was playing top 40 country music inside, which is unusual in my experience of this region. After the infusion, we took a quick walk in the sunshine and I tried to feel the excitement of being in a completely new place, in spite of my observations so far and the general heartache of these times. I saw a store that was called vintage supply or something and I wanted to look inside. It wasn’t vintage at all– it was new, super preppy, and they were playing the same country music. We needed to eat something so we went into a juice bar that sold us a legitimately rotten avocado toast that had an accidental dusting of lavender, all disguised by sad tomato slices. And they too were playing the exact same music. We walked outside and there were jeeps everywhere. We started to feel totally yikes’d out. You’d never know there was a genocide going on or a pandemic for that matter. This was the day we had planned to go to DC for the march and that made the whole journey even more surreal and depressing.
The day ended with a trip to urgent care to try to get some meds adjusted. The doctor didn’t believe what we were saying about a potentially harmful interaction and got defensive. Then he looked it up on his own, and came back in the room to tell us that we were right, but not in those words. He wouldn’t do a new prescription, told us to wait til Monday, and we went home. I felt ragged and anxious, and like I was absorbing Alex’s experience too much.
1/14 (remembering 1/12)
Two days ago I didn’t have words so I drew some of israel’s law goons while watching the ICJ hearings. At first I was just listening to Tal Becker drone on and on and I kept thinking what the fuck is he talking about. Like full legal jargon that was robotic and not compelling. Then there was a similar vibe with Malcom Shaw, but I perked up when he started getting flustered about his papers– blaming someone for getting his papers out of order. Finally: “Someone’s shuffled my papers like a deck of cards.” I was cackling, thinking about how these people should never trust their servants and how quick they are to blame someone else when they look and feel foolish.
I sat down to watch more carefully, and started to feel the pull to hate-draw that so often comes over me when I see official goons defending state violence. I warmed up with Galit Raguan while she talked about the humanity of the IOF “sacrificing operational advantage” by delaying their ground invasion, and dropping thousands of leaflets and making thousands of phone calls, telling Palestinians to evacuate (to where?). I thought of the news that came out last month, about how some of the leaflets jeeringly quoted a verse from the Quran: “The flood overtook them, while they persisted in wrongdoing.” Disgusting.
Her eyebrows made perfect cartoon evil person eyebrows, I didn’t even have to exaggerate them. I continued to draw, spending more and more time on the sinister hair of Omri Sender, the disheveled wig of Chistopher Saker, his frumpy robe, and pilgrim/ Hitler youth-looking neck bow, and finally the soulless pallor and very shiny head of Gilad Noam.
I thought about how just the day before I wrote “the body is never wrong,” and began wondering if focusing on the appearance of my enemies instead of their actions is perhaps against my ethics.
I have long reveled in caricature, and enjoy thinking of it as drawing at its most violent. In 2019, Lindsey Graham introduced a bill to extend the detention limit on migrant children from 20 days to 100 days. I was so angry, I became obsessive. I conducted a ritual experiment called Draw Him to Death, drawing him 110 times while listening to recordings of him speaking, hoping to accelerate his destruction. Strangely, and completely against my will, I came to find some femme sympathy or allegiance with what I believe to be his true wounded gay essence, even if he took it in the wrong direction. But that’s another story.
Another reason I want to draw my enemies is because I am fascinated by how their bodies seem to exude the harm they perpetrate. This feels like a slippery observation, given that I do believe the body is never wrong, and I hate body-hatred (because it is painful and harmful, and always imposed by destructive, culturally dominant, racist, and ableist forces). But am I perpetrating or relying on these systems in my hate-drawing/ caricature practice? On the other hand, if the body is never wrong, maybe it simply gives away the hatred and illegitimate power of its inhibitor… but then again, because I can never fully exorcize or eliminate my allegiance to these systems, their illegitimate power lurks in my calculations. Exorcism is one of the main reasons why obsessive, repetitive, ritual experiments are useful to me, and I think the fact that I found an unlikely link to LG’s soul hole could be telling in terms of my larger anxieties about caricature.
I have way more to consider here, and would like to talk it through with others.
Right now it’s starting to feel a bit like a distraction. Free Palestine, and fuck those law creeps.
Image Courtesy: Ruby T
Image Description: Vertical image of a quick ink drawing (black on white paper) of Gilat Raguan at the podium, with severe eyebrows, beady eyes, and pulled back hair. She smiles slightly as she delivers lies in a self-satisfied way. Her robe is billowy, and not filled in.
Image Courtesy: Ruby T
Image Description: Vertical image of a medium-paced ink drawing (black on white paper) of world bank lawyer Omri Sender at the podium, with sinister shiny black hair shaped almost in a parody of male-pattern balding. He has an exhausted, empty facial expression. His neat black robe is slightly filled in, with black blacks to match his hair.
Image Courtesy: Ruby T
Image Description: Vertical image of another medium-paced ink drawing (black on white paper) of Christopher Saker at the podium. His disheveled law wig is a perimeter of several saugagey shapes with little spikes in the middle. Thin wisps of real hair escape at the sides. His head is large, and he talks out of the side of his mouth, with big black rimmed glasses covering vacant eyes. I tried to represent his frumpy robe by scribbling to fill in the blacks. He wears a neck bow reminiscent of pilgrims or hitler youth.
Image Courtesy: Ruby T
Image Description: Vertical image of another medium-paced ink drawing (black on white paper) of attorney general of israel Gilad Noam at the podium. His head is shaped like an upside down egg or maybe teardrop, and dotted with close shave stubble or fuzz around the perimeter and mustache area. He’s talking out of the side of his mouth, and looks like he’s seething with irritation and petulance. His suit is sharp, angular, a little too big.
1/11
Last night I dreamt of other childhood friends, who came to me in adulthood, and revealed their madness in a direct, humorous, and self-loving way. As is often the case in my dreams, there was also stressful travel involved, perhaps more like fleeing. It’s always a boat or train, never a plane.
As usual, Alex is up early with symptoms, but today is worse. I leave work at 11am because their shaking is so bad. I’m texting with Aria for a lot of the day, and they underscore radical, aggressive rest, and introduce me to a new term/ strategy: energy envelope. I wonder if the spike in symptoms is because we did too much yesterday (including this potentially trauma-stirring therapy) or if things are getting worse.
Aria tells me many other vital and wise things about connections between Long Covid, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), and POTS, cross-checking symptoms, self-advocacy with doctors, and more. One thing is this:
Be careful about going too far down a behavioral/mental health rabbit hole though, because LC is a “real” physiological illness! I really worry about people spending a lot of time/effort/$ trying to treat illness this way. Old trauma tends to get stirred up by illness/stressful events, but that doesn’t mean the symptoms are *caused* by trauma per se.
My feelings of gratitude and tenderness toward my old friend are very strong. Another strong feeling of late is that I have wronged my friends and broader community by not always practicing the kinds of learning and care that I know is needed. There have been times when I have ignored information, or chosen not to learn, or chosen not to mask when I knew I should. It extends beyond covid and into the broader realm of disability justice praxis and studies, which has sharpened my knowledge and teaching for years. I owe so much to those who educate me, and I want to take some accountability. I tried a little accountability-in-writing over instagram, but so often that venue feels inadequate and/ or performative. I’ve heard that the bulk of accountability comes through action, and I am definitely changing my actions.
We go on a short walk in the woods behind our apartment, and talk about how the body is never wrong because the earth is never wrong, or something like that. We inspect plant life in various states of change.
I almost thought I couldn’t write anything today, because it’s been so sad and hard. Dishes piling up, fear, furious online research and symptom tracking, wide and dry screen-time eyes, the nagging details of my job that I mostly abandoned today, more mass death.
I watch the ICJ hearing and while the details of the testimony are horrific, the fact that it is happening is uplifting. Palestinian instagram and x are full of heartfelt statements on what this means in terms of affirmation, solidarity (especially among those who know apartheid), and breaking through apartheid conditions.
We switch over to a reality tv show about merpeople. When I see the gorgeous self-described merson The Blixunami playing with their merdolls and talking about how they WILL unapologetically play with dolls and WILL be singing underwater in their upcoming music video, I suddenly can’t stop crying.
I really don’t want to make The Blixunami a conduit for my grief. I rush to articulate: I know I am crying because it’s been a long day and I am full of feelings about childhood and the power of true, pure, play. I wanna call it innocence, but it’s more so the knowledge and survival that roots when we can assert our right to innocence… something like that. And so many children are fucking dying with all their imagination and invention taken. For what.
Now, in the past hour, I see the news that disgusting biden & uk are bombing Yemen, bypassing congress yet again. I get back online to understand wtf is going on, especially today when the ICJ hearings began. Someone writes in the comments section of Anaïs Duplan’s post that maybe they’re trying to reframe genocide as war …
The pull towards fantasy is strong right now, and I am thinking about how I can have fantasy without escapism. Cold, hard fantasy. I watch The Blixunami’s music video “Splish Splash On Em” with Alex and leave a fangirl comment. I notice that I am commenting as @mizroobi and don’t remember making that embarrassing username. Intrigued, I click on my account and see our old music video from when Alex and I were in a band in chicago, Lezurrexion. The song is called Fun Young and I haven’t watched the video since I uploaded it on a whim a few years ago after cleaning out an old hard drive. The lyrics are when we were younger, didn’t we have fun/ now you’re no fun.
The theme of these days continues…. not to mention the irony that we were actually very young when we wrote this song in 2011ish. Roni wrote the lyrics– maybe she was talking about childhood too
Image courtesy: Ruby T
Image description: A vertical color photo of a thick wood vine wrapped tightly round a small tree. It emerges from an embankment covered in fallen oak leaves and smaller vines. Several veiny tree silhouettes lace across the gray sky. Cedar shingled houses tilt in the background.
Image courtesy: Ruby T
Image description: A vertical color photo showing a bright and vibrant green patch of moss, almost in a heart shape, surrounded by brown fallen leaves and pine needles.
10/10
It’s 10:20pm and we just finished dinner after getting home late from sagamore, which is about an hour and a half from provincetown. Living out here, I’ve gotten used to going longer distances for certain necessities or to visit people, and it feels strangely easy. Now I am counting the hours since I left work at 2pm, and it feels like maybe the journey ate the day. That’s okay though, especially because it was for a good reason. Alex had an appointment with someone who does Accelerated Resolution Therapy, which could help with these mysterious post-covid symptoms.
I sit in the car and talk on the phone with Aria, one of my oldest and closest friends. We are trying to figure out if/ how we will get to DC this weekend (as of later this evening the answer is that unfortunately we are probably not going).
Aria and I met in first grade, and when we were in fourth grade we invented a religion together, which involved every single being (whether animal, vegetable, grain of sand, or fingernail clipping) having a direct godx-like entity floating directly above it, moving with it at all times to keep this heavenly vertical spacial equation intact. We called it The Crazy Religion.
Another feature of the religion was falling into trance states, which we called crazy spasms, and you could only be revived with sugar water. I remember entering this trance state, shaking on the ground and having visions, and it being both pretend and real. Thinking about it now, it’s obvious to me that Trance States of Pretend and Real are very much operational in my art practice. Maybe I need to better consider where trance originated for me–with this wild game/ system we made as children.
And why were we spasming? How did we learn this? The remake of The Crucible (which I think features convulsing teenage girls) came out in November of 1996, but my notes on the Crazy Religion from one of my childhood journals are dated August 30, 1996. And upon closer inspection of these notes, we also had talking spasms, laughing spasms, spinning spasms, and dying spasms. It also says that taking out pigtails is one of the most important and sacred ritual actions. And I spelled spasm spazam. I haven’t looked at these notes in a long time and am struck by the timing of encountering them when adult spasming is so prevalent in my daily life.
Is trance a key? Is spazam a portal?
I am currently (and really always) looking for keys and portals to understand– to embody–the necessity of art-making when genocide seems to render art meaningless. I have written about it and drawn about it and read about it for years, but the reasons and justifications I come to are always slipping through me or getting worn out. Like my practice won’t let me have a thesis until liberation for all feels secure, and sometimes I think that is the thesis. But it has been particularly weighing on me, as I have a show coming up and the idea of exhibiting right now usually feels crass and off-track.
Related to this is steadfastness. Steadfastness is a translation of the Arabic sumud. After I talk with Aria, I get on an organizing call with a group of people collaborating to make a guide for artists facing censorship and repression for Palestine liberation work. Our wonderful facilitator poses a check-in question for us, asking how we are thinking about or practicing steadfastness. Yesterday the psychologist and author Hala Alyan created an important instagram post about steadfastness and how to counter psychic numbing. She says many useful and poetic things in this post, including “Any steadfastness of the diaspora and allies is a direct testament to the steadfastness of those on the ground.”
We go around the virtual space and talk about what’s bringing steadfastness; what we are doing to keep our minds, bodies, and spirits functioning and available to this struggle (with the long and broad game of liberation as the frame). This makes me reflect on how during the first few months of the bombardment I was not interested in food, and I was bingeing on news and information. Now I am putting more energy into cooking and eating, and trying to take in information more in the spirit of awakened witnessing, less in the spirit of bottomless, directionless, voracious consumption and despair. I know that artmaking is a kind of nourishment too, but I am having trouble with it right now.
On the ride home (actually, we stop at the grocery store) we listen to the second half of Democracy Now, and there’s a story on how israel is using starvation as a tool of war. It goes into great detail, though I can’t remember if it mentions that people have resorted to eating tree leaves, which they have. To be talking about cooking and eating and towards liberation, and buying food, and listening to this testimony on forced starvation all in the same hour– there really is no framing, judgment, or analysis of this shared time/ truth that is sufficient.
I do know that I still need to consume a lot of information everyday to stay awake to what is going on; to avoid psychic numbing. Many journalists in Gaza admonish those who bear witness but do not act, and I think ‘act’ is the operative element in the equation of information intake. Bearing witness is the key to action, but it is not the action.
Til later~
Image courtesy: Ruby T
Image description: A horizontal color photograph of an open and worn composition book. The visible text is in black ink and messy, child handwriting. It reads:
SPAZAMS
1. Crazy SPAZAM: when you go crazy
2. Talking SPAZAMS: when you Babble on And on and don’t stop
3. Laughing SPAZAMS: when you can’t stop laughing
4. Spinning SPAZAMS: when you turn Round and Round
5. Dieing SPAZAM: When you lie very still and Dont Move, And CAnt talk. Sometihems if it’s not as serious you can move and can only talk to one person.
Image courtesy: Ruby T
Image description: A vertical color photograph showing my view from the driver’s side of the car in the parking lot of the AR therapy office in sagamore, mass. A red dumpster glows against a tree holding onto its dead leaves, while taller and greener coniferous trees reach up to the sky and catch the last bit of sunlight. I took this photo because Aria was telling me about how the time of day and year (4pm in the winter) is challenging, and asked me where I was, which made me look.
1/9
I was very awake last night– first of my own accord, and then because Alex had a shaking episode. I wrapped myself around their body and gripped my thighs onto their trembling legs, bearing down with my weight. I listened to their heart beat and wrapped my hand tightly around their vibrating shoulder. I drifted in and out of sleep wondering if I could keep my muscles engaged; if something like deep knowing and love would let me grip through sleep.
In the morning I get up and go to work, dreading the entrance into what I have come to think of as the other reality. I’ve had lots of day jobs, and I always feel like they invite or impose a parallel state of existence– one where I am a little bit outside my body, but if I play it just right I can get a thin and fumy high off of my exceptional customer service skills; I can revel in my power to know exactly what most people need and want and let that distract me from what I wish I was doing. I’ve known for a long time that it’s a cheap high, and in recent years I’ve been practicing withholding my energy.
Now that we are witnessing and trying to stop a genocide–or as Rasha Abdulhadi puts it, a “spectacular annihilation” punctuating an “ongoing genocide”–I find my state of existence while at work to be more upside down than parallel. Early on, in October, when I was so wrong as to to think that this couldn’t go on for more than a month or two at most (I was naively thinking of 2009 and 2014 as the horrific template), I did have one conversation with a few of my coworkers about the bombardment, and specifically israel’s role, and the differences between Judaism and zionism. It made me feel closer to them, because they showed such dismay and made time for a long and genuine conversation. One asked that I include her in future actions in town, and another left a supportive comment on the Provincetown for Palestine rally flier I posted to the town’s community facebook pages, which otherwise got mostly trolled or deleted by admins.
I should remember these small acts of workplace solidarity more often. But in the day-to-day it’s as if there is no genocide. While I occasionally catch myself feeling a sense of unexplained well-being, I remember quickly what’s really going on. I sneak into the bathroom or empty studios to check the news, to call representatives, to post stuff on social media. Sometimes I just do it at my desk. Sometimes I try to weave it into the office conversation (for example I had a recent opportunity when people were chatting about instagram cleanses and the needlessness of social media). I notice that I am involuntarily testing them; trying to bring it up without saying too much in hopes that they will pick up my thread, and also out of fear that they won’t. There’s a tightness in my chest and a flutter in my throat. I try to remind myself that they are probably not consuming the same information that I am, but the implications of that are not at all comforting. Mostly I am surprised by my sudden timidity.
I walk outside and look at the water and think about the journalists in Gaza gathering at the beach at the end of the day to greet each other and be together and try to pick up wifi signals. Or I look at the clear sky and think of bombs. What I want is to think of this stopping– to look at the sky and sea and think of the same calm surrounding Gaza.
Today I notice that the vibration of Alex’s shaking is inside of my body, especially when I am sitting. It feels almost real, and I wonder if I absorbed it through my gripping. I wonder if I am clairsentient, and/ or if I have horrible boundaries. I think of the vibration of drones. I think of the word I learned recently from the journalist Bisan: zanana.
I leave work a little early and lay in bed making spreadsheets for tracking workshop registration. I drift off for twenty minutes while Alex shakes beside me, and then we go to the health center. The visit is inconclusive and the nurse won’t give them a referral to the long covid clinic in Boston because she’s not their primary care provider but the primary care provider doesn’t have appointments for over a month and that’s why we’re seeing this other person in the first place. We wait for their new prescription to be filled at cvs and I paint my nails in four different colors and pick out green mascara and green eyeliner. I want to feel like a fairy wood nymph or maybe I just want to feel like wood.
Now I realize that in my haze I forgot to check to see where the makeup falls under BDS guidelines. I learn that essie and maybelline’s parent company is l’oreal, and read about their collusion with israel– operating a factory on the land of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village called al-Mujaydil but now renamed; donating $100,000 to israel’s weizmann institute of science which does research and development for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. I will return these products, and turn my fantasies toward less capitalistic and murderous ways of feeling like wood.
Image courtesy: Ruby T
Image description: Horizontal color photo of provincetown bay on a gray cloudy day with sunshine trying to break through just over the horizon. In the foreground is seaweedy sand with old mismatched chairs and a table, bordered by a wood retaining wall. The water is dark gray with white highlights, and there are piers stretching out across the water in both the mid and far distance.
CLOSE DISTANCE 