quasihumanist

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Hannah Close in conversation with Andreas Weber (2022)

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Some thoughts on Andor, and that final shot everyone hates so much.

I don’t. I’ve been sitting with this show for a while now. This whole season I’ve been waiting to hate Bix’s arc with the same fervour that some of the more vocal fans do. I’ve been waiting to feel the injustice done to a “strong female character” (a phrase I fucking hate by the way, but that’s an argument for another time). I’ve seen the arguments that she should have stayed with the rebellion, that she was a fighter sidelined for the sake of a man, that she was reduced to a baby-factory straight out of right wing propaganda (Jesus Christ). And I disagree with every fucking one of them. 

For me, in season two, Bix is the heart of the show. She is the ethos, the drive, the reason that rebellion matters. Bix becomes, in a way, the most important character Andor has to offer us.

Andor has always been very clear in its ideology. Blatantly so. And one of the ideals it strives to impart to its audience is that we are not meant to live in fear. We are not meant to live under oppression. We are not meant to live looking down. For Andor the heart, the drive, the reason behind rebellion is to create a future where we are free. And where love, and peace, and community, and kindness, and hope are our foundations and are the only matter of our lives. 

Andor doesn’t want its characters to be fighters. They are forced to be. Andor doesn’t want its characters to live hiding and scared and clawing for any glimpse of peace and love and hope they can get. They have no other choice. Rebellion is important. It is so so fucking important. But it is only important because of what it fights for. 

Bix is not a fighter. In Andor’s first season she is a mechanic selling to Luthen on the side for extra money. She is not struggling against the empire. She is not joining a rebellion. She is getting the fuck by and living her fucking life. And one day her connection to Cassian puts her under the empire’s gaze and she is invasively tortured and horrifically traumatised because of it. And she endures. 

Bix is, also, an incredibly important character to me personally. There can often be a narrative surrounding trauma that it should make you the fighter everyone seems to think Bix should be. That you should take your pain and terror and suffering and turn it around and let it make you stronger. Use it to beat back against the person, or group, or institution that traumatised you. That you should pick yourself up, dust yourself off, take that horror, and fight back (girlboss-ify yourself and take those motherfuckers down). And to that I say, no. I don’t want that. I’ve done my fighting. I’ve lost my battles and I’ve come out the other side scarred in ways that still hurt to touch. What I want is to stop. Is to rest. Is to put this pain down and move out the other side of it and live, finally. 

For me, watching Bix as an horrifically traumatised woman live stuck in that fight for the first half of the second season was harrowing. To see her spend her time in the Coruscant safehouse grappling with the true cost of what it means to fight the way she needs to in this war, never at peace as the life she lives and the things she must do force her to stay held in her trauma, had me aching in ways I didn’t realise I would. To see her stuck in the dark and the gloom and the cold, and yearning the whole time she is in Coruscant to be able to go out and live without having to look over her shoulder, hurt in ways I struggle to put words to.

And then, to see her get out. 

I know there is a lot of contention about seeing Bix have little to do on Yavin. And to that I will say, it’s a big show, there are a lot of characters, and she is on Yavin during a storyline that arguably should not narratively or structurally be focusing on her anyway. I know there is also a lot of contention about writing her leaving Cassian for the sake of the rebellion. That it diminishes her character to a plot beat. And while perhaps the tropes at play feel trite in comparison to the more grounded beats the show is known for hitting, this is still storytelling. All the characters are, functionally, still devices serving a narrative. Bix leaves, and narratively becomes our ethos. Becomes the heart of this story. Becomes the reason we have been watching this all play out for our two-season run. Bix becomes the most important character in the show. Because this is why we must fight. For Bix. For everything she represents in that moment. She becomes the way Cassian’s life should be if it weren’t for this war, and in doing so becomes the way all of their lives should be. Should have always been. And will be one day soon. 

She is the reason. For all of it. For every loss, for every death, for every fight. It is her. She is the hope at the heart of the rebellion.

That last scene on Mina-Rau; the gentle light, Bee playing, the table set for a community to eat and laugh and be. People smiling and content and together and peaceful. And Bix, free. Of the trauma, of the loss, of the death, of the fight. Looking up at the open sky with her child. Literally holding in her arms the life that the rebellion has always been fighting for. 

That is the hope at the end of our story -- that Bix is the one that gets to live. 

And you can pry that fucking ending from my cold dead hands.

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I can’t tell if I’m on a journey of meaning or if I’m just tired. But also I can’t remember that last time I wasn’t exhausted. Months, arguably years. Is this something to get used to? Is honest work this caught up with heartache?

I miss the trees. They would fix something probably - because I can’t help but thing something is wrong with me.

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running errands like kurt vonnegut

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“Letter to the Local Police” from June Jordan’s Passion

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Rest in Peace Louise Glück, died October 13th, 2023.

The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

OCTOBER

1.

Is it winter again, is it cold again, didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end, didn’t the melting ice flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible above the injury

terror and cold, didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden harrowed and planted–

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense, in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted, didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care what sound it makes

when I was silenced, when did it first seem pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is–

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds, weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

. 2.

Summer after summer has ended, balm after violence: it does me no good to be good to me now; violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine ochre and fire, even the fields shine. I know what I see; sun that could be the August sun, returning everything that was taken away —

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice; you can’t touch my body now. It has changed once, it has hardened, don’t ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer. Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples nearly mauve on the gravel paths. And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

It does me no good; violence has changed me. My body has grown cold like the stripped fields; now there is only my mind, cautious and wary, with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer; bounty, balm after violence. Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future, I won’t believe you. Tell me I’m living, I won’t believe you.

. 3.

Snow had fallen. I remember music from an open window.

Come to me, said the world. This is not to say it spoke in exact sentences but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture on each living thing. Pools of cold light formed in the gutters.

I stood at the doorway, ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art, I found in nature. What others found in human love, I found in nature. Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt, bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal — I can finally say long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty the healer, the teacher —

death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.

. 4.

The light has changed; middle C is tuned darker now. And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. —

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered. This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate: the ideal burns in you like a fever. Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful. They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind. They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly in anticipation of silence. The ear gets used to them. The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind; it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How priviledged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestro, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.

. 5.

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

I am at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees; we are

companions here, not speaking, each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron gates of the private houses, the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s duty to create hope, but out of what? what?

the word itself false, a device to refute perception — At the intersection,

ornamental lights of the season.

I was young here. Riding the subway with my small book as though to defend myself against

the same world:

you are not alone, the poem said, in the dark tunnel.

. 6.

The brightness of the day becomes the brightness of the night; the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I think sunlight has failed her. Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.

Between herself and the sun, something has ended. She wants, now, to be left alone; I think we must give up turning to her for affirmation.

Above the fields, above the roofs of the village houses, the brilliance that made all life possible becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch: they give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth’s bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

LOUISE GLUCK (1943-2023)

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A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde

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sasquatch melancholy

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Be there for the seasons. Be there for you. We're all awaiting your arrival.

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wonderful interpretation

the new sufjan album is receiving a lot of (rightful) comparisons to his older work, especially his Christmas music and Carrie and Lowell. but I feel it sounds sonically most similar to Carrie and Lowell live, where he repurposes the songs in a way where they still start off quiet and muted, but then burst into drum- and electronic-driven, maximalist catharsis. On C&L live, he said:

“I found that performing these songs live allowed me to work through my suffering by giving it away. In sharing this music with the audience, I could surrender it to them as a gift, that they might be able to go home and contemplate death with an open heart. It was important for me to create an experience of sadness and exuberance, and to remind people to live everyday as if it were their last.”

given his dedication of Javelin to his deceased partner and love of his life, Evans Richardson, the similarities break my heart a little. I hope the making of this album offered some kind of healing.

[quasihumanist]

Bill Mayer (American, based Decatur, GA, USA) - The Offering, 2017, Paintings: Gouache on Watercolor Paper

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Unfinished Duet - Richard Siken

At first there were too many branches so he cut them and then it was winter. He meaning you. Yes. He would look out the window and stare at the trees that once had too many branches and now seemed to have too few. Is that all? No, there were other attempts, breakfasts: plates served, plates carried away. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He likes the feel of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw? Yes, and he likes flipping the chairs, watching them fill with people. He likes the orange juice and toast of it, and waxed floors in any light. He wants to be tender and merciful. That sounds overly valorous. Sounds like penance. And his hands? His hands keep turning into birds and flying away from him. Him being you. Yes. Do you love yourself? I don’t have to answer that. It should matter. He has a body but it doesn’t matter, clean sheets on the bed but it doesn’t matter. This is where he trots out his sadness. Little black cloud, little black umbrella. You miss the point: the face in the mirror is a little traitor, the face in the mirror is a pale and naked hostage and no one can tell which room he’s being held in. He wants in, he wants out, he wants the antidote. He stands in front of the mirror with a net, hoping to catch something. he wants to move forward into the afternoon because there is no other choice. Everyone in this room got here somehow and everyone in this room will have to leave. So what’s left? Sing a song about the room we’re in? Hammer in the pegs that fix the meaning to the landscape? The voice wants to be a hand and the hand wants to do something useful. What did you really want? Someone to pass this with me. You wanted more. I want what everyone wants. He raises the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins. That’s what the violins are for. And yes, he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it until it shines. So what does it shine on? Nothing. Was there no one else? Left-handed truth, right-handed truth, there’s no pure way to say it. The wind blows and it makes a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there no one else? His hands keep turning into birds, and his hands keep flying away from him. Eventually the birds must land.

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i’m rather lonely right now, which i feel bad about, and whose reason is hard to articulate without sounding very very unfair to the people who make me unlonely. i am tired of the work, i am tired of our phones, i want to talk about the wind before the monsters. i want to be more to you than just around.

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An Incomplete List of What The Cameraperson Enables by Kirsten Johnson

For the cameraperson: Access and a reason to stay in worlds not of one’s own Permission to behave, ask, do in ways that are transgressive/outside social norms Complete distraction from one’s own life The creation of evidence of experience The chance to be closer or farther (through the lens) than is physically possible Emotional connection Trauma (vicariously, secondary, and direct) Enhanced influence and power A sense of invisibility Magical thinking Suspension of time

For the people filmed: The chance to speak of thins they have never spoken of and hence say things they never expected to say An invitation to think of a future when they will no longer be alive but when what they say and do will be preserved in another form The chance to see themselves as subjects (worthy of time and attention) The chance to imagine different outcomes A change of status in the community (family, village, profession) Increased risk to their own safety and/or reputation The creation of an image of self, the distribution of which they cannot control, on a global scale in perpetuity The opportunity to see themselves from a different perspective A shift in perspective about which transgressions are possible Emotional connections with the film crew The hope that being filmed can change their fate or might impact a situation in the future

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self portrait

in an airport

what on earth is coming!!

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“But our first third thing was art.”

-John Green making my heart swing & plunge with hopeful, earnest romance in the Anthropocene Reviewed

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the final paragraph of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities