haikaveh... save me haikaveh...
i KNOW it's been talked about to death but. the haikaveh research project. it literally haunts my mind. i cannot get over the implications. alhaitham going through his school life as someone that most people dont even really know about because he keeps to himself and doesn't socialize, with kaveh being the one exception to that, finding his way into his life as his Best Friend, and then leading to alhaithams one and only time he participated in a research topic. his bio says he only ever did ONE joint project!!! one!!! the one with kaveh his best friend and i think also his only friend at the time!!!! and then it ended in not only the project falling apart but also alhaithams only friendship. kavehs best friendship. they were each others closest person. they had no family around - alhaithams parents having died when he was young and his grandmother dying before he joined the akademiya, and kaveh's dad dying when he was young and his mom having moved to fontaine. like even if you dont look at it through a romantic lens it's still undeniable how important they were [and are] to each other..........
i'm getting off track but my point is very specifically for alhaitham, the one time he got close to someone, made a friend, even agreed to join one(1) group project ever, it ended in disaster. it led him into a fight so bad that his one and only friend said he regretted that friendship!!!! it was so bad alhaitham left the project and he and kaveh didnt speak for ages until they just happened to run into each other again at the tavern!!!!! like obviously it has to be incredibly awful for both of them but i just think how this probably had alhaitham in the cynical mindset that friendships and collaborations like that might just never work out for him because the one time he let someone into his life, it blew up on him and he was all alone again. even though alhaitham never seems to care much if people dont like him, that clearly cant still apply to someone he was exceptionally close to. like if he didnt care he woudlnt have been the one to take his name off the project and mutually not speak to kaveh...... kavehs words are the ones that hit the most significantly to alhaitham.......... kaveh is said/implied to have had at least some other friends while at school / people knew who he was, but not so much alhaitham. people didnt know him and the ones that did just knew he didnt socialize/he was not easy to get along with. he only had kaveh and then, for a while, he lost him too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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The more time goes on, the more I think we (= westerners, especially white westerners) are just so fucking bad at guilt. I feel like guilt is among the most pernicious and dangerous emotions out there --not because guilt is literally deadly in isolation, it is an excruciating emotion but it will not kill you in itself, but because we have been trained to associate guilt with worthlessness (I partially blame christian values, the idea of impurity and sin --not to downplay, of course, the danger of a community judging you or being expelled from that community on the basis of being considered a danger to its other members due to the thing you've done that has been generating this guilt), and so we must, absolutely must, protect ourselves from simply feeling that guilt and processing its cold indifference washing over us, and we must do so through any means necessary. This can involve defensiveness, denial or reject of that guilt altogether so we are mentally protected from having to reevaluate ourselves and our place in the world, or can involve wallowing in and using it to self-harm --focusing on the pain and on self-hate rather than on what the guilt is telling us about ourselves and our heritage; blinding ourselves to it still in a twisted way.
I think it's also complicated to know how to manage guilt in a world where we're generally (as a whole) deeply powerless. It feels unfair to be called out about not doing enough when you know that pulling even mediocre heroics on your own will most definitively do almost nothing, hurt you, and be buried in a way that might be extremely unhelpul --not to mention, that it would actually hurt you in a very real and final way and lead to entirely thankless results, even if it was the morally correct thing to do. I do not want to pretend that it's not, very often, the results that awaits even serious and well-practiced activism --or even mild activism, major shoutout to everybody who got maimed or arrested or even killed on zero basis simply because they happened to be at or even near a protest, when they were not brutally attacked for no reason even outside of activism because an officer was racist or sexist or queerphobic or simply bored that day. There are genuinely good reasons to be scared.
So we feel guilt because of this fear, because of our isolation from any serious movement and the fact that we privilege our comfort over letting action taking over whatever else we have going on, and because fear and comfort knowingly keep us into inaction --or action that doesn't feel like enough, or that we feel doesn't achieve much of anything (which I think is never true: even giving someone a glimpse of hope for a second because we made an effort towards them is always always worth it in my opinion, it's not nothing and it's not a cop-out --of course it's not enough and we collectively need to find ways to do more, but it's not nothing and it should never discourage people from taking action --but I digress). But I think we start making a mistake when we point at this very real powerlessness as a shield from the guilt. Both can coexist. Both have to coexist. It isn't fair that some people are being forced to be courageous when we can afford to remain cowards. It is not even a moral judgement that condemn our souls forever, weakness is human and lack of individual reach against an overwhelmingly powerful and removed system even more so; it is a simple fact that we *have* to acknowledge if we want to take a clear look at the actual situation instead of camouflaging it behind self-justifying walls to give ourselves temporarily relief from that awful feeling. And I'm not saying it's not a constant effort, to keep those instincts of self-preservation at bay, or that some people don't have really good reasons that they cannot act more than through social media or miniscule donations or by talking about it around them, or being powerless to even do that without putting themselves into real and concrete danger --or that letting guilt in will be pleasant or even healing. It won't be. But it's also not the point.
Yeah, I get that it's hard to truly reckon with the fact that almost everything that made us (= westerners, especially white ones) is soaked with blood, imperialism, white supremacy, sexism, queerphobia, and a whole sweve of truly rancid ideologies that we cannot afford to passively accept as our lot. We were not given a choice in that legacy, and we don't have a ton of leverage over reorienting our haunted civilizations into something that isn't a horrible nightmare; but it is a fight that is happening right the fuck now.
I genuinely think guilt is a feeling we are not taught to handle in a healthy way; and because we have essentialist, pseudo-religious and punitive justice concepts terminally untangled with that feeling, guilt governs our politics and our private lives in the most rabid and unchecked way imaginable. But guilt will not kill us, unless we allow it to, and it will help literally nobody if it does. Guilt isn't evil in its soul-crushing pain as much as it is informative. Guilt is unbearable, unfliching clarity. But fever boils us alive because there is an infection that needs to be destroyed.
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Burial Hymn for A Dislocated Rib
Or, an excerpt from ‘In Perpetuum’, in which Laz Atwater loses his patience.
(TW for gore and self harm)
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Sometimes I feel like I need to start over. As though if I allow my body to grow itself from scratch, the aches and the soreness and the ways that I was forced to heal incorrectly will solve themselves and I will live without pain. I forget about the way my twitching muscles will struggle to hold my bones in their places, how my head will throb from dehydration while my veins contract around what little blood still flows through them. No, I forget the truth of the matter in favor of my fantasy where a new body will form and that body will be perfect. Then I dig my fingers under the edges of my rib cage and pry them open, letting each rib stab into my chest, puncture my lungs, restrain my breathing as my heart thunders against each cracking, concave rod. I peel my own skin back like I’m skinning a rabbit, I press my knife between the joints in my hip and i crank it, wrench it, force the tendons apart and the meat of my flesh tears as I butcher myself. It is a lapse of sanity and it is a desperate gamble to gain it back. I dismember and dismantle myself, pry out each tooth one by one, pull my entrails out hand over hand until my stomach is empty. I bleed myself like a pig. I hope it will kill me. It never does.
And it never does what I want it to, either. I am always in pain every moment of my reformation. I will never be whole — something will heal wrong, something new, some ache or pain that I never had before. A kink in my back that I have to stretch every hour where I never used to. A soreness in my shoulders when I sleep on my side, a click in my knee when I walk up the stairs. A throbbing in my knuckles, a twinge in my eye. A rotating cast of symptoms I can never outrun and never recover from.
But they will be new pains at least. The old pains will be gone. It will be refreshing, these new terrors. I hope I will be refreshed, anyway. The only reason I tear myself apart is because I cannot bear the monotonous hum of underlying ripping, tearing, stabbing pain I am in. I need it to change its tune. I need to change it even if it means digging a blade into myself and hoping I’m hitting the right nerves, the right chords, rearranging the right bones into the right place.
I take a deep breath and feel shooting pain. One of my ribs healed incorrectly. If I breathe as my instinct is to breathe, keep my breaths shallow, I don’t notice it, but if I inflate my lungs to my fullest it stabs into me, presses into the air-filled sack and threatens to puncture it, though my subconscious won’t let me get to that point.
There is the impulse to reach into my chest and snap it, move it out of the way. But I have been in enough pain today.
This will have to be an ache I tolerate until the next time I reach my limit and search for new agony in rebirth.
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