Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

As per the title, to be honest, I’m at a loss. The protests, our school’s suppression of voice, screams urgency, begs for artistic engagement. I can not imagine, at this moment in time, being a literary citizen of this campus and writing about anything else. And then I remember that I’ve been writing about sports this whole quarter. There are times where I have pushed back against this idea of athletics and fan culture as shallow, because I have always believed that sporting is mythology, and all myth is just a vehicle for the value systems of the groups that consume them. But right now, I don’t know if I have the ability to conceive of what just happened today— on UCSD campus, in Rafah, everything— through the lens of any kind of metaphor. It feels like a disservice to think that I can write about these sorts of looming, tragic realities by allegorizing them into anything smaller, quainter; anything easier to exit. In times like this, it’s hard not to think of symbolism as a cop out, of myth as simply hedging the gravity of a message. And even this idea of in-campus site specificity, that I was so keen on exploring before, just seems fragile, flippant. It seems that there’s little use in waxing lyrical about the aesthetic nuances of one corner of campus, when UCSD’s administration has just shown us that the entire school can be boxed in (literally, by police, and figuratively), reduced to a single thing: a slogging limb of the larger war machine that is this country. I think about the other campuses all across this country– what use is site specificity when everything everywhere feels suppressed by the same forces? 

At the same time, I can’t stop writing. Diggs says, in her digital reading, that one must think about the “beauty of multiple languages dancing beside each other.” In my first journal, I briefly mention the ostensible difference between the language of movement— what laypeople usually ascribe to sports— versus the language of numbers– UCSD’s most lucrative majors, its various engineers and data scientists and biomedical researchers. These two are not separate languages; and even if they are, I do not think their two different dancefloors render them forever unable to touch. There is something to be said about how the exaggerated performance of US professional athletics, under capitalism, is backlit by the institution of analytics; each team’s owners deploying legions of analysts who crunch numbers, negotiate contracts, distill players into their separate parts, the sum of their advanced equations. Decide which bodies to keep, which to ceremoniously, or unceremoniously, ship out. Sometimes, players are lucky if they are handed the direction of their imminent relocation before those who are paid six figures to break trade news on social media speak their own fates to them. A game of numbers, a game of movement– and when the two are made to dance, there is a pain, a beauty, a sort of beauty in understanding. 

And then there is something to be said about how those in the western, imperial core, are trained by generations of news cycles to take the phrase “40,000 dead” lightly when those numbers come screaming from countries in the Middle East. How we avoid the terms “kill, murdered,” how life is reduced to numbers, and numbers– sundered from physicality, from the glory of movement in our minds– are reduced to nothing. We might hear the massive, massive number of people torn out of living, and never even begin to conceive the velocity of the bombs that spear from IDF jet bays; the obliterating movement each shell breaks to bear forth. If I am a limb, I want to be the arm that fights its own conditioning. A dance alone in the dark is a death.