Bubbles

Even silence

is a language

that takes years of learning

to master.

 

Have you ever watched as tea goes from a small simmer to a boil? The bubbles start at the edge of the sufuria. At first they are few. But the heat continues to excite the atoms impressing them to do more. Do you think the first bubbles get tired? Do the bubbles that burst ever get to hear that the tea boiled eventually?

I’ve been thinking about exhaustion recently.

Perhaps it is because I have been feeling tired.

But I have been thinking about exhaustion and the impact it has on the work. (What is the work? That’s a question that demands more words, and less tiredness). Ahmed writes that when we write about the things we come up against we come up against the things we write. By this logic then to stop coming up against things would be as easy as to stop writing about them. But then Lorde reminds us that silence will not save us.

But of all the apparent things

only three remain:

That you were,

that you are

and that you will be

until you aren’t

what you once was.

 

Time, love and memory are all functions of the same device. This is to say that we only know what we remember and we only know how to love what we know. And since we can only remember what we have experienced through time then love continues to be a labour of time and memory.

All this is what we already know in different packaging.

 

“We have to keep repeating the same things because they keep doing the same things.”

– Wambui Mwangi

 

To continue on the path of the work of memory is to manufacture the raw ingredients. What then do you chose to remember? Perhaps it is important to see the self loathing of a people and dissect it to begin to understand why it exists. Maybe not because there is anything more worth quoting than the fact that there is what is, and to begin to ask why this thing finds itself here. The why naturally will lead to a what, when, how and eventually a who. But, once this information is fully understood then the next step is, how do we change this?

How else but to keep repackaging the content to be understood?

Without the new packages we are then madmen, standing on the corner of the street, shouting the same thing on repeat. Like those first bubbles we continue to vibrate in the same spot, trying to share a heat. Like those first bubbles, many of us burst. Like those first bubbles, we are fueled by a source that is distant and has only reached us through others like us.

Still, we rise.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.