2025: dawn of a new practice

Alex: Good morning, Gavin. It’s Saturday, January 4^th, somewhat early in the morning. We are in bed having a lazy morning but you agreed to be my guinea pig for the new and final phase of my blogging project during the interval between when our new president was elected and his inauguration, which is on the 20th, something like 15 days from now. I ran out of steam writing about going to things and being in audiences. I thought for a while about what I wanted to do next. And I realized that being in dialogue or conversation, listening and learning with someone else or others, not just writing all by myself, would be useful to me. (Thanks to Ted for initiating this format as a hijack).

And so, given that you’re right here, and that I had written that being in an intimate audience with one person is another form of community and sustenance, you are my first conversational interlocutor in this second and final phase of my practice for the interval.

Gavin: I would say it’s an honor, but I don’t think it is because I’m just proximate. But I’m happy to participate.

Alex: I’m still defining my new practice: what will be the terms and protocols for writing.

Gavin: I like your practice.

Alex: The previous one? Writing a blog post every time I was in an audience?

Gavin: Just in general, the way you fumble, stumble—that’s not exactly right—but you don’t always know where you’re going. When you start, you don’t have a destination necessarily in mind, just some principles and a step forward. But you don’t always know exactly where you’re going and then you just find out. I admire that and I like that.

Alex: Well, yes, I do believe that something wonderful can happen between a person and another person, a person in an encounter with the world or with art, if you stay open, if you just go there. Those open-ended encounters (even within instructions for engagement) can lead you to places you weren’t ever going to go. And in this case, that place is you saying that I lead from principles. Would you be willing to take a stab at what you think those are for this project?

Gavin: There’s something about your understanding of feminist practice, right? The way something is done matters as much as the thing that is produced. That’s a big one. And then general intellectual curiosity and something to do with technologies: a belief in their expansionist capabilities, how they allow for information distribution and knowledge acquisition by populations that might otherwise be prevented from achieving or gaining that information. But you’re nothing like a technophile. You’re not exactly a technophobe, but you’re wide awake to the limitations of technological distribution. The way in a capitalist and corporatist society, distribution becomes narrowed, limited, protective of capital. So it’s not a binary. It’s not like technology is horrible or technology is amazing; it’s like technology is horribly amazing and amazingly horrible. You seek gray areas rather than blacks and whites, and what are the truths within those? I appreciate that you’re not a binary thinker.  

Alex: Indeed, my feminist praxis gets us here (in this grey bed), thinking about and enacting together the intimacy of an audience that can be produced between two people who spend time talking … about the weather, plans, and then also art and ideas. And these topics can intermix if you’re lucky enough. Have any of the ideas of the project—and we have spoken about it several times—been feeding for you, given that I’m hoping to learn about and contribute to our thinking as citizens of this country anticipating what comes next, after inauguration?

Gavin: I admire this project’s attempts to grapple with our current political moment. I feel a little overwhelmed by it, and I feel passive in its face. I remember in 2016 and into 2017, feeling like I wanted to fight, feeling excited about marching. And now, eight years later, I feel deeply saddened at our nation’s willingness to elect this president with full knowledge of who he is. And just deeply … I’m depressed, and I feel less like fighting and more, almost, accommodationist. It’s like, well, it probably won’t be that bad. How bad can it be? And I actually think it’s going to be way worse.

My truth is that I’m less energized and more depleted, defeated by the political reality of what my nation believes and is willing to accommodate and willing to support.

So, I’ve followed way less news. I’m much less engaged by the details. I have a theoretical belief that I want to do something, and I can think of a variety of things, but I’m not energized by any of them. I entertain a notion that I want to write more, and come up with some sort of writing project, perhaps similar to this project you’re engaging in. And yet I’m depressed, and that doesn’t make me want to write or create or do anything. And so I feel passive. I’m interested in your different definitions of audiences, and all of that has been intellectually engaging. But I haven’t been emotionally engaged enough to act.

School’s been out a week and I’m not working and keep falling asleep at 8 p.m. Last night I forced myself to stay up til 11, watching basketball, listening to songs I know by heart. For no reason I woke at 12:30, icicle dripping over my heart, pondering recent misplays, misapprehensions, misstatements, mistakes. The Girlfriend stirred, asked to cuddle, but my frozen guilty heart lay uncuddlable. When the catalog of mistakes stretched past a year I grabbed my laptop to play word games. An hour later I fell back, sleepy, but my mistakes remained primed for accounting. I watched a comedian’s stand-up set, sound off, reading subtitles. The hour ended. I thought about listening to a podcast but couldn’t stir from bed to find headphones. Finally, after running down search-engine holes (the comedian has a new romantic partner!), past 4 a.m., I drifted off. At 7 I awoke, unrested, fixed breakfast, thought about tackling my to-do list. But the icicle still drips and it’s 2 and I’m in my pajamas, guilt-twisted. — Gavin McCormick, December 27, 2024

Alex: Thanks for sharing that short piece, Gavin. My practice of writing since November 20—which also has had strict rules attached to it—has helped me through my depression (as has my reading, as you know uncountable novels since the election. And yours and other’s prose.) When I’m working really hard to write these, I’m focused on at least some of the ideas (and their communities, forms, and protocols) that could play a part in the world we’re heading to. I feel more connected to the art that I see, the audiences that I’m in, in a different way, which is not passive. Of course I don’t think I’ve come up with any solutions, and I don’t know that they’re there to be found. And this is probably always the intellectual’s plight, the artist’s plight: thinking and writing about or even making frameworks to better understand the world we’re in and the world we’re about to be in, which is some part of some solution or at least a better response than being passive.

Gavin: A notable thing about your project is the number of different communities you’re involved in. And one community that has provided a little spark for me is a friend’s writing group. She usually runs them in four-to-six-week bursts. But in this interval, she is planning to run it every other week. We started last Friday, eight days ago. That is a community I feel lucky to be participating in. It has a number of impressive writers. She provides prompts, and we write for 6 minutes (like my piece above), and then share what we wrote with the group. It enables me to keep my own personal flame of writing flickering, a personal community that’s going to feed me. It feels a little fragile because my friend Sarah can decide to stop running the group at any time. But that feels appropriate actually. I’m realizing, in part through your blog posts and their understanding of the different kinds of communities that can form—some of them planned, some of them spontaneous—I also need to participate in something that’s going to contribute more directly to this political moment, something more communitarian.

Alex: Well, that’s not this intimate chat … But I thank you, Gavin, for trusting me with your warming heart. Your honesty, and your words, and your willingness to engage with me on my project.

Gavin: You’re welcome.