From Auntie Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself:
"An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not 'mirror' one's own constitution."
Dear Jonas,
Today’s word is “affirm.” We’ve been out walking a lot over the past two days because I am too excited to stay home. For some reason Obama’s electoral landslide makes me want to be around people. I want to see how everyone else is taking it, and I guess I’m craving some sort of recognition from our neighbors. I turn normal interactions into gestures loaded with meaning; commonplace body language becomes knowing winks and nods and sparkling eyes saying: Obama. Saying: it’s okay that you had that baby. Hegemonic alterations of power really happen. It’s good that you’re here in Brooklyn. It matters that you are right here in your skanky precious gorgeous neighborhood. For all of its utter ridiculousness, Williamsburg understands that the devil is in the details.
I’m thinking about the little shops with owners who seem more concerned with process than profit, the food, the obsession with style, Spoonbill & Sugartown—my favorite bookstore—where we bought a copy of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch during their “All Hail Obama” sale, bicycles chained to everything, seriously hot trannies, Desert Island—the carefully curated comics store, assiduously prepared coffee at Oslo or Gimme Coffee, warehouses, woodshops, a mister softee on every corner and Ben Van Leeuwen’s artisanal ice cream truck driving past us on Metropolitan Ave on his way into Soho, slices of Manhattan viewable from almost anywhere, morning glories trellised around streetfront gates, rooftop honey, grassfed beef at Diner, dog parks, record shops, locally brewed beer, babies, hipster milliners, green markets, paper thanksgiving decorations in half of the windows in my neighborhood, alleyways, locally made Salvatore lesbian ricotta, Polish newspapers, Italian street festivals, skylights, neighborhood gardens, the lesbian couple I met the other night and their little guy a few months older than you who invited us to the mom’s group at the Greenpoint Church, and running into friends from Gainesville on the train. This is a very, very small sampling of what makes our neighborhood so special.
The point is that I am feeling a correlation between the way I was nervous of investing myself in the current election and the way I have been reticent to connect to my neighborhood since I moved here a year and a half ago. I’ve spent my entire life being disappointed by American electoral politics. (I still remember my middle school gifted teacher, Mrs. Weimer who rode her bike to school every day, with her Dukakis button on election day telling me: “it doesn’t look good.”) And I’ve spent the last year here at a critical distance from my surroundings because it just seemed too good to be true. But this election has reminded me that it just doesn’t matter. Barack’s administration might turn out to be a total failure, but at least he, and we, have decided to try. Likewise, all of the creative world-making that goes on around here might be a total waste of time, but I doubt it. These examples I’m giving you are tiny, careful gestures of hope that are collectively producing a kind of localized alteration of the possible. In short, maybe politics looks different than we thought it did, but it starts with an affirmation that other worlds are possible. And affirmation involves understanding that we can’t stop because we don’t know exactly what change will look like; embracing that opacity is what makes affirmation exciting.
