“The old world order is ending”

We know this story already. And no, it never does.

Control of the land, control of who owns it and who does not, control of who can be there and who shall not, control of who can take from it and who must not. A bullet in the face of a woman from a soldier, a dispute of who has rights to be “here” and who does not, who must be obeyed, and who need not be obeyed. This is a very, very old story, as old as the story of a ruler dethroned by another ruler, as old as an island claimed by one and now claimed by another.

I’ll admit: I’ve lately taken a luxurious distance from giving attention to what’s going on in the world. Helping in that has been the five days each week I’ve been in the gym, along with the urgency of my mother-in-law’s declining health and the ever-present pile of editing work always in front of me.

I’m smiling a bit when I think about the angrier, more un-embodied activist incarnation of me. That guy — that me — would have called such an active distancing “retreating into privilege,” as if being constantly crippled by anxiety, outrage, and fear is somehow a duty of every “good” person.¹

Of course, it’s not been possible to avoid hearing about the latest happenings. That event with the activist and the ICE agent, for instance? I heard about it first in my gym, with no fewer than three guys — one of whom is a police officer — bringing it to my attention on the training floor the day it happened.

Something similar happened regarding Venezuela. In fact, a family friend here is a Venezuelan refugee, and she, young and quite a kind person, was one of the many thousands of Venezuelan refugees in Europe who celebrated the kidnapping of the president whose reign they fled.²

And, of course, I live in Europe, so it’s been impossible not to hear about the Greenland threats, nor the quieter, nearly subsonic drumbeats of European militarism and re-armament. There are recruiting ads on buses here, and every front page headline on the papers of news stands I passed advertised a new 150 million euro war defense bond issued by the government (and snapped up in one day) to prepare for a potential — perhaps eventual — war.

But though it’s been impossible to avoid hearing about these things, the immediacy of bodily things — which is anyway where we must always start from — has had my attention instead. The exquisite burning in my shoulders, back, arms, and chest when I slowly lower my body and then raise it again, repeatedly, in chest dips. The warm feeling of my husband’s head on my shoulder after a long day of work and worrying for his mother’s health. The aesthetic pleasure of a well-designed book layout. The subtle scent of waking earth pushed up by early snowbells. These, and all the other ways the body senses itself, are far from “retreats into privilege,” but rather the only place from which we might understand the rest of the world.

And from that place, it’s not so difficult to feel one’s way through these things, especially when we have recourse to the other paths from the body into the world. By this, I mean the Other paths, the trails and chemins the soul can take through the world, or rather worlds. Empathy, of course, is one of the very few of these ever encouraged in our disenchanted modernity, the ability to take on the bodily feelings of another and feel them ourselves in order to understand them. It’s a basic form of shapeshifting, the most fundamental form: we take on another body, the body of another, and try to sense with them.