Forgetting the De(a)bt(h) Sentence
Notes on inheritance, Jewish cosmology, and the poetics of plaguetime
An earlier version of this essay was originally printed in “MOURNING,” the tenth and final issue of FDBN..., a publication by Sticky Fingers.
This piece contains references to suicide, eugenics, drug use, and systemic medical neglect.
9 FEBRUARY, 2023
The visits are getting more regular now—a thrum on which I can count:
Q: Are you anuss K’Shaul?1
A: No, not Saul! Not to-night!
Q: Poor Saul!
A: Pitiful Saul!
Q: Blessed Saul! etc
I don't know how people can trust tolerate their own handwriting. I don't know how to trust tolerate my own handwriting. Switching over to keyboard in sad dull effort to avoid own hands, what to do with them.
From Z–
I genuinely love your handwriting.
To Z–
But you love most things about me, and thus are not to be trusted.
I knew immediately how unfair I was being. Why couldn't I just thank him? Will apologize.
sprez·za·tu·ra
/ˌspretsəˈt(y)oorə/
noun
studied carelessness, especially as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature
Consider this journal an exercise in studied carelessness.
Now the spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD tormented him. . . .
Saul left no note. I wonder still, about his handwriting.
Whenever I try to picture Sheol, a certain fog descends over me, and refuses to quit.
But then it lifts. Brain fog is also a technology, a way of doing weather and weathering memory; like its meteorological namesake, it threatens to plunge familiar continents of ratiocination into myth, erecting in their place entirely new critical cartographies2 wherein no ‘thinker’ is actually a thinker as they are imagined.3 An archipelago: an amphitheatrics of forgetting.
I have a new neighbor. The mailbox says so. Printed in neat, tightly-spaced letters: QUINTESSENZA D’AMOUR—a name fit for a French perfume, or a recluse of a novelist. When I compile these journals, I’ll christen them the Collected Quintessences of Love, and I will dedicate them entirely to the resident of Apt. 7F, whom I do resent. (She has no excuse not to be prolific.)
I could simply write the history of my neighbors; that would be a life's work. True, it would be more the history of the symptoms they have caused in me . . .4
Of course trying to write about the fog in the midst of it is silly work, and vitally so. I know the stakes because I live them: how rigorously I must play with my material (knowing as I do that play is not the enemy of rigor but a genre of it), how I must bet absolutely nothing on my cognitive capacities, wont as they are to come and go unforecasted. How the space of time for the words to form or be written is long enough for the situation to totally alter, leaving you liar or at search once again for the truth. . . .5 As an architect on a flood-prone coast I must construct a language that is true enough to lie, to float and weather these extreme fluctuations in intelligence and memory, and mood.
When asked how to know if you really like something, T– said: Maybe try doing it once in a good mood and once in a bad mood, and if it makes you feel good both times it’s liked.
How could Saul be so sure of what he wanted? If it is impossible to taste suicide, to fall on the same sword twice.
Maybe I am being unfair to Quintessenza, like I was to Z–. Maybe she resents her name the way I do Saul’s death, the inimitable elegance of it.
Saul, would it be unfair of me to call yours a “quintessential suicide”?
17 FEBRUARY
What was it P– called me? Her favorite theorist of risk. Is that what I am, what I tend towards, being? Writing with these hands these pedestrian missives, pedestrian as in quotidian but also as in ambulatory, itinerant, circumlocutory, crossing the days in half like pages, like roads? (Remember, mistakenly, how page used to mean simply one who left.)
As always, Glissant: The root is not important. Movement is.6
Also always, Tracy Chapman: Some say the devil be a mystical fact / I say the devil he a walking man . . .7
Glissant again: Conquerors are the moving, transient root of the people.8
Alright, I’m walking. Risk does not dwell within any one of us, but laughs in the crossroads, the to-and-fro of it. Is that right? Am I the devil?
Just now: Bird flu spreads to new countries, threatens non-stop 'war' on poultry. To think how many years were spent wasting on the outside of the joke. The chicken dies by suicide!
23 FEBRUARY
Tried and failed to read the Books of Samuel, to sleep. And still no word from Z– in days or (touchless) nights. . . .
I inherit suicide on my Ashkenazi side, from my father’s cousin, M–. No one called it a “suicide” at the time, much less an “overdose.” Either that or they did, in which case I wasn’t paying close enough attention. (How often is suicide blamed on the attention-deficient, the socially illiterate, those distractible children who fail to sit up straight and pay attention, to read and heed “the signs” of its imminence?)
In an epistolary chapbook to the suicided Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar, Katie Ebbitt: Forgive me for trying to read what has been erased.9
But that is only the diurnal etiology. The nocturnal one is this: you had lots of sex—sex in galleries and public parks, sex that made you liken yourself to Delany (careless), sex you cruised and sex you didn’t, cruising for a feeling, that feeling that only sex installs, sex in stalls, you know the one, don’t worry no one will hear us, I’ve done this before. Now, for $4000 a month you get to lap dirty pills off the clinic bathroom floor, in conferral of an unrepayable debt—a dark sense of what is due—to the deep open velvet of you. Every pill is pop-able but also jewel-like, precious, something you are lucky to have attained on the State dollar. You want to slip them out of their crude container and into something more befitting: a ring box, perhaps. Like a charm strung round a chain, the antiretroviral’s ingestion calls attention to the excessive promiscuity of the open mouth, the severe exposure of the neck and throat. That the mouth is so easily distracted, the larynx crushed, the neck overcome by adornment: all this only intensifies the talismanic hold of the necklace on you, the taboo of the tablet that keeps death at arm’s length . . .
Also now: you dream. You dream you are in Sacred Heart, your childhood Sunday School. Each night reprises the same scene: the nuns, your teachers, touching, taking, spiriting away your hearts. You’re told that it used to be unimaginably worse, that the old drugs would have entire wards of AIDS patients (patience—Joselia reminds you—is just another word for suffering) filling the halls with their screams, so petrified they were of their incubi. Perhaps your dreams signal you to betray all that you have been taught to know and hold as sacred. Perhaps you should stop taking your Biktarvy so late. What does betrayal mean to you?, Joselia asks. I don’t know, you say. Only that my dreams neither work nor care for me. I must not be their god.
(And you were that distractible child. And you are that distractible child. What does it mean to be a child? This: You archive the forgetfulness of your father. You always did swallow.)
My turn to tell a joke. Why did the author cross (out) the page? and the one before that, and the one before that . . .*
*The thing about suicide notes, Olivia Dreisinger writes, is that they aren’t as common as one would assume.10
And since I am taking stock, my maternal grandmother, who never met me: twice married to my grandfather, and twice she went blind. My grandmother did know how to be blind. Not blind to knowledge but blind as a method of knowing, the blindness of knowing. Blindness as glancing (from the Old French glacier, “to slip,” which itself derives from glace, “ice,” hence glancing is another kind of walking, of ice-skating), skating outside world time, its signatures. The cloying fixity demanded by andante—as tempo, debt, penance. You slough all that off. (Remember how Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha once praised the work of Alice Wong? We make the road by limping, crutching, rolling, signing and stimming . . . )11
Some of my mother’s fingers came out webbed, like a bird’s. From a young age my mother was operated on like a bird. And the nuns. Seeking to shift her from right to left-handedness, they made her ambidextrous. And yes I do know how completely this delusion cripples all pretenses of autorial “intelligence.” That suicide makes branches of my hands. That, more than a successful writer or lover or friend, I want just to be a decent stranger to my mother once, to give her cause to smile while crossing chance paths.
My father does not recall the specifics of the note, save that the letters looked shaken, as if penned with a trembling hand.
M– died in my father’s childhood apartment, in the bed of my grandmother, a lifelong smoker who’d succumbed to lung cancer some months prior. (It bears mentioning that my father is also M–, in that his name is also M–. What’s more, their mothers were twins. You can imagine my great-aunt’s ire at this shameless display of sororal plagiarism. Didn’t the two already share enough?)
M– died in debt, too, having spent all the cash my father had given him for rent on other, presumably nefarious, accouterments. My father wanted nothing to do with his childhood apartment after that—tainted by the suicide, he called it—so when the management company started calling about the outstanding rent, he didn't pick up. (Not at first, anyway. He’d wind up having to pay it all eventually.) So they seized everything, and that was that.
5 MARCH
Catching flecks of Rilke—for some reason he always struck me as a Jew or a suicide or both—by dumb luck of street lights, circling same passage, same road over and over: Rome was of no interest to him; he imagined it to be round, for some reason or other, and left it at that.
Or: Rome is no longer in Rome, it is wherever I am.12
Or: how a father drives. How your father needs idiots in order to drive. (Some people just have a fucking death wish, etc.)
How you ponder the death wish, or suicide’s capacity to fulfill.
4 APRIL
Today marks three years since I published my book marks four years since HIV published itself in my bloodstream in the room in the sickbed I inherited from E–. But of course none of this is worth citing: the plagiarized vicissitudes of a secondhand lonely,13 quintessences perversely diluted, sentences protracted, welcomes overstayed; I sobbed at the sound of an icecream truck today, went viral in completely unearned guilt, guilty of every woman who has ever or will ever walk alone, I watch them from the window of the apt. I never leave, who am I to compete with the dead for the last word, etc.
And is it not a contradiction in terms: student suicide? If the one empties everything the other exists to fill in: the blank, the mind, the seat, the locker, countless pages and journals; it hardly matters with what. (I might as well fill these journals with cum—that’d satisfy the prompt just as well.)
And if I were to inaugurate a poetics of missing: the point, the mark, the memo, the cue, the reference, the train, the trees (the forest for . . . ), you? I know that I’m a piss-poor shot, that I couldn’t miss you if I tried. But still I do, try, even if these (sorry) missives can only ever miss you, misfire, cum too early or not at all (cum: to die on arrival, to arrive missing . . . )
I’d say that cum archives my missing you, if archive were not a misnomer for the fact that every time I try to miss you (piss), I miss you (cum). So it is not enough to say that cum archives my missing you, but rather that cum archives my missing-you- cum-missing-you (cum). Cum being far too insufficient an archive of my missing you (carelessness), . . .
What I am trying to say is that I have filled too many journals, shot too many blanks, stained too many pages with idle doodles of my carelessness, and not a single one for lack of missing you.
I don’t know why so many people feel the need to apologize to me for a virus they didn’t give me. Perhaps they’re not really sorry to me at all but for me, out of some inference that they “owe me an apology.” Of course, an apology that flows from debt can only commute its debt. What is it, then, about diagnosis—or the fantasy of diagnosis as a disclosure/betrayal event—that compels apology so? I’m thinking in particular about someone who once hurt me deeply, only to text me out of the blue: I’m so sorry about your HIV.
I don’t know how it didn’t occur to me earlier, Saul—that David’s harp was your antiretroviral, that you were Patient Zero this whole time. That all debts point to you, like roads to Rome.
In your last conversation, E–, in whose bed you seroconverted, called you increasingly toxic.* How could she know before even you did—that you were a biohazard?
*For fear of menotoxins, your mother’s mother disallowed her from jarring tomatoes whenever she was on her period. Is this inheritance? you wonder.
10 MAY
Audre Lorde, upon outliving even the most optimistic prognoses of her cancer: Science says so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation.14
The well-intentioned, upon hearing about your HIV status: Oh, well at least it’s not a death sentence anymore.
Prompt: live and write the aftermath of the death sentence, after the math of the death sentence. Forge a memorial brace against the forces which conspire to delete you and all other allegedly high risk groups from public life, from public memory, from the mathematics and sciences which tell you—in pitying eyes and nervous smiles painted on unmasked faces, in subway ads enjoining you to imagine a world without AIDS, imagine a world without HIV, etc., in the four grand a month it takes to keep your cells from offing themselves (speaking not only metaphorically, but also in the very real sense that HIV owes much of its propagation to the process of pyroptosis, an inflammatory form of programmed cell death, also called mass cellular suicide)—that you are not supposed to exist.
The State has been an exceedingly bad boyfriend, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes. The State is a bad boyfriend because it forgets us, because it wants us to forget that there was a moment — a long, two-year moment — when people felt that everything could be different, that revolutionary change was possible.15
Counter-prompt: yes, and.
Yes, the State forgets us. Yes, the hospitals. Yes the unions. Yes the intersectional feminists, yes the workerists and abolitionists, yes the protestors, strikers and organizers, yes the Party (any party), yes the intelligentsia, yes Drift Comma The and Times Comma The, yes the QTBIPOC safe spaces, yes the harm reductionists, yes the ADA-accessible residencies, yes all cops.
Yes, and.
Yes, and (a reparative reading of forgetting): we can forget them back. We can abandon the death sentence halfway through—sorry, I lost my train of thought—laughing. We can lose the train, miss the train, forget there ever was a train. Forget to buy a ticket—how much was the fare again? Shit, I forgot my wallet. Would you mind . . ? Thanks, IOU. Forget the laws of statistics, forget bell curves, disremember all Darwinisms, all proportions and disproportions, equalities and inequalities . . . forget ACT UP,16 SILENCE=DEATH, HIV=AIDS, AIDS=DEATH and UNDETECTABLE=UNTRANSMITTABLE; forget love is (equal to) love. And for that matter do away with all mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence,17 forget to equal, forget to aspire or ever have aspired to equal or be equaled, to zero or be zeroed, to (re)pay or settle our unpayable debts. Forget this debt, and remember it later.18
We can forget lines of inheritance and descent, regard possession as if it were conditional, rather than absolute, as if beautiful objects were intended to be shared, as if the loveliest things were rightly a communal luxury.19 We can enter the fog willfully, and forget whose memories, whose debts, whose deaths are whose.
Yes, and we can forget them back. We can forget to be forgotten. We can do nothing without in(at)tention.*
We might think of the fog as a pool in perpetual Purim: a pool(ing) of all our debts, a countertidal whirlpool wherein the debtor seeks refuge among other debtors, acquires debt from them, offers debt to them.20 As a genre of water, the fog occasions and inaugurates a kind of osmotic thinking, an indebted thinking (every molecule owes gravity to all others) which invites a critical reappraisal of every death sentence as a debt sentence, attention deficit as attention debt, forgetfulness as plenitude: a fullness of forgetting.
*(All this is not to say that the fog is not a real site of violence or grief or loss, is not to downplay the gravity of the mass disabling event, the particular chapter of eugenicist fascism we find ourselves in. Another yes, and: our symptoms are only exacerbated by the false conviction that every one of us is an island unto ourselves, that we are no archipelago.)
And it is when the present surpasses its holding capacity for the dead, and funeral pyres blot out the Sun, and the gravediggers are forced to cart off the excess remains into the mass grave of the eventual (we have to get on with our lives eventually—they grumble—everyone is going to get sick eventually)—that we are called to risk.
To risk what, exactly? A poetics of risk, a poetics we must endlessly risk.21 This is (there is) no time for libertarianisms or individualisms, nor for cultish espousals of hedonism or personal liberty or even bodily autonomy as grounds for sacrificing the weakest among us to isolation, debility, and death; no, but a risk of refusing the corrosive logics of the eventual: a poetics of grief. No I will mask my face = Yes I won’t mask my grief. Masking as a technology of anti-surveillance, as an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance,22 as practicing in anticipation of a blind future,23 as thinking blind, becoming blind . . . (Jarman, whom AIDS blinded to all colors except, in the end, blue).24 And I can see that blue without seeing it, touch you without touching you, know without knowing (like how Jo met me years before she met me in Bryant Pk. . . . ) that there is nowhere to walk, nowhere to go but our grief, which is nowhere.
But what can possibly be said of or from this nowhere? What can be said? (Our blood can forget to belong to us. We can forget to die. We owe each other this.)
From “Suicide in Judaism,” The Jewish Virtual Library: “Jewish law does not . . . place all suicides in the same category. One category of suicide . . . includes those who are in full possession of their physical and mental facilities (b’daat) when they take their lives. A second category includes those who act on impulse or who are under severe mental strain or physical pain when committing suicide. Jewish law speaks of an individual in this second category of being an anuss, meaning a ‘person under compulsion,’ and hence not responsible for his actions. All burial and mourning rites are observed for him. The first anuss in Jewish history was King Saul, who, after being defeated by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa, realized what would have happened to him if he were taken alive. He therefore impaled himself on his sword (I Samuel 31:4). This action gave rise to the expression anuss K’Shaul, meaning ‘as distressed as Saul’ . . .”
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
Mel Y. Chen, “Brain Fog: The Race for Cripistemology,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2014.)
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, tr. Stephen Mitchell (London: Vintage, 1990.)
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (London: Penguin Classics, 1980.)
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Michigan: University of Michigan Press: 1990).
Tracy Chapman, ‘Crossroads’ (1989).
Glissant, ---.
Katie Ebbitt, Para Ana (New York: Inpatient Press, 2019).
Olivia Dreisinger, ‘Death Cult: An Essay on Suicide,’ painwise (2022) Online.
See praise for the “Resistance and Hope Anthology,” Disability Visibility Project.
Glissant, ---.
Toni Morrison, Sula (London: Vintage, 1973).
Lorde, ---.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, ‘Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to ‘Move On’ From COVID,’ Truthout (2022) Online.
Alexandra Juhasz, ‘Forgetting ACT UP,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech, (2012).
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, ‘Debt and Study,’ e-flux (2010) Online.
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (London: Profile Books, 2018).
Moten and Harney, ---.
Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
Ibid.
Glissant, Mahogany.
Derek Jarman, Blue (1993).