On space
Restorative Community Project Session 1:
Yes, I am on the train back to philly. And sufficient therein is an explanation for this occasion: you know, even if you feign ignorance, how trains and their windows are a site of enforced self meditation. And a vertiginous one at that. For invested in our single word is an entire poetic and visual history of pseudo-metaphysicists (such as your author) looking out into the passing world but really, looking within to the eulogized self, growing more and more dead as we watch.
So what is it about these seats that invite such profundity? Is it the sense that the world is moving, all the while we are not? A sort of dual temporal suspension and spatial activation? Or asked another way: is it this hermetic vacuum pushed through the murkiness of travel’s frenetic chaos that puts us at unease? A kind of natal experience that evicciates the finite by failing to realize the very birth it promises. If I am to have a body, it is this sort of dialectic I am interested in. A container for reason in an ecology antithetical to its very survival.
To thematize the ontologics of flesh, or in my case, meat, along the rubric of locomotion and philosophic locution, seems at once overly pedantic and hot with exhaust. The temperature rising, not only because such an activity is one of athleticism, but also because of the fatigue that accumulates on its reflexive subject. If my body, as it were, produced such occasions for constant inward invasion, I approach the problem of limits. Either in capacity or insight. Dig too far and you might end up on the other side.
So to speak of bodies is at once postmodern and uniquely boring. Boring in that it is everyday and, depending on your attitude towards that repetition, either overly familiar or as Nealson puts it, possessive of a “secondarity… [and] sheen.” But a meditation on bodies in trains attunes us to a newer dimension, the occupation of a volume, within a volume, within a volume. For good measure, our triptych here is the body, the train, and the peripheral world. This spatialization isn’t truly unique, which is why I said it was boring, in that the same is somewhat true of let's say our domesticities (those of us who are so lucky enough to have such claims that is). But our homes are for the most part non transient and fixed; locomotives are mobile. This is an aside but I’ve become increasingly weary of using such language even if on some level the parlance has to do with my attempt at capturing a species of facticity. I’m not certain that my gesture at translating a derivation of truth is worthy of its ableism not because I care so much about its discriminatory workings but more so for all that is lost. Here that would be an attention to the static space, as opposed to its agile counterpart. Of course, here I’m thinking about Aristotle's notion of ensouled mobility but also Chen’s intervention of (de)animacies. But alas, this bullet has already left the station.
What is profound about trains is this sense that we are enveloped in motion, a thesis we derived during our inaugural class of the Restorative Community Project. Kwaku began our ceremony by asking the group to join him in a collective visualization-through-meditation exercise; one that would draw out the dimensions of a metaphysical space we would have occupied together were it not for the sophomoric temper tantrums of a global health crisis. What was imagined broke boundaries: “this space has no walls to accomodate all that which we would learn together.” It was a Dickinsonian dwelling with “no ceiling to see the sky.” It became a shapeshifting and constantly inflected medium of voluminous space unfixed and trans because with every contribution made by our new family of revolutionaries, the stress of young imaginations pressurized it anew.
I wonder if a more fitting location of wake work could have been imagined. This place of fugitive movement, as self-inventive and Newtonian in bound. A iterative prism of pleated dimensions asymptotically approaching whatever it is that rests beyond the lonely work of a single mind. Beauty? Perhaps.
On this day where the sun has rushed to save me, I get the sense that it is this pursuit of a shared infinity in space through motion that best attempts to name what miracle is underway every time we convene as a renegade confederation of young people in search of more than what we have been dealt. For if, as Maggie Nelson writes, “Space is distinct from alienation,” then Collective Climb and the Restorative Community project is about the dream of a common bound, not bond, and the experiments of space made unlevel. The very stuff of coal dust as moved earth to borrow from Fred Moten. The train is now approaching its destination, and yet I am certain that with these young people, our arrival might finally be undone.