In the Flickering

My brain is flickering, jumping to multiple realities. I have been obsessed with the Apple TV show “Severance” for a long time, and my brain feels like a flickering of two faces that protagonist Mark Scout is shown to experience: his innie and his outie.

Neither life is great, but outie Mark has “freedom.” But it is a freedom constrained by grief, and by the constant presence of the corporation in a company town, and in the end of Season 2 we see that even his grief is created by the company.

Innie Mark is innocent, and even within the cubicle farm where he works, he experiences joy: the light and adventurous spark between people that happens even under terrible circumstances with no windows, no outside. His work evokes a prison, and the aesthetic evokes the 1950s. This is why the show is so popular, I believe: it is a map to where we are, and the map is something that these innies are always trying to make.

How do we map the place where we are right now? It is a place where, over the last month, we have seen people detained for keeping any electronic trace of who they are or what they care about, for risking to care about other people. In Severance, the innies write on scraps of paper to share information.

I don’t know how to map the place where I am. I am functioning, and at work I am trying to do my job of teaching and being a professor and also trying to do my other job as AAUP president in a moment where higher education is a central target, holding forums and meetings and making the spaces for necessary conversation. This is what everything feels like: ( ). [ ]. { }. Even among the cubicle farm and the corporate hallways filled with vague threats and abusive coercion to apologize for being human and alive, we find each other.

It’s so important to make these spaces to talk, to be real with each other, to share, to support each other. And in those moments of honest connection, I feel held.

My brain feels like a salad, chunks of stuff colliding with each other, getting something weird caught in my cognitive teeth, a news story from among the barrage that my brain will hold onto, with a weird intuitive sense that this might be a dangerous key. But it’s so hard to make meaning of it all, and so hard to see the future, or to understand what any of it might mean.

Part of the flickering I feel that is like Mark’s stuttering brain is the scenarios. People are posting on social media: Now is the time to leave. Now is the time to. Now is the time to erase. Some one needs to. It is dangerous to do. It is necessary to do. Like a particle-wave in quantum superposition, my brain is attempting to suss out multiple scenarios with no concrete guidance. Part of me is on a plane. Part of me is fighting until the end. Part of me is hiding. Part of me is being brave. And since there’s no real choice, because of the brain freeze, I am thinking and doing all of these things at once.

I don’t have any answers. Interestingly, in the quest to get my husband some relief, he had his brain mapped so that he could do some biofeedback. They traced the way his thoughts go in his brain. They will not put in a chip to compartmentalize him. Instead, the goal is to connect the areas so they can talk to one another, so that he can reintegrate.

I told my sister, who lives in Australia, that the scary weirdness of this time only has a reference point in the early pandemic, five years ago around this time. Now we are thinking another pandemic will be layered on top of this, as people welcome measles and anything else that can kill, as they delight in dying, just so long as high school athletics functions the way it never did but conforms to the 1950s movie version they hold in their minds.

I believe in superposition. I believe that even amid the flickering, we are still here, and that this stuttering is not ideal but that I am still alive. I know you are too, in the flickering.