Razor Blade and Library Card

These are the days that seem to speak in signs and symbols, like yesterday afternoon when on a walk with the dog we passed a library card and then, a foot away, a rusty razor blade on the sidewalk. The pair together seemed like a headline, like the choice before us, and I picked up the card to return it to the library but knew the cut did not want the steel. These days I open Instagram ready for my heart to ache, and I paste a section of a Jack Gilbert poem, “Tear It Down” with a line that says “We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows” into the comments of Palestinian people trying to raise funds to survive, and children with tarps flapping amid rubble tell me to press all four buttons. These days my Instagram is Palestinian people and recipes for surprising vegan treats made only of cocoa, an apple, and almond butter. These days I make date chocolate truffles and put them in the freezer so I have a nugget of joy in the afternoon, conscious of all these things I have as I taste sweetness and shop at Costco. These days I am thinking a lot about the Popular Front, the too-late idea for alliance between the Communists and Social Democrats in Germany, who together could probably have stopped Hitler if they’d stopped calling the other side names like “social fascist.” These days I am thinking about how to write about fascism, and how words like fascist and neoliberalism mean specific things and are not generic insults like “bozo” or descriptors like “person I disagree with.” These days I am thinking about what it means to try to organize people by insulting them, and whether that works. These days I have 75 post cards left to write before Oct. 24, and I do a batch while watching the video of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour on Disney+. These days my skills at argument fail me and I can only make lists. These days I find myself flipping rapidly and numbly on Instagram past Palestinian people begging for their lives and know that I am a monster, and I commit to work tonight to paste and press four buttons, and I donate $20 for my lapses. These days sometimes I write a scary sentence and then let myself look at animal videos for twenty minutes because Moo Deng, a baby hippo, is possibly the center of our humanity—in that you are human if you can muster a smile for him—but then I worry about all the horrible things fame is going to do to a baby hippo. These days I am seeing the stripe of the early pandemic run across my classrooms, the things that students did not learn, as I see them sniffle and cough in class or leave class because they’ve strangely developed POTS or a heart condition. These days I concoct devious ways to get them to read sentences, hiding them like chocolate truffles, to lure them back to detail and words chosen in a string. These days I have another ganglion cyst in my wrist from all the hand-writing and from doing NYT Spelling Bee and texting with my thumb, but I committed to fewer voter calling shifts because I am unsure where the energy will come from. These days I touch the ganglion cyst, which juts out from the right side below the palm, and I think about the folk cure of dropping the Bible on such cysts to explode them, which works. These days I think about the Bible, and I think about its violence, and I think about all the violence that isn’t in the Bible but that people imagine its covers contain, and about the State Department’s commitment to more bombs. These days I think about Donald Trump’s desire to make U.S. police into “Death Squads,” and why that’s not even news, and what it means that he is seen as the candidate for the party that seeks its justification and its rescue in the Bible. These days I try so hard to let go of my worries, and I wish we had an eternal flame for all the worries to burn in, some specific lamp that would lick its orange dance to remind us that we too shall burn, either by fast heat or slow, and how breakable we are. These days I think about how our signs and symbols are captured in social media squares of light that shift depending on which plot of land we call home.

Today, I go back to the razor blade. I want to take a picture of it because text must have image to make it fly, and the blade is not there. In the face of all else, with as little and as much as we can do, someone stooped down in the last 24 hours and picked up the razor blade, holding it gingerly, to save another unknown person from one cut. It was not an end to all razor blades, it was not the illusion of joyous safety from all injury, it was not ignorance of all the other blades, but it was two inches less of harm left in the world.