With many thanks to Rafael Diaz for reviewing an early draft of this Offering.
All week I thought about vulnerability and power. I slept poorly most nights, which has been common since COVID. It is 3:47 a.m. as I put the last touches on this Offering and prepare to record. I have thought what feels like nonstop about more than eight hundred starved Palestinian people—whose names I have not been told—who were either murdered, maimed, or otherwise injured by Israeli forces in Gaza this week as they scrambled in masses for flour.
In their essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Judith Butler articulates a “hierarchy of grief” which is forged in part by the genre of obituary, “the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed” and “the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life…1”
In the essay, which was published as part of Butler’s collection Precarious Life in 2004, they note that “we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children, and adults.”
My work revolves around the iconoclastic power of images and their capacity to jeopardize entrenched ways of thinking, feeling, and moving. Which is to say I have struggled in all seriousness with the images that make up these days. Because I am the only human in my household of two, these images are hard to stay holding.
Judith Butler writes about vulnerability as rooted in the reality of being “socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.” They also note that vulnerability is required for mourning, which involves an acceptance that “by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever…the full result of which one cannot know in advance.”
It is exactly because mourning cannot be tackled like a to-do list, but is instead a process through which the very self as we know it is sacrificed, that it entails such intense vulnerability. And Butler’s language on mourning is some of the best I have come across, yet:
“…One starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing. Something takes hold of you: Where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?…Something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us…I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well…Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we're not, we’re missing something.”
The day after Aaron Bushnell self-immolated I read a chapter in Catherine Keller’s book On the Mystery about the logic of God’s omnipotence and the question of evil. For instance, if all is God’s will, explain genocide. Explain a scant loaf of bread that is hydrated with blood.
Keller writes, “The waves of creation—always uncertain, always risky—sometimes swell to unbearable violence in our lives…When we think that for some inscrutable reason God is causing our tragedy, does this alleviate suffering?…Many people just go numb in the face of this contradiction…In this numbness, grief gets repressed.”
It feels like what Keller hopes to disrupt here is an assumption that Divine power is synonymous with causation and control. She asserts that a “formal doctrine of omnipotence” does not actually exist in the Bible. Instead, Keller notes the Old Testament’s Job—a faithful believer whose unspeakable losses he can not understand—to whom the word of God finally arrives in "the whirlwind.”
Not the rain storm, not the flood, not the lightning bolt. The whirlwind. And while the whirlwind in this tale “takes no responsibility for the ills that befell Job,” Keller wonders if it might “will a world, a living whirling, open-system of a world?”
What happens—spiritually speaking—if we trade in the almighty for the mighty in all? A sort of mighty that lives oddly inside that which makes us most vulnerable? Which is that our bonds to each other “constitute what we are.” What if God was up to us?