Stephanie Wakefield in May journal:
For every sad soul who insists that nothing is possible, our time shows precisely the opposite. Tens and hundreds of thousands of people take over parks, refuse to leave. They camp out there, set up barricades, fight off incursions and attacks, risk injury and death, form alliances, take care of the wounded, stockpile food supplies, holding their ground like they were defending their homes, homeland, or territory. ‘The life of a child is ungraspable, not because it transcends toward another world, but because it adheres to this world and to its body in a way that adults find intolerable.’ (Agamben) Confused, deranged, wracked by anxiety, but searching from within the devastation, humanity is figuring things out, discovering a million things as if they’ve never been thought of before—because lacking the jadedness of the militant, the ironic detachment of the hipster—and acting with refound dignity and enormous mental fluidity, not according to preconceived ideas or principles, but by responding to the moment, playing with whatever can be found. How do you pilot a space capsule when the instructions are in Chinese? How to communicate when there’s no common language? If the astronaut bouncing around in space is the figure of twentieth-century liberal humanity, the figure of the Anthropocene is Stone trapped inside her spacesuit, gasping for air, tangled in a parachute cord, using a fire extinguisher as a jet pack, trying to get back to the world.