Things Are Things And People Are People And Light Is Light
‘We want a perfect war’ – Donald Trump, 2025
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Transmitter facilities for WWOR-TV, along with eight other New York City television stations, were destroyed on 11 September 2001 when two hijacked planes obliterated the World Trade Center. Licensed to Secaucus, New Jersey, WWOR-TV responded by feeding its signal through existing satellite and cable systems instead, running nonstop coverage of the attacks from CNN and Fox News. ‘We are having some technical difficulties, which is totally understandable when you try to do, you know, ad hoc reporting and getting information to you as fast as we possibly can, and making sure it’s accurate at the same time, so…’ the station anchor’s voice trails off over looped footage of the Twin Towers disappearing into smoke and dust. Then his colleague cuts in to inform viewers that Donald Trump has called the station and is now on the line. ‘For years I’ve looked right directly at the building,’ Trump says. ‘I’d see the Empire State Building in the foreground, and the World Trade Center in the background. And now I’m looking at absolutely nothing.’ And nothing in the Twenty-First Century is more American than watching television.
“The musk is within the deer, but it seeks itself outside.” - Kabir, 15th century mystic poet.
A musk deer roams forests and fields following the scent of another. But the perfume it seeks and yearns for is leaking from its own body.
This is the central tragedy of othering. Of mistaking the borders between the self and the other… to search outward for what is already emanating from within. Oof. Herein lies our mistake. Kabir’s image is a little sentimental on the surface but the more I think on it, the deeper it sits in me. The brutality of bodily fluids. The primordial weight of the world on a tiny human mind. I do not want to be a deer chasing what I already contain.
I may run myself into exhaustion, confusion, ruin myself by driving off a cliff into an abyss and for what? To find the truth is already leaking from my ribs.
What does it mean, then, to smell something and not recognise it as you?
I pick fresh hearts from the street
The most defeated ones
With nimble fingers, I steal the tears
I fill rusted sardine tins with the smell of sorrow.
I was addicted to bird seeds. They said it was a sign of misinformation. The spat away shell. Seed on the floor like a feather. Couldn’t stop until my lips cracked. I loved to watch them pile up. When children would get sent on school trips to beaches to clean up my mess, I would look at them and continue my spray. I loved to walk up and down Green Lanes with a butterfly knife and jab in zig zags if anyone tried to tell me to stop. In parachute pants and clogs, I blended into new north London once I put the blade away.
