by Gelare Khoshgozaran
3/25
How does one prepare for mourning?
No matter how much you know it is coming—it’s not like training a muscle by repeating a movement while incrementally adding weight or pressure. It comes when it comes and everytime it plants a seed of grief in you to grow.
If there was a centrifuge of emotions to put a person in, the seeds of grief would sediment as a mass at the very bottom of an emotional test tube.
Grief, too is material.
3/27
When we were kids, anytime my brother or I refused to eat something, my father would say “live your life so that when there is a famine tomorrow, you won’t be the first to die.”
When last year I reminded him of what he so casually used to tell us, he seemed embarrassed. I reassured him I understood he was doing his best—parenting, raising two kids for the first time during a war. He didn’t know better: the fear, the graphic images of famine he would conjure in my head. Had I written them down or held on to those images, I would have been a better writer.
3/28
Some traumatic life events make you age suddenly; the ones that turn your figurative, or literal hair gray overnight. Communities around the world have been aging suddenly collectively for decades and centuries. Those of us who aged multiple times—collectively in our communities—are reminded of all those sudden aging events while also aging:
suddenly,
collectively,
anew.
4/19
There is something intellectually satisfying about the life of uncertainty. This disruption seems to only make sense as the organic form in which life must continue. Otherwise how could life be so experientially, morally and philosophically unbearable and yet there would be no power and water outage?
There has been a war out there but with no shortage of milk, like in the war of my childhood.
4/21
Today: closed the borders
stopped immigration to the US.
closed the borders:
just shut them close as if the blinds of a south-facing living room.
Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and writer who, in 2009 was transplanted from street protests in a city of four seasons to the windowless rooms of the University of Southern California where aesthetics and politics were discussed in endless summers. Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in contemptorary (co-founding editor), The Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, X-TRA, Art Practical, Jadaliyya, LA Review of Books, Ajam Media Collective, Temporary Art Review, and most recently in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, (MIT Press co-published by the New Museum. 2020).