But being so dependent on our devices also comes at a cost. Having to socialize almost entirely online has meant most of us now know far more than we’d like to about our neighbors’ and old classmates’ bad political opinions — not to mention their clandestine indoor parties and questionable pandemic vacations. And, to the detriment of our mental health, it has also meant an increase in doomscrolling. Perhaps you’ve used social media to shame others for their careless pandemic behavior; perhaps you’ve been shamed yourself. Meanwhile, throwback features remind us of parts of our past that might be embarrassing or painful: Facebook surfaces a photo of you with your friends in a bar last year, maskless and carefree, and you feel a stab of sadness for how things once were; your iPhone reminds you that you were once married to someone with whom you no longer speak, or that you previously held opinions you’re now ashamed of.
It makes complete sense, then, that some people have decided they’ve had enough.
Because language is a collection of symbols and representations of our journey through the world, much of it is spatial. The term “plot,” for example, contains an implied cartography, and indeed, all maps tell stories, and story-writing is a kind of mapping. These ways of rendering meaning, however, are also tremendously subjective. Eléna Rivera’s The Perforated Map, a collection of experimental poetry published in 2011, fuses the relationship between maps and language, considering a paper map as a metaphor for language itself, one which can be pierced and punctured. To puncture a sentence or an entire poem means reaching through language’s strictures and expectations into what’s on the other side, and accessing language’s limits. Rivera considers the syntactical and metaphorical act of perforation as a way of liberating language from both the writer’s and the reader’s reifying expectations.
Simard’s memoir, “Finding the Mother Tree,” describes the intersecting webs of her career and private life that brought her to rewrite not only the forestry canon but our understanding of nature itself.
Fashion, though, is malleable. And Ford makes an elegant argument that because fashion is a living language, it has the capacity to evolve. Those who are willing to transgress against the established codes force the rules to change. They force power to change hands — or at least, over time, to be shared.
I had no choice but to embody the lake.
My nail beds anchored beneath stones, weeds.
To float or drown is the same ache.