Estelle and Blue sit and watch the young go by; or, The Final Communion

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #183. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Peripatetic. Orientation. Discourse.

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This season we’ve etnered, a season of haunting, when fire and snow are no longer opposite. The history that remains adn remains oncee the waters recede, revealing lilacs out of the dead land — flowers and snow, holly and oak — no value other than as spectacle, a palce the mind cant stay quiet. It is not new, this shared snese of an end. Summer surpriseed us with a pattern we are threading. Duiee knowing someone you dreamed of killing will outlive you. Die knowing it is not new. When the time comes to youi at which you be forced at last to utter the speech which as lain at the center of your soul for yearss, which you have have, all that time, idotlike been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy ofwards. We are iun our darkest hour. Behind every ruler there isa  a Ryler. How can they meet us face to face tillw e have faces?

Let this thread know true grace.

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There is a dam that will bury a religion. But now a girl is riding a bicycle over its crest, and she will write a poem about how the wind felt against her cheeks. In an archive, recordings, photos. All that was: captured in a song sung in a language already forgotten, in a moment she closed her eyes, in the prose of her elders and in the dreams of her friends, the sketch of a father who never left home. There is a you that remains and remains.

Rituals take grief and give it a shape and a story.

There is a Watcher circling that place we all were before our memories began. Who thought she could feel all the history in a single girl; Was manipulated by the invisible historian.  And there is a Blue she communed. Felt the history, stumbled over the words. They remembered it together. Saw the place promised in their early days — as if suddenly rendered in FMV. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; she is seated in a row with her and her. The daughter of a poet. The daughter of a mother.

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The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter Kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Italo Calvino: “Desire are already memories.”

“Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times.” — Clint Smith

You’ll never get anywhere by tampering with history.

Eliot: “Summer surprised us.”

“Darkness unspools so slowly it looks like light. The end unspools so slowly it seems like the start. Winter and summer — flowers and snow, holly and oak — dance with each other as they battle. Each is both at once. Our life means our death.” — Nina MacLaughlin

Kyo Maclear: “Die knowing something. Die knowing your knowing will be incomplete.”

I can only show you what was lost.

Jorge Luis Borges: “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map…”

“The ruin has no value other than as spectacle, a metaphor representing our fear of the abandonment of civilization and our powerlessness over nature.” — Leila Taylor

“A ruin is a place the mind can’t stay quiet.” — Paul Cooper

Southern Gothic, Rickey Laurentiis:
…the history that remains
once the waters recede, revealing the land
that couldn’t reject or contain it…

MacLaughlin: “This is the season we’ve entered, a season of sorrow, when fire and snow are no longer opposites.”

We fought for a different future until we couldn’t.

“Someone you dreamed of killing will outlive you.” — Hanif Abdurraqib

MacLaughlin: “It is not new, this shared sense of end, and that is some comfort surely. But the sense exists regardless. We are in our darkest hour.”

“I have come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.” — Lulu Miller

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” — C.S. Lewis

It is not too late.

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A version of this essay first appeared in Videodame.

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Autumn Wright is a critic of all things apocalyptic. Follow them @theautumnwright.bsky.social.