I’ve been longing for some uninterrupted writing time. I am frequently thwarting myself, and I imagine that I could reconfigure my time—“optimize” it—or eke out more time by emulating one of the many writers who have either stayed up late or woken up at 4 am every day to write before their other labors commence. Discipline is one thing but a bootstrap theory of writing puts me off.

Interruption contains rupture, the break. After a month of playing in it, my reading group finally asks out loud what the fault zone is in Eleni Stecopoulos’s Dreaming in the Fault Zone. The seismic fault zone frames proximity to an epicenter of shared experience.

I am among the throngs of people near the epicenter of shared interruption. The fantasy of uninterrupted time is promulgated by a different echelon of class. The isolate “I” concentrates (the reverse of this concentration might very well be the dream of loving interruption) where as we interrupt each other.

I don’t remember who I first heard it from, but the phrase “cooperative overlap” has been in my vocabulary for a few years now (useful for understanding why my ex sometimes thought my family was angry when we were all on the phone together, when we were actually just riffing). This breaking in isn’t an act of aggression but one of collaboration.

The kind of interruption I’m thinking about isn’t an act of aggression. In fact, it isn’t really an act at all, just a condition of being. Unfortunately, my neurotype makes it difficult to resume where I left off. I return, sooner or (more likely) later, dis-oriented. The compass and map of the writer trying to follow a particular line of inquiry is the the act of retelling where the project begins.

Pain is one of the more profound forms of interruption. My friend Flora referenced Elaine Scarry the other day, so her work, The Body in Pain feels ready-to-hand in the moment when my partner is having an excruciating flare-up of pain. In that book, Scarry writes about the inarticulateness of being in pain. Language gathers around it, like an accretion disc around the void beyond the event horizon. And yet every sci fi movie or story ever invokes black holes (and worm holes) as portals—leading where?

In the section “Austerity Constellation,” Stecopoulos and her collaborators adapt the practice of constellation therapy to ask questions broader than familial trauma—inquiring into larger social traumas (e.g. of austerity). This adaptation of a therapy practice reminds me of the use to which Rachel Pollack puts tarot in her later work A Walk through the Forest of Souls in order to ask theological and cosmological questions (rather than personal ones). Stecopoulos:

If we can speak of collective trauma, then let us speak of empathy as emplacement. Who is willing to put their body in the place of those who suffer? To understand, to stand in the midst of chaos. In this respect, the protester on the frontline who acts as the vanguard, who takes the bullets and blows and tear gas to shield the others, offers their body toward the equity of pain. This is what a therapy ritual cannot do. This is where there is no surrogate. Constellation work is abstract, and physically it marks a safe space—by definition, abstraction is a pulling away. Yet the constellation also suggests a rehearsal for feeling together, for feeling what one has not experienced. (287)

Is a feeling for what one has not experienced a precondition for care? Empathy, lately maligned at various points along a political spectrum: to the right presumably as a weakness that perforates the hermetic enclosure xenophobia produces; to the left as insufficient, paternalistic.

I’ve been longing for uninterrupted writing time, but now I’m thinking about what it might mean to collaborate with interruption and to write from within the camaraderie of the interrupted. But is there an empathy that doesn’t erase difference or presume a shared origin? An empathy large and porous enough to hold both carers and cared for, and wise enough to understand the mutability and interchangeability of these roles.

Stecopoulos dreams of a philology like this, “as a method of loving rather than a tool of oppression,” grounded in Glissant’s thinking on opacity (295).

Glissant proposes an ethos of opacity that does not rest on primitive or primitivist inscrutability but reciprocal irreducibility—equal being. A radical opacity, where I accept that I do not understand you, I do not share your experience. I do not have to strive to make you legible in order to see that we are equals. I do not have to reduce you to a universal (non-)person I can tolerate. I do not have to understand to love. (293)

I’ve been annotating different readings of this book with different colors of pen. In an earlier reading, I drew a vertical line in magenta to the right of this paragraph and wrote, “For the pedagogy of Love & Friendship.”