Nathan Schiller

Only twice, in the two years since I started this blog, have I been unable to write my monthly post: during the George Floyd protests, and during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. History in real-time is tragic, and the internet has plenty of arenas for reacting. A diaristic think piece on a personal blog felt frivolous.

Law enforcement murdering Black people is the history of America, imperialism and genocide are the history of humanity. We all either know these stories or ignore them. They’re too big to hash out in the moment, in the mode they deserve, in written language. I can’t, at least, or don’t want to. I don’t want profit motives tied to trying to do that. 

Words rarely counter violence at the point of force anyway. Words name a thing, describe an action, express an emotion. They’re diffusers. Ammunition bundles the consequences of them into a finger twitch. Words amass power in aggregate, and often in abstraction. The years we spend reading are pretext for the slogan, not the other way around. The other way around is how “Never again” turns hollow.

I need this space for celebration. A little community, in cyberspace, where there’s always something life-affirming, if you resist the algorithmic death spiral. That’s why I take photos of parks, gush over great music, pick apart sticky art. This stuff is the antidote to the ills of our species. Not blogging about it per se, but doing it, experiencing it, and feeling compelled to talk about it.

It’s a daily existence for me to get into this stuff, usually in a vacuum of headspace. But once I write, something happens. I feel the pull of the American angle. To speak simply, I have always been fascinated by the circumstances of this country. Or, I should say, haunted by them. Most of my great-grandparents were born in Europe. There’s none of England in me, no Dutch. How anyone gets here is as critical as what we do here.

In The Shining, one of my favorite films, and certainly one of the most terrifying, Stuart Ullman, general manager of the Overlook Hotel, tells Jack Torrance, the writer and winter caretaker, that the hotel, which will drive Jack into a murderous rage, “is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground.” 

Not far from my home, at the northern tip of Manhattan, where I walk, run, shop, eat and socialize in peace, is the site of a slave burial ground.

As I was saying, there’s always an angle in America.