#weirdmirrors

[vasilinaorlova]

Public Announcement

Dear friends, starting from today, 12/21/2018, I will publish my “Letters from the Depths of Solitude” on my other blog, WeirdMirrors. I want to keep this space for poetry only (and occasional selfies and reblogs of the juiciest prose pieces). Please continue following me on my journey and subscribe to my other blog here on Tumblr. It’s been quite a travel! Love y’all. 💖

[charlimaemiel]

Genuinely who hung this airbnb mirror so low?? I'm not even tall

Dm me for uncensored.

[vasilinaorlova]

Letters from the Depths of Solitude. 174. On New History

I did not want to go, I was sick, and exhausted by the end of the day. At 6 PM, the department announced, will begin watching an election which we could share. I stood for a moment near the Turtle Pond deciding if I want to go--I did not want to, but I felt I have to. It was the final stage of the exhausting election 2016, and I thought some company is going to soothe the transition to the uncertainty for me. In 5.518, the screen was already down, with polls."Is the party here?" demanded Julie, opening the door."It's not a party. It's a panic room," the response was. I was startled to see how high gets Trump's voting in the very beginning, and hoped that CNN decided to ignite suspense and demonstrate traditionally red states first--although, does it make any sense? Is Trump even a Republican? No, he was an independent runner, who joined the Republican wing because there was no other alternative--was the second party in the USA libertarian or communist, he would join them as well, for a cynic it does not matter, it's a laughable issue who to join as long as there is potential access to power. "Any exiting stuff happening?" Asked someone. "No. But there is alcohol." Everyone in "the panic room" made cheerful confessions, how many of their relatives vote for Trump. Everyone had a nephew, an uncle, a mother, etc, who would vote for Trump. "Your secrets will die with me," I said. I already performed my civic duty: I did not vote that day. I have no right to vote, I have no say in the future of this country. As a blanket of red slowly spread across America, I could not help thinking that such a division is a decent foundation for a civil war. There are two Americas. "Are you sick?" Asked Julie. "Yes." "You need some tea." "Eventually. When Trump is a president." I joked. "It's gonna hurt so much when it's Texas." Chris said. One could write about affect of election. It's a slowly rolling breaking wheel. Or, as Alejandro Flores noted, Trump's has been politics of affect. Instead of effective politics we may talk about affective politics, the only effective politics of the times. There was pizza and there was wine. People came and went, returned, and went again; and someone remarked that wants to cry in private. There was a brief moment of cheering in the "panic room:" New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, and DC voted Hillary. But Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Mississippi --Trump. I watched as America votes Putin. America votes its Putin. Freely. I left the Panic Room when the fate of Florida had not yet been decided. The night was full of light, and I wanted to go home and fall asleep. Wake me up in some different America, America with emerald eyes, where the lion lies down next to the lamb, rivers are bluer than the sky, and grass is taller than trees. At home I learned that Florida, which first was red, and then blued a bit--the results of big cities were coming in--flipped. Since this moment, a hope for a miracle was an ever diminishing trajectory. It was one of the days which makes one question tomorrow. Tomorrow rose in all the precarity of its predicament. It was Trumpxit, a self-exodus of America; Brexit all over again. The Western civilization seem to not be containing itself. I imagined throngs of startled Trump's supporters who would claim they did not want Trump to win. I could not help but think about a bitter irony of my own trajectory. To emigrate Putin’s Russia only to find oneself in Trump’s America. Vladimir Nabokov narrowly escaped the Red Russia to settle in a pre-Nazi Germany--I thought it's a twentieth-century-style experience--aren't I privy to get a taste of in in 2016? He at least had America to flee. America is a small island. A small island in the ocean of another America. Make America great again--America of Nabokov, the land of hope, the land of dreams of equality and brotherhood coming true. Make it great again--not now. Not tomorrow. But some day, perhaps. Some day. I had another desperate thought: What would I tell my son tomorrow? The boy came agitated home in the beginning of the summer, when he just learned about Trump. I told him there is no ground to be worrying, that no one would admit Trump to presidency, and that America would not permit Trump to win. I cannot believe this gruesome present had started, in the beginning of election, with laughter, proceeded with laughter throughout, and continued with laughter, until last minutes. What a carnival, what a masquerade. Thus battles are lost. A miraculous moment when all funny jokes of the election season instantaneously become signs of tragic idiocy. It was a moment of epiphany for me--I understood that I did not know America at all. And perhaps I am grateful that I knew another America. That I got to live and see it. And take it for granted. Yesterday's America, where Trump is laughed off. Never before, not in 1991--collapse of the Soviet Union, not in 1993--overturned coup d'état--not on 9/11 of 2001, when I, together with the world, watched the towers fell, not when Putin won the election--or fabricated results, rather--had this feeling of sitting in a house the door of which is open in a blizzard. On the edge of some historic abyss. The beginning of the nuclear winter, scholar César A. Salgado noted. But the belated realization. The magnitude of my denial. The absence of knowledge that the real America is Trump’s, which renders all other Americas are but feeble fruits of imagination. But how did it happen? How was it possible? Russia reelected Putin after 75 years of the official Soviet power and several years of 'timelessness,' after Putin had weeded out all his opponents, and still--on the fraudulent election, which brought massive protests, during the winter 2011-2012. America freely chose Trump over a decent candidate, using the election system most transparent in existence, we are taught to believe. Tomorrow there will be a global financial crisis, but that is nothing compared to the crisis of ideas and collapse of another set of ideals. America does not want to part with the colonial past. America wants to be the empire she has been, and she will be. You know what, I wish Romney won the 2012 election. I knew some ultra progressivists were a minority in this country, but I did not imagine this country's majority is what it is. And the irony, for the President of the United States of America we have the only true supporter of Russia, supporting Russia for all the wrong reasons. Granted Hillary's post-Cold-war anti-Russianness did not bring me joy, but Trump's pro-Russianness is downright devastating. The only bittely funny moment of the counting votes was, how the third party supporters felt that they can afford to support the third party. Such independence of thinking when the question is, whether the White House was to be taken over by a person who propose to build a wall on the border with Mexico, who propose to mark Muslim with a special ID, who said "blood was coming from her whenever," who has an open case of rape coming under consideration in December--is like to support Greenpeace in Germany in 1933. So many of the best hopes are dying right now in agony. I imagine Trump supporters googling Trump. That ignorance took on, and not viceful hatred, is my only hope, but what does it matter which intentions and fantasies they had--that you do not mean to offend using an ethnic slur, does not mean you are not offending or not using a slur, after all. And of course, there is another wing of Trump's supporters--those who knew very well what they chose, and now, for the first time, they will be very visible; no matter how vocal they were, in the last decades they were never before embraced or empowered in such a decisive way. I think I might not lead a discussion session in the course Introduction to Cultural Anthropology today. It seems excessive. The only message of anthropology which deserves understanding--that people are equal and none is inherently better than another because of race, gender, sexuality, wealth, health, citizenship, privileges--debunked and assigned the position of gibberish in the public imaginaries again; politically opted out. National celebrations will follow, no doubt--a very serious business. I propose to implement the open carry on the UT campus too. During Obama's time there was concealed carry, for no good reason. We must advance things in proportion with their progression, as the eight-years' Trump presidency unfolds in front of out eyes--America has been waiting for too long for this very moment, the moment when America once again gleefully embraced the white burden.

This is a new history. A new historic epoch. Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Gadaffi, Assad, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un, Erdogan, Putin, Lukashenko--existed before, and would exist after. But I might have entertained a hope my private, small, unrepeatable, poor life would pass not under the rule of one of their kin. Well, I was mistaken. “The soundest empire” (Foucault) of the USA, permeating the world with security, surveillance, and control apparatuses, outsourcing inequality, supra-technological, containing industries of dream productions, armed better than all the other countries of the world combined and better than ever a country was in all the history of the planet, came to the understanding to its true nature. 

The USA which was so hospitable to me, which brought me so many ideas, hopes, insights, the USA which grappled with its ambitions, downsides of the postcolonialism and neoliberalism, questioned globalism, fought racism and misogyny, aspired to keep the side of justice, endorsed gay marriage, gently advanced secularism--this USA exists no more, it fell into the hands of the plutocratic ruler. One could not do much but observe, from an inner distance, unfortunately preserving no geographico-historical separation, at how quickly this irreversible tragedy has happened, how carelessly it was allowed to happen by all the “people of good will,” and how persistently it will now every day be repeated, in every possible range from the darkest comedy and absurd drama to surreal tragedy.

It is time to mourn.

(Written on the weirdmirrors.)

[vasilinaorlova]

Prose

I banned my prose to @weirdmirrors

[vasilinaorlova]

Invite

http://weirdmirrors.tumblr.com/: Dorian Gray; In Praise of Unread Books; Tumblr Poetry at its Finest, etc.

[vasilinaorlova]

Something Different

I tired of my own prose interfering with my poetry here, and opened a new tumblr account (I know; don’t judge me), weirdmirrors. It’ll be a secluded place, I think, at first at least. I simply want to write, I used platforms as mediums for as long as I can remember, and tumblr is the less glitchy platform of all I knew. (I do have issues with tumblr though.) You are of course very welcome to follow me further in this strange journey, if you want.

And here finally I would post only poetry and maybe love letters, which is strictly speaking the same thing.

Copybook

A new copybook was Like a new account: There was always this illusion That you could write something different.

[2013]