Horizontal politics
You’ll have thought about what I’m about to say, I guarantee it, but I want to record it so we can rewrite what being horizontal can mean together. I mean that dualistically—let’s create and be horizontal together.
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framing the bed
In fragments, I write to you from bed. It’s foggy most days here—the kind of climate that can make a mind spring leaks. Days between the sheets meld together marked by snippets written between rest.
When discussing scattered hours in her essay collection Constellations (2019), Sinead Gleeson revels in the fractured ‘un-ness’ that creative work can guide you towards. Narrative is a well-known trickster, non-linear, and messy; it traverses shape and seldom emerges fully formed or in social isolation. She writes, “Outside of writing, a fragment suggests that it’s part of something else.” For those who are sick and disabled, using fragments of experience to create or describe is a reclamation of our continued existence.
“For those who are sick and disabled, using fragments of experience to create or describe is a reclamation of our continued existence”
Living with limited energy elevates the momentary; even performing the most mundane of acts can feel wondrous. To record these things, then, to archive the can and cannot is of equal importance. To create, when possible, is to collect scraps for an ongoing quilt stitched together by moments of finally!, maybe I could . . . , and tomorrow will be better.
Jots of life discoverable in archives or online feed into bigger tapestries, from diary entries and unearthed poems to zines and footage from protests. Seeking the museum-authenticated or publishing house story for legitimacy can be habitual—people who live outside of legitimacy are endlessly imaginative. The minds of those who are excluded from dominant narratives are sharpened to see absence. We can choose to leave them blank or fill them, but to record regardless of the outcome is an active form of remembrance.
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changing the sheets
A fresh sheet is an empty page, an invitation. Such spaces beg to be filled—a nothing waiting to be a something. The changing of one thing into another is alchemy at its most elementary. There are many ways to make a tangible mark; in a joyful way (the first footprints in fresh snow), an accidental way (pasta sauce on white clothing), or a powerful way (throwing a rock at a windowpane). But, while one change begets another, surely, who records such transformations?
Discovery has long been seen through the eyes of those who wield power. So, what is a map but something someone powerful has made according to their journey through a landscape? Though they’ll tell you it is objective/neutral/correct, between the miles represented by millimetres, inevitable gaps are facts. Ask: who and what is missing? Ask: which histories were untranslatable? Ask: what is over there, not represented by the map’s legend (river/train line/rumour)? If there are margins for error, there will be marginalia.
‘History’ may be written by the victors, but the ones worth knowing are not always so easily accessible. Listen for: the voices whispering from communal shelves, the wisdom of elders, the plan in the encrypted chat. The more you read and listen, the more you learn. A scroll through most socials will reveal useful tips like: write the protest support line number in permanent marker on a body part, blur faces if you share pics from the march, intervene without risking the safety of yourself or the other person, find spaces to share the burden of what it means to continue.
“‘History’ may be written by the victors, but the ones worth knowing are not always so easily accessible”
These thoughts are one version of what a map could be. Set them on fire, annotate or add to them, transpose your own landscape here.
making our bed
Construction is a job for many hands. To make this bed communally, we’ll need to take turns and regular naps. It’s holding the meeting from bed, sharing links to heat pads and body pillows to be cradled by, cooking for each other when we can’t get up, and embodying flexitime as we reschedule again and again. Here, you’ll always be invited next time.
This is a fragment of a bigger whole, a comment in a conversation happening in pockets across the globe as we find ways to exist together in spite of. One story of chronic illness and disability is never just that. Beyond the desire to taxonomise bodies for statistics, our similarities give way to solidarities, like informal advice on how to navigate: insurance, the unlistening specialist, side effects of that drug, hygiene hacks, small ways to find joy on bad days.
Another dialectical thought, the central thesis at last: the bed is both a political site and a canvas. It’s a place that offers space for boundless thinking, no, let’s say it, for dreaming. While the bed’s role in sleeping and intimacy is consistently defined and redefined. In the same way a library is like a portal into other worlds, the bed, too, can be whatever we make it. To practise this reimagining, here are some jumping in exercises:
“The bed is both a political site and a canvas”
For five minutes or less, picture your bed as a:
Mountain top
Club night
Ship sailing through uncharted waters
Feel free to move around and add sound/scents/lights to set the scene.
While this is an optimistic portrait of where some of us spend most of our lives, I know, at times, it can feel like a confine. In this sense, the internet is a portal and a lifeline. I write to tell you that in the lonely hours swallowed up by painsomnia there will be someone there to listen, we just haven’t met them yet. No time spent alone is ever truly that, despite how it may seem. Think of all your online sick pals and what you’ve learned and shared from them. Can you even remember the before?
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lying in it
When we dream of a liveable world, we gesture towards a horizon not yet defined, made of building blocks on the notion that every life should be expansive and joyful, not just survivable. As Audre Lorde (1980) wrote, “Living fully—how long is not the point. How and why take total precedence.” As we build, crafting towards fullness is vital. The tools of how and why provide strong foundations. No more of the scraping by, the preventable deaths, the ‘that’s the way it’s always been’. Apathy is more tired than we are.
So how to make something from exhaustion? Many of us are already a horizon of sorts, bodies lying in wait for a day with a little less pain than yesterday, more mobility for tomorrow. Bodies hold struggles, dreams, pain, memories, illness, and disability—the foundations of a future we seek, the blueprints in our bones. The spaces outside legislated and legalised by people we’ll never meet are vital to our continuation. What is beyond? A belief.
Lorde reminds us, “While we fortify ourselves with visions of the future, we must arm ourselves with accurate perceptions of the barriers between us and that future.” We have never been the architects of these barriers, but we work to burn them, warming ourselves on their flames—we became architects by necessity. Our structures may fail, everyone fails, but continuation is important; this work doesn’t begin and end today. Where we’re going is unmappable unless you know how to traverse the landscape. Luckily for us, we already have the knowledge and adaptability, remember?
Voyaging through these portals towards one another, we know that the bed exists outside chronology. There is no 9 to 5 here or anything that even resembles work, lest it’s in service to each other. The way we care from bed counts. As if there was a right ‘way’ to participate in the world to demand change! The bed is a place for strike, for solidarity, for a march. While we may not always be visible, we know we’re here. This is an ongoing invite to the possible; let’s lie down together.