On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous contains the “epistolary novel” of Little Dog as they write notes and fragments of thought to their illiterate mother. This is similar to the form of reading a diary, where each page contains the thoughts of Little Dog grappling with their identity, trauma, and memory. Though, we must remember. Little Dog is writing not to himself but to his mother. And in his prose, the ghosts he grappled with are made clear. We, as readers, get to experience Little Dog write with and through intergenerational trauma, cultural displacement, language barriers, race, sexuality, and death itself.
My Personal Reflections
“Ma, I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.”
As I started to read fictional works such as this, I further realized that theory is nothing but a nascent outline of the worlds we enter daily. Hauntology provides a lucid lens in reading the characters and narrative but misses out on the ongoing material nature of “ghosts” in the world.1
Queering the reading would look at the power structures imbued in Little Dog’s relationships with his family, Trevor, and himself, but miss everything not in the domain of gender and sexuality.
Feminist theory would speak to Little Dog’s mom and grandmother’s experiences as gendered bodies against hegemonic structures but miss out on, (maybe controversially…), some of the biology behind it.
A Marxist reading would provide insight into the economic structures, socioeconomic status, and class struggles of all the characters, but it misses everything said before.
Then intersectionality says to take everything into consideration, and it becomes a great mess for better or for worse. I say this as a reminder that theory is a rather reductive tool. That humanity, us, we, and these characters often transcend upon these theories. 2
On The Good Life
For Class
Thinking about the first task of class, where we were told to imagine the good life here in time, I don’t think my idea of the good life has changed. It is the simple things in life that bring us joy, and recognizing that same capability of joy in others is a pretty good starting point for advocating for the collective good life. The roadblock to that goal, I see, is a problem in understanding the ineffableness of human experience. There might be some aspect of human life that doesn’t require the highest degree of scrutiny or is rather good simply because it is simple and stupid. And so existential speculation nor perfect rationality will get us there. 3 Though it may lead to a sort of cop-out answer that we should all just aspire to be virtuous actors.
The problem of how to do it together then gets complicated as a societal project. The tidbits from the Book of Delights and the thoughts of plenty of other philosophers highlight the latent power of meaning-making in the world. The good life really is just the ability to live out our values or find meaning in the world. From Aristotle’s “eudaimonia” to most likely even before then, humanity has known what it means to live a good life, but the tricky question is how.
A lot of the things we read in class were about alternatives, and existing options at that, to “open” the space of solutions and really get thinking about some of the fundamental pieces each mode of society needs to grapple with and what works in what context, how good life is not just economic freedom, but also how economics seem to be a really coercive means to freedom. Even in poverty, people still find happiness, or maybe that is just a story that says to ignore the enormous perils faced by not being materially well-off. In the end, I have gone a bit in full circle. In order to do it together, we need to not fall into our vices.