Held in the Palm

I went to an art gallery with my friend Alex. It was an unassuming white cottage on the west side of LA only minutes away from the beach. Daylight reflected off the rain-soaked streets through big Victorian windows. It was a singular room called the Zodiac Gallery with work by Zoë Ghertner.

I arrived slightly before Alex and chatted with the gallery owner. I’ve never studied art and don’t consider myself to know much about it, so I resorted to asking her questions, deflecting any turned back on myself lest she realize I wasn’t meant to be there. Alex arrives and easily slips into dialogue with the woman from her world. How she knows Zoë, recent shoots of Zoë’s, her background.

We amble around the room. Starting at the small white table in the middle before moving around the walls clockwise. She’s singularly focused, taking pictures of the photographs to return to for cinematic inspiration in her film. I’m in my head, projecting the contents of the inaccessible places of my mind onto the art. The print acting as my digestif to metabolize thoughts that lie hidden under the cover of daylight. I don’t think of the artist’s intention for the piece. It exists only in the capacity I want it to.

For the last few months my thoughts keep coming back to man’s place in nature. I’m in the mountains and I notice our roads artificially carved into the walls of granite and limestone. I’m on the beach and stare at the man-made groins designed to restrict longshore sediment transport. It’s quite exhausting really. That which is meant to be beautiful degraded by the ugly underbelly. I explain this so that you understand the background track playing in my mind while I take in the photographs.

The namesake piece is a close-up of a woman’s hand with beads of liquid mercury. I’m looking for a word that is what hydrophobic means for water but for human skin because I swear it was as though the liquid was trying to float above the hand to minimize contact as much as possible. If only that were an SAT prompt so I could check the answer key.

Jack London used to rub liquid mercury on himself thinking it would cure him of all illness which only caused him to develop mercury poisoning and die.

Many people have a middle school anecdote of someone in science class shattering a thermometer causing liquid mercury to go flying everywhere.

I would go on a tangent about irony of mercury being released into the air by burning fossil fuels, contaminating sediments, entering the bloodstream of the smallest fish which are then eaten by the medium fish which are then eaten by the big fish and finally by us where the mercury bioaccumulates, crossing the blood-brain barrier leading to neurological, gastrointestinal, kidney, cardiovascular, and developmental disorders. But I won’t get into it.

So how deliriously beautiful is it that she rests her palm, holding the deadly silvery liquid, allowing fate to run its course.

How often we let things happen to us out of denial of the truth. We can’t hold the concept of many awful things in our minds just like we can’t comprehend the notion of infinity so in both cases we replace it with a more comprehensible idea or nothing at all. We say that consciousness separates us from other species but we live so much of our life passively allowing ourselves to be carried downstream by the current.

I wrote an article in college called “Swimming Upstream” on the importance of resisting cultural influences that would turn us into sheep blindly following the leader rather than salmon swimming up against the current hurtling themselves up vertical walls of water. But the truth is I often feel like a sheep. Existing in a dissociative state from my body. My eyes often glaze over making me see the world in a haze like a mix between a static tv and distant heatwaves that rise of a concrete road on a hot day. I’ll be driving on autopilot and forget the last 10 minutes of turns I made. I tell myself I was made to dissociate in the car because otherwise I’d be too good of a driver.

In an overstimulating world, we are all numbed. Scrolling through hours of videos as a break from and for our brains. The ultimate paradox of the world being too much to actively take in so instead we passively consume mass amounts of media and information. I’ll admit to slightly enjoying this numbness. I couldn’t possibly be expected to exist in my mind and body all day. Living in the world is a Herculean task but so is living in our minds. It’s an aggravating distortion of images cut and superimposed on reality.

Mock me for referring to Zizek if you’d like but his writing hinges on the assertion that we live under dogmatic ideology in a sort of mental slumber where we aren’t aware of the ideological game we’re participating in. No matter our intentions, we make sense of the world through ideologies: religion, neoliberalism, socialism, postmodernism, pragmatism etc. The operative word our is used because I write all of this through the lens of ideology just as you read this through your own. I gravely apologize to those who believe they independently develop opinions.

Following October 7th, I held such disdain for people who support the state of Israel and saw them as nothing more than an ideological foot soldier. I went through what seemed like logical steps: I too went to Hebrew school and made art projects of the Israeli flag; I too was raised in a Jewish family that made me feel like anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism; I too have been called anti-Semitic slurs because my last name is overtly Jewish. But I stripped away that mental scaffolding and came to the conclusion that Palestine should have the right to self-determination. I said to myself, if I can do this why can’t everyone?

Though I could go on a whole tangent on the outrageous use of past genocide to justify current and future genocide, I will not. And while I do often feel that Zionists are “dogs of the US empire” to quote a tweet a friend sent me, what I fail to take into account is that my own arrival at any such belief is predicted on an entire set of ideology itself.

The curious thing about our perspectives being an overlaying set of ideologies is the contradictions that arise because of inconsistencies. I used to agonize that I couldn’t arrive at a coherent philosophy but now I see cognitive dissonance as wholly insurmountable.

I work at a nonprofit and spend time reading anti-capitalist discourse because I have the luxury of not having to pick a job a based on money or work multiple jobs to make ends meet because my parents profited off capitalism itself. So if I’m the beneficiary of the system how can I claim to be against the system? How can I enjoy shopping and watching runway shows when fashion to be an environmentally and socially exploitative industry? How can I enjoy skiing when it requires the retrofitting of mountains for human pleasure and extraordinary amounts of water to make man-made snow amidst rising temperatures? Some of you will be mentally answering that the system is to blame, not individuals. And that’s true but my stomach still twists into knots and my cheeks redden in shame at these thoughts.

I’m sitting on the beach right now. About a mile away from the gallery where mercury is held in the palm of the woman. The waves are crashing perpendicularly to the beach. These aren’t surfable waves because they don’t curl. I’ve learned this not because I know how to surf, not well at least, just because it’s one of those things you pick up when you spend time in Los Angeles.

The break edges closer and closer to me while I lay on my stomach writing this. I’m often interrupted by a friend sitting to my right in a bright red camping chair reading a copy of David Berman’s Actual Air which he bought second hand for $50 full of scratchings in the margins. Each time I come up for air I look just to my left and see three people with their backs to the water. It’s curious, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen people sit like this. Maybe I should move.