Another animal reference this week, and fittingly we’ve moved on from the predators to the prey, with the short narrative work How to Break a Zebra by Quincy Kmetz. I wish I could say I’d planned that, but I’m not nearly so clever. There’s a lot more connective tissue between our previous inclusion and Kmetz’s short fiction than just allusions to animals however. Both pieces, in their equally disjointed but still distinctive ways, speak to the deep-rooted yet intangible pressures that we all must bend to under the current system.
As with You Can Only Turn Left, How to Break a Zebra perfectly threads the needle of both speaking plainly to the universal, systemic experiences that any and all of us must contend with, while still being deeply personal, if not necessarily autobiographic. Zebra is so affectingly personal, in fact, that there are sections which I do not pretend to fully understand; though this ambiguity is very much a strength and not a weakness. Spliced in amongst its relatable and appropriately understated depictions of contemporary life, are segments that speak so intensely to a singular lived history that one cannot hope to ever fully inhabit them. The work is essentially operating on two simultaneous frequencies, which, while never harmonious, are nonetheless highly charged while in tandem.
Throughout my first reading, several different object / spaces jumped out at me. Roadsides, porch lights, gasoline, office machinery, and especially mirrors, all possessed an undeniable weight to them. Each was instilled by the voice of the text with a sort of banal, ever-present…maliciousness? Not quite. Power, certainly, though a rather dull, barely-present type of power. Intent, also yes; though again, not really true intent but rather a sort of hollow into which intent can, and is expected to be, placed. Despite standing out so sharply, any words which I can ascribe to their impacts seem necessarily ambivalent.
Ultimately, these mundane but invasive symbols, each as much an expression of a system as an object, seemed to radiate a sort of malignancy by omission. Each one an outcropping of a much more deeply-laid vein of absence, formed beneath our feet by the undoing of those things which life depends on, but which cannot be made amenable to Capital and its goals, and which one can never truly put their finger on, even when at their greatest intensity.
This is not to say of course that active, directed maliciousness isn’t a significant part of contemporary existence. Obviously it is, but, due precisely to its more visible, point-to-able nature, it isn’t the frequency which does the most damage. The true, malignant force of our world-as-it-is, the unseen but highly charged wave which piggybacks under its more identifiable mechanisms, is not so much the clear and present harms of what Neoliberalism does and is, but rather the infinitely echoing silences of everything which it is not.
Within the physics of sound (at least according to Wikipedia) there is something known as destructive interference. This is when two intersecting waves, of equal but opposite frequency, cancel each other out. In other words, two sounds that, when heard together, sound like nothing. Importantly, however, despite their zero net sum, each wave within the interference must maintain its intensity to likewise maintain the negation which it feeds into. An absence of sound, born from the constant energizing and re-energizing of an invisible violence.
And it is this more violent and overcharged ambivalence which I think so perfectly encapsulates the contemporary experience. A sort of active cancellation of that which might work against the prevailing wave of late Capitalism, or attempt to grow outside its bounds. As though the very mediums of contemporary life itself, devoid of living and connective signals, filled their vacuum with a cancerous counter-wave. Thrumming down power lines and gas pump hoses, and dancing like heat waves over sun baked highways. Buzzing over our mirrors in windowless bathrooms, like the cicada song of fluorescent bulbs, softening everything at the edges in the worst possible way.
It is this inescapable negating presence, this Anti-Life Equation, (to be explicitly nerdy about it for a moment) which pervades our everyday spaces, and instills in them the dull, chewing-on-tinfoil ache of anxiety which is so distinctive to our era. It is also, I contend, the secret ingredient which renders Kmetz’s narrative vignettes within this work so impactful; and why they are able to operate so well even when fully disjointed from the larger context of their inhabitants’ lives. We do not need the backstory, the before-and-after of each scene, because we feel in them that unspoken anxiety which we already know too well. Which we live, and can see that Kmetz’s character live also.
Not to toot my own horn too much, (especially since, as stated above, the arrangement of the two works was not by design) How to Break a Zebra and You Can Only Turn Left work exceptionally well in conversation with one another. Which is precisely what was hoped for in putting together this archive. If we are all to be subject to the violent waves and counter-waves, the destructive interferences, of the Neoliberal order, then it is essential that we establish our own interferences as well. Our own frequencies, which, even if they cannot drown out the dominant ideology of our times, can at least survive within its flows, and offer alternate modes to those ready to hear them.
So, if you’re ready for some soft yet impactful horror, something of a more personal bent, then I highly suggest you take in Kemtz’s work; followed by Emiland Kray’s You Can Only Turn Left, if you haven’t likewise done so already. Within each, and between the two, there are no shortage of worthwhile frequencies to tune into.