There are many things which Lucy Earle’s Inside The Ashes touches upon, alludes to, sits within, or defines in the negative. There are yet others which it addresses head on; fluctuating organically between the overt and covert aspects of its world. As a piece of flash fiction it’s an impressive feat of worldbuilding, defining its setting with an economy that never fails to be evocative or rooted in its characters. It likewise has much to say, even with its very lean word count, about both its world and our own. Any of the themes or concepts which it explores would make a fine subject for this response, but given our current theme, Lament Configurations, and its emphasis on architecture / systems, there is one particular element which I’d like to highlight.

“Behind her stands a tall slender building, casting a shadow on her path, reflecting the light around her…”

This is how the second sentence of the work begins, and the image of the tall slender building is repeated several times throughout. Towards the end we discover that held within this building, which our two protagonists sit mournfully across from, are the cremated remains of one of their fathers. His death and interment within the looming structure are representative of the collapse of both his daughter and a broader resistance movement which he was a leader of. The building also serves as some form of power base for those who killed him, and in turn have subjugated the world to an oppressive (and science fictional) network of control.

This brings forward an interesting facet of the contemporary world which I had not before considered; the architecture (or perhaps geography) of grief and trauma. For many of us, the source(s) of our trauma can be traced to particular neoliberal systems, either as they are expressed in the positive, (police violence, eviction, workplace injury) or in the negative (poverty, lack of medical care / mental health resources, austerity). And while the root causes of these forms of trauma and violence are broad and systemic, they are also manifested through particular agents, or nodes.

It was a specific hospital that we were turned away from, a specific store from which we were illegally fired, a specific street corner that we stood on when we looked at our bank account and realized we couldn’t make rent. Again, the actual causes of these issues aren’t individualized or geographically specific, but their expressions against us are. And we often have no choice but to revisit those places, as well as other places which are identical in their structure, branding and policy.

It’s true of course that people have always had to confront the sites of their trauma, especially those that occurred within the home; but unlike previous eras, the infrastructure of contemporary trauma is many magnitudes greater in scale. Scale in terms of not only literal size, (looming skyscrapers which can be seen across the city) but also also reach (companies which have dozens of storefronts in our own city alone) and ubiquity (state and corporate policies which are uniform not only geographically but also in terms of how they are applied, regardless of context or circumstance). The mass, dimension, and potency of our sites of trauma are greater than they have ever been before. And our ability to avoid them is the lowest it’s ever been.

We cannot afford to walk away from the company that exploited, cheated and harassed us. We cannot give up trying to receive medical treatment from the hospital that bankrupted us, profiled us, or refused to treat us. We cannot leave the apartment that hiked our rent, refused to perform basic maintenance, or which schemes to kick us out so it can be sold to condo developers. In part this is because the level of our precarity, our inability to meet our most basic needs, has steadily escalated since the invention of capitalism, and especially its reinvention as neoliberalism. Another significant component is that there are increasingly no alternatives.

All companies, hospitals and housing structures are increasingly identical, not only physically, but also in terms of their trauma-inducing modes of exploitation and control. Getting another job, seeking treatment elsewhere, or finding a new apartment (even if we actually had the option to do so) won’t materially change our circumstances, and may well not even change the appearance of our immediate surroundings. The locations of our greatest traumas have been systematized and mass produced all around us. We cannot escape them.

Just as the protagonists of Earle’s story sit across from the building that epitomizes and profits from all of the worst experiences of their lives, so too are all of us constantly forced to reinhabit the structures of our own undoing. To acquiesce to their limitations and modes of conformity, to interact with the people and policies which constructed them, and to be reminded at every step of our greatest traumas. Neoliberalism is, at its core, an architecture of extraction, exploitation and control, all things which unfailingly lead to trauma, and the scale and reach of that architecture looms higher than ever before.

As stated at the beginning of this response, this is only a single aspect of Inside The Ashes; merely the element which jumped out most at me. It is also personal, and heartbreaking, and speaks to many things, including the role and treatment of the arts under the current order. While brief, it has much to say, and is well worth reading, at least once if not multiple times.