Notes On Survivor's Camp
A Brief Diversion
Quick diversion to build out a theoretical lens I want to use, don’t mind me.
In the fall of 2022 I had a breakthrough, or perhaps it was a breakdown. One of the two. I was being abused by my boss at my "dream job" doing I.T. for Tulane's Library and the HR department had made it abundantly clear that despite my nervous breakdown at the suggestion of having to continue working under my supervisor they were hell-bent on ensuring that I was to be thoroughly ignored & was expected to continue on pretending everything had been fixed somehow via their inaction.
Back at home was no better. I was closing on a year since Ida - while away on evacuation my house ahd been burgled. Two weeks later, my tires were stolen from my car. I was anxious and stressed at home but nevertheless was completely unprepared for my landlady (a dear friend of 17 years at that point) to kick me out so she could divorce her wife and fuck a 23 year old.
So what I truly didn't need was for her to move my move-out date up two weeks on me while I was simultaneously searching for a new job & was struggling to come up with money for a deposit for a new place.
After a week of throwing rash out (I soothed my anxieties post-burglary with a return to hoarding tendencies I'm deeply ashamed of), I switched to packing mode. I somehow landed the double somersault through the flaming hoops of "finding an apartment" and "finding a new job" and now it was time to move. Tick tock.
I'm going to pause here for a moment and reflect the chatter amongst my friends (as reported to me by my boyfriend):
"They keep asking if you're okay and I tell them 'I keep thinking "no", but somehow he keeps doing what he needs to do.'" And he was right - it's not like, a good thing, but as a 38-year oldgay man from New Olreans... man and it's so much more complex than that I promise... I have had to put one foot in front of the other and not look down too too many times.
But one evening, with the clock ticking particularly loudly in my ear, I found myself trying to dislodge a frustratingly struck shelf from a baker's rack. With neither the time nor the patience to find the rubber mallet that would be the "appropriate" tool to dislodge the shelf, I chose instead to grab the nearest "thwackable" object in my immediate proximity - a prayer candle to 'Our lady of Guadalupe' I purchased 'ironically' to be part of a strategy of de-stressing during the interview process for my first programming job (It's a long story) - and sucessfully loosened the first two corners of the stubborn shelf.
But the third thwack? Rather than finishing the job on the shelf, it finished the job on the candle. The glass erupted into shards and I, surprising myself I supposed, erupted in laughter. Of course, of course of course of course.
In hysterics, I stopped what I was doing and rather inexplicably stood fully clothed (& fully dry) in my shower. There were no windows in that bathroom so when I shut the door, I was completely in the dark I opened my notes app & wrote my frist pass on "Notes on Survivor's Camp" my personal variation on Sontag's "Notes on Camp" - an aesthetic/sensibility interested in the humor necessary to navigate the delta between your needs and your resources in times of crisis. Starting with those first notes from the shower, here are my "Notes on Survivor's Camp":
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART ONE. In the undifferentiated mass of existence - the real existence that we try to true the model we have in our mind to - we as queer people naturally understand that the perceptions other people have of things, their nature, etc. can be wrong (because they have been wrong of us) and so we lean on things that we know will support our weight as in this undifferentiated space regardless of how it may appear to those whose burdens are lighter.
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART TWO: The rest of the world now understands that a hairbrush is a microphone for someone whose voice was too big for the bathroom but there is so much more creativity that we, as queer people have unfortunately been forced to generate, that nevertheless needs shepherding back out to the world. This is a form of camp I don’t think Sontag ever noted - survivors camp.
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART THREE A huge part of why New Orleans is so queer friendly is because of survivors camp. We fundamentally understand the absurdities of say, a trans woman using her high heel to stomp the gun out of an attackers hand because it rhymes with the Dadaist absurdity of, say, a bar that’s using a generator to continue to serve their customers that just need a drink after Katrina took everything they had and they stared up at the sun of a new day with Red Cross and road home forms and well meaning If unhelpful fema folks. But for now, you have a bar with Christmas lights up because that’s what the generator will run, and they’re not charging you because what’s money actually mean in this undifferentiated space of now? In short, survivors camp.
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART FOUR: Throughout New Orleans there’s a tried-and-true refrain: “Ain’t dere no more.” No matter how great the ice cream at K and B was, it ain’t dere no more. No matter how many grade school sockhops had king cake from McKenzies - they ain’t dere no more either. The impermanence of greatness is a key foundation of survivors camp. We keep the quotidian markers of what we had - pill bottles and ice cream cartons and K and B Purple - we write songs about them and decorate our houses and refuse to forget them.
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART FIVE While a casual observer to the city may view the “ain’t dere no more” as a response to “acts of god” (gawd???), and while it’s true the city has conditioned itself to, in some ways, believe that, a good deal of the erosion of greatness is not because of Hurricane Ida, or Rita, or Katrina, or even Betsy or whomever else in the procession of saints wanted a piece of us, it was bad business deals (K&B sold to rite aid , Hibernia to capital one, etc), or bad business practices (McKenzies shut down after countless food safety violations)
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART SIX: A pitfall of survivors camp is that, in celebrating the thing that could bare the weight of the overburdened, that which overburdened the survivor is given an imprimatur of inevitability.
NOTES (APP) ON CAMP PART SEVEN: Survivors camp is necessarily (1) archival and (2) contextual. A blockbuster tape in your house in 1995 means something completely different than today.
NOTES PART EIGHT:
in a metamodern context, survivor's camp is thus not defined as the oscillation between abundance and scarcity but something closer to material needs - sufficiency and lack. The sublation of insufficiency into the novel and unexpected: i.e. the kludge.
NOTES PART NINE:
When found in a crisis - a point where the system has literally broken (or is about to break) - we are essentially dealing with the deconstruction of the system. If you have the resources, you rebuild the system more or less the way you found it (or better) but if you don't have the resources you now have two crises: (1) you don't have access to the system and (2) you don't have the resources to manage. If you can creatively resynthesize your environment (i.e. create a 'kludge') you are back down to just one crisis - however, now your resources are stretched thinner. Unless it's made clear that things are not equitable and resources reallocated evenly this causes one system to become more robust while another becomes more brittle.
This is my jumping off point on these notes for right now, but I'll return to them. This is a living document and is chiefly just a chance for me to share some of my thoughts as I'm thinking them...
