It is said we live in an age of precarity. Every age has its own forms of precarity. When people think of precarity, they think of conflict zones or wealth inequality or certain bodies having official vengeance exacted upon them. When people thought of precarity, they thought of nuclear holocaust, periods of scarcity, the possibility of ending up as someone else’s property. They did not think of poetry, or they called it something else. What some people call courage others simply call life, because it is common and ineluctable and it goes until it ends, which is a process too synchronous to be called courageous, though courage is sometimes required to maintain its seriality. Some precarity is invited, while other precarity is inflicted. Invited precarity is also called privilege, which is a clinical kind of precarity that can be halted when it becomes too much like itself. Those subject to one species of precarity sometimes deny other kinds of precarity. The discrediting of certain types of precarity often involves the use of pronouns, and a pronoun is its own form of precarity. Precarity is not a condition or the mechanism through which precarity is evoked. Precarity is a noun mistaken for its adjectives. Precarity isn’t a concussion perpetrated against saints whose suffering necessitates investiture. A body inscribed with precarity becomes a text for everyone else. Admirers of precarity are in love with the productions of biography. A body that becomes precarious tries to tell itself through the text it is mistaken for. Trauma and courage are often used interchangeably, but they are not. Those furthest from precarity will often admire its body from afar while wishing it dead, from pity or attrition. Put it out of its misery is a popular sentiment expressed towards precarity. Precarity is at once susceptible and impervious to kindness; this is not a contradiction. Precarity as a body is an irreconcilable difference. Seen as a gesture that will terminate; as a movement that will end. As some would have it, a precipice: a loss of equilibrium in the moment before the fall. Precarity is understood by its readers (those who mistake the body for its condition) to be temporary, when in fact, the body and precarity share a vanishing point. Precarity is like a proper name: that which you did not give yourself; that which you cannot remit.
