can you even imagine feeling differently than you do right now? i have felt so good. i daydream about a life that doesn’t consist of so much waiting to feel good, such pragmatism, meaningful experience penciled in. i tell myself what i tell everyone: it may not be your fault; it is your responsibility. if i don’t take it, i am half a person. when i felt myself separate from the world, its people, the earth, i felt no duty to our failures; only to my own. now, i feel released from the burden, that heavy need to achieve the unachievable with my one little life, to make every day worth living. but substance and substances, the new age and my new age, the wave and the ways, have made me one with it all (if i am a drop, i am the ocean, all water touches the shore) — and, oh, lord! i cannot take the guilt of what all that we have done.
1 < this is a footnote for this ^ image. it’s at the bottom! i don’t know how this works. can you click on it? who knows! see? life is a mystery.
i am always apologizing for myself. sorry, i was in the way. sorry, i behaved autistically, i embarrassed us both, not sure what that was about. ope, can i just sneak by you there. can i just, i’m sorry. can. can i. just. sorry. today my sorries are not my own, but i am sorry. it drags me to the ground repenting. sorry i couldn’t drag history into a more humane arc. sorry i couldn’t make my people revel in the mysteries, revere a little magic and keep it alive inside of them, sorry we refused to take our time instead of taking all these perfect things and turning them into things we don’t even need. we took it all and now there is almost nothing left and we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and we’ll scrape and scrape until the bottom falls out and i’m so sorry for it and for the first time i have an arrogance: i’m sorry the world isn’t more human, more like me.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.
and i’m glad the earth will shake us off and what comes next will have its shot at being better. i saw the marquee sign on the church and i read what it said and it said “be angry and do not sin” and i have thought about that every day. we are all so reasonably angry and no one reasonably believes that life will get better for us, no one on either side, on any side, believes it, not even close, not even the inches between the ear and the brain could change it. a death is not a revolution. maybe go ahead and believe something unreasonable. implausible. believe in a getaway, become a runaway. maybe you have heard ursula le guin on capitalism and kings,
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
but maybe you have not heard these words on where that transformation begins:
The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.
i wrote this one almost a year ago when i was pissed off about something but who knows even what it was, some sort of violence, there are so many kinds of violence in this country, violence turned inward and poured outward and they tell us it’s something other than violence when the government does it with its money or its bombs, which are the same thing2, or when a politician does it with his pen, or when a justice does it with his gavel, or when a cop does it with his boot. sorry, sir, about your ear, sir, i wish you a speedy recovery, sir. violence violence violence. condemned or condoned, here it comes.
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
don’t be so naive! we have to kill their kids and let our kids be killed and if you disagree you have a kid’s understanding of the world, leave the governing to the adults, the ones who tisk tisk in all directions from the center, they know so well what’s right. they know so well that things can never change they know so well that they are safe behind their pithy yard signs.
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
i want you to know that they don’t know shit and while i don’t have much faith that things will get better i do have faith that we are right and that in some way that does matter, or will matter. foster a little revolution inside of you. rub it against your friends. take your revolution onto a boat, take the boat onto a lake, keep it afloat. let it out in small ways and you will not save the world but you will make it a little better. i am so comforted that when it’s all over, we’re all going the same place, and all this human folly and suffering will be gone and all that will be left is our better nature, nature itself.
may i one day have the courage of my convictions.
this is on the cover of one of the first mississippi records mixtapes i ever bought (i have, conservatively, one hundred of them). i have thought of it so often without taking the time to find out where it is from. turns out it is poet mary ruefle, which is a fun coincidence, because i am reading a collection of her poems right now. here is an excerpt of a poem from ruefle’s collection that i love (i can’t find the poem online, but luckily i took a photo of it in the book) and a song from the mixtape that suits the spirit of this whole thing. we’re all going home, and it’s the same place.
