Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell

Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell:


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“As is often the case with those who make disturbing art, he seems a person of integrity. Those in the public eye who go out of their way to seem benevolent, the supposedly squeaky-clean ones, are the ones to beware of. Nasty pretends to be nice, and vice versa.”


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“Mainstream entertainment, like mainstream religion, is used to control people. But there are threads that run through all religions and I see music in similar terms. Both religion and music provide ways of seeing the unseeable and a necessary escape from the sometimes unbearable harshness of reality. Ideas can be communicated about death and the worlds beyond the one we inhabit.”


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“Once I had been allowed to enter the movement, I decided it was rubbish, continuing a lifelong pattern of disowning my goals once they were achieved.”


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“Not only did this represent champagne aspirations on a beer budget, but Nick and I were attempting it without our partners. There were lessons to be learned: break up a winning team at your peril. Never overlook the contributions of your collaborators.”


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“Every artist who achieves longevity does so not just through the making of music, but the making of decisions, eventually thousands of decisions, starting with what to call themselves and who to play their demos to, through whether to sack their friend and go with a professional manager, which live agent to work with, and then on to the lifelong navigation of an endless series of suggested compromises.

The artists who thrive are not just the most musically talented but the most dedicated to their core values. There is a toughness required of this kind of work, but given that artistry is delicate, a dichotomous nature is necessary. That is the thread that has linked the artists I have worked most closely with. Extraordinary strength coupled with sensitivity that is so acute it is almost psychic.”


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“I was starting to realise that a large part of the creation of success was about ignoring the reasons it might not happen. Blocking out reality and getting on with it. Focusing on what I wanted to happen and how to get there, not the reasons it was unlikely to work.”


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“The process of songwriting and recording often involves wild oscillation between feeling immensely empowered – godlike is how some describe it – by one’s own abilities to make something out of nothing, and feeling like an idiot who is wandering around naked while everyone laughs. These extreme swings can occur in very short spaces of time and when they do you are fairly close to madness. The uncertainty of the creative process feels to me at times like chewing tin foil.

The manager of one huge artist proudly told me that he insists to the musicians he works with that they behave functionally. He said that he doesn’t buy into the idea that instability is intrinsically linked to creativity. Perhaps, I thought, he is just working with talent so mediocre that their behavior is as mundane as their music. Whatever abilities I possess feel like they are simply the flipside of the least functional parts of me. Dysfunctionality comes with gifts as a consolation prize. Whether a person is able to tap into these gifts is another question.

But no one whose art is really good tends to feel all that good for much of the time. Blissful happiness is an unlikely condition in any event and would certainly be an unusual place for a gifted person to inhabit, at least for long. The best a great talent can hope for is to reach some sort of an accommodation with themselves. An appreciation that they at least have something to show for their alienation.”


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“John Peel was an influential tastemaker, but I wanted to diverge from his approach as much as emulate it. He was probably the greatest champion of independent music ever because the way he chose which records to play was so ideologically powerful. His position was not that he would play good music, regardless. It was more political than that. If he perceived something was too pop, he would not play it.

So while John Peel was a supporter of Scritti Politti’s early singles and debut album for Rough Trade, Songs to Remember, he never played anything from their masterpiece, and one of my all-time favourite albums, Cupid & Psyche 85. This music was even better than their previous output but he did not support it. Green and co. had decamped to New York and made the music they dreamed of, which was R&B, with storied soul producer and arranger Arif Mardin. But Peel stopped playing them because he considered what they were doing too pop.

I didn’t wish to take this approach.

‘Indie’ to describe music was a term that was destined to become obsolete, and I didn’t want this type of ghettoization to happen to XL. I wanted to be able to back artists to be as ambitious as they saw fit. Equally, I wanted to discourage artists from being overly commercial if that meant their records would suffer. I wanted to work with the best artists and help them make the best music. I didn’t want to be tied down to an ideology that would get in the way of that. I didn’t want records to have to be commercial – like a major; equally, I didn’t want them to have to not to be – the way John Peel seemed to sometimes see it.”


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“Her approach owed something to punk, perhaps best summed up as: If it ain’t broke, break it.”


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“This book is not about sales figures or awards. Too many artists whose work is close to my heart have not achieved huge sales for me to think of units sold as what is important. Commercial success is a measure of something outer; not necessarily anything deeper. The record industry’s obsession with figures is limiting and stifles creativity. Music that reaches a lot of people but has no substance is of no interest. Music that has depth but only reaches a small audience is often the most important and long-lasting.”


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“I just knew that whatever we did needed to be a celebration, and that I had to have faith that something special would manifest. The principle I tried to stick to was that the absence of doubt would lead to success. Commit to the process, don’t waste time thinking about whether it will or won’t work, and execute to the best of your ability. The rest will take care of itself.”


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“Coincidences are ‘God’s way of staying anonymous.’ They are a reassurance that there is a flow and it’s useful to note and appreciate them when they occur.”


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Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman

Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman:


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“Regardless of specificity, solidarity always requires awareness, self-criticism, consciousness, the decision to act, and the need to create strategy, to build alliances, and to listen. It always requires taking chances, making mistakes, and trying again.”


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“The US entertainment industry is one of the last places a person can find solidarity.

Most corporate-produced culture is filled with terrible values, is blatantly retrograde or – at best – meaningless, which is its own politic. The product exists to make money for people who have fun solving intense but tightly focused problems. Its social function is to create individuals who can feed the need for fame, upon which American marketing depends. A friend once pointed out to me that America’s greatest exports are film/TV and weapons, and most of the highest-grossing films and TV glorifies violence in a way that serves as advertisement for weapons.

I am not the only person who reads incredible reviews for plays or movies or TV shows that turn out to be banal, repetitive, or nonsensical. Part of the problem is that print and online critical publications are tied to the marketplace. Critics mostly write about books or actors or writers or filmmakers who have a new product on the market right now, rather than works that the critic feels illuminate our current moment.

It occurs to me that most (not all) of these institutions that drive me crazy have historically and consistently excluded, watered down, or marginalized the more interesting and necessary ideas in any given period. Risky and exciting movements of forward-thinking people were usually debased or ignored, while avoidant or repetitive work was elevated and glorified, and then given awards. This system of repetition is reinforced psychologically by the creation and strict maintenance of a scarcity-based concept of an elite. If an artist or intellectual or activist or any combination thereof is looking for non-market-based support adequate to live safely and comfortably while following their gifts full-time, it’s literally a MacArthur or nothing. Repetitive ideas are selected by gatekeepers, elevated by critics, rewarded with prizes, and branded as good and important, when they are often actually stagnant. We have collectively underestimated the ultimate danger of that entrenched cycle. It turned out to be far more sinister than just boring, as corporate entertainment sells bad values about humans being expendable and worth destroying when compared to the risk of losing social status or influence with funders. Cultural producers should be joining the large numbers of people trying to stop this war on Gaza, but either being quiet or supporting the killing is actually consistent with the norm.”


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“What makes it so confusing is their embedded accompanying system of self-praise telling us repeatedly that the repetitive, banal ideas in mass circulation are special and deserve reward. Year after year we are told through many selections at elections, through promotions or even the Oscars, Tonys, Pulitzers, and the full range of intellectual and citizenship awards in corporate marketing venues, that irrelevant products deserve to be the focus of our attention and should be replicated. This reinforces the idea that the way things are is not only great, but the best. This merry-go-round debases and marginalizes risky, exciting movements of forward-thinking people while elevating and glorifying avoidant work that pretends away the most important questions of our time: Who has the power, and why?”


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“It was a cultural moment that made white writers look in the mirror and wonder if we have been confusing it with a window.”


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Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore:


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And how this happened for me too – twenty years ago, when my chronic pain first became debilitating and I couldn’t write like I used to, in frantic bursts trying to get everything out. So I decided to write a few sentences a day, with no intention of plot or structure, and after a few years I was shocked to find I had over four hundred pages. And that text became my second novel.


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How music always carries the memory of when you first heard this music. How this can be a burden. How this can be glorious. How this can be suffocating. How this can make you shake. How this can make you sing. How this can make you dance. And this can be true of visual art too.

Sometimes, when the CD skips, I think maybe I should stop listening to CDs. And sometimes, when the CD skips, I think this is what it feels like to really love something.


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Gladys saw herself as a contemporary artist, so she didn’t want to be defined by the past. She wanted her art to be considered on its own. But then Bobby wrote the catalog copy, and she rejected it. So someone else was hired to write it.

Bobby says Gladys was not a risk-taker, she was fiercely competitive with herself and how she saw herself among Baltimore artists, but she turned her back on the professional art establishment, and after that she didn’t pursue a professional career, and you can’t expect the world to come to you. She enjoyed the process of painting, and put that above anything else.

Like many artists of her generation, Bobby says, Gladys made the mistake of thinking that genius will be discovered.


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When someone asks what is your writing process, I think it must be to try and try and then finally, in the gap between the limits of my body and the possibility of pulling something through, somewhere in that gap—


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Maybe a different way to say history repeats itself would be to say history never resolves itself. History is a lesson, this may be true, but, as with any other lesson, the people who need it the most rarely listen.


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Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman

Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman:


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I find it hard to pretend like something is happening all the time. I resist, in fiction, the notion that you must write the boring stuff to make the parts you’re excited to write about more believable. If something makes you go dim, I think you should avoid it.


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But I want to be a kind of reader as I write. That means not knowing what’s up ahead.


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I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV.


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Did I say that a large majority of books in the lesbian romance genre are poorly written? This is the case for hetero and other queer romances, too. It’s an asshole thing to say but no less true. The genre does not regard language as a living force, as an inhabitable space, a space for encounter. Rather, each sentence tends to be treated as if it were a sharp-edged container with one function. Like: point. Or: explain. Or: dramatize. It goes: “Lucy opened the refrigerator.” “I drove home.” “We looked at each other with heat in our eyes.” “Doug nodded.” “Bess was puzzled.” “After everything that happened yesterday, Morgan knew what she needed to do.” In a way, these are the sentences we live with. Maybe we don’t say them, but this is what we’re acting out all day, and someone had the bright idea, yes, let’s use these sentences for writing. Conversely, though, literary fiction is bad with love. Very very bad. Like ugh, could this be any more devastating, any heavier or more hopeless? I do it too. I leave my characters sitting on hilltops for all eternity. I have them being swept out of a familiar world into an unknown and dangerous one. People walking the streets desperately alone, fleeing a crisis they can’t even see. So… yeah… could I write something that made people feel good – women, I guess, or people who were excited to see women fall for each other – and could the language have some aliveness to it? Be porous? Be responsive? Make atmospheres?


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When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.


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Some passages from The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo

Some passages from The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo:


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In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.


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I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.


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When dealing with power – the power of employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.


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This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.


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Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

Some passages from Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir:


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The dominant issue bringing people into my office for psychoanalysis is the sense that, after sacrificing so much to achieve the lives they had dreamed of, they’re unable to experience the pleasure they had expected to accompany those ideal lives they labored to construct.


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“Look at your aggressiveness,” Winnicott writes in a letter; “…it provides one of the roots of living energy.” By numbing aggression, as by supressing anxiety, you may avoid conflict with those around you, but you will also lose access to the taproot, the ability to feel creative, alive, connected to others, real. By harnessing your living energy – aggressiveness, anxiety, primitive destructive impulses, savage complexity, you can, as McGonigal suggests, “use some of this energy, some of this biochemistry to make choices or take actions that are consistent with what matters most.” 


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One of the exercises in clown school was to take the stage with others and spontaneously create a game. The first initiated action functions as a proposal that is then collaboratively developed through improvisation. When I performed this exercise, one of the actors onstage with me lifted his shirt and another spontaneously slapped his belly. We then created a game of shirt-lifting and belly-slapping.

However, as anyone who has participated in a group project knows, there is invariably an alpha participant, who, believing they have an idea superior to the one at hand, directs their energy toward changing course, switching from shirt-lifting and belly-slapping to some other game that has been proposed by them that is more in line with how they would like to be perceived.

One of the most meaningful lessons I learned in clown school was offered by Bayes in the moment when one of the actors onstage with me tried to do just that. “There is no better game,” he admonished, “than the one you’re playing.”

Or, as in driving, always turn your wheel in the direction of the skid –


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Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)

Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels):


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The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”


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Some books are written to be read, others only to have been written.


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Along the lines of thinking the glass is half full or half empty, some people who believe they’re in danger of dying are in fact in danger of living.


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Proverb for artists: when art fails, chance succeeds.


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Rumour is certainly related to fantasy, but it can also be related to tactics.


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To be the object of ridicule, but to put on a good show.


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Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe:


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I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.


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There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.


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Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.

Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.

Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.


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Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.

I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.


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Some passages from What Love Looks Like

Some passages from What Love Looks Like: A Conversation with Tim DeChristopher by Terry Tempest Williams:


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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: A while back I was reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on historical Jesus. Do you see Jesus as a historical figure in terms of leadership?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I do view him as an example of a revolutionary leader.

TERRY: How?

TIM: Well, he was saying very challenging things both to the people who were following him and to the dominant culture at the time. And it led to some radical changes in the way people were living and the way people were structuring society.

TERRY: What would you view as the most radical of his teachings?

TIM: Turning the other cheek, I think, is one extremely radical thing. That, I think, is his powerful message about civil disobedience. And the other, which might be even more radical, is letting go of material wealth. That’s so radical that Christians today still can’t talk about it. I mean, he said it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven. And he told his followers to drop what they had, to let go of their jobs, to let go of their material possessions. Even let go of their families. If they wanted to follow him, they had to let go of everything they were holding onto, all the things that brought them security in life. They had to be insecure. That’s pretty radical.


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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be? Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial, or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.

TERRY: Coming out of college?

TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.

TERRY: In terms of climate change.

TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s — but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

TERRY: When was this?

TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future — of a career and a retirement and all that stuff — I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.


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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Here’s an idea that I want to know what you think of: Laurance Rockefeller, as you know, came from a family of great privilege, and he was a conservationist. And in his nineties, he informed his family that the JY Ranch — the piece of land in Grand Teton National Park that his father, John D. Rockefeller, set aside for his family — would be returned to the American people. This was a vow he had made to his father. And he was going to “rewild it” — remove the dozens of cabins from the land and place them elsewhere. Well, you can imagine the response from his family. Shocked. Heartsick. Not pleased. But he did it anyway, and he did it with great spiritual resolve and intention. He died shortly after. I was asked to write about this story, so I wanted to visit his office to see what he looked out at when he was working in New York. Everything had been cleared out, except for scales and Buddhas. That was all that was in there. I was so struck by that. And his secretary said, “I think you would be interested in this piece of writing.” And she disappeared and she came back, and this is what she handed me: [Reading] “I love the concept of unity and diversity. Most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say, ‘This was right, that was wrong’; the difference was a feather. I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that. They’re a symbol of my awareness. Of the distortion most people have of what is better and what is not.” How would you respond to that? The key sentence, I think, is, “The difference was a feather.”

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, the difference is a feather. I guess that’s why I believe that we can be powerful as individuals. Why we actually can make a difference. The status quo is this balance that we have right now. And if we shift ourselves, we shift that scale. I remember one of the big things that pushed me over the edge before the auction was Naomi Klein’s speech that she gave at Bioneers in November of 2008. She was talking about Obama, and talking about where he was at with climate change, and the things he was throwing out there as campaign promises, you know, the best things he was offering. And she was talking about how that’s nowhere near enough. That even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough. And she talked about how, ultimately, Obama was a centrist. That he found the center and he went there. And that that’s where his power came from. She said, “And that’s not gonna change.” And so if the center is not good enough for our survival, and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center. And that’s what she ended the speech with: “Our job is to move the center.” And it was so powerful that we actually got the video as soon as we could and replayed it at the Unitarian church in Salt Lake, and had this event one evening where we played that speech and then broke up into groups and talked about what it meant to move the center. And what I came away from that with was the realization that you can’t move the center from the center. That if you want to shift the balance — if you want to tilt that scale — you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push.


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Read the entire interview here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-love-looks-like



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Some passages from The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza

Some passages from The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall by Alicia Garza:


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Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves then they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. We inherit movements. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.



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Recently I was in a staff retreat with my team at the Black Futures lab, an organization I started in 2018 to make Black communities powerful in politics. We were discussing a breakdown in communication, trying to get to the root of how it happened, ostensibly so we could avoid it happening again. At a certain point in the conversation, the facilitator interrupted and said, “When I was growing up and I would get into an argument with my mother, she would say to me, ‘What happens between us is half yours and half mine.’ I want to encourage you all to take that approach here – how would the story of what happened change if you all acknowledged that what happened between you is half yours and half theirs?” I found that to be a helpful intervention…



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How do we make new mistakes and learn new lessons rather than continue to repeat the same mistakes and be disillusioned to learn that they merely reproduce the same results?



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Many of my teachers, trainers, and mentors have fallen into a pattern of making their political circles smaller and smaller rather than bigger and wider – whether that be in formal organizations or efforts that are organized but not housed in organizations. They look for people who think like them – who experience the same anxiety about having to engage in a world where not everyone thinks like you – and have adopted the idea that finding a group of people who think like you and being loud about your ideas is somehow building power. To be fair, we all to an extent look for our tribes, look for the places where we belong and where we can just be ourselves. But when it comes to politics, when it comes to governing, when it comes to building power, being small is something we cannot afford. And while I feel most comfortable around people who think like me and share my experiences, the longer I’m in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn’t about finding your tribe – it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals. It’s about being able to solve real problems in people’s lives, and it’s about changing how we think about and express who we are together.



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Some are surprised to learn that movements for justice can be guilty of the same dynamics they seek to challenge. I have been to thousands of meetings, conferences, convenings, gatherings, and campaigns that failed to live, in practice, the world they claimed to want to bring into existence. Even the most radical organizations often fall short of their stated ideals. I’ve lost count of how many times organizations would state a value like “sisters at the center” and then pretend not to notice that women did the bulk of the emotional and administrative work while men did the bulk of the intellectual work. More than that, I spent ten years of my life in an organization comprising a majority of women of color, from the membership to the staff, and yet the few men in the organization watched those women do the bulk of the work of building with members, recruiting new members, organizing community meetings, setting up for and cleaning up after those meetings, navigating the difficult dynamics of coalitions and alliances, raising money for the organization, and responding to crises in the membership, while they waxed poetic with other men about what the movement needed to be doing and where it needed to go.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been referred to as sister, queen, and the like by my peers in movements and yet been offered no vision in those organizations for how the work we did would affect my quality of life. It seemed as though I was there not as a strategist, not as a tactician, not as a group builder but instead as a means to someone else’s – usually a heterosexual man’s – improved quality of life.



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Decentralizing leadership, however, is not synonymous with having “no leaders.” Decentralization means distributing leadership throughout the organization rather than concentrating it in one place or in one person or even a few people.

Occupy Wall Street designated itself as “leaderless.” Everyone was a leader and no one was a leader. All that was required was that you show up.

The problem, however, was that simply declaring that there were no leaders didn’t mean there weren’t any. And declaring that there were no leaders didn’t address the fact that not only were there leaders but those leaders struggled to not replicate the leadership they were fighting against. Leadership was largely male, largely heterosexual, largely white, and largely educated at elite universities. If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power and we are not creating change – we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions.



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Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız

Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız:



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I knew I was right – a prison break would constitute an action taken against the enemy. If I’d been able to use the opportunity it would have been a good hit. Probably I was too optimistic, but this dream was just too beautiful.


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It was just too strange. All those guys who supposedly loved me so passionately tended to idolize me. They hardly dared love me, they said, because of my goddess-like nature. But with their clumsy, unbounded, disrespectful, and cheap declarations of love, they essentially smashed an idol that they’d created. Their emotional world contained a drive to dominate others. Where did their woolly feelings begin, where did they end, what were they based on, and what were they good for? On the one hand, these men were secretive, egotistical, and individualistic; on the other, they were crude, exuberant, and absolute. At any moment their supposed love could flip over into a desire for revenge.


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The woman friends I’d brough in lost confidence in me, saying my dreams were beautiful but impractical. That was bad. Yes, I lived in an exorbitant fantasy world, but the actions I fantasized about were doable. The question was, should we take risks and allow ourselves to dream, or avoid risks and reject dreams? I always preferred to take risks, and that was the choice I made my whole life.


*


At the hospital, we sat together in the waiting room for a while. The men wanted to know what had been done to us, and I told them what we’d been through. Fatma was silent. Her coldness was hard to take even in normal times, but now we were sharing our journey to death together. Everything about her was calculated and measured. What a strange person she was. I believe in recognizing life’s beautiful sides. I wanted to die laughing and dancing. I think only those who know how to value life are ready for death. Otherwise, neither life nor death has any particular meaning.


*


In prison, these events gave us strength and hope – and not just us but prisoners from other political organizations too. Some accused us, once again, of reckless adventurism – we’d heard that a lot when we first got to prison, especially from Kurdish leftists. They said it was madness to wage an armed struggle against the junta, which would then take revenge on the civilian population. But they feared the enemy more than they cared for the people. They thought of the enemy as an invincible, all-powerful force. When things got hot, instead of fighting him, they preferred to take a break. When the enemy proclaimed that he had annihilated all revolutionary thoughts, they believed him. Ultimately they just didn’t believe in revolution.


*


Her knowledge was of such immeasurable value that we tolerated her sometimes obnoxious behavior. She tended to squabble and interfere in everything. When bickering erupted, and women got angry at her, I tried to calm the waters by emphasizing Mevlüde’s positive qualities. But Mevlüde herself never shied from conflict. Replying to the general criticism of her, she said, “In the past I was worse – sometimes I couldn’t adapt at all. That’s why the friends sent me home. But I’m beginning to change myself and my behavior here.”


*


I thought of my own escape attempt back in Malatya. What a beautiful night! I’d been overjoyed, as if I’d done some important action. I’d actually succeeded in getting physically outside. I’d told myself, Now I’ve done the hardest part, I’m home free. I thought I’d really escaped. I imagined telling the friends about my successful escape. It was like a movie: August 20, 1980, the only beautiful night in Malatya! But no, I just made it to that point and didn’t know what to do next. I hadn’t done enough planning, and I didn’t know the area, so my success was short-lived. If I could have walked directly into a forest, I would’ve made it. In the mountains you can always hide, they provide protection. It was probably worse to be captured outside than to have not tried at all. If you’re too weak or clumsy, faint-hearted, or otherwise unable to even try something, that’s understandable. But to succeed at the hardest part, and still have enough strength to keep going, yet ultimately fail because you didn’t think far enough ahead or because you are overconfident and drunk with success… Did I enjoy taking risks? Being a victim? Making sacrifices? I had to think more about the concept of sacrifice. It had all started when I got angry. Conventional wisdom has it, “Those who stand up in anger, sit back down damaged.” But of course that was no justification.


*


In love there should be no lies or roughness. Yes, I was a dreamer, prone to illusions. My attitude toward love was utopian. Meanwhile I thrived on conflict. A moment without struggle was like torture for me. It was struggle that made life worth living and gave me strength.



.

Some passages from We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

Some passages from We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba:


*


So, maybe I just have a different perspective and I talk to a lot of young organizers - people reach out to me a lot because I’ve been organizing for a long time - I’m always telling them, “Your timeline is not the timeline on which movements occur. Your timeline is incidental. Your timeline is only for yourself to mark your growth and your living.” But that’s a fraction of the living that’s going to be done by the universe and that has already been done by the universe. So, when you understand that you’re really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, you just are, then it’s a freedom, in my opinion, to actually be able to do the work that’s necessary as you see it and to contribute in the ways that you can see fit. So, I think that’s my answer to that.

And self-care is really tricky for me, because I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care, I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other. How can we collectivize the care of children so that more people can feel like they can actually have their kids but also live in the world and contribute and participate in various different kinds of ways? How do we do that? How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people that are not just our prayer warriors, but our action warriors who are thinking through with us? Like, I’m not just going to be able to cook this week, and you have a whole bunch of folks there, who are just putting a list together for you and bringing the food every day that week and you’re doing the same for your community, too.

I want that as the focus of how I do things and that really comes from the fact that I grew up the daughter of returned migrants, African-returned migrants. I don’t see the world the way that people do here, I just don’t. I don’t agree with it, I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves and I just don’t subscribe. And for me, it’s too much with, “Yeah I’m going to go do yoga and then, I’m going to go and do some sit-ups and maybe I’ll like, you know, go to…” You don’t have to go anywhere to care for yourself.

You can just care for yourself and your community in tandem and that can actually be much more healthy for you, by the way. Because all this internalized, internal reflection is not good for people. You have to be able to have… Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay, but then you need to test it in the world, you’ve got to be with people. So, that’s important. And I hate people! So, I say that as somebody who actually is really anti-social… I don’t want to socialize in that kind of way but I do want to be social with other folks as it relates to collectivizing care.


*


You can’t force somebody into being accountable for things they do. That is not possible. People have to take accountability for things that they actually do wrong. They have to decide that this is wrong. They have to say, “This is wrong and I want to be part of making some sort of amends or repairing this or not doing it again.” The question is: What in our culture allows people to do that? What are the structural things that exist? What in our culture encourages people who assault people and harm people to take responsibility? What I see is almost nothing.


*


Not only is it true that punishment doesn’t work, but also when you prioritize punishment it means that patriarchy remains firmly in place. And if I am at my core interested in dismantling systems of oppression, I have got to get rid of punishment. I have got to do it. But I want accountability. I want people to take responsibility. I want that internal resource that allows you to take responsibility for harms that you commit against yourself and other people. I want that to be a central part of how we interact with each other. Because while I don’t believe in punishment, I believe in consequences for actions that are done to harm other people. I do. I think boundaries are important. I think all these things are really important. But with punishment at the centre of everything we haven’t been able to really address the other stuff that needs to happen. Because people fucking need to – they need to take accountability when they harm people.


*


Oh my gosh. You’re asking me great hard questions. I keep threatening to write an essay called “Abolition Is Not About Your Fucking Feelings.” I wrote that in a tweet and got so much blowback because people felt like I was insulting their ability to feel what they want to feel. That’s really not what I’m saying. The concept of the personal being political as a basis for feminist organizing in the past is so true, and yet it is so fraught at the same time. What it’s not saying – and I think what sometimes people want it to be saying – is that how I personally feel then should be made into policy. And we can’t operate in a world where that’s true. We shouldn’t codify our personal feelings of vengeance to apply to the entire world.


*


Also, I really feel like over the years I’ve learned myself better. And that helps you to figure out what your actual boundaries are. And also, boundaries are usually a negotiation between what you want and what other people want. It’s not like a firm, set thing. You have to get really good at being able to negotiate. And the only way to do that is to know who you are.


*


It’s like, why? You’re going to burn out. It’s not humanly possible for you to just be your Lone Ranger self out there in the world. Ella Baker’s question “Who are your people?” when she would meet you is so important. Who are you accountable to in this world? Because that will tell me a lot about who you are.

And how much hubris must we have to think that we, as individuals, will have all the answers for generations’ worth of harm built by millions and millions of people? It’s like I’m on a five-hundred-year clock right now. I’m right here knowing that we’ve got a hell of a long time before we’re going to see the end. Right now, all we’re doing as organizers is creating the conditions that will allow our collective vision to take hold and grow.



.

Some lines from the first two volumes of Susan Sontag's diaries

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From Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963




I am not myself with people […] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.


*


The world is cluttered with dead institutions.


*


Life is suicide, mediated.


*


There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today (when I went up to 122 Boulevard Saint-Germain to check for her mail) in Harriet’s journal about me – that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concluded by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us)… Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will Harriet ever read this?


*


Harriet said something very striking yesterday, apropos of Sam W.’s enormous library, that collecting books in that way was “like marrying someone in order to sleep with him.”

True…

Use libraries!!


*


Inspiration presents itself to me in the form of anxiety.


*


I told her tonight she is always putting me in the position of saying “I’m sorry.”

She told me to go read a sex manual. 


*


From As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980




A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings.


*


One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinion that the other thinks too much.


*


If I can’t bring judgement against the world, I must bring it against myself.

I’m learning to bring judgement against the world.


*


Every act is a compromise (between what one wants + what one thinks is possible.)


*


Ivan searching for a reply to something I said: “Wait… I can taste it but I can’t yet find the words.”


*


I suspect now that lusting after the good isn’t what a really good person does.


*


Thoreau on his death bed – on being asked what were his feelings about the next world: “One world at a time.”


*


The extraordinary frequency with which the plot of a serious contemporary novel turns on, or resolves itself, by a murder – compared with the extreme unlikelihood that the educated writers of vanguard fiction have ever been anywhere near a murder in their lives.



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Some passages from Believers by Lisa Wells

Some passages from Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells:


*


One of the ways we humans organize and make sense of our experience is through the telling of stories. And the stories we tell, in turn, have profound effects on how we relate to ourselves and to those entities on which our lives depend. Many of us are learning that the stories we inherited are not only suspect but in large part responsible for the threats we now face and will visit upon our heirs: the story of infinite growth, of survival of the fittest; the story of human supremacy, and, incongruously, an innate human selfishness and propensity to destroy. Chiefly, the story that tells us that we are separate from the whole, at once alienated from the broader community of life and above its laws of ecological reciprocity.

New stories are in order, but often the dominant culture responds to the crisis at hand by replicating old themes. Features about doomsday preppers, Silicon Valley tech bros with “go bags” and ATVs, million-dollar compounds in decommissioned missile silos in central Oklahoma (my particular vision of hell) – stories about life support systems devised to keep self-interested individuals alive while the rest of us burn. Stories that are, of course, no deviation at all from the dominant narrative. Perhaps the fullest expression of this lack of imagination is the techno-utopian dream of colonizing other galaxies, as if colonization wasn’t at the root of our trouble but its solution: the ultimate geographic cure. Even if some eccentric but benevolent billionaire invented a machine to spirit the human race to outer space (big if), it’s delusional to think we wouldn’t take our problems with us.

It seems to me there is a surplus of terror and delusion in the ether, but spare few visions of how you and I, relatively ordinary people, might live otherwise. I believe the future of the world depends on those visions. If our descendants are alive and well in a hundred years, it will not be because we exported our unexamined lives to other planets; it will be because we were, in this era, able to articulate visions of life on earth that did not result in their destruction.


*


Put bluntly, one of the greatest barriers to realizing energy independence is our addiction to stuff – to having what we want whenever we want it. It may be true, as Finisia and her crew sometimes said, that it’s easier to jump off a structure that is standing than a structure that is collapsing, but so long as the structure stands, most people will – in ignorance or out of fear or habit – return to its eaves when the rain arrives. This is why some frustrated rewilders I’ve spoken to doubt very much that consciousness-raising will create lasting change. Change will come when the collapse of our current way of life demands it. Communal subsistence living inevitable results in periods of discomfort and strained relationships, and so long as warm beds and Netflix and grocery stores exist, most people will return to those comforts when the going gets tough.

That’s why Peter believes social skills like cooperation and conflict management are far more crucial than the so-called hard skills of wilderness survival. And that’s why Todd Wynward believes that that if it’s just up to us, we’re fucked, that spiritual conviction is required to bridge the divide.


*


“Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul,” wrote the seventeenth-century philosopher-priest Nicolas Malebranche. If we believe him, it follows that whatever commands our attention will determine the form of our god. If we mainly train our attention of the screens of our devices – that’s one kind of prayer. If we train it on the dirt, or the birds, or the faces of those we love – that’s another. Most of us run a gauntlet of rotating concerns, with little agency over the convulsions of our minds. Or else we forgo agency entirely and remit our attention, via any number of substances, to a high. In any case, our preoccupations become objects of worship.


*


Human beings are social animals, and it’s a central paradox of human life that other people should confront us with our most difficult problems while possessing our only hope for a solution. “That’s life,” to quote Sinatra. A cynic might call it pharmakon – we are, at once, each other’s poison, scapegoat and remedy. However you want to cut it, we require other people to survive, to love, to be loved by, to reflect that we exist in time. Or at least, we used to.

In a technocentric society, isolation – or the illusion of isolation – is not only possible, it is increasingly unavoidable. But for most of human history, isolation meant death; so human cultures, by necessity, developed ceremonies, laws, rituals, and stories to redress common conflicts that arise between people and to teach their members how to live in accord. Metabolizing conflict while maintaining the bonds of the group was not so much a moral endeavor as a practical one.

What becomes, then, of a people who invent a way to live without relying on others directly? I think we’re finding out.

As is true of other survival skills we’ve lost, social skills atrophy with disuse, and once our survival no longer depends on our togetherness, what impetus do we have to tolerate the conflict, confusion, and vulnerability that are the price of relationship? I’m not certain that it’s possible to sustain communalism long-term based on ideas alone. So long as there exists a more comfortable world to defect to – even if that world is laced with depression, anxiety, and isolation – we will be tempted to take the out.

This goes for noncommunal endeavors as well. Time and again I hear stories about idealistic people, wholly devoted to worthy causes, who wind up tearing one another apart over relatively minor disagreements before retreating to their former lives of quiet desperation.


*


I’m interested in the limit of forgiveness. Where it is, and why, and how some people are able to forgive those who’ve done them the greatest harm, often when they haven’t earned it.

Just reading reports from Standing Rock, I found my mind drifting into violent fantasy. A part of me wanted the police and the corporate VPs and private security people to feel the pain they’d inflicted, to be hit with hoses in freezing temperatures, to have their snarling dogs turn against them – and it wasn’t my home that had been invaded. This was a problem. Not because violence isn’t warranted in defense of the planet but because the violent fantasies of a distant observer like me might serve a shadow purpose.

If there is such a thing as evil, I presume Big Petroleum is high on the list. But it’s a divided self who daydreams about eviscerating the hocks of an economy in which she participates. And if those violent daydreams provide catharsis, if they serve to further distance her from her own culpability, to mutilate that which implicates her, and thereby help her dodge the imperative to effect material change – then aren’t those fantasies an extension of the evil at hand? And so long as we’re at it, why not acknowledge that by she and her I mean me.



.

Some passages from Writing in Space by Lorraine O’Grady

Some passages from Writing in Space, 1973–2019 by Lorraine O’Grady:


*


I wanted to set up a situation where the movement back and forth between the experience of the piece and the process of hearing me talk about it might be disorienting, might create the feeling of anxiously watching your feet as you do an unfamiliar dance.


*


Dancers, for instance, who use multi-media are adding new props, but they are still trained bodies moving in space, no matter how outrageously. That is why they offer more audience satisfaction and are more traditionally successful than artists and writers doing performance. And why they are much less interesting.


*


That first week, I went to the Eighth Street Bookstore to look for books on visual art. The first book that attracted me looked like no other I’d seen before. It was a small-format book, wider than it was high, and had a strange red cover totally filled with print. It was Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. It was the first art book I ever read, and it totally changed my life. It was an almost artless chronicle catalog of documents and events, and I’m sure Lucy never anticipated that someone would read the book from cover to cover, but I did. By the time I finished that history of the conceptual art movement and all its subgenres – performance art, body art, earth art, and so on – I said to myself, “I can do that, and what’s more, I know I can do it better than most of the people who are doing it.” You see, I was always having those ideas, but I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know they could be art, and until then, I hadn’t been in a position, in an intellectual milieu to discover it. After that, the struggle became focused: to discover what my art was, where it came from in me.


*


One of my personal cognitos, a favorite is: “I dance therefore I think.”


*


The one advantage art has over other methods of knowledge, and the reason I engage in it rather than some other activity for which my training and intelligence might be suited, is that, except for the theoretical sciences, it is the primary discipline where an exercise of calculated risk can regularly turn up what you had not been looking for.


*


I spent all of the 1980s and the 1990s feeling “God, will it never end? Will they never stop taking up all the room, stop speaking for themselves as though speaking for everyone?” The death of the author? The total construction of subjectivity? Sexual liberation as the prime victory of feminism? For you, perhaps. But for others, there was more.


*


History as the single-minded story of the winners is something premodern and modern cultures have in common. But history has, in reality, always been just one story among many – and not always the most interesting, not always the most useful to present. It was just the story that was needed to survive, to justify power, or the one capable of being understood with the mindset then available. I like to see the lost stories recuperated: stories to use, to amuse.


.

Six Paul Valéry Quotes

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The path that leads from a confused idea to a clear idea is not made of ideas.



God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.



The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.



Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.



Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.



At times I think, and at times I am.



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Some passages from M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Some passages from M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs:



*


it hurt to move. it hurt to breathe. the food decline plateaued because it hurt so much to eat. and we were thick in our clothes for swelling. and when our eyes swole shut we couldn’t see. and then we finally saw. we saw it.

we hadn’t told the truth is so damn long.


*


at some point the work of pretending we weren’t going to die, that our children weren’t going to die, that our deaths and lives weren’t going to be forgotten, became unsustainable. it was hard enough to just breathe and metabolize. to find something to metabolize. to find people to metabolize near. now some people call it the true end of whiteness, when the world could finally operate based on something other than fear of blackness, of being, of death. but at the time all we knew was the story had run out. all the stories. of staying young to cheat death. of thinking young people wouldn’t die. of immortality via “making a difference.” of genetic imprint as stability. of stacking money and etching names on buildings. people used to do those things before. not to mention that they would not mention death and would hide the dying away and strive to protect the eyes of the children who already knew everything.

at some point. all the dead being here anyway and all of us here being obviously doomed, we let go of that particular game. and started breathing. and saw our hands.

we let go.

i felt like i could fly.


*


what we wanted was to want to. not to have to do anything. and the problem was we forgot after all these years of force what wanting was.

want was not getting, nor was it having. wanting was not needing. wanting was not having to have or needing not to need. it was not. and there was a wideness in wanting that didn’t quite fold in on itself. it deepened and rose up and radiated out and touched softly to itself with warm warning.


*


not knowing when made them reckless in their trust and irresponsible in their love attempts.


*


we questioned the end point of evolution when we noticed it wasn’t us.


*


so she happened to remember the time of the surface people who had hated and manipulated depth in their vain attempt to accept death. how they had blown the peaks off of mountains like this to dig out the darkness they couldn’t find in themselves. how they had blasted into the ground threatening all the underneath water to frack out the darkness they couldn’t trust in themselves. the surface people, she inhaled and exhaled, who blew a hole in the sky as big as what they were unwilling to know.


*


that was the challenge. to create oneself anew on a regular basis. it started with every seven years (also called the new cell cycle) and accelerated for the talented. to every three years, every year, every season, every month, every day until the prestige came from re-creating a self unrecognizable (to both your former self and the expectations of others) multiple times in any given day. they said it was towards the evolution of the community. a community that could not depend on previous expectations would have to evolve new needs. their individual shapeshifting was towards less collective dependence on a former world. let the new world meet us faster where we are! the people sometimes said to affirm a particularly brave invention.

they went from mostly not knowing their neighbors to perpetually not knowing themselves. which seemed more useful. and like the rare urban neighbor with the time to watch their transforming neighbors walk in and out their doors differently every day, the social media applications were even more useful for creating narrative out of the random moments of self-documentation offered by the digitally literate.

maybe that’s where they went wrong. the watching. because at some point the point changed from transforming need and evolving skills to performing further and further newness. as if novelty itself was the measure and the outcome and the point again. and eventually it distilled down to the same people looking different every day and going to the same places they always went just to provoke contrast and doing the same things they always did (eventually just the work of looking for and financing new costumes). so the challenge was called off around the time when it got most boring.

it wasn’t worth the use of fossil fuels.



.

Some passages from What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché

Some passages from What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché:


*


I was at the time quite young, with a romantic view of the world, and I was also an American, which made this worse.


*


“I don’t think you understand Leonel. I’m a poet. Do you know how poets are viewed here? We’re seen as bohemian, or romantics, or crazy. Among the poets I admire, there is one who waved good-bye before jumping from a bridge, another who put on a fur coat and gassed herself in her garage. Great American poets die broke in bad hotels. We have no credibility. Although this isn’t true of every poet, and I’m giving you the dramatic examples, when poetry is mentioned in the American press, if it is mentioned, the story begins with ‘Poetry doesn’t matter,’ or ‘No one reads poetry.’ No matter what else is said. It doesn’t matter.”

He appeared surprised. “Well, you’ll have to change that. In my country, and the rest of Latin America, poets are taken seriously. They’re appointed to diplomatic posts, or they’re assassinated, or put into prison but, one way or the other, taken seriously.”


*


From childhood I had experienced bouts of depression, and my mother had also suffered this during her child-raising years. I would find her in her room sometimes, crying and staring at nothing. She told me that I would understand when I was older, something she said about many things. In my own life, this darkness descended always unexpectedly. That is, it did not seem caused by particular events. The sadness arrived, stayed for a while, and just as unexpectedly lifted.

Something could, at times, push against it. Work did, and also the urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice against another, and this urge swelled during the conversations on the terrace in Mallorca that summer, as I sat on the edge of the circle taking things in, until, toward the end, I also worked at being invisible, because it seemed, from what I understood from these conversations, that injustices of a political nature were not historical accidents, and that most injustices in Latin America were supported or made possible by the United States, or that was my impression. One of the visiting writers had even responded to my plaintive question regarding ways I might get involved with something like: There is nothing you can do, my dear. Change your government. Enjoy your summer.


*


Margarita had insisted that I be my own person. Leonel was also adamant that I think for myself, that I let go of my preconceptions, although I hadn’t, until then, been aware of having any. But all right, I thought. How to do that? Leonel had complained of my daydreaming, that I wasn’t paying proper attention to things around me in my waking life, so from now on, I would pay attention, and try to see as much as I could, not the world as imagined in my continuous waking dream, but as it was, not only the obvious but the hidden, not only the water cánteros but their weight, not only their weight but why it was necessary to carry water such distances. I would try to learn from Leonel how to listen to what was said but also to what was not said, and I would also try to learn how to detect deception in others, which, he assured me, is a skill that can be acquired. I would learn to review my experiences for the missed details, and to keep in mind that while I was observing others, they were also observing me, and I would become less (how did he put it?) readable, and when necessary, I would attempt, in his words, to “manage the perceptions of others” so that, of the “five versions of the truth,” in any given situation, mine might prevail.

“This place is a symphony of illusion,” Leonel often said, “and an orchestra needs a conductor.”


*


“Revolutions do not go according to plan,” he went on. “There must be thinkers among the commanders who understand the tactics of the battlefield, who can think strategically, and whose plans can be executed successfully so that they may command loyalty and respect. There must develop a strong bond among the fighters so that they will risk their lives for one another, not once but every day. And these fighters, who will nevertheless be hungry and thirsty, wounded and in pain, must respect the lives of the people, must not steal from them or harm them. And when the enemy is captured, he must also be respected and not harmed. Those captured must be housed and fed and clothed and treated for their wounds. None of this is easy,” he said. “Armed uprising is one way to attempt to lessen repression and begin building a just society, Papu, but it is not the only way, and it is, without question, the most difficult, and when it is over, and let’s say you have triumphed, you must guard with great vigilance against becoming an oppressor yourself. This is the greatest danger. If you are defeated,” he went on, “that’s another story. Waging a guerrilla war takes something more than waving red flags with hammers and sickles at the bull.”

He wasn’t exactly talking to himself, but he certainly seemed to have said all of this before, and possibly many times, but to whom?

“As Sun Tzu teaches us, ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’”

“Leonel, are you a Marxist?” I wanted to know this because it seemed to matter so much here.

“Marx was a great social philosopher.”

“But are you a Marxist?”

“I have told you, I’m not a religious man.”

The bus had pulled to the shoulder to disgorge passengers. The women bent down to hoist the water cánteros back onto their heads, and the men swung large sacks over their backs.

Perhaps to dissociate myself from those he considered ideologues, I might have said something critical about the Soviet Union at that moment. It hadn’t yet been a decade since the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that is the lens through which I viewed the Soviets: from the kitchen table where Anna sat, listening to the radio with a handkerchief over her eyes. The Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring. They had sent their writers to the gulag.

“Remember that the USSR lost twenty million people during the Second World War. Twenty million. Leningrad was under siege for nearly nine hundred days. They were pulling wallpaper from the walls to eat the wheat paste. And, remember, they won that war in Europe for you. Without the Soviets, Hitler would have been victorious. What? You look surprised.”

“No, not surprised. Well, maybe a little.”

“Don’t get caught up in the rhetoric. If the Salvadoran campesinos fight, and I think they will, they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another two hundred years. But to win, they must defeat the Salvadoran military, and if, in this engagement, they are perceived as so-called Communists, the Salvadoran military will have the backing of the largest military force in the world. So. If you are going to wave a red flag around, you had better know where is the bull.”


*


“Let me give you a little history. Several years ago, some campesinos came to me and wanted to farm this land, which, as I said, had been abandoned for lack of infrastructure in the area. Who wants to grow crops when there is no way to get them to market? So I said yes, and we settled on the percentage I would be paid. Fine. At the end of each harvest I would visit, make arrangements to collect my rent, and it went on like that. Soon, there were a number of families farming the land. One year, the crops failed. I don’t know why. Maybe blight or drought or some such fucking thing –”

“You were charging people to farm your land?”

“This is the system here, but wait. That year, when I visited, I decided to cancel their debt because of the failure. Remember – I was learning something too. I told them that if they formed a cooperative, I would charge half what I had been charging. If they opted to stay on their own, the price would remain the same. The next year, I went back, and guess what? All but three had formed a cooperative. So I made good and charged the cooperative members half. The next year, everyone was a member. At that year’s meeting, I suggested they might want to do something for the children. I didn’t say what. You decide, I said – but do something. That is how the school appeared. And as each year passed, the people became more secure. If the cooperative continued, it was always half price, if the crops failed, no charge, and each year when I visited, there was something else to show me: the clinic, the playground, the new road, and then they began to paint the houses. I realized that the one factor, the one difference, and maybe the only difference was this: The people felt secure. They made decisions together, they took risks together, they shared the risk, and, very important, they knew I wasn’t going to kick them off the land.”

The engine heaved and pulled and the sun bore down on us. We were off the dirt road now and onto the paved highway that led toward the coast. There was salt in the air. I was smoking again and drinking from the warm canteen.

“What?”

“That all sounds fine,” I said, “but – ” The water was almost hot.

“But what?”

“It’s your land. You are the one who visits. You are the one who makes suggestions, and you are the one who collects the money. You make the rules. Why don’t you just give them the land? They are the ones doing all the work.” I crushed the butt into the ashtray and leaned back, folding my arms across myself. “That’s what I think.”

We drove, listening again to the engine.

“I can’t give them the land.”

“Why not? Of course you can. You’re the padrino! This is paternalism, Leonel, pure and simple. You’re the jefe. Well, good for you!”

I pressed my bare feet into the dash, leaned back, and closed my eyes. “Maybe that was a little harsh. I liked your village. But it’s yours.”

This sounded smug and self-righteous and I knew it, but I didn’t know how to save the moment. The wind in the Hiace buffeted us because of how fast we were going on the paved road.

“I can’t give it to them,” he said again, flatly. “They have to take it from me.”



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Some passages from The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow

Some passages from The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow:


*


Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy of activism will negotiate the stretch between speculative desire and the shortfall of action in her or his own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough horizon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: failure, confusion, and the falling out of comrades. There is no right way to balance these things…


*


One can’t help remarking that internecine fights are often the hottest – because of the tearing apart of what is also – in some ways – connected, and because other more powerful enemies are further off, even harder to imagine as subject to change.


*


...the strange line we draw between work and play


*


The women retold tales Dorthy had loved about the triumph of eros over thanatos, like the one about a woman who falls off an ocean liner and, some hours later, when they discover she’s gone and turn back, they find her because she’s still swimming.

*


In an anecdote she loved, a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive and survives.


*


The unorganized are always the most vulnerable to cynical or instrumental manipulation. They can’t produce social institutions that shape or interpret political experience.


*


…things come from outside, and people make use of what comes, even from tainted hands.


*


How obvious this sounds now, how rare and shocking then. The courage it took to demand a new place in history can no longer be imagined.


*


Words are their way of denouncing mayhem and of living in it. As far as I know, writing puts power and powerlessness together like no other experience. As far as I know.


*


I live with a composer, Daniel Goode, who has a piece called “Finding the Unison Sentence.” A group of people are to start talking, each one talking continuously, all trying to find a sentence they want to say together. I used to think the piece was a failure, since the groups never came close to unison, petering out instead. But the composer suggested that on the contrary, perhaps the piece shows that there is no unison sentence.


*


People make change; it’s never only a matter of macro forces which no one can predict or influence; we are, gulp, in some sense implicated in the construction of our world. Art is one way into imagining something different, activism another. Always people are imagining, wanting, and acting from somewhere in themselves, or rather from often unacknowledged multiple states of self.


*


There is always the personal question of how to survive being forgotten or aggressively misunderstood. Inevitably, with longevity or luck, one outlives one’s formative moment. In the case of those who were a part of ecstatic, hopeful, utopian movements, this common tragedy of the mismatch between an individual’s life and the arc of history is likely to be particularly acute. For them, forgetting goes beyond personal loss to the loss of the whole world.

But one step beyond these feelings, that one’s acts and words of protest have been specially chosen for neglect and insult, lies another more reliable experience feminists share: in modernity, feminism keeps returning. Though obscurity and abuse dog feminism, self-conscious feminist struggles are constantly finding new forms. Even if each return is greeted as if it were for the first time – the New Woman again and again – still she keeps coming. And she keeps bringing back some version of feminist resistance.


*


Dinnerstein offered a subtle, revealing account of the deals men and women have traditionally struck with each other, including what was for me the first intelligible, usable explanation for women’s shamed acquiescence in male power, and our ambivalence about our own uses of force. She saw the female monopoly of infant care as decisive in all the gender asymmetry of social life that follows. It is a woman who introduces us to the world before we can recognize her as a limited, mortal being like ourselves. Struggling out from under the control of this first alluring, seemingly all-powerful person is the biggest fight we ever fight. Exhausted, we fling ourselves out of the sea full of mermaids onto the dry land of minotaurs who roar and strut but who nonetheless seem much more tamable and rational in contrast to the mother still stalking in an infantile layer of our personality.

Dinnerstein argues that male power in the public sphere feels right, even when terrible; at least male tyranny stands on the firm ground of adult mastery and will; at least it seems solid in its denial of absurdity, limitation, and death. For the most part, public projects are carried on without the constant modifying influence of doubts. One boldly builds the bomb: one doesn’t let anxiety about how to stow radioactive garbage slow one down. Worrying about the waste products of human efforts is somebody else’s job, and that irritating, nagging somebody is a woman. Men agree to build the world while women agree both to support them in this struggle and to give vent, like harmless jesters, to the knowledge both sexes have that “there is something trivial and empty, ugly and sad, in what he does.” A proverb records this bargain: Men must work and women must weep.

In spite of feminism’s extraordinary energy and collective will, which did indeed change so much, hatred and fear of women is entrenched, pervasive within us as well as without. The Mermaid and the Minotaur didn’t rescue me from this fact, or from my vulnerability to policing by men, but Dinnersteinian knowledge shifted the burden, making my common womanish feelings of self-doubt, foolishness, inconsequence into a shared – perhaps an alterable – condition.

Such a public airing of women’s often unconscious, usually private griefs went a long way toward explaining where the powerful rage of feminism comes from in our time. The ancient symbiosis between men and women, with its traditional divisions of labor, was never fully consensual, never reliable. In modernity, the old arrangements show increasing strain. Women notice and suffer from this crisis more. They are now supposed to do both men’s and women’s traditional work, an emotional and physical overload neither honored nor supported by the culture. Because they are the ones who were dependent on that symbiosis to recognize themselves as valuable and whole, they feel bitter when men retreat from the traditional responsibilities of the old bargain. But finally, however much they depend on it, women lost more under the old regime, sacrificing sexual impulse and worldly freedom. From that dear old familiar system’s decay they have the least to lose.



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Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout

Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout:


*


The experience of this theatre-goer, then, is one in which anticipation gives way to disappointment, in which pleasure is bound up with anxiety and even perhaps pain and illness, in which acting is confused with vulgar interruption, in which the transcendent possibilities of the world’s greatest dramatic poetry appear to pass by almost unnoticed in a ‘deliberate monotone’, and success appears as dependent upon the audience as it is upon the artistic capability of the actor. Yet for all this, for all the confusion, anxiety and disappointment, it is an experience which he cannot bear to bring to an end, and to which he will repeatedly seek to return.


*


This ambivalence certainly characterizes my own relationship with the theatre. Theatre, being queasy, makes me queasy. That such queasiness is widespread, that we find theatre uncomfortable, compromised, boring, conventional, bourgeois, overpriced and unsatisfactory most of the time, is I think not only generally accepted as true, but also generally accepted as part and parcel of the whole business. Theatre’s failure, when theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps constitutive. What I want to argue here is that it is precisely in theatre’s failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois pastime that its political value is to be found. Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital.


*


Of course, never in the history of theatre has the social position of the actor been so similar to the social situation of the character: they are, at last, contemporaries, and more than that, members of the same social class. This means that the ‘actual life’ the actor is required to simulate is close enough to her own for her life to become a private resource for public display. While Diderot feared that the actor’s over-identification with the emotions of the character would be detrimental to theatrical representation because it would lead the actor to lose control of her technique, the new danger for the actor is that their new technique, along with the new forms and subject matter of bourgeois naturalist drama, might permit so intense an over-identification, that the actor might no longer be required to act at all, but instead just effectively ‘be’ a version of herself.


*


McKinnie points out that the theatre is an economic subsector in which work is clearly alienated. Picking up on this perception one notes how the employee’s time is regulated with rigorous force by bells and curtains, how both the rehearsal process and the nightly routine of performances are dominated by repetitive activity, how wage levels are set in structures of extreme differentiation, how these are maintained by a huge pool of surplus labour which renders effective industrial organization impossible, and how the core activity itself is both a metaphor of alienation and alienation itself: the actor is paid to appear in public speaking words written by someone else and executing physical movement which has at the very least usually been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny by a representative of the management who effectively enjoys the power of hiring and firing. The actor is both sign and referent of the wholly alienated wage slave.



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