culture fix

brujo shit

“what first inspired you to resist the status quo?”

“inspiration is the wrong word. it was desperation. it was a survival instinct, a rebellion, an intuitive rebellion…the images i saw on TV were all of families that all liked each other and treated each other good and everything, but that wasn’t my family. in my family, we were all concerned with the needs of my alcoholic father. we didn’t like each other in my family, we didn’t treat each other good. and then i went to high school, and i just couldn’t do all the stupid stuff that they tried to get me to do, so i did whatever i wanted instead and got in more and more trouble…i figured – and i had a lot of encouragement in this viewpoint – that i was just a criminal. i could maybe deny it or try and hide it, but basically i couldn’t. the reality that i experienced sharply contrasted the reality that everyone else claimed to experience…”

-andy keniston

inspiration is really the wrong word. i advocate conflagration to reconcile my heart with the world outside of me. the only given seems to be that i will experience a rift inside myself, a misery that i cannot translate to those i love, no matter how hard i try. the misery we share is barely acknowledged as misery, if it is spoken of at all.

i notice i’m not fundamentally different from the religionists – fervently adhering to a desperate sense that justice and decency will prevail. i wonder how one could do without some sort of belief to make it through the grinding repetition of american life. the predictable, cold, driving, viciousness of the way we live is like a cloud of contagious gas which plagues me at all hours. i cannot run far or fast enough to escape the cruelty of our civilization.

and i am still naïve enough to read stories from the past as if i don’t know the ending. my sense of surprise when i learn that the voices for liberation were slaughtered is genuine. how else could i keep reading?

when my uncle was my age, he fled chicago to find a quiet place to fade into his alcoholism, and his weary, appalled sadness in reaction to the calm, calculated, and clearly counter-intelligence murder of fred hampton. ten years of drunkenness like an unriddable virus, the type of rage that lands people in jail, and a whole series of decisions that he will never cease to regret. ten years sinking into his own desperation, letting it overtake him and swallow his passion to live another way. ten years of surrendering to the supremacy of the beast.

i don’t know how to moralize against this anymore. what is the cogent argument for why my uncle should have continued to wade through the blood of the empire and call out through the haze for a world that lives?

two summers ago, when my uncle attempted suicide, i rode down to baltimore with my mother, and spent the whole ride arguing against her desire to give him a firm talking to. though shaken and terrified, a part of her still thought it necessary to tell my uncle what people “should” do – what’s “right” and so on.

i was belligerent: “unless you can offer him a dignified alternative to the current labor choices in america, his decision to die is perfectly reasonable.”

the dignified alternatives are few and substantially invisible. thoroughly irreasonably, we live on.

so inspiration is the wrong word. arson begins inside us, and threatens to overtake us completely, unless we offer the flames some release. to survive, to preserve our dim hopes for an enjoyable existence, we choose something else to destroy, and begin setting fires. unless there is some profound transformation, the rest of our lives will be spent feeding and spreading those flames, and yet keeping them from torching our hearts, minds, flesh.

perhaps we need a good deal more myth. “brujo shit.” time to start telling stories about healing fires – the rebirth of the prairie, the crops that feed on ashes, the forest which burns so that it might live. maybe it doesn’t even take that much. just the slightest little glimmer of a chance and, thoroughly irreasonably, we live on.

i stay bouyed up high enough to breathe knowing that my uncle lives on knowing that i live on. i have chosen not to resign myself fully to the slumber of my self-hatred, addiction, and hopelessness because i am not living only for myself.

but the winters grow colder, longer, lonelier. and the fascists grow stronger, more subtle, more overt, more cohesive, more numerous, more unanimous. time grinds against us – each setting sun takes with it another bit of evidence for the notion that, somehow, all of this will give way to something meant to sustain human beings.

i said in philadelphia, 2001, “if they kill my uncle, i’ll ravage the motherfuckers, i’ll totally lose control…” no matter how my uncle dies, i will blame america; i blame her in advance.

i told him when i was 14, “i can’t make peace with the so-called normal people. i tried. i just can’t do it.” and he told me that i could walk the warrior’s path – hard, unforgiving and relentless.

once you begin walking this way, you can’t walk any other way. the world burns around you, and you walk on.

somehow, thoroughly irreasonably, we live on.

inspiration is the wrong word…

I.

in time, all betrayals are mutual.

it comes slowly

and you see it only from the backside

or it smacks you down

suddenly

everyone involved knows

• and no one could tell them –

something dies,

disappears,

disintegrates.

we have crossed into a space that will suffocate us.

II.

what i need to thrive

we create

i lose me

without us.

the traces of our time = us

there is nothing more

what is shared

what is remembered

we trace, together - us.

III.

slow, fragile, stretching

love is an attempt to not-wound.

all building is re-building

all turning-towards is

turning-against old wounds.

love is forgetting betrayed.

a person cannot decide to stop longing

connection is human being.

IV.

in time, all betrayals are mutual.

we trace, together,

bitter sadness and rage

indelible.

the worst moments stick worst of all

and worst of all, they erase the other moments

slow, fragile, stretching

all building is re-building

ok, so start again!

but how to re-build into and onto

a structure disintegrating,

disappearing?

turning against the wounds we gave

each other

and turning, again, into

each other

V.

love is an attempt to not-wound.

love is forgetting betrayed.

slow, fragile, stretching

a person cannot decide to stop longing

connection is human being.

**

I feel like I must be really lost. I can’t remember where my solid ground might be.

I tried to love a woman once. We tried to build a life together. We broke each other’s heart, and then spent years ripping apart whatever remained holding us together. I felt like I had to claw my way out. Still, I fell back into her embrace with a reckless passion like nothing else. Not just once, but again and again, I threw all of myself into devouring her, being devoured by her. She told me she could use her body to heal me, her, us. In reality, ours was a mournful, desperate cry, a mutual and inescapable howling. I wanted it more than any other thing, and I wanted more when I was done.

**

I told myself that I had finally learned how to love one person – and just one person – deeply, reliably. I had tricked myself for so long that only a short success was necessary, that I was started to believe in the potential of long-term results. In short, I have walled off portions of myself, attempting to leave a portion intact that is worthy of respect. I asked her to facilitate my frailty, and how could she have complied?

It has taken me a long time to register just how deeply I was crushed by our failure to maintain a certain level of cohesion, passion. I still have not said how much I mourn the passing of our fluid, fluent desire. We fall into each other like well-rehearsed characters, sometimes even pulling off our parts, but something has died. And rather than allow the death to stink up everything, I have let it rot within those parts of myself that survived the walling, and there is little room left to be respectable.

**

For all my attempts to cajole myself into adulthood, I still love like a child. Privately, I laugh haughtily at the adults and persist in my boycott of manhood. To your face, I am trying to learn how to be reliable, decent, strong. Each night before I sleep, I am flooded with a desperate longing for connection. What would it be to hug every woman I’ve ever felt drawn to? What if I did make love a thousand times, with a hundred different women?

I hurl scorn at my old lover for bringing a man into her bed every night; but what else should she do? Who should hold her the way she needs to be held? Don’t I simply wish that it would be my hands wrapped around her naked skin? And don’t I get to be held, too? Is it ok to demand such a thing?

“If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

- James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time, pp. 119-120

we are still ready to forgive our rulers.

necessary atrocities

to keep things the way they are;

the daily violences and indignities

of a system that cannot do otherwise;

we describe, instead, as errors and aberrations.

1977, steve biko dies in custody -

the murder is horrific, terrifying.

we are outraged

and the security police issue apologies, reforms.

“from here forward, we will not commit torture,

we don't believe in it...”

the public is told.

the public – you and i – believes them.

back in the interrogation rooms

the black activists are told,

“in this room we killed biko,

and we'll kill you in the same way...”

and believe what they hear.

our outrage is made impotent

by our naivety

and our desire to exonerate our torturers.

if they could have had apartheid without torture,

they'd have done it.

if we could have toppled apartheid

with requests, apologies and reforms,

we'd have forgone thirty years of war.

2.

2005, piles of US army photographs are publicized.

here we see iraqis humiliated, beaten and raped

by 20-something american 'boys and girls.'

the 'heroes' of every hometown

now displayed as barbaric, perverted beasts

flagrantly displaying a level of racial hatred

that is no longer popular in this country.

what does all this despicable imagery mean?

the iraqis were being asked important questions:

“where is saddam?

where are the weapons of mass destruction?

where are the terrorists?”

oh.

of course.

seeing the impossibility

of these explanations being taken seriously,

the army changes tactics:

1. this is the work of a 'few bad apples.'

2. torture is justified under certain circumstances, in the interests of national security and

3. we never use torture unless we mean to or unless

4. it's the work of a 'few bad apples.'

hiccup.

an unpleasant moment in the 'endless war' campaign.

seize the strategic advantage.

control the conversation about your own horrific deeds.

say it's legal.

say it's necessary.

say it rarely happens.

the public – you and i – believes it.

our outrage is made impotent

by our naivety

and our desire to exonerate our torturers.

the daily violences and indignities

of a system that cannot do otherwise

are taken in stride.

we are still ready to forgive our rulers.

1.

if a person can come to america
and still be "from" somewhere,
they are not - yet - members of a race.

what is happening to the mexicans here
is not so different from the italians a century back:
cultivating the delta and hanging like strange fruit.
there's no reason why today's spics won't end up just as white as yesterday's dagos.

2.

it is popular now to make racial issues
out of matters that are entirely otherwise
while simultaneously proclaiming the 'withering away'
of race as a concept.
race withers like stalin's dictatorship,
not like grapes on a vine.
i am an american;
i cannot imagine my country without race.

3.

the only black people who'll say "let's not discuss race"
have spent a decade or more in 'all-white' environments.
surely i'd try and end the discussion as well,
in their position.
dominating everything else, what's to stop whites
from dominating the discourse around their own domination?
all the same, 'downplaying' the importance of race
is just another way to entrench us in it.

4.

the citizen's council was right:
those damn rednecks in the klan
forced integration
but!
the citizen's council has stayed in power.

5.

the boers and the zionists share a unique place in history.
the honest articulation of their goals,
codified in thousands of laws
and reinforced by american ammunition and the special branch
is a true gift to the rest of us.
in our situation, "we pay so much attention to their faces,
we miss the motion of their hands."
we are heirs to south africa,
but no one has told us yet.

6.

the 'old days' are right around the corner.
meanness, unrepentent arrogance and brutality
are increasingly 'en vogue' amongst the powerful;
the 'zeitgeist' of 1939 is once again feasible.
meanwhile in basra, the blunt antagonisms of this arrangement
are splattering about in the buses, cafes, market stands,
atvs and mosques
of everyday life.
still, the incessant TSA queues are blase;
nothing yet appears as a deterrant, or provocation.

7.

whenever the brazenness of the powerful
outstrips the tenacity of the exploited,
we are living in truly troubling times.
before the fires in the oilfields reach my doorstep,
there will be a long silence:
hands bound.
heads bowed.

8.

fifty years ago, i'd have been a 'race man.'
on whose side?
is a 'nigger-lover' any more courageous or honest
than an 'anti-racist'?
do people only take the stands that appearing threatening
in their age,
or do they occasionally surpass even that benchmark?
is it an accomplishment in-and-of-itself
to proclaim the moral bankruptcy of your times?