Starter Kit for Revolution: in which we pitch a tent
What work makes sense in times such as these?
Do I need to elucidate what times such as these means? (List the thousand cuts) Probably not, but just in case: war. Everywhere there is war, everywhere there is war waged to maintain power and profit. Sometimes the war looks like bombs, sometimes the war looks like lawns. We are in an epoch of hubris where war is normalized, where we build societies based on this supposed inevitability, what work makes sense in times such as these?
Humanity has separated ourselves from the fabric of existence and our ventures of exploitation and disharmonious rhythms are poisonous. In a time of rapid and incessant environmental ruin, what work makes sense? In times of forced labor to earn money, of living in an economic system built on exploitation continuously requiring sacred life blood to fill the wealth stores of a few, what work makes sense?
The problem is everywhere. I’m here, in southern Appalachia, where I experience relative peace and health, enough to muster an action that is beyond mere survival. I say this with extreme humility and gratitude but I think it’s also important to say that the land of the free is not the land of the free and even the folks who are supposedly enjoying the plunders of colonialism are not. They cannot be enjoyed. We are starved for time and the capacity to exist exuberantly. We have supposed comforts but those are predicated on the subjugation and exploitation of other people in places we usually try to forget about so that we might keep functioning in this maladaption. We are lonely, diagnosed with a plethora of mental illnesses because we aren’t able to manage the insanity of this culture. We are sick with the sick we outsource. Most of us work to work. Most of us spend our lives building an abstract notion of a life well lived that doesn’t give a fuck about us. We’re pacified on good days and tormented on bad ones. If the propaganda were true, if we really could win at someone else’s expense, I’d maybe get it. But I don’t know anyone free, few having any fun that isn’t bottled and sold to them.
These are the times in which we (1) exist, but this is not the whole of it. There is work to do that makes sense, but we must listen very carefully for tasks worthy of our attention and energy. There is living to do. There are tasks for salvaging the good, for hospicing modernity (2), there are tasks for mourning the things we don’t get to take with us, for telling the stories that might be the seeds, there are tasks for paying attention, for noticing the things that were never as good as we told ourselves they were, and there are tasks for picking up the dropped threads from an earlier story and weaving them back into this one (3). There is vitality to express, play to play, joy to inhabit, love to make, snuggles to snuggle. There is bare footing and dancing and breathing to breath. There is fire building and cold plunging and rollerskating. Holy fuck, how (did) do we miss it? It’s stunningly, terrifyingly, heartbreakingly, gorgeous. It all hurts, nothing hurts. Here. We. Are.
Until we aren’t. And then still we are, we.
Given that we all will die, self survival is not enough (4). We must prioritize living over survival. We have forgotten that we are one, and if one of us suffers, then we must say, enough. I say enough. I say enough in humility. I say enough with absurd gestures and with nonsensical weirdness. I say enough with a heart that is open to love, to the obliteration of adventurous intimacy. I say enough by not taking myself so seriously, by laughing. I say enough by questioning rules that don’t make sense. I say enough by challenging laws, habits, and habitats that reproduce the world that exists but that we do not want. I say enough by living freedom, even if it’s only in the crevices of a crumbling matrix. I say enough with experimental living. I’ve had (we are) (this is) enough. I say it with inner work unfolding in the context of global work (5). With an art project (this makes my medicine easier to swallow), let’s call it a painting (6), that disavows the premise of a subject and an object.
I am making home for a gestational period of nine months in two tents on the outskirts of my own domesticity (7). These will be our places to live a bit closer to the ground, we need this. These will be our places to live an anarchical revolution. These will be our places to prioritize care over work, joy over duty, excess over dwindling returns. These will be our places that allow us to take our energy out of making their world and making our own (8). This is a protest, this is resistance, this is provisional, a staying-with-the-trouble (9), a statement and a question, an invitation and a temporary and ever-shifting boundary. This is hunting and gathering. This is nothing but allowing myself to be lived, listening into the world beyond the material premise of this one and doing what is asked of me. This is a process. This is a wrastle match and a becoming-with. This is play, I’ll be wearing glitter panties. This is freedom and so I will fail glamorously (10).
By living in our yard and renting the rooms in what used to be our single-family dwelling we are making a living that allows for being, that allows for presence afforded by a lower cost of living. We are offering our space for alternative ways of being together, of arranging ourselves. We are seeking pathways of mutual aid and reciprocity and letting the isolation of nuclear households (visibly) deteriorate (they have never been the firm foundation they are lauded to be). This is our apocalypse, the uncovering of the premises from which this world was built. We are taught othering and we say enough. We no longer wish to participate in the world engendered from colonialism, from capitalism, from ideologies of separation, from fear and the premise that the (really real) world under this one is hostile to our existence. We relax into the I-don’t-know with a posture of gratitude and paradoxical, foolish, trickster energy that is the Way.
I hope this helps (11).
I love you.
I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you (12).
Footnotes:
When I say “we” I mean everything that continuously emerges from the Big Bang. I say “we” in defiance of categorization, in lineage with Fred Moten’s language to “consent not to be a single being”
Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
These tasks are outlined by Dougald Hine in his address to the European Ecovillage gathering as heard on the Community podcast episode published Nov. 21, 2022
another thought sourced from Dougald Hine
I’m currently learning about this in Terra Nova by Dieter Duhm
a painting as a built structure, painting as a surface that makes visible the imaginal
my yard, yo
Practical Anarchism by Scott Branson
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
Mothernism by Lise Haller Baggesen
A painting by Michael Grubb that stays with me. I think I’ll make a whole series as an ode.
Ho'oponopono
photo credit: Aimee Rievley, The Sparrows Eye
textile installation at WRASTLE MATCH, cape made from gifted doilies, boots tufted with found and purchased fibers
