All Emergency All The Time

one month in, signaling

Waving/Drowning?—either way signifying

The Musk criminal takeover of government agencies across the board—even if it doesn’t last, even if it is or can be stopped (that is, this ongoing coup doesn’t establish an enduring basis of unelected rule)—has been as successful and irreparable in its destruction as a raid of thieves and berserkers.

An alarm blares, useless background noise to the damage done: caved-in doors, ransacked valuables, compromised files by the millions, broken walls and windows, condemned buildings.

At the same time, perfectly legally (thanks to a complicit Republican congress), Trump has captured these agencies—or what will be left of them—with his pernicious, unqualified cabinet of sycophants and psychopaths. It has been wholly plain that the primary qualification for each nominee has been loyalty to Trump (not to the constitution or to the people of the United States of America, mind you); “loyalty,” for further clarification, meaning “willingness to obey any or all orders regardless of the law.”

Because Congress isn’t doing its job as a check and balance (that would be refusing to confirm insane nominees, asserting its right to control the purse strings, demanding that the laws it passed protecting the civil service be heeded), the courts are what we’re relying upon in defense of our democracy such as it is: rule of law. There is indeed every indication of a relentless holding of the line here, within the judicial system. It isn’t only the institution of the courts that make this line real, but above all, the present willingness to contest each and every one of the multitude of corrupt and illegal actions this administration has been taking in its power grab. You can follow what’s going on here: Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions

Don’t let anything go. Call out each injustice. In the courts and on the streets—or online, on the frontlines of the propaganda war. It continues to be worthwhile calling Congress; the deluge of phone calls tends to have a concentrating effect on politicians trying to avoid scrutiny of what it means to do their jobs.

Who am I to urge all this? (So rarely urgent, I; and my consistency always makes space for time, for the Arising, for “expecting the unexpected” intermittently.) An activist-artist in the past, for now I’m doing my best to zero in on exactly what is the response most suitable to my skills, temperament, and calling. I’ll offer that outwards here as I can: encouragement to be who you are doing what you need to be doing, taking this crisis as incitement to break through to new and untested capacities.

Rebecca Solnit launched a subscription newsletter on Ghost a few weeks ago in contention with the onslaught. Meditations in an Emergency resonates—in title and intention—with the direction I’m consciously evolving here at P,T,WM amidst our dire situation for democracy (and creative equanimity), without any pretense to keeping up with the day-to-day insanity. My own essentially poetic practice (whatever I’m writing) insists upon rhythms of diving and emergence, in contrast to the timely reactivity of journalism, obviously in concordance with Solnit’s remark “action demands thought and thoughtfulness”; she did cop to cribbing Frank O’Hara for the title, and that very poem exclaims upon the sort of surgent constancy within which I’m dedicated to engaging our freedom.

…the ecstasy of always bursting forth!

—Frank O’Hara

Resurgent, creative force promises the future anew. Noise can’t be avoided these days, blaring alarm; now, what to listen for inside of it all? Resilient, relentless, renewing sounding of what’s yet possible, under the circumstances. A new creative-humanist thrust.

Signal/News through the Noise: Alarm! All noise all the time; its volume signifies. There’s no going back, too much is undone. Mindful of what’s worth saving, what’s worth saying, we’re going to have to create something new.

auroral scorpion, sting my eyelids / awaken me to visions unforeseen

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Readings/Mindset

Creativity Will Save the World: toward a Spiritual Humanism by Nicholas Berdyaev (selections from Berdyaev edited by Tom Willett, translated by Fr. Stephen S. Janos and Donald A. Lowrie) connects to an emphasis on emancipatory humanism in my last post, Art and Irreconcilability. Here Berdyaev notes, “In theocratic societies, based on sacralization, the creative powers of people are not sufficiently free,” and so too in profane, sacrilegious—however fronted with white Christian nationalism—authoritarian societies, based on dehumanizing totalization (look at how Trump wants control over art, names, and sex and gender relations, along with every aspect of government), creative powers are suppressed… because they are recognized as a threat.

Humanism is a liberation of the creative person and in this is comprised its truth.

—Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)

I’m also reading Pleasure Activism: the Politics of Feeling Good “written and gathered” by Adrienne Marie Brown, again with an ethos of defiance through joy and bodily, embodied—sensual—erotic, somatic—liberation; I’m brought back to recurrent themes of my Free Spirit work of the mid-2010s, not least for a fresh Raoul Vaneigem kick, Situationist author of The Revolution of Everyday Life as well as of an astounding historical inquiry, The Movement of the Free Spirit.

If you’d like to participate in a reading group towards strategizing resistance based on humanistic, free-spirited principles (starting with the abovementioned books), reply to this in your email, leave a comment here on the website or app, or click this button to message me.

Pretty late into his alternate history novel of the Conquest of Mexico, You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue goes meta and suddenly treats his characters as characters, admitted figments of his meticulous imagination. Enrigue (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) employs an auxilary “would” for the hypothetical experiences of his hybrid of the real-life chronicler Bernal Díaz and other on-the-record conquistadors, beginning a chapter with, “If Jazmín Caldera had existed…”

Caldera would have walked north—full of foreboding, his heart thumping—to face the thing he wasn’t sure he wanted to see: the huey tzompantli of Tenoxtitlan, alluded to in fearful tones by everyone they had met once the company made landfall and decided to set out for the city. The various Mexica colonies and military bases they’d encountered along the way had tzompantlis, but there was only one—the one he was about to see—that merited the label of great, or huey. He would have approached it with reverence and curiosity.

It occupied the center of the citadel and was a rectangular platform some thirty yards long and ten yards wide, enclosed on the east and west by two whitewashed walls. Approaching it curiously, almost like a tourist, Caldera would have heard first a sound like seeds inside a dried gourd. Then he would have discovered that the two walls were connected by an obsessive number of poles and posts strung with thousands and thousands of skulls, perforated through the temples. Twelve poles joined each post to the next, from top to bottom; twelve poles each hung with six or seven skulls. Ten identical racks followed. And then another section and another and another. According to his rough calculations, there must have been some forty thousand skulls, many with a few vertebrae dangling to make them more effective rattles. Sound—like smell and taste—was a form of prayer for the Mexica.

It would have been amazing if while Caldera stared at the huey tzompantli, lost in the malign daze produced by this display of the banality of life, a breeze had sprung up: the gentle clatter of the skulls and vertebrae would have become a clacking buzz, a roar, a clamor of flutes and rattles; the depraved music of a priestly caste and a political class anointed by fear, maybe, but also a grandly formal reflection on the foundations of any system of religious thought: we don’t last.

Seen from the twenty-first century—a century terrified by the finitude of the body—a temple like this is first and foremost an affront. For a sixteenth-century Spaniard, who had witnessed wars and autos-da-fé and seen the rebels of his time die, rot, and wither in cages hanging at the gates of cities, it would also have been astonishingly hygienic in its presentation of macabre realities of life. The white floors; the skulls, bleached and bare. All sanctified by a tidy geometry. It wasn’t an edifying display of the suffering to which errors in conduct would lead, but a representation of things as they are: inside each of us is a skull, and that’s all that will be left of us when we’re gone; thanks for your participation.

Talk about noise!— “the biggest dead-man’s rattle in the world,” this multilayered lattice of bleached skulls and vertebrae as it is further described later in the book.

What is there to listen for inside of it all? Clatter, shudder, what signal through the noise of an uprising gale singing through these bones: this is the spine-tingling of a moment lost in an eternal now of fatality. (In)significance beyond any signaling, without recourse to silence beneath the roar, senselessness is the pattern of this rattling.

Aside: forthcoming on 3/18 and now available for pre-order, my sister-in-law Dev Petty’s picture book, Monty and the Mushrooms, is made for “kids and their people,” and any further adult attribution of relevance to the following passage is purely guilt by association.

You Dreamed of Empires continues its meta-anachronisms and makes its own sense drenched in mushrooms and peyote, when Moctezuma—utterly zonked (in a temple’s inner sanctum, “where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers”)—swishes his hips to T-Rex’s “Monolith.”

It’s no joke, oh no, oh no

The Throne of Time 
Is a Kingly
A Kingly Thing
...
Shallow Are the Actions
Of the Children of Men
Fogged Was their Vision
Since the Ages Began

And Lost Like a Lion
In the Canyons of Smoke
...
Marc Bolan

Don’t miss anything! Coming soon: Yoga of the Internal Horizon Dawn

How to oppose the forces of unfreedom? Live free.
free spirit creativity, pleasure activism, ecstatic bursting forth