The New Not Normal

Transformational Improvisations towards better future norms now

Exactly one year ago on this date, major news media called the election for Joe Biden based on data from the vote count as it was proceeding and exit polls. Since 1848 this has been the trusted manner of quickly determining the winner of a U.S. presidential race in order to insure - when a change of administration is indicated - a smooth and peaceful transition. It isn’t until the Electoral College meets weeks later that the states’ vote counts are finalized and certified and then again weeks after that when a joint session of Congress counts the electoral votes to formalize the long understood outcome; yet the stability, continuity, and perceived strength of government depends upon the country’s early acceptance of the facts coming out of a free and fair election.

It’s difficult to imagine the four day wait wasn’t agonizing for anyone who had a stake in the outcome - whether in devotion to country or personality cult. Many of us who feared for our democracy were ready and trained to take to the streets should Trump attempt an overt act right away (visions of tanks, National Guard, deployed militia and mobs, military cronies standing by his side in defiance of the constitution). The coup - or, technically, autogolpe (intriguing to, gulp, tongue that apt-ugly term) - didn’t happen in those first few days: it wasn’t until a crucial latter point on the timeline for making the election official did actual Trump-backed militia and mobs set out to deny the democratic process by force.

The denial of facts, along with the lies and legal challenges to election processes in multiple states (over 63 lawsuits lost, dismissed, or dropped for lack of merit), began even before the media called it for Biden.

What it was like when it was happening, when attempts against a peaceful transition began? A single year’s speedy, unrelenting passage shakes up easy perceptual access to this recent past, shift by obfuscating shift. A sense of its actuality is what I’m trying to regain through minding the anniversary - through remembrance, reminding… Never Forgetting.

Antagonists purposely broke trust in the normal transition process at the end of a presidency which itself represented a major offensive against norms and decency. Pandemic added to that, and a year later everything is far from normal, even though “normal” is a fraught word for the creative spirit - and hardly the goal for artists and writers steeped in experiment, the avant-garde, resistance to dominant culture, dedication to some kind of pure or original utterance or imagining.

So what is the normal we’re pining for? Amy Siskind’s website The Weekly List referred to the advice of “experts in authoritarianism” as her inducement to track the Trump administration’s consistent norms-breaking from its beginning. Over time, this list became problematic for me because many of her listed items weren’t in fact all that abnormal in terms of executive conduct, although with Trump they invariably did indeed have crudity and a certain air of menace, for destructive, autocratic intent and effect. Also, it was clear that the expert advice she claimed had deep connection to commentary by Masha Gessen and Timothy Snyder, but these two - instead of fretting every day about every outrage - offered evolving insights into the defense of democratic values and institutions based on honed political and rhetorical strategies as well as the cultivation, basically, of action-oriented civic virtue as a form of integrity and awareness.

Insert repetition with regret

So what is the normal we’re pining for? If only, if only. In my intellectual and artistic abstraction of events even as they happen, I sometimes haven’t respected enough the trauma of my nearest and dearest in the face of these years’ reality disruption, distortion, violation.

Insert an infusion of negation

The normal now is not normal, it isn’t normal nor is it not normal, the not normal now is not not normal, isn’t it not now the new not normal is not now (nor ever was and wasn’t) not normal. Never.

Insert colorful archaic expletives

Gadzooks! Zounds! What the cuss! Thunderation! Damn my eyes!

Insert filled pauses

Insert imaginary friends

Fricative percussion

Inflect into Possible Worlds

The previous “instructions for linguistic/phonetic/semantic transformations” are from poet and Old Songs musician, Chris Mason. Last night I went up to Baltimore to spend time with Chris and another comrade in text and performance poetry, Christophe Casamassima, along with Bev Folk who was new to the game and game enough to engage with us in uninhibited vocalizations upon Chris’ source pieces.

It was good to get together and play with words and sounds and their evocations. Just the getting together again still seems new and tentative. Five years ago, ten years ago, it was a regular thing for us to perform poetic ritual in public or have our structured improvisations upon source texts interact with audiences in art galleries, bookstores, and bars. Those days seem quaint at this point, so long ago and far away, long gone. That past itself hearkened back to a deeper past, decades ago - revivified for our practice and performance - no, not thus revived but still and already and always alive for the moment, continuous with the past - in which John Cage and Jackson Mac Low danced chance operations into expected text and normal forms in (dis)order to explode life and art rigidities.

Celebration of change. Revelry in raveling, unraveling the thread of the given. Embrace of lucky and unlucky variation.

Mistakes, mis-hearings, misunderstandings: welcome. Get it wrong right. As in comic improv, go with it, say yes, take what’s there, and add your own “and”…

Here in poetry and performance, in thought, a practice for going forward. How about as a practice for living? Let’s go!

I’m sorry things are so fucked up. I’m sorry the world is upside down.

S-s-s-so? Sorrow. Row, worry.

It’s Sunday. There’s beautiful light in my office. In a few minutes, I’ll take my son to tennis.

Now, I’m here. Really, I’m with you.

Most of all, I’m inside my love for the people I love.

Today, say yes, and please follow one or more of Chris Mason’s prompts above and enter a few words into the Substack comments. I’d especially love to hear some colorful archaic expletives; and from this point on, let us all Inflect into Possible Worlds.

Please expect: I’ll post on the anniversary of key dates on the timeline of the 2020 election and its aftermath over the next few months, along with a few other types of entries in between, and thereby discover what rhythm develops for this project in responsivity to the times - in tension with past, present, and future.

Alive to the moment for variations, transformation, of the normal not normal - sorry not sorry - towards a new normal according to our highest values, cherishings, hard won worldly wisdom, profoundly-mined spiritual wisdom, and perhaps some chance hearkening of a dim echo of a poetic arc of nearly unutterable thought-truth.