Tag Archives: apocalypse

Building Social Spaces, Struggle & Movement, Writing

Andrea Hairston and Bernice Reagon: Song and Struggle

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Andrea Hairston - MindscapeMindscape by Andrea Hairston is quite an incredible book, I can’t believe it’s her first. Maybe I do, because I confess it just might have taken me a little while and some work to get into it, but damn. I loved this story of hope and struggle and culture and ideals and love and death and some freaky alien future earth. It’s complex and complete with Ghost Dancers and ‘ethnic throwbacks’ in a supposedly postracial world that still hasn’t quite got there (because whiteness still seems like it’s getting in the way), technology and healers and spoken combinations of German and Yoruba. It’s also full of heat and action, symbiogenesis (taking me back to Butler) and plenty of deep thoughts on language, race and struggle. From my favourite character, Lawanda, who sticks to her talk despite being looked down upon for it:

Survival be havin’ words to call home, havin’ idioms and syntax to heal the Diaspora. In your cultural rhythm and rhyme, that’s where the soul keep time. (51)

Her lover, the Major, responds in his intellectual way:

Consider that language, despite science fantasy projections, is essentially conservative, hence our ability to communicate across generations. Even the hippest multi-channeling gearhead uses two-thousand-year-old metaphors, slang (such as “hip”) from 1900 that’s now standard, as well as jazzy, take-no-prisoners inspeak that leaves the rest of us down a corridor as the portal collapses. The battle over language, over naming and experiencing the universe, over what constitutes reality is always fierce. Ethnic throwbacks are ideal warriors in these gory cultural skirmishes. (78)

It’s still one hell of a battle, in SF as much as anywhere.

This novel is all about change through struggle, about launching yourself into the unknown and risking everything to change a world of deep pain and horror. It’s about the people who ground you while that change is happening, and the words and culture and songs you hold on to.

997330I love when things in life coincide, disparate things coming together at the right time — like reading this at the same time I reached the excerpt from a 1986 interview with Bernice Reagon–member of NAACP and SNCC and the Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, she’s amazing–in Eyes on the Prize: The Civil Rights Reader.

Funny because look here, in the epigraph for Book IV, Hairston quotes Reagon: ‘Standing in a rainstorm, I believe.’

Reagon’s interview has been one of my favourite parts so far in wading through this massive collection a day at a time. She brings together music and tradition to show the ways that these two things only truly become your own through struggle. They root you in the strength of your past, and uplift you in the movement for the future. Mindscape was full of the power of music and harmony to sculpt human and alien reality both.  There is Mahalia Selasie (see what Hairston did there?) and her gospel choir working along with everyone else to create a better future, helping one lost soul after another. To heal, to open, to change. Bernice Reagon on music:

Growing up in Albany, I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song…. Now the singing tradition in Albany was congregational. There were not soloists, there were song leaders.

Like the struggle in which you find your true self:

I know a lot of people talk about it being a movement and when they do a movement they’re talking about buses and jobs and the ICC ruling, and the Trailways bus station. Those things were just incidents that gave us an excuse to be something of ourselves. (143)

She was in Union Baptist Church after the first march, when asked to sing, she added the word “freedom” to a traditional song. She tells us:

I’d always been a singer but I had always, more or less, been singing what other people taught me to sing. That was the first time I had the awareness that these songs were mine and I could use them for what I needed them to.

At that meeting, they did what they usually do. They said, “Bernice, would you lead us in a song?” And I did the same first song, “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air,” but I’d never heard that voice before. I had never been that me before. And once I became that me, I have never let that me go.

Reading this is pure joy, no? This is the moment that change happens.

I like people to know when they deal with the movement that there are these specific things, but there is a transformation that took place inside of the people that needs to also be quantified in the picture. (144)

This is what Paulo Freire and Myles Horton and Ella Baker and Septima Clark (and I’m getting to the ladies soon, I promise) were all about, and the process that we are enveloped in through Hairston’s novel. Only there’s sex and violence and you never quite know what is going on and it’s all a bit complicated and there are a lot more ants.

I confess, I fucking hate ants. I could have done without the ants, but I honour their place in Mindscape’s mythologies. She does one hell of a job worldbuilding. Just two more quotes — and I confess I singled out the more political bits because that’s how I roll, but it is not especially how the novel rolls so don’t worry. These points are just in there because it’s people working through why things are the way they are, and this shit explains it. Why don’t I have quotes about music? I don’t know, maybe because it’s woven throughout. But I liked this:

Look, ethnic throwbacks do culture not identity politics. We don’t put stock in color. Race is how the world see you, ethnicity is how you see yourself. (121)

I smiled at the next one, I ask this question all the time:

The Last Days… People be past masters at imaginin’ the end of the world–Armageddon, Ragnarök, Götterdämmerung, Apocalypse Now, the Big Crunch–doom and gloom in the twilight of the Gods–but folk’re hard put to imagine a new day where we get on with each other, where we tear it up but keep it real. Why is that? It’s an ole question, but I gotta keep askin’.
— Geraldine Kitt, Junk Bonds of the Mind

I appreciated that in this novel nothing comes easy, least of all love (whether that be for one person or all of them). No one is perfect, but somehow people manage to pull it together and the point of it all is to imagine a new day. It’s inspiring, so maybe I’ll just end with a quote from Septima Clark, who fought all her life for justice and equality and who also knew that your humanity is found in struggle and in change.

But I really do feel that this is the best part of life. It’s not that you have just grown old, but it is how you have grown old. I feel that I have grown old with dreams that I want to come true, and that I have grown old believing there is always a beautiful lining to that cloud that overshadows things. I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift, and this has come during my old age. (Ready from Within, 125)

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Environment & Justice, Travel

Coming to America

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The forces of nature were at work as I traveled. I’ve been reading so much about our relationship with nature, whether we are part of it or a devastating destructive force somehow outside of it. We flew into Chicago and I stared down. The city didn’t seem real. Didn’t seem within our powers to build, to transform the earth so. To leave such a mark.

How wondrous and terrible to be so high above it. In the sky.

This Chicago of skyscrapers — the bounding humanism of Louis Sullivan, the graft and corruption of the Monadnock, the early utopian ideals of Bertrand Goldberg, wondrous words and heartbreaks of working class communities, communities of colour written by Stuart Dybek, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry. Its early days and connections to the countryside and food production so described by Edna Ferber in one of the great American novels you have never read. Me sitting above all this, and millions of lives being lived.

I quite love it from here, but to get to O’Hare you keep flying, and flying. Miles of flat and sprawl.

The plane from Chicago to Tucson sat on the tarmac, and sat. And sat. ‘You gotta be kidding me, a storm?’ chided the six year old in the seat in front of me.

Natural forces. Lightening sheeting across the sky. We turned back to the gate. Frustrating, but gave me a few hours to see my brother and Sandy and my baby nephew, all of whom I love very much. I was one of the lucky ones, even without my luggage (medicine, face cream, special shampoo, a change of clothes, things I am shamefacedly so sad to do without). I had someone to call, and a bed for the night after stealing some hours of sleep from my poor brother.

Back in the air late the next afternoon, we came into Phoenix, 111 degrees. The plane sailed down for the landing and then abruptly banked back upwards. Fear. A cold front had come across, causing whirlwinds of dust, gusts of over 50 mph. We circled, the left engine grinding like the slight rise of panic in my stomach. I am slowly coming to hate flying for more than environmental reasons (the ones that maybe should be but aren’t strong enough to keep me from visiting my family). I am not ready to plummet to earth in a mass of metal.

‘You gotta be kidding me, a cold front?’ demanded a man somewhere behind me.

Now home in Tucson, happy to be back in heat that wraps round you like a blanket. Reeling a bit as always with the size. Everything is so huge here: cars, roads, empty lots, sprawling cities, people. We went to Target, and I thought perhaps a new phobia should be invented for fear of large stores, overwhelming choice, terrifying impossible demands on your capacity to consume. Even the shopping carts are bigger, and they have seats like little plastic cars for children. Bohemoths left blocking the massive shining white aisles while mom stares at rows of hairsprays. I don’t know why the carts bother me so much, far beyond her rudeness. The size I think, like the health food store with it’s giant canisters of super-food powder for $75.99 each.

I feel sometimes I see it all through post-peak-oil-globally-warmed-already-run-out-of-water-and-even-hotter-after-the-whimpering-apocalypse eyes. No one should possibly ask ‘why’ it has happened, but I imagine they will.

Environment & Justice, Struggle & Movement

Death and the Anthropocene: Roy Scranton

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25330145There is a name for this new world: the Anthropocene. The word comes from ancient Greek. All the epochs of the most recent geological era (the Cenozoic) end in the suffix “-cene,” from kainós, meaning new. Anthropos means human. The idea behind the term “Anthropocene” is that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force. (17)

There you have this new word being thrown around in environmental and urbanist and academic circles — anthropocene. It annoyed me at first, I confess. But new words often do, when they feel like an academic gimmick to make old ideas stand out. I’ve decided this isn’t one of those words though, I think it’s a good word.

I liked this tiny book as well, a couple of essays pushed into a just-long-enough form. There is plenty to ponder here with some solid references for climate change and the role human beings have played in entering this new period.

Thomas Schelling is one to remember, writing that carbon trading simply will not work. The idea of climate change as a ‘wicked’ problem, I am trying to remember where else I have seen that used:

Global warming is what is called a ‘wicked problem’: it doesn’t offer any clear solutions, only better and worse responses. One of the most difficult aspects to deal with is that it is a collective-action problem of the highest order. (53)

and this:

The problem with our response to climate change isn’t a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people’s minds or raising awareness. Everybody already knows. The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. the problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is that the problem is us. (68)

There were a few other references that fascinated me — Mount Tambora exploding in 1816, creating ‘The Year Without a Summer’ (52). And then the ‘dark snow’ effect that is helping melt glaciers in Greenland (52). I have never heard of either.

But really, this comes down to a rather interesting philosophical take on what is needed now from human beings:

To survive as a soldier, I had to learn to accept the inevitability of my own death. For humanity to survive in the Anthropocene, we need to learn to live with and through the end of our current civilization. Change, risk, conflict, strife and death are the very processes of life, and we cannot avoid them. We must learn to accept and adapt. (22)

There is a lot about death. A calling on samurai wisdom. I feel this probably works for some, but at the same time it is such a male path, a warrior path — and it feels like a path, a way. This is such a continuation of beat poets and City Lights tradition. Nothing about love, healing, compassion, creation, cooperation in here, though I think they are as much processes of life as anything else. Vandana Shiva is as much a warrior, but it has nothing of her love or hopes for the future or sense of connection to the world nor how we might change things in very different fashion. So all in all, I wouldn’t mind working side by side with people on this way, but it is not one I would chose. Or that would choose me.

I’m not one to completely discount the need for violence in liberation, but I disagree that violent struggle is the real maker of change. Nor do I quite see civil rights struggles in the same light. He writes:

‘What’s more, the success of the Civil Rights movement can’t be properly understood, without taking into account federal military interventions'(73)

He lists Eisenhower sending troops in 1957 to desegregate Little Rock schools, Robert Kennedy sending marshals to university of Mississippi in 1962, John Kennedy sending troops to stop rioting at University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama 1963, federal troops protecting marchers from Montgomery to Selma. (73)

‘…the fight to win fundamental civil rights and political equality from segregationists and racists was grinding, dangerous, and aggressive: it strove to take something from Southern white racists that they didn’t want to give up, namely power. (74)

And from this he goes on to quote Heraclitus:

It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife. (76)

And:

Fight. Flight. Fight. Flight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives. (77)

I think there’s a bit more to us, to animals. I have to disagree strongly with Heraclitus.

The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. (23)

I think acceptance of this statement will help some people, but I don’t think it will mean anything or be at all helpful to others.

The other really interesting thing in here, though, was on resonance, energy, our communication and how it is changing and potentially changing us. Think of bees and their dancing, their hive mind, and then think of twitter and facebook:

Politics, whether for bees or humans, is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems. (55-56)

Are we really organised entirely around energy? That is a really fucking interesting thought, though I’m not sure I buy it:

The key is energy: energy production and social energetics. Just as a beehive is structured around the production of honey, so are human societies structured around labor, horses, wheat, coal, and oil. How bodies harvest, produce, organize, and distribute energy determines how power flows, shaping the political arrangements of a given collective organism behind whatever ideologies the ruling classes may use to manufacture consent, obscure the mechanisms of control, or convince themselves of their infallible omniscience. (56)

He quotes Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (on my list to read for some time now)

Workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a class culture, collective ideology, or political organization, but by the increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined, loaded, carried, stoked, and put to work. The coordinated acts of interrupting, slowing down, or diverting its movement created a decisive political machinery, a new form of collective capability built out of coalmines, railways, power stations, and their operators. (58)

I’m just not so sure this is entirely true as the foundation of power whether or capital or labour, or even of organising. Again it is such a male world, a working world that has nothing to do with women and children, home and community, words, race, sexuality, cities… so much is left out of this equation.

He has this interesting theory about vibrations though, the way we now share and thus amplify meme after meme, pictures, news, sound-bite beliefs:

But politics is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems, and we live in a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve particular interests…Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations, the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain locked within a machinery that offers no political leverage:  they do not translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of power. (84-85)

This is so SF, so William Gibson, I don’t think the internet and virtual reality has actually quite worked out like this. But maybe. It’s worth a ponder:

A new form of life has become evident: humanity has revealed itself as collective energy, light swarming across a darkened planet, a geological forcing, data and flow. We live in networks, webs, and hives, jacked in to remote-controlled devices and autonomous apps, moments of being in time, out of time. No longer individual subjects or discrete objects, we jave become vibrations, channelers, tweeters and followers. (107)

As is the idea that there are ‘new technologies of photohumanism’ and what that means.

I confess I like too the call for a renewed humanism — reminds of Edward Said’s defense of it really as a critical consciousness and an awareness of all that has come before us and all that will come after:

Philosophical humanism in its most radical practice is the disciplined interruption of somatic and social flows, the detachment of consciousness from impulse, and the condensation of conceptual truths out of the granular data of experience. It is the study of “dying and being dead,” a divestment from this life in favour of deeper investments in a life beyond ourselves. (91)

I like too that it is something we actively engage in, it is not just an archive:

The study of the humanities is nothing less than the [patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life. This nurturing is a practice not strictly of curation, as many seem to think today, but of active attention, cultivation, making and remaking. It is not enough for the archive to be stored, mapped, or digitized. (99)

I’m not sure at the end, quite where this leaves those of us who feel more called to life and love than death though.

Walking

Jesus is coming to Echo Park!

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Terrible day today but enough of that.  I walked most of the way home today, hell of hot but I like walking and seeing the city in ways i’ve never seen it before, and it’s also good for thinking and getting tired so you sleep better because i’ve been doing lots of the first and not so much of the second…thought about what to do with myself and where to go and what I want to be and the best color to paint my toenails and why things are the way they are and how many squirrels it takes to screw in a lightbulb and similar sorts of things.  I’ll say now I had no time to eat a damn thing today so I was a bit lightheaded, though a lovely old woman who brings me her mail so i can translate it for her also kindly brought me a mango, I’m eating it later for dessert.  She thinks I don’t eat enough, though I don’t know what could give her that idea…

On my journey I saw an old guy in a wheelchair shaded by three very large chinese flowered paper parasols in brilliant shades of yellow, blue and purple.  I saw another old homeless man who using a sharpie had written on the back of his jean jacket in very large numbers 007.  I walked up the hill on 6th to find downtown spread out before me, and palm trees silhouetted against the blue mirrored glass of skyscrapers.  I saw heat rising from the pavement in waves.   I saw a man with a sign that said Arab arab = 9/11 and that made me incredibly sad.  I saw a tiny little traveling carnival called the Silver Streak with a carousel and a pirate funhouse and a giant bumpy slide…

The good news is that Jesus Christ is coming to Echo Park in a little less than a year.  Hooray!  About damn time too, he has left us on our own for far too long and christians have become just about unbearable.  I hope mohammed and yahweh join him, and whoever the mormons and jehovah’s witnesses believe in comes along as well, and buddha could add a sense of humour to the party.  I found these notices wheatpasted along sunset…took a picture but am missing upload capabilities so here are some excerpts, they’re brilliant!

“This is all the words for the return of second time to the world to fix the word.  Everyone of Los Angeles is giving God the greenlight to let Jesus Christ to Echo Park lake on 7-7-2007 at 8:00 pm, with a rainbow & 1,000 doves representing angels of god and angels of los angeles to be at echo park.

word-lotus-us-for jesus-ol>Olga prophet and St for christ.  he’s going to stop everyone from 40 and up so we can live to see 3007…”

and so on and so on, he’ll also be giving away green cards and clothes, and “heeling” people, not sure what that is, sounds a bit violent actually, but you have to be in echo park on 07-07-07 (ahh, numerology, my favorite exact science) to get them.  Think I might go, though absolutely sure that I won’t be living here anymore.  Think you can make something happen if you post enough hand written notices along sunset blvd?