How do we now navigate a new chaos of possibility? Our languages and investigations of utopias, prehistoric caves, history’s revision from a people’s point of view, i.e. the invasion of Turtle Island (“these were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries”). Pratitya Samutpada is a handy term to conjure here from Buddhist psychology which underscores the interconnectedness, the cause & effect—the endless karmic web of action. If you do this to that this happens or that to that to that to that to that this happens. How navigate the “horbins,” or holocausts in memory, out of memory & to come? Is it conceivable? Dare we say oppositional is a spiritual poetics? How navigate mythological poetic wars, planetary finitude, unfathomable sickness, starvation & death. How navigate the new savage state? As writers what’s the task? More letters to immured powermongers? New hope in a fresh, less cynical “administration”? Putting our energy onto quote a “candidate”? Total candor? Total renunciation? The Crips & Bloods the newspapers say orchestrate a kind of truce since the L.A. Insurrection, people to people we are made. My best friend & I argue about that word: insurrection. Want to get the facts straight. Is it simply a “frustration”? A looting? You think “riot” is a better nomer? Some of us think since Jan 17, 1991, everything’s markedly different. My niece had “communist” smeared across her high-school locker for refusing to salute the flag during Desert Storm in upstate New York. No never sleep. You go against the grain for the benefit of others.
As the muse said to Hilda Doolittle, “Write, write or die.”