A sip of liquor from a creek. Saturday syndicated Good Times, bare legs, colors draped like an afterthought. We bright enough to blind you. Dear anyone, dear high-heel metronome, white noise, hush us, shhhhh, hush us. We’re artisinal crafts, rare gems, bed of leafy bush you call us superfood. Jeweled lips, we’re rich We’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, history and clothes and a mother. Portrait-ready American blues. Palm trees and back issues of JET, pink lotion, gin on ice, zebras, fig lipstick. One day we learned to migrate. One day we studied Mamma making her face. Bright new brown, scent of Nana and cinnamon. Shadows of husbands and vineyards, records curated to our allure, incense, unconcern. Champagne is how the Xanax goes down, royal blue reigning. We’re begging anyone not to forget we’re turned on with control. We better homes and gardens. We real grown. We garden of soiled panties. We low hum of satisfaction. We is is is is is is is is touch, touch, shine, a little taste. You’re gonna give us the love we need.
At the risk of going a bit down the road of making a colorblind racist argument, I'm thinking more and more about how the crux of the ongoing issues around race centers around our lack of skill dealing with and successfully navigating through and negotiating conflict.
I remember when I was interviewing for a scholarship before beginning college, and someone asked me if I had hope that men and women would ever resolve their differences. I remember saying that it's a miracle that any of us can relate to anyone else, and gender differences just complicate things further. 30 years later, I would just add that race, class, urban/rural, liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, formally educated/life educated, and on and on add to the complexity and potential for miscommunication, misunderstanding, false assumptions, implicit bias, discrimination, prejudice and on and on.
A common trope is to say the life skill that should be taught from kindergarten up. Taking turns? Check. Saying sorry when you make a mistake? Check. But what about examining why you make mistakes more often when someone seems different from you? Not so much. Maybe Sesame Street? But only in a "we're all different, and that's ok!" kind of way. Not "You're different from me, and my first instinct is fear, but I need to lean into that and realize I just have something to learn - and you have something to each me!" And please, lord, teach us early and often how to work through conflict using nonviolent communication: "When you [observable behavior], I felt [real emotion, not a phrase beginning with "that"]. In the future, I would prefer [action the person can take or not take]."
I made the off-hand comment to a friend that no one likes conflict. We all avoid it. And that's clearly not true. The worst bullies among us LOVE picking fights. And every Karen among us thinks she has every right to make anyone else feel uncomfortable if she's got any want, need, or complaint. But most of us are in the not-so-sweet spot between the poles of "I have every right to ask for anything I want/need" (i.e. entitled arrogance / arrogant entitlement) and "I have no right to ask for anything I want or need" (i.e. no self esteem / underfunctioning / invisibility).And we're terrified to say anything out loud lest we be asking too much. Am I worth it? What if they say no? Is the request worth the conflict?
Instead of this win/lose polarity, we need healthy boundaries and ... ugh ... balance. Like the new thing people use as ground rule at meetings: Take space / Make space (the adjustment to replace the less inclusive "Move up / move back"). This comes with 2 acronyms to think about:
W.A.I.T. = Why Am ITalking?
S.P.E.A.K. = Share Perspectives / Engage Another Knowledge-base
There are 3 stickies on my desk that I stare at all day long:
What does it mean to undo harm?
What would being silent exacerbate?
Diversity does not equal racial justice
What would my life be like if I asked myself (and everyone else did the same) these questions in every interaction when we notice difference (and we should continually be learning to notice difference more) interfering with our communication and/or relationships?
Watched Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar talk with Katie Couric about their new book: You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey.
Amber said she feels no compunction to teach white people why what they just said is hurtful and ignorant. Lacey, as an HR representative and one of the only people of color in her company and in Omaha, takes responsibility for teaching the history lesson, when she can.
This makes me think even more about the sermon Forgiveness by the Rev. Angela Herrera, which is worth watching (daily!) in its entirety.
The key points are transcribed (poorly) below:
5:05
To forgive is to let the debt go, is to release a claim you
have against somebody. It is to say we are no longer bound to each other by
what happened and by what remains unresolved. I release it. And in doing so, I release
myself.
Sometimes people speak of forgiveness as a gift to the
person who is being forgiven, and it certainly can be. It can be an underserved
gift, which is to say, something that you could not be entitled to, the other
person couldn’t do anything to be entitled to be forgiven.
Of course, If you revel in how undeserving the other person
is, you’ve probably undone some of the goodness in that. But if you do it well,
you can forgive somebody in such a way that doesn’t involve any sense superiority
but leaves you that a burden has just been lifted from you – the burden of
being angry. Where forgiving with a sense of condescension or superiority
leaves you with a new negative way of thinking, forgiving freely is liberating
and it helps us to be at peace and well in ourselves.
That feeling works even if the person never knows they have
been forgiven…. It opens up more space in us for gratitude, love, awe, joy.
Releasing our claims against the past allows us to become more present to now
and to what goodness is still unfolding.
8:36
Hindu teaching – Bhagavad Gita
“If you want to see the
brave, look for those who return love for hatred; if you want to see the heroic,
look to those who can forgive.”
12:32 – start with curiosity. Compassion questions.
Forgiveness does often begin with cultivating compassion in
ourselves. Even Just a tiny bit….
Compassion might begin with a little curiosity. How did this
person come to do what they did?
Have they been broken by something larger than themselves?
What does their behavior or their way of being cost them?
Are they happy? Are they caught up in larger systems of oppression and
violence? Do I have any personal experience with that kind of mindset? … Is it
possible that on some terrible level, they are doing the best they can? …
It’s not actually necessary to believe that the person
deserves to be forgiven. It’s more important to believe that you deserve to be
free of anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge. …
Anne LaMott –
"Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and
then waiting for the rat to die."
13:55
Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. It does not
require speaking to the other party… or being ok with what happened.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting someone continue to do someone to harm. It’s
not weakness. We can forgive and still find it best to end the relationship. Forgiveness
does not mean liking or agreeing with bad or even evil behavior. It does not
mean becoming friends from someone who would continue to hurt you… We can
forgive and we still expect the offender to face reasonable consequences, whatever
those might be.
15:00
To forgive is to say outloud or in our hearts: I’m not going
to be angry anymore. It’s saying: even though what you’ve done is bad, and it would
be perfectly acceptable. It’s too late to have a better past, it’s not too late
to be present to what is and to experience liberation
When you forgive another person, you release the power their
action has over you, the tension of that debt pulling on you is released, and
you can get back to yourself, back to some peace because the chains between you
and that other person have been broken or removed.
17:50
The message of our Universalist faith is that Every one of
us is forgivable. Everyone is lovable.
Goodness and discernment are big things to fail at. Yet the
trees stirring around her remind her that she came into the word to go easy, to
be filled with light, and to shine. My hope for each of you, for all of us, is
that we’ll experience forgiveness however we need it. May you receive it and
give it as often as needed, even an inch at a time. May it be so. Amen.
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
This week, the forces for white supremacy were besides themselves with indignant rage at cancel culture at work in eliminating the gender from Potato Head and the casual racism of Dr. Seuss.
The same week, I participated in a Lunch and Learn about Intercultural Communication where the instructor taught that if we ever faltered in how to handle microaggressions, we were to just think of them as sexual assault and handle them that way. The perpetrator was to be banished. The victim was to be believed and supported. End of story.
As a white person who freely admits that I have been steeped in and shaped by white supremacist culture, I know that I have been guilty of casual racism, implicit bias, subtle acts of exclusion, and unjustifiable ignorance. I acknowledge that I must work to stay awake, stay aware, learning and growing and listening.
And I do not believe that microaggressions are only perpetrated by white people. If you accept intersectionality of power and oppression, you acknowledge that it's a one-up, one-down game in all directions and at all levels.
And if you accept that, then you must know that despite all our best efforts, mistakes and slip-ups and gaps in knowledge, skill, and grace are inevitable. And "punishment" for microaggressions is not just short-sighted but woefully inadequate for the ocean of water that we all have to carry to get from where we are to a world in which we resolve conflicts with peaceful resolution. What's peaceful about treating a microaggressor as a perpetrator of sexual assault?
I am a Universalist Unitarian, and the first part of my faith history is a heretical belief - at the time but also now - that every human being is worthy of salvation. That we are all redeemable. As Ruby Sales put it in her interview with Kristen Tippet in the podcast On Being:
This whole business of demonization, I’ve been deeply concerned about it, because it does not locate the good in people. It gives up on people. And you see that most especially in the right and the left. I have been very concerned about the demonization that comes out of right-wing communities and also the demonization that I’ve heard on the left. And it comes from the same source of displaced whiteness. So I think that there is, at the heart of this business of finding something good in people and not giving up on anyone and not writing anyone’s obituary until they no longer have breath in their bodies, is very problematic today. And I have had deep problems with the anger, the vitriolic rage that has come out of the right and the left — and I never thought I would say this — and the only safe landing space seems to be in the middle. [laughs] And I think we should really think about that. I do believe that we’re witnessing something that we need to pay real attention to.
She entreats us to ask "Where does it hurt?" when people are acting poorly, acknowledging that bad choices are born of pain, hurting, feeling like no other option is available. She alludes to white grievance feeling like white culture is under attack, that to be white is to be racist, to be irredeemable, to be flawed, to be bad.
To say that white supremacy culture leads white people to walk around harming others by denying their own cultural centers is not to say that whiteness is bad. It is to say that white supremacy is bad. And that actions and words and inaction and silence that reinforces white supremacy is bad. The difference between guilt - I have done a bad thing - and shame - I am bad.
But to let go of shame is to let go of the excuse that because I cannot shed whiteness, I have no way of doing better. And those who support and defend white centered culture want no part of any path that would hold them to doing better.
But the admonition that anyone who perpetrates a microaggression is akin to a rapist also narrows the paths toward reconciliation. Where is the island big enough for all the misfit toys? Hint: It's all the continents of the world.
And so if we say that all people are made up of intersectional identities, and each is connected to cultures, we must also say that because we are constantly communicating across cultures, miscommunication is to be expected and mistakes large and small will be commonplace. And therefore our work to be in right relationship, in Beloved Community of acceptance and celebration, must be the work of openness to learning and affirming and repair and reconciliation when harm occurs.
(Is my feeling of urgency to get to learning skills of conflict resolution and reconciliation and repair a way of skipping past the acknowledgment of the need to learn and do better? Or, rather, is it side-stepping the instinct to not do better until I "learn enough" - a trap of inaction because there is an never-ending amount to learn?)
I want a "how to have hard conversations when you've screwed up" course. Or a "how to call in when someone's screwed up" workshop. I want more models of mama love - the image of a wolf nipping at her cubs when they get out of line but mostly letting them learn their own lessons through play with their littermates.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg gets at this new culture where mistake and repair is normalized and de-stigmatized when she offers this language, with a laugh, in an recent podcast with author Ijeoma Oluo, "You could just say: I did a racism, didn't I?" and then use the Jewish tradition of atonement as a model for how to get back into right relationship.
Rabbi Ruttenberg responds to Amy Cooper's sorry-not-sorry apology after calling the police on a black man when she broke the law:
She will not own that she DID a racism -- she could not possibly have DONE a racism, because that means she IS racist. ... Rather than, for example, saying something like, "I did something that was racist and I commit to educating myself to better understand why what I did was so harmful and to make better choices in the future." Something that would involve owning harm, working to change, and, I might add, offering amends of some sort to Christian Cooper. ... I don't believe that people cannot learn and grow and choose different actions. But that work demands taking full responsibility for the harm caused -- including amends and a real apology to the harmed parties -- and taking steps to become different (which could involve things like therapy, education, etc.)
Rather than acknowledging, eg, that we all live in a white supremacist society and that it takes a lot of work to fight the messages that we have all internalized.
I would offer that a full apology to the person harmed is Plan A. But I'm remembering a sermon on forgiveness by the Rev. Angela Herrera in which an apology is perhaps more necessary to oneself. A moment of reflection and reckoning and re-orientation to be in right relationship with one's own values and a re-commitment to do better (and do what doing better will require, including therapy, education, etc.). Forgiveness involves 2 people but only requires 1 to act.
And the reflection part includes Ruby Sales' question: Where is it hurting? What made you say or do or think or act or not say or not do or not think? (Seeing the water in which you swim. Reasserting your values. Re-orientation. Re-commitment.)
And the larger question of how to be in relationship with others, to be in community? It's a longer timeframe and more than 1:1 interactions. We should not only be focused on the success or failure of individual interactions and the quality of apology and atonement for 1 microaggression. The microaggressor may not be the right person to help heal the harm they caused, which is not to say that they shouldn't apologize, but rather to say that we all have a role in repair. That many hands make light work. That some harm can only be healed in community and over generations in the progress we make in dismantling systems of oppression. Which is not to let anyone off the hook for the responsibility to learn more so that we can individually do better, or to learn better how to apologize and repair/atone when we don't always do better.
This is both/and. Individual interactions and the long arc of justice. The resilience of a tree, turning to grow in a new direction when the light is blocked from one side, as poet Jane Hirschfield writes in the poem "Optimism." Or, as Ruby Sales said, cultivating and embracing the love borne of redemptive anger ... that moves you to transformation and human up-building." (And fortifies you to hold others to account for their missteps.)
I'm thinking here of the usefulness of the wave/particle metaphor - that light acts both as a wave and a particle, depending on how you set up your equipment to study it. Our interactions are this way - a lesson at the level of 1:1 interactions as individual particles and on systemic levels when we look at interactions among intercultural communities and across generations. Both are true. Both are useful depending on the level you're working on. (Ah, William James, you so-and-so, teaching us that what's useful is what's true! I see you!)
"We are incomplete without knowing each other." Ruby Sales says. And because of our intersectional identities, there is an infinite web of cultures to know.
"Our job is to take care of one another. To fight for a world where everyone is safe, is free, is whole. All of us. In this together. That's it. That's the work. Don't ever forget it." - Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
I spent two years not looking Into the mirror in his office. Talking, instead, into my hands Or a pillow in my lap. Glancing up Occasionally to let out a laugh. Gradually it felt like a date with a friend, Which meant it was time to end.
Two years later, I saw him walking Up Jay Street into the sun. No jacket, His face a little chapped from wind. He looked like an ordinary man carrying Shirts home from the laundry, smiling About something his daughter had said Earlier that morning. Back before
You existed to me, you were a theory. Now I know everything: the words you hate. Where you itch at night. In our hallway, There are five photos of your dead wife. This is what we mean by sharing a life. Still, From time to time, I think of him watching me From over the top of his glasses, or eating candy
From a jar. I remember thanking him each time The session was done. But mostly what I see Is a human hand reaching down to lift A pebble from my tongue.
In this time of transition from anger, despair, and loneliness to one of hope and possibility, we pause to consider the ways that we have been hurt in the past year, the ways we were injured by witnessing things that we know to be wrong. As we consider what we have lost, may we acknowledge our wounds and take the time needed to heal. May we honor that process of becoming whole again, and from that return to our commitments to build a world of love and kindness.
May we pause to notice the ways that the world is beautiful. May we breathe in the possibilities of life and growth and laughter.
We give thanks for the gifts that we receive, large and small. Let us not consider whether we deserve them or not but simply bask in the grace of being here, being on earth, being together.
There are lots of ways to stay alive. You can wear soft clothes and focus on brushing your teeth and hydrating. You can ask yourself what you need and not be mad when you don’t have an answer, only a shrug. You can breathe in. And then, with care, you can also breathe out. Taking the thing one single breath at a time.
You can give yourself a chance. Remember not only your mistakes, but also all the ways that you matter. From eyelash to shoelace, you matter. You matter when you are sad, when the world is heavy like wet laundry, dragging from your arms. You matter when you are angry and you use your teeth like welded prison bars to keep the words that might cause harm from escaping past your lips.
There are many ways to stay alive.
You can come, heart wrapped in several layers of foil, mashed into a plastic box with an ill-fitting lid, to a place where people say your name like it is good news.
You can fight your way toward freedom.
I recommend that you decline the option of struggling by yourself. The point is to get your life. There was this wise ruler who said once that by ourselves we are unprotected, but two people together can face the worst: [the failure, the heartbreak, the upending of worlds we hold in our hearts, and the secret shame that we will shed like the skin of a smooth snake, though it will take some time.] And with three people, you being one of them, you may find that eventually, all will be well.
Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs, just as he would fall in love with the moon— no women in the world yet, he was only ten years old. A ten-year-old is made of time, the world had forever to learn about Egypt. He entered encyclopedias and looted every fact of them and when he had finished looting there he broke into the Bible. He snuck into his mother’s room and drew thick lines around his eyes and those were the borders of Egypt. He carefully wrote in stiff small birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes, he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans. The ten-year-old world needed so much privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt glyph and learned to make the sound it made. I am an old white British man, decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung of his body was the shape of Africa and one single square breath in it Egypt. They never found all the tombs, he knew. Anyone might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old world in love with it, I will send my wind down into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them, and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light on even their littlest names.
"The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a fucking act of will."
"I want to say and re-say to anyone who ask me, I do believe in gratitude ("flowers") as a kind of discipline, an energizing and catalyzing, and potential collectivizing discipline. What I mean is that, when I'm thinking of gratitude, or the gratitude I'm thinking of, is the ways we make each other possible. And that gratitude makes me more interested in making people possible, myself included.
...
(14:28)
If there's anything that's interesting to me about the poems, it's that they are motivated by precisely the desire to reach across, which is exactly what metaphor means, after all. Have you seen the moving trucks in Greece emblazoned with the word metaphores? My poems would be stupid little things to me, if they didn't reach your way. Who has the time?
...
(24:39)
I'm resisting your question about resistance, looks like. But I'm not really resisting; truth is, I'm making an argument. I'm making my argument with my body and the ground, about our bodies and the ground.
...
(28:30)
How you see or what you see depends on the ground. You cannot engrave, in other words, you cannot cannot dig, in other words, you cannot prepare the earth for your body, without a proper and true ground. Maybe this book of flowers is a preparation for the ground I wish to enter.
...
(28:55)
... I'm talking about the ground, what holds us, what we walk on, what we fall onto, what we leap from, what holds us, the ground.
Or in a painting that against which the marks are made in a Franz Kline painting, the big industrial swipes of black arguing with or emerging from or even resisting the creamy surfaces, gestures legible because of the ground, dependent upon the ground, or better yet a Glen Ligon painting, the Zora Neale Hurston quote ad black text on a white surface: "I feel most colored when I'm thrown against a sharp white background."
...
(28:34)
I'm really curious about the ground of our imaginations and the ground that it is implied or assumed by the word resistance in the context of your question... about this book. "What are you resisting in your book about flowers, black man?"
...
(30:00)
What I hope I'm doing actually is imagining a ground different than the one the question presumes. Because the ground that question presumes is something I refuse to abide. On that ground, which is simply descriptive of an America, which is for the record, like everything fleeting. Let's call it an American ground, in which, for which, upon which black people are not actually people. And sometimes it feels that if an America grants that if we are people, that it also imagines that our natural condition is pain, is suffering, is turmoil, is indignity, is death. It's big business, our suffering, our death.
...
(30:55)
Sometimes it seems to me that a black person becomes more legible in this particular American ground the closer they are to being dead. ...
(31:09)
That is the ground. I hear myself say it among friends, so I'll say it to you right now, that they would like us to believe it. They would like us to believe, I sometimes believe, watching Walter Scott being shot again and again on the news, when any child can see... watching Tamir Rice be murdered again and again that our natural state, our natural condition, our ground is pain, if not death. ...
(31:54)
Let's call that an American imaginative ground. ... A foundational American imaginative ground. ... I don't believe in it as a ground. And consequently I don't believe in it as something to be resisted. I just believe it's a persistent and abhorrent disruption to the actual ground, the actual ground being what I hope my book, a black man's book of flowers might look at. ...
(32:36)
I'm a flower in your garden being planted around your garden, a fervent and raucous mint.
So what's the ground? Our necessary lives or our lives necessary. And in our lives are so many things -- loss, sorrow, violence, pain, yes, but also delight, silliness, raucous laughter, care, care, as I see it, above all. Love, as I see it, above all. A thousand, thousand undocumented instances in my life alone of how I've been loved and cared for, lives that have seen my life and thereby made it possible. Lives, life, which has made our lives possible.
Celebration, exultation, praise, gratitude, and the rigorous practice, the rigorous public practice of those things is one of the ways we remind ourselves that our lives are the ground, that living is the ground. Those things remind us that being murdered and fucked over and terrorized is an aberration and to announce to the state or our shared consciousness or a broken American imagination by hollering with the light at our utterly necessary lives, our beautiful, beautiful necessary lives, that we are in fact meant to live.
So ... this book about flowers by a black man ... was both utterly conscious -- I knew what I was and wasn't saying -- and what, perhaps, I'm expected to be saying -- and it was just me minding my business, talking about my life, my life."
Building on Resmaa’s framing, I have been also thinking about power. It seems that power can show up as clean or dirty, as well. For example, when we believe that you having power or voice means that mine is silenced or that power is a zero-sum game, I think we are acting from dirty power.
But, when we see that power can grow across communities, that it can be a source of community transformation and well-being, and that we are all stronger when we see, hear, and find solidarity with each other, I believe we are acting into clean power.
Podcast - University of Arizona, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Center for Compassion Studies
Resmaa: There’s a white spoken word artist that I heard the other day, and he said something else that made my brain kinda go ‘click!’ and go ‘yeah, that's it!’ One of the things that he says is that when it comes to white people, and he’s talking about his own people, when it comes to white people, it’s important to realize that white body supremacy is the water, not the shark.
And many times progressives are always looking for the Trump shark, or the KKK shark, or the Mike Pence shark, right, they're looking for the shark, right, but not the fact that they are steeped in the water. And when white progressives put themselves on this continuum of, you got Trump’s over there and you got ‘good’ white people over here, what is happening is they forget that that continuum that they're on, the one that says they’re a good one is actually a sliding continuum.
It is not a fixed continuum. It slides. And when white progressives...this is something that Jim White has been saying lately, is that progressive white supremacy is as damaging as devout white supremacy. What I mean by devout white supremacy is that those who are so dedicated and devout to the destruction of people of color. Those are the devout ones, right? But the progressive ones, that insidious type of white body supremacy...that even though they say they don’t believe in white body supremacy, they are steeped in white body supremacy and those notions of who black people are in relation to who they are is still steeped in white body supremacy.
And if that goes unexamined, they continue to wound people of color, and then feign...and then won’t take responsibility for that wounding. So part of it for me is that when it comes to healing this thing about white body supremacy, white bodies have to begin to get together to figure out how they’re gonna create a container, a cultural container by which they can begin to develop culture to begin to actually attack it.
White body supremacy...the abolishment of white body supremacy, currently as it stands...white people have no notion how to begin to deal with that culturally. They have a notion around segregation. They have a notion around assimilation. They have no notion around abolishing white body supremacy, or racism, or anti-racist things. They have strategy around it, but not culture.
The KKK, the devout racists, have a culture. They have symbols, they have colors, they have music, they have dance, ways of speaking, ways of standing, ways of being, all that different type of stuff. What does the white liberal have other than strategy and a racial resume, right? And if I’m a fourteen year-old white boy, having music and symbols and a shared historical understanding, even if I know that the shared historical understanding is abhorrent, I still have something that speaks to me more so than picketing, and sitting around, you know, something that I’m protesting. That does not sustain culture. And until white liberals begin to actually develop a culture around anti-racist, abolishing, somatically abolishing white body supremacy, until they begin to think about this as a culture and less about this as a strategy, they will continue to re-wound people of color.
It was only months when it felt like I had been washing the dishes forever.
Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky. What is it to go to a We from an I?
Each time he left for an errand, the walls would squeeze me in. I cried over the nonexistent bathmat, wet floor of him, how south we were, far away in the outskirts.
(All the new bugs.)
I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying a zucchini like a child.
This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.
This was before we got the dog even, and before I trusted the paralyzing tranquilizer of love stuck in the flesh of my neck.
Back home, in my apartment, another woman lived there. In Brooklyn, by the deli, where everything was clean and contained.
(Where I grieved my deaths.)
I took to my hands and knees. I was thinking about the novel I was writing. The great heavy chest of live animals I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?
I made the house so clean (shine and shine and shine).
I was suspicious of the monkey sounds of Kentucky’s birds, judging crackles, rusty mailbox, spiders in the magnolia tree, tornado talk, dead June bugs like pinto beans.
Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles, they found a woman’s body at the bottom of the cistern.
Imagine, just thinking the water was low, just wanting to take a shower.
After that, when the water would act weird, spurt, or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for, at the lowest curve of the water tower.
Yes, and over and over, I’d press her limbs down with a long pole until she was still.
Tippett: I wanted to talk to you about justice and how you grapple with that reality, that aspiration, that concept. And there has been an evolution of that. You have brought together the idea of longing for justice and working for justice with also exalting the beautiful and tending to what one loves, as much as what one must fight.
Gay: Tending to what one loves feels like the crux. And I’m very confused about justice, I think. I feel like the way we think of justice is absolutely inadequate, often. Often. Not everyone. And I am curious about a notion of justice that is in the process of exalting what it loves.
Tippett: So here’s something you wrote somewhere. You said,
“I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”
Gay: I also think that there’s a part of our bodies that are wired — and this is a thing that I noticed, that when I would experience something delightful, and sometimes I’d be like, “Oh, that’s wonderful” — so often, I’d be like, “I want to tell you.” It is this thing that actually makes me reach out towards someone.
And that feels bodily. I don’t know if a scientist has found this out yet, but when something good happens, do we gather around a thing? It is a feeling that I have, a deep feeling that I have, and I feel like it’s something that I witness, too, that people kind of want to share the stuff that they love.
Tippett: There’s this famous line from Cornel West, that justice is love made public.
[Reading and talk: What's the difference between exuberance (commitment to wonder) and earnestness (too tight fastness to rube-like wonder) when reading the essay about the meanings of "touched"]
Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath enlarges all of space. Let your presence ring out like a bell into the night. What feeds upon your face
grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered. Move through transformation, out and in. What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.
In this immeasurable darkness, be the power that rounds your senses in their magic ring, the sense of their mysterious encounter.
And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
All morning I’ve thought of you feeding donkeys in the Spanish sun—Donkey Petra, old and full of cancer. Blind Ruby who, you say, loves carrots and takes a long time to eat them. Silver the beautiful horse with the sunken spine who was ridden too young for too long and then abandoned. And the head-butting goat who turned down your delicious kiwi so afterward you wondered why you hadn’t eaten it.
Here I feed only the unimpressed cats who go out in search of something better. Outside, the solitaires are singing their metallic songs, warning off other birds. Having to come down from the mountain this time of year just to pick at the picked-over trees must craze them a little. I can hear it in their shrill, emphatic notes, a kind of no, no in the undertone.
Gabriela-flown-off-to-save-the-donkeys, it’s three hours past dawn. All I’ve done is read the paper and watch the overcast sky gradually lighten. Breaking news from the West: last night it snowed. A man, drunk, tied a yellow inner-tube to his pickup, whistled to his daughter, and drove in circles, dragging her wildly behind…
I know. But to who else can I write of all the things I should not write? I’m afraid I’ve become one of those childless women who reads too much about the deaths of children. Of the local woman who lured the girl to her house, then cut the baby out of her. Of the mother who threw her children off the bridge, not a half-mile from where I sleep.
It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I asked for your favorite feeling. You said hunger. It felt true then. It was as if we took the bit and bridle from our mouths. From that moment I told myself it was the not yet that I wanted, the moving, the toward—
“Be it done unto me,” we used to say, hoping to be called by the right god. Isn’t that why we liked the story of how every two thousand years, a god descends. Leda’s pitiless swan. Then Gabriel announcing the new god and his kingdom of lambs—and now? What slouches
toward us? I think I see annunciations everywhere: blackbirds fall out of the sky, trees lift their feathery branches, a girl in an out-sized yellow halo speeds toward—
I picture her last moments, the pickup pulling faster, pulling rougher, kicking up its tracks in the slush: she’s nestled into that golden circle, sliding toward the edge of the closed-off field—
I am looking at the postcard of Anunciación, the one you sent from Córdoba in the spring. I taped it to the refrigerator next to the grocery list because I wanted to think of you, and because I liked its promise: a world where a girl has only to say yes and heaven opens. But now all I see is a bright innertube pillowing behind her head. All I see is a girl being crushed inside a halo that does not save her.
This is what it’s like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.
What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.
Sometimes I half think I’m still a girl beside you—stretched out in the ravine or slouched in the church pews, looking up at the angel and girl in the colored glass, the ruby and sapphire bits lit up inside them. Our scene. All we did was slip from their halos—
Which is to say, mi corazón, drink up the sunlight you can and stop feeding the good fruit to the goat. Tell me you believe the world is made of more than all its stupid, stubborn, small refusals, that anything, everything is still possible. I wait for word here where the snow is falling, the solitaires are calling, and I am, as always, your M.
