Indie's Inanities

IndieGirl:

an old one I found today...


the feeling of fleeing

streetlights

are dependable andso
they have my love.

boys: get hurt,
become pirates.

chase me up,
to call me
a siren.

i sing because i'm tired
of bone
heads these
decaying down
on the rocks.

my mind effervesces miles
over dead
see

a fakelove has nothing
to do
with me.

you could've been
my velveteen
rabbit
and i
your good
skin horse.

but your story flecks

my
dulcet name
who rides truthful
condensation trails skyward.

and yet i've known no greater
love than
what it's like
to fly

away.

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It was not these ghosts, though, nor the untroubled allees colonnaded by plane trees, that calmed her. It was that the stillness sheltered an aggregation of mute evidence, apparent throughout the city in its small-scale neighborhoods, that our history is finally human. Regimes and ideologies - Tamerlane's Mongol empire, Caligula's Rome, Stalin's Soviet Union - whatever their horrors, whatever afflictions they deliver, pass away. What endures is the simple question of having lived.

...

The intricate nature of the emotions men and women exchange made the two of us sense our own endangerment when we disagreed; but we had also been speaking of the ephemeral love one can feel toward a complete stranger, for the way they step off a sidewalk or a father hands his daughter her gloves at the door. Bound together in these many ways, we are still swept suddenly out of each other's lives, by tides we don't recognize, and tides we do. The sensation of loss, the weight of grief, the feeling of being naked to a menace are hard to separate. The fear of an outside force at work makes us reticent in love and suspicious. We identify enemies.

The instruments of discord show up daily in our lives, of course, demanding our attention. The unscrupulous peer, the woman on the make, the purblind enforcer, the self-anointed official and his cronies, people with a craving for confrontation. We are foolish to give any of them what they ask for, and we betray ourselves and anyone toward whom we have ever felt tender by not sending such people immediately on their way.

...

After university, I and my friends had scattered abroad - to Brussels, Caracas, Sapporo, Melbourne, Jakarta, any promising corner. Two or three went deep upriver on the Orinoco or out onto the plateaus of Tibet and Ethiopia. We had come to regard the work of artists and writers in our country as too compliant, as failing to expose or indict the escalating nerve of corporate institutions, the increasing connivance of government with business, or the cowardice of those reporting the news. In the 1970s and 80s, we thought of our artists and writers as people gardening their reputations, while the families of our neighborhoods disintegrated into depression and anger, the schools flew apart, and species winked out. It was the triumph of adolescence, in a nation that wanted no part of its elders' remonstrance or any conversion to their doubts.

The years passed. We had no plan. We had no hope. We had no religion. We had faith. It was our belief that within the histories of other, older cultures we would find cause not to be incapacitated by the ludicracy of our own. It was our intuition that even in those cultures into which our own had injected its peculiar folklore - that success is financial achievement, that the future is better, that life is an entertainment - we would encounter enduring stories to trade in. We thought we might be able to discern a path in stories and performances rooted in disparaged pasts that would spring our culture out of its adolescence.

This remains to be seen. We stay in close touch (a modern convenience), scattered though we are. And now others, of course, keep close watch on us, on what we write and say, on whom we see. We are routinely denounced by various puppet guards at home, working diligently for a prison system we don't believe in. As the days have mounted, though, we've tasted more of the metal in that system's bars.

We feel cold.

Our goal is simple: we want our country to flourish. Our dilemma is simple: we cannot tell our people a story that sticks. It is not that no one believes what we say, that no one knows, that none of our countrymen cares. It is not that their outspoken objections have been silenced by the rise at home of local cadres of enforcement and shadow operatives. It is not that they do not understand. It is that they cannot act. And the response to tyranny of every sort, if it is to work, must always be this: dismantle it. Take it apart. Scatter its defenders and its proponents, like a flock of starlings fed to a hurricane.

Our strategy is this: we believe if we can say what many already know in such a way as to incite courage, if the image or the word or the act breaches the indifference by which people survive, day to day, enough will protest that by their physical voices alone they will stir up the hurricane.

We're not optimistic. We chip away like coolies at the omnipotent and righteous facade, but appear to ourselves as well as other to be ineffective dissenters. We've found nothing to use against tyranny that has not been written down or danced out or sung up ten thousands times. It is the somnolence, the great deafness, that reveals our problems. It is illiteracy. It is an appetite for distraction, which has become a cornerstone of life in our nation. In distraction on encounters the deaf. In utter distraction one discovers the refuge of illiteracy.

And here is nearly the bitterest of blunt issues for us: What can love offer that cannot be rejected? What gesture cannot be maligned as witless by those who strive for every form of isolation? When we were young, each of us believed that to love was to die. Then we believed that to love was essential. Now we believe that without love our homeland - perhaps all countries - will perish. Over the years, as we have learned what it might mean to love, we have generally agreed that we've better understood the risks. In our nation, it is acceptable to resent love as an interference with personal liberty, as a ruse the emotions employ before the battlements of reason. It is the abused in our country who now most weirdly profess love. For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.

We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe that they are creatures in search of a proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty that people want, not triumph. The stories the earth's peoples adhere to with greatest faith - the dances that topple fearful walls; the ethereal performances of light, color, and music; the enduring musics themselves - are all well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms, from the eras of Lascaux and Shanidar to the days of Prado and Butoh, these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition, because just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean. To achieve progress, we've all but cut our heads off.

...

The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon.

...

We are not to be found now. We have unraveled ourselves from our residences, our situations. But like a bulb in a basement, suddenly somewhere we will turn on again in darkness. We will carry what we know - what it can mean to have your country under you like a hammock, what it is to take part in a world instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world's meaning and expression - we'll carry all of this into other countries. It will be hidden in our individual skills, in our dress, in our speech and manner, in the memory of each one of us. The memory of one will kindle the memory of another, a burst of electricity across a chasm. We will disrupt through witness, remembrance, and the courtship of the imagination. We will escort children past the darkest warrens of the forest. We will construct kites that stay aloft in the rain. We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant.

...

It is also our intention to break these stories out ahead of your avenging fist, to get them, through the agency of a sympathetic and defiant publisher, directly into the hands of men and women who stand at similar thresholds, before you stifle their initiative with your intimidations.

We regard ourselves as the servants of memory. We will not be the servants of your progress. We seek a politics that goes beyond nation and race. We advocate for air and water without contamination, even if the contamination be called harmless or is to be placed there for our own good. We believe in the imagination and in the variety of its architectures, not in one plan for all. We believe in the divinity of life, in all its human variety. We believe that everything can be remembered in time, that anyone may be redeemed, that no hierarchy is worth figuring out, that no flower or animal or body of water or star is common, that poetry is the key to a lock worth springing, that what is called for is not subjugation, but genuflection.

We trace the line of our testament back beyond Agamemnon, past Ur, past the roots of the spoken to handprints blown on a wall. We cannot be done away with, any more than the history of the Sung dynasty can be done away with, traveling as it does as a beam of coherent light far beyond our ken. We cannot, finally, be imprisoned or killed, because we remember and speak.

We are not twelve or twenty but numerous as the motes of dust lining the early morning shafts of city light. We are unquenchable and stark in the same moment we are ordinary. We incorporate damage and compassion, exaltation and weariness-to-the-bone.

What follows is our response to your intrusion, your order to be silent, your insistence that we have something to talk over.

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IndieGirl:

Thanks, Mum!

Here are a bunch more... sorry you all have to suffer through me having nothing better to do no a Friday night!


me reading "touchwords"


me reading "the bird"


me reading "when you met me"


me reading "absolutions"


me reading "untitled 5.23.07"


me reading "sunleaving"


me reading "goldwatch"


Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go record me singing horribly along with my favorite songs and then laugh at myself.

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IndieGirl:

Mole shaggers to you

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IndieGirl:

I have plenty of sources say otherwise!

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syber rad:

IndieGirl:

I have plenty of sources say otherwise!

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Well the two raddest dudes on this wide wide world of web say that your voice would be an excellent singing voice. and one of them has heard it a fair bit, so you should take their opinions over everyone else's.

Rad having you back Syd.

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IndieGirl:

Well if Syd and Syb say so, it must be true.

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