health as a collective endeavor

[bookshavepores]

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin  (via rosepetalbath)

[collective-health]

“She wanted health, she wrote; but what did she mean by health?  ‘By health’, she wrote, ‘I mean the power to lead a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love - the earth and the wonders thereof - the sea - the sun.  …Then I want to work.  At what?  I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain.  I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music.  And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing.  (Though I may write about cabmen.  That’s no matter.)’”

-Virginia Woolf, from her essay about Katherine Mansfield, “A Terribly Sensitive Mind,” published in the New York Herald Tribune, September 18, 1927

[altlitgossip]

'What Poets Should Do' by Dorothea Lasky

Poets should get back to saying crazy shit All of the time I am sick of academics or businesspeople telling poets What we should do A poet is a scientist To favor poetry Or science In that both relate to Buddhism However, both are things that melt A purple haze or dawn What sunken in Always a shifting mood, But it’s true, I love you guys and gals Of the wood and word Let’s say whatever it is we please We don’t have to defend anything It is our God-given right to declaim No, let me start again It is our universal law to speak Not an actuary to measure how thin The arguments of our verse To say we make a treatise in language, no No we go on living and living and living on That’s beautiful, and poems are, too Poems and shells These little nothings I pick them up All the livelong day They are the signposts of comfort possible To smooth the jagged edges Of this worried traveler That’s what poems should do And that’s what poets actually do Damn light Always going on in my face I just want a poem to speak of So I go on and on Into the night And the townspeople, they say to you That they may have seen A monster But no no I was only the dawn

_

http://www.biglucks.com/lasky/

[mashatupitsyn]

-Zygmunt Bauman, “Consumerist Culture”, from Liquid Life. Another reason to hate Facebook.

[wellconstructedsentences]

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

Zadie Smith (via wellconstructedsentences)

[reitsc-deactivated20221203]

[collective-health]

breakthrough: the number of people you've had sex with is a reliable but not valid measure (i.e. Are u a slut? Are u a good girl?)

[purplebuddhaproject]

The Three Kinds of Pride are: (1) thinking I am better than the other(s); (2) thinking I am worse than the other(s); and (3) thinking I am just as good as the other(s).

Thích Nhất Hạnh (via purplebuddhaproject)

[lazz]

since the election, my news feed has been a constant stream of fighting spirit, bad news, and despair. i remember announcements directly after by those who were “more committed than ever” to coming together, but even then i recall asking, “why does the left need a bigger monster to awaken it; why do people need a glaring harbinger.” i want to dissociate from a politics that is rejuvenated only after the terrible fact, after it is too late, after insurmountable enemies have already taken the reins.

maybe in a different era i wouldn’t have written insurmountable, but the difference now is that i think certain kinds of optimism are reckless. when i finally watched Selma, aside from its major respectability politics and other issues, i couldn’t stop thinking that the promises he made to those under his wing, and his self-assurance that justice or love would prevail, were irresponsible.

i’ve also been thinking about what could be right about the alt-right’s shapeshifting platform, and how the very left i’m tired of might fuel some of that platform. after reading the draft of a friend’s great article on the alt-right (forthcoming in social text hopefully soon, i’ll post when it’s out), we talked about this—how he wonders about the part he played, growing up in the south as a teenager, on the internet as what people now call a sjw. “the problem is when leftist politics become formulaic; it’s not math,” i said. shouting at someone “you’re racist” doesn’t magically transport them to realization, much less to not being racist; the knowledge that brought you, the witness, to that observation is not then translated. but that’s the problem, or at least it seems to be: translation. the glaring question for me during the election and its aftermath is what to do with the fact that the burden of translation falls on the ones most harmed. when audre lorde laments that in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” and says that the responsibility falls on the oppressed to teach their oppressors, she actually never says “no it doesn’t” or “refuse that responsibility.” the observation, or complaint, comes from a state of exhaustion. the essay is directed toward those who don’t want to acknowledge difference or oppression; it’s a plea. but this is the very question we’re facing now. are they listening?

(are we?)

at least one person i know said the election made them seriously consider leaving a newly-earned faculty position to go back to their rural hometown and do something called the real work. this person is a trans woman, and i can’t imagine that talking to trump voters in her hometown would be that “successful” (how would we measure), personally fulfilling, or even safe. more and more i’ve come to feel that cultural capital is amassed in my direct circles through the demonstration of fighting and self-sacrifice. i spent my whole life in red states, first georgia and then its symmetrical opposite, arizona. it’s why i can see both the limits and the possibilities of translation. and in many ways, i spent the majority of my life trying to get out. 

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

love trumps nothing

Nov 15th, 2016 christopher bollas recently wrapped up a one-week residency at UC Berkeley on the theme “unconscious perception.” it ended the friday before the election. those in the seminar read and discussed his work for a month beforehand and then sat with him for a few hours during each day of his visit. it was clear that the election was an implicit referent and that there was collective reticence to circulating trump’s name, but this fell away pretty early on.

we started by talking about the “group mind,” which bollas approaches through his training in Group Relations (GR). GR employs a method by psychoanalyst wilfred r. bion called the tavistock method, which “concentrates on the individual only insofar as s/he is manifesting something on behalf of the whole group.” in group relations what one person says is not treated as commentary on the individual per se but as a function of the group mind. instead of “sarah thinks this” a facilitator might put forward “the group thinks this” or “what do we do with the part of ourselves that thinks this?” thus the person isn’t isolated, and paranoia is kept to a minimum. i think it also brings to light unconscious material that may be shared but voiced by few. in groups, there’s often the idea that the solution when someone does something we don’t like is to eradicate them (e.g. the war on terror). there is also the idea that we need to find the perfect group, when bollas maintains that “we have a group, but we don’t want to be in it.” his point was that you can’t purge difficult people from the group process, “they are the group process.”

referencing the pre-election polling that had clinton slightly ahead of DT, bollas asserted many people in the US had gone the way of hate as opposed to its more difficult alternative, love. “the group mind of the US is psychotic, we must have a way to reconfigure our group mind and find non-psychotic ways to relate.” the foundation for the seminar was really laid by this early conversation on love and hate. love is very precious, bollas maintained, because it’s not easy to come by and it’s not common. it takes an extraordinary amount of effort and time. but, if you want to hate you will have a companion for life. the child’s first powerful word is no, and with hate comes power; around ages 4, 5, and 6 that new power is intoxicating. hate is highly pleasurable, it’s more reliable, it can be generated individually because it doesn’t require another person like love, and it’s easily transmissible. bollas said that hate is when the self begins to kill love, and as this happens it reduces complexity. paranoia and hate are mechanisms for simplifying and therefore feel pleasurable. love is harder because the price of connection is pain.

in this sense, the phrase “love trumps hate” is a misplaced ontological confidence, to quote @afieryflyingroule. it’s the kind of empty untruth that is partly to blame for the results of this election. the paradox of love is that it doesn’t outpace or surpass anything. it’s constitutionally more delicate and easier to destroy. what is important for group life is that the compulsion to destroy is an investment in staving off pain. bollas argued that the flip side of the right’s paranoia is the left’s sanctimonious rectitude—the righteousness that is paired with having the correct answers and just pointing to or calling out what’s wrong; neither is open to dialogue. 

knowing that racism—by white subjects or others—might be an attempt to stave off pain does not warrant sympathy or forgiveness but rather provides an opening to those who might take it. “what am i trying to protect myself from? is it working? is an alternative more beneficial?” those harboring racism or protecting their right to accumulate capital are invested in separation (and/or destruction) because it is synonymous with ego enrichment. contrarily, many are invested in destruction or separation from the first group because their lives are at stake. as jina b. kim succinctly posted the other day:

I’m also tired of “agreeing to disagree.” Your opinion means the disproportionate death of black, brown, poor, immigrant, disabled, and queer communities. My opinion means your white uncle doesn’t get an extra boat this year. (via)

what many are staving off by “hating” trump and his supporters is deportation, incarceration, misery, impoverishment, and death. the stakes are entirely different. 

i’m still thinking about what to make of the gap between the two. the acts of pointing that get us nowhere. responses to [un/conscious] ego enrichment that might shed light on similarities. and who this burden falls on because others refuse to take responsibility. jill gentile recently wrote a book likening free speech in democracy to free association in psychoanalysis, arguing that in neither case is the importance of free speech really explained. why do we value it? she says that the following passage from freud indicates that he had already detected the democratic process in free association, because he did not just value solipsistic speaking but named a hearer, a partner in the journey of free association:

“Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental change in the person to whom they are addressed.” (Psychical [or Mental] Treatment,” 1890)

gentile argues that what is missing in the first amendment is a commitment to the process of hearing and translating. in a way, she suggests, the polis values speaking but not listening. “we need to restore a good faith relationship” between listeners and speakers.

bollas and group relations would say: we’re in a group and we’re responsible for the group mind, whether we want this one or not. this is what i walked away from the seminar and into the election and now around inside of its aftermath thinking about, with extra attention toward openness that doesn’t feel so pleasurable. i don’t have a lot of answers and feel more uncertain than anything else. but how one might do something other than multiply paranoia or feed off hatred is on my mind. “the broader part of love is to encounter hate in ourselves,” bollas said at one point. “to admit that is our ironic statement of love for people around us.”

-liz

[pure]

rookiemag: you can be friends with someone who functionally wants you to perish a slow and painful demise due to a lack of state-sanctioned resources

[collective-health]

AND SO THEY DREAMED IN PUBLIC...

-Naomi Klein, Climate Change is a People’s Shock

[poetsandwriters]

“…we were ready / to care for each other we were ready to see / our range of possibilities as a precious commodity / to know every other as another to live in the width / of our being…”

—Claudia Rankine, from “The Health of Us”

[machschine]

But [E]xit can mean more than just leaving the country altogether. There are many historical examples [of] Exit from given system within the state, coupled with the establishment of alternative, accessible infrastructures of support that are community-based and *not* corporate or profit-oriented in nature. One of the best historical examples of this is the direct community service performed by the Black Panthers during the 1960s and 1970s… ‘Free Breakfast for Children; liberation schools; free health clinics; Free Food Distribution Program; Free Clothing Distribution Program; child development centers; the Free Shoe Program; the Free Busing to Prison Program; the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation; free housing cooperatives; the Free Pest Control Program; the Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program; renter’s assistance; legal aid; the Seniors Escorts Program; and the Free Ambulance Program. Virtually all chapters ran at least a Free Breakfast for Children Program at some point.’ These programs served diverse communities, providing concrete and necessary aid that the state was failing to provide. They also highlighted the states failures to step in and meet the basic needs of its people, particularly in underserved communities, while at the same time giving local communities knowledge and experience in 'understanding of the process of grassroots institutional development  —  how to create and sustain their own much needed institutions from the ground up.’

Molly, on the Black Panthers’ community service network as a model for contending w the impending diminishment of federal care services in the U.S. (via machschine)

[heteroglossia]

What does it mean to be radical, to tell radical stories in our time, to win the battle of the story? The North American tradition seems to focus its activity on the exposé, the telling of the grim underside of what we know: the food is poison, the system is corrupt, the leaders are lying, the war is failing. There is a place for this, but you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. You need to tell the stories they are not telling, to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we’re winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time.

Rebecca Solnit (via heteroglossia)

[collective-health]

Jews say the most (sacred) (important) act is to draw together the two most disparate ideas Rabbi Hama said: Just as in the case of iron, when one implement sharpens another, so, too,  do two Torah scholars sharpen each other when they discuss questions of halakhah together. Rabbah Bar Bar Hannah said: Why were the words of Torah analogized to fire? For just as fire cannot be made to burn with one piece of wood alone, so, too, the words of Torah cannot be retained by someone who studies alone.

ugh i didn’t save the link

[collective-health]

I'm not trying to co-opt this beautiful dialogue on Black intellectualism and spirituality, but I would like to point out some amazing thinkers who posit that an inability to dialogue is the result of a supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal world.

"However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another that subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process. So to some extent, we invite all readers then to rejoice with us that this subject-to-subject encounter can be possible within a White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal context that would, in fact, have us not capable of talking to one another." --bell hooks to Cornel West in "Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life" (1990).