The First Chapter

The first chapter of the book I’m currently working on is entitled “The moment I no longer wanted to be famous,” and, for me, the implication is that once one truly understands the science and the full situation of our current ecological collapse, all other concerns should somehow fall away and one should dedicate oneself only to deep political change. But, strangely, it doesn’t quite work that way. This feeling that the planet we live on and with, our home, is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and that many (but not all) of us are the perpetrators of this situation—this feeling is both everywhere and nowhere; it is too diffuse. I continue to do all the things I’ve always done while at the same time feeling that instead I should be doing something else. If everyone stopped everything they were presently doing and engaged in 24/7 civil disobedience until the problems were solved, I assume it wouldn’t take long. It wouldn’t take long until we found a completely different way to organize society and our lives. But not only can everyone not seem to do this, I can’t even seem to bring myself to do so—to bring myself to believe that to do so would do any good. It might be said that a good part of my paralysis exists because I benefit far too much from the systems I would also like to see dismantled. I constantly ask myself: To what degree do I actually want to see these systems dismantled? In my lack of convincing answers, I fear I am not alone.

I’m remembering a poem I wrote when I was a teenager, something about “when our turn for extinction arrives,” a moment I, at that time, felt was somewhere in the distant future, a moment I currently feel is more or less now. Unless we act. A global refusal of the status quo more overwhelming than any seen in previous human history. A global refusal of the status quo that could be truly up to the task at hand. Meeting the situation’s diffusion (of feeling, if not of impact) with an equally focused solidarity and intensity. Of course, this is a fantasy. But so many of our actions are based on at least a certain degree of fantasy. Whatever we imagine the future will be like—apocalypse or solar-fuelled possibility—I believe exists (to such an uncomfortable degree) at the level of our imaginations. So many writers, activists, thinkers, and radicals have imagined a different future and continue to actively do so. If you haven’t read them already, I might suggest: Grace Lee Boggs, adrienne maree brown, Ejeris Dixon, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Renee Gladman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya V. Hartman, Jas M. Morgan, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Nora Samaran, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kai Cheng Thom, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Sylvia Wynter, and of course so many others. I continue to write while wondering if perhaps it would be better to read other writers instead of me. But, if I’m honest with myself, I know I can’t stop. (I sometimes say I’m too much of an artist for my own good.) And I’m not sure stepping aside would do any more good than, for example, trying to do the exploring and understanding I’m attempting here. But neither am I certain it wouldn’t.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how polemic or not polemic my writing should be—how concentrated or diffuse—and what exactly writing in more (or less) polemic ways might actually do, in the world or upon the consciousness of people perhaps a bit like you, dear reader. I can’t quite imagine anything I write is going to change much in the world, and I can’t even really imagine that it’s going to significantly change your mind or your position. Yet still it must do something. (But this something is so diffuse. And this very diffusion might also be what is best about it.) What is most alive in the act of writing is the fact that I can never know—sending words out into the world that might go beyond what I intend, that might reach someone and unsettle their thoughts in some small or large way. And that, most likely, will go out into the world and achieve less than nothing.

When I allow myself to drift toward polemic, this is the sentiment I find myself hammering out over and over again: that everything needs to change. Almost anything I’m able to think about regarding how our culture thinks or conceives of itself cannot remain the way it currently stands. (Someone might ask what I mean by “our” culture. Monotheism onward? The Enlightenment? The nation state? Mediated experience? Western art and literature? Liberalism and neoliberalism? Capitalist realism? Colonialism and white supremacy? All of this, and so much more.) The difficult questions that feel most pressing to me revolve around three things: money, punishment, and competition. If we could completely get rid of all our current ideas around money, punishment, and competition, what might our culture look like then?

The fact that punishment is one of the points on this rather short, and obviously incomplete, list is a direct result of the fact that I recently finished reading Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us. If you haven’t read it yet, I would highly recommend you do so. There are so many passages in this book I find myself thinking about over and over again, but perhaps this one most of all:

If the world we want—after considerable struggle to get there—arrives in 500 years, what might we be doing now to at least be heading in something resembling the right direction? I don’t know the answer, but worry far too much that, whatever it is, I am not currently doing it. Too much diffusion makes all future intergenerational goals feel vague and out of reach. Nonetheless, 500 years gives us room for an enormous range of imaginings, every kind of evocative abolitionist prognostication, and the work of turning such fantasies into concrete action remains never ending and more necessary than ever.