Offering: November 2023
"Be careful on this Earth"
Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Six of Cups by Pamela Colman Smith. In it, a person is passing a cup down to a smaller person in what appears to be an act of care and sweetness. The smaller person is looking up at them, adoringly and with trust. Behind the card is a shelf with special objects on it—a gold rose pin, a glass heart, a pearl necklace, shells.
“There is no other child who is this one. There is no other nurse who is this one. There is no other hand eye tooth bone. There is no other sibling, no other tree. The rulers kill the world and say their stupid words. Their sounds waste breath and with their lives they kill life.” — Aracelis Girmay, October 27, 2023 on Twitter
Poet Audre Lorde famously wrote that poetry is not a luxury. In her essay by that name she writes that “there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power.”
And though they were not meant to survive, “we can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared…Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
In statistical and numerical topographies, it is practically a command that one lose touch with feeling. Beauty—which includes emotionally resonant arrangements of language, image, and sound—brings us back to our watery origins. It stirs and moves us, making ripples and waves.
For Lorde, it is through an honest exploration of feelings that “the most radical and daring ideas” can come forth, which make way for meaningful action. “There are no new ideas,”1 she writes. Just new ways of seeing what old ideas really feel like, in the moments that matter.
The other day I watched a clip of the U.S. National Security Council’s John Kirby saying, “This is war…it is bloody, it is ugly and it’s gonna be messy…that’s unfortunately the nature of conflict.”
It made me think about a documentary I watched earlier this year on the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. Asked by an interviewer about the origins of deconstruction (which is his legacy) Derrida starts out by commenting on the “completely artificial character” of the situation they’re in. Theirs is neither an organic dialogue, nor an event in his sense of the word which involves a degree of spontaneity.
Rather than “feign a naturality which does not exist,” Derrida wants to be clear: Their context is constructed. It’s a documentary. There are lights, make-up, and microphones. The questions are planned in advance. And then he says: “I’ve already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn’t natural. To not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.”
John Kirby made a different decision than Derrida. Kirby chose to naturalize conflict as bloody, ugly, and messy and I think it’s likely he did so to undermine dissenting voices, legitimize killing, and manufacture consent. I think his decision also illustrates the extent to which the “war” he was referring to—Israel’s bombardment and genocide on the Palestinian people in Gaza—affects all of us.
Authoritative truth claims (ex. “this is the nature of conflict”) shape how those on the receiving end can conceive of what’s possible. Personally, I like to imagine that love is exalted in difference, as an “ethics of otherness that thrives on the adventure of otherness.”2 But if conflict’s bound to be bloody—per Kirby—maybe I’d better stay home. I’d better cordon off my grievances and deny the revelations of others. I’d better keep to my self and hold tight to my knowings. Maybe I’d best not love at all.
In On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process, theologian Catherine Keller cites professor of Jewish education Barry Holtz on the bet midrash, a “loud, hectic hall” for Torah studies in which “students sit in pairs or threesomes, reading and discussing out loud, back and forth.”3
Keller draws on Holtz’ description of the bet midrash to make a larger point about what she calls “a high level of fidelity, not just to the text but to one another.” She notes that in her own faith tradition of Christianity, conflicts “have often led to violence, permanent schisms, and war. As in many private families, we do not know how to differ faithfully, to argue trustworthily.”
Working in the poetic way that she does, Keller wonders if conflict often leads to violence “because we began to think the truth was something already received / settled and single? Did we mistake differences of perspective for the impasse of either / or? Did we develop a phobia toward the open forcefield of the spirit?”
—
I’m remembering these lines from “Revolutionary Letter #8,” a poem by one of my longtime Italian-American heroes Diane di Prima:
“know your limitations, bear contempt
neither for yourself, nor any of your brothers
//
NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down”4
—
Finally, because beauty, I went back and watched this scene from the film Beatriz at Dinner. The protagonist, played by Salma Hayek, says she believes in fate and that her fate is to heal people.
“I’m tired,” she says. “You think killing is hard?…Try healing something. That is hard…You can break something in two seconds. But it can take forever to fix it. A lifetime, generations, that’s why we have to be careful on this earth....”
Onward,5
Jessica
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From “Poetry is not a luxury,” by Audre Lorde
From “Witnessing subjectivity” in Ipseity and alterity by Kelly Oliver.
From Barry Holtz’ Back to the Sources, via Catherine Keller’s On the Mystery
From “Revolutionary Letter #8” by Diane di Prima from Revolutionary Letters.
From Diane di Prima, who made my life as a youth when she replied to an e-mail I’d sent her and signed off this way.
Thank you so much for this.
Never forget that same man cried addressing the nation abt the cruelty and depravity perpetrated on Ukrainians only a year ago. It’s only natural and expected when brown ppl are being oppressed.