And then there was

And then there was light. I mean…that isn’t to say that things were particularly dark in the interim. Kind of a dissonance to leave dangling unresolved. There were just other things that drew me away from the practice of posting something on a regular basis.

Chatham Review liked a piece of fiction, well enough to print anyway, that is my latest publish. I moved from the flagship prison in our system to a medium-security sprawl. I have been fortunate to have been in policy conversation with our new administration… progressive ideas seem to insist on taking hold. There are reasons and persons about which to be optimistic.

Then there are the real reasons for coming back around to the habit of writing in this medium. My person shared with me this Martha Graham quote:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others

Three compelling revelations as a result of that read.

1) “queer divine dissatisfaction” is the lifelong condition of never, ever, ever…ever, E-V-E-R feeling you can fully inhabit a goal as it’s met, a project completed, an epiphany in full bloom; sometimes even up to where an unconditional love that would floor an ordinary person comes off as banal and maybe even a little shallow. I know that one, two-part answer to why every serious romantic relationship I have ever been in has ended in ashes and tears: the abject selfishness of an insatiable hunger for more, coupled with an inexorable restlessness calling me out of every home. No house, no job, no person, has ever been enough. This time has taught me to accept this and live accordingly, with compassion for others, rather than settle and watch them burn in the flames of resentment their mere presence eventually stoke. To be clear, I see this past as my fault. In the relative vacuum of my life as it stands now, there isn’t much more that I can do other than admit that.

2) I am insanely fortunate to have the support of a handful of brilliant folks who love and support me in ways that render fences and walls effectively null. (the first item isn’t anachronistic, full disclosure and healthy boundaries make for brilliant personal relationships–learn from your mistakes, especially if those mistakes are measured in the ruin of others). Despite the dynamic engagement of other brilliant persons there remains an ongoing struggle for connection. We are not, as incarcerated people, able to engage with the world in the ways that everyone now takes for granted. It is what it is. But, if I don’t make the point of speaking into a digital space where I am able, it seems to leave a necessary channel closed altogether. Obviously my voice is of interest to me but also, “because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.”

I felt challenged by way of a recent John Jeremiah Sullivan essay in The New Yorker to consider what I, in this place, might have been born to do. I am fortunate to be a writer…really, I ought to be writing here, at least.

3) When I first started posting a while back I felt concern for who might be listening. I made edits and felt reservation for what consequences might arise for being subversive. Two ways how this ended up as nonsense; I ended up saying most everything I would have thought subversive directly to our then commissioner of corrections because he asked for my input; and really, if not to make an issue or a point and then stand on it, why bother writing any of it at all. In fact, beyond the prison-specific stuff, I can never know who might be reading. I have to remain open and put the work out there, regardless.

Maybe you’re reading this right now and are working out an opinion that you otherwise might not have. The Graham quote is as much about YOU having arrived in this moment, to read and think and breathe, as it is about ME having responded to the sudden imperative, the NEED, to pick up my tablet and collect the words necessary to try and make sense of the disparate ideas and their cumulative urgency to be thought, and explored, and the emotional experience to be processed and…felt.

In any case, that feels like a start. Hopefully there’s more to come.

Slavery Present

We are without demands. Slaves cannot have demands because slaves are not persons in the eyes of the law; we are property, chattel. And for all of the blood spilled to break the systemic spine of persons as chattel in this country, slavery remains the backbone of America. And as long as the 13th Amendment enshrines slavery as “a punishment for crime”, slavery shall endure.

War torn, America is a cemetery of marked and unmarked graves. Men and women fallen on battlefields and backwood paths to freedom; dark alleys and factory floors, both seeking liberty and worked to death in its name. Bodies fed over time into a machine of commerce, greed, and hatred. To paraphrase Aesop’s fable of the fox, the hare, and the hound; men in power have sought to wage this war over money, whereas the rest of us are fighting for our very lives. What’s more, this war has never truly ended. Our struggle ebbs and flows with the gravity of conscience our culture is willing to bear during a given period in history. This dissonance over who is a person and who is ‘other’ is only ever relegated into our shadow; pushed down into our collective unconscious while escaping from southern fields into northern industry. Hidden in the clockwork of government, business, and society. This war persists because we have allowed ourselves to believe a peace can be won and somehow survive resignation into neglect.

However, Truth, like energy, can never be created or destroyed. Our laws, however maliciously insipid, are incapable of its destruction. Repress Truth and you merely convert its power into other forms, to well up and be reckoned with again. The shadow this nation casts is long. Its depth reflects the nature and volume of horrors that generations have labored to conceal. But, on a long enough timeline the survival rate for every lie drops to zero. Because even after every piece of evidence has decayed, and every witness silenced or passed, the buried Truth survives in shadow form.

It survives in slave patrols cum law enforcement. It survives in the ghettoized poverty that redlining built. It survives in mass incarceration, where, incidentally, the last real slaves are kept. Not by slovenly southern gentry, but by America itself, in every state of this union. The nation, in its heart, murmurs. A muttered utterance. A confession woven into the textile fabric of our society, Truth persists — and we haven’t learned a damn thing.

Today there is blood in the streets, and in traffic stops, and in apartments where the innocent sleep, and in churches, mosques, and synagogues; spilled by uniformed agents and radicalized children bearing military arms. They act knowing the system has already blessed their violence as righteous. But bullets and chokeholds and knees to the throat are not the only way they take life. The state sanctions murder of another kind. They take life while leaving breath in the body. And there is no cell phone video to capture the strategic targeting of Black and Brown and Poor neighborhoods; or the implicit bias of policing, charging, and disproportionate sentencing. There is only the endless rows, millions of persons in chains, separated from their families and kept in cages.

In these cages even the strongest lose their grip on meaningful life. Try and hold on to your people while being bled by the dollar for fifteen minute phone calls and siphoned off for forty cent electronic messages. After the years murder your relationships, try and build a new life in the world with that permanent X tattooed on your existence. They didn’t use ink to burn those digits into the skin of your forearm, but you best believe that number is as permanent as you are. Whatever window dress they put over the work they do to reinforce the belief that these cages, as they exist today, are “necessary to ensure public safety”, never ever lose sight of three simple facts that undermine the national lies of liberty, justice, and equality.

1) Slavery still exists in the United States of America. The use of slavery as punishment for a crime is codified by the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution. It is not by accident that the amendment used to abolish in fact preserves slavery by law. That some prisons in this country do not share a cosmetic association with antebellum cotton plantations (while others very much do) does nothing to diminish the psychological horror of defacto enslavement in totalitarian facilities as a punitive response for a conviction in the legal system. Furthermore, conviction of a crime ensures relegation to a permanent domestic underclass, which translates to permanent loss of citizenship. 2) Slaves do not have rights. Despite being counted toward the population of the congressional districts where their cages have been built, prisoners are barred from direct participation in municipal, county, state, and federal electoral proceedings that determine the funding and administration of literally every aspect of their lives. Prisoners, deprived of their right to vote, are no one’s constituent. Defined as wards of (see: belonging to) the state, they are without agency. And while prisoners do have limited access to the courts, there remains the impossibly steep obstacle of affordable representation. Regular citizens typically cannot afford an attorney, where is a slave going to get the money? And as lawyers are fond of repeating, “An attorney who represents themself has a fool for a client.” 3) Enslavement persists upon release. No one succeeds because of prison. They succeed in spite of it. There are some who recover with the support, and at the private expense, of a healthy social network. But the vast majority of ex-prisoners never truly go home. Many prisoners in this country never regain their rights to vote or hold office, the so-called foundation of our allegedly democratic system. For those that do, a felony conviction typically bars licensure or professional certification in most service sectors where one is required. A criminal record is used to discriminate in housing, employment, and access to education. Does any of this sound familiar yet? In case you were not aware, (former)slaves are not a protected class. *** The current trajectory of social justice movements is unprecedented. The national confession of systemic racism has delivered wave after stunning wave of revelation. To everyone marching, fighting, working, and dying to force this moment into accountability and reckoning: remember that immediately beyond the social enslavement of systemic inequality, right after the laws and the courts they use to hide behind, there are literal slaves, shackled to one another every day, and put away in cages every night. And that as things stand today, as they have always been, it does not matter whether or when we are one day released. In this country, we shall never again be free.

The Curious Moment of Perspective

As I made my way into my forties I also crossed the midway point of my incarceration. In my past I have looked back over periods of ten years or so to decide how far I’ve come and whether anything I’ve done from there to here is worth a shit. Like, at twenty-eight I could examine my eighteen-year-old self and speak confidently of his idiocy compared with the ten years experience that separated us. I would also hope then that my thirty-eight-year-old self was ten years ahead and staring back at me with eyes of mercy and contempt to forgive whatever stupidity I was incapable of seeing in that moment. And so it has gone.

As proof of faith I used to offer that the most valuable things in my life were things I hadn’t thought to imagine, as though life held a mystery of purpose beyond my ability to conceive. The challenge then was to throw myself into the unexpected value of something sprung from beyond my imagination. There is truth to this notion, that our lives are meaningful as an expression of choice, especially as it pertains to people and events outside of our control. And while it makes for compelling evidence of design when woven into tapestries of conventional wisdom and obviousness, this idea doesn’t fully embrace the less glamorous reality of everyday lives. Because sometimes we make mistakes and just have to make the best of a bad situation. And labeling a silver-lining-respite amidst soul crushing despair as part of a “plan” can hardly equal the invigoration of life’s work realized after years of backbreaking work and overcoming constant defeat. Not exactly magnificent. It has something to do with perspective. And while I remain a person of faith, I have gotten better at discerning between help from others, help from myself, and pretty fictions spun to assuage the slow breaking of a useful spine wasted bracing the otherwise useless.

At thirty-one I was spread just about as thin as I have ever been. Definitely struggling to rationalize a slew of poorly examined decisions, buckling under the weight of compounding consequences, simultaneously praying to hold everything together for just one more day while unconsciously hoping the bill would just come due so I could let it all collapse. I hurt other people when I failed and I’m responsible for my part in that. But when I unpack the damage and trace my blame I blow right through the worst of it to the very beginning, when I knew I didn’t belong there, when I tried to walk away and kept getting sucked back in to the worst of situations. Where you know the foundation is a lie, where you can see the end coming years in advance, but you let yourself be persuaded to go along because too many people who don’t know any better are telling you the same thing. They love you, so they must know you, so they must be right.

What if the reason I couldn’t have imagined the life I was living was because it was 100% the wrong life? All due respect to the blood and bodies behind me, what if I was never supposed to be there in the first place? I know I knew this at the time because I said as much to a significant partner, over and over again. I don’t understand why I let myself wear down, except for that I trusted the people around me. The girlfriend who swore up and down how great our love was. The best friend who admitted he prayed he could have what I had one day. The licensed therapist who admonished me that my standard was impossible and that I ought to accept these people and these relationships where they were at. The precocious little girl who reminded me just enough of me to project meaning into the prospect of improving on the convoluted and shallow upbringing I had. Deep down I knew I didn’t want any of it, and I said so, but then I let it happen. I’m no victim. I am a fool. Ask me whether I’ll make those mistakes again. Ask me if in my grief for what I lost I worry about the fate of any of those people. I would rather live the unfulfilled, impossible life than a miserable compromise surrounded by existential cowardice.

The curious moment comes when I reflect on what I’ve gained these past ten years, the rewards for work I would not and could not have undertaken with any of those people still passing through. I may have gained something else if I had avoided them in the first place, a head start on what I’m doing now if nothing else. But I know I have things I could not have come upon in any other way, including the handful of truly difficult choices made while I’ve been inside. I would not trade this for anything. The worst parts still serve their purpose. The constraints have forced me to creative solutions. There is clarity I can no longer live without. There are tools I need that would never have seen in my former life. I regret the time I’ve wasted -before- coming to prison, and little else.

I don’t have the energy to hate anyone. I have more important things to take care of. I have such an excellent life, in progress while under construction. All of the animosity has long since bled away, and in the space left behind only indifference remains. What better burden to carry with me in memoriam for a dead life than no one and nothing at all?

Autumnal rumbling

I have lived enough to have arguments and sorrows old and echoing from darkened distances. Like rich acoustic strings reverberating in a room of stone and steel. Strains of a lone cello, haunting thoughts and memory. Sometimes I even feel wistful for old angers and unresolved issues. I wonder if other people wrestle to figure the worth of holding on to things. Maybe just let the old row die? Bury the past and plant a black walnut over the grave. Red birds nest in the tall branches after a generation passes. They dive upon unsuspecting passersby, crowding out the robins and the jays, a splotch of color amidst the ravens. The early autumn air reminds me of just how quickly everything turns over, rolled under and again. I swear that I’m changing, if not for the better, then certainly for what’s coming.

Born For?

I woke up feeling off this morning. Underneath, or perhaps just hidden from the regular daily expressions of my life here, growls the churn of what I term as greater forces at work. I think that a lot of people who connect with, or careen through these waveform patterns of emotional upheaval associate the effect with religious experience or spiritual transcendence. While I have my own notions of faith, for me, having a sensitivity to the often crashing surges of synchronicity and foreshadowing has meant trying to find a way to feel normal about being swept away. To feel suddenly ruined with purpose without having to express that madness when it swells. It feels like raw nerves, chest tight, imagining the gulping sobs of an uncontrollable crying jag, the frenzy of a stifled panic, and the blanketing fear that I’m about to miss whatever signal or message is about to crest above the floodwaters. Some folks expect God to answer this sort of overwhelming, whereas I suspect this is in fact the answer, and that this is just how the universe works.

Today, amidst coping with the aforementioned urgency, I picked up an old issue of The New Yorker. A John Jeremiah Sullivan feature about Rhiannon Giddens, a mixed-race/black artist of the black/non-black roots music of the South. Fiddles and banjos and such. I pulled her up on the kiosk and I was floored. Brilliant, beautiful, haunting, and true. Being deeply American, with racist-southern family roots, I was appropriately fascinated by her reclamation projects and emergent persona in her latest original work. Having awoken vivified I took up the work of parsing the writing for subtext and content to mulch into the planting beds of the person I keep trying to grow.

I allowed myself to be assuaged, as I often am by great writing, and to absorb the underlying message of the work. Violent histories. Uncertain identity. Where the truest version of your Self is cripplingly obscure amid a landscape of broad brush strokes. Narrowing the focus of talent to hone necessary craft, to preserve something at risk of being lost. Sullivan’s closing line, “–in that she seemed, in some more than figurative way, to have been born for it, for the moment. I think she knew it.”

I think of this time, this place, this moment. Specifically, how much everything hurts all the time, how hard it is to feel useful against obstacles, not least of which are my seeming failures to be fully human. When I examine the intersection where I live (incarceration/justice/race/gender/sexuality/art/society) I ask what I was born for. Burdens have long since buckled my knees and crushed me into the asphalt lanes. All of these words are whispered in shallow breaths beneath boulders of the necessary. I keep returning to brokenness because this experience remains resonant with my concept of Self. I accomplish marvelous things but keep my inner voice personal.

My life is a saga of conflict between ego and the spirit it was built to protect. The closest thing I ever had to a true mentor struggled to show me how to let go in order to discover and thus flow from my true Self. He failed me, in part, because he felt the walls I’d built were unnecessary if I would just surrender my will to the greater process at work. Except the individual will cannot be anything BUT subservient to a universe in motion. We are so tiny, after all. Our choices, for the most part, only belong to us anyway. A story we tell ourselves along the way to our moment in history. And, the annihilation of being in one of those great big channels of power where you truly belong to something profound, the experience is so much more intense and overwhelming, ineffably so; I wish he’d taught me to built better walls, the boundaries necessary to return to this world, to return from madness. But then, you cannot teach what you do not yet understand.

Therein lies the paradox. That I fought like hell for forty years against the inexorable Truth that true power only ever issues from suffering and surrender of intention to something greater. That I had imagined it would be awful, painful, and indescribably difficult to cohere, only to be swept away completely by the onset of the real work; that the only way to reach the other side of things is to embrace the suck and seek a larger portion; that the only way to ease the pain is to welcome greater pain; that the life and the people I’ve ruined were really and truly just in the way–I have come to understand why some things I thought I wanted could never have been; that I suffer less, unencumbered and freed by this understanding. If I had been conscious of what I was way back when I made those decisions I would not have risked the lives of others. If I were a better person I would feel worse for having dragged them on a chain behind me as I drove, blindly trying to discover my eyes in the darkness. But here I am. And they are, all of them, gone. And most days I barely even care.

So, then, what am I born for? What are any of us born for? Skipping the literary treatment of free will, there remains a question of whether one even believes in fate or destiny or a being necessary to our creation, like a God. Rules of the universe already flow through and around us, like a prehistoric river eroding our legend into cosmic stone. Each possible path exists simultaneously, our choices governing which channel our consciousness travels until death, and then, who knows? Anyone claiming descriptive certainty is a liar. My point is that we are all born for some thing -or- no thing at all. Any number of things narrow as we move along a direction of travel through time, choosing as we go.

I think I was born to suffer gladly in satisfaction of my need to press my psyche beyond limits of reason, and then, write it all down or set it to music and hope it will be of use. This, and the canvas of the lives in which I work, whether they ruin or endure. I would not want things any other way. I have wandered too far past my own ability to conceive to even imagine what I might desire instead of this life and these pursuits. To say I am living well is an understatement.

What is it that you were born for? What are you without all of the external definition, the social engineering to say what your life means, what you ought to be about? Who are you really? How do you know whether any of it matters? Do you even know whether it’s real? How can you tell? And, would you have even bothered with the question if I hadn’t bothered to ask?

far

Standing in snowfall
limelight and holiday brusque
strains of piano waft up from
open winter windows jazz
favorite carols from my animated
childhood seem so very
far from here

Gusts up from streets and
strands of chestnut hair whip around
your fallen face
tears for your brother
who needs more
than life will provide for him

I come up here when
I think about jumping
you say and purse your lips
looking down and away
from knowing/inside I imagine
reaching out to draw you in and away
from the parkside view

Turn my collar to shrug
the chill beneath disheveled creep
my thoughts cover my ears
flakes gather in rivulets
down the slope of my nose

And I do that thing where I ask if you’re ready
And you say yes
And I take a deep breath
And you wrap my arms all the way around

And in my exhalation I pour as much love
And concern and feeling as I can focus
And for the moment your fears at rest
what we have seems almost real

Dress for the Weather

PRIDE was last month. I get it. I’m super late for this post to be timely.

Songwriting for me is a process that begins with my letting the muse know where to meet me. Being locked in a room with my primary instrument has made for a lot of growth as a writer. Regular sessions with music and my barrel of issues, unresolved or otherwise.

It takes a while for the first bars and a lyrical concept that love each other enough to demand eternity, to clutch one another in inexorable devotion to be written together and sung. This one started out watching short docs on Stonewall; listening to old folks reminisce over knocking down the cops and cornering them in the gay bar they came to jackboot and extort. The vivified glare of a liberated person in reflection, reliving the memory of that catharsis. Justice. I got to thinking about how far we’ve come. Everybody…and I do mean everybody.

I recognized my non-binary identity through the discovery of the language of gender fluidity during a dig through available material on queer theory, pretty much for the sake of itself. I was raised a white male. Incarceration had already cultivated my allegiance and feminist awareness, intersecting with issues of race, civil liberty, and, of course, LGBTQ+ identity. That I found an explanation for how I experience myself and others, and so, the world, was an unexpected dimension to invigorate everything else I’ve been working through along the way.

So the song began as a sketch of a map to corral a handful of images and ideas in a way that could cohere when set to music. The underlying concept took hold from the perspective of someone not unlike myself, but older in both years and mileage, and, if I’m being honest, with a much rougher time of things, emotionally, while trying to figure out who they were. I have lacked the security of self-understanding and a corresponding label, but I would be lying if I said I suffered. I simply acted on who I felt I was as I tried to explore the new ideas as they came. Seriously though…some white people shit. White male privilege afforded me the confidence to express myself so freely. I recognize the fortune of my birth, I try and cash checks against it for others wherever I can.

I am ineffably grateful for the long smoldering counsel of Reva/Raven, who did time with me in this very prison over twenty years ago. We used to sit in her single in Maple and watch syndicated episodes of ‘The Nanny’ before the last count at night. She was the first ‘she’ I knew that had to ask people to recognize and respect her as such. I am grateful for her love and her friendship, and for her confession, as I left, that the only reason she never made a play to jump my nineteen-year-old bones was because she knew there was this nice, unsuspecting girl out there waiting for me, and she “didn’t want to see [me] fuck that up, no matter how hot it might be….” I felt flattered and bashful and blushed as hard as I have ever blushed. Thank you, honey. Wherever you are, this song is for you. Love, Billy

Dress for the Weather

My brother saw enough love to go around
He promised the moon and a partner in crime
He said, Bill can’t you see all them stars just beyond Sunset
But I was already on Hollywood, turning on Vine

I can’t keep living on the outside
I can’t keep searching for someone to be
If I carve my body into a replacement
If you finally found me, who would you see

My sister swore that love was enough
As children we’d dress up for tea and we’d lead the parades
She said, Billie you know this farm cannot possibly hold you
But I was already in handcuffs and taken away

I can’t keep living on the outside
Running my fingers in search for the door
How will I know whether you hear me knocking
How will I know what these moments are for

I keep reading these leaves from the bottom of this paper cup
I dress for the weather but I never change
Each day that my body betrays seems the one where I’ll finally give up…when you interrupt

My children are grown and their mother is gone
Where fences are white and answers are known
She says she looks upon me from afar
(But she don’t know) Just because I’m by myself doesn’t mean I’m alone

I can’t keep living on the outside
Knowing all that I am lives from somewhere within
Knowing all that I’ve done has led to this moment
Now that we’re all here we can finally begin
Now that we’re all here we can begin

how far will I fall

I’m staring out across the way
Into a fog I knew would be but I cannot contain
As I prepare to leave this place
My head is filled with thoughts of you are not here I am hopeful all the same

I’m edging closer to it all
These rays of sun are not the same I’ve never seen this light before
The glass is flowing toward the floor
A fluid form reminder of the changing I will not see when I’m gone

Hey, how far will I fall today
Hey, hey, how far must I fall today to day-to-day to day-to-day

My heart is still the hole it was before you and remains because
I will not deny the Love that’s waiting for the moment I let go
Of all the sense I’ve tried to make this flailing grasp into the darkness
To hold on to this in spite of all I’ve lost along the way

Hey, how far will I fall today
Hey, hey, how far must I fall today to day-to-day to day-to-day

My ears are ringing from the call
I am still here waiting but I will not see you anymore
I throw the phone into the hall
(Somehow) I started out so far ahead you’re leaving me behind how did this all

Hey, how far will I fall today
Hey, hey, how far must I fall today to day-to-day to day-to-day

~AF

(super)hero #2

The light from the hallway pours through the opened door, chasing the shadows of softer light into the darkness cast by fluorescence. Nurse Roberta steps lightly into the room and crosses to the IV pump to check the vitals of the boy sleeping in the single bed behind the curtain. Her soles squeak as she walks toward the door. She halts the rhythm of her exit, turns her head to the side, and speaks into the darkness.

“He stayed up as long as he could, waiting for you.”

The darkness didn’t answer, but she thought she saw a figure seated in the far chair out of the corner of her eye. Her vision wouldn’t adjust for the light, but she could see the puddle of rain that had run off of him and found its way out onto the floor where she’d walked.

“Don’t wake him, okay? He knows when you’ve been here.”

Roberta waited for the words to soak the silence that hung the three of them. Knowing the absence of rejection is not the same as affirmation, choosing to accept the stillness as such, regardless.

She never figured how he still reached through the window at thirty floors, or how the boy always seemed to sense he was coming. Fighting medication and sickness to stave off sleep, losing every time.

She pulled the door closed and resumed her round, twisting her feet to hear the rubber echo in the corridor. A secret she and the linoleum would keep with the man who kept watch over a dying boy, and listened for the sound of her as she walked away.

Entropy

July 24, 2017

(took me a while to chew on this one, sorry.)

entropy n., The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.

Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. I agree. Some feel, especially in our current political climate, this notion is idealistic. Perhaps even naive. Forgetting for the moment the visible, active, and coordinated violence against the movement by the state of that time. Pretending for the moment that we do not naturalize tens of thousands of foreign nationals every year, making them United States citizens, subject to the full rights and protection of our Constitution. Ignoring for the moment that, given the status quo, in just three and one half years (not counting mid-terms) we must only change the minds of less than eighty thousand people total, across three states, to turn the most powerful office in our country over to a whole other person, with a whole other family. Setting all of that and universal suffrage aside, imagine King was wrong.

We may argue for the existence of and the rules governing all manner of derivative Creations, but they are all subordinate to at least one. A moral universe, a political universe, any categorical margin we create, is first bound by the physical universe in which we live. And while I, as Dr. King, am a person of faith, I disqualify contrary arguments from positions and promises of faith for one reason: the hereafter has yet to strike an empirical balance with the world in which we live and observe. Whether a Creator exists, this physical universe is our absolute proving ground.

A moral universe only ever bends in a direction commensurate with the will of its attendants. That’s us. And though we may interfere with the physical universe, its arc bends toward a singular, immutable, inexorable conclusion. Entropy. All of the stars are going to burn out, the planets will harden and cold, nuclear reaction will slow and eventually cease, nothing but the ice and darkness of deep space for as far as the eye, organic or mechanical, could possibly dream of seeing. This is our future.

There are some who point to our fate and the seeming insignificance of our role in the cosmos as reason for nihilism, a denial of existence. I disagree. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote:

“What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself…Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious.”

Whether you believe or not in a preexisting purpose for being, it is impossible to dismiss our intrinsic and natural reasons for being.

We seek to make our own order from nature. We build yurts and skyscrapers, roads and dams. We seek out the other side of oceans. We try and bend other people to our will; at times willing to sacrifice freedom for dystopian visions of peace. Our spirit for conquest is only very recently undergoing a renaissance of mitigation. I argue this welcome change is the result of having driven the pendulum too far. We crave balance, even though our selfishness shields us at times from seeing our ultimate goal, the forest for the trees. The point is that human beings crave a vision of order that flies in the face of the natural conclusion. The purpose of life is to end. Still, humanity flails to grasp a substantive rejection of the natural order: What does this mean?

What does it mean that we simply will not stop trying to organize our world amidst its inevitable decline? I say organize in the sense that we make and remake systems according to our own ideas of order and purpose. There is a lot of noise being made over our destructive streak when it comes to nature. We are unquestionably mired in generations worth of abuse of our ecosystems and climate. Reasonable people agree with the science that supports the notion of our having crossed the line of environmental sustainability. Though I cannot help but wonder at the difference (in principle) between where we are now as opposed to when we first fashioned tools and began a new level of decimation of the local animal food source. What about the first agriculture? These are not different in principle, only different in scale, compared with our crises today. The fact we have come to recognize our capacity for damage and seek to remedy our mistake is not a rejection of this ordering principle but a more fully developed version of this essential aspect of who we are as a species.

Reordering nature according to our own vision, toward our own purpose, is the chief separation between our minds and the rest of the animal kingdom. Tools, agriculture, energy, are all expressions of this notion. Clean power and sustainable agribusiness are refined iterations of efforts that may yet scorch the Earth. It matters that we’re learning. We were always going to learn, it was only ever a question of how much it was going to cost us.

It is easy to look only at the dissonance in our society and claim the sky is falling. It is lazy to state that the global quality of life statistics are on the upswing and pretend there isn’t work to be done. Each of us must balance the anxiety we feel over the tempest with our innate capacity to order and navigate this ship we’re in. Take a deep breath, step back, and consider a much broader perspective. We survive on such a narrow margin in the cosmos. We thrive on rearrangement of tumult, one after the other. (Why do you think Candy Crush is so hopelessly addictive?) Our species thrives in rejection of cosmic principle, astronomical insignificance, and inexorable failure. How small then it is turn around and be conscious?

Be deliberate. It is in fact your whole reason to exist. That you are alive and wandering about is just one of billions of notes sounding in the relative emptiness of our neighborhood. If you do nothing but stare at the ground and shuffle along, your life is static. White noise. Turn up and choose your tone as an alternative and you get to resolve the clamor around you. Even if you can only wrangle yourself in tune. Everyone begins somewhere. Why not here?

I recognize this may seem abstract and complicated, vague. If only because it’s difficult to prescribe independent of a specific cause. In fact: “Do something (anything), as long as it’s on purpose.” may do very little to rally the masses to action. But hey, the world is ending. The whole universe, actually. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But if there’s one thing humanity has always done well, it is to ignore this fact and aspire toward something greater and exceeding our grasp entirely. Why not you?

~AF