TRYING TO GET A HANDLE ON
the rotten roots of radical communities. the toxic year i had last year. where politics are more important than kindness and somehow there's no overlap between the two.
and i wouldn't have called it this at the time, but the drama. the unending drama. when the personal is the political, everything makes you madder'n hell and yer not gonna take it anymore! except that you do. i did.
i don't believe in intelligence but i've called it that: emotional intelligence. hypermepathy might be another word for it. feeling too hard for other people. not understanding how they can't feel too hard for me, once in a goddamned while.
everyone feels this way in the city: shat upon. different people chalk it up to different things: regional disparities, youth, rootlessness, class privilege. i figured, maybe just the fucked-up crowd i loved while i was doing actions with them, who are a different story entirely when all the radical projects in the city (that is to say: all the projects we ourselves had started and worked on) folded in on themselves (student occupation movement; 123 community space). then, we were a group of fucked-up kids with nothing to do together. (well. march fourth, mta hearings, mayday. you get tired of bailing people out that you don't know. you get tired of tiny black blocs, reading groups, zines, bookfairs, talks, film screenings. you get tired. quoth debord: the Spectacle is the guardian of sleep.) the political is the personal. kindness is worthless to people who have a different analysis than you, apparently. even if they live in your house. even if they're letting you live in theirs. apparently.
the word that comes back again and again is COMPLICATED. i was no fucking saint this year either, mostly because i was flipping my shit trying to go to NYU and support myself at once. it was a bad year, that's the crux of it. a series of bad jobs. eight hours of commuting every week. dark trains, dark skies. bad lovers. bad friends. worse acquaintances. the word caught in the throat of radicals choking back tears of sorrow or rage: community. we don't have one. did we ever? when we were famous and getting out of jail it sure as shit felt like we did. what are the politics of affect? what are the words for that feeling of certainty in each other: what are the potentialities of that feeling, and where did it goddamn go? what to do when the action moved west? what to do when a politic wasn't expandable into all spheres? we all like occupying things--do we have anything else in common at all? do we give a shit to try and be okay together anyway? we skip town instead with sordid stories of social crimes. tiqqun is saying, i think, that "terrible communities"--our radical anticommunes, spread across apartments that we kill ourselves to pay for, foodstamps and bike rides and snowstorms and meetings--are tied to the same empty social relations as every other section of society. we run away, disgusted. but we always come back.
this scene is crippling in that way. we forget how to make conversation with people who haven't read the same esoteric frenchmen as us. in greensboro i speak of SCUM politics to knitted brows of women who taught me feminism when i was 16. nasty is a word for it. last year i became an anarchist; this year i became a militant feminist. drunk and flailing in a swimming pool two weeks ago, i say to dan, certainly: i espouse a very violent feminism. the corollary to this is the requisite hatred of men, the justification i feel in that, and the relative lack of people who can get down with this analysis. and so: i say little or nothing except occasional extremist quips in conversations outside of this awful rotten scene on women or race or class. i am as bad as anyone else. the world outside of it is as terrifying as the world inside.
and so, summer insists upon itself, and i still don't want to leave my apartment. terrible friendships have fled this place, though their shit persists behind them. conversations with my mother reveal that resentment is forever. like a secret, i cling to the thought that most of these people don't give a shit about me. i revile the words, the idea, try to spit it out of my chest, but suddenly, during a conversation one night in greensboro: it's real. they contact me only to ask for something, still. since when am i this person? how can you spend so much time proximal to someone without building some kind of worthwhile relationship with them? i try to sort through the people in my life and whether they are able to be kind to me, but it never stops getting muddled. old friends desert, are a million miles away in this city or elsewhere, people i love still have girlfriends and immeasurable perspective on awful friends around the block. everyone's a frenemy. nobody knows better in the city, even when the sun shines, even when the sky is blue.
this week i espouse a politic of real talk. it's principally exhausting, but it doesn't feel wrong. resentment tastes metallic and smoky. resentment disgusts and sinks like a ship. i go to bed hungry and dream of places that are home and aren't. i don't want new friends but i need them.
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and i wouldn't have called it this at the time, but the drama. the unending drama. when the personal is the political, everything makes you madder'n hell and yer not gonna take it anymore! except that you do. i did.
i don't believe in intelligence but i've called it that: emotional intelligence. hypermepathy might be another word for it. feeling too hard for other people. not understanding how they can't feel too hard for me, once in a goddamned while.
everyone feels this way in the city: shat upon. different people chalk it up to different things: regional disparities, youth, rootlessness, class privilege. i figured, maybe just the fucked-up crowd i loved while i was doing actions with them, who are a different story entirely when all the radical projects in the city (that is to say: all the projects we ourselves had started and worked on) folded in on themselves (student occupation movement; 123 community space). then, we were a group of fucked-up kids with nothing to do together. (well. march fourth, mta hearings, mayday. you get tired of bailing people out that you don't know. you get tired of tiny black blocs, reading groups, zines, bookfairs, talks, film screenings. you get tired. quoth debord: the Spectacle is the guardian of sleep.) the political is the personal. kindness is worthless to people who have a different analysis than you, apparently. even if they live in your house. even if they're letting you live in theirs. apparently.
the word that comes back again and again is COMPLICATED. i was no fucking saint this year either, mostly because i was flipping my shit trying to go to NYU and support myself at once. it was a bad year, that's the crux of it. a series of bad jobs. eight hours of commuting every week. dark trains, dark skies. bad lovers. bad friends. worse acquaintances. the word caught in the throat of radicals choking back tears of sorrow or rage: community. we don't have one. did we ever? when we were famous and getting out of jail it sure as shit felt like we did. what are the politics of affect? what are the words for that feeling of certainty in each other: what are the potentialities of that feeling, and where did it goddamn go? what to do when the action moved west? what to do when a politic wasn't expandable into all spheres? we all like occupying things--do we have anything else in common at all? do we give a shit to try and be okay together anyway? we skip town instead with sordid stories of social crimes. tiqqun is saying, i think, that "terrible communities"--our radical anticommunes, spread across apartments that we kill ourselves to pay for, foodstamps and bike rides and snowstorms and meetings--are tied to the same empty social relations as every other section of society. we run away, disgusted. but we always come back.
this scene is crippling in that way. we forget how to make conversation with people who haven't read the same esoteric frenchmen as us. in greensboro i speak of SCUM politics to knitted brows of women who taught me feminism when i was 16. nasty is a word for it. last year i became an anarchist; this year i became a militant feminist. drunk and flailing in a swimming pool two weeks ago, i say to dan, certainly: i espouse a very violent feminism. the corollary to this is the requisite hatred of men, the justification i feel in that, and the relative lack of people who can get down with this analysis. and so: i say little or nothing except occasional extremist quips in conversations outside of this awful rotten scene on women or race or class. i am as bad as anyone else. the world outside of it is as terrifying as the world inside.
and so, summer insists upon itself, and i still don't want to leave my apartment. terrible friendships have fled this place, though their shit persists behind them. conversations with my mother reveal that resentment is forever. like a secret, i cling to the thought that most of these people don't give a shit about me. i revile the words, the idea, try to spit it out of my chest, but suddenly, during a conversation one night in greensboro: it's real. they contact me only to ask for something, still. since when am i this person? how can you spend so much time proximal to someone without building some kind of worthwhile relationship with them? i try to sort through the people in my life and whether they are able to be kind to me, but it never stops getting muddled. old friends desert, are a million miles away in this city or elsewhere, people i love still have girlfriends and immeasurable perspective on awful friends around the block. everyone's a frenemy. nobody knows better in the city, even when the sun shines, even when the sky is blue.
this week i espouse a politic of real talk. it's principally exhausting, but it doesn't feel wrong. resentment tastes metallic and smoky. resentment disgusts and sinks like a ship. i go to bed hungry and dream of places that are home and aren't. i don't want new friends but i need them.
-