Once upon a time, I was obsessive about keeping, literally, everything I created. Every email. Every Usenet thread. Every article. Every assignment. Every. Single. Item.
It was how I reminded myself who I was in a world ever ready to try and overwrite me to their own ends.
I think it was about 2011 when I finally started letting the mass of media go. Slowly though, just in case. (It is no coincidence this is when my husband and partner decided to move here to be with me.)
I still have some items I’m not willing to part with… and since I do not have to, I’m not. Hiding under the appearance of this “new” blog is a history of blogging before blogs were a thing. Journal keeping, they used to call it. Or “keeping a diary”. Staggering years of entries where reality and creativity entwined to make a quasi-fiction in which I could gently place my reality… a reed basket set upon the river that is life.
The practice harkens back to a time when the only way your thoughts could hope to outlast you was if you wrote them down. Even then, likely as not, they wind up in someone’s fireplace, the waste, a charitable donations outlet store or, if you are truly fortunate, your family values them and assures they live beyond your time.
Now, the internet is the world’s file cabinet (among other things) and, at least now, there is a very good chance that, if you put something “out here” it will actually get catalogued somewhere for perpetuity.
Long did I hold that all humans have an obligation to the future to try and truly render their deepest held views into writing. It seems almost an arrogance because, really, who am I in the overall scheme of the world history? No one. Well, ok, I have a footnote on an old legal fight that turned out to be the piece of adjudication that helped overturn the communications decency act. I think not a full 15 minutes, but certainly, definitely 1.
Most of my writing sits in a locked file because so many others have written so much more effective than I about these things. I feel my words are a distraction, not helpful. But I wonder if that is still history whispering in my ear. Can you tell I do not know?
My educational process has taught me that I have yet to manage even a single, genuinely new thought. Indeed, I found that one month before my birth, a peer-reviewed paper encapsulating every major theory and most included concepts about the subject upon which I built my career was published.
No one remembers it today, it seems. But the reality of it seems to have permanently flipped my “relevant” switch into the “off” position. That item existed before I was born. I have been unable to improve upon its findings despite my best efforts. I was not able to make it more accessible. I was not able to teach others how to understand it better.
Worst of all, others now clutter the conceptual landscape with competing versions of offerings designed to teach you JUST ENOUGH to really mess things up (and here they come to “save” the day… billable at time and materials, of course). Just… pragmatically insurmountable predation on an ignorance practically designed by the cultural and societal choices leading back into history.
And in the face of that inability, I have become upset with it all. The world. Myself. “How things are…”, you see? Nothing new. Just another human, doing the hew. Just like you.
But in this reality, the place where everyone understands the rules and gets along… I just do not fit. All I can see are the glaring exceptions, the contradictions, the double standards and the ugly defensiveness of them.
There is no defense of them.
But it seems history and culture and society demand we play this stupid and transparent game of plausible deniability because, when you get right down to it – it is a supremacist culture and society. It descended from a supremacist culture and society.
The current cultural war is over “whether or not it is a supremacist culture and society”.
Those who engage that as a legitimate topic are letting themselves be distracted. But I can’t tell them that. I don’t matter.
Little by little as that certainty and the security of my relationship finally sank in, I started not minding that I didn’t matter. And I began divesting. It was a relief to feel for once that I really do not have an obligation to “matter” beyond myself and those close to me.
Funny how that worked out. All that cultural claptrap about “change the world”? That’s the first flag of distraction, calling you down a path of easily managed and rather predictable progression – along which the systems of authority and power and its intention can direct as they desire.
Turns out that molting a mountain is much faster than moving one. The only reason I wanted to remain was that I wanted so badly to fit in, to belong, and of course, to matter.
But time and experience have revealed much deeper wisdom. I matter. Always have. Always will. Even if as some super symmetry, unseen, spinning with countless, entangled others in this crazy weft and weave called life.
I do not need or want to fit into this sick culture, this suffocating society. And mattering within it seems only to lead to instant and lethal war over self-determination. No thanks.
I didn’t imagine that America was grounded on the premise of self-determination. Even as the glaring pox of slavery festered and poisoned everything.
I didn’t imagine that self-determination, by definition, sets the view of the unique self, observer, as sacrosanct, ultimate, and unassailable.
And I have not imagined that concept of an actual noblesse oblige nation died in 1619, when a bunch of white dudes decided that didn’t matter, and neither did the freedom of the indentured, black explorers who had secured their arrival in the new world.
But no matter how I say it, supremacists will not accept it. They cannot, for their entire determination is bound in the perspective of otherness as requisite. The dichotomy is their dogma, the iterative surge of “them” into our lexicon as an indicator of expectation.
And there are other voices more appropriate than mine that are trying to speak.
So….. a decision – I’m getting rid of all but self-determination pieces and the creative work. Maybe just the creative. Still considering. I think the creative work of life is all that really matters. It’s the only pure communication because it is broad enough to carry the “melody” of thought, but leaves plenty of space for the experience of the observer to fit it into their own thinking.
It’s built for inclusiveness because it mirrors the organic method of symbiosis… the act begets an act… the seed is the shape of the thing in itself.
Which makes the act of sharing/empathy an act of expanding all by contributing to the proximal. Humanity thinks it is at the pinnacle of a pyramid. It is actually a grain of sand in the ground upon which what might become a cornerstone presses.
Nothing I have written outside the creative has any hope of being different or new. I have confirmed it.
The weight of that mountain, sliding off as if in liquefaction – it is indescribably delightful.
And so it goes….