Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

John Tierney in The New York Times:

TIER1-articleInline In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems. Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is.

Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.

More here.



who touches this touches a man

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The concrete, material presence of books on our bookshelves transports us back to the time and place where we first read them, we sometimes are pleased and other times shudder when we think of what a book meant to us then, what it has come to mean to us now, we are sometimes comforted to see the continuity of ourselves when we read our earlier marginalia, sometimes disconcerted by its now-alien quality, and occasionally we have dreams about books, like the one I had after my mentor died. When I was in graduate school, he used to lend me his books, their margins overflowing with neat, handwritten questions, objections, notes to himself (I can still picture the fine purple line quality of his felt-tip pen), teaching me how to read in conversation with the author, that is, when I paid attention to the author and not, as I was inclined to do, to the always more interesting thoughts of my mentor. When he died, I dreamt that he had left me a book that he had annotated especially for me and how grateful I was to have it (“who touches this touches a man”) and how sorry I was to wake up.

more from Rochelle Gurstein at TNR here.

the end

Soccer

RUSTENBURG, South Africa—If you drive outside the main cities in South Africa, you will always find a fire burning. Beside a highway. In a field. On a dirt patch, men huddled around its warmth. I saw many such blazes on the road from Pretoria to Rustenburg as I made my way to the round of 16 match between the United States and Ghana. On Saturday night, the smoke from all of these fires seemed to pool in this hardscrabble mining town. It burdened the air, reducing visibility to a few feet, even with a full moon low in the sky. My traveling companions and I felt the hoodoo: Whatever happy energy once fueled the American adventure here had been replaced by apprehension. Perhaps my mood was colored by the fact that pickpockets had stolen my tickets the day before. With FIFA’s help, I found new ones outside of the U.S. supporters’ section. It didn’t matter. Most American fans had already gone home. Exactly two weeks ago, I’d had to push my way past Donovan and Dempsey jerseys into a nearby bar. Now the place was all but empty. In the smoke outside, I kept bumping into haunted-looking Englishmen who’d banked on their team winning Group C and playing its knockout game here. “Extra England ticket?” they whispered. “Trade? Trade?” We even saw a handwritten sign pleading for tickets, left on the ground, pinned down by rocks. But where were the Yanks? Maybe American fans felt their team wouldn’t make it this far. Maybe fewer of them gave a damn than I thought.

more from Luke O’Brien at Slate here.

know your place

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Studies show a host of physiological benefits to having high status, whether you’re a senior partner at a bank or the alpha male in a baboon troop. But while that may come as no surprise, there are also findings that suggest people derive psychic benefits from being low-status, as long as there’s no question about where they stand. In a 2003 study by Larissa Tiedens and Alison Fragale, both then at Stanford University, subjects who displayed submissive body language were found to feel more comfortable around others who displayed dominant body language than around those who also displayed submissive body language — and to like those with more dominant posture better, as well. People, it seems, prefer having their evaluation of social hierarchy confirmed, even when they see themselves at the bottom of it. These two linked findings — that people derive comfort from an established hierarchy and that they react particularly strongly to those who buck it — may help explain why McChrystal’s insubordinate comments and the French soccer mutiny were so compelling as public dramas: They were conflicts over who is in charge, and over what punishment the loser would suffer.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Of National Character

With Especial Attention to the Americans, the Muscovites, the Magyars, and Various Balkanic Peoples, touching particularly upon their Aspirations to Global Hegemony, and their Use of Air-Conditioning.

Justin E. H. Smith

Feszty Organic nationalism, which emerged towards the end of the 18th century, supposed, or at least implied, that a nation bears some essential relationship to a particular territory. In the most mythologized version of this belief, the nation is thought, or at least said, to have arisen directly out of the earth, to be literally autochthonous, springing up from the depths without any connection to neighboring groups. Moderate nationalists of the period, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, sought for a way to defend national distinctness without resorting to such crude myth, and while they did not pretend that a people is born directly from the soil, they still hoped to tie national character to the way it is forged over the course of history out of a particular geographical nexus.

A clear demonstration that we are not in fact like plants, rooted in our national soil, is our ability to get up, should we so choose, and go somewhere else. We do not wilt and die, though we also do not remain quite the same. I am an expatriate, and it grows harder with each passing year for me to maintain a personal sense of what being American must mean. I have lived outside of the US steadily for seven years, and spent large segments of the decade before that outside of the country as well. Although I am fully connected, via the internet, to the American media that keep that country's pulse around the clock, it is increasingly difficult for me to maintain any real interest in domestic issues. Unlike nearly all the Americans I know, I am not really made angry, for example, by Glenn Beck. Outraged reactions to the latest stupid thing he has said strike me, I dare say, as a bit undignified. He is a buffoon, and he occupies a niche that has its equivalent in every time and place. Let him do his thing, and let us not stay tuned in to the networks that give him voice.

Expatriation, I mean to say, helps one to overcome the passions with understanding. As my identification with one or the other party to internal American conflicts diminishes, my perception grows sharper of the very long historical processes that give shape to current American life. Thus for example I often find myself trying to make sense for bewildered Europeans of western American crackpot libertarianism by arguing that it evolved directly from the settling of the frontier, with the ethnic cleansing and genocide that that involved, but also with a certain 'spirit' of freedom and individualism that cannot be valued nearly as much in dense urban centers. In turn, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that American imperialism, and the delusions of entitlement and superiority for which individual Americans abroad are so often criticized, flow directly from the late-18th and early-19th-century project of constructing America through expansion into the frontier. Oklahoma and the Phillipines and Iraq were just different stages of the same development, and this centuries-long process has something to do with the perception of the world, and of their place in it, often had by individual Americans.

Read more »

Heroes and Whistleblowers

Whistle A mysterious, white-haired man casts a cautious glance over his shoulder and steps onto a train. Like a man on the lam, he has no fixed address and lives out of the rucksack that he carries. The man could be a character in a Hollywood film, maybe one of the Bourne series, but he isn’t. The man described is Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, an internet site for whistleblowers. And he’s right to be cautious.

Whistleblowing isn’t to be taken lightly. Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement, for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear program to a UK newspaper. Amnesty International described Vanunu as a “prisoner of conscience” and he’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times. He’s paid a heavy price for his courageous actions.

Whistleblowers comprise an important and undervalued genre of hero. Just as traditional heroes, they demonstrate courage and bravery, and accept personal risks in the interests of others.

On a recent Veteran’s Day, I was struck by the extent to which we use the term “hero” to describe soldiers. I don’t disagree with this use, but it seems odd that the term is seldom qualified. What distinguishes our soldiers from the soldiers on the side that we’re fighting? How do we know that we’re the good guys?

Read more »

Good Government: The Imperative for These Times

by Michael Blim

Chicago-law-school_676103n In the Chicago of the Daley dynasty, they have been disparaged as the “goo-goos.” They are the “good government” types whose passion for honesty and the pursuit of the public good have offended generations of political machine hacks whose motto for the great seal of the city, Mike Royko was fond of saying, consisted of the two word phrase “Where’s Mine?”

Good government in Chicago was and still is an honorable tradition. It produced Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Abner Mikva, and Barack Obama. It joined with Chicago’s black community to elect Harold Washington. With Jane Addams and John Dewey acting as its exemplary turn of the 20th century intellectuals and activists, Chicago’s good government movement is one of the taproots of American liberalism.

I confess that it has taken me a while to accept that Barack Obama, for better or worse, is a “goo-goo.” He is the latest in a distinguished line of pragmatist, intellectually inclined politicians who believe that the public interest can be served by intelligent decision-making based upon the analysis of facts and the implementation of technically sound rules and administration.

What is interesting about the new “goo-goo-ism” of Obama is that it is shorn of its more radical roots. The radical reformism and pacifism of Jane Addams and John Dewey, despite Obama’s community work that derives from their inspiration, is notably absent. Missing too is the New Deal version of good government: there is no left wing in the White House west wing as there was under Roosevelt. There is no one the likes of Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, or Raymond Moley, just to name a few that put a radical liberal edge on the New Deal, to push the Obama Administration from within toward more fundamental government guarantees for a people being battered by economic crisis and an inept political system.

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Reality Hunger: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

Reality hunger 1

The format: David Shields’ Reality Hunger is written as a series of short, numbered paragraphs. The content: Reality Hunger, according to the flyleaf, “is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about ‘truthiness,’ literary license, quotation, appropriation.’ That means mashups, sampling, the whole ‘meta’ thing. Get it?

2

The book's numbered-paragraph format is, among other things, ideally suited to presenting ideas as aphorisms and aphorisms as stand-alone objects. David Shields quotes a lot of aphorisms and writes some others himself. I just opened the book at random to look for some, and in the pages that presented themselves I found three.

3

The above statement about opening the book at random just now and finding three aphorisms is true. That makes it a piece of reality writing about Reality Hunger. Here are the three: “There is properly no history, only biography.” “All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.” “The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.” They are from Emerson, Yeats, and Wilde. Aphorisms, especially absent their original context, are a stimulating but ultimately unsatisfying form. They’re popcorn shrimp on the buffet table of literature, postage stamps on the billets-doux and unpaid utility bills of the human spirit. To be honest, I think they're cool and fun to quote just as much as the author does. But then I love popcorn shrimp, too, so my original point stands.

4

As for those paragraphs, here's one: “In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original …theft without apology …” Followed by this: “In the slot called data, the reality is sliced in – the junk-shop find, thrift store clothes, the snippet of James Brown, the stolen paragraph from Proust, and so on.” See? He’s telling you why he’s throwing all those aphorisms in there without crediting the authors who wrote them. He's doing it to echo what he says is the new, magpie-like structure of 21st Century creation: appropriation without credit. But, as he explains in the end, the lawyers made him credit everyone at the end of the book anyway. He suggests you cut those pages out of your edition with scissors, but I’m not going to do that. It would diminish the resale value of the book.

5

So this book adheres to a self-referential form of literary construction, the “form follows function follows form” school that looks for a unifying concept and then seeks to mimic it in its own structure. It's not as bad as poems about vases that are shaped like vases, but there's some relationship there.

Read more »

The sound of silent art: Colin Marshall talks to writer, composer and sonic curator David Toop

David Toop is a composer of sound, writer about sound, curator of sound and research fellow at the London College of Communication. His works in text include Ocean of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather and the Rap Attack books. His latest is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, which explores the sound of silent art. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Toop1 The idea of doing a book about the sound of silent artworks — it's served you well. It's made an interesting book. It's made a book I've enjoyed reading, and presumably you've enjoyed writing. But there is a certain core absurdity to that idea that I'm sure is not lost upon you. Is that an advantage, the sheer humor, in a sense, of writing about the sound of things that are without sound?

Yeah, It's a kind of crazy idea. I was very conscious of it, particularly when I felt I was moving into areas that an art historian is really qualified to deal with. I thought, “Why hasn't this been written about?” Of course, one of the reasons it hasn't been written about before is because it doesn't exist. It's purely speculative.

For example, I write a lot about sound in 17th-century Dutch genre painting, the way acts of listening are represented. I hope I've made a convincing case. I was very conscious that these speculations, certainly based on research and intensive looking, but in the end, you can't hear the paintings. You can listen as intently as you like; there's no sound actually there. It's partly dependent on the development of an idea, for sure.

How accurately could I say the book is based on specifically your perceptions? After 40 years of intense listening, this is specifically about what David Toop hears in artwork?

It's certainly very personal. One other aspect of the book is the idea of sound as being very uncanny. I write a lot about, for example, sound in ghost stories and supernatural fiction, writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens. That, for me, connects with deep childhood experience. One of my first memories of sound is of lying in bed, feeling very frightened, hearing a sound; I didn't know what the source was. Just lying in bed as still as I could, as quietly as I could, believing I could hear somebody walking around my bed in the dark. What I was hearing would've been the normal sound that houses make in the night, creakings and groanings, the staple of horror films and ghost stories.

But this had a very profound effect on me as a child. It stayed with me. I've come to the point now where I'm asking myself, “Why is this so powerful, this idea of sounds that can't be connected with their source?” Why is it so useful to filmmakers, to people writing these kinds of stories? You come to the idea that sound, because it's so intangible, because it's so transient, it's something that we can't grasp, we can't see. It always has this property of being unstable in some way, elusive, uncanny. That, to me, is fascinating. Of course, yes, it's the David Toop perspective on things. It goes right back to this time when I was a child, having this very personal experience. At the same time, I don't think that makes it an experience so personal that other people can't relate to it. This phenomenon of things that go bump in the night, creaking noises and fear of the unknown as heard through sounds is extremely common.

I was watching a film last night with my wife, Paranormal Activity, which was on the television. We'd seen it before at the cinema. I thought one of the striking things about this film is that there's nothing frightening in it — except for sound. I mean, you see absolutely nothing. You see nothing. Nothing terrifying really happens. Toward the end of the film, a few small things like bedclothes being dragged off the bed and so on, but mostly you're hearing strange sounds: knockings and so on. Some people find this film really frightening. I think it's a good illustration of how powerful this is, this notion that sound is somehow threatening, somehow strange and uncanny.
Read more »

Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception

by Sue Hubbard

TORNADOThe first work in Tate Modern’s retrospective of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is, fittingly, a chimera. Projected onto the wall is a 16mm film of a mirage shimmering on the horizon of a Patagonian desert highway. There is no sound, except for that of a tolling cathedral bell from another work in an adjacent gallery. Like the Yellow Brick Road, the image beckons with utopian possibilities. Yet, as modern sophisticates, we know, in our hearts, that such promises are unobtainable. It is at once a simple, seductive, sad and rather profound image. Entitled A Story of Deception 2003-6, it gives its name to the whole show.

So what is this ‘deception’ that preoccupies Francis Alÿs, a Belgian artist born in 1959, who trained as an architect before decamping to Mexico City in 1986? Essentially it appears to be the false hope and subsequent disillusionment at the heart of the modernist project, and the desire to find appropriate metaphors to reflect the urgent political, economic and spiritual crises of contemporary life. He invites us to assess the relationship between poetics and politics and question the underlying absurdity and ‘senselessness’ of everyday situations in order to create new spaces for alternative ways of thinking and doing.

ThereParadox of Praxis is a lightness of touch about his work, a slapstick quality that, like Beckett’s knock about tramps, belies its seriousness. In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing)1997, the artist pushes a block of ice around the dusty streets of Mexico City like some Dadaist Charlie Chaplin, until after nine hours he is left with nothing but a puddle. Alluding to the unproductive hardships that constitute the daily reality for most people living in the region, Alÿs avoids heavy political didacticism in favour of his own form of the theatre of the absurd. Life as a Sisyphusian struggle is revisited in his video Rehearsal I, 1999-2001. Here a plucky little red VW Beetle climbs a dusty slop on the impoverished outskirts of Tijuana, accompanied by the sound of a brass band rehearsing. Each time the band pauses the driver removes his foot from the pedal so that the little car slides defeated back down the slope. As an allegory for those struggling to reach the US border from Latin America it is a poignant image. Like the clown in the circus, who continually goes back for yet another custard pie to be thrown in his face, we cannot help but admire the little car’s heroic stoicism as an enactment of Beckett’s famous “fail again fail better.” After all what else is there to be done? Structured around the recording of the brass band’s rehearsal, the film evolves into an apparent comic narrative that highlights the difficulties of Latin American societies to resist western models of ‘development’ before they regress back, all too soon, into another economic crisis.

Read more »

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Keynes and Social Democracy Today

Pa1393c_thumb3Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:

For decades, Keynesianism was associated with social democratic big-government policies. But John Maynard Keynes’s relationship with social democracy is complex. Although he was an architect of core components of social democratic policy – particularly its emphasis on maintaining full employment – he did not subscribe to other key social democratic objectives, such as public ownership or massive expansion of the welfare state.

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes ends by summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of the capitalist system. On one hand, capitalism offers the best safeguard of individual freedom, choice, and entrepreneurial initiative. On the other hand, unregulated markets fail to achieve two central goals of any civilized society: “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.” This suggested an active role for government, which dovetailed with important strands of left-wing thought.

Until The General Theory was published in 1936, social democrats did not know how to go about achieving full employment. Their policies were directed at depriving capitalists of the ownership of the means of production. How this was to produce full employment was never worked out.

His Master’s Voice: a Cartoon Homage to Jaques Tati

Kaleem Aftab in The National:

It was a request to use some footage from the Jacques Tati’s classic Jour de Féte that led to Sylvain Chomet being given the opportunity to make The Illusionist, a screenplay written by the legendary French filmmaker, who died from lung cancer in 1982.

There is a scene in Chomet’s 2003 animated film Triplets of Belleville where the principal characters are watching television, and Chomet thought that it would be more interesting and surprising if the characters were watching a live action movie. It immediately struck him that he should use footage from the man who is famous for making the universe look like a cartoon, the great master Jacques Tati.

To get permission to use footage wrote to the head of Tati’s estate, his daughter Sophie Tatischeff. He explains: “We had to show her some elements of Triplets, some graphics, the script, when it was only around a third done. Sophie said she really liked the idea and the style and everything and it made her think about this script written by her dad that had never been made.

“For her this script was really important because it was a message from a father to his daughter. She didn’t want the film to be done in live action, as she didn’t want someone else to play her dad’s role, so she thought it would be perfect as a cartoon. So just four months before she died – she died like her father of lung cancer, because they’re really heavy smokers – I finished Triplets and on my way to Cannes to present Triplets, I read the Tati script and fell in love with it. I never got to meet Sophie, or even speak to her about the script.”

The Illusionist is about a once popular stage magician who upon reaching the latter stages of his career realises that audiences are more interested in emerging rock stars than his vaudeville show.

Words

Judt_2-071510_png_230x739_q85Tony Judt in the NYRB blog:

I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay The Uses of Literacy (1957). A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. From Lucky Jim through Look Back in Anger, and on to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the end of the decade, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and “proper” speech were under attack. But the barbarians themselves, in their assaults on the heritage, resorted to the perfected cadences of received English: it never occurred to me, reading them, that in order to rebel one must dispense with good form.

By the time I reached college, words were my “thing.” As one teacher equivocally observed, I had the talents of a “silver-tongued orator”—combining (as I fondly assured myself) the inherited confidence of the milieu with the critical edge of the outsider. Oxbridge tutorials reward the verbally felicitous student: the neo-Socratic style (“why did you write this?” “what did you mean by it?”) invites the solitary recipient to explain himself at length, while implicitly disadvantaging the shy, reflective undergraduate who would prefer to retreat to the back of a seminar. My self-serving faith in articulacy was reinforced: not merely evidence of intelligence but intelligence itself.

Did it occur to me that the silence of the teacher in this pedagogical setting was crucial? Certainly silence was something at which I was never adept, whether as student or teacher. Some of my most impressive colleagues over the years have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy in debates and even conversation, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I have envied them this self-restraint.

Walker Evans

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Morgan,-Amsterdam-011 Evans got his start working for the government. The Great Depression was on and the WPA was in full swing. The Farm Security Administration was looking, in particular, for photographic documentation of what the Depression was doing to the American farmer. Fortune magazine was interested in the same thing and, famously, notoriously, sent the writer and critic James Agee along with Walker Evans to produce a text with photographs. Fortune killed the story but it survived as the now iconic piece of work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

While Agee's text focused on the misery, it has often been remarked that Evans' photographs, bleak as they are, also capture something noble and unbowed in the individual faces he captured on film. Susan Sontag picked up on this fact in her own analysis of American photography from her classic work, On Photography. She saw a Whitman-esque spirit in Evan’s photography, a deeply democratic viewpoint that allowed each object, each person, to express the dignity of his own specific existence. She wrote, “American photography has moved from affirmation to erosion to, finally, a parody of Whitman's program. In this history the most edifying figure is Walker Evans. He was the last great photographer to work seriously and assuredly in a mood deriving from Whitman's euphoric humanism.” This Whitman-style exuberance was doomed to be shattered on the rocks of actual historical experience, thought Sontag. The happy American is also the childlike American. Whitman himself may have been special; he could sing the body electric all night long and still be humming the tune the next morning. The rest of us were not so lucky. The years pile up and do their dirty work.

More here.

Putty Hill

Roger Ebert at his website:

Bilde In a way rarely seen, “Putty Hill” says all that can be said about a few days in the lives of its characters without seeming to say very much at all. It looks closely, burrows deep, considers the way in which lives have become pointless and death therefore less meaningful. It uses fairly radical filmmaking techniques to penetrate this truth, and employs them so casually that they seem quite natural.

Matthew Porterfield's film, which takes place in a poor, wooded suburb of Baltimore, involves the death by overdose of a young man named Cory. We never meet him, although we see his portrait at a memorial service. The portrait tells us nothing: He projects no personality for the camera. His family and friends gather for his funeral, and we meet them in unstructured moments that tell us much about them but little about Cory.

The sad truth is, nobody knew Cory that well.

More here. [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Sunday Poem

The Bridge

I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends’ parents…

Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I’m sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I’m sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf of your better selves

I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self

Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die

The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses

I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

by Donna Kate Rushin
from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Kitchen Table Press, 1983