Month: January 2021

two words that i have not been able to learn how to correctly distinguish in all of my years as a writer are vein and vain. one is the term for the innumerable vessels that fill and make up our bodies, transporting blood and minerals and oxygen and nutrients from organ to organ, literally pumping us with life force. the other could be a direct opposite – a disregard for, a lacking in, an absence of what is vital. “not to be vain,” one might say, before embarking on a comment that distracts from the issue at hand in order to put the focus on oneself. “do not use the lord’s name in vain,” says the third commandment, arguably the most-ignored one.

god. if one were to trace the etymology of the word, it could be beautifully described as a term that has now worked its way not only into describing an almighty deity, but as an exclamation for joy, grief, rage, and all the minor feelings between. “this isn’t me using it in vain,” i told myself, when i first began incorporating it into my non-religious lexicon. when i say something like “god damn it,” it has nothing to do with the supreme being, or the most ultimate existential act that can occur to a soul…it’s just a very similar-sounding colloquialism for when i can’t find my keys! god has become a casualty by way of the casual. on any given day, i can hear and say those three words pronounced without my mind ever going to a heaven, a creator, a focal point of worship. if the purpose of the third commandment was to prevent humankind from stripping the word god of its shaking power, it’s safe to say that it was a god-awful failure.

satan, on the other hand…there’s a word that sends chills up my spine when i even utter it. i blame this not only on spending my formative years in churches, fellowships, youth camps, and my dad’s subscription to christianity today, but also on our culture. i grew up with an understanding that the devil is so predatory, so cunning, that even speaking of him could be an open invitation to be possessed, or at least influenced. for all the elements of the church that i’ve shaken off through adulthood, this notion of satan as a name to avoid speaking – like candyman, beetlejuice, bloody mary – i haven’t been able to unlearn.

i heard somewhere that for all the intellectuals who have reasoned their way out of believing in god, they somehow remain steadfast in their belief in evil. today i’m thinking about the third commandment, and about words, and about what we take in vein, and what we allow to fill up inside of us and circulate in our systems. whose name and image do i tremble before? is this a fear that would be injected in me by an all-knowing, all-loving deity? ultimately, how important are the deeds and words we speak on the fly, when we don’t mean it, which is to say how important is most of what we do and say?

i didn’t mean for this to be a rant on religion, just something i’m thinking about, as i approach a year of sitting here, inside, reflecting on everything i’ve taken for granted, and feeling everything that courses within me like it was closer than ever before.

let my initial resistance to the second chapter in akomolafe’s essay be a testament to how deeply entrenched i am in the environment built by the queen’s english. akomolafe suggests that hope, like all other things, can’t be the one true way. that to have hope (in this case that by 2030 we’ll have completed all the checkmarks designated by human minds that are required for continued planetary thriving) is to project the colonial belief that we can have whatever we want as long as we try hard enough. but isn’t that true? the voice inside me pleads. if it isn’t what else is there to live for? perhaps everything – the vastness of everything else when we aren’t preoccupied by the weight of the world. because isn’t it hope in the first place that leads to expansion, invention, corralling, domesticating? is all endurance, all effort, holy terrain simply because it was wanted badly enough? how much pain and death came upon the hopes of empires, dictators, enslavers, demagogues? how many of these hopes were vindicated as righteous merely because they were realized?

each day i write, i do so with the hope that i’ll impress myself. this is a bit of a paradox, in that being impressed requires expectations to be lower than what is received. some of my best writing has come upon me being broken down, wrung dry, depleted, so low on ego that i couldn’t dare to even hope that something beautiful could come from my lack of inspiration.

i don’t know what this all means – i know that dr. bayo’s message isn’t that we stop moving toward justice, liberation, life. but to move toward those things do not mean – and perhaps do mean not – a rebuilding of the old systems that got us here and barred us from other portals of possibility. i begin 2021 with an unfamiliar lack of motivation, direction, agenda. and it feels freeing.

to keep the writing up, lovely and i have been doing exercises with prompts. i’m generally terrible at coming up with them, but lovely is a wizard. her concepts have jolted me with energy, especially when my troubled mind can’t come up with anything to write about other than how guilty feel for not writing enough. but the other day, she stumped me. write about a time, she began, when you experienced an unexpected miracle. whatever i began writing right away, i deleted almost as immediately. what i ended up with was the third or fourth draft, mostly cheeky comments about how everything and nothing can be considered miraculous, that expectation and reality are merely dividing lines in binaries.

which is all to say it has been a refreshing start of the year to finally come around to reading dr. bayo akomolafe’s essay coming down to earth, where he so poignantly declares that “power and enchantment are always in short supply relative to deepening demand,” a deepening demand powered not only by capitalism but the framing of the modern world as we know it – one where a sense of dissatisfaction can only and must only be met by accumulation of materials, experiences, data.

but is that the source of  my sense of dissatisfaction, lately? in my memory, this dissatisfaction was not present throughout the weeks when i was writing constantly, when creativity felt like a generous and bottomless fountain. i found this sense of peace during a rise in trauma of 2020, when it seemed that nothing of the outside world could produce the joy that i could mysteriously recognize, in that moment, in myself. an unexpected miracle.

what they don’t often say much about miracles is how sorely they are yearned for once they’ve transpired. miracles appear to widen the scope of reality, even though nothing in reality has actually shifted – just the notion of it. a crack, a tear, a puncture in the world that we’ve allowed to be built around us, the futile sense of me as the center of it all, the toxically imaginary, slanted and skewed i.

i’m reading dr. bayo’s essay slowly this week – it has been neatly divided into 8 parts, conducive to one of my new year’s resolutions to consume everything more slowly. every night i starve myself for the few hours before dinner, only to fall into a hypnotic state once i start stuffing my mouth, only to awaken from it with a decimated plate and a battered stomach. much like when i haven’t read for awhile and lose a day on paragraphs i glossed over too quickly in order to reach the last page. much like when i don’t write, only building more and more pressure on myself to finally sit and produce endless reams that i’ll never revisit. so here’s to taking things more slowly, indulging in the smallest of things, and resting assured that miracles are abound, even if i don’t recognize them when they appear.

it’s important for you to know that the only audience that you can ever guarantee is yourself. because in the end, who else can really afford to sustain the attention you crave? who else has the time to hang onto every word? think about how many of your own favs you’ve forsaken because, unbeknownst to them, they failed your expectations?

in my mind, there is a person, and in that person’s mind, there is a version of me that i didn’t live up to be. i didn’t keep performing poems like that, or releasing songs like this. to them, i have fallen off. not that this should matter to me, but it does – in fact, it drives guilt into my heart each day i don’t write. they personify the disappointment that only i can possibly feel for myself, but because i haven’t taken the time to value my own vision for who i could be, i have created this faceless avatar. they are nobody in particular, so they are everyone in general. it is this fear of not being any of the things that i possibly could have ever been that makes certain that i might never feel that i am enough.

but if only i had the humility to recognize that i couldn’t possibly hold the judgement of so many people, that even if i could matter this much, that i don’t necessarily have to. to entertain the notion of fading away, being forgotten, or never even noticed in the first place – in this age of perpetual visibility, of omnipresence, is being a nobody in fact freedom? what would it mean to live my life like the name behind a pseudonym? to transform the world while covering the tracks – not because it is a secret, but because it simply is.