This is the preamble to the introductory remarks before the end of hesitation. This is where the ground from which to begin is mapped. Here is where the “I” is marked from the “Not-I,” where references are made to permit the “I” to speak. This is where I tell you that I have been reading about C. G. Jung without telling you that I have been reading about C. G. Jung.
Here is where that vernacular and these references allow me to keep speaking. This sentence is where I anchor the text in my personal experience.
That is how I gather allies.
This is where I tell you about these thoughts I had in conjunction with a song I heard. That is how we cut our lives into pieces—in contrast to the ecstasies, from Old French—extasie—via late Latin, from Greek—ekstasis—meaning ‘standing outside oneself’, based on ek- (‘out’) + histanai (‘to place’). That is how we step outside of ourselves. That is how my “I-statement” enrolls you.
As Lebanon’s disastrous rule crumbles on a planet suffocated by more globally-catastrophic rule, that’s the part I already tweeted out. The politics of last resort is the only politics there is. That’s a thought I wanted to write but could not express until the preceding paragraph.
This is where I start hedging my argument again.
Is it this?
This is where I reference a different song.
You and I are established as points from which we may begin speaking. Here is the main body of text.
Our words are someone else’s song coming to resonance within us. If we do not reference a different song, we will speak the song we have always known. We will live the words we have always spoken.
Nothing’s alright.
Nothing is fine.
Can’t
Go
On,
Live-
-ing
This
Way.
x
I haven’t read the Reuters piece on “veganism” as a response to Lebanon’s food crisis & it’s probably unrepresentative of everyone’s actual experience; but the backlash to the very idea is telling of a deep trauma leading to unhealthy immobilism in our culture.
The contention is that veganism is a lifestyle choice whereas adapting to the inflation of food prices is simply poverty. Changing your diet is even referred to as “filling the gap,” a very interesting term more often seen in talk about informal transport.
The inability to see political agency in any act of adaptation to worsening socioeconomic conditions is a sign of the hard limit of representational politics, when “the right” to something becomes an impediment to imagining new ways of being in and moving through the world.
Give me fuel. Give me fire. Give me that which I desire.
As Lebanon’s disastrous rule crumbles on a planet suffocated by more globally-catastrophic rule, this kind of blind idealism may be literally killing us—a moralistic mass suicide.
This is where the rules of Western rhetoric dictate that I circle back to a point I made earlier. This is how I will do what I learned in Arabic class instead: this part is for the cat people in a world gone to the dogs.