“Great Storytellers Break Spells.”

Do you believe that the internet has the power to change you? I do and that change can be for the better. My most recent little tidbit of wisdom that came to me from a wild cascade of firing electrical signals was the Art Coop podcast series. After finding the Art Coop IG page, it only took a couple screen taps by your friendly neighborhood druid to find this little message jumping off the screen at me:

“Great Storytellers Break Spells.”

It was the title of a conversation between Maddy Clifford, MADlines, and Marina Lopez of ART.COOP as part of the Remember the Future Podcast Series — Link. I immediately listened to the conversation and was rewarded with this beautiful nuanced conversation about the role that a storyteller and, more generally, art plays in waking people up from the spells of systems seeking to dominate them.

In the Interview, Clifford made noted that art is a birth right, an ancestral tool, and a weapon to push back against systems of domination, especially for people of color:

“It shouldn't be so difficult to be an artist, and I think we've kind of accepted crumbs for a long time, and we've accepted the starving artist trope and the tortured artist trope, these are like Western and European and, and colonial ideas that have really been pushed onto us, especially as people of color. Our ancestors, art wasn't like an extracurricular activity. It was part of the fabric of who we are and how we engaged with each other. It was a weapon.”

This is a beautiful articulation of the same burning demand that echoes out of every fiber I touch, every word I pen. I, too, want to retake art as this anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-oppression domain of magic that creates generative futures out of all people being given the means and capacity to articulate themselves. As much as white male heteronormative privilege has benefited me with ears and eyes turning toward me whenever I speak, its also the fucking coffin that folx are constantly trying to bury me alive in. My actions over most of my life have been like the thousands of punches Beatrix Kiddo landed on that wooden coffin with her bare hands in Kill Bill, Volume 2 when she was buried alive and left for dead. She emerged from that grave, hands bloodied, went to get a cup of coffee, and then got on with the work of her revenge.

Like Beatrix, I dragged myself out that coffin and I am not going back. As a poor kid raised by a single mom descended from people with deep roots in Appalachia, there has been a seething flame, an urgent demand that cant help but emanate out of all my practices. It feels like this deep ancestral cry from the dispossessed people of quiet desperation that I am descended from. You know, the sort of people like my mom with no health insurance who die in their early 60s of an entirely preventable form of cancer. People like me are never supposed to express this flame, save in socially-appropriate avenues like sports. I was never supposed to make any urgent demands of the world around me. I was supposed to shut the fuck up, get a job, and stay in that coffin until the air ran out. I was supposed to let the racist, patriarchal capitalist gristmill grind me into pulp and act like other oppressed people of color were the problem. But, I refuse to do that. Spoiler alert, “We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine And the machine is bleeding to death.”

Most of us are in the gristmill and we need to be in solidarity with one another if we are going to get out. See, somebody done messed up when they let the poor kid from a rust belt town in Ohio get a college degree and then a PhD in sociology. I can feel my voiceless poor white ancestors behind me begging in unison with all the other poor displaced people of the planet, “FREE ME, FREE ME, FREE ME.” “There is no me,” I must say to them, “We all gonna get free.”

This is that vibe and has been for decades. IYKYK.

My whole aim in story telling is to be good enough to jolt people out of their passivity and into action, especially folx that are or currently experiencing poverty. I have this distinct memory of being a kid, sitting in my room as a teenager in a house next to some railroad tracks playing around with hemp with some cd on in the background. I didn’t know how to braid the hemp, weave it, or do anything with it. But, that desire to do something was there, but there was no space to explore that. It was just school and tennis and school and tennis and school and tennis, over and over and over again. There was no fucking Montessori school where you get to explore all these different modalities. It was just catholic school and the idiot Father Cardone giving sermons about the evils of south park to a bunch of 4th graders. So, why do I write these sets of words that feel like they are on fire with passion? It’s because I don’t want you to lose any more fucking time to the way the world is organized, especially if you are poor, queer, a person of color, a witch, or a woman. I don’t want you to be like my mom and pass on a burning desire to gain some skill to your kin on your death bed.

Almost cut my hair
It happened just the other day
It's gettin' kinda long
I coulda said it was in my way
But I didn't and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
Yes, I feel like I owe it to someone.

CSNY “Almost Cut My Hair”

No, go out there and wave your freak flag to the world, people, preferably while blaring “Almost Cut My Hair” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Don’t let our culture tell you that you are not good enough. You are. Don’t let our culture tell you that you aren’t smart enough. You are. Don’t let our culture shun you for being yourself. Tell them normies to FRICK right off. Don’t let our culture tell you that no one cares. We do. Don’t let the systems that we have created make you feel like your own worth is in what you produce. You are so much more than that. You have an entire world that is just waiting to hear about the worlds you are imagining and slowly bringing into being. Remember, this isn’t a race. In fact, if your rebellion is radical amounts of rest. I wouldn’t blame you. It took me years of recuperation doing joyful things after I got off the hamster wheel of doom. Below is actual footage of me in hamster form from my rest period.

I would counsel you, if you are open to such counsel, to slowly and surely a bit each day disinvest more from the harmful systems and ideas that surround us and commit yourself to some act that reinvests yourself in the connective tissue of the community that you see around you. For example, cancel a streaming subscription from some large multinational corporation and sign up for a patreon to a local creator whose work you want to support. You could forego the trip to home deport for some plants and instead throw a wildflower seed ball into an empty lot. You could gift a friend a handmade gift as a surprise and watch as you create a relationship of reciprocity, a gifting economy bloom between you both. You can choose to amplify the work of the artists and local businesses in your community by sharing them with friends and family. Those are the sort of small acts of ceding your consent, whether active or passive, to punitive, extractive systems that make up the work of abolition. I always like to couple my acts of abolition with generative acts of imagination, so that’s why you see me putting my time and energy into seeding something beautiful while ceding my ties to systems of oppression. You see, this is the way, because as jackie sumell of Solitary Gardens, notes, “Abolition, like growing a plant, requires daily attention and care.”

It’s in this daily discipline to ceding consent and seeding imagined futures where we are all free to create, be nourished, and to rest that we could be dangerous, where art could be a real threat.

“We could be dangerous.

Art as a real threat.”

Refused “Protest Song ‘68”

Now, we are not saying to be dangerous in some martial militant way. No, we would be dangerous in the sense of having broken the spell of the dominant zeitgesit of the extractive, punitive systems we are surrounded by and created the autonomy to live within a community where our spiritual, mental, and physical needs are met. This dangerousness is a threat to the bottom line of that dominant way of life, the greatest danger of all. This is to win the hearts and minds of people to their own capacity to be a cherished member of a beloved community of people dedicated to all people’s flourishing.

Is it a dream? Sure. Is it the work of multiple lifetimes? I would think so. Yet, the daily discipline of working ceding and seeding will go on until my spirit leaves this animate clay that I inhabit now. To that, I am devoted for my daughter. I just want her to live love enough to see that mountain torn down.

“Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down
Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down”

Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra “Austerity Blues”

May we live into a “solidarity economy,” a cooperative, communal world where all are taken care of and have the conditions to fulfill their spiritual, artistic, and physical potential, free from the burdens of this punitive, extractive world we live in today, with harm to none.

All my best, dear reader, until next time.

James

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