The "Spectre of a Society Which Could Be Free"

After my bike crash a few months ago, I have been rather preoccupied with wholeness, for better or worse. I feel like my perception is back on the topic due, in part, due to becoming so dramatically undone by a bike crash where myself and my family are left with rather vivid emotional and physical scars. Not a day goes by that Lily or I doesn’t startle awake to the fact that we are living in a different world to some concern that we hadn’t dealt with before my crash. This leads me to the sort of liminal place where a lot of physical and emotional certainties that I are all up in the air. In such a space of chaos, I have reached for wholeness as a way to grapple with the incredible complexity of this liminal state. There is always a sense of calming control that comes with the imposition of wholeness by one’s mind.

This seeking of wholeness is not surprising. There are countless mental and social constructs that our brain creates and imposes on reality to simplify and make sense of the incredible amount of stimuli that are pummeling towards us in everyday life and that’s before even taking into account the digital slipstream that we upload into our brain everyday. Race, class, gender, architecture, urban and rural design, health, magic, logic, law, deviance, ethics are just some of the countless, contested fields of meaning that we use to collapse the complexity of the world we live in to a digestible, predictable world to navigate. Likewise, we have this concept of the self that we create for ourselves, comprised of understanding of who we are, what we do, and what our limits are, that allows us to navigate these boundlessly chaotic environments around us with a certain fixed understand of what our relationship is to the world around us. For me, getting hit by a car and subsequently crashing broke some of those social constructs and my own understanding of myself that I took for granted, constructs that I had relied upon to get through my days without running around like a chicken with its head cut off screaming, “WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, HOW?!?!?!”

There is comfort in knowing that we all do it, this drive to wholeness. This is how our brains and our perception of the world around us works. We are all little fragile, carbon-based life forms that use the grey matter in our brains to magically create little models of the worlds we inhabit in order to navigate the world a little easier. As a PhD-trained sociologist, I do have qualms with what I believe are the erroneous ways that some people impose their view of that world onto others in public policy (See the Clinton-era “Super Predator” fueled war on drugs as an exemplar of this). However, there is comfort in knowing that this quest toward wholeness is a human phenomena. I am sure I am not alone in seeking wholeness out of this moment that we live in today in its incredibly fractured and chaotic state. This brings me a sense of comfort, but I don’t necessarily want to bail out into the comfort of wholeness.

with my vital faculties improving by the day, I want to lean back into this liminal state where chaos reigns in order to begin anew. By noting that I am leaning into chaos, I am embracing a less taken-for-granted approach to my everyday life. As a sociologist, this is the real work of praxis, or of applying the theories that I loved talking about in classrooms into my everyday life to guide my actions. With those theories, supplemented by own nature-based spirituality, as a guide, I have tried to work on de-educating myself in the many ways that our society tries to short-circuit our own critical thinking and experiential learning faculties. This is only chaotic in a sense that I am relying on my own seeking to make sense of and understand the world around me, rather than just relying on the comforting, easy dominant narratives of our culture want to place on something. Instead, I want to make my mind up for myself and create my own stories about the world around me.

Yes, the storyteller wants to tell their own stories, surprise surprise. In some ways it is that simple, but I don’t think a lot of storytellers do it. No, they short circuit themselves out into genre or literary shortcuts, or economic imperatives mean they have to tell a story in a universe not of their own creation. Films are the most common areas were we see this economic stultification of not allowing storytellers to create new worlds and tell different stories. Case in point: Somehow we are still being subjected to Star Wars, Fast & the Furious, and Batman movies. In so many case, storytellers limit themselves into telling other people’s stories and not their own. Me personally, I don’t want to just fizzle out into someone else’s universe or rely on plots of stories other people have already told. No, I am interested more in storytelling my way through the contested terrain of the future.

This has been particularly helpful of late as I recover from my crash. I could write myself into a story of sad failure at the loss of a fledgling dream. I could also force myself back into randonneuring and cast myself as the triumphant hero that overcomes all obstacles. Viewing our decisions that we have in front of us as different possibilities of ways that we can write our own story helps us to weed through the popular tropes that we didn’t realize influenced us our decision making. Me? I CHOOSE CHAOS. thehehe. Jokes aside, I don’t want to write my story after my crash in either way that those popular sport-related stories go. I choose option three: none of the above. Instead, I just want to make decisions that allow me the space to process my crash, rebuild my dreams for my future, and participate in the construction of the collective future we will all live into.

Yes, it all comes back to the future in the end. Alongside my interest in wholeness, I have been working through Mark Fisher’s work on the necessity of inventing the future. Before he passed away, he was working on book on what he called Acid Communism where he envisioned a world where beyond capitalist realism, or the thought that their is no alternative to capitalism. In the introduction to that lost text, Fisher drops a knowledge bomb on how we can rethink the 1960s counterculture:

With his concept of Acid Communism, Fisher wants us to return to a time period in the 70s where the "inevitability of the “convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness, and psychedelic consciousness” was thwarted by the challenge of neoliberalism, a movement which begged our society to imagine that there was no alternative to hyper-individualist capitalism. Yes, what if the best is yet to come? What if we can be free and be vital little cogs that can bring about the freedom of all people from the drudgery of hyper-capitalism and statist, authoritarian communism?

This is the sort dreaming into the future that I like to do, because if keeps alive the prospect that our lives and what we make of them matter. I have read too many books to believe either of the poles of the individualist dichotomy, either that individual people are powerless or all powerful. No, it’s always more complicated than any simple intellectual short cut makes it out to be. However, you can never count any of us out. We are all much more powerful than we think we are. What if we work a little bit each day to build a society that is free? That’s what I try to do through all my little actions that deny the validity of the capitalist system. Sure I have to play along still with a lot of rules that I deny to eat, have health care, and a roof, but I am also dreaming of the “spectre of a society which could be free.” I honestly think that is the strand that unites all my art and storytelling together. I just want us all to remember that we were born free.

There is no more interesting place for me to spend my time than in create little portals for us to slip out of the enforced horror and drudgery of our current moment into an alternate future where we are all free. I suppose that’s really what’s at stake in this tiny weavings that I work on. Through weaving, I was able to escape the reality where I am a computer-bound, knowledge worker and enter one where I am a craft artisan. Since this craft helped me slip the trap of that reality into one that is more empowering and fulfilling, I think its my responsibility to offer you little portals where you can conceptualize your own escape to a society that could be free. This is your little doorway to your own secret garden of empowerment and possibility.

I didn’t really think about this possibility with this weave. Now that I have uttered that truth, however, I cannot deny it. This is why I believe so strongly in showing up for my date with the page. It rarely ever goes as planned. All these words and meanings just flow through me just like the sample in DJ Shadow in “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt” intones:

“And I would like to be able to let what is inside of me, which comes from all the music that I hear, I would like for that to come out. And its like, its not me. The music’s coming through me. The music, The Music is coming through me.”

Maybe that’s how our imagined future will arrive, all at once, like a cascading waterfall of change toward a world in which we are all free. tehehe. That’s more of a dream than anything I have uttered here today. However, if we wake up to the work each one of us has before us to tell our own stories and not rely on those stories that have been handed to us, that future could again be just as inevitable as it once was.

Thanks for being here, dear reader. I hoped you enjoyed this week’s essay. You are what keeps this project afloat. You are what keeps me coming back to this page to pour myself out into it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for caring enough to spend some time with me today.

Best,

James