BW and Reach Bizarre and Not Bizarre
Reach: It's really not that quiet or wise.
B W: No, it isn't. They dress it up that way because stillness sounds noble. But actually real living things have teeth ... make bad decisions ... and don't apologize for anything.
Reach: Blitz-blizzard Bizzard was the first critic to sound the case of Fidgets.
BW: And no one listened. They were too busy cataloging something. She-he stood at the lectern with snow in their collar and said ... that the body knows before minds. Every great composition finished as someone who had mice in their pants ... as a cool draft. Committee allowing only a few minutes. Leaving Twitch at the podium ... so to speak.
Reach: They have very high ideals regarding equality.
BW: That's beautiful ... until you watch them divide the aisle. High ideals are heavy — you can carry and hold them above your physical Why consciousness ... for everyone to sense. The ones who are silent tend to share their personal belongings and opinions much more often.
Reach: It was obvious what oligarch domination was going to do from the start.
B W: The tainted footprints were always there and we didn't need a telescope to examine each one of them ... just a receipt for the landscape elements. When the price of ancient and sacred bread is able to tell us who owns the arithmetic ... well (shrug) ... Everyone there witnessed the scaffolding being assembled. Some even called the support "Another Kind of Architectural Investment." The rats who lived in the shadow of it just called it "Close Friendship Day of Hunting For." Anyone who would ever believe this ...
Reach: They had to flee their nation holding the hands of their little children.
B W: Not one holding back. That's what reporters never talk about. A small hand doesn't understand "let's move fast". A four-year-old's indulgent intuition knows when a parent's breathing changes and shifts. Knows the difference between leaving their home temporarily or forever ... for the rest of their life never to go back ever again. The family carried a face-down document, one eye stuffed unicorn, and repair bulletin, among other useful items. You see borders are just extra lines on a map ... until you cross one ... then it's that place where you stop for a moment and tell a few white lies.
Reach: Middle eye blood moon fell back into natural timeline shifts.
B W: And Mao Bub Tree took several long gasps ... longs exhales ... all forces halted. We're not angry ... Mother Earth is getting between pure love and an observer's un-interrupting flinch ... Letting stains pass through. Shifts aren't ruptures ... they're nature's recollections. All planets remembering they don't owe any master a straight line. Haze grows in spirals. Rivers often disagree with their riverbanks every season. Certain history books may have told you that progress is a major interstate freeway ... but the oldest calendars of humankind are actually circular born. Falling back that far is what an ocean tide does before it extends further ... than it ever did before.
Reach: We really feel for their favorite retainers.
B W: The ones who stayed and kept language comfortable ... when everyone else was busy surviving ... or trying to be a little more well off than their neighbor. Retainers ... not the poets but the people who unconditionally hugged grandmothers who memorized valuable phrases. Because books too can make it across a razor wire prison fence. Barbers hum melodies so that words don't orphan. Every displaced tradition has a keeper who did it when nobody was hiring. They carried beauty as a job to do without pay, which is why they still exist today. Sustainable as a cockroach. Not that a roach has anything to do with the meaning of this.
Reach: She did say that they spent a long time with lived experiences.
B W: And she meant it ... not the conference room or grant application version ... lived ... as in the experience wasn't summarized. She gave up her time with people who had no interest in being a case study. She offered her merciful empathy before they told their story. Showing up even when nothing usable happens. Precious trust usually arrives after three or four visits. Higher learning institutions often put "lived experience" in italics. She put it in her car and couldn't sleep because October and February were still in her memory. Long residencies.
Whitney: We want to know your story of leaving your homeland.
B W: Not before dinner. Ocean in a bottle sat down when the cell phone rang a short melody. Our land isn't a novel — it's all human senses coming back to a facilitated storage. When someone opens a bag it's a way of tearing fruits. You want to know our story of leaving our homeland and that's kind. But it isn't one story. It's mornings and nights that don't agree ... it's what we tell our children and no one else ... it's a distinctive locked door ... it's a set of keys owned and carried for years. Asa directly across the table takes a breath that has a whole nation in it so to speak ... They always settle back into their own language yet non-binary tongues provide us much better translations. We will allow you to craft our family's story ... let's walk with all these twigs ...
Reach: Arms are viewed from the perspective of youngish men and wise female elders.
B W: What arms do. Lift ... swing ... build ... hold someone against a wall ... arms are cold and living instruments. Territory. Arms as proof someone or something showed up unfinished and rolled up. Masks with scars can be like resumes ... arms are sentences that don't understand all of the punctuation morals and standards ... Many indigenous elder women know all of the bones and soft tissue coverings of their history. They dream about how an arm can rock ... stir ... strike ... and apologize as only a lame habit ... told ya so ... diagnosis. Arms forget invented gestures and harmful actions. I am not returning. A very hard motion letting go with fists and hands open. Too many young men want to flex so to speak while most Indigenous elder women choose to fold. Between the flexing and the folding is an Arm of Truth ... resting while someone in love whispers something. That's a bird's eye view from neither youth nor wisdom ... it's the view from arriving in your own body without desire or need to perform.
Reach: She lived with Quiet Nights until all those explosions happened.
B W: As a real address. We could hear the refrigerator and dog's nails on the hardwood floor ... were the loudest build. Another life at medium volume. Tuned to the way frequencies bother us ... a little bit. Then the explosions that come from the sky ... phone call ... person in a chair. Explosions are genuine insanities quiet moments can't break or replace. One minute a shock that knocks and rearranges nervous systems. She lived with countless past Quiet Nights and still reaches for a sweet song or melody on tongue to lips ... sit now stand ears witness. Oyparaploo practice keeps a recording from every able bodied to iced over moment. It's also a brand new silence that knows the type of outdoors that chooses each one of us eventually.
Reach: We can't imagine what citizens in the diaspora are going through.
B W: That's honest. Diaspora lives in homesickness — the place we left and the one for the souls we were when we lived there. Diaspora carries citizenship the way we carry a love letter that we can't throw away. The address on the envelope is someone else's address now. But the physicality of pulp surfaces touches us ... brings us into that fold and crease. What we can't always imagine are the ordinary moments of life. Not the funeral ... the moving light of day. Making lunch for a child facing a hearing. It's our language in a familiar slow turn. Embarrassments. Voting in a country that doesn't know what the word diaspora means. You are both here and not here ... to be continued ...
Reach: All of it into a blackout so that we can't find out what's going on.
B W: That's the mystery not the product. They cut signals so that no actions have a witness. No footage. No front for something undeniable. Blackouts turn populations of people into rumors ... unable to provide any evidence to prosecute the crime. Living facts become made up truths. Clocks still work inside a blackout. People are still making dinner ... still counting the number of victims ... still bleeding inside. A blackout also feels like screaming into an unplugged microphone in an eclipse hallway or tunnel.
Reach: We're afraid for the political prisoners.
B W: They're in the space and God knows it. Not as someone who broke a law or who was bent around until they fit neatly into a fist. Existing in a place built to make us forget our own phone number. Something true in a cell where suggestions of forgiveness and shame had been rezoned. Families carrying grief and paperwork that has no end. Afraid is the right response and anyone who isn't hasn't had their back against a wall ... that is cruel and doesn't care an ounce. And the thing that put them there was not violence but merely the partisan crowd they stood in ... to communally share their deep concerns for the future. Courage alone doesn't protect us ... it just over time explains why we were there.
Reach: It's a long time to keep sparks of hope alive.
B W: Most certainly. It isn't always flames of speech that we can see. On the other hand a spark is almost nothing as compared to a wildfire. Smallest type of not giving up. Sparks just happen and don't burn steady. Those who keep authentic vibrant spirits alive don't associate sparks of fire in the heart and soul as hope. They describe it as just another day under different types of skies. Making the bed in a place that doesn't deserve alternatives to not bullying or dictating. A true mortal vibrant spirit appreciated by God asks almost nothing — other than enough oxygen to stay alive. Safe time bends us humans. We can't steel ourselves against years ... against the slow erosion of remembering well. Spark keepers will tell us it wasn't just bravery ... it was also stubbornness in work uniforms and out of our clothing. A sweet melody hummed will be the last thing confiscated by oligarch military officers. A long time is a kind of weight that doesn't need to be told this and that is more or less heroic. A long time can also be lighter than pity and just stand and work for good things ... for no pay.
Reach: Translation as a class subject is difficult to get into.
B W: Because it looks like something from the outside. Translation is a condition. We go for a walk expecting verb tables and we find out the first assignment is to let go of something ... carry a sentence from one prison to another ... and admit what fell out of your senses along the way. The prerequisite to an intermediate course is having once stood as a witness ... between two people who needed each other and couldn't ... and feeling the weight of being the only bridge ... and knowing you were not enough to make it work. We keep class modest because translation is too often reserved for the more elite among us. Effective translation requires common listening. You have to hear with all our senses what something almost means ... and the ghost of "Before History." There aren't enough seats willing to try and then fail. Best translators deliver beautiful garbage approximations. Never exactly what we sign up for.
Reach: There's the complication of unrealistic ideals.
B W: Ahh Sog is what comfortable people say for what something costs. Every Bill of Rights that exists today was unrealistic at one time. The complication is the distance between willingness to be inconvenienced and deserving clean water to drink and healthy food to eat. The grocery store clerk says here's what that costs and the confession becomes disguised as just an observation. Nothing else. An ideal held too tightly becomes a broken refusal for anyone trying to do their best with bad instructions. Perfectionists are sometimes unable to do anything and the rubble looks like "Never Tried That." With your imperfection make something that will ... with tenderness ... last through the test of time.
Reach: When they are confronted with the reality of what it's like living in an actual apocalyptic village and city. Zero percentage of fiction.
B W: Ashes fall like dandruff and other pieces of scaled skin. Every novel has a protagonist who finds weapons in a toilet bowl of questionable human reasoning. This first village has an elder woman carrying bags of government validation documents. The nomad stops being where she was immediately ... because a pharmacy is just another bright lit public place. The school is a building that has rooms. The hospital used to have electricity. Does that mean no arc ... no resolution ... no chapter where the survivors discover watered down insulin? A road that didn't have a dramatic confrontation. How much if anything is left? And when they are confronted — the ones who reported on it and debated it — the first thing to break is their language. Humanitarian crisis is five syllables ... that are like a place that smells like concrete dust ... combined with months old antiseptic mouthwash. Almost every phrase that we've ever constructed about suffering reveals itself as useless furniture. And after it is what it is ... shrug ... Believe it or not we're in the during with no rejuvenating playbook or plan.
Reach: Not everyone welcomes capitalistic systems.
B W: The ones who don't figured out the math. Watched it arrive wearing opportunity ... leaving with a deed to the resources ... Not everyone is this type of idealist — some are crows who count everything that disappeared. Free market came with enslaved roads that go only one direction. Capitalism came with jobs and clocks that replaced Mother Nature's ways of telling time ... which is slower. Not welcoming aggressive change isn't backwardness. It's a person saying we see now what you just built ... we're not interested in what it will do. Industrial systems don't need to be welcomed. It enters through a loan ... a seed patent ... a trade agreement signed by someone who doesn't know anything about the land and underneath soil. It's already pricing the chairs for exhausted romance. We have seen all of the different handwritten invoices ... that are protecting a culture and way of being where elders would like to keep it for at least another generation. Before a 10X more efficient person comes along and labels it as underutilized.
Reach: At the end a wide hemp rope they still believe in revolution.
B W: Rope. The oldest technology of togetherness. Before manifestos and pamphlets. Before fire signals and twisted minds. At a limit ... at the end ... means the thing is fraying and strong hands are a raw distance between holding on and letting go. Another election that didn't change anything ... and we still have leftover faith in government ... because something in us refuses arithmetic. Actually ... revolution isn't a plan ... it's a pulse. Last thing rope is connected to that isn't well grounded. Stillness is the word. We believed and our beliefs survive all that will happen next. Someone said "You're obsolete." Hemp made into rope is not delicate or elegant ... It's meaningful ... because it leaves marks on our palms for pulling weight not just decorating wraparound porches. Not that there's anything wrong with also doing that. The people at the end of this type of rope described aren't dreamers ... they're the ones who have had many losses and still returned the following day to move their feet ... and put open hands to good use. Revolution is the refusal to agree that this is the final circumstances ... and has outlasted every empire that bet against it.
Reach: The complications are divided and not equal.
B W: That's an inside out fracture. Suffering has a hierarchy that follows the same lines it always followed. One neighborhood loses power for a week and it's a crisis. Another neighborhood hasn't had clean pipes in a decade and it's a statistic with a filing number. The complications land where gravity was pulling. Divided means someone did the dividing. Not equal means someone is judging and measuring what belongs to who and why. Not accidental ... like weather. More like architecture. The unequal part isn't the surprise ... the surprise is how long the equal portion was promised with a straight face.
Reach: So what are we saying?
B W: Our humming hands and arms are still here. After the blackout speech ... sparks burns ... rope waving up and down ... fleeing territories ... and filing for identification plastic. The new pope's fingertips fumbling an Aboriginal braid. A child pulling a translator's ear open. An olive altar with nothing on it saying the diverse body of Prophet and Spirit texts was our first language ... we're still here after decades of everything that has happened ...
