Utter (dis)belief
In The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, describing some of the faggots, Larry Mitchell writes, “They had all heard the harsh voices and none of them had believed them.”1 This quote has stayed close to me since I read the book last summer. I have written with it, quoted it. I love it.
As I compose these notes each week, haphazardly, belatedly, doubtfully, I notice how part of me feels like I ought to acknowledge all the cruelty that has transpired since I wrote you last; I don’t quite know where the wish to seem unflinching and awake ends and the wish to be so begins.
Then there’s the part of me that remembers Ruth Wilson Gilmore writing:
By the end of the day, we have specified many times the conflictual and convivial co-constitutive interdependencies of race and space and culture—forever commingled by terror and love. The wide and unsteady temporalities through which, for example, making music or other art—sonic or otherwise—demand so much noticing, such attention, that resists reciting catastrophe or epigram as though some facts or phrases were the way out.2
Here still, wedged between terror and love, remembering that harshness is born of terror (*sigh*).
The people who don’t believe the harsh voices are the ones so often singing, painting, gathering, assembling. The people who don’t believe the harsh voices are not fooled (though they are called fools), they do not aspire to any of what the Harsh Voices boast of. They hear the HVs and don’t even react; they have other things to do, like water the plants or wash the clothes or weave the paper or forgive. They have to go take care of their entire lives. I’ve got to remind myself that we’re surrounded by them, that they’re the only reason I’ve made it through.
for those proximate to NYC the next BREATH DOOR SHOW: Comedy for the Solidarity Economy is on November 7th here’s the info & Here’s the gist:
changing (changed) the name of this little show....Transgender Style.....last fall equinox (prayers for balance amen) I hatched this idea to collide two of my earthly obsessions -- humor and the solidarity economy -- and it’s been a real gift and adventure......many brilliant comedians and organizations and people have conspired to meld the haha! with the aha! as it were......as you may know Love is asking us to change pretty much everything in order for humans to still live on earth, and it will take a long time (generations...etc) but I wonder if we can’t do it joyfully, mirthfully, mischievously, curiously, and with so much breath that we meet each other energized, restored, renewed, nearly unrecognizable.......
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, p. 96, Larry Mitchell, illustrated by Ned Asta
https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/a-possible-geography-of-light-at-dusk