Cloudy with a chance of trust

Here the sun's so scarce it seems sacred
Silver slides from the clouds like the crowd's initiation
The substance of congealed condensation and elation
The cold grey silence finally breaks in conversation

Recollection of these ruptures runs these streets like grace
Which means: renegade barricades and memories of your face
Which means: love, linked arms, not a coupled-off embrace
Which means: hip hop cypher-session picket lines in place
On point, at this port, this shore, and this trace
Of unexpected upheavals - wait! Don't wait

For the next sunbreak
we'll collectively create-

We're not sedate; we did it once,
so we can can  recongregate

Like: put your hands up if you can still relate
to the remnant of trust that survived all the mace
That shines through the spray
and the daily rat race

Is this what our elders used to call faith?

A high school prayer of refuge

Afternoon in the West,
A teenage Muslim sister walks the line
Of shadows on the feild

Modest, flowing black school dress
Red hijab under a red hoodie
Just flowing with no obsessed pockets
No black or red flag hanging from them

Just posted
Like a revolutionary flag
Contemplating the line between shadow
And slanted red autumn sun

Pacing like a pilgrim from the 40 yard line to the soccer goal and back
While cell phone ringtones
Pop off like gun shots
She cuts through their orbits in calm silence
Like a razor sharp call to prayer
Like a refugee from the education camps we call classrooms

She reminds me of the times I used to act so strange
Fleeing high school drama classes to just sit for hours as the
Leaves would fall, begging for the season to change
Seeing God in what's unplanned

She reminds me I haven't changed
I can still pause my stress and stop writting these lesson plans
I can still cradle my face in prayer
With two fingers pointed up, like Malcolm, toward heaven
Becuase she points her two feet forward, like Malcolm, toward heaven
Becuase we can all still interrupt the bells of history and make this an early release day
Walking forward, like Malcolm, toward revolution
Revolving like an unwound tradition
Cutting silence into this chaotic confusion

I wish instead of worksheets on allusions,
I could assign this young sister's splendid moment of silence:




"Students your homework is to walk the edge of the field like a pilgrimage.
If anyone asks why you don't answer just tell them your ringtone is now
the sound of grass waving at the line between sun and shadow
you can't hear their drama becuase it has blended into your scenery.

If the school district asks me what's the objective of this lesson
I'll tell them I want you to discover it for yourselves:
That sometimes forward is all you need
Sometimes motion becomes your creed."

a Sabbath thought

We've worked way too hard the past 10,000 years. It's time for a day of rest. A global sabbath, a jubilee, an exodus, a revolution. Then we can live on the fruits of our labor, and alienated work will become obsolete. As Ernst Bloch and St. Augustine put it, we can sing "Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus"- the 7th day will be us. That's when human history really will begin.

Heaven's prequel

Here is a new spoken word poem inspired by the same piece as the title of Black Orchid's recent zine "Between the zeal of the young and the patience of the old".

We won't be revolutionaries,
we'll be the revolution.

We are the fault lines
the divine sign
and when it comes time
to fire that nine
we'll be feelin' fine

'Cause we'll take your profits
break them
the things we need
we'll make them
we'll put you in the cemetery
if you try to take them.

Because change
is somewhere between destruction and creation.
It's the pent up creativity after centuries of alienation.
It's the bread riot 'cause we need to eat
It's the love dance we start in the street
'cause we can't wait to find a place to meet
and besides,
we just abolished the whole concept of temptation.

So why are you still here bragging about your nation?
Fuck your borders and your bombs and all of your plantations

We are the global upheaval
Nat Turner's sequel
Marx's equal
and heaven's prequel.

And yeah, we're stormin' it -
fuck what's realistic, we're steadily ignoring it
'cause what's on our plate
is way more drastic than 1968
and even back then our graffiti was exploring it
"Demand the Impossible"
not the same old boring shit

Because communism
is somewhere between "where the people are at"
and utopia
between the crowd's spontaneous upsurge
and heaven's doors opening
between democratic workers' councils
and the end of work as we've known it

We won't be communists
we will be communism
just like when we were workers
we breathed capitalism,
ate, drank, and pissed every one of its divisions
and each day reproduced that horrible condition

when shit pops off we'll be breathing liberation
drinking freedom
and eating emancipation
reproducing prophets
who speak in conversation
not so much laboring
as being our creation
not so much working for it
more like generation
of everything between us
that conceives revelation

Is discipline a good thing?

I'm part of a political group called the Black Orchid Collective, and recently we've been doing a study group on revolutionary theory and biographies. For the past few weeks we’ve been reading Black Radical, Nelson Peery’s memoirs from his years in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and similar organizations. Peery, a Black working class revolutionary who devoted his life to Black liberation and class struggle, writes a gripping account of the twenty year period between World War II and the Watts Rebellion. Showing the mistakes the Communist Party made, this book provides some crucial insights about what kind of revolutionary organization fosters healthy development of its members, and what kind of organization stifles its members. For more on the book, check out our blog post on it.

One of the most important questions that emerged from our discussion was the question: is discipline a good thing? Peery had been a veteran in World War II, and he carried the discipline he learned in the military into his life as a revolutionary after the war. Over at Black Orchid, we wrote:

We really admire the discipline that [Peery] espoused while recognizing that there were probably a number of negative aspects to it. This is very much related to our ongoing questions of what type of person is required to be cadre in a revolutionary organization. The Bolsheviks were soldiers. Is it too much to ask people to be soldiers right now? Is it unsustainable? Is it unreflective of our times? Does a revolutionary organization have to conform to the times in which it finds itself, and develop member expectations accordingly?

Our current society isn’t producing people with high levels of discipline and commitment to revolution. But this could change fast if things heat up. Back in Peery’s day, it was very uneven: the experience of WWII vets produced a lot of highly disciplined and motivated Black militants. The white working class, on the other hand, was experiencing upward mobility. Society produced very few disciplined white militants. That’s not the case for white working class now. That might mean more of a chance for highly disciplined multiracial organizing.

We also want to know how can we talk about discipline that’s not authoritarian? It might be useful to reclaim discipline with a Marxist-Humanist character, embracing creativity, love, and joy. You have a purpose because it makes you feel good, and because the struggle deepens your connection to humanity.

Katie and Scott from the Workers Self Education Project shared their thoughts on this topic in the comments section over at Black Orchid. I'm reposting their comments here because I think they shed light on how we can develop a revolutionary spirituality today. Katie wrote:

Discipline comes from learning that one’s actions have consequences. (The word “discipline” is from the Latin for “teaching” – the consequences are what do the teaching!) This can take the form of reward and punishment, so that becoming disciplined is akin to being trained like a dog. But it may also be that one’s actions have consequences for something other than oneself that one begins to care about – for another person, for learning an art or skill, for some common endeavor, or for a cause. When one realizes this, really feels it or sees it in practice, then the process of becoming disciplined isn’t just imposed from the outside. Rather, it is internally motivated by a larger aim – learning the skill, or not letting others down, or whatever. This is clearly a better kind of discipline!

It sounds like Nelson Peery’s experiences in the war instilled in him both kinds of discipline. On the one hand, he was at the bottom of an authoritarian power structure, expected to follow orders without asking questions. On the other hand, he and his fellow soldiers depended on each other for survival, and they also felt they were fighting for higher ideals such as democracy.

As you say, “our current society isn’t producing people with high levels of discipline and commitment” – not just to revolution, but to anything. Capitalism has made it extremely easy to live a life in which one’s actions don’t really have consequences. As a worker, you are replaceable. Relationships are transient – you can always move on to the next person. Immigrants with families still have discipline; so do the few workers who really want to claw their way to the top. The rest of us, lacking traditional responsibilities and having nothing particularly enticing to work toward, feel that we could pretty much disappear off the face of the earth with little effect. Why bother to cultivate discipline? Discipline toward what end? Of course, a life without consequences is also a life without meaning – and this is why, as you suggest, the end of upward mobility means “more of a chance for highly disciplined multiracial organizing” today. The problem is how to create an environment in which workers can begin to realize that maybe their actions can have meaningful consequences.

This is where I think community comes in, as they key to creating a culture of discipline that is not authoritarian. Here I am conceiving ‘community’ not as a ‘feeling’ but as a co-ordinated set of communistic projects that make workers’ lives better: living together, teaching and learning arts and skills, doing childcare, food preparation, etc. at a community-wide scale. In such projects, people’s actions really do have meaningful consequences – they have to work together, and they have to be reliable and committed, in order to succeed. And the results, the common goods and the feelings of solidarity that flow from these activities, are palpable. In this environment, social expectations will encourage discipline, but more importantly there will be things worth cultivating discipline for. This, I think, is how we can “reclaim discipline…embracing creativity, love, and joy”.

The life-affirming discipline learned in community can then carry over to class struggle – and here it will be an antidote to the fanaticism, the self-imposed authoritarian discipline, the willingness to sacrifice oneself and others to a merely abstract goal, that can come from conceiving all of one’s actions as directed toward ‘the revolution’. This isn’t to say that sacrifices won’t be necessary, just that they should be motivated by love (and guided by reason) rather than by the desperation that comes from having nothing worth living for. We need to have experience, real knowledge of the better world we are fighting for – because we’re not just going to win it, we have to build it.

Scott followed:

I’d like to submit a few words from radical psychoanalyst and humanist Erich Fromm. In the Art of Loving (1956) he writes:

“One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, hew wants to be lazy, to slouch, or to use a nicer word, to ‘relax.’ This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of than enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.”

The routinization of life under advanced capitalism, the spending of our time for a purpose alien to us as human beings and about which we have no say, produces an aversion to discipline and a lack of skill in practicing it. We are thus robbed of the opportunity for self-directed activity and self-mastery, which only come as a result of rational, non-exploitative discipline.

Later, in the same vein he writes:

“How does one practice discipline? Our grandfathers would have been much better equipped to answer this question. Their recommendation was to get up early in the morning, not to indulge in unnecessary luxuries, to work hard. This type of discipline had obvious shortcomings. It was rigid and authoritarian, was centered around the virtues of frugality and saving, and in many ways was hostile to life. But in reaction to this kind of discipline there has been an increasing tendency to be suspicious of any discipline, and to make undisciplined, lazy indulgence in the rest of one’s life the counterpart and balance for the routinized way of life imposed on us during the eight hours of work. To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies [and today one might add, video games], at least not beyond a certain minimum; not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of our Western concept of discipline that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful and only if it is painful can it be “good.” The East has recognized long ago that that which is good for man—for his body and for his soul—must also be agreeable, even though at the beginning some resistances must be overcome.”

Here is my response, which connects their comments to the type of spirituality I'm attempting to express through my writings on this blog:

Thanks Katie and Scott, your comments are really helpful, and I agree with what you’re arguing. You make Marx’s ideas in the 1844 Manuscripts (Alienated labor) concrete, accessible, and up to date. You also pull the ground out from under the kind of conservative critiques of modernity that I grew up around as a Catholic. Catholic critics are correct when they argue that modern life provides no positive vision of discipline and hence dissipates our energies and saps our creativity. However, they have no solution except for patriarchal, authoritarian, and repressive forms of spirituality and religion that bring us backwards instead of forwards. Your take on Fromm provides the basis for a different type of spirituality, one that unites the struggle for personal wholeness and positive self-discipline with the struggle against alienated capitalist labor. Instead of saying we should work hard and offer it up as a sacrifice, Fromm’s ideas suggest we should abolish alienated work, which then will allow us to abolish undisciplined, dissipated “play” so we can build a new type of human self-activity. This self activity would unite play and work into a creative whole, expressing our social humanity.

Sensuous infinity

God is the relationships of sensuous existence

the ensemble and symphony of life generating life

in stillness you can hear the chorus of her mattering

she's sizzling through quantum ripples

evolutionary pathways

revolutionary events

explosions of neural complexity

lighting webs in the darkness

infinity lit outward on the inside of our eyelids

But usually we can't see it. 'Cause we chopped God into pieces and made gods out of her.

Prophets could see it, sometimes. So they picked up our hammers

And sickles to smash the gods we had made.

but instead of healing Her scars

they just ground the gods into a fine dust

filling the lofty abstractions of vaulted cathedral ceilings and factory smokestacks

While she kept bleeding below

We can't see her in us

'cause we chopped God into fine pieces and made commodities out of her.

they pulled their separate ways across the globe

drawing and quartering her bodies

and taking ours with them.

We bow down in confusion and obey the works of our own hands.

But God is resurrected in creative reproduction

are we in labor with her, or is she in labor with us?

we don't know, all we know is it matters

that she be the life generating life

that we become

more than workers

our labor mediating the metabolism

between humanity and nature

she breathes in our labor

it is no longer labor

it's creation

Grace, Works, and Fire

The place where grace abounds is the space between us

But that space is filled with the fetid damp exhaustion

Of the city and its traces

That space is rotting

Out beyond the crack in the pavement by the empty basketball courts

Under the shattered cathedral window

Where the rain bores down toward purgatory

This place is where all of our relationships come for healing, prayer and therapy

It has become a swamp

The very space between our faces

Has begun to grow mold

So intricate in its strangulating patterns

That we can't figure out where it started

Or where it ends

So we just call it eternity

Around this place lie the records of our histories

Half-cleaned recycleables

Precepts of the law

Open letters

Activist flyers

Court injunctions

Manifestos

Child support payments

Psychologist appointment insurance company reimbursement receipts

IOUs

Good intentions

Appeals for Safe Spaces

Threats

Anarchist skill shares and

Leninist Party edicts

Betrayals

Lesson plans

Church missilettes

Unfinished parts of missiles

The Constitution

Parking tickets

Union resolutions

and

broken promises

They all pile up across the floor as we try harder and harder to work out our differences.

They all mix together and grow mold, as History and Reason and Identity endlessly patter on

Like the rain in a Detriot parking lot on a Tues afternoon.

St. Paul sits there as the rain soaks through the slashed cathedral window, as the odor of the world creeps like incense

As the priest lifts up the stinking chalice

Full of our rotted good intentions

And tries to get drunk off of it

To numb the pain of

The cancer that's eating his

Aged liver

Reformers burst in, like foremen bossing around the janitors to sweep the mess into piles.

They arrange and reaarange the piles in mandalas of precepts and hymns

St. Paul just watches, and lights a cigarette. He nervously paces around thinking about the 7 churches, their faction fights, their petty personal beefs, and the content of his next letter

The Reformers shout at the janitors to spray some bleach on the dirty chalices. All that does is add a caustic edge to the stench, and the mold spreads. The old priest just sits there complaining about what the world has come to.

St. Paul asks one of the janitors what she would do if this were her house.

They talk for a while in the dark corner, out of earshot of the priest and the Reformers and foreman.

Then they walk over to the pile of moldy debris

Drop his cigarette on top of it

And the thing catches fire

As the fire burns, we can finally see each other clearly

The space between our faces is filled with a crisp, clean light

And when we look around we can see that there were thousands of people

waiting at the door holding unlit torches

They come in to the bonfire and start to light them, from the embers of the altar

And slowly, with noone really signaling to start,

We begin to march out the door...