“I can’t write”, Toni Morrison says, recounting an exchange with a friend once over the phone. Some form of political violence had just happened. “This is the time when artists go to work,” her friend told her. “Not when everything is alright not when it looks sunny. It’s when it’s hard.”
Early in the pandemic, I listened to a conversation between Carrie Mae Weems, and Aja Monet where Weems spoke of the changing same.
“We are on a spiral,” she said. “A continuum. You are always coming back to the place that you were. Hopefully, when you return, you are slightly at a different elevation every time you go around the bend, sometimes collapsing; that is the changing same. Coming back to the same place but at slightly higher ground allows you to develop a critical lens to see the patterns and allows us to grow.”
Life is this—witnessing oneself and also the world. To be a witness bears a responsibility to tell the truth.
Weems adds,
“Get out of the way of the work so that the work can do its job. It’s one of the hardest things to learn and one of the hardest things to do. Often we overthink we over push we overanalyze. We doubt ourselves we lose our faith we lose our confidence we get off center. We’re trying to wrestle with ourselves. You have a bad night’s sleep and it’s because you’re wrestling with yourself. You’re not giving space and room to ideas to be what they are and to do what they can do and to be relaxed enough to know that if I stop fighting and struggling that’ll allow the ideas to emerge in a way that is really quite extraordinary.”
I wonder if we are learning as we go ‘round and ‘round the bend. I wonder if I am. We tell our story, people claim to understand, and yet progress is slow. Still, things are complex as genocides are committed, wars are waged, and death tolls rise.
There are microplastics in the water so tiny they can’t be filtered out. Twenty years ago, I wondered why we were making new plastic instead of recycling what was already here, when we know the cost, which is corruption, which causes climate change, which causes unprecedented natural disasters, which leads to unnecessary death and displacement, which leads to carceral penalties for being poor, and on the margins. Count the cost. My mother always tells me that.