(via christianbowe)
Tom Melville reflects on the Cantonsville Nine forty-five years later: “Sometimes people think we’re better than we are, but lots of times when they get closer and scratch the surface, they find out we’re not so great. We were nine simple people who performed an act their consciences told them to perform. That’s all. We did what we did, and I’m satisfied with that. I don’t want any kind of monument.”
“One day, you will understand that there exist men and women such as us, without a face and without a name, who have abandoned everything, even their own lives, so that other children can get up everyday without having to remain silent and hiding their faces to confront the world. When that day comes, we, those with no face and no name, will finally be able to rest under the earth. Dead, of course, but happy…”
We would like to show but not be obvious
except to the oblivious
We want to show ordinary life
We are dying to show it
Try this one on your tongue: “the poetry of the enemy”
If you read it will you succumb
Will the enemy’s wren fly through your window
and circle your room
Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house
he has had to rebuild in words
Would you weaken your will to hear
riffs of the instruments he loves
rustling of rivers remembered
where faucets are dry
“The enemy’s water” is there a phrase
for that in your language?
Don’t think you’re the only bastard who ever suffered — just write as if you were.
Do you lose yourself
in the cave of endless breath,
the moment you don’t want to know yourself,
soaring or frightened—
Says Arjuna on the battlefield, throwing down his bow,
“I refuse to fight my cousins and kin.”
Says dark-blue Krishna, “These are only tricks and metaphor,
selfishness and separation, your cheapness and rage.”
“Shoot!” Krishna yells,
to Arjuna, “You can destroy your own alienation if you do it!”
“The Austerity State’s claim is that it is bankrupt and therefore that the people are too expensive for their own maintenance, such that they must undergo both an expectation and resource shrinkage and a transformation of the fantasy of the state. But fantasy can’t be garbaged in the same way that governmental infrastructures have been: for the state’s legitimacy to continue appearing sovereign and performative, the state finds it still imperative for citizens and denizens not only to appear to consent to the law, the police, and the tax code, but also to harbor the sentimental collective memories of suffering and optimism that maintain the fantasy of the common that still floats the nation form’s promise, even as its material presence, sold off to the highest private bidders, disappoints, defunds, and deserts the mass of the people who rely on it.” -Lauren Berlant (Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness)
