It’s true. 2020 is a year most of us will be glad to bid farewell to. For frontline workers, those in healthcare and essential services like grocery store workers, delivery, and transportation, the year has been the most difficult and terrifying. Government and corporate services have been scant and fall far short of the adequate protections working people need, especially in the midst of a global pandemic. But artists, poets, musicians, writers and independent journalists have also found this year especially challenging because we are all too often forgotten or marginalized within the ranks of society’s labour force. The contributions and services we provide for mental, emotional and spiritual health, as well as toward continued independent, critical thought and analysis of our political and social landscape, are generally looked at with an indifferent eye under the paradigm of late capitalism. And many resources have been either reallocated elsewhere or simply do not exist.
Therefore, it is with great humility that I ask for donations this year. I understand most of us are struggling; and there is absolutely no obligation or guilt implied with this request. As with previous fundraisers for this site, this one does not place any requirements upon the reader. Whether one is able to donate or not, all articles and access will remain free, and no government or corporate entity will have sway over the content or what is written. Also, my editorial support from the exemplary Elena Baudelaire and technical assistance from Patrick Hanaway will continue.
We are all looking forward to 2021 as being a fresh start. We look forward to an end to the pandemic, but also for a beginning of meaningful dissent and liberation from our existentially devastating status quo, including militarism and endless wars, economic disenfranchisement, political and corporate tyranny, social oppression, and the ecocide of our precious biosphere. Personally, I look forward to working with other writers and activists, continued writing and critical analysis for this site, more guest writers, poets, thinkers, philosophers, bards and other artists, as well as a few other exciting and fascinating prospects, including a fiction I am currently working on.
I wish you all a truly magnificent Solstice and New Year. And thanks in advance for your support, whether it be in sharing my pieces, the contribution of ideas or informed criticism, monetary assistance, or any of the above.
My heart is sore today. The pain is raw and it feels as if a giant chasm of emptiness stretches out in front of me. The loss of my gentle companion, a feline that provided me immeasurable comfort and joy for years and in some of my darkest hours, has struck me deeper than I imagined. There are layers to this pain, indeed. But our modern life often robs us of the agency to express our pain or sorrow out of fear of judgement or ridicule, especially when it is related to the loss of a non-human being. It is all too often trivialized. And this trivialization has become normalized.
But of course, I am reminded that this is the same societal paradigm that has trivialized the living biosphere itself. It is a pathology which has allowed for its wholesale destruction for the accumulation of coin and the lure of convenience for the few. If the cries of the billions of species it crushes under its busy, productive feet were made audible, the entire human species would be permanently deafened from the colossal lament.
Whenever I am in pain, I retreat to the world of imagination, and music, and art. Today I came across this self portrait of Frida Kahlo done in 1940. I have a small replica I bought as a souvenir in Mexico City years ago. As is the case with most of Kahlo’s paintings, this one is drenched in symbolism.
The hummingbird, usually a symbol of life and vitality, is dead and hanging from a necklace of thorns. Thorns which pierce Frida’s delicate skin. Perhaps it is reminiscent of Christ’s crown of thorns and the pain he suffered carrying the weight of the world’s sorrows. Or perhaps it is Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, and perhaps it is its weight that is causing her injury. And the butterflies and dragonflies on her head may be symbols of resurrection or renewal. But the neckless is being held by a black monkey, perhaps a symbol of the indifferent torment she endured throughout her life. And a black cat, one very much the appearance of the dear loved one I just lost, stands just to the back of her. Although she is undoubtedly in pain from the thorns, Frida stands calmly, stoically, as if daring the world to hurt her more.
As I pondered the meaning of this portrait I thought about her life, one fraught with disappointment, rejection, grief and extreme physical pain from a horrendous streetcar accident when she was only 18 years old. Along with a tumultuous relationship with artist Diego Rivera, she had to endure at least 35 agonizing surgeries on her spine and body throughout her entire life. She was often bedridden for months at a time. And yet there she is, staring it all down. Through the pain into quiet dignity. Frida actually had a monkey and a black cat, among other animals, birds and plants. I marveled at the many photographs of her holding them and caring for them when I visited her home, Casa Azul, in Mexico City.
Frida lived her life as an open wound, open for the world to see. She displayed her pain as one would display an accessory to wear out to the market or to a concert. It was beautiful because it was true. And this gave me a peculiar sort of strength. We cannot traverse this terrestrial plane without facing pain, and loss, and sorrow. Again and again and again. Bursting through the walls of our heart. These are the very signatures of life and of love. And in a time of unprecedented ecocide and endless assaults on our biosphere by a society unable to face or grapple with its demons and shadows, continuously numbed by distraction, and spectacle, and avarice, and substances, and cruelty, and materialism, unable to feel its pain, we are called to do just that. Face it. And express our pain, and loss, and sorrow. Publicly. Daring the world to hurt us again. Because, without a doubt, it will. It will break your heart. But remember this, it is only the broken heart that has the capacity to expand.
Today,I am deeply honoured to feature a poem by one of the most prolific, talented and graciously human thinkers of our time: poet, singer/songwriter, playwright and political journalist, editor, and activist, Sandy Leonvest.
Damn the world
and all its pain.
I am feeling light
at the moment,
so just let me be.
Lighter
than the child
with a gift for song,
who spent
long summer nights
spinning threads of sorrow
into grace notes,
and weaving
bright white lies
into snowflakes,
while dancing
for her life;
Lighter
than the moth
who once imagined
herself
a butterfly
in the fleeting reflection
of a mother’s eyes …
Lighter than dust
drifting amid the soaring souls
of the newly departed,
where I once followed
my mother
into the womb
during a moment
of dreaming;
Lighter even
than a cloudless sky
just after a summer storm,
giving rise to a brand new star,
Or the first moon of December
waxing faithfully
over a war-weary world,
to share its luminous nature
with snow-capped mountains
and rivers of melting ice.
~Sandy LeonVest has, over the course of her writing career, been a poet, playwright, singer-songwriter, political journalist – radio and print – and the editor/publisher of SolarTimes (solartimes.org), a groundbreaking energy publication and newspaper distributed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from 2006 through 2013. Today she spends most of her time writing poetry and fiction, which she believes was “who she meant to be all along.” Sandy’s poems capture the spirit of the 21st century, with all of its circularities and contradictions – fathomless beauty and incomprehensible ugliness; infinite joy and endless grieving; and the inevitability of “the ever-spinning circle.” Sorrowful endings followed by new beginnings. Her poetic voice seems to channel the poets of long ago, at once emanating from another era, yet echoing universal and timeless themes.
Title photo is the Helix Nebula, a dying star that is 650 lightyears from our world. Source: NASA.
Today, I am happy to welcome back guest writer Phil Rockstroh with a powerful piece on love and its mysteries. I am also immensely pleased to feature a lovely piece of artwork by my sister, Cheryl Orphan. A painting entitled “Social Distancing.”
I remember a vast, comforting, sublime aloneness in childhood. A sense of being embraced by an infinite, knowing order — of being held in warmth, by a power, by a loving consciousness beyond words.
No one knows where one is going…We are pulled forth on currents of mystery…that are more like songs’ sound waves than following the itinerary of a travel plan.
In childhood, in dreams, I walked with God and elephants. The world was made of music, infinite song. It was the kind of love in which there was no blame, no burden. No apologies needed to be proffered because all things were present and aglow with light and smelling of earthen loam.
Love need not be conjured — it is built into the scenery, swells from the orchestra pit, flows from the stage lights of a theatre built and scripted by Love itself.
When you gaze upon lovers you are looking into the architecture of yourself. When you know this you will give love in abundance knowing its source is inexhaustible. Notice: Life seems more bearable now.
Thus you are granted an ardour to praise what is beautiful and love what is flawed. The world is the face of the beloved, born from an exquisite music.
The person who chooses to dance to this music does so in a room of Divinity. Your life has become a great song.
Biden won. Trump lost. I am pleased the orange proto-fascist lost. But before the champagne bottles start popping there are a few things we should remember.
Biden won. Trump lost. But it should have been a landslide. It wasn’t. In fact, the Democrats lost a lot of ground in other key races. A few QAnon folks are now going to Washington. And the Supreme Court has now decisively shifted even more toward the right. This has all kinds of implications, but the most obvious is that the American Empire is both deeply divided and shifting ever rightward. Fascism has always lain under the surface of American society, but the veil was completely ripped off over these past four years.
Biden won. Trump lost. But Trump will not go gracefully. He is already calling it fraud and challenging the results. And his sons and other unhinged sycophants are calling for a war. Literally, a war. Don’t forget the plot to kidnap a US governor. Don’t forget Amy Coney Barrett. Don’t forget Bush v. Gore. Don’t forget that Trump had the backing of many police departments, ICE, and countless white supremacist groups. Don’t forget that there was a surge in weapons sales in the run up to the election. Don’t forget that there a lot of people who feel very threatened right now. Threatened that their status in a society is at risk. Threatened that “communism” or “cultural Marxism,” as ridiculous as it sounds, will sweep through the country. In fact, the threat of violence and unrest has never been higher than it is now. I urge my American comrades to be vigilant and careful.
Biden won. Trump lost. But remember that Biden is not MLK. He isn’t Malcolm X. He isn’t Gandhi. He isn’t Mandela. He isn’t even a good person. He was just the only alternative offered up by the ruling class to oppose a proto-fascist who emerged from that same ruling class. The US remains a dictatorship of money. But it was Black, Brown and Native people who made this victory possible because they have the most at stake. If Biden and the Democrats toss them aside, which they will likely do, or if he maintains the status quo and continues neoliberal policies, which appears inevitable, another Trump will emerge. And the next one will be far more formidable, dangerous and terrifying. The question is, will white American liberals fall back asleep for the next four years, or will they come to realize that problems like racist police violence and economic inequity are systemic and structural? And that the Democratic Party has no plan to address any of this in any meaningful way?
Biden won. Trump lost. But do we really want to return to “normal” as I have seen so many white liberals say in recent days? What was normal? No healthcare for working people and the poor? Continuing police brutality? Growing income inequity? Continued subsidies for corporations? The fossil fuel industry? The arms industry? Record deportations of immigrants, as what occurred under Obama? Drone bombing wedding parties and ambulances in Afghanistan? More support for despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia? Or military juntas in Egypt or Honduras? Or apartheid in Israel/Palestine? The steady destruction of the environment thanks to unbridled industry? Does any person of conscience really want to return to “normal?”
Biden won. Trump lost. But the dissolution of the American Empire will happen regardless of this election because it is failing in all the ways empire’s fail. It may take decades (Rome did not fall in a day), but on its current trajectory, it is inevitable. And truthfully, that is the best prospect for humanity and a living biosphere.
It comes down to this: If we don’t understand Trump to be a symptom, we will be missing the lethal disease we are collectively afflicted with. If we don’t understand that the current political, social and economic order is pathological, we will merely perpetuate its cruelty by actively or tacitly giving it a veneer of credibility.
Since my recent piece I have been barraged with messages, tags, etc. Several have requested I weigh in on their personal pages with friends of theirs who may have objected to some of what I had to say or who are demanding I produce “solutions” to the problem of American Empire. I am sorry but I don’t have the time to get to all of these requests. But I appreciate people taking time to really think through the issues and what I had written. Thinking and discussing are good things.
As I stated in my piece, the only hope we have is for the dissolution of the American Empire if we want to have a livable future. This was mistaken by some to mean that there is a plan for this in the works or that ordinary people have control over this. The truth is that ordinary people do, in fact, have agency, but only when they organize en masse and in solidarity to fully disrupt the power arrangement. Outside of this, we are at the whims of the powerful and the caprice of societal trends and schisms.
Whatever the outcome of this election (and at this point it appears, predictably, that Biden will win and Trump will do everything within his power to sow chaos and discord), the American Empire will hobble on for several more years. If Biden wins, many white Liberals will likely go back to sleep, ignoring the cries of Black and Brown people besieged by a racist police state and the agony of millions of foreign victims of America’s brutal military/surveillance state. I have already seen many of them say they “look forward to getting back to normal.”
But what was normal? No healthcare for working people and the poor? Continuing police brutality? Growing income inequity? Continued subsidies for corporations? The fossil fuel industry? The arms industry? Record deportations of immigrants, as what occurred under Obama? Drone bombing wedding parties and ambulances in Afghanistan? More support for despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia? Or military juntas in Egypt or Honduras? Or apartheid in Israel/Palestine? The steady destruction of the environment thanks to unbridled industry? Of course, if Trump somehow manages to win the swift slide toward a more overt fascism will be inevitable. But does any person of conscience really want to return to “normal?”
To be sure, the American Empire has been in a state of decline for the last 20 years. So its eventual dissolution is inevitable. This may take decades (Rome didn’t fall in a day), but it will dissolve because it is failing in all the ways empires fail. Bloated, over extended and expensive military and the accompanying occupations and forays. Disintegrating social safety nets. Growing economic shocks, insecurity and disparity between rich and poor. Ecological devastation and depletion. General lack of confidence in a unifying imperial ethos among its subjects. It isn’t alone in this. China and Russia are facing similar prospects. But the American Empire remains the most powerful and wealthy hegemony on the planet.
So I think it is more constructive to realize that we have no power over this dissolution. What we do have power over is how we organize and react to it. On an individual basis this might mean some tough choices like relocating. On a broader basis, this might mean joining or building resilient communities in places as far as possible from the epicenter of the empire’s collapse, since that is where most of the chaos will be located. But my piece was not primarily intended for an American audience. It was written for the rest of us. Those of us living on the margins of empire, outside of its physical borders, yet are subject to its ruthless rule in various ways. Incidentally, this would include Native peoples who reside on bantustans within the empire itself.
I respectfully encourage my American readers to remember that their government, military and intelligence agencies have and continue to interfere in the political, economic and social affairs of virtually every other nation and region on the planet. Therefore, we have every right to voice our rage, and owe you no explanation or “solutions” to your problems. We care about the poorest and most vulnerable among you, but we simply want your empire to fall for the sake of humanity and the entire planet.
I care deeply for my friends and family in the US. I care especially for those who will face oppression, poverty and violence no matter who gets elected. But right now my concern is more for those living on the margins of American Empire. Because they are, and have always been, the main victims of its ruthless bellicosity, exploitation and belligerence.
Kenn Orphan November 2020
Title painting is The Course of Empire, Destruction, 1836, by Thomas Cole. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
As I write this I await, like everyone else on planet earth, the results of this spectacle called the US elections. I await the outcome of a sham that empires throughout history have foisted on their subjects. The illusion of choice. I also await the inevitable contention. I await the speculation that will likely stretch on for weeks or more. I await the unhinged machinations and chaos making from the sitting president, as well as his unbridled fascist putsch, an expected act born in desperation from a sociopathic narcissistic megalomaniac.
But let’s be frank, Donald Trump was never the real problem, he was and is the rancid product of a centuries long experiment in racist colonial settler imperialism, first born on the continent, then later exported to the entire world. It started when European settlers set foot on this occupied “New World” and declared it their own, Native peoples be damned.
Trump’s penchant for detached, sadistic cruelty is what has always lain under the surface of American “exceptionalism.” This is the same cruelty that spawned Indigenous genocide, the African slave trade, lynching, Jim Crow, and a nation that put its citizens in concentration camps, normalized the nuking of civilians (the only nation on earth to ever do so), carpet bombed South Asian villages and doused their children with napalm and Agent Orange. The same one that trained death squads in Central America and Indonesia. The same one that assassinated Lumumba and ousted democratically elected presidents like Allende and Mossadegh. The same one that allowed for the decimation of Iraq and an entire region based on lies, that tortured children and their parents in the dank cellars of Abu Ghraib, that drone bombed a grandmother picking okra in her field. The same one that turned Libya, once Africa’s wealthiest nation, into a center for the modern slave trade. The same one that has bestowed tanks to its police, trophies of its bloody forays in the global south, now destined to crush its own people. The same one that locked up an entire generation of Black and Brown kids for the possession of a plant or because they injected something into their impoverished arms to alleviate the agony of living in a hellscape of hopelessness.
The US just experienced its biggest voter turnout in 150 years, yet it did not produce the so-called “blue wave” so many liberals were hoping for. Trump, the festering pile of orange dung that has haunted the Oval Office for the last four years, should have been crushed in any election in a free and equal society. Yet, nearly half of those who voted chose that proto-fascist dung heap, the one who ripped children from the arms of their parents and put them in cages as they sobbed uncontrollably. The same one who has openly encouraged violence from his more extremist fanbase. The one who said neo-Nazis were “very fine people.” The one who commanded racist terrorists to “stand back and stand by.” The one who has mocked healthcare professionals and science while a fully preventable pandemic surges across the country. The “grab em by the pussy” chauvinist who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 26 women. The one so many evangelicals sickeningly fawn over as if he were the American version of the biblical King David. The one who has consistently demonized the press as well as anti-racist and anti-fascist activists.
Why? How can this be possible? Because white America, liberal and conservative alike, has for too long been drunk on its own hubris, willfully blind to the misery it has inflicted through apathy or deliberate policy. It has been continually hand fed the lie of its supposed greatness from CIA/Hollywood propagandists for decades. It has continually been hand fed the lie of the “free market,” ridiculing socialists and anarchists, while millions languish in shanty towns outside of cities like Los Angeles or in capitalism’s industrial cancer alleys. And its dissidents, of whom there have been many, have been repeatedly chided, silenced or ruthlessly punished for daring to expose the lies for what they are. One sits in a gulag in Britain awaiting his fate at this very moment. America is, in fact, an empire in a state of steep decline on a planet ever besieged by war mongering, ecocidal psychopaths, far more interested in accumulating coin than even the lives of their own children and grandchildren.
Joe Biden, a lingering ghoul of America’s past racist and genocidal forays, was peddled to the country as the only viable alternative to a proto-fascist. A man whose groping hands have unwelcomingly caressed more buttocks than can be counted. Who proudly cavorted with segregationists, authored a crime bill that sent impoverished Black and Brown kids packing to prison, championed a war based on lies that took hundreds of thousands of lives, if not more. Who continues to defend apartheid in the Middle-East and military juntas in Central America. Who still lauds fracking amidst a climate melt down. And who refuses to consider anything close to universal healthcare in the midst of a pandemic. This was the alternative. And yet so many liberals still incredulously wonder why he didn’t garner much enthusiasm.
Regardless of the outcome, it should be clear that the US is a failed state. While most of its people are decent and willing to engage with a world far bigger than its borders, a sizeable chunk of its constituency has demonstrated it is not. A sizeable chunk has embraced fascism, even if they are unable to define such a term. This is a fact that must be stated plain. And its belligerent government’s disregard for facts or even a modicum of decency, cooperation, compassion or conscience has been revealed to every inhabitant on the planet, and in very stark terms. It cannot, and should not, ever be trusted. In fact, its dissolution is the only hope we have for a livable future on earth.
Today, I am happy to welcome a guest writer to this site, Dan Hanrahan, who eloquently captures our current moment of collective angst, remorse and longing in the context of ghosts and their meaning and message.
Watching the final episode of “The Haunting of Bly Manor” tonight, I was reminded of those details we always hear about hauntings: Some traumatic event or unfulfilled vengeance or unrealized longing anchors a person to a place. Whether it is the residue of one’s spirit sunk into an area or the actual animated consciousness of a self, there is a presence which will not relinquish its claim to a place and which must assert itself. Ghosts emerge out of the unresolved. They haunt us to say: see me, remember me or give me what is my due. And something about their monomaniacal, unrelenting quest renders them grotesque over time – contorted in order to pursue one aim.
Before we switched to over Netflix to watch “Bly,” we had watched a few minutes of the presidential debate. The idea suddenly struck me: Is Donald Trump a ghost? Is he pure, animated id, now become hideous and mono-pitched as his quest for something… loved denied, perhaps, has overtaken him entirely?
But the sheer, careening force of his malevolence feels larger than that. Donald Trump is a phantasm who appears to lack a self. He seems archetypal, as a monster in a folktale. I had the sense tonight that none of what I am saying about this is metaphor. I had the sense that Donald is the hungry… the insatiable ghost of America’s longing and crimes and greed, now manifest to haunt us. To make us pay. And, as in what is perhaps the greatest American novel, “Beloved,” it is only through access to our ancestral memory of a time from before the horror story of our history began, and only through community will and rite that we will vanquish the dumb, plodding, suffocating ghost of him.
*** There is an exit to the nightmare of our history – to the slave ships bobbing on the eastern horizon, to the dread hooves and creaking wheels of the settlers’ wagons pushing west, to the villagers running from the flying armaments above them and the exploding landscapes around them in the Philippines, in Vietnam and Central America, in Iraq and Afghanistan, to boots kicking down doors – but it requires us to leave behind all of it, to stop our pursuit of the false gods and to listen to the spirits in the land around us and to our deeper selves that precede the nightmare. Trees, rivers, creeks, hills and mounds and mountains, the animal descendants of those animals we have punished, the human descendants of those sacrificed on the bloody fool’s errand of The American Dream – they all retain the memory of something previous to this ghost-driven present. It is to them that we must listen.
Dan Hanrahan is a musician, writer, translator and actor. His essays, poetry and translations have appeared in Counterpunch, El Beisman, The Mantle, OpEdNews, Brilliant Corners and the American Academy of Poets archive, among other places. Dan has written music for Chicago’s Colectivo El Pozo theater and recently had a feature role in the first film produced by the collective, Cuaco (2020, official release delayed due to the pandemic). In 2020, Dan released his third full-length album, Radical Songs for Rough Times, a collection of original protest songs in English, Spanish and Portuguese. www.danhanrahan.net
*Title image and all other images in this piece are by Dan Hanrahan.
Years ago, I had an opportunity to watch the dissection of a seabird. It was not an academic venture, but one of bearing witness to the devastation that industrial society has brought to countless species on our planet. The bird’s stomach contents revealed human detritus of all manner, plastic lighters, bottle caps, pens, even a spoon. This one creature represented hundreds of millions or more, and species of all kinds. All impacted by the byproducts of our modern consumer capitalist world. It was a surreal sight only later matched in intensity and horror when watching a video of the dissection of a deceased whale whose belly was bursting with tons of plastic bags and other hard synthetic polymers, or the sight of a deformed tortoise whose shell was strangulated throughout its life by a plastic beverage holder.
This month another set of photographs highlighted the global crime and catastophe of ecocide. It was by Sri Lankan photographer Tilaxan Tharmapalan, and it won the UK’s Royal Society of Biology photography competition. Tharmapalan captured images of a wild herd of elephants scavenging for food in a rancid landfill near a wildlife sanctuary. Many of the elephants have become ill or died as a result of feeding on plastic and other toxic waste. But it is the ubiquitous nature of plastic, the myth of recycling, and the normalization of its presence in our lives that I wanted to discuss in this essay.
Images like this make the greenwashing efforts by the plastic industry and Big Oil fall flat. In fact, they have been a lie from the start. It was the plastic industry that started the idea of “recycling.” But this was not intended to reduce the production of plastic. On the contrary, it was intended to give a veneer of “corporate responsibility,” while they ramped up plastic manufacturing. Over the decades recycling became the mantra of many “environmental” organizations. But the myth of recycling remains largely obscured. In every recycled plastic product there is an equal measure of new plastic, so there is no real reduction. It is the exact opposite.
Single use beverage containers have only increased, with only a fraction of the plastic packaging produced ever recycled. Most, over 90% in fact, wind up in landfills like the one in Sri Lanka, or on the side of roads where lazy and self-centered motorists dispatch them in haste from their car windows every single day, or in riverways that run to the ocean and wind up churning into a great toxic gyre in the centre. Today, there are more types of plastic than ever before. Most are unrecyclable, although they will be imprinted with a number on the bottom to add to the illusion of their future incarnation for use.
Plastic has become integrated into every aspect of modern life, from medicine to food to furniture to clothing to machinery. Bathed in it from the delivery room of a hospital till the morgue, there is virtually no place in modern life that it cannot be found. And with it has come an incredible curse. All around the planet plastic waste has become a problem of monumental proportions, and most especially in the global south. But westerners need to halt themselves from distancing or heaping condemnation on the global south for this problem. Sri Lanka, where the award winning photo was taken, like so many other countries under the heel of the IMF and World Bank, are not the ones profiting from the plastic industry. The profiteers are multibillionaire companies like Dow Chemical, Hanwool Corporation, BASF, Lyondellbasell, Ihne & Tesch GmbH, Exxonmobil, Matsui Technologies India Ltd., and SABIC. And billionaires like Stewart and Lynda Resnick of The Wonderful Company or William Young of Plastipak or Warren Buffett. And as the demand for plastic continues to surge, their net worth has only grown larger.
In addition to this, it is the west, or global north, that has been shipping the bulk of its unrecyclable or “undesirable” plastic refuse to the global south. So the trash in these landfills that are fouling estuaries, deltas and wildlife sanctuaries around the world are from those of us in so-called “developed countries.” Some of these nations have pushed back against these acts of environmental colonialism, but they are in an uphill battle with some of the most powerful and wealthy corporations ever known.
The elephants in that landfill in Sri Lanka are no different than the seabirds, or the whales, or the sea turtles we have watched succumb to humanity’s insoluble and indigestible jetsam and refuse. In fact, they are all harbingers. Portents of what lies ahead for all of us. Whether we like it or not, we are all denizens of a plastic coated world. One that has made enormous profit from the overproduction of plastic for a few and incurred incalculable expense for us all. Plastic can now be found in virtually every corner of the planet, from the Arctic to the Pyrenees to the Marianas Trench. It has even been found in the cells of organisms and in every human tissue. And all of this has come about thanks to the political and economic arrangement of late capitalism, an arrangement that does not possess the capacity for ethical and moral direction in regard to a living planet.
The thin and fragile ribbon we call the biosphere is the only place that we know life exists for sure, and in its great abundance. And it has been relentlessly assaulted through rapacious mining, deforestation and the extraction of fossil fuels by a ruling and wealthy global elite. The byproducts of the latter being climate change fueling CO2, oil spills that ravage coral reefs, and plastic pollution. As for the latter, we will never fully grasp the carnage wrought upon countless species by plastic refuse, on the lands and in the seas we deceptively call the “wild.” We can only fight to protect what remains, even if it has all been tainted by the mad dissemination of synthetic polymers.
The following is a collaboration of poetry and prose with Jennifer Robin and Phil Rockstroh. Introduction by Kenn Orphan.
And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea:
we are the ones we have been waiting for. ― June Jordan
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” — Robert Graves
“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.” ― Charles Bukowski
Kenn: Over the past few months we have witnessed climate catastrophe in the form of mega storms and ferocious fires, uprisings against racist police state violence, rising fascism, white supremacist militias, and a pandemic which has taken the lives of over a million people around the world. Now, that virus has poked its spiky, protein arms into the very centre of American imperial power.
It would be naïve to deny the deep psychic trauma that all of these events have inflicted on each and every one of us. Some have been galvanized to take to the streets as militarized police launch tear gas at mothers in Portland and students in Minsk. Others have become paralyzed by the weight of these wounds. A segment of the population has become entranced by the cult of Q, which reduces all of the human failings of our age to a fantastical and sinister cabal of supernatural beings.
It is perhaps the latter which has become the most emblematic of unhealed trauma. It provides a refuge, however irrational, for the wounded to hide in, away from the complexities of the world and its myriad and existential problems. But to make sense of our moment in history we must reconnect with a language that is far older than the parlance employed today. A language of the soul, of the psyche. One that is able to grapple with truths and trauma that we find impossible to face otherwise.
As ash from the West coast of North America drifted over my piece of the world here in Nova Scotia, and the sun became a dark orange and foreboding hue, my mind drifted along with it to places that once had form. Did this ash contain the remnants of an ancient tree? Or countless mammals who sought refuge from the flames deep in the forest? Or the bones and flesh of a fellow human being lost to the inferno? And with this came the trauma of knowing and not knowing.
We sit in the ashes of a world that is aflame, but we are not alone. With us sit the ghosts and the gods who implore us to do what conventionally is seen as a waste of time. To pause and reflect deeply on where we are as a species among billions of species, on a world in a deep state of trauma. The following is a reflection in prose and poetry by Jennifer Robin and Phil Rockstroh.
Jennifer: The first day of fire rise with anger; resignation the next. Take stock, no funds, dough-facedmoll, find a lens that keeps the blowflies elsewhere. Colonizers flaunt gas masks, King ArthurFlour, kiddie pools. A man hears a wild horse halt in fright and exhaustion and scream, tendonsseize and break, musk engulfed by flames. We’ve never met, virtual friend who fills my mindwith horse-fire.
What will the textbooks say? What are textbooks? A wall of ash is ten thousand tons of vinyl siding and particle board ambition; is rabbits, is moss. The Enchanted Forest’s heir pictured here, a smiling blond boy with his dog is lost, runs down paths made unfamiliar, undone.
A week before fire I watched a video of a man summon right-wing ghouls to poison Portland’s water source, coordinates of access roads not on maps, voice like a bowling pin, it teeters, hints of tributaries, haunts of thrush and owl, summoned, not yet done. A week before fire I stopped myself from sharing a video: Cops crush a medic’s head. A voice tucked behind my lung asked: Is this food I serve? What is fed?
When I was four I heard the fable of animals who were wise. They stored nuts for a winter long as childhood, while others frolicked by a stream. Winter fell like strychnine, dreamless sleep. The ones who lay in sun and danced under moon now ran in circles until their hooves and beaks could no longer scrape bark from trees, no longer dig for seeds, even wilted weeds, fur claimed in patches by ice.
Night is abolished. Night, like an escort, is hired. A party of three in hunting gear block a man delivering dinner for the color of his skin. Screens of powder-light show the West in flames; four thousand miles away friends on the Gulf face hurricanes, we once broke bread together, saliva, wishbone lullaby, heart emoji, look away, glad it isn’t me. My lover names those who fled on planes while we squat lower, breathe shallow, boil herbs that go the way of bees, our eyes stinging with future.
Phil: When the air is stippled with ashes, when the color of the sky has been usurped by thereflection of cataclysmic flames, and when the smoke of the burning world occludes city’smonuments to rich men’s vanity — will you then — only then — half-blinded by veils of smoke— be able to see clearly?
There must come an immolation of your view of the world held within. No — not by the fantasy of a flaming sword held by the hand of blazing blue Heaven — but by a baptism by inner flames that reduces to ashes clutched convictions.
Descend into your shadow that has been cast by the flames. To create a shadow one must possess a semblance of substance.
A Phoenix will build a nest for her fledglings within the shadow of your heart. She will sustain her young with the sustenance of your vehemence.
A UPS truck in the red glow of wildfire on the west coast, 2020. Stock footage.
Jennifer: Unwind: Smallpox blankets, the Paxton Boys and the Glanton Gang, scalps dried in sun,saddles grow heavy with bounty hunter’s gold, gravel in the streams, land claimed for cotton,burn them out, trail of tears. Lies called treaties to gain timber and salmon and ore in high yellow hills, across two billionacres, monopoly ghosts who play guns, play cannons, play fire.
Trappers trace: Charred villages, mountains of skulls, truce is empty.
Standing Rock, private security hired to hose lives singing, bleats silence. No one gets out of here alive, not North Dakota, not the Siletz with their heads sculpted young by boards, songs of Shiok the Transformer who took people to sky, and eagles could pass between the lower and higher realms, and what rubella didn’t claim, tuberculosis took, until memory was null.
By 1860, four and a half million slaves are in the United States and they know no hour without the threat of murder.
Phil: Yes, there is blood pooled in your streets.
I have stared into your face until I disappeared, inhabited the shadow of your self-justifications, and read with the fingertips of my heart the braille of your scars.
I drown everyday in the rising of your blood-tide, unloosed by your sacred guns and rage-protected pride. Your children, from birth, fed on lie-rancid milk, have grown rifles for hands.
I recall being devoured by Alabama moonlight and deluges of jasmine fragrance as the rising waves unearthed the imprecatory chants of Creeks, Choctaws and Seminoles from their black soil entombment. I was given no choice other than to be undone by the rebuke of slaves chained in the haunted night air.
This is the news of the day: The lilies I brought to you, drenching your house with their saturating fragrance, report, the History that made your Now is watered with blood. The scented air demands:
Go to the dead and let them do to you what they will.
Jennifer: Can you count the tents? All of the tents? Above them rooms that fail to blink out of existence,even when they hover, chalk white and smelling of old refrigerators, with the weight of vacancy.
A Black Lives Matter march moves down the street and a cat’s head in slumber rises, listens to the cadence of honking horns until the surge fades.
Cops riot, rain bullets and acid and fists, shatter spinal cords, turn mothers to orphans. The march is a river and bends and I think of the words of Lao Tzu: Nothing is softer than water, but when it attacks something hard or resistant, then nothing withstands it.
Silence returns. The cat’s head settles into fur, amoeba sleep.
11th Hour Instruction Manual: Consult Marvel oracles for pushbutton salvation. Sing the song of self while pawning a wedding ring for five pints of ice cream and a bottle of Hair Buster Draino.
Cut and paste: Wishing the fascist well whom you said should get the guillotine three days earlier. The mind-virus of progress at any cost: Profit at any cost is antimatter. Do not revive.
This burned forest floor will be marvelous for fracking! Who doesn’t need the daddy? Who turns off thought, legitimizes mind-crimes, whispers: Anger is good. Arise and smite.
Our heroes are young again and fifty feet long! Biden has a new chin, Superman cleft, aborted glyph of Saint Michael and Dick Tracy. Trump has a neural stimulator, a fine skein of silver concealed under his game show quiff. Rumors abound—he gobbles french fries and Adderall, a maskless vigil outside Walter Reed Hospital assembles to faith heal, officers deputized as feds so that every protestor hogtied is a felon; ICE helicopters fly 10 hours a day, plan on “immigrant roundups” before the election. Thor-worshippers, Oath Keepers, and “rational thinkers,” oh my!
Practice past; it repeats. Dive into the past; the past is finite, is done. The past is re-written, rummage its lacunae with your fingers while your eyes are too stunned to see. Feel old letters, wrinkled paper. Severed tongues reanimate. The past absolves you of future, fills you like a chalice with blood-curdle hymns: We are the elect, when men were men, and women were—
Trump: My mother prays for him.
Rouged cheeks are practice-fever. Move closer. Hear the clink of horse brass, smell the reek of rotting hay. Tulsa, 1921: Black Wall Street burns, bombed by air and ignited in alleys. Hamburg, 1941: A woman replaces the star on her Christmas tree with a photo of Adolph. The pushbutton ones swim in mythology until the trains come. Which was the string of strings that unraveled the silken purse called earth-hive?
Commune mind: Earnest, under thirty. Black lives hold their ground in the streets, getting published, on screens as living minds instead of dead bodies. Earnest, under thirty. Find each other, learn to use the crossbow and irrigate corn. Earnest, under thirty. Learn the uses of elderberries and sage. This is no longer practice fever.
Earnest, under thirty with no illusions about the dynamo spinning down, cities blinking out, programming growing erratic, the fires yet to come.
Moon, like a scoop of lemon sherbet, shines so bright.
Jennifer Robin is the author of Death Confetti (Feral House), Earthquakes in Candyland (Fungasm Press), and Even Snowflakes Heal and You Can Download Skin (Ladybox Books). She also posts on Medium.
Kenn Orphan is an artist, writer, nature lover, antiwar and anti-capitalist activist, sociologist, spiritualist and hospice social worker. He writes for this blog and numerous other sites, including Counterpunch, Hampton Institute and Dandelion Salad.
Kenn Maurice Orfanos (Orphan) 