Incoherence

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” (Toni Morrison)

It has been a while since I have written here. I have many drafts of blogs left unfinished in the past two years that I will hopefully get to at some point. I think the issue is that I have always felt that what I write here needs to be perfect, but I am learning that what I write here needs to be me. That whatever I want to say at any point is enough. This space was always supposed to be for me to express things I sometimes never get to, especially when my life is busy like mine.

This past month, it's felt like my whole world has been torn apart both at a personal level and in general when I look at the world around me. I have always identified as a poet, and in many ways, it's poetry that has always managed to help me and support me to get out of dark places. Sometimes, that poetry is mine; sometimes that poetry belongs to other people who have found words to articulate feelings, thoughts and sounds that are sometimes incoherent. Incoherent is what I have felt like this past month. My feelings and thoughts have been dark but incoherent. What do you write when it feels like the very foundations of the world are breaking, and as they break, they are breaking with you? What do you do when all the worst-case scenarios that you have built in your head come to pass? I have no answers, and I am still seeking them.

When I thought about incoherence and being incoherent about what I felt, it felt like a loss of language. This reminded me of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize literature that explores the use of language, and I realized that incoherence is not a loss of language. Incoherence is more about my audience understanding me than my loss of language. "This quote from the speech helped me reflect "Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation." I was reminded again that what was scary about the incoherence was the fact that I did not have language to give names to what I was feeling and experiencing. However, how do you name the evil currently happening in the world? How do you name the evil your wildest imagination could not have conceived? How do you give names when what you name is twisted by the media and framed as lies? Where do we find the language for the death, for the grief, for the neglect and for the denial that we are seeing? I am reminded that regardless, we still have our words, we still have language, but what happens when it's incoherent? What happens when that incoherence makes you feel helpless and inadequate? I still have no answers, but I know that we were not built to experience whatever trauma we are going through at the moment. The same speech reminds me that language was never supposed to be perfect in expressing what is going on right now. Its power was in its ability to continue aspiring to do that which it can't.

We are watching in real-time as people decide that 75 years of history. We are watching in real-time as people erase the humanity of a whole nation while there is open denial about it. I have always asked what I would do if I lived in Nazi Germany, and many people have said that, whatever you would do, you are doing it now. I hope that my incoherence does not limit me. I hope my struggle to find language, does not make me docile and that even when I stutter because I speak the language of love and justice, I do not allow that language to die.

Present

The call to be present

Present and be a witness

Present and sit between comfort and chaos

Comfort for us to dream

Chaos for us to be reminded why we dream

The call to be present

Present and be a witness

Present to look unprecedented evil in the eye

Present to sit between hope and helplessness

Hope for fuel to create the future

Helplessness to remind us humility and the purpose of community

The call to be present

The call to trust that being is resistance

The call to know that survival can be resistance

The call to remember that we are not the first to survive

The call to remember the seed never dies