April 4, 2011

PREOCCUPATION

 

1.  position your body in minor places unwelcome to your body.  you may start with places rented or leased to you, or places in which you have a kind of tentative and half-access or right.  10 minutes under your own bed in your rental home or apartment.  then, also, fifty minutes sitting quietly on the strip at the end of the yard, the easement owned by the city and on which the city won’t let you plant rosemary or carrots.  if you have a job, stand in your workplace’s supply closet for seven minutes longer than necessary for whatever task, in the supply closet,  might be done. have a picnic of apples and beer on an island in a parking lot.  sit on the bench outside of olive garden for a morning, reading a romance novel in a navy blue windbreaker.  if you can go to the doctor, do not leave the exam table until three minutes after you have been dismissed.

2. dance music is closer to a true politics. secret ballots and lots of talking and drone attacks are not a true politics, not like dance music. those things are a pre- or post-politics.  the body under dance music is the memory of the body under true politics, is the re-animated and re-vitalized polis. under dance music there is only with the greatest resistance any kind of not moving or not body or almost never a paucity of courage.  and how rare is the lonely dance music?  also how rare the dance music individualist who can remain, over time, against both the crowd and animating beat?  under dance music he forgets, also, remembers, and finally, despite these weights of the present, moves.

3.  "sovereignty is the enemy of freedom."

4. to begin the practice of solidarity, approach, first, the plants, and then the animals, and then the children also the teenagers, and then the elderly, and then the downtrodden who hold signs near the streets despite the heat cold or wind, and then the women (both beautiful and unbeautiful), and the men (both besuited and lacking suits), commenting first upon some shared environmental experience, like rain or the sirens, and remarking upon, second, some  aspect of the other’s undeniable beauty like the softness of their hair or the yellowness of their blossoms or the practical nature of their glittering shoes, and third, after some practice, mention some matter only oblique and suggestive of  justice, or of shared suffering like disease or mortality, or of the world.