RESISTANCE - ‘WE CAN BE PART OF SOMETHING’

On Saturday 18th September the world stopped with its interminable gyrations and convulsions, as we held a promotional event for “0w1:believe”.

 I’m really grateful to Colse for Producing the show and was especially touched to hear Chris talk about the humble beginnings of the Upptäcka community and his experience of homelessness, in the USA.

Me (left) with publisher and poet, Chris Lorensson, of Upptacka Press.

 That story touched my heart and I’m left thinking that if that was the origins of Upptäcka, then we have travelled a great distance, but also it gives me hope that the journey is not over; we have a great deal further to explore.

 The richness of my life is to be found in family and friends from around the world; in terms both of relationships and also in imagination and what it can build and plant. Chris is responsible, through his generosity, for giving me a platform.

 “0w1:believe” has given me the opportunity to explore thoughts and commitments that were perhaps laid latent within me for decades. Perhaps Chris has released the Kraken!

 Strix’s passion is for writing and exploring his place in a world, that seems to have excluded him and silenced his potential. He speaks of his need for intimacy and believes that there is a forlorn hope of finding love. His ultimate fear though, is that as a writer he will remain anonymous.

 But this is where his tenacity, his resilience and fearlessness shines through. He knows from his father’s example, that when anonymity is replaced by notoriety, it may cost him his life.

 Jack’s political dissidence has helped me to begin honing the hidden anarchist within me; in the sense of not being under any authority. And also, his poetry has led me to writing poetry, which before Jack, I would never have thought about. Albeit through the filter, or rather through the animating spirit of his perspective, and his acerbic point-of-view.

Jack could see what was coming, always in the true guise of a Seer. He knew that more methods of control and constraint was coming from a State that was moving from Democracy to Corpocracy.

This has also been the case with Shula, who we haven’t met yet in the 0w1 Series, but whose tender and mystic heart challenges me to write with less anger and more insight, less angst and more compassion.

The promotional event explored this a little and also beyond these characters I’ve been very much gripped by James Baldwin’s wisdom in the quote I shared. Baldwin was an African-American poet and writer. Perhaps that’s why his thoughts resonate with me so much. Soul to soul, heart to heart.

“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to, any system whatsoever.” From, ‘The Artists Struggle for Integrity’ (1963)

Artists who are ideological based or institutionally grounded, lack integrity. We know that there is an agenda, a weapon that they are wielding; a word-domination system. They require our subjugation, or acquiescence to slavery, or they will snatch our freedom from us, by their work acting like a social anaesthetic.

 Ideology, after all, is the opiate of the people.

 And so, I sit and ponder, at the talent that gave birth to this event and made it all possible and the unfinished business we have to support one another, to take us beyond anonymity and towards cultural significance and yes, even notoriety.

 As Transition sang on Saturday night:

“Don’t lose your grip on things that really matter most. I’m listening for the whispers from the start of the morning show.

We can be part of something and I know that that’s for sure...”

‘All that I’ from the album ‘Three Bridges’.

Geoff Hall