RESISTANCE - SOLIDS AND FLUIDS
Solids and Fluids (with thanks to Audre Lorde – on the shoreline together)
This was to be a poem, but it ended as pollical prose. Maybe at some point, I will finish the ‘Standing on the Shoreline’ poem.
Standing on the Shoreline
Standing on the Shoreline
between solid and fluid worlds.
The solid world forms,
solid things; l
ike institutions of power, race, gender and status;
from whence we are supposed to gain our identities.
The Solids. For those who are empty within, have to look
to the externals of life, to make up for their loss.
The void within needs filling without.
(The irony of which, should not elude your heart).
The Fluids. The fluid world forms, sometimes deforms,
but then re-forms in vast ocean gyres.
Unseen by the State’s bestial ravenous eye.
The Fluids. For those fluid within, translate the invisible wind
of Spirit and resist the Solid’s way of non-being.
No race, no gender, no status lives within (or without) them.
They refuse pronoun servitude.
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The art of the Fluids denies the denizens of despotism and the rigidity of classifications of genre. We will allude to and not declare. We are evocative and not declarative.
Solids build structures; institutions, walls and barbed-wire fences. They feed the carrion birds with our carcasses.
Fluids build communities, source rivers of consciousness, flow around ‘solid’ structures and undermine their foundations.
(Structures breed strictures, wherein we cannot breathe).
Setting captives free is a slow work and it takes time because compassion is patient and kind.
Yes, compassion is a slow process that needs nurturing; helping people to see the alternatives they have, when for years they have seen none.
Poetic language is evocative and descriptive; it embodies the possibilities. It is never prescriptive, unless it is State sanctioned, or System-blessed and forces people into compliance or a revision of their own solid realities.
What we Fluids do, is erode the bastions of race, gender and status.
There is no coercion here, just the simple laws of fluids wearing down solid things. We shun the weapons of propaganda and manifestos, which are declarations of word-domination. You cannot claim to be working for freedom, when you use such instruments of conquest.
Freedom is a process, not the consequence of actions from the raised fist of the unconscious revolutionaries of destruction.
The Artist behind the design of our bodies, used curves and not angles. The Supreme Artist is a Fluid! Sharp angles chafe against soft flesh. They are aggressive, not pliant; sensuality has no place in their angular human frames.
Angles are created for delineation and confrontation; to delineate between race, gender and status. They are not the stuff of the caress that sighs are made of, but create the moans of torture, abuse and violence.
Non-violence is a fluid-form, eroding solid constructions of conquest, war, famine and death. They ride four horses, allegedly. Even their coffins are angular constructions, unless of course they burn our bodies to hide the evidence of their atrocities.
Identity politics works on the classifications of race, gender and status. There is no need to ‘come out’ and play the game according to their rules.
‘Prefer not to Say’ may be a better response. (For now) . All of these rules stem from the different forms of Statism; of creating subjects, when what we should do is refuse their authority and live ‘an arche’ or ‘an archia’ and refuse to play their identity games.
As Fluids, we set our mode of living to resistance; to the Empires of State and show the world an alternative to their slavery.
Manifestos breed victims, scapegoats. They tell people about freedom, whilst never being able to deliver on it. All they really want is your subservience, so be careful what you sign.
Manifestos tell people about freedom, whilst building a wall around you and then claiming it’s for your own protection. The ideas that need such boundaries are really forms of slavery and oppression. Have we learned nothing since the joy of Berlin, in November 1989?
Generally speaking, you would not be signing up for freedom, equality and fraternity, but death; for that is what the Revolution brought to France. A Reign of Terror is not a high water-mark in human and social development.
But if that is the only alternative presented against the State Machine, then sadly people will take it. The problem there is, that it just ends up creating another form of State control.
We have to offer alternatives of resistance to the oppression and violence of the State against the people. We are sick of fighting their wars, paying for their economic downturns, being terrorised by political and religious ideologies, or threatened with nuclear annihilation and chemical/viral attacks.
The State has got to be removed as a point of reference in our lives, outside of which we can live and move and have our being.
Communities of resistance; helping the lame to walk and the blind to see, setting the prisoners of oppression free, so that those who live in darkness can see a great Light dawning.
This is what Fluid Arts are all about; not in the abstract, but where the rubber meets the road, putting a spike in the wheel of injustice and ending the tyranny of the State, against families and communities whose only desire is to live in peace and nurture their children into the realm of consciousness and create the New World that we have been waiting for, for way too long.
It will not come from the State,
it will come from the People.
Shula
