My last post for BorderTalksBlog is dated February 3, 2012. I was two years out from having received my MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. My writing interests had taken me in new directions. Now, on January 1, 2017, I find the world of states and men (primarily) has either retrenched or ruptured, rather than grown toward the light of creative problem-solving.
Talk about transgressing borders! In art, in life, I have applauded honest challenges to and transgressions of the accepted order not for the sake of anarchy but for the sake of renewal, enlargement, and the fulfillment of human and creative potential. A thriving community of art makers whose business it is to challenge accepted norms often speaks to where growth needs to happen, and where stagnation has taken hold in the larger culture.
The art makers of 2016 had given us fair warning. From photographer Nona Faustine’s “White Shoes” series to the writings of Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates; from author J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13th, we are reminded that the evils we had thought to be in decline are, in fact, not. These artists and others have sounded the alarm. Our society, not for the first time, is at odds with its principles and ideals.
The election of Donald Trump shouldn’t have been a rude awakening, yet it was. We didn’t believe our country could be that racist, that misogynistic, that ignorant of history and science. Yet the country proved itself to be so, and more. Years of economic decline, political stalemate, and complacent journalism, along with the neglect of communities forgotten by the educational system, industry, the corporate state, and the technological innovators has fomented a new class of aggrieved and anarchistic citizens willing to implode our very political system in order to make their presence felt.
In 2017, we will see the reckoning. In the meantime, each of us has a responsibility to push back against “the new normal” by revealing what it truly is: the old order.
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At this moment, I am reading your interesting blog from a different space–from my interior self, having spent the morning reading of others’ interior selves: Through the Narrow Gate, a memoir from the 1980s by Karen Armstrong about her years as a teenager and young woman in her efforts to become a Catholic nun, and in the process, trying to remove, or grind to powder, her individual ego; and Gerard Manley Hopkins, a priest-poet, an enduring poet-light, who talks about his agony of desire to remove his interior imperfections but who writes most singularly, as far as I am concerned, about the connection between his deep interior self and the entire world in all its manifestations. What is most striking to me right this minute, is the distance between the ardent search for the interior self, and the current climate of an external world that threatens the very existence of human interiority. Which is to say, I think, that today’s world threatens humanness. I want to plod forward, in favor of humanness.
I, too, Michael.