[I hope when it happens]

I hope when it happens I have time to say oh so this is how it is happening
unlike Frank hit by a jeep on Fire Island but not like dad who knew too
long six goddamn years in a young man’s life so long it made a sweet guy sarcastic
I want enough time to say oh so this is how I’ll go and smirk at that last rhyme
I rhymed at times because I wanted to make something pretty especially for Mikel
who liked pretty things soft and small things who cried into a white towel when I hurt
myself when it happens I don’t want to be afraid I want to be curious was Mikel curious
I’m afraid by then he was only sad he had no money left was living on green oranges
had kissed all his friends goodbye I kissed lips that kissed Frank’s lips though not
for me a willing kiss I willingly kissed lips that kissed Howard’s deathbed lips
I happily kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Basquiat’s lips I know a man who said
he kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Whitman’s
lips who will say of me I kissed her who will say of me I kissed someone who kissed
her or I kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed her.

 

Diane Seuss

New York Times Magazine

October 17, 2021 

Days of Future Past

Sasha, a quiet drunk, an esoteric, a poet,
spent the entire summer in the city.
When the shooting began, he was surprised —
started watching the news, then stopped.
He walks around the city with headphones on,
listening to golden oldies,
as he stumbles into burned-out cars,
blown-up bodies.

What will survive from the history
of the world in which we lived
will be the words and music of a few geniuses
who desperately tried to warn us,
tried to explain, but failed to explain anything
or save anyone;
these geniuses lie in cemeteries
and out of their ribcages
grow flowers and grass.
Nothing else will remain —
only their music and songs, a voice
that forces you to love.

You can choose to never turn off this music.
Listen to the cosmos, shut your eyes.
Think about whales in the ocean at night.
Hear nothing else.
See nothing else.
Feel nothing else.
Except, of course, for the smell,
the smell of corpses.

Headphones
By Serhiy Zhadan
New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2021

"O for a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity, as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demands of slavery!"

Frederick Douglas

"This Decision Has Humbled The Nation" 

Speech delivered in Washington D.C., October 22, 1883

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught

"And so Kreindel learned the story of Eve's fashioning from Adam's rib, and its accompanying lesson:  Thus a women is strong by nature, for she was created from a bone, while a man, created from earth, is weak, and quickly dissolves."

The Hidden Palace

A Novel of the Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker 

Waltizing with Bears

A Song Near the End of the World

Because I suddenly think of the bear—
my head jerks up—doesn’t mean the bear
is near. I was here four months before I saw the bear.
Huge exhausted mammal trudged by the porch—it was the bear
Joe told me Sue had seen while she was picking berries.
Male, five hundred pounds, the bear
was massive in front, and tapered toward the bare
patch on the furred almost curly truculent rear.
Such a hot midsummer, such a tired bear.
He was like a god—so much space was filled with bear.
Like a cumulonimbus come down to earth—a density of bear
with blood in him, and teeth, and a bear
liver and bear
lights. A pirate bear, a private bear, a lone bear,
it may be a father bear, it is a son bear,
a quarantine bear,
doing the essential work of his life—an endangered bear.
We did not share breath—I was behind the window, and the bear
passed on the other side of the porch rails like a bear
passing through bars of sunlight. And bears
are imprisoned now in smaller and smaller wild jails for bears.
When I stand at a bush now and pick a blackberry,
I wonder how the bear
does it, with his teeth or his bear
claws, which in my youth were bear-
mitt pastries, brown sugar embedded with poppy seeds like the dirt and gore in bear
hands—people were eaten by bears
every summer. My favorite part of this bear
was his velvety golden-brown bear
muzzle. Galway and I were mates, in a way—a friendship that could bear
strong hugs. To me, a male—bear
or human—was an unknown, like my husband, like Galway. I bore
many poems by Galway, and he bore
many by me. Was “The Bear”
a boy? I think so. A human being was male, then. A girl bear
might have seemed too much like a mother—what man then could bear
his mother. I think this song is like a mate for Galway’s “Bear.”
A friend at the end of the world—it is barely
known how long we can go on. A wish for the bear:
pleasure, safe cubs born
and yet to be born; ease of bear
mind; bear
heart’s ease, and a dream of a bear
heaven, hills and woods of comb-born honey.

Sharon Olds

The New Yorker

July 12th & 19th issue 

 

The Bear

In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.


2

I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.


3

On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.


4

On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.


5

And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.


6

Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.


7

I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

Galway Kinnell 

A New Selected Poems, 2000 

 

Countless Schemes

 

Countless schemes have been proposed for solving or dismissing this problem, most of them impracticable or impossible. Of this class are such proposals as: (1) the deportation of 12,000,000 Negroes to Africa; (2) the establishment of a separate Negro state in the United States; (3) complete separation and segregation from the whites and the establishment of a caste system or peasant class; and (4) hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race. (The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot, 1922, published by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, page xxiii)

1
you don’t have enough boats

we came here head to toe
spoiling like old meat
in every liquid thing a body can make
the bravest gone to Yemaya
and now we are millions
and now we demand to sit upright

and so you don’t have enough boats

2
you would give us the most wretched desert,
not the desert of our fathers where god is watching
and manna comes down like the snow.
you would give us a desert of sorrows and nothing.
you would give us the dream
where you want only to yell and no noise comes
you would give us all that is barren
you would give our children sand to eat

3
we been had that

4
you said
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro
hope for a solution through the dying out

you said hope for the Negro dying
hope through the dying
hope for the dying out
the solution dying

you said dying. the Negro
the Negro dying
the Negro hope
hope the Negro

you said hope for dying
hope dying
dying
dying

you said hope

 

Eve L. Ewing

1919 Poems

Our Purpose in Poetry: Or, Earthrise

On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronaut Bill Anders 
Snapped a photo of the earth
As Apollo 8 orbited the moon.
Those three guys 
Were surprised
To see from their eyes
Our planet looked like an earthrise
A blue orb hovering over the moon’s gray horizon, 
with deep oceans and silver skies. 

It was our world’s first glance at itself 
Our first chance to see a shared reality, 
A declared stance and a commonality; 

A glimpse into our planet’s mirror,
And as threats drew nearer,
Our own urgency became clearer,
As we realize that we hold nothing dearer 
than this floating body we all call home. 

We’ve known
That we’re caught in the throes
Of climactic changes some say
Will just go away,
While some simply pray
To survive another day;
For it is the obscure, the oppressed, the poor, 
Who when the disaster
Is declared done,
Still suffer more than anyone. 

Climate change is the single greatest challenge of our time, 

Of this, you’re certainly aware.
It’s saddening, but I cannot spare you
From knowing an inconvenient fact, because
It’s getting the facts straight that gets us to act and not to wait. 

So I tell you this not to scare you, 
But to prepare you, to dare you 
To dream a different reality, 

Where despite disparities
We all care to protect this world,
This riddled blue marble, this little true marvel 
To muster the verve and the nerve
To see how we can serve
Our planet. You don’t need to be a politician
To make it your mission to conserve, to protect, 
To preserve that one and only home
That is ours,
To use your unique power
To give next generations the planet they deserve. 

We are demonstrating, creating, advocating 
We heed this inconvenient truth, because we need to be anything but lenient
With the future of our youth. 

And while this is a training,
in sustaining the future of our planet, 
There is no rehearsal. The time is 
Now
Now
Now, 
Because the reversal of harm,
And protection of a future so universal 
Should be anything but controversial. 

So, earth, pale blue dot 
We will fail you not. 

Just as we chose to go to the moon 
We know it’s never too soon
To choose hope.
We choose to do more than cope 
With climate change 
We choose to end it—
We refuse to lose.
Together we do this and more
Not because it’s very easy or nice
But because it is necessary,
Because with every dawn we carry
the weight of the fate of this celestial body orbiting a star. 
And as heavy as that weight sounded, it doesn’t hold us down, 
But it keeps us grounded, steady, ready, 
Because an environmental movement of this size 
Is simply another form of an earthrise. 

To see it, close your eyes.
Visualize that all of us leaders in this room
and outside of these walls or in the halls, all
of us changemakers are in a spacecraft,
Floating like a silver raft
in space, and we see the face of our planet anew.
We relish the view;
We witness its round green and brilliant blue,
Which inspires us to ask deeply, wholly:
What can we do?
Open your eyes.
Know that the future of
this wise planet
Lies right in sight:
Right in all of us. Trust
this earth uprising.
All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core, 
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for. 

 

Dedicated to Al Gore and The Climate Reality Project 

The following poem by Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States Amanda Gorman (link is external) was read from stage at the Los Angeles Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training on Tuesday, August 28, 2018.

 

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. 

Thomas Jefferson

Letter to John Holmes, 1820

As it was, so it shall be

This crisis mentality is a vital component of the process of political change.  There were no assurances, no guarantees of success, and a constant fear that the entire structure would come crashing to ruin.  Imposing patterns on the period in hindsight, we often forget that this was a world of chance and circumstance, where voting patterns and probabilities that seem obvious to us were obscured in a cloud of uncertainties and fears. 

Affairs of Honor

Joanne B. Freeman

"The Hill We Climb", Amanda Gorman

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it.

Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.

That even as we grieved, we grew.

That even as we hurt, we hoped.

That even as we tired, we tried.

That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.

Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.

We feared at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.

But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.

Our blunders become their burdens.

But one thing is certain.

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the golden hills of the West.

We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sun-baked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.

The new dawn balloons as we free it.

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

 

Waltzing with bears

John Muir said that if it ever came to a war between the races, he would side with the bears.  That day has arrived. 

Dave Foreman

"Strategic Monkeywrenching"

 

quoted in I'm With the Bears. Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, edited by Mark Martin

"Catch The Fire"

 

(Sometimes I wonder:
What to say to you now
in the soft afternoon air as you
hold us all in a single death?)
I say—
Where is your fire?
I say—
Where is your fire?
You got to find it and pass it on.

You got to find it and pass it on
from you to me from me to her from her
to him from the son to the father from the
brother to the sister from the daughter to
the mother from the mother to the child.

Where is your fire?  I say where is your fire?
Can’t you smell it coming out of our past?
The fire of living…not dying
The fire of loving…not killing
The fire of Blackness…not gangster shadows.
Where is our beautiful fire that gave light
to the world?
The fire of pyramids;
The fire that burned through the holes of
slaveships and made us breathe;

The fire that made guts into chitterlings;
The fire that took rhythms and made jazz;

The fire of sit-ins and marches that made
us jump boundaries and barriers;
The fire that took street talk sounds
and made righteous imhotep raps.
Where is your fire, the torch of life
full of Nzingha and Nat Turner and Garvey
and DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin
and Malcolm and Mandela.
Sister/Sistah  Brother/Brotha  Come/Come

CATCH YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
HOLD YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
LEARN YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
BE THE FIRE…DON’T KILL
Catch the fire and burn with eyes
that see our souls:
WALKING.
SINGING.
BUILDING.
LAUGHING.
LEARNING.
LOVING.
TEACHING.
BEING.
Hey.  Brother/Brotha.  Sister/Sista.
Here is my hand.
Catch the fire…and live.
live.
livelivelive.
livelivelive.
live.

Sonia Sanchez 

"Words born of turmoil and misunderstanding/I write of visions I see through the haze"

"San Diego Evening Tribune." The speaker is a woman.  "A simpler question than Gary's: Can songs change the world?"

Too much like hard work for me, thinks Dean, looking at Elf, who looks at Griff, who says, "Hey I just drum along."

"Songs do not change the world", declares Jasper. "People do.  People pass laws, riot, hear God, and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars."  Jasper lights a Marlboro.  "Which raises a question.  'Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?' My answer is 'Ideas and Feelings.' Which begs a question. 'Where do ideas and feelings originate?' My answer is, 'Others. One's heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs.' Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time.  Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines from nine or ten songs.  Dean recognizes "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Strange Fruit", and "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine."  Others, Dean can't identify, but the hardboiled press pack look on.  Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. "Where will these song-seeds land?  It's the Parable of the Sower.  Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don't take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready.  Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy.  Assurance. Cathartic sorrow.  The idea that life could be, should be, better than this.  An invitation to slip into somebody else's skin for a little while.  If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world."

Bloody hell, thinks Dean.  I live with this guy.

"Why's everyone gone quiet?" Slightly alarmed, Jasper asks the band.  "What that weird? Did I go too far?"

 Utopia Avenue

David Mitchell

'

Days of Future Passed

 Five years later, I take a deep shuddery breath to stop myself crying.  It's not just that I can't hold Aoife again, it's everything.  It's grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office -- all so we didn't have to change our cozy lifestyles.  People talk about the Endarkment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it's a plague of God.  But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through.  My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing -- while denying -- that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.  

The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell 

(c) 2014 

"Is is strange to say I miss the bodies of others?"

In the way that absence illuminates desire, and breakage illuminates function — you don’t notice the doorknob until it twists off in your hand — quarantine has made it plain to me how much I miss the daily, unspoken, casual company of strangers, the people whose names and lives I’ll never know, who populate my ordinary urban days with their bodies on the subway, their glances on the sidewalk, their stray comments at the A.T.M., their hands holding whole milk and gummy bears in front of me in the bodega line.

It was in the early months of my separation that I started to become acutely aware of this gratitude for the peculiar anonymous company that urban living offers — for the cafe just downstairs from my new apartment, where many of the same regular customers gathered each morning: the amiable elderly man chain-smoking and mansplaining trans-Atlantic politics; the mom-friends with their parked bassinets; the 20-something boys reading Bakhtin and Heidegger who never offered to help me carry my stroller up the stoop stairs. In the aftermath of my household unraveling, it was an acute and unexpected comfort to find this daily ragtag cohort just downstairs — a looser household, but a household nonetheless.

Walking late at night on Flatbush Avenue, I appreciated all the anonymous strangers I passed for the ways they suggested, even if I didn’t know their stories, how many different ways it was possible to craft a life. The man buying mangoes at the bodega just before midnight? Maybe he was a father of five. Maybe he was a single father of five. Maybe he and his husband were trying to adopt. Maybe he and his wife had been trying to have a child for years. Maybe he and his wife knew they didn’t want a child; maybe they were saving up to travel the world instead. Maybe he lived alone with his aging mother. Who could know his story? I never would. But I didn’t need to. I only needed to know, through his presence on that sidewalk, that so many plotlines for a life were possible.

When we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers, we don’t just lose the tribal solace of company, but the relief from solipsism — the elbow brush of other lives unfurling just beside our own, the reminder of other people’s daily survival, the reminder that there are literally seven billion other ways to be alive besides the particular way I am alive; that there are countless other ways to be lonely besides the particular ways I am lonely; other ways to hope, other ways to seek joy.

Leslie Jamison

The New York Times

September 27, 2020

Mississippi: A Poem, In Days

 

Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.

It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

The worst of white folk will not be persuaded; they can only be beaten. And when they are beaten, they fight more ferociously. They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we’ve shown exquisite grace, an enemy we’ve tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.

Titillation.

I lather my hands in sanitizer and google gun shops in Lafayette County on my phone. I do not believe in guns. I do not believe in prisons. Yet I know I need one if I am to continue living alone in this Mississippi, American town.

I look at the grizzled cotton fields outside my truck window on Highway 6. I want to ask, where am I?

But I know.

This is not home.

If this is home, it is not healthy.

I do not want to humiliate. I do not want to be humiliated. I do not want to kill. I do not want to be killed. I want us to be free. I know what I feel. I know what I’ve felt. I must buy a gun if I continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, so I cannot continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, no more. It took way too much Black death to get here, and here is where I’d love to live without guns, without prisons, without monuments of humiliation, without the undervalued expected sacrifice of essential workers, without the worst of white folks. Here is where I’d like to tenderly, honestly, radically live and love with you.

And here, one day, will be Mississippi.

 

Kiese Makeba Laymon

Vanity Fair, September 2020  

The word "my" brings pleasure.  The word "my" brings pain.  These are true words for masters as well as slaves.  When they are drunk, we become invisible to them.  Their talk turns to owning, or to profit, or loss, or buying, or selling, or stealing, or hiring, or renting, or swindling.  For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships.  They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands.  They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas.  Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison.  They complain they are not free.  Only Dr. Marinus is free from these complaints.  His skin is a white man's, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a white man's soul. His soul is much older.  On Weh, we would call him a kwaio.  A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns, each time in a new child.  A good kwaio may become a shaman, but nothing in this world is worse than a bad kwaio. 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
David Mitchell

One of what we all are, Pelly. Less than a drop in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems some of the drops sparkle, Pelly. Some of them do sparkle!

My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear aught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity.  My thoughts flow thus.  Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rise & fall of civilizations.  My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief. 

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world.  If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail.  You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds.  What of it if our consciences itch?  Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? What fight the "natural" (oh weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul: for the human species, selfishness is extinction.  

Is this the doom written within our nature? 

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe diverse races & creeds can share this world as peacefully as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & and the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.  I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real.  Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.  

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.  Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response: "Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam.  But don't tell me about justice.  Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's!  Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses!  You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified!  Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you grasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops? 

Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
2004

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making.

blackswangreen
David Mitchell

Whitey on the moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be paying still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man just upped my rent last night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's upping me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already paying him fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes taking my whole damn check,
Junkies making me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is going up,
An' as if all that shit was't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made last year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I just about had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Gil Scott-Heron

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o' that kayak.  Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul.  Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds. 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Archivist: Weren't you curious about Union's blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America.  Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

Sonmi-451: You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist, I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An Abyss cannot be crossed in two steps". 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Archivist: Fantasy, lunacy. 

Somni-451: All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

"When I think of the road we're travelling on, I can't help but wonder what's gone wrong."

"Your ignorance, Bat!  It's not funny! It's agony! You're Einstein's tea-lady, Newton's wig-delouser, Hawkings's puncture-repairer!  You fanfare your 'Information Revolution', your e-mail, your v-mail, your vid-cons!  As if information itself is thought! You have no idea what you've made!  You are all lapdogs, believing your collars to be halos! Information is control.  Everything you think you know, every image on every screen, every word on every phone, every digit on every VDU, who do you think has got their hands on it before it gets to you?  Comet Aloysius could be on a collision course with Grand Central Station, and unless your star guest here chose to let the instruments he controls tell your scientists, you wouldn't know a thing until you woke up one morning to find no sun and a winter of five hundred years!  You wouldn't recognize the end of the world if it flew up your nose and died there!"

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell

"If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation."

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell