Into The Blood
We need more life about each other. Light creates understanding. Understanding creates love. Love creates patience, and Patience creates unity.
-- Malcom X
Or did I just blow your fucking mind? It's not what most people expect to hear from brother Malcom, but there it is. That man was deep. What a blogger he would have been.
I've got my work cut out for me. This one's optimistic, but the situation right now isn't good. It's not the end of the world, but there's certainly a bit more of a shadow over my vision. Tough living, these days.
In a quest for inspiration, I look back at some of the performance work I did hack right after 9/11, the spirit that was expressed then. In something I wrote between 9/11 and 9/13, I informed my audience that reality was in their hands to create as artists:
Change your reality, shave your head, move, eat a new food; or find a new fantasy, believe in love, in opportunity, in your fellow human. Either way you change your experience. Change your experience, change a lot of experiences, reclaim the dignity of a lot of experiences, and you can change a lot of reality. Then you too can move the heavens and the earth.
That's right, man! Justify your existence! A month later trying to put my theory into practice I presented a character based on the homeless man who fix bycicles, including mine, in the East Villiage, as well as my own naiscent philosophy of change and politics.
Yeah well, you know, it's like... if you could figure out how things are changing though, like the code to change, like the rhythm, yeah the, the wavelength - there's a, there's a wave of change, and you could hop up on that shit. You could surf that change, you know, bust some serious Big Kahuna Che Guevara moves.
Man you could get it together, the change, like all the spare change lying around, get it together and it's a real thing. Change, man. Real change. Real-World change. Real-world "change the world" Change.
Viva Che! That one was scored to Radiohead's Optimistic, quite a stirring tune if I don't say so myself. I had it played live on acoustic guitar and told jokes with my musician as part of the performance.
Anyway, the point is that at the end of the day, these are things I still really believe in. I believe in the social revolution, and I believe that the political process is a part of it. They can be complimentary elements rather than antagonists. I believe that by changing enough hearts, we can simply prevail by our energy, without having to destroy other lives.
The question is, how do we do it?