anarcha adventures

I think I understand you when you say “I think I understand” to me. We speak the same language, we speak to each other about the same ideas, we’re both anarchist, and yet you say “I don’t understand”, or “I think I understand” to me. You’re peering through a key-hole. You’re looking through a veil. You’re staring into the ocean, watching the monsters swim down below. You can’t see, but you say you see.

How can you not understand me? I’m speaking another language - one that doesn’t dither. Too direct for you, its an alien dialect.

I want to determine my own input into the group. I want to have my own ideas. I want not to be parented by you, with your cloying concern for ‘the group’, ‘the others’, the nameless whole who you think I’m outranked by.

You get offended by everything I say. What is it? Post partum anxiety - I’m the evidence that you don’t own my reality?

When I say this, you say “I think I understand”. But its just a way to appear polite, to appear to have accepted what I’ve said. You haven’t understood. You haven’t listened. You’ve sacrificed the group to your idea of what the group should be.

But this year, I’m making an exception, and makeing some resolutions.
1. Work less. Stop working full time - by either getting a PT job, or some other drastic measure.
2. Write more. More drama! More expositional montage! More voice over! And m0re barely-informed poltical ranting. Yes.
3. Read more.
4. Make an attempt to co-opt the forces of my body’s rebellion against me. I’ve barely spent a day in the last years that wasn’t full of aches and sniffles headaches and bleariness.
In short, the point of all these belated ‘resolutions’ is to take back control of my life and try to be a little bit happy.

I’m listening to a KRS-ONE retrospectrive albulm (called, funnily enough, “Retrospective”). There’s this song (”Love’s Gonna Getcha”) where he talks about becoming a drug dealer and lifting his family out of poverty into a high-consumption extravagence. He drops out of school and starts earning cash. Buys good food, a new teevee and a beamer. The refrain goes “tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do?”. And it might stay there - a hard-ass sob story, a case of not having a choice about dealing with drugs. But there’s this line:

You fall in love with your chain
You fall in love with your car
Love’s gonna getcha

I reckon that makes it pretty universal. You fall in love with your chain. It makes more sense that “all you have to lose is your chains”. The chains are what bind around and define me within my little world. The chains are all that’s known and knowable for some. To get rid of them, to peel them back is to repel one’s very identity - whether you’ve formed that identity by moulding yourself into the ideal of our time, or pushing to oppose them.

I understand that its scary for some people to take any of those small steps toward creating revolution. The tiniest of steps that start without movement - looking at the deepest places in yourself and finding a strength to live without the chains. I also see why it might seem lunatic or empty to some people to go on a demo, but like a firey revolution to others. So maybe those tedious marches through the centre of sydney do more than just draw attention to the issues de jour - they actually create a radical space where the chains are pulled a little looser and something different can happen. Even if its just for a few hours.