Global diaspora of various beginnings combined with
digital communications has made the world smaller while also not acknowledging
the digital gaps that still exist and how there are always going to be shadows
for the forgotten. Been thinking on what I am as a human, accepting my status
as white male in America, yet also realizing I’m not entirely like a lot of
other white males. Been thinking of myself as unwhite lately, because I’m
externally identified as white, most certainly, but I try my best to not
perpetuate a lot of that shit with my own actions. It’s impossible to detach
yourself from how others identify you, including systems built on biases which
benefit you, but it’s also very possible to actively not embrace that shit, and
definitely you can do the work to not perpetuate the ugly side of that.
And yet I went to a home funeral yesterday, where
we stood around the grave that the family dug, and they played a couple old
bluegrass songs at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, and there’s a
cultural context to all this for me – greater Appalachian roots which came from
Scottish highlands… a common theme in the eastern half of the U.S. But also I’m
a product of various immigrant diasporas – one quarter Polish with a variation
on “fisher” surname, a quarter Scandinavian, part German-ish as filtered
through Pennsylvania mountains… but standing at home-cooked funeral, outside,
old folks playing old instruments, singing old songs about finally being free,
it’s all cultural at molecular and unexplainable level that’s not evil. The
history of globalization and empire and dominant cultures, even within the
framework of racial divisions, is one where dominant cultures consumed and
suppressed even other cultures within what we now see as the same.
It will be interesting to see how this shifts in
the near future, now that we have these handheld devices that educate as well
as delude us, and so many cultural things are cross-pollinating each other. And
yet also, we’re experiencing a vast superficial knowledge of more, while
knowing deeply less. Someone once told me about the difference between knowing
one square inch a mile deep, and one square mile an inch deep, and how
superficial knowledge doesn’t actually allow for root knowledge, and can easily
be washed away. As I helped dig a grave this past week, I thought about that,
as we dug shovelful by shovelful, down through the silt, luckily not too red
clay, far deeper than one normally digs, because that’s how deep you have to go
for safe eternal resting space. I don’t come from high and mighty people,
despite the privilege I do have, and there’s a lot of cultural pieces that were
lost because of that. I knew drug culture better than people playing banjos,
although there was crossover, like an old dude called Rocky Top who had drank
himself out of Nashville who sat around the poker table at Tank’s house where
my folks went every weekend, picking songs. But I do know piecing it together,
and how to get shit done when it needs to be done, rather than planning and
talking and thinking about it forever.
Humanity is no more fucked now than it’s ever
been. But there’s a lot of hard work that needs to be done. Not discussed and
delegated and argued and talked over and hashed out and endless circles of
discourse and spirals of power hierarchies that destroy actual collective work
ever getting done. There’s enough work for all of us to just get to doing in
our own lives, daily. And that helps establish new cultures, new
cross-pollinations that aren’t appropriation or assimilation or suppression and
oppression, but actual shared physical acts of working together. The arts falls
into this as well, because the arts is the fun work you do after the hard work
is done. And fuck man, nobody wants to just do the hard work seven days a week
without doing the fun work too. Every somber Sunday morning needs a feral
Saturday night. Life needs contrast in order to not be mundane to the point of
just sitting around waiting for death. It feels a lot of times like our one
inch deep knowledge of the square mile of today’s existence is severely
lacking, at least to me. But ain’t shit to do about it except get to work going
deeper.
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