(The Wind Will Carry Us, 2020, Carlo Rey Lacsamana)
The world is crazy, Carlo.
The world is fucking burning, Chris.
Zozan, a Kurd, talking about the struggle of her people, wrote to me saying, "The Kurds only see oppression... I want to be free in my own country.”
Even the words we tell ourselves and each other are full of adversity.
While somewhere someone is suffering, dying from the consequences of the pandemic and elsewhere a people who have suffered much, a people in pain are being handcuffed, tear-gassed, clubbed, beaten, shot by that horrendous human invention called the Police, a tiny plant blooms tumultuously, uprightly between huge slabs of stones. From afar we watch with breathless admiration, awe, sadness, and prayers those little people, descendants of lonely slaves, stand against the colossal injustices of tyranny, vindicate their ancestry, their history, with warrior-like courage that would not be quenched this spring. The hues of our spring belong to twilight.
We are attacked on all sides: plague, tyranny, economic inequality, racism, climate breakdown… Our personal lives, imbued with the sorrows of circumstances, are barely holding. Yet we hold on. We have come to resemble those characters in Chekhov’s stories who cannot go on but endure. Yes, Chekhovian endurance: an almost slave-like spirit to proceed. How so? Maybe because we possess nothing that we are capable of withstanding our own capacity for losing everything, that we can take another step knowing we will be trampled upon, crushed by their ruthlessness. We keep on not because we are heroes—God forbid!—but because we do not know the solutions; and not knowing the solutions we are free from the arrogance of certainties, of cheap optimism, of false hopes. Like the sisters in Chekhov’s greatest play we tell ourselves: “if only we knew.” To stand on the promise of uncertainty, to move between grace and anxiety, courage and surrender, stillness and disquiet, to plunge into the struggles we have not chosen but have chosen us—this is how we honor life. Like that tiny plant blooming between the indifference of stones we shall be plucked soon: it’s okay: we were summoned to bloom in the middle of fear and trembling.
Wherever you are, endure as nature does against the unstoppable colossus, monster, machine, nightmare, in the pit of darkness.
We have been defeated.
We have failed grandly.
Tonight, light the pit with the song Keep On Keeping On by that great soul brother Curtis Mayfield:
Many think that we have blown it But they too will soon admit That there's still a lot of love among us
And there's still a lot of faith and warmth and trust When we keep on keeping on