Reaching Across The Pavement - by Nicki Clarke ---------------------------- Today I take hold of my courage, take hold of a belief in myself and what I have to say, and dare myself to communicate with the world. For years I have written yet I am gripped by fear whenever I show what I write to others; I fear accusations of self-indulgence, boringness, sloppiness of style, incomprehensibility, vacuousness, irrelevance and bad politics. When people whose opinion means something to me criticise my writing I feel wounded, ashamed and less than perfect. Today I give myself permission to speak my thoughts and tell my stories in the best way I can, and that is the most I can expect of myself. I urge myself to push past that fear barrier - "you won't like me if you know who I really am" - to give up my need for such extreme self-protection in order to communicate and connect. This is the revolution - to reach out and touch each other's hearts and lives through creative love, by whatever means possible. This to me is the anarchist project - to resist the forces that hold us back, that divide us from each other, that keep us dependant, that deny us knowledge, that keep us solitiary and blind and frightened and ashamed. It is the *process* of challenging this state of being that is revolutionary and transforming. At times I have felt myself naive or ignorant because I am constantly surrounded by people who seem so much "wiser" than I am; I see their knowledge as a judgement upon me and what I have to say. But today I have this flash that the fact that I am constantly challenged by my intimate relationships is a wonderful thing...I think of how many people are closed to the experience of others, and remain unaffected and unchanged by interactions...their souls seem cast in concrete and barricaded against the other...this internal fortress is manifested externally in the nuclear family and the "homes" in which it lives. To let the other into our hearts involves risk, it involves confronting ourselves. It raises issues of trust and exposure, it means we are open and vulnerable. It means the possibiblity of pain. We live in a society that seeks to repress our pain, that seeks to distract us with consumer culture,and impresses upon us the urge to find our comfort in the acquisition of things. Our need to amass is testament to our inability to heal ourselves and each other. When I write, it is usually to make sense of my world, as a journey of self discovery, a quest for clarity. Sometimes I write for the sheer joy of it, and other times I am writing but simultaneously fighting the urge to do it (I do not wish to know myself; I long for oblivion). I write to comfort and nurture and sustain mnyself. Sometime I write to prove that I am real; I form myself through my words, through my communication with myself. I am at time weighed down by my writing - the ten years of journals, unfinished stories/poems/raves, the scraps and seeds of an article which I have never written, yet feel I should, the articles that I have written but need an absolute overhaul before they say anything near what I want to say...I am leaving these for now. If those ideas are important enough I will write them and if I don't at least I haven't guilt-tripped myself about them. So most of what you read here will not be laboured over, reworked and interrogated for "truth". This is a love letter from me to you, and I am not prepared to torture myself in order to make my voice heard (when I am tortured I am unable to love). I write this to you to express my desire to know you, to be with you in a common space, to be able to share in the commlexities of living in this world, to find solidarity in joy and sorrow and love and pain and death. When we reach out to each other we diminish hate, we battle its manifestations in racism, sexism, homophobia, religious prejudice when we offer to each other ourselves. I *long* for connection...often this longing has misrepresented itself to me and I have sought it through other means...I have not understood at times what this has meant, and thought that it was the wish for a lover, a home, new friends, a career, a degree, religion, or the "right" politics...but these things are not the end in themselves, they are possible paths through which I may find connection (with myself, with others) if I am open to it. My yearning now has a face and a name...I feel I am at last identifying what I want...This is what anarchist politics are about - liberating ourselves so that we may experience the connection, that we may tear down the barrier between the internal and external, the familiar and the unknown, the living and the non-living...Building community where and how we find it, learning and growing through varying mediums (we know that the real stuff is not learned in schools). Trusting our intuition and learning to discard the crap they dish out everyday. Honouring ourselves and each other and beliving in our wisdom. This is my anarchist project. Living my myself for the last six months has been a time of incredible growth. I confronted by fear of going insane if I had no housemates to distract me from my depression, of abandoning my politics if I had no-one to police my actions. Living alone has been important in so many ways - beginning to appreciate my rich inner life that has been cultivated in solitude, withdrawing energy from external demands and giving this to myself, giving myself the space in which to rage and scream and cry and be paralysed with fear and yet emerge from that with insight and understanding. Living alone also gave me the opportunity to create the "home" - the space of safety and security and unconditional love and privacy - that was denied me as a child, and has haunted me ever since. It has released me from resentful bonds to my mother and my father, allowing me to parent myself, taking on responsilibity for my well-being, relieving them of that burden. To be able to do this, in a society which raises us to be responsible dependants, is truly remarkable. it has allowed me to face my shame instead of trying to hide it, and gives me courage not to be in the world...Having internalised that safe place, it is time for me to dismatle home, and to step out from security and the familiar. It is time to dance in the space of the unknown...It is important now for me to know that I exist without seeking proof of who I am in the things I surround myself with. Having given myself home, I am now free to leave it, in the knowledge that I can have access to it again if I need it. This is a society of the spectacle precisely because our invisiblity is a requirement of inclusion. We are encouraged not to take up space, to be silent, to minimize the impact of our lives upon others, and to guard against their impact upon us. The result of this squashing down, this compacting and containing, means that our need to connect becomes twisted - visibility is sought through the tangible (consumer goods), through exploitation and violence. Because our desire to love abundantly and freely is stunted into monogamy, into the nuclear family, it is ironically those who love who suffer. We are squashed into little shoeboxes in order to contain us, divide us, keep us fearful and vigilant lest our territory be invaded. We are encouraged to see all that is external as a threat, as the stranger, as the enemy, as the thief in the night. We build our own prisons, we police ourselves and each other. We censor ourselves and believe our voices feeble and ineffective. Our laughter shrivels in our throats - and the sounds emanating from the houses are uniform - the choice of five TV channels drowns out spontaneity. To speak becomes fearful - I have days when i cannot leave the house to buy a loaf of bread because I will have to make eye contact, converse, articulate myself. We bury ourselves in houses, protect our fragile selves with walls. A blank wall holds no comfort, is sterile and forbidding, so we decorate with prints and wall paper in order to hide its true nature. We draw the curtains to hide from the outside world. We turn the televion on so we can listen to lies, rather than listen to our hearts. In our shoeboxes we deny our existence. We are a society of addicts. The mainstream would have us believe that it is only some who are addicted, it is the "substance abusers" who are weak and immoral and powerless and lacking the ability to "just say no". Psychologists now talk about love addicts and food addicts and sex addicts but fail to realise that our "addictions" are a product of a society that requires us to be responsible dependants; participation in this society demands the maintenance of addiction. If we release ourselves from addiciton then we open ourselves up to change; addiction is only habit, it is the unquestioned singular way of being/seeing. We are a society addicted to the known, to the definable, to the rational and controllable. We are offered pacifiers to relieve the symptoms of unrest and dis-ease, we are fooled into thinking that happiness is a pain-free existance, that the absence of discomfort is a desirable state of being. When our bodies get sick, we rush for pharmaceuticals so that we can continue business as usual; if we did not do this, we might start to ask "why do i always get a headache when I talk to my mother? Why do I get bronchitis when I work in an office?" We would have to look at what our bodies are telling us about the way we live, about what we are addicted to, and what it might mean to challenge our ways of being in the world. If we paid attention to our bodies we would start questioning the price we are paying, acknowledging that we are relinquishing or ignoring in order to conform to society's expectation of health and normality. We might stop adapting our bodies to fit an externally imposed set or rules and start discovering our own relationship with the world, leading to a breakdown of the barrier between "me" and "not-me". We would then be honouring our own and each other's unique perception rather than forcing ourselves to see everything through one narrowly focussed optical lens which provides a (seemingly invisible) window to the world. It is the so-called aid to vision that actually renders us blind. The transparency of the window gives the illusion of connection, participation, the supposed clarity that is gained though putting on the spectacles of conformity is at the expense of our connection to our environment. Our vision of the world is filtered, sanitised, reduced to flatness and easily interpretable shapes. Our experience is rendered two dimensional. This society is preoccupied with the uniformity of vision. I do not mean this metaphorically - I mean it literally. In this society it is imperative that we all see things in the same way, that we all see the same things. When I was in fifth grade I got headaches at school; it was determined by the authorities (the ones who Knew) that the problem was that I couldn't see (specifically that I couldn't see the blackboard). Rather that questioning why it might be that the words of my teachers were rendered an unintelligible scrawl, rather than believing that I might actually be experiencing different modes of seeing than what was required by the education system, rather than thinking that it might have been the environment that was a problem in need of fixing - the teachers and the doctors and my parents ordered me a pair of glasses so that I could see. I learned to distrust my own vision, I learned to value the sharp definition through the lens, and privilege that over the blurred edges beyond my frames. I learned to value distinction and boundaries and containment and the separation of one thing from another. I learned to be dependant upon an artificial interpretation of the world, to take this perception as the unquestioned real, and to believe that what I see through my own eyes is illusion and distortion. I am trying to break my addiction to my glasses and this is fucking difficult. Resisting the impulse to have the world tunnelled into my eyes while I stand still and passively accept - this is a hard lesson to learn. To be in the world without glasses fills me with panic; I am vulnerable, lacking trust in my own perceptions. It is a challenge to exist, as all is not readily apparent. In order to know something, I might have to ask a stranger, or I may have to walk right up to a thing before i can recognise it. It means abandoning the desire to stand immovable and mute, it means crouching down or reaching up or moving sideways or touching in order to discover. It means making a connection, risking impact at close range. Not wearing my glasses challenges me to pay attention, to actually be aware of my environment and of myself, to develop my senses. Allowing myself the right to my own vision places me in a position of potential risk and vulnerability, the probability of "making mistakes" and causing myself embarrassment. I leave myself without that particlar defence and reliquish the "proof" of what can be seen...all is open to interpretation. Reliquishing my glasses is about putting down my shield, my armour, the means of holding the world at arm's length. To watch your face as you speak to me means you must come closer - in this we challenge our boundaries, we narrow the gap between us, we risk touching, impacting, we risk being changed by each other's presence. Without glasses as shield and filter I risk seeing love or anger or hatred or sorrow or joy in your eyes - I risk experiencing your emotions and feeling them emanating form you body. I risk feeling repulsed or attracted - I am unable to remain indifferent to you, I am unable to remain impervious to your being. I no longer grant myself the *luxury* of warding off the possiblity of being changed by our encounter. I challenge myself to confront my fears about what I do not/ cannot see, I challenge the belief that what is not seen is unknowable and a threat to my fragile existance.