words from the future 03/09/21

prefiguration/twite

before we get into it, one timely matter: a weeklong boycott of Amazon in support of unionizing workers in Alabama is afoot 3/7-3/13 (including watching Prime! don’t cross the picket line, I’ll give you my HBO Max pw if you need it)

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I often used to say “we create the future by how we are together,” words I like for an idea I love shared by multiple people I look up to. For a time, I stopped saying it, maybe because of ambient advice about not getting hung up on small stuff in big change work. In beneficial-flora form that can be like heyyyy so we don’t need a standard of perfection in our movements because then no one will want to join and we will never win, but in giardia form sounds more like if you’re critiquing hypocrisy instead of systems, you aren’t really about it! I became shy about my thoughts without realizing it had happened.

Two ideas, together, refreshed and reconnected me: Ruth Wilson Gilmore talking about the need and opportunity to practice “care and conviviality as new senses of being” during the pandemic, and adrienne maree brown‘s “in emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. fractal – the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.”

Being fractal in our work is not to avoid hypocrisy, or be perfect, just… we really aren’t going to build a future where interdependence is acknowledged and care is prioritized by not trying to be interdependent, or by undervaluing everyday care while we destroy racial capitalism. “We create the future by how we are together” is a beautiful as well as practical matter! Lately, I say it a lot again. And it has a WORD and I just learned it: prefiguration! What a joy.

today in visionary lexicography (prefigurative language!):

first: an update on our last word, “inner bottom": head back there for some cute comments about what we want that to mean. Almost everyone who wrote to me directly rather than publicly did so to say something about a butt or perineum. It wasn’t a small number of people; you are in good company. One emailed idea was the same as my own first thought: “Being a gay man, inner bottom is clearly a man who normally tops but might benefit by letting his inner bottom out once in a while.”

now, behold:

You can reply to this email or leave a comment or tell some friends: what would it delight you for this to mean, in a future you want to live in?

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key references/influences: Emergent Strategy, Critical Resistance, Kelly Hayes’ podcast: 2020 Turned Our Worlds Inside Out. Here’s What We Learned (especially Rabbi Brant Rosen on Shabbat) Kimberly Dark, Catalyst Project’s Culture Shifts for white antiracist organizing, Eric Mann on Transformative Organizing, Ruth Wilson Gilmore in April 2020.