sunday energy #58
one of the most important things that human beings do
I want to be a more dangerous writer. What I mean by that exactly, I can’t yet say. I think “dangerous,” in this case, means many things at once. I have been dangerous before, in what feel like small, fleeting ways. I suspect I could be dangerous in more expansive, more sustained ways, in the future. As someone trying to think and write and survive in dangerous times, I know that part of this expansion will require a growth in my commitment to intention, a deepened awareness of the fragile bridge that links what I say to what I mean.
Bridges, after all, require maintenance.
Being a writer online in the 2010s, during my early to mid 20s no less, was, in retrospect, such a destabilizing time for my craft. Corporate media and its insatiable hunger for hits and views and engagement resulted in an era in which words—one of the primary vehicles of meaning—were conscripted into the language of performance. In certain corners of the internet words began to function less as precise instruments and more as blunt tools, the general vibe of meaning as opposed to the actual thing.
(To say “I’m screaming” is not to scream.)
This was also an era where marginalized writers were encouraged and (meagerly) rewarded for trotting out the traumas of identity for liberal audiences more concerned with vague gestures towards justice than the full, fluid movement of liberation. So many young writers were fed to internet wolves uninterested in engaging in the so-called discourse with true rigor or in good faith, reactive before even contemplating what they were reacting to. Over-circulated phrases. Underdeveloped thought.
One day I’ll write at (juicy) length about that time, but I bring it up now just to say that, in retrospect, I recognize he nullifying effect those years had on how we communicate ideas, on how we do language. To be clear — it isn’t the language that’s changed, it’s the culture around it. Language is, at its core, a constant thrum of potential and possibility. For all this dilution, words themselves remain potent.
So maybe what I mean by “I want to be a dangerous writer” is I want everything I write to make me feel a little out of control, out of my depth, out of my mind. Because that’s what it’s actually giving. That’s the experience I’m actually having. I feel lost, afraid, manic with dread, often hopeless and at a loss at the banal cruelty of the world, frustrated with both my sense of helplessness and the conditions that have made me feel helpless. And I think perhaps the most dangerous thing I can write, at least in this moment, is the truth: I wake up, everyday, terrified that I (we) won’t survive this.
I have been looking to the past, as people so often do when they feel untethered in the present. Using the past as a reminder to myself that the internet is not the world, and the world is not the universe. Thinking about different times, different realms, different registers of speech. Words spoken in times of crisis. Words that held weight. Words that had consequences.
Toni Cade Bambara, in a 1980 essay titled “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” wrote this:
And it’s true. It’s true. That’s why the girls ban and burn books. That’s why they co-opt words like “woke” and render them into meaningless dog-whistles. That’s why they want to pretend like pronouns aren’t merely part of the machinery of language, but harbingers of doom. Ninety-five theses can induce a religious revolution, six words can bring down a whole government (🤭). We know this because history tells us so.