How do you relate to language and writing?

Sort of compulsively, in that I experience a lot of the world through words. Only recently did I discover that not everyone is like this — my inner monologue speaks in full sentences, which can be a bit unsettling. So writing is a thing that feels good, that I like to do, because it fits in with how I think.

From a different perspective, it’s something I've been drawn to because I’ve always loved reading. Particularly science fiction, and sometimes poetry. I’d read a really good book and think, “Damn, I wish I could do that.” Ursula K. Le Guin was an early influence — I really loved her short stories when I was growing up. I like a good story.

From a third perspective, it’s my weapon. I used to write a lot of essays — for school or for fun or for publication — and I got fairly good at a kind of rigorous, argumentative writing. I don’t do that so much these days, and my skills have definitely eroded, but I carry from that a love of the craft of speech and rhetoric, comedy, debate, etc. There are people for whom this is a whole world view — not me, it’s just a bludgeon I use to clobber my way through the world when I need it (and there are times when we all need a weapon).

What led you to poetry, and what do you bring to poetry?

- Being an angsty teenager. Many people write poetry when they are 14. I was one of them, and I just kept doing it. While I like to think my craft has improved, at the heart of it my goals and outlook with regard to poetry have not changed all that much. I'm trying to get my feelings out, express rage and heartbreak and tell jokes, and I traffic in sincerity more than anything.

- I love songs and song lyrics and I’m always hearing them, but I can’t write songs and I'm not a great singer, so some of the same impulses push me toward poetry.

- As written in the previous answer, it lets me stretch my rhetoric and oration muscles. For me, a lot of poetry is sound, rhythm and energy, which are concerns shared by musicians, speechwriters, dancers, clowns, and poets.

- As with most poets, there are feelings and experiences too complex to process directly, and so you have to do poetry about them. For me, it’s often a strong emotion, or something I find particularly beautiful, etc. The classic concerns.

I love “I traffic in sincerity more than anything.” The rise of Gen Z nihilism has made me feel, at times, like a lone sincere person at a massive rave party steeped in irony and hopelessness. It seems you can only be sincere if you have access to hope. Is this true for you?

Hope for younger people is very understandably a hard commodity to find, and they also express it in ways that are impossible for me to understand. I don’t always read that as nihilism, although that’s part of it, and I’ve definitely had the experience you describe. Is it different from the experiences our parents and teachers had with regard to us?

I must have access to hope, or it would be impossible to go on. But again, I think the word is a liberal bugbear, in that it is often posited as the prerequisite for action, and is used to justify lots of wasted ink and breath spent on motivating people. “Hope” locates the object of struggle in a desired and abstract future, rather than a concrete, improved present. I would like to replace hope with need, desperation, power, historicity, desire, boredom, solidarity, and revenge.

I think I am sincere because it’s what I was taught. It is a component of the kinds of music and writing that give me solace, pleasure, and excitement, and the future does not enter much into it. Much like some of the younger folks I’ve been around, I used to be much more ironic, detached and oblique, and kind of an edgelord some days. It wasn’t out of a lack of hope; it was out of a desire to be cool and abjure the appearance of attachment. Eventually I found out that this is a recipe for terrible relationships and loneliness, and I became more sincere. If anything, I have less hope now than I have ever had in my life. But I am more committed to action.

I would like to better understand the younger folks, but it might be impossible to fully do so. Sometimes I don’t feel welcome, or just like an alien, and that’s fine. I think about becoming obsolete a lot, and that it’s really not so bad. The need for relevance or even certain kinds of understanding is itself a symptom of this monolithic cultural moment.

How I might be of greatest help to the younger generation might be by obsoleting myself in a corner and being one of the things in the universe that is incomprehensible to them, the same way they are to me. Maybe it will shake things up.

A poem you shared with me previously suggests that empire and art share similar motivations. It moves through images of war and conflict, before alighting on a final image of “the daisy that dies in the field,/ before anyone can paint a picture”. Could you say more about it? Where do beauty and truth reside for you now?

My point in that poem was stronger than what you say about motivations. The speaker is suggesting that art and empire are literally the same thing, in that they are constructed of the same substance of domination, division and conquest, and that one’s existence implies the other. So when they suggest that truth and beauty may be corrupt, it’s not a division of real truth versus a mistaken truth, or the division of good actions from bad actions. It’s that truth and beauty really are concepts that we might productively throw away.

The alternative proposed is — pragmatic and healing violence, clandestinity, attack, sacrifice and, above all, survival. The person suggests that what is worthy of celebrating in the world may persist even if we abandon art altogether. The daisy and the other things (“the knife that curls on itself”, “the scalpel”) don't form an organic/ inorganic binary; they are a collection of celebrations.

This may be a bit more extreme than the views I personally hold (that I'm figuring out), but it rings true for me. It is certainly true that art has always accompanied empire, and that well meaning liberals have always made it a project to divide good art from bad art. I do that too, but it is a deeply troubling process. In my mind, art’s existence as a category is already a way of creating a commodity that can be used for the purposes of domination. We didn't always have art; for a long time we just had painting and music and poetry and dance.

While I do engage with beauty often, reflexively or for pleasure, what I find truly special about writing or music is the stuff that emerges out of need, antagonism, confusion, and love. Maybe in a few years I will have a better articulation of it.

So by art you mean the formalization and institutionalization of it, which you differentiate from "painting and music and poetry and dance".

Yes and no, and I apologize because I realize I am now talking fully in circles, but my idea is that there is not a thing and a frame, a structure and a superstructure, a practice and a medium. All those pairs are potentially distinct, but hopelessly entangled. When I say art is corrupt, I do actually mean that music and painting and poetry and dance are corrupt, and their formalization as “art” is as much a cause as it is a symptom. I wish I had a clearer way to put it! There are no good ways to separate art and its institutions permanently for me. Temporarily, yes, but it is always borrowed freedom.

Could you share more on “pragmatic and healing violence, clandestinity, attack, sacrifice and above all survival”, especially as alternatives to truth and beauty? It seems to tie in, also, with your preference for “need, desperation, power, historicity, desire, boredom, solidarity, and revenge” over hope.

“Truth and beauty”, “hope”, and things like that are meant to evoke our best selves, our civilization, or our capacity for sophistication/ organization. As a person who doesn’t believe in best selves, civilization, or organization, these are all hollow ideals.

At the same time I reject solely pleasure-seeking nihilism (something I may one day reconsider), so the question is: what else motivates me to write or to make music? Absent hope or whatever humanist notion I keep reading about in museum blurbs, I somehow still need to make music, in a very real way. And in attempting to name this wordless motivation, I began finding ways I can be forceful and loving and committed to people and to the world without having to hope at all, to believe that people are inherently good (they are not), or to believe that anything has intrinsic value (it does not). Clandestinity, attack, desperation, boredom, etc. are reflexive, driven by direct need rather than abstract principles, and thus less susceptible to our highly unreliable imaginations about who other people are!

As a counter-example, the one instance of hope that struck me the most was the Obama 2008 campaign slogan, “Change we can believe in” and the chant, “Yes we can”. That campaign won on a wave of popular hope in the overturning of an unjust economic system, the end of systemic racism, and a kinder and more just America globally. It was also a campaign that came with a wave of popular art. This sloganeering turned out to be a brilliant rhetorical coup de grâce which in two phrases allowed voters to believe in whatever change they needed to to get them to vote, and to imagine whoever they pleased as the “we” in “Yes we can”. All of this set the stage for some of the worst racial violence America had ever seen, as well as Obama getting away with some of the worst war crimes in recent history.

As it turns out, there wasn't actually any agreement on what “change”, “hope”, or “we” meant! Maybe things would have gone differently if Obama were presented with a population inoculated against hope, recognizing it as a way to confiscate their needs and to defer liberation until the future. See: the current uprisings in Bangladesh, motivated by maybe hope but also desperation and rage and the need for things to be better NOW. Those folks were willing to burn some shit to the ground. And sure, when Obama won I celebrated too, because I definitely drank the Kool Aid. But when I eventually got to America, I felt robbed.

I used to believe, in a very Catholic way, that my needs should be de-emphasized in lieu of the needs of people who may need more. I don't actually have too much philosophical beef with this. But that kind of thinking has, for me, proven to be a producer of pointless and difficult action. The things that are worth doing, whether they're music or love or sabotage, need to be done over and over and over again, and making that a sustainable practice has meant getting very real about my needs. Hope has no place in that, only... hunger?

I think about the riots in Philadelphia in response to the George Floyd and Breanna Taylor murders, and how the people most committed to organized, principled action failed everybody they tried to lead, and the people who actually smashed the damn police cars were largely those just out for revenge, to have a good time, or to steal some shit. Thousands of others and I walked in a big circle around the city, and then I got tear gassed, and then I went home, having achieved precisely nothing. In the end, the rioters did more, both to materially damage the infrastructure of oppression, and to force the fascist state into unmasking itself. (This was less true in other cities.)

I have gotten very, very tired of the careful moralizing from every part of society. Not to throw away the idea of right and wrong altogether, but I have come to believe that any instigator of real, deep change will not necessarily be principled; rather it will be feral, and I can neither create it nor manage it. I think about birds and wolves a lot, and how they might be better people than us. So I've set for myself the purpose of encouraging that wildness wherever I see it, and embracing love that is rooted in the world I can touch with my fingers.

Could you elaborate on how “Clandestinity, attack, desperation, boredom, etc. are reflexive, driven by direct need rather than abstract principles, and thus less susceptible to our highly unreliable imaginations about who other people are”? There's something compelling there.

I think I wrote some of the previous email in a kind of dim and manic place. I read it again and I stand by it, but it's so easy to misrepresent myself as having particular, stable convictions instead of being a ball of contradictions. Let me try my best to explain, with the caveat that you feeling compelled might be enough; I'm not convinced I have much more enlightenment to offer.

In my mind I have constructed two classes of action: one driven by principle, such as “I should help people who face oppression”, and one driven by immediacy, such as “I need to eat”. I make this as a practical distinction in that the former seems to be a generator of ways of being that replicate helplessness again and again and again, and the latter in my experience is a generator of ways of being that endure and are full of agency.

Which is not to say that helping people is bad. In fact, I spend a great deal of time doing just that, but it is hollow and does not persist if it comes from guilt or obligation. I simply can't do that much without a personal interest, even if I want to. That can sound really isolating and selfish, and to a degree it is, but I am coming from a place of deeply radical politics, that is to say anarchism. It says my needs are entangled with others and that collective action is the only way forward. I think this “cultural moment” that we've complained about would be a lot better with less moralizing and more people thinking of their needs and forcefully claiming them.

More specifically: I would not like to meet more people who believe in doing the best things and being the best people. I would like to meet more people who are bored out of their skulls and would like to do something interesting for a change (and also who aren't awful). The latter may be worse people, but they're much more likely to achieve literally anything.

All the above is a very specific complaint that's rooted in the socio-economic milieu we find ourselves in. The world is undoubtedly already full of people who are absolutely right now “thinking of their needs and forcefully claiming them”, but we somehow fail to see that as politically or artistically relevant.

A couple of zines to read about this — “On Hating Art” and “Be Gay Do Crimes”. They explain it better than I can!

I can’t quite empathize with your view that hope, truth, and beauty are hollow ideals, though I can intellectually understand you. I find that hope, truth, and beauty are useful, though mainly when accompanied by sharp, clear awareness and understanding. I have faith in a truth that exists in us, which may feel and look different in each person.

I don’t really begrudge you the belief in these ideals. I need to step away from them for practical purposes, but there's no reason someone else shouldn’t believe something different — that just makes things exciting. For instance, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if we agreed, and I hope you find as I do that it’s been more fun to have this conversation than to not have it!

At the same time, of all the things I can hand wave, the one I can’t make peace with is that we have a truth to ourselves. I think there is a truth in the world, that we can observe and be alive to with our senses. That people have needs and desires is clear; that there is a coherent self behind them waiting to come out is not as clear to me.

Improvising in music has taught me what I call the “empty step”, which is a phrase borrowed from tai chi. It is action full of desire or whatever, but coming from nowhere and gesturing toward no self. It is gesturing outward and becoming a part of the world and expressing nothing. I like it when I hear and perform the empty step. I have little desire to know or hear about anyone’s selves, truths, or distinctiveness, and I very much disbelieve that I have a self, truth, distinctiveness as a solid identity. I think I’m a bundle of tendencies and ongoing causations in a trenchcoat masquerading as a person, and that’s pretty joyous.

Also, I promise that if you’re my friend you’ll one day hear me say something that directly contradicts all this.

How has it been like getting very real about your needs? I find it so easy to misunderstand my needs.

Oh yeaaaaaaaaaa totally. There isn’t a lot of literacy about learning what you need, and a lot of the brutal work of the state, patriarchy, capitalism, empire, and art, is gaslighting people about what they need. “You need entertainment and relaxation.” No, I need to not have to work, and for my friends to not have to work so they have more time to spend with me and each other.

One way for me has been thinking through (with a therapist) and embracing anger as a way of reaching for needs. That’s hard work, because anger is one of those things that can easily cause you to misunderstand your needs, and to hurt people you don't want to hurt. I'm still working through that. But it’s like all those writing crits in creative writing classes: pay attention to the parts of your writing people have the most critiques about. Their critiques will often be useless, but it’s very important that they’re there. They’ll point you to the weakest parts of your writing, even if they’re wrong about what needs changing. Same with anger — it’s often destructive and misdirected, but it points toward real need. And the strength it gives you is real if you can love it and take care of it.

The other thing is being better about seeking pleasure and not feeling too guilty about it. That’s a step away from hedonism because I want to be real about what pleasure costs sometimes, and deep inside me is a Calvinist I have not murdered yet. But yeah, taking slow pleasure and seeking it out, and giving it time and resources. And giving pleasure to other people also!

What have you been enjoying in this “monolithic cultural moment”? I’ve been pretty miserable, and perhaps I'm not looking hard enough.

Yeah! Punk and noise and to some degree metal have always been good places for me, even though they're frustrating and rife with contradictions. They’re spaces where people come together to experience something special, something that speaks to anger and joy and brutality, and that feels more real than any number of other spaces I’ve been in. They’re places that contain real, physical and spiritual danger, and (I claim, but many would disagree) that the danger isn’t the point, but the fact that there’s danger means that something worth doing is actually happening. They’re strange, edgy, bro-ey and quite violent places sometimes, which sucks, and yet I, a queer middle class femme, have experienced more healing in them than in a decade of carefully curated “safe spaces”. This is definitely not true of everyone, and I want to avoid portraying all this as some kind of paradise. It is not. Many people here and in other scenes have left because of frankly unacceptable behaviour. What I mean to communicate is

- We find love in all kinds of compromised places

- Violence and rage are so tied up in pleasure and healing it’s no wonder we fuck up so much

I love genre stuff in general, because that’s where people know what they want. My favourite band in Singapore is Sial and you should absolutely see them live or look them up on Bandcamp.

Playing music for myself has been very wonderful. I love the other musicians, who are sweet and sincere even though sometimes I think they're playing the silliest shit imaginable.

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01 / I would like to replace hope with need, desperation, power, historicity, desire, boredom, solidarity, and revenge.

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