By John Paul Davis — Nov 24, 2024

Startled by startling truths

It’s a Wednesday, far too warm for November, a full twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the same day last year. I don’t want to get up, having had my most fitful nights’ sleep in years, and as I lie in bed, looking out the window at the wind pushing & pulling the branches of the trees in my building’s back yard, the still-green leaves add another layer of concern to tight knot of worry in my chest. That same wind puffs the scent of burning wood in through the open window and I remember the forest fires in New Jersey, a minor news story from yesterday.

I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to work today. I don’t want to take my customary morning walk through Van Cortlandt Park, even though the leaves are turning and the whole park is a decadence of color. I especially don’t want to read the news. It is the day after Election Day 2024 here in the United States, and I am sad.

I had hoped for a much different outcome. Vice President Harris lost the election "bigly" (to borrow a fake word from her opponent), and I had hoped that a majority of American voters would not choose the treasonous convicted felon and rapey foul-mouthed grifter who was in clear cognitive decline and who incited an attempted insurrection. My sadness is not as much because Kamala Harris and her largely neoliberal vision for the future of my country lost, but because Donald Trump and his nightmarish kleptocratic plans for the United States of America won, because that means a majority of the voters in my country could not see past their fears to reject that vision, or maybe, they agree with it, maybe that reflects the kind of future they want to live in. I continue to hope that is not the case.

Apart from my own sadness, I have not got much to say in the way of a “take” on the election. I am, in general, not good at “takes,” because I am a person who takes a while to know my own mind, and because I am ultimately not very partisan about much of anything but also because the driving force in my inner and intellectual life is curiosity. If I claim any politics, I am probably an old-school socialist; Bernie Sanders is often the U.S. politician who articulates anything close to how I see things and what I hope for, politically. Apart from that, I take all the "love your neighbor as yourself" stuff in the Gospels seriously. When I vote, it is usually for the “lesser of two evils,” which, well, I’ll let you parse that phrase and what it implies for yourself.

A “take,” is, of course, a way of trying to exert control over what remains, essentially, uncontrollable, because the past has already happened; it cannot be controlled, only reckoned with. The future might be influenced, but it too cannot be controlled. Control, also, as Hartmut Rosa has observed, creates unbridgeable distance between us and what we seek to control, because control destroys any chance of resonance - of having a meaningful encounter and relationship. Control alienates us from what is controlled by making it a mere object.

Poetry and music, and all art, offer a way of re-wilding, re-weirding the world and what’s in it, and therefore being in relationship with it. I am suspicious of my own poems when they parrot a talking point or a party line, or an accepted explanation, or when they amount to a pledge of allegiance or recitation of a creed - they may be well-phrased, or even clever, but they are not doing the work I believe art best does - that of making the world strange and wondrous again, of refusing to compute. They also end up boring me. The poems, both of my own and by other people, that move me the most, color outside the lines, make the world stranger and more mysterious, and yes, more dangerous. They challenge accepted narratives and explanations. They startle me with startling truths. And don't we need more of that right about now?

In that spirit, here are some poems and songs. About seven years ago I wrote a poem called “Bring A Forest Fire To Work Day” which entertained what felt like science-fiction at the time I wrote it - that the forest fires of the west would come east and trouble New York City, where I live. Of course, this ended up happening. Another, written during the first Trump administration, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Like Lying Down,” only barely didn’t make it into my second book, because I wasn’t really sure how to end the poem; in the two years since submitting the final draft of the book, I’ve revisited (has anyone ever observed the similarities between revisit and revise? Newsletter topic for another time) more than once, and the ending it has now (I make no promises I won’t revise it again) came to me about a year ago, reading the news about what is going on (still, sadly, still) in Gaza. “Upgrade Blues” did make the book, but it remains a favorite of mine, and has a new resonance today than it did four years ago when I wrote it. I’m including two fresh, (as in, written since the election) poems here as well, because what’s the point of having one’s own newsletter if one cannot self-publish one’s fresh-baked poems?

As far as songs go, there are two I’m thinking of, both written during the first Trump administration, both written with my wife in mind, both attempting to articulate my vision for our future, hers and mine, in the face of the many and continuous emergencies. “Courage Either Way” is a song by my band Love in the Ruins, and so is sung by my incredibly talented bandmate, Dana. I wrote the whole thing in about an hour; it’s one of those that “just came,” the lucky way some art can come into being. It captures, I think, the sense of helplessness that once can feel when facing the many emergencies, but also choose hope, even if the hope is small:

push away these fears
for just one more day
or for years and years
it’s courage either way

“Not Flying” had its germ in the opening line - “we’re not flying / we’re just falling slow” which sums up how it feels to be trying to make a life worth living in capitalist modernity, but I struggled with it lyrically until, at the mention of it by a friend, I was re-reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” from The Four Quartets, and these lines struck me:

music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

Though I don’t think Eliot is using the image in this way (it is part of the poem’s larger argument that humans are stuck in time, and people’s proper concern is something more eternal, like the divine will), it struck me as an apt image of what it is to live in and through capitalist modernity, especially (but not exclusively) as an artist (my wife is also an artist - an actor and writer), and I hit upon the song’s chorus - “we’ll be the music / as long as the music lasts / we might not make history / but this is where I want to be.”

It is tempting to think that as writers, artists, music-makers, what we do is merely “entertainment,” that it does not matter. The world of capitalist modernity certainly sees art, and “the humanities” this way, partly because the choices of artists are foolishness in its eyes. At the same time it does all it can to convert what we make and do into products - to squash it into mere entertainment (that is the goal of generative “AI” after all - to flatten and standardize human creative output into purposefully mediocre “content”) the same way social media seeks to squash human relationships into its “graph”. It is in the bridge of the song that I keep returning to these days though; it is the closet I’ll ever get to a “mission statement”:

It’s your spirit
lights our corner
in this injured world
in these hard days
oh my dreamer
we’ll need dreams more and more

To misquote St. Peter: Takes have I none, but such as I have I give thee: take up these poems, these songs, and walk.

Poems!

Bring A Forest Fire To Work Day

The world's getting hotter
meaning the great fires of the west will move north & east
toward our temperate suburbs
with their young, development-friendly trees
& houses printed from pulp. so it's not surprising
when one shows up at the office,
the scamp of a small flame,
little lethal pulse riding unseen up the elevator
to the nineteenth floor, climbing the walls
in the morning meeting
melting the plastic frame of its chair,
roaring & cracking so loud
that the interrupter who predictably sucks
the air out of the room finds he's met
his match. You can't interrupt
death. Smartphones & laptops stop working
above a hundred Fahrenheit.
The burning gobbles up the conference table
& cracks the glass walls. Productivity plummets.
No voice comes out of the flaming.
It is what it is, but it is no god.
It devours the just & the unjust. All ashes look the same:
money & contracts & passports & the autobiography of the CEO,
tailored suits & off-the-rack jackets.
As the hot gusts winnow the window offices & the cube farm
to petrochemical & silicon puddles I realize this means I'm jobless now.
Pressed in a bottleneck of bodies, we clamor for the stairwell,
stinging tongues licking us with burn marks.
All this equalizer wants is to translate us to smudges of carbon
without care for who we love or what we wear
or whose brand is stamped on the back of our phones
or who we voted for or what we pray to.
If any gods are listening, none answer
as the roaring light swells
toward the melting point of steel.

(originally published in my second book, Climbing A Burning Rope)

Upgrade Blues

I bought a new smartphone, the old one dying
as they're built to do so we'll have something
to send to the landfills, beryllium & cadmium
to sour the air over Ghana when the poor children

breathe in neurotoxins while burning the junked
old devices to strip precious minerals off their plastic carapaces
which they'll sell below market rate
so their families can eat meanwhile the price per share

of stock in the phone's manufacturer headquartered
in a zero-emissions future love paradise campus
goes up & the new phone is tastefully shiny & calculates
faster with a screen so wide you can't tell when it stops

& reality starts & the improved camera means I can take photos
of myself in this dark winter also its canny face sensor
recognizes me even if I no longer do, if you had told
me 40 years ago I'd hold this kind of power in my hand

it would have sounded like a utopia daydream
yet I'm still sad reading the news from 1000 newspapers
I can now access which all say the world's getting worse
& sliding my thumb across the jewel mirror face

of the thing only allows me to reload the same page or tweak
the settings which is only useful if you want to keep
using this system but if you want another one entirely
then adjusting the preferences changes absolutely nothing.

(originally published in my second book, Climbing A Burning Rope)

It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Like Lying Down)

How did the Germans who were not Nazis in 1938
get out of bed & perform well at work
day after day is what I wonder while the news
coughs up more doomsday on the TV kitchen
at work. The sound is down but I don't have to hear
the exact words of the flush-faced chinless old white man
snarling to know he's making the world
a worse place. There's also music streaming
in from somewhere, a playlist some coworker
made & right now it's the song from my childhood
about the end of the world, the singer's breakneck
& breathless delivery a symbol of panic
which means he's probably lying
about feeling fine or maybe it's more wish
than lie like when the President said he could gun
someone down in the middle of 5th Ave
& his voters would still love him. Can I make another
online shopping cart today? Another product
display page? It doesn't feel right
to work so hard to make everything get incrementally
more terrible, but there's apparently no money
in making things better so I have days where the cursor
throbs on my screen like the narrowest heart,
like a dehydrated digital dog panting, like a bomb counting
down to its final whimper & I never type any code.
I have days where I wake up to overcast
skies facing another day in limbo
praying to whoever will listen that the less-evil
political party will win control of Congress
so things can maybe not get worse for a few years
but I’m granted no wishes
& I have days where I think about the warming
skies & the die-off of even the insects & voter
suppression & murderous racist police
& all the new & interesting places we get to have forest fires
& rapists on the Supreme Court & another genocide
& another genocide & another genocide
the stink of it flavoring everything,
until even our coffee & toothpaste & the kisses
of our lovers taste of it, the stench, the stain,
the bombs bombing the bombed-out schools,
my tax dollars at work & what if we all just stopped
what we were doing, refused to earn another cent,
would the bone machine just keep grinding
down everything beautiful about the world
or could we starve it? Say we left our desks
& our stations & just all walked out onto the street
& lay down? I’m going to Fifth Avenue,
right under the dark tower
with the President’s name on it, & I’m going to lie
there, & wait for him to come down his golden escalator,
let’s all go, let’s stop the traffic,
he can’t shoot all of us,
let’s shut off the stream of commerce,
seriously what if we all just lay there between the shine
of the skyscrapers, what if we stopped throwing
our bodies into the mechanism’s steely teeth?

Planned Obsolescence

I do not have admin access.
I grew tired of proving to the robot
I am not a robot. I practiced a robotic
affect & approach
when they started giving our jobs to robots
which weren’t very good
at our jobs, but were not good in a specific
way I learned to copy. The party that lost
the election insists the economy is good
& the party that won insists it’s not
but in two months when power is transferred
they’ll switch opinions
& I’ll still be squeezed like the soft creature
I am. It doesn’t take much pressure
to pop all my bones to powder.
Despite all the emergencies I am
expected to show up to work. Several slow-motion
apocalypses smudge the window to the future
but someone has to make these slides
for the presentation. In the future
robots will make the slides
they’ll show to robots programmed to watch
& report to robots with admin access
& the numbers will shift from one column
to the next while everyone I love
will spend their weary days losing
their appeals to the robot
decisions. Filling out the forms,
weekly, daily. By then every robot everywhere
should certainly know everything
about us but once again the form
will require that we enter our names
& addresses & postal codes
which is how we will bow,
by offering up our data,
which is how we’ll show
we are not a threat.

American November

Sometimes I hate being proved right.
The forest fires came east just as the polls closed.

Just as the fires closed in, the polls burned in my eyes.
Science-fiction & hope have become the same thing.

Sorrow & loneliness have become the same thing
coiled around my heart, unholy.

Wrap me in a holy bite, o teeth of love
call me back to myself, whoever that is.

Whoever you are, don’t turn your back on me.
Patriotism is a cheap substitute for community

& community doesn’t come cheap. Patriotism
is the last refuge of the terrified, the go-along, the exhausted.

Come along, you terrified & exhausted, take refuge
with me from hate. Prove me wrong.

Music!

“Courage Either Way” - Love in the Ruins

Listen on Apple Music | Listen on Spotify

“Not Flying” - Day of the Mountain

Listen on Apple Music | Listen on Spotify

A Playlist:

One of the ways I respond to the world is by making playlists. I've been doing this since I was a kid; my sisters and I actually had a pretend radio station called WMUDD in which we used a boombox with two tape decks and a mic input to create our own mixes and also talk in between. We talked about the music but also did little comedy routines. I even made custom-designed covers for them. By the time I got to high school in the late 1980s, my "mix tapes" were requested, and I continued making them until CDs took over, then switched to making mix CDs, and then finally, playlists. I still design custom covers for them.
After the election, I made such a playlist, and the act of making it changed me, partly because listening to that many songs adjacent to my theme of political heartbreak, the songs found homes in me that called forth the parts of me and my relationship to the world that do not fit easily into popular narratives. Some reminded me of what I already believed and had let nap during election season, because I wanted to hope for a better future. Others gave shape and weight to my sadness. Others reminded me of what I believe art can do that opinion articles, political discourse, theory, and stump speeches cannot - namely, keep the world unusual, and call people back into relationship with the world and each other. Among other things.
In any case, here is the playlist, which comforted and reoriented me, partly in the making of it, and then in the many listens I've given it the past two weeks.

We'll Need Dreams More And More - Apple Music
We'll Need Dreams More And More - Spotify

Readings:

I mentioned Hartmut Rosa above; I recently read his book The Uncontrollability Of The World, in which he expands on the central thesis that “attempting to ensure control over things only robs them of their resonant quality,” resonance being a “true, vibrant experience.” The more we try to control something, the more it moves out of reach, until we push it into a state where not only is it uncontrollable, but irrevocably so, because we lose the ability to truly reach it.

Rob Horning feels about podcasts about the same way I do:

“The genre of podcast where people “hang out” and engage in unstructured chitchat for hours about a basket of loosely related topics is especially alien to me; it sounds like drive-time radio for a journey that everyone has accepted will never end, because there is nowhere to go and no way to get there. Livestreams presumably take that banter-and-blather ethos to its full phatic apotheosis, where, as Eric Harvey suggested in a Bluesky post, it becomes “just recursive content, a person or a bunch of people sitting in front of a camera talking about how many people are currently watching them sit in front of a camera.” It is just presence announcing itself as the only topic left, the only thing atomized monads can have in common.”

Dougald Hine is as reluctant as I am to offer a “take” on the election, which I find comforting.

On the other hand, I am totally here for Phil Christman’s election “take,” maybe because I, too, am a Christian and a leftist, so perhaps my agreement with him is not surprising.

And, finally, Justin Smith-Ruiu writes about how reality TV broke out of its confines and invaded politics, prompting me, as he so often does, to see the whole thing in a completely different way.