WHEN I'M JONESING FOR A MONARCH //THE AMERICAN ASSUMPTION

Thoughts while cleaning my bathroom sink this morning, which is pretty gross from rinsing paint brushes / using a soap that apparently doesn't dissolve (??) :::

It's kind of a 'duh' observation, but a big function of "culture" is to keep people from getting stuck in their heads. 

Everything has a downside and I wonder if being stuck in our heads / disembodied / dissociated is just a noxious byproduct of working out multiculturalism.

Because in America for example, there are SO many stories going around about what is Real, what is Good, what is life / death, how to show respect, how to mark time,,, that they all unwittingly cancel each other out, in terms of their ability to answer big questions / provide deep comfort to the individual psyche so we can focus on sensual processing, daily deeds, and putting up with each other's bulllllllshhhhh----

It's easy to perceive the cynical side of things these days, to see cultural narratives or any kind of mass-storytelling as 'propaganda' / castration of free-thinking -- but the same phenomenon can also be described as a harmonizing force of nature, enabling large groups of people (read: wild animals!) to imagine in alignment & move with elegance. 

That democratic dream.

Whereas without a regional religion or cosmological myth, it is up to each individual to 'solve' the deep existential (cellular?) tantrums that demand to know, What am I doing here, Am I doing it right, and What comes next? 

I also wonder if lacking that core narrative only sets us searching for other stories to justify neurosis, fixing a sometimes too-critical eye on our personal histories, in particular the faults of our parents.

So individualistic !!

Sometimes I have a lil nervous giggle when I wonder if maybe I wouldn't prefer to have a king, or a queen, or even a priest who everyone deferred to, if it meant I could grow up with a deeply incorporated sense of Social Selfhood, where the dispersed unconscious speaks the same language, referring to the same icons, and we all gather for the same holy days where no one is left out... 

I'm aware that fantasy has a shit track record, and it's by no means to say I think the project of multicultural compatriotism is futile, just that it's turning out to be a WAY bigger project than we imagined when storming the Bastille

-- so, we might like to be patient with ourselves.

I want to see racism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism and native/settler strife, not as a dead end nor as an edict for nationalist homogeny, but as a dilemma that's teaching us something sweet about ourselves :::

That through the stress & conflict conjured by -- let's call it the American Assumption (that humans can live peacefully as One People without subscribing to One Story of what this life is, a very new hypothesis!) -- we're becoming aware how deeply our bodies love to correspond with the earth, and how diverse the earth is in what it calls out from us. 

Because the "tribalist" instincts we now consciously wrestle with aren't only about old patterns of self-preservation or even hierarchical logic; they're also about the momentum our nervous systems develop while corresponding to a specific place :::  when / what / how much to eat, how loud to talk, how sexy to dance, what of the body to cover, how often to gather, how much of a bounty to sell or to save -- these reflexes grow out of our ancestral memory, the embodied expectations of our predecessors, based on the literal climate of the land that dreamed us into being. 

And those lands have raaaaange ...

So importing all these tendencies from around the world, it's like a dance floor where everyone's listening to their own music -- sexy as hell but akward as fuck, pretty much inevitable but not not-dangerous -- and I like to believe that if you are here, you were born wanting to help make it work.

I have 'notions' of what this might take ...

But in the meantime here we are, twirling up the memory of far-off places -- me, Ireland, you, Taiwan -- with ways of being that are both completely valid & inherently foreign to this 1/2 acre patch of Texan/Apache/Comanche/Tonkawa grass. 

But there is comfort in that, isn't there? 

Not that this or any land has ever been utopian -- hello, earth to planet earth!! -- but, native histories remind us that American soil has always been diverse, interdimensional, and nomadically inclined.

Which to me means there is room for my dúchas and there is room for your 遗产.

I put that peace in the water as it washes clean my sink.