“I’m crying because it’s beautiful and because no one ever told me”
-Paul, a wastewater engineer, on observation of mangrove (a salt-filtering organism) in the Galapagos Islands. As told by Janine Benyus
April 13th, 2023 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 22
There is nothing quite like the celebration of the bare minimum to serve as a compass by which to orient towards what really counts. The argument here is for treating the mundane, suffering-ridden as it is, as something in which to indulge.
“The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees – to learn something by being nothing.”
— Mary Oliver
With the embrace of mundanity can come the exact opposite experience of it. And this is not to promote this embrace in a racist/classist, soberpilled, or ableism-apologetic way (pause here to give much respect to all working class, marginalized, sober, and disabled truehearts), but to promote it more as something that all people of all experiences can jive with no matter what their personal experience of reality. Anyone, anywhere, at any income level, any spot on the harm reductive drug consumption spectrum, any variation of psychological resilience ability, can (in their own way) embrace the mundane.
Mundanity silently cracks the best jokes. Mundanity is a grounding force to be reckoned with (in fact it’s a clamp-like mechanism for enforced contact with the ground). Mundanity turns the noise down and (no matter how anyone feels about the politics) threatens to call the cops. Mundanity is the cruel (and widely agreed-to-be-hot) dictator of wider reality. But mundanity is also free, and frankly, none of these bids for shared understanding at all even begin to capture mundanity.
“Look at philosophy as something that’s radically creative. Almost not even just philosophy, think about things that you do from a very creative perspective. I think that’s like, god, if there’s one thing about how we conduct society, our economic systems, it’s that it is rigidly non-creative in many ways. We don’t value creativity, we do, we only value creativity when it can be syphoned into categories and [is] something that can be marketed, sold… a commodity in and of itself. I think that really kills an element of creativity, maybe not kills, but it hides a kernel of what made that happen which is creativity, which is art.”
WWADWWAD (?) Featured Curiosities:
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& In Defence Of Bad Vibes by Laura Pitcher, aka this utter BANGER of an article
Upcoming Events
Local, AKST Time:
Community Action Night - April 17th at 6PM at the Trophy Lounge (at Jewel Lake Bowl), meet up to meet fellow community members interested in collective liberation at a local level
Community Discussion Meetup - May 20th at 1PM, meet up to discuss pressing community needs, message the poster of this for location information
Taste Of Spenard - May 21st at 12PM food trucks, farmers’ market, & craft vendors, Location: Koot’s parking lot
“What I like about the Christmas film so much is that (and I think this is universally true about the Christmas film, and I talk about it in the book) they’re films that set up a group or a social order or something, through the castration of the symbolic father figure.
And I think that’s such a radical way to imagine. I mean, I think it’s true to the spirit of Christmas! Christmas is about God’s castration. God comes down, the infinite takes the finite form.
And so I just love that and I think maybe It’s A Wonderful Life is the most obvious. It’s very clear that the father is going to kill himself, he’s so bereft of enjoyment, and … it’s only through the seeing how terrible things are, and he learns how to embrace the things that before were an obstacle to his enjoyment, as the object of his enjoyment.”