My dreams are telling me that living it out loud means needing to be ready to fight.
In the sleep before last I created a scene about standing up to my father.
In the latest one I ended up fighting and defeating all three hosts of a podcast, and then becoming the fourth based on the victories.
Just refusing to be constrained by ideas is one thing; fairly simple and mostly a matter of my relationship to myself.
But refusing out in the world is not going to be that simple.
I think for a long time I’ve been stuck at a place where I live it out loud as much as I dare, but how much I dare doesn’t amount to much. I’ve lived so that I let their ideas constrain me, and even worse I restrain myself.
It’s like the chilling effect in journalism. People yammer on endlessly about “the liberal media”, and it’s true that most journalists start out friendly to a very socialist way of seeing the world.
But socialists don’t own newspapers or media conglomerates. The boss class is not socialist at all. Quite the reverse.
So the young journalist learns by mostly unspoken rules where the lines are, and the catastrophic consequences of crossing them.
Most of them conform, and it’s not really very different in academia.
Every once in a while you get a Chris Hedges instead. What eventually happens is that they cross the almost invisible lines bravely, And in spite of their prodigious talents, and their willingness to go to the worst places on earth to cover the story of evil winning, they get fired for noting that evil is winning, and that their bosses live at the root of that evil.
On a much smaller scale, the same thing happened to me in academia. I was only pushing half a foot over the line from time to time, and usually for causes involving mere personal nobility. But the tripwire finally tripped anyway.
It was neither well-rewarded nor heroic, and that’s the tragedy of it that I still feel deeply today. Sometimes I feel stupid, for not finding my way to bigger rewards. Sometimes I feel shame for the pitifully shrunken nobility of my causes.
What functioned legitimately for many years as the smallest and narrowest of win-wins … became lose-lose in the end. In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey. Soy un perdedor …
But the crash and burn isn’t the end of the story at all.
In fact I’m right here at the start today in brown August wondering where the monsoonal lions are and with infinite slowness crafting the kind of life that is up to the safari of answering the question.