What We Think We Want, and What the World Thinks About That

[Image: photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões of a portion of an exhibit (2015-16) at Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belem, by Colombian artist Nicolás Paris. The exhibit was called Four variations on nothing or talking about that which has no name, which — depending on your point of view — might say everything or nothing, or, really, anything in between. Quite a title, eh? (Found the photo on Flickr, naturally enough, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

If you, not just you in this room tonight but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as but individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

In one generation, all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins, and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and all the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.

(William Faulkner [source])

…and:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.

And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.

(Hannah Arendt [source])

…and:

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

(Linda Pastan [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Mushim Ikeda: I have to laugh when people say they would like to live like a nun or monk in a temple or a Buddhist spiritual community, because they like to be alone and meditate all the time. That’s the last thing you’re going to find in any of those places. There will be times, hopefully, that it’s quiet. There will be a schedule, and during that time people tend to be quiet and well behaved. However, in any community, virulent tensions will arise because of individual differences. Human beings are going to have conflict, and conflict generates a lot of noise, both internally in the mind and externally in the environment. As an example, I heard about one residential community where the kitchen staff got into an acrimonious and lengthy debate about whether there should be one large bottle of Tabasco sauce kept in the condiments area or small bottles at each table.

Joan Sutherland: I can understand the desire for the silence and the space to relax and to begin to see things more clearly, but the dichotomy between that and the Tabasco sauce wars is illusory. Neither can exist in isolation, and if one part of our practice is about a deepening experience of spaciousness, the other part is about embodying that in the world. It’s the old form and emptiness thing, and if you fall too far on one side or the other, something is missing.

(Lion’s Roar [source])

…and:

…what I desperately needed when I was twenty-one and could not find was a set of possibilities, of alternative universes of social discourse, of other assumptions about what was good or primary, of other viable ways of making a living, making love, having and raising children, being together, eating, cleaning up, relating to a landscape, dying, burying and mourning my dead, remembering, forgetting, and imagining.

I still need this today. What we think we are determines what we see as making us, what in the past has led to us. What we think we can be comes from what we think we are. What we think we want to be and what we don’t want to be makes us choose among available pasts and futures.

(Marge Piercy [source])

…and:

what everybody knows now

Even though the laws have changed
my grandmother still takes us
to the back of the bus when we go downtown
in the rain. It’s easier, my grandmother says,
than having white folks look at me like I’m dirt.

But we aren’t dirt. We are people
paying the same fare as other people.
When I say this to my grandmother,
she nods, says, Easier to stay where you belong.

I look around and see the ones
who walk straight to the back. See
the ones who take a seat up front, daring
anyone to make them move. And know
this is who I want to be. Not scared
like that. Brave
like that.

Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown
pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit
wherever we want now. No need in making trouble,
she says. You all go back to New York City but
I have to live here.

We walk straight past Woolworth’s
without even looking in the windows
because the one time my grandmother went inside
they made her wait and wait. Acted like
I wasn’t even there. It’s hard not to see the moment—
my grandmother in her Sunday clothes, a hat
with a flower pinned to it
neatly on her head, her patent-leather purse,
perfectly clasped
between her gloved hands—waiting quietly
long past her turn.

(Jacqueline Woodson [source])