As I sit and listen to the fireworks on the Fourth of July, I realize I’m not as frightened as I’ve been in the past fifteen (give or take) fourth of Julys. Even my cat is calmer. The fireworks are not more or less loud. They are a reminder that, well, this is all they’ve been able to do so far—not in a ‘well, we’re fine way,’ because we clearly are not fine, there are clearly many people hurting, but there are also people living loudly and defiantly. And in a neighborhood where most of the fireworks are being set off by black and brown people, they are a reminder that there is still much power held by the people. All night low riders cruised up and down our busy street playing cumbia-infused trap music. This didn’t happen the last four Forth of Julys I’ve lived in this house, and I like it—a sense that someone new is on the prowl, someone or someones ready to fight a little and take back a sense of belonging from those in power.
The thing about power and deciding who to kick out of your nation is that eventually, if you kick enough people out or put them in camps or make them live in fearful silence, more and more people wonder what it is a nation is supposed to do. In the national imaginary, a nation is meant to keep people safe and give them a sense of belonging, but more and more it seems they don’t do that for the majority of people of this planet. A nation is meant to promote a sense of global community where peace proliferates and resources are traded, but that also doesn’t seem to be the case. We appear to be at the end of a centuries-long era when to belong to a nation ensured a certain amount of protection, where it supposedly made sense to live in, belong to, and create your own nation. But nations now are little more than formalized units of corruption.
Writing in this vein poofs up two tiny devils on my shoulders: one saying I’ve been woefully inadequate in assessing the crimes of nations these last decades, and the other saying I’m being far too critical and besides, what other containers have we for ensuring human rights? I wave the two devils away as best I can, because I’m only recording thoughts here. I think a lot about the title of this blog, Instar, and how I hope it captures transitions not just of gender and climate but also the small shivers of discontent when world orders no longer symbolize what they might have once, for some.
On the night of July 3rd I attended a concert at Reed College by the internationally renowned pianist Kit Armstrong, who stepped out on stage and immediately took the mic to say that he did not put much stock in the idea of modern nations, that as a diminutive Asian person with a British accent who had lived and had meaningful experiences in many different countries, he’d ceased thinking of himself as a subject of a nation and more as being at home in many different places. The laughter in the mostly white crown was uncertain. I don’t think anyone was expecting to be confronted with open anarchy in such an unassuming package on such a fete. But Armstrong was playing a program designed to evoke Franz Liszt’s idea of home as he moved from France to Weimar to Rome over the course of his life, between the varying cities and factions that were still competing to establish themselves as capitol cities of young or yet-to-be-born nations. And a young nation is one that also grows old and dies, eventually.
Incidentally, my favorite piece that Armstrong played that night was "Song of the Madwoman on the Seashore" by a mentor of Liszt’s, French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan. Spooky and haunting and threaded through with whimsy, it made me feel that suffering contains in it a certain kind of tenacity, an evidence of life, that shouldn’t be overlooked in favor of something brighter. So here’s to that, I guess.