Thoughts

Made with Neocities and Phoenix Code

"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself." – Susan Sontag

A place to put my thoughts on different topics.

Ancestry

1.7.25

I like researching my ancestry, both the micro on Ancestry.com as well as the macro of learning about place and culture. But I've been increasingly frustrated by the feeling that I'm not really learning anything; instead I'm just adding to my own fiction about who my ancestors and heritage were. I can make some assumptions about individuals, but I only know some facts about them, like when and who they married, maybe their occupation. Even then, I've made mistakes—once I spent an hour or so diving into a really interesting character in my family tree, only to get a message later from someone else on Ancestry pointing out that the dates didn't line up and he wasn't the husband of my several-times-great aunt. I felt so disappointed, and like I had wasted all this time researching this California Gold Rush outlaw. But thinking back on it now, I got to learn about an interesting person and became part of a very small group of people who even know he existed. All of the times I've researched any other, more famous historical figure (a favorite Wikipedia rabbit hole of mine), did it matter that they weren't related to me? Why do I care in this particular instance?

The thing is, I had built up this story in my head about this person being part of my heritage, and it made me feel special and part of something, part of history. As if my ancestors who didn't have newspaper articles or criminal records weren't. And all of this lost information about who they were saddens me—the people who knew them have passed. I asked my dad and aunts and uncles about whether my grandparents had shared stories about their own parents or grandparents (especially any medical conditions, since I've been having some issues of my own), and I didn't get much from them. My grandparents weren't really the kind of people who would talk about that, or would only mention some factoid or story occasionally that didn't really give a full picture. So now all of that history is lost, and it only hammers home to me the sheer magnitude of human history that has also been lost; all of the people we know nothing about.

In the macro, I often find a dearth of sources on things I really want to know about a culture my ancestors were part of. I mean, if I stuck to more recent eras, I can find a lot on a general region, but not much about a smaller area or village I've identified. And often, I'm interested in several centuries ago, pre-Christianization, and there's just not a lot of info. I recently spent the majority of two days researching Slavic folk religion and ran into a lot of roadblocks. There's some of it that's been pretty well-preserved due to folk orthodoxy, but its syncretic nature means that it can be hard to parse what the "original" or "authentic" beliefs were, and how much was changed when it met Christianity. Anything about the pantheon of more major gods (as opposed to spirits, forest deities, etc.) does not have super credible sources; mostly mentions from Christian missionaries or Romans who were not very interested in accurately documenting the culture.

So a lot of it is just guesswork—educated guesswork, often in conjunction with what we know about neighboring cultures, but not something to hang your hat on. I know that's how history is—it's our own interpretations and narratives we place on the past. But it's still frustrating.

Another major issue on top of all of this is that so much of European (likely others, obviously, but this has been my focus) folk history, religion, culture, etc. is the result of 19th- and 20th-century nationalist projects, and have been used by Retvrn-types and rightwingers to advance fascist rhetoric and movements. The modern movement to return to the Slavic Native Religion (Rodnovery) has had a lot of issues with xenophobia, antisemitism, racism, nationalism, etc. Not the entire movement, but a concerning number nonetheless, have advocated for things like banning interracial marriage, expelling Jewish people, Muslims, and others from their countries, creating ethnostates. And a lot of their beliefs aren't even based on what we know or have guessed about Slavic Paganism, including the use of texts that are known forgeries. It's like the US alt-right's interest in Nordic mythology not for its own sake, but to advance their own narratives about White Replacement Theory, superior races, and so on, so that when you see someone with a Nordic rune tattoo or a Mjolnir pendant, you're not sure if they're chill or a Neo-Nazi. Dogwhistles, man.

Being Known

10.8.24

Ever since my childhood I've felt like nobody really knows me, and more than that, nobody can really know another person. It's something that I've struggled with during episodes of depression. I've found some solace in writers like Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, who have expressed these feelings more eloquently. Kafka once wrote, "I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones." Similarly, Woolf wrote that "we do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others."

Every person I know only knows a few facets of myself, or a few versions of myself. The self I am to them is not me. The person they know is not me. Even the people who know me best—my sister and my wife—are missing huge parts of me that I don't or can't share with them, or that I've tried to share and they just don't understand.

I do think there is a relationship between being known and being loved, but at this moment in time I don't think that you need one in order to have the other. I mean, obviously you can know someone and not love them, or love someone but not know them, but I've always understood it more as meaning that if you truly, deeply know somebody, you cannot escape loving them, and vice versa. Because how much do you need to know somebody before loving them? In my favorite parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan doesn't know anything about the other man except that he is a neighbor in need of help, and that's all it takes to perform an act of love.

At the same time, I would love to be known.

Martyrdom

10.6.24

I had a conversation the other night with my wife. I had mentioned casually how I would die for one of my friends. I mean, I brought it up casually, but I was completely serious. My wife was upset about it, and asked, "What about me?" I was confused about this, and said that, of course I wouldn't want to leave her, but hypothetically, if I had to die for my friend, I really would because of my love for them.

She asked again, "What about me? What about your love for me?" and I realized that what she was asking was why I didn't love her enough to live for her. It wasn't really a question I could answer. I've grown up with Christianity molding my psyche. "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends" (John 15:13) has forever been engraved in my heart. Jesus dying in solidarity with us is held up as the greatest act of love to ever occur. Not even to mention centuries of church history that celebrated martyrdom as the ultimate display of faith and love.

In revolutionary leftist circles, self-sacrifice for the love of others, dying for others, is also a virtue. It's one of the greatest acts you could do for the cause. But I don't feel like I've seen many people talk about this other side of it. I mean, maybe they do and I just haven't been part of that discussion.

When someone dies from suicide, often their loved ones can react with anger that the person "chose to leave them"—it can feel like the person didn't love them enough to stay, which isn't necessarily true but is still how it can feel. It's why people say suicide is selfish. That's a topic for another time.

I've dealt with suicidality throughout my life, and I do think that my attraction to martyrdom, and desire to be a martyr, is connected to it. I don't really see that as a problem, to be honest. It makes me think of people who've self-immolated; literally using suicide as a form of protest. Sometimes it makes me wonder how many martyrs in the past were suicidal, and were able to weave those feelings with their deeply-held beliefs to find a kind of calling.

During the 2020 protests, my wife and other partner stayed home while I went to actions. I don't think they're bad leftists for it. My wife and I went to more of the family-friendly protests and marches together, but I went without them to other ones. They both had a hard time with it, especially after I was arrested at one point and went to jail. My other partner told me that her therapist had told her about when her husband was involved in revolutionary action in India, where she was from, and she would try to hide his weapons and gear to prevent him from going out and participating. I was so frustrated with her at the time because I felt like she was trying to guilt me, but now I realize she was just trying to get me to understand that what she was feeling was something valid; it didn't mean that she thought what I was doing was wrong, but rather that she loved me and didn't want to lose me.

I don't know how to balance this. What is greater, to love someone enough to die for them, or love someone enough to live for them? It's like the trolley problem, but with yourself simultaneously on the tracks and at the lever.

Media

11.21.2024

I feel a little embarrassed sometimes as an anarchist and prison abolitionist who enjoys watching police procedurals. But, I also know several other people with similar guilty pleasures; another leftist I know still likes to watch The West Wing, for instance. I feel like there are a few reasons why I still watch them that I wanted to think through for myself.

Part of it is definitely just the comfort of watching shows that I watched when I was younger, and even for those that are new to me they follow the same structure. It's like ordering a cheeseburger at a place I haven't been to before, I guess. There's the cold open where someone gets murdered, the team is put on the case, they overcome various obstacles as they try to solve the problem, and then they deal with the bad guys.

I've had an interest in justice since I was young as well; for a time in middle and high school I wanted to go into forensics or work for the FBI or something similar. That's stuck with me through my journey as a leftist, as I've wrestled with and encountered other perspectives on what justice really means, and what nonviolent, noncarceral solutions would look like.

Even though these shows are sold on the punitive justice system—the "bad guy" either dies or is "put away" in the end—I find it interesting when they deviate from that perspective. I think there is a lot of tension in these shows about the efficacy of the justice system, like when victim's families say they don't feel better or don't even care when a perpetrator is caught, because their loved one is still gone. Or when a member of the crime-solving team has to encounter a situation in which there's no real justice—I feel like this comes up often in storylines where a perpetrator is getting revenge on someone who harmed them, or when a perpetrator is experiencing something like psychosis (although how these shows deal with mental illness is a whole other issue, lol).

I really like the team-as-family trope, and crimesolving partner relationships. Something about trusting people with your life, and them trusting you with theirs. Friends (sometimes more than friends) with bonds like that are something that I wish for. I think that may be the case with some of my friends, to be honest, but we're never put in situations like in these shows to test that. That's a good thing, of course, but that's also why I like the hurt/comfort trope, because it lets us see how deeply the characters care for each other, and what lengths they're willing to go for each other, and I can imagine that my friends and I would do the same for each other.

Theology

11.3.2024

I wrote a few paragraphs on this a month ago and ended up deleting them because I wasn't happy with it. As someone who is generally in queer leftist spaces, I don't usually share that I also identify as a Christian, because many people have religious trauma around that or are generally against religion. My closer friends and partners, however, are chill with it although only one of them is also Christian. My wife and I met at a Christian college (lol), and she doesn't like talking about religion at all anymore. My other partner is somewhat spiritual and takes my faith seriously, and will talk to me about it, but we have pretty different beliefs.

So basically I don't have people right now to talk to who share my beliefs; I haven't become close friends with anyone at Friends Meetings yet but I know that's probably the best avenue to do so. There were other queer anarchists at the meeting I used to go to (I've moved since then, unfortunately). A group of them even took me to my first anti-fascist action. I was friends with one of them, but we sort of drifted apart since I moved away.

It's hard to explain to non-believers why I'm still Christian. Sometimes it's hard to even determine for myself why I am. The short answer I usually give people—which is true, just a bit oversimplified—is that I became a leftist, and an anarchist specifically, through studying theology in college and learning about the rich history of leftist Christian movements.

The other aspect of it, though, is that I just feel like my mind has been so molded by my Christian upbringing that it's hard for me not to see the world through that lens. And maybe I just want to find a way to reconcile that worldview I grew up with and the ideolologies I hold now, instead of having to give up one. It makes me feel like I'm just weak-willed sometimes, since my siblings left Christianity without much issue, and of course I know many many ex-Christians. I think part of it is just that I've never really been able to just have passive beliefs; even growing up as a conservative Christian, I was very "on fire" and was super involved in my church. I really couldn't understand the other Christians around me whose faith just meant that they went to church, prayed before meals, and voted Republican because they were anti-choice.

So I still have this strong conviction about what my beliefs should mean in terms of how I live my life. I don't think everyone needs to be Christian or even religious; I do feel that if someone is, though, it should to radically influence the way they live. Else, why bother? It reminds me of these verses (James 1:23-24): "Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like." Chris Hedges has said something similar: "There is nothing easy about faith. It demands we smash the idols that enslave us… It demands resistance. It calls us to see ourselves in the wretched of the earth… It knows that once we feel the suffering of others, we will act."

I have in my Quotes page several quotes about faith leading us to take action and be in solidarity with our neighbors. I feel like this is the core of my faith, while other specifics of it (do I believe the Trinity exists? do I believe Jesus is God?) are things I'll think about and change my mind on, but are ultimately not really important in terms of what my faith leads me to do. After all, "the one who loves another has fulfilled the law" (Romans 13:8).