“Poetry
became an adventure. The finest of human adventures….Its goal: vision and
knowledge.” —Aime Cesaire
Perhaps
it is because we live in a time of so many unknowns that now, more than ever, gives
a call for our opus to become an adventure that flings open portals for vision
and knowledge.
In
this open place, remembering and imagination draw back from harsh borders where
each abruptly ‘ends’ and the other ‘begins.’ The present knows itself to be
shaped by pasts and futures even as it emerges with them. Pasts and futures
have knowledge for those inhabiting the present even as denizens of the present
are responsible to them.
The
task of reimagining and reconstructing pasts is not a tertiary one in the palimpsestic
present. It is necessary so that futures may grow strong roots. The past shows
the future its sharp glistening hunger—and healing futures nourish the hunger
of the past. Past as ancestral memory sends visions of healing into the future.
Futures are continually being shaped by pasts—just as the pasts are being
reshaped and reimagined to open up futures before us.
The
entanglement of pasts and futures in visionary perception reveals linearity as but
a flickering moleculate—a link.
Inhabiting
this fluid realm becomes possible as a result of our capacity to imagine.
Imagination allows reality to become more than the density of reality
determined by dominant perception.
In
contrast, the dominant mode of Cartesian-Newtonian dualisms conscripts our inner/outer
movements into boxes or categories. Colonization of the mind by philosophies rooted in separation teaches
humans to see Earth and body, emotion and instinct and intuition, dream and
vision as inferior or naïve sources of knowing. These very forces are—in the
epistemological universes of people of culture—regarded as sources yielding
knowledge about the full spectrum of relational human experience. “What counts as knowledge is crucially important across human cultures precisely because what counts as the known usually helps define positions within the culture on questions central to human existence on the earth,” says Jane Duran.
The loss of these other epistemes in modernity has
resulted in a narrowing of our collective imagination about the Earth and each
other. Our human pursuits have come to be driven by a Promethean impulse that
sees itself as separate from and needing to tame nature. Diane di Prima reminds
us that “the war is the war against the imagination,” and that this is a spiritual battle.
Colonialist-imperial-capitalist-patriarchal matrices have
always known it is our forgetting that will establish their sway. What we forget
we are in relation to becomes vulnerable to being exploited or razed down. Without
the remembering of interconnectedness, binary modes play into a politics
of disenfranchisement, of dislocation.
Disconnection
is an age-old tactic for inducing traumas practiced by systems of domination.
Then,
reconnecting ourselves to vision and imagination becomes a political act. By
extending ourselves in a stance of openness and radical hospitability to
sources whose knowing (of life) has been silenced, marginalized, or invisible,
we assert that we will no longer endorse the tactic of disconnection—or our own
alienation.
In
Gloria
Anzaldúa’s telling, Coyolxauhqui will not stay fragmented: her very fragments
are filled with a desire for connection, reconstitution, healing. Imagination
is key to her processes of integration. “You use your imagination in mediating
between inner and outer experience,” says Anzaldúa. After Coyolxauhqui dismantles
her old body/self, she re-composes a new body/self whose connective sutures hold
nodes of new insights and possibilities for connection.
The body holds an innate awareness that intimacy and alliances break open trauma paradigms.
When bodies
dream—bodies made of seeds and grains and sun and rain and dung—when this
dreaming begins to speak—it exposes the subskeletal connections to life, to all
of reality. What has been broken begins to link to each other: to heal.
We
dream so that the yet unrecognized may come into being. We slip out of the
stranglehold of dominant reality and weave a reality from the fibrils of our
dreams.
Dreams and visions move
us out of collective amnesia. They are the
dark matter that allows reality to shift. They emerge from precisely the
fissures structures of domination do not understand. Their very process is alchemical.
The dissolution,
re-membering, fluidity of becoming we encounter in visionary space can
transform every aspect of our lives. Visionary
imaginary takes us beyond the hegemony of modern/colonial pregivens to usher
processes of decoloniality. As adrienne maree brown puts it, “Our radical imagination is
a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived
reality.”
Making the future asks of us willingness to cross the threshold between
visions and reality—nimbleness—uncontainability.
This
crossing is familiar, in a way, to artists. Dreaming and artmaking have much in
common. “Working at art is so much like dreaming, sometimes I don’t know which
is which,” says Denise Levertov. “True poetry,” says Cesaire, appeals to the unconscious—“the
receptacle of kinship that, originally, united us with
nature.” Thus in its shaded tongue “modest, secret” visionary truths can come
forth.
Yet what we are calling in is something more than can be contained
by the definition of art. We are calling in a “consciousness of making / or not
making your world”—a poetics, to quote di Prima—“no matter what you do.” What
we are calling in is seeing.
Remembering and imagination are modes of seeing.
Seeing entangles us—we can no longer be on the outside looking
in upon the spectacle of the real. Seeing, we acquire the power to transform it.
Visioning is very much a relational mode. The visioning mode plucks
us out of the mode of epistemic dependence that the dominator paradigm
promotes. Taking full responsibility for what we
see—through remembrance and imagination—transforms us into sovereign beings.
The step that comes after is trusting what
the vision is pointing to and taking pragmatic action. As Patricia Hill Collins
reminds us, “the functionality and not just the logical consistency of
visionary thinking determines its worth.” Actions link our visions to the
ongoing struggle of transforming reality.
The failure of the reality we live in is an
ask upon us. Creating a different reality for ourselves, our children,
ancestors, civet and trees and oysters and oceans is our task.
Will we, then? Forge real relationships with extraordinary
dimensions—with ecological realms or agency—storehouses of memory and visionary
futures?
Will we
risk univocity and rational stakes—fluency and cognicentrism—guardedness and
certainty?
Will we
proliferate beyond our own knowing, ego’s conceit?
Will we pay
attention to the ancestors?
Will we speak
from our hooded bodies, speak with stones—sibyl in frequencies such that speech
swells and spills outsides the spectrum of normality?
Will we
light ourselves with our visions, prophesize the worlds we most want to see?
Monica Mody is a poet and feminist scholar from India who currently
lives in Yelamu, San Francisco. She has a chapbook, Ordinary Annals,
forthcoming from above/ground press soon. Visit her website at
www.drmonicamody.com.
