USELESSNESS, NONCOMPLIANCE, & DIVESTMENT: POSSIBILITIES OF SURVIVAL UNDER WHITE SUPREMACIST CAPITALISM
w/ thanks & love 2 Diane di Prima, the Nap Ministry, Sara Ahmed, The Zhuangzi, Sylvia Plath, An Duplan, Joyelle McSweeney
I
In The Zhuanghi, yr average radical Daoist philosophical and religious text, lies a parable about the Carpenter Shi, who, upon seeing a great tree during his travels, says
It is a worthless tree! Make boats out of it and they'd sink; make coffins out of it and they'd rot in no time! make vessels and they'd break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It is not a timber tree -- there's nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be so old!
Later that night... Shi meets that very same tree in a dream... The tree says,
What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry, apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs -- as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves -- the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it is the same way with all other things.
As for me, I've been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I've finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover, you and I are both of us things. What's the point of this -- things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die -- how do you know I'm a worthless tree?
I admire the tree. The tree does not possess an interest in tables, chairs, or firewood. The tree recognizes that these manifestations of its flesh are nothing more than thoughtful taxidermy. In the global West, we do not often consider the inner life of trees, but perhaps we ought to; perhaps they have lessons to teach us.
Short story: one time, an adult in my life told me that there are two kinds of people: gardeners and carpenters. The carpenter shapes, refines, and trims; the gardener prunes, supports, and supplies. However, both actors seek product from their circuit of activity: the gardener, a plant; and the carpenter, a (?)stool.
I would like to be a third kind of person, one who acts separately from a capital-oriented impulse and doesn't need to make nobody.
II
The tree is "useless" insofar that the system into which it is interpolated is extractionary and violent. As such, the tree engages self-preservation by taking meaningful(/less) action to exit the system (of use), which ensures its destruction.
Here's some poetry I wrote:
"I guess the poem could just lyk b a tree!
A tree A green
decideous tree
A loose of leaves
The keyless poem supply request confetti!
brief color’dful trash lol OKAY OK OK OK
bak 2 our regularly scheduled cessation of the self 4 scale The gaze which carries the sigh / 2 an island / from which we identify 1 lopsided blink from another lopsided blink’s
waiting trigger wide smoke"
By this I'd like to say I mean that if in poetry we are talking about --
1) Poetry as... "a little music machine" (Plath),
2) as... "the social life of language" (Duplan),
& 3), as uselessness (Hilliard) --
poetry is how language gestates, generates, recoils and explodes. There is a reason the tool of political speechwriters, advertisers, and marketers come from poetry: metaphor, assonance, consonance, wordplay, rhythm -- the list goes on. And on. And on. And this is not a necessary condition of language, but it is a condition of use, it is a condition of language in the service of white supremacist capitalism.
As Duplan makes clear, poetics are better understood as a system of contact, not as objects. There are no "poems," there is no "creative writing," there is only a manic quest for the good gooey truth and beauty of consciousness (because poetry is always already limited by its conditions of authorship and viewpoint).
As Plath adds, poetry offers us music. What gets the party going? What is the sonic accident? What is the friction of cities, cities like Cleveland, but a kind of music?
III
I guess I am here to do shit; to have shit done to me; to be made of and make some local music, some local social life. This intervention is one of presence, participation, and access free from the dangers of violent use.
If I had to be clearer, I'd say that The Tree and I share the same zip code: Joyelle McSweeny's "Necropastoral" which reworks classical separations of the rural and the urban, the idyllic and the worldly.
The Zhuangzi's Tree story occurs in the Necropastoral: worldly, urban carpenter engages rural and idyllic tree in fisticuffs; tree wins.
The Necropastoral is the untrimmed edge of Ancient China and America's lawn -- it is the place where bugs lie in wait, where those strange men live, from where the next attack will come; it is also a safe place for those deemed unworthy, undesired, or unfit for society. In this way, the necropastoral is a kind of waiting place.
Hi, my name is Kamden Ishmael Hilliard, and I love living,
even, in the Necropastoral. I just hate
having to. (this is, alternatively, “the wake” (Christina Sharpe)
IV
As the managing editor of Exclamation’s Gauntlet, as the managing editor, as someone managing, as a subject requisite of a "the," I hope to promote a sense of uselessness.
No one seeks to make a boat of me, or, as a matter of fact, American Poetry, but we must remain wary of becoming the opener for neoliberal white supremacist nationalism. Worse, we must be wary of letting the interpolations of white supremacy and homonationalism and other nation-centering forces divine their way into our poetics.
We ain't tryna warm up the crowd. If anything -- we are (and of course this we is the we of Queers, Black People, Women, and Differently Abled folx) intent on calming some of this shit down. Should there be applause? What are you cheering for? We are arbiters of a boring, almost administrative message -- that our way of life (agriculture on) -- is killing us, and that if we want to survive, we must change. This is also a change of poetics, of ethics, of preference.
Carpenter Shi's apprentice said of the Tree "Since I first took up my axe and followed you, Master, I have never seen a timber as beautiful as this." I think this awaits us, at the end of use / the end of task orientation / the end of efficiency: to be as beautiful as this. The tree, unwilling to go the cute, normative, and utterly fashionable way of the necrocultural industries, chooses to live right outside of them; in spite of them. WE MUST DO THE SAME; we must name what hates us; we must engage what hates us which sometimes means to evade / to make of these threats algorithmic a song, to make their avoidance a dance.
V.
Sara Ahmed says, and g-ddamn do she say, "...the useless part can... be understood as a killjoy or as willful... [it is] deemed to cause a breakage, to stop something from working, to prevent an action from being completed; it is what gets in the way of a progression" (67, Willful Subjects). If capitalism is a circus of markets, and if markets operate on growth, how does our dominant capitalist system regard the useless part or killjoy? When we resist the very respiration, beats, and silences of capitalism, we resist the longest running gags of neoliberalism. We get to rest.
As far as I can tell, from my 26 years old long, there are things to get in the way of: capitalism is something to get in the way of; growth is something to get in the way of; ascendancy is something to get in the way of; creative writing contests for middle schoolers and high schoolers and undergrads and creative writing majors and people without an MFA and people with an MFA and people without a first book and people working on their second and people "emerging" and people "established" -- are something to get in the way of.
Canon & Syntax & Grammar!
With their formal allegiances to white supremacy and speech, are something to get in the way of!
And what happens when we get in the way?
Other people say, "well fuck,,, i didn't know I could" and then they join
and more join
and more join
Until that way we were protesting is closed
and until there is a new way.
outro.
Diane di Prima is a goddess
w/ trash poems about the end
of sick and fat people
That's a little hope
full actually because if Diane
di Prima can do some good
while fucking up moral
ethics for young anarchists,
like myself,[1] I wonder what
good I can do, and what
bad for which I might be
forgiven. Not to say
I am lazy and earnestly prepared
to take uncalculated
risks but that I have found
others to do so with me
next to me, and along side me.
1 more.
I was thinking, just now, that uselessness offers us a pathway toward divestment.
To mark the tools of animal trade, mineral extraction, and white supremacist capitalism as useless would be to deny them access to your selfhood. That sounds pretty good to me, like a good tome.
If publishing this project means anything, I hope it means becoming useless to what would kill us; I hope we can find newer, kinder methods for co-existence beyond use.
[1] Diane di Prima's work, particularly "Revolutionary Letter #43," has been criticized for advancing a eugenicist wellness.
Kamden Hilliard is a Black, nonbinary settler from Hawai’i and author of three chapbooks, most recently, henceforce: a travel poetic (Omnidawn Books, 2019). They earned a BA in American Studies from The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and an MFA in Poetry from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kam studies surveillance, race, queerness, and American politics. They are thankful for support from The Davidson Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, The UCROSS Foundation, and Callaloo. You can find Kam’s writing in West Branch, The Black Warrior Review, and Tagvverk. Formerly, they are an AmeriCorps VISTA, teacher, and Pfluflaught Fellow at the University of Iowa. Currently, they are the 2020-2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Forever? Find ‘em on the internet at kamdenihilliard.com.