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Reaching Across The Pavement                - by Nicki Clarke
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Today I take hold of my courage, take hold of a belief in myself and 
what I have to say, and dare myself to communicate with the world. 
For years I have written yet I am gripped by fear whenever I show 
what I write to others; I fear accusations of self-indulgence, 
boringness, sloppiness of style, incomprehensibility, vacuousness, 
irrelevance and bad politics. When people whose opinion means 
something to me criticise my writing I feel wounded, ashamed and 
less than perfect.

Today I give myself permission to speak my thoughts and tell my 
stories in the best way I can, and that is the most I can expect of 
myself. I urge myself to push past that fear barrier - "you won't 
like me if you know who I really am" - to give up my need for such 
extreme self-protection in order to communicate and connect. This is 
the revolution - to reach out and touch each other's hearts and 
lives through creative love, by whatever means possible. This to me 
is the anarchist project - to resist the forces that hold us back, 
that divide us from each other, that keep us dependant, that deny us 
knowledge, that keep us solitiary and blind and frightened and 
ashamed. It is the *process* of challenging this state of being that 
is revolutionary and transforming.

At times I have felt myself naive or ignorant because I am 
constantly surrounded by people who seem so much "wiser" than I am; 
I see their knowledge as a judgement upon me and what I have to say. 
But today I have this flash that the fact that I am constantly 
challenged by my intimate relationships is a wonderful thing...I 
think of how many people are closed to the experience of others, 
and remain unaffected and unchanged by interactions...their souls seem 
cast in concrete and barricaded against the other...this internal 
fortress is manifested externally in the nuclear family and the "homes" 
in which it lives. To let the other into our hearts involves risk, 
it involves confronting ourselves. It raises issues of trust and 
exposure, it means we are open and vulnerable. It means the 
possibiblity of pain. We live in a society that seeks to repress our 
pain, that seeks to distract us with consumer culture,and impresses 
upon us the urge to find our comfort in the acquisition of things. 
Our need to amass is testament to our inability to heal ourselves and 
each other.

When I write, it is usually to make sense of my world, as a journey 
of self discovery, a quest for clarity. Sometimes I write for the 
sheer joy of it, and other times I am writing but simultaneously 
fighting the urge to do it (I do not wish to know myself; I long for 
oblivion). I write to comfort and nurture and sustain mnyself. 
Sometime I write to prove that I am real; I form myself through my 
words, through my communication with myself.

I am at time weighed down by my writing - the ten years of journals, 
unfinished stories/poems/raves, the scraps and seeds of an article 
which I have never written, yet feel I should, the articles that I 
have written but need an absolute overhaul before they say anything 
near what I want to say...I am leaving these for now. If those ideas 
are important enough I will write them and if I don't at least I 
haven't guilt-tripped myself about them. So most of what you read 
here will not be laboured over, reworked and interrogated for 
"truth". This is a love letter from me to you, and I am not prepared 
to torture myself in order to make my voice heard (when I am 
tortured I am unable to love). I write this to you to express my 
desire to know you, to be with you in a common space, to be able to 
share in the commlexities of living in this world, to find 
solidarity in joy and sorrow and love and pain and death. When we 
reach out to each other we diminish hate, we battle its 
manifestations in racism, sexism, homophobia, religious prejudice 
when we offer to each other ourselves.

I *long* for connection...often this longing has misrepresented 
itself to me and I have sought it through other means...I have not 
understood at times what this has meant, and thought that it was 
the wish for a lover, a home, new friends, a career, a degree, 
religion, or the "right" politics...but these things are not the end 
in themselves, they are possible paths through which I may find 
connection (with myself, with others) if I am open to it. My 
yearning now has a face and a name...I feel I am at last identifying 
what I want...This is what anarchist politics are about - liberating 
ourselves so that we may experience the connection, that we may tear 
down the barrier between the internal and external, the familiar and 
the unknown, the living and the non-living...Building community 
where and how we find it, learning and growing through varying 
mediums (we know that the real stuff is not learned in schools). 
Trusting our intuition and learning to discard the crap they dish 
out everyday. Honouring ourselves and each other and beliving in our 
wisdom.

This is my anarchist project.

Living my myself for the last six months has been a time of 
incredible growth. I confronted by fear of going insane if I had no 
housemates to distract me from my depression, of abandoning my politics 
if I had no-one to police my actions. Living alone has been important 
in so many ways - beginning to appreciate my rich inner life that 
has been cultivated in solitude, withdrawing energy from external 
demands and giving this to myself, giving myself the space in which 
to rage and scream and cry and be paralysed with fear and yet 
emerge from that with insight and understanding. Living alone also 
gave me the opportunity to create the "home" - the space of safety 
and security and unconditional love and privacy - that was denied me 
as a child, and has haunted me ever since. It has released me from 
resentful bonds to my mother and my father, allowing me to parent 
myself, taking on responsilibity for my well-being, relieving them of 
that burden. To be able to do this, in a society which raises us to 
be responsible dependants, is truly remarkable. it has allowed me to 
face my shame instead of trying to hide it, and gives me courage not 
to be in the world...Having internalised that safe place, it is time 
for me to dismatle home, and to step out from security and the 
familiar. It is time to dance in the space of the unknown...It is 
important now for me to know that I exist without seeking proof of 
who I am in the things I surround myself with. Having given myself 
home, I am now free to leave it, in the knowledge that I can have 
access to it again if I need it.

This is a society of the spectacle precisely because our invisiblity 
is a requirement of inclusion. We are encouraged not to take up 
space, to be silent, to minimize the impact of our lives upon 
others, and to guard against their impact upon us. The result of 
this squashing down, this compacting and containing, means that our 
need to connect becomes twisted - visibility is sought through the 
tangible (consumer goods), through exploitation and violence. Because 
our desire to love abundantly and freely is stunted into monogamy, 
into the nuclear family, it is ironically those who love who suffer. 
We are squashed into little shoeboxes in order to contain us, divide 
us, keep us fearful and vigilant lest our territory be invaded. We 
are encouraged to see all that is external as a threat, as the 
stranger, as the enemy, as the thief in the night. We build our own 
prisons, we police ourselves and each other. We censor ourselves and 
believe our voices feeble and ineffective. Our laughter shrivels in 
our throats - and the sounds emanating from the houses are uniform 
- the choice of five TV channels drowns out spontaneity. To speak 
becomes fearful - I have days when i cannot leave the house to buy a 
loaf of bread because I will have to make eye contact, converse, 
articulate myself. We bury ourselves in houses, protect our fragile 
selves with walls. A blank wall holds no comfort, is sterile and 
forbidding, so we decorate with prints and wall paper in order to 
hide its true nature. We draw the curtains to hide from the outside 
world. We turn the televion on so we can listen to lies, rather than 
listen to our hearts. In our shoeboxes we deny our existence. 

We are a society of addicts. The mainstream would have us believe that 
it is only some who are addicted, it is the "substance abusers" who 
are weak and immoral and powerless and lacking the ability to "just 
say no". Psychologists now talk about love addicts and food addicts 
and sex addicts but fail to realise that our "addictions" are a 
product of a society that requires us to be responsible dependants; 
participation in this society demands the maintenance of addiction.
If we release ourselves from addiciton then we open ourselves up to 
change; addiction is only habit, it is the unquestioned singular way 
of being/seeing. We are a society addicted to the known, to the 
definable, to the rational and controllable. We are offered 
pacifiers to relieve the symptoms of unrest and dis-ease, we are 
fooled into thinking that happiness is a pain-free existance, that 
the absence of discomfort is a desirable state of being. When our 
bodies get sick, we rush for pharmaceuticals so that we can continue 
business as usual; if we did not do this, we might start to ask "why 
do i always get a headache when I talk to my mother? Why do I get 
bronchitis when I work in an office?" We would have to look at what 
our bodies are telling us about the way we live, about what we are 
addicted to, and what it might mean to challenge our ways of being 
in the world. If we paid attention to our bodies we would start 
questioning the price we are paying, acknowledging that we are 
relinquishing or ignoring in order to conform to society's 
expectation of health and normality. We might stop adapting our 
bodies to fit an externally imposed set or rules and start 
discovering our own relationship with the world, leading to a 
breakdown of the barrier between "me" and "not-me". We would then be 
honouring our own and each other's unique perception rather than 
forcing ourselves to see everything through one narrowly focussed 
optical lens which provides a (seemingly invisible) window to the 
world. It is the so-called aid to vision that actually renders us 
blind. The transparency of the window gives the illusion of 
connection, participation, the supposed clarity that is gained 
though putting on the spectacles of conformity is at the expense of 
our connection to our environment. Our vision of the world is 
filtered, sanitised, reduced to flatness and easily interpretable 
shapes. Our experience is rendered two dimensional.

This society is preoccupied with the uniformity of vision. I do not 
mean this metaphorically - I mean it literally. In this society it 
is imperative that we all see things in the same way, that we all 
see the same things. When I was in fifth grade I got headaches at 
school; it was determined by the authorities (the ones who Knew) 
that the problem was that I couldn't see (specifically that I 
couldn't see the blackboard). Rather that questioning why it might 
be that the words of my teachers were rendered an unintelligible 
scrawl, rather than believing that I might actually be experiencing 
different modes of seeing than what was required by the education 
system, rather than thinking that it might have been the environment 
that was a problem in need of fixing - the teachers and the doctors 
and my parents ordered me a pair of glasses so that I could see. I 
learned to distrust my own vision, I learned to value the sharp 
definition through the lens, and privilege that over the blurred 
edges beyond my frames. I learned to value distinction and 
boundaries and containment and the separation of one thing from 
another. I learned to be dependant upon an artificial interpretation 
of the world, to take this perception as the unquestioned real, and 
to believe that what I see through my own eyes is illusion and 
distortion.

I am trying to break my addiction to my glasses and this is fucking 
difficult. Resisting the impulse to have the world tunnelled into my 
eyes while I stand still and passively accept - this is a hard 
lesson to learn. To be in the world without glasses fills me with 
panic; I am vulnerable, lacking trust in my own perceptions. It is a 
challenge to exist, as all is not readily apparent. In order to know 
something, I might have to ask a stranger, or I may have to walk 
right up to a thing before i can recognise it. It means abandoning 
the desire to stand immovable and mute, it means crouching down or 
reaching up or moving sideways or touching in order to discover. It 
means making a connection, risking impact at close range. Not wearing 
my glasses challenges me to pay attention, to actually be aware of 
my environment and of myself, to develop my senses. Allowing myself 
the right to my own vision places me in a position of potential risk 
and vulnerability, the probability of "making mistakes" and causing 
myself embarrassment. I leave myself without that particlar defence 
and reliquish the "proof" of what can be seen...all is open to 
interpretation. Reliquishing my glasses is about putting down my 
shield, my armour, the means of holding the world at arm's length. 
To watch your face as you speak to me means you must come closer - 
in this we challenge our boundaries, we narrow the gap between us, 
we risk touching, impacting, we risk being changed by each other's 
presence. Without glasses as shield and filter I risk seeing love or 
anger or hatred or sorrow or joy in your eyes - I risk experiencing 
your emotions and feeling them emanating form you body. I risk 
feeling repulsed or attracted - I am unable to remain indifferent to 
you, I am unable to remain impervious to your being. I no longer 
grant myself the *luxury* of warding off the possiblity of being 
changed by our encounter. I challenge myself to confront my fears 
about what I do not/ cannot see, I challenge the belief that what 
is not seen is unknowable and a threat to my fragile existance.