Within, Against

What time is love? Where is beyond?

No frontiers, no center, no edges remain.

No habitable positions exist outside

this absolute terrain.

We all develop defences against it.

Adjusted our particular custom set of

compromises. These nomadic practices, these

tactical framings. All this reckless abandon, this

hunting and gathering, adaptation and

surrender, transformation for survival.

Inhabiting the hollow land, when there's war at

the horizon, we're all looking for clues, on how

to live in this time.

Detach yourself from the empire.

What does it mean to live within and against?

What does it mean?

Within and against it.

That's not me and it's shutdown,

Design Week and it's shutdown,

embargo in effect and it's shutdown.

Pacifist in the air tonight; ceasefire,

fight fire with fire; all wrong, all right.

Centers create peripheries.

Empires create barbarians.

No exit, no escape. Out the reach of its power,

its gravity, beyond the sphere of influence...

Off-grid, out of the line of sight, within its

fabric, turning against it, abandon its logic,

its broken values...

What does it mean to save your time, hold your

own? What does it mean to reject and dissolve?

What does it mean to abstain and abandon?

Within and against it.

I dreamt of animism–a spiritual material

practice, a spirit inhabits each creation: every

object its own. The spirit of this microphone,

the spirit of this keychain, the spirit of this

stone relief, the spirit of this building, the

spirit of this word, of this entity of nature and

non-nature. All alive with its own spirit, and in

my dream I realised; no sacred thing can be

owned, exchanged, traded, bought or sold.

Our duty is to make the unseen seen, unknown

known, unheard heard, conjure things from

our imagination, to live towards the life we can

imagine and one thing at a time, through labor,

work and action to make into being, fragments

of a just world, to make our lives within and

against these conditions, this reality.

Within and against it.