I’ve also yearned for what Virginia Woolf describes in her novel “Jacob’s Room” as the “spiritual suppleness” of the kind of intimacy in which “mind prints upon mind indelibly.” That was what I saw in those Penn photographs, and what I saw in recent months, too, in a number of shows, in which artists seemed to be exploring the smaller worlds found in rooms. It started in the late spring, with Sanya Kantarovsky’s (now closed) show “Scarecrow,” at Michael Werner.
This is all to say that what is unprecedented in scale is not altogether without precedent. The wish for precedented times is a wish for a present made intelligible, tamed with language, a moment we need not flail to meet.
But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.
Tippett: Well, what also strikes me when you write about the garden is public space is also something you care about, you go around looking for, thinking about. I share that with you. And it strikes me that the gardening flows into that in interesting ways, because it’s also when you write about it — here’s a place where you’re writing about that it’s such a study in the interrelationship of things, and how if you put something here, it might not happen, and if you put it near this, it might not happen; but if you put these two things together — so there’s this kind of — there’s this real rigor and sophistication that goes into it. And then there’s also so much unexpected that happens.
Gay: Totally. And actually, when you said that, it made me think too, talk about public space, that — it’s also a thing that the orchard, you can always walk into the orchard. I want to say that because so much space becomes private these days — that to have a space that you can just go there, you just go there, no just go there — it’s a big deal.
Tippett: Well, just how the garden, the complexity — well, it is. It’s a little microcosm of wholeness and the complexity of wholeness and the interrelationship of things.
Gay: Yeah. Totally, right. And you’re constantly imagining, “Well, what if this was here? And what if this was here? And what if —” I’m always trying to think of ways to interact with bugs, say, that eat my plants, and “What if we had these things here? What if we invited these things into the garden?”
[…]
Tippett: I wanted to talk to you about justice and how you grapple with that reality, that aspiration, that concept. And there has been an evolution of that. You have brought together the idea of longing for justice and working for justice with also exalting the beautiful and tending to what one loves, as much as what one must fight.
Gay: Tending to what one loves feels like the crux. Yeah, I’m very confused about justice, I think. I feel like the way we think of justice is absolutely inadequate, often. Often. Not everyone. I am curious about a notion of justice that is in the process of exalting what it loves.
Tippett: So here’s something you wrote somewhere. You said, “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”
“It’s a kind of casual blackmail that warns everyone to conform or be exposed; a way of saying if you don’t cave to my point of view, redefine yourself in my image of what sexuality is or should be, and (most importantly) apologize to me and the public, I will subject you to my large following and there will be hell to pay. Such unproductive and antisocial behavior is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.”
In short, all good things are wild and free. Walking, Thoreau.
