Dying on that hill, Falling on that sword

States & The Other: A Story, State, Action Diary 01

Hidden by Rivers & Lakes, Swallowed by Mountains & Woods

- an ancestor

A morbidly poetic review slash mind map of James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” but really also actually a purgative diary of thoughts, feelings and actions towards movement, death and jazz.

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Introduction: Who is The Other?

Something that happens in capitalist imperialism is that community is stripped of all power so that all people become individualist consumers who must protect their “brand identity” at all costs — because that’s their only weapon of survival in an economic hellscape. We live in a version of movies like The Running Man, Hunger Games and Squid Game. Baked into this manufactured scarcity and competition is the baseline of a fear state. We can take this to mean a nervous system state, but also a nation state, because nation states ARE fear states, Control states, Domination States.

As a poet, among many other shifting identities, I look at words as doors, gateways into animistic relationship. It’s interesting that a term for our nervous system and bodily tone, has also come to mean a nation state, an oppressive entity that taxes, tithes, enslaves and exploits the “barbarians”.

Who are these barbarians, really?

Anyone who isn’t fully weaponized by the state.

I’m slowly moving through the audiobook of James Scott’s amazing work listed at the top of this piece. I will likely listen again and again, and read as well, for I do have the physical copy. I find that listening and reading give different connections in the body-mind-spirit compound.

Each new paragraph explodes with lingual phrases and terms which simultaneously excite and depress me. I’m not sure a non-fiction work has done this in a long time. Perhaps I am just out of touch with memory, as many non-fiction books have changed my life, upgraded my thinking, and helped me to develop my Story, State, Action model of wellbeing.

I bring this up because these things, the book and my model, are dancing together inside me along with myriad other voices and spirits… in a totally anti-IFS way. (seriously, for the last time, IFS is a fucking colonial dilution of animism and should be called out every goddamn chance)

Recently, as I’ve been navigating yet another chronic illness flare, with all of its heaviness, the weight of symptoms combined with the weight of cultural and societal stupidity, imperialism and whiteness, the mediocrity of white middle class pedagogy and what is deemed popular thus true in the world of health and wellness, I’ve been asked, tasked, to reflect on WHY I made the STACT model.

• An aside: i named it story, state, action model because i didn’t want yet another acronym adding to the conceptual noise pollution in this colonized field. Yet, as i write and speak, the shorthand STACT has arisen and i don’t know whether to use it or refuse it.

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The Why: Why did I do this?

Any inquiry of value and values inevitable pulls on desire. After all, we usually do a thing to get another thing. A task begets a result, even if it is a fantasy. When I ask myself, “is this what I wanted to do?” the answer is emphatically NO. I did this, worked on this for the past 15-20 years of my life because I had to, not because I wanted to.

This is why it’s been so hard for me, nay, impossible for me to join the sleaze parade of authors, wellness celebrities, con artists and carny hucksters in promoting their absolutist models of reality to desperate people who need real POWER, not a pill, not another idea, not another shameless abstraction designed to funnel resources into the bank accounts of the middle class and elitists.

My version of pedagogy stems from the lineage of Paolo Freire, a critical pedagogy of the oppressed, which states that education is never neutral. It is only ever a weapon against the people or for the people. Conformity or Liberation. I mix this lens with radical nondual animism from Daoism, Dzogchen, and various other Native, Indigenous, Black, Brown, Asian ways of knowing and ways of relating. I do not claim authorship or lineage, I do not need “initiation” or “permission” in the white, capitalist sense of those words. I am a child of genocide. As a diasporic mixed heritage Afro-Puerto Rican, I understand innately what colonization is and does. Tribalism is meaningless in the face of narcissism and imperialism. As we are entering a new age of ethno-nationalism, this brings me back to the notion of States, and the multiple meanings of that word.

As an actor trained in devised physical theater, improvisational methods, clown and bouffon, I learned how to devise and make work from states. State-Based methods. If you change your state, your actions change, thus enabling a faster connection between impulse and action, preventing the ego, the indoctrinated mind, from obstructing the creative flow state. After many years of studying healing practices and being failed, utterly failed and betrayed, by so many “healers”, “doctors” and “helpers”, reflecting on this training of state-based work helped me to redefine and develop my model.

It is much more complicated than that though.

The nation state also exerts its will. The ghosts and demons that possess the people, based on their own misconduct and the misconduct of others, affects the nation state and thus the state of all people within the nation state.

This brings me back to what I want versus what I feel I must do, and the internal conflict and compromise within such a karmic, imperial situation.

You see, the bribes of whiteness, of patriarchy, of imperialism are ever present. Invisible many times, operating on the level of Story. Shaping Value. I will say it again, the underlying cosmological and philosophical Story of the nation state shapes and deforms value, what is deemed valuable and thus what is prioritized.

To deny the bribes of whiteness etc. requires a kind of internal strength and dignity that co-arises with pain, fear and hunger/desire.

To do this without a real semblance of true indigenous community is harder still, and likely results in chronic illness, disability and disability adjacent symptoms.

It is a vicious circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy that one can only withstand as a “spiritual” effort. A karmic holding and carrying through thresholds of ancestral and historical residue.

To turn this pain into beauty is the true desire, the true value, under the heavy weight of our shared misconduct.

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Beauty is The Risk, but It’s All I Have Left

Beauty is the reason. Beauty is the only way to make this millennia long excursion into addiction and domination a transformative process. Without beauty, all we are are the ghosts of our ancestors. Many people alive today are willfully choosing the path of ghosts. Many are choosing it because they think they have no other choice for power and agency. Many are ignorant. Many are ignorant but believe they are not. This is the weakness and fragility of ghosthood. The oppressors oppress themselves in ways that are psychologically, spiritually and emotionally horrific.

To resist these bribes, is to accept a different kind of horror, one that we have realized is less horrific than what our oppressors have accepted.

Even as the fractured pseudo-communities around us flicker between addiction and creativity, between betrayal of what is valuable and acceptance of the karmic task of carrying and holding.

Another way to speak of Value is Story. This is some of what my model points to. What we Value, the Stories we tell and think and believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, SHAPE OUR STATES.

I mean that in manifold ways.,

Our Story-Values shape our physiological, emotional States, and it shapes our nation states. Additionally, our States shape our Actions, our behaviors, and our Actions shape the kind of States we embody and the kind of society we live in.

We either craft a vicious circle or a virtuous circle.

In James’ book, the refusal of nation states and proto-imperialism is the secret history of “the barbarians”, of “the others” who were villainized in the histories as written by the colonizers. This is worldwide, a precursor to the violent white and male and oligarchic supremacy we exist inside of today.

The history of real humans is the history of an animist anarchism that willfully and continuously rejected the centralization and weaponization of their bodies and the land by States and their agents.

We are, I am, the child of slaves. As are likely YOU, reading this now, even if you have been given and accepted myriad bribes throughout your life in order to “get by”. We all may do this to some degree — we fawn to survive; we compromise and lick the boot. Some of us always remember that it is wrong, that we have been forced, while some of us have genuinely learned to enjoy the taste.

Notice I have not once in this writing used the terms good or evil.

These are also false Story, Wrong Story, that clouds our ability to see reality.

In my model, the ancestors helped me to see that creativity and addiction are two sides of the same coin. What gives humans their capacity for beauty-making, when repressed, oppressed or suppressed, turns in on itself and appears as addiction — fractally exploding into internal and externally violent actions.

Addiction is a survival response to perceived threats, seen and unseen, material and immaterial alike. So too the addiction to domination, as appearing in pathological terms such as narcissism, and in sociological manifestations as patriarchy, racism, etc., are survival reactions to perceived threat — but that threat is not “The Other” as it is so commonly projected. That threat is generational suppression, repression and oppression of creativity within the individual and collective body, mind and spirit of the oppressor.

I explicitly say this now, we are all the oppressor and the oppressed, because we cannot truly escape our natural interdependence and historical co-dependency patterns. Thus, we are all addicts, too, in one way or another, because the nation state actively and in seen and unseen ways, limits our creativity via manufactured threat and violence, scarcity and competition.

Some of our addiction actions are co-signed overtly, but all of our addiction actions are co-signed covertly, by a nation state society that is based in fear, slavery and domination.

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What is my work? How can I hold it?

I leave with this coda for today, as a sick, poor person living in a predominantly white city. I endure, I defy, I continue, but for how long can I withstand this onslaught? I do not know and I cannot say. Without patrons, funding and community, I wither and struggle. But this isn’t about me, it’s about us.

Now that I have this model, a clear and lucid model that does not bypass or whitewash, how do I use it to be able to make Beauty? Have I failed, have I wasted my life? Will this work die on the vine as so many other oppressed people’s labors have been relegated to the dump of time? How can I focus on Beauty given the state of things? How can I value Beauty through this model without bowing to the pressures of the market, which doesn’t know itself well enough to know what it needs?

I need rest, I need time, and I need care. In lieu of all that, I wrote this.

Fuck.

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Introduction to the model: The Story, State, Action Model

Story, State, Action Diary series

Diary 01: Dying on that hill, Falling on that sword

Diary 02: How Your Senses Have Been Colonized

Diary 03: How to Become Normal Human*

Diary 04: Normal Human = Sublime

Diary 05: Normal is not Normalized, Normalized is not Normal.

Diary 06: Chaos, Our True Home.