Artist-Activist Meetup Blog 12
December 2024
Celebrating the New Year(s)
I’ve never found much personal significance in ushering in each new Gregorian year. The singing of Auld Lang Syne (listen; learn) moves me deeply—I can feel there’s something rich, something cultural there, something yearning in its performance (singing together always makes me weepy)—but that’s about it. I don’t drink, so the champagne thing is out, and I can kiss my sweetheart anytime we want.
The turning of the new Gregorian year feels like an arbitrary day, set up by powers arbitrarily connected to our own cultural powers. By the time each new Gregorian year comes around, I’ve already done a lot of shedding and reflection, reminiscing, mourning, grieving, rejoicing, celebrating.
There’s incredible power to the performances we make, to both the ways we gather to celebrate our collective acknowledgment of the passing of time and to the ways that we allow time to wash over us in our solitude. To begin this final entry of 2024 and the twelfth entry of this—very enjoyable and, I think, successful!—sibling project to the Artist-Activist Meetups, I would like to muse on some of the performances I engage in as I pass through each season cycle.
Find here my story of autumn and winter, and, perhaps, too, find inspiration for your own individual and communal practices to help you embolden yourself, your art, and your community.
• I consider summer to be a time of chaos. This is not a judgment, it is simply the way it feels in my body. Summer is pure ecstasy, with every flora, fauna, and funga singing all at once with the movement of the wind and the beating down of the sun and the heaving of the rain. My first practice begins with attending to the slowing and quieting sounds of insects and birds, to the rustling of wind through turning leaves. Alongside that, sometime* in the last few Gregorian months each year, come the Days of Awe, during which I exhale the exuberance of summer and inhale the somnambulance of autumn.
*The Jewish calendar is lunisolar, so its significant dates oscillate against the Gregorian calendar.
• I was born in the beginning of December. I am told it was night when I came into the world, a full moon, and raining. It’s nearly always rainy and quiet on that day each year, so I find time to turn inward and sit beside all of the Jacobs I’ve been. There, in that quiet meditation, they exist simultaneously as my inner children and my ancestors: I let them guide what version of myself I would like to bring with me into the next spin around the sun.
• The winter solstice is huge for me. It’s a tradition born of necessity, as I get pretty intense seasonal depression, so counting down toward the solstice (the shortest day and longest night of each year in the northern hemisphere) and then ecstatically celebrating that day by taking in the cold, watching the sun set, and eating starchy, fatty foods is healing for my brain, my body, and my spirit. Each day after the solstice, I find hope in the fact that the days are lengthening once again.
• Sometime* around the solstice, too, comes Hanukah, which I honor as a celebration of community. In the days that are coldest and darkest, we gather together and whisper around the candles, and we do this for many days in a row so that the feeling of togetherness seeps deep, deep into our bones.
A note about the mutability of tradition and the embracing of change in the name of liberatory thought: while it is commonly seen today that the candles increase in number over the eight nights of Hanukah, there is another, equally valid interpretation, that we begin with all nine candles and each night the number diminishes. This year, I have been reading conversation around the decolonization of “night” and “darkness” as equivalent to “bad,” suggesting that we can meditate on the power of the transition from light-into-darkness just as we could meditate on the power of the transition from darkness-into-light. I’ve been ruminating on this concept a lot these days.
These are a few of the many traditions that prepare me for newness, that allow me to shed old forms of myself in order to grow healthier, more grounded, more filled with love, more radicalized toward care. I am a being that needs myth, ritual, tradition, and connection. I am a being that needs togetherness.
In feeling these togethernesses, there appears something else, too: a quantifying of apartness.
This could be something as simple as asking yourself, “how do I make sure to use inclusive language while at this gathering,” or asking a gathering itself, “who is not at this meal with us tonight? Let us extend compassion toward them wherever they are.” In my own seasonal/temporal reflections, I find to be persistent in my mind the very real, very tangible effects of oppression throughout our world. The performances of my rituals within community and in solitude always find their ways back to a mediation on my place within systems of oppression.
I believe that celebrating our togetherness by quantifying our apartness helps to open a portal of connection between peers and ancestors, reorienting and reinforcing our dreams of a future yet-to-come.
Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) has become a holy site of reflection for me. One of our culture’s most powerful recent ancestors, King wrote this piece as a political prisoner, while deeply embroiled in ideological arguments about peaceful protest and what dissent should look like in the hands of the oppressed. His adversaries, the state and the white church that aided it, demonized the actions of civil rights protestors and imprisoned King and other civil rights activists in response to their nonviolent protesting. In this letter, King describes his frustration in the white clergymen who chose to side with a system of control and his disappointment in the “white moderate” who blindly believes in “order,” that laws are immutable and that justice could not possibly stem from dissent.
I share this excerpt as a beacon of intersectionality, a reminder that we in this country have been shaking ourselves and each other free of the bonds of order for a long, long time:
“Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, “Get rid of your discontent.” But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.
But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist…. So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”
((For brevity, I have omitted Dr. King’s examples of extremism, but I strongly suggest you find the time to let this document speak to you in full. It is, unfortunately, still just as relevant as when it was penned in 1963, but that means it will, I hope, resonate with and inspire you. It is pure poetry.)
As we enter 2025 together, I ask you to consider how you may choose to radicalize yourself toward love, how you will become an extremist for the cause of justice.
Here are some of the ways I continue to deepen my extremism.
As a poet and scholar, I am enamored by the relationship between voice and audience and the ways that we can guide into, through, and out from such big ideas to produce some sort of magical connection across time and space. I can record some facet of my being, taking care to tenderly curate that work as an invitation into new ways of thinking, and I can transmit that across impossible distances! What a blessing. What an honor. I feel charged with the responsibility to strengthen my knowledge of critical lenses so that the work that I put forward and the work of others I help to put forward is honest, progressive, liberating, and radical. In the work I help to make, I hope every day to channel revolutionary ancestors and passionate peers alike.
As an organizer, I am obsessed with the performances of community and the many ways that I, a singular being, catalyze or otherwise impact those performances. Further, I find myself constantly wondering: when and where does community begin? Is it only once we sit down together at a table with a door closed, just before we call for the start of our meeting, or is it once we each walk through the threshold into the room? Better yet, is it when each individual decides to leave the security of their home, foregoing other plans to better themselves by joining under one roof? Or is it even earlier, when we light up, telling a loved one about the excitement we have for our gatherings?
Perhaps the most repeated word across these entries (I write anecdotally) is “reflection.” In constantly working to “see” ourselves and one another more and more deeply, we continue to build and develop the stories we hold within us that empower our every thought and action.
I recognize a sacredness in the power of self- and communal-creation.
No empire can take away our agency to actualization. No empire can stop us from dreaming ourselves, our art, and our collective action into existence. For those of us gathering under the roof of our “Artist-Activist Meetups,” we recognize that our art, our expression, is radical if only by existing: our voices, different but unified, will always have the strength to drown out systems of oppression.
I will close this entry with one final quote from Letter from Birmingham Jail:
“I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”
I look forward to meeting and re-meeting you throughout this new year.
Interested in a complete and ever-expanding list of references made across all of our Artist Meetup blog entries? Visit our Artist Meetup Blog’s new Annotated Bibliography!
Our Artist Meetup series and this year’s Celebration of Expression have been supported by New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit that funds initiatives to benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities. A first-in-the-nation project, the Consortium reimagines how public funding can be used to address the growing problem of news deserts, misinformation, and support more informed communities.