Sentimentalrobots - All Of These Things

selections from 'truisms,' 1986 in jenny holzer - diane waldman (1989)

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Me & the other drivers were really impressed when you swerved around all of us at high speeds & got to the red light before anyone else

I know how bleak things seem.

I am not going to lie to you. There is no gurantee you, or me or any of us make it, and taste a better life.

Happiness. Sincerity. Tranquility. Peace. Love. Rest and leisure. Celebration. Cooperation, building something beautiful and meaningful together. A better, more just, more natural life.

None of it is guranteed.

We are balancing on a razor's edge as we ascend closer and closer to our crucible, to our defining moment as a sapient species on the cusp of a new age. Things can go horribly wrong. We have seen sickly dread, clawing woe and untenable rage in our hearts that reverberates through our times. Biblical times, apocalyptic times. Reality may be even worse than the cries of mothers, the silent blood, the vivid imaginations of dystopia.

But, I want you to understand that this is just one possibility.

There is a better world. It may be veiled, we have stumbled through fog and tunnels for so long that we don't believe there is a light anymore. But it is there, and it is not as excruciatingly impossible to hold together as it seems. Tunnels end. Just as we may be staring down the barrel of a gun, we are just as likely simply experiencing a dark, long night before our dawn we so shamefully crave.

Do not be ashamed. You are not weak, you are not naive, you are not stupid. You are a unique shade in a most wonderful swatch of color. We have all been polluted by a system, a feedback loop, a fetishization of fear that has grown its own legs and operates beyond the control of any single person. We are our worst selves right now, it is remarkable we are functioning at all despite everything thrown at us.

It is not doomed to be in vain. The odds on paper do not look great--it is easy to rationalize defeat. Have faith. Have some secret hope tucked away, even when it repulses your sensibilities. History is littered with the impossible being done by those who scoffed at barriers set by naysayers--having the gall to try despite seemingly imminent defeat is what wins the day far, certainly far more often than throwing in the towel before halftime.

Maybe it WILL be in vain. Maybe something miraculous will happen, something unexpected, something that couldn't have happened if we all resigned too soon. Do not be so arrogant as to assume you know the future, you can't possibly, there are variables you cannot possibly forsee at play here.

I know how bleak things seem. I am asking you to try anyways.

the saddest universe

the saddest universe is not the one where i love you but you do not love me.

the saddest universe is not the one where i love you and you love me but the gravity of fate tugs us apart.

the saddest universe is not even this one where i love you and you love me and we lose each other over and over and over and over and over again.

in the saddest universe we have never walked in the same place at the same time.

in the saddest universe i have never seen my eyes mirrored in yours and you have never felt your fingers brush against mine.

in all the infinite possibilities of time and space and fate this is a universe where i know the color of your eyes and the shape of your name on my lips and the echo of your voice in my bones.

and for that i am grateful to the kindness of this universe no matter how many times we must lose each other over and over and over and over and over again.

at least in this universe we have something to lose.

- by sylvie (j.p.)

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

national identities were a hoax invented by Big Nineteenth Century to sell more fascism