36. Notes on Sacrifice
Hello dear ones. <3 I’m writing to you from Kerala, India, where I’ve spent the last ten days being nourished by friendship, celebrations of love, sambar-soaked idlis for breakfast, and the poetry of Kamala Das.
I’ve been contemplating writing about sacrifice for a while now. This month I’ve been compiling a playlist around the theme of the martyr wound. I’ve been in conversation with women in my life about the theme of self-sacrifice in life and relationships. I’ll share some of the songs from the playlist along with some notes and gathered thoughts further below.
But first, I want to offer some words on Palestine and the current U.S.-backed genocide that is unfolding before our eyes.
A few days ago, active airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in his military fatigue outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington. An act of moral clarity situated in a lineage of this kind of protest. I feel immense grief. I have been thinking about how it’s seen as honorable to die for one’s nation in battle but seen as abhorrent to die in protest against the morally reprehensible things it does.
The first diary I ever started keeping was sparkly and iridescent. It looked like a scale from the Rainbow Fish. I was ten. My first entry was about war.
I am encouraging all of my U.S. taxpayer friends to join me in war tax resistance. This can look very different depending upon your employment situation, and there are different levels of risk associated with varying forms of resistance. Almost half of our federal income tax goes to military spending.
As U.S. taxpayers, we are by default complicit in a web of global atrocities. If presented explicitly with a choice, I doubt we would opt to use our hard-earned dollars to fund an unfeeling, imperial, out-of-control war machine.
If you receive a tax return this year, consider donating all or part of your return to medical aid for Palestinians.
Being alive right now is a precious gift and it comes with a responsibility. I believe it means witnessing and not looking away, feeling every ounce of the revulsion, grief, and anger at the total disregard for human life. May we choose love and liberation in our lifetime. This consciousness begins on an individual level but can’t end there.
My perpetual prayer for myself and each of you reading this is clarity, compassion, and moral courage. May the shrouds of our conditioning fall away. May we devote ourselves to something other than our own comfort and prosperity. May we see where we’ve been lied to and forgive ourselves for believing.
~
Martyr: a playlist
These songs are an evolving collection for the girlies moving through it. Whatever your relationship is to self-sacrifice, it’s a pervasive myth, an itch to scratch. I have struggled all of my post-pubescent life with the urge to turn my body into a symbolic altar space. To be a living reminder to turn towards love. On its own, I don’t think this is a bad thing. It has informed much of my performance art (I’ll share some archived performance photos next month!) and writing.
But, because I am a bit wayward and prone to decadence, that has often looked like very self-destructive relationships. Dynamics that were actually a form of self harm. I’ve been aware of this pattern for a long time and my complicity in it. And yet, somehow, each time, another layer reveals itself to me.
There’s this tendency to shapeshift into more palatable textures to appease others. To offer myself as a gift. If I just become small enough… If I need less and less, then maybe things will click into place and I’ll feel peace. In “Heavy Stone,” Kyla La Grange sings “feed me to the years and I will make myself harmless as a drawn on tear.” Like, let time do its thing, let it devour me and I will do harm to no one and thus be loved and cherished by everyone.
“Martyrdom contradicts everything we are told to value in this world. It entails giving without reserve, sacrificing all, even the greatest good, which is life itself. And yet the martyrs are a stark, beautiful, and perhaps even uncomfortable proof of what sacrificial love can look like. They help us readjust our eyes to the eternal”
– Catholic Apostolate Center
“Ask the books I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to by myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world as a sacrificial gift”
– Kamala Das in her autobiography, My Story (1973)
In “Vertigo,” Griff sings “I’m used to fixing broken things before/ I thought maybe I could fix you too.”
Call me eldest daughter, call me delusional, but I want to put things together.
Jessie Reyez, in the song, “DISHONORED” with Sean Leon perfectly encapsulates the insane feeling of this dynamic in three stark images:
“Lucifer and God in one apartment
Buried alive inside a coffin
A pregnant mother in a mosh pit
How I felt trying to be your partner”
She goes on to sing:
“Forgive me mother
I give my heart to impostors
And just like a martyr
Blood on the hands of my lover”
“You’re lost at sea, I’ll command your boat to me again” sings the oracular Lana del Rey in “Mariner’s Apartment Complex,” adopting the persona of a whispering siren, a lover assured and pondering, “maybe I can save you from your sins.”
There is also an eroticism in offering. “Eat your heart out, my body is a buffet” Tinashe implores and invites in “Needs.” Also, this music video is incredible.
“I’d save a life if I thought it belonged to you, Mary Magdalene would never let her loved ones down” – FKA twigs in “home with you.”
Here is the full playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/martyr/pl.u-DdANrX3uakBYvxL <3 <3 <3 for catharsis, for alchemy, for sublimation. Thank you to the friends who shared their input and their songs.
Some news:
Molly and I were interviewed in Hustler Magazine!! We spoke about the founding of our imprint, Working Girls Press and The Holy Hour Anthology. Thank you so much to John Blaylock for this thoughtful interview and writeup!
Today is my book’s birthday! Hemorrhaging Want & Water came into the world one year ago today. Happy birthday to my first book! If you’d like to help me celebrate, leave a Goodreads review or send me a favorite moment from the book…a synchronous moment while reading, a favorite poem or line, etc. Many of you have already done this throughout the past year, and for that I’m so grateful.
x
until next month.