Horror at the Heart Circle

And some reading recommendations.

You people are intensely beautiful. Yes, you—and especially those of you who wrote about the weather in my last post. If you didn’t yet, do please consider it. And regardless, consider especially reading what others wrote. It’s pure delight, I promise.

Let's Just Talk About The Weather

Sliding-Scale Reparations

I was going to write about something, but it’s really ugly and I think I probably just won’t. There’s too much ugliness in the world, and there will be other ugly moments, so let’s leave this one with a brief observation.

What I was going to write was a long piece about the arrest of the leader of the Black Hammer Party, a leftist black separatist movement in the US, and how the mechanism by which is was run (including its internal “heart circling” as a mode of abuse and its really manipulative demands for reparations) is not merely some aberration in the US “left,” but is really rather typical. Every anarchist group I ever encountered had the same dynamics, and there’s a large anti-racist group tied to the DNC that does the same sort of struggle sessions, getting people to become “vulnerable” about their privilege and “internal racism” so that it will later be used against them by the organizers.

Their reparations program is really worth your attention if you’ve never encountered this sort of thing before. I’ve mentioned elsewhere and many others have also noticed that many individual reparation scams parallel (or are directly derived from) Catholic Indulgences, but this one is even worse. It’s a protection racket, offered on a “sliding scale.”

For 600 years, you have been murdering Indigenous people, enslaving Africans, and colonizing the globe. Aren’t you tired of endless genocides enacted in your name?

You have raped Turtle Island and her Indigenous Nations. You stole African people from their prosperous continent to build your plantations. You have stolen our lands, forced us to work as your slaves, wracked up the plunder of Colonialism to fuel the parasitic, capitalist system that murders us today. The genocide of Colonized people never ended, and they are continued today worldwide through colonialism and imperialism. 

You have blood on your hands but you can never wash them clean on your own accord.

…Revolution will overturn all of these contradictions and colonizers can either fall in line behind our leadership and help us build, or you can stand in the way of our hammers.

The Black Hammmer Party was able to raise $100,000 this way. As with the money raised for the national Black Lives Matter non-profit, it ended up not being used for anything they said they’d use it for and much of it disappeared. And then someone got killed.

I’ll leave it there, and for others to write about.

The Horror At the Heart Circle

Speaking of heart circles though, I’ll tell you a brief story about one I didn’t mean to go to, suddenly found myself trapped within, and didn’t know how to get out of it.

A heart circle, in case you are fortunate enough not to know, is a west-coast hippy-inspired idea where you gather around in a circle with others and talk “from the heart.” There are rules to the event (I won’t call it a ritual), and sometimes also a “talking stick” or some other object that people are supposed to pass around. Basically, the person holding the stick is the only one allowed to talk, and everyone else is supposed to listen and “hold space” for whatever that person says. Then it is passed along to the next person, who can then respond to what earlier people said or speak something new.

No one’s supposed to leave until everyone has had the chance to speak, and the idea is that everyone must participate in a kind of confession in order for each individual to feel safe enough to confess as well.

I thought I was going on a date. This was years ago, while visiting a friend in Portland, Oregon, where heart circles are the equivalent of mid-century rural knitting bees. I’d run into a guy who seemed really cool and definitely attractive, and he invited me to his place that evening and so I went.

I arrived just as all the others were arriving. I didn’t know who they were or why they were there, and my “date” acted surprised that I somehow didn’t know what was happening. Next thing I knew, I’m sitting on an uncomfortable cushion on the floor next to eight other guys, and they’re crunching pita chips and soybean “hummus” (because, as someone explained, chick peas aren’t really “vegan enough”) and talking “from their heart” about how they were decolonizing themselves from “hetero-monogamy culture.”

Now, this was weird, but I need to be honest. Some of the guys were attractive enough that I didn’t run away immediately, and I entertained the possibility that maybe this was all just a really weird way to start an orgy.

It wasn’t.

And it got weirder. See, it was organized by someone other than the host, and he was the first one to speak because of course he was the one who brought the talking stick. And so he talked, and talked, and talked. Mostly he talked about the amazing sex he’d been able to have now that he and his partner finally understood that monogamy was colonialist and oppressive. He explained in quite some detail how he and his partner both had come to understand that they were never made for just one man, how thrilling it was to feel the love other men besides his partner had to offer him, and especially how satisfied these other men seemed with the love he offered them.

While he spoke and others in the circle snapped their fingers, I watched the guy to his right slowly go pale and then wilt. I thought perhaps the soy hummus had not agreed with him, so nauseous he looked. I felt sick for him, and wondered when the first man’s interminable “vulnerability” would finally end.

The leader kept speaking and speaking, and then finally just before the end I understood why the man next to him looked so close to death. “My partner and I are still working out the emotional difficulties monogamy causes,” he said, grabbing the man’s hand, “but we’re both really glad we started this journey.”

The man hung his head, averting everyone’s glances. He looked close to tears, and most definitely not as “decolonized” as his partner, the leader, claimed to be.

The soy hummus actually saved me. I excused myself when it came my turn to speak, claiming my stomach doesn’t do well with soy and I needed to go to the bathroom. While they continued, I slipped out a back door and got the fuck out of there.

Some other things to read that aren’t heart circles.

Each month, I try to point you to other things I’ve read that I think you might like. It feels like Substack has become the last great refuge for meaningful online writing, and I now read more from other Substack writers than I do from anything else on the internet. Here’s some of it:

Mortals of the Earth Unite!

First of all, though I mentioned two pieces on trans-humanism at the beginning of my essay on Gnosticism, a third really fascinating piece didn’t get mentioned because I hadn’t listened to it yet. That’s ‘Mortals of the Earth Unite!’ a podcast interview of Anya Bernstein by Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda at Yasha Levine’s substack:

Mortals of the Earth Unite!

The topic is about Cosmism and the current of trans-humanism within Russia and the USSR. The esoteric aspects of Soviet scientific frameworks is utterly fascinating to me: for a supposedly atheist empire, they were pretty damn into the occult. But I knew nothing of Fyodorov—an Orthodox Christian in the 19th century who dreamed up a religious framework for space exploration and immortality-in-this-life—until listening to this podcast episode, and I’m really glad I took the time to do so.

Ceci n’est pas une manifestation.

N.S. Lyons just featured an incredibly well-researched guest essay on the situation in France which is really worth your attention. The author, Renaud Beauchard, discusses the really tenuous grip both the ruling president and also all the other formal political forces have on the really unstable situation there:

France, Farmers, and the Failing 'Extreme Center'

I lived in France for several years (including during the Gilets Jaunes) and can attest that this analysis squares well with the political currents I saw there.

The only thing missing in that essay is the really unstable nature of the social system and the really ridiculous relationship the French have with it. Everyone I knew (including my roommates) had a complex plan to stay on unemployment and housing benefits as long as possible, including some who would take very short term work contracts specifically because they knew they could get another year of being paid for not working. Everyone was gaming the system, except for the few bitter bastards who wanted a bit more from life and resented that everyone they knew was partying on a Tuesday night while they had to work early the next morning.

That thing conservatives warn us leftists that socialism will become is pretty much what’s happened in France, and it’s crumbling. Macron’s attempts to fix it at the behest of the banks are awful, but so too is what has become of the French left. What was especially notable about the Gilets Jaunes was that they were protests by people actually working, rather than the radical anti-work crowds. The same also with the protests against the passe sanitaire, the national COVID vaccine program. Other protests tend to be driven by those who are out of work and are trying to hold on to the social programs that make not working a perfectly viable option.

Perhaps something else will indeed arise, and as Lyons’s guest writer notes, it won’t come from any of the formal political movements there.

Elite nostalgia

The narrative we all tell ourselves about the radicalism of the 60’s and its influence on today is really strange when you look at it closely. We’re a full five decades later yet still evoke it the way some racist US Southerners talk about the Confederacy. That isn’t to say it’s in any way irrelevant to the present, but rather that historical “moments” should really be seen more like brief snapshots of longer historical forces.

There’s a short but poignant essay on this at Flatcaps and Fatalism. And if you have the time to open the links, it also functions as a kind of liner-notes or a musical map of cultural collapse.

The culture wars were irrelevant by 1976

The Friends We Lost

Year ago, I tried my hand at writing a series about sex and relationships called Fur/Sweat/Flesh, themed upon the idea “Sex That Haunts.” The essays I wrote all tried to get at the really difficult and unnameable emotion that feels somewhere between regret, longing, and forgiveness for how ridiculous and silly we humans are when we try to learn to love.

At The Wonderland Rules, Jay Rollins has published a truly exquisite essay full of subtle and raw emotion that does much better than what I tried to do. It’s called “The Real Magic Was The Friends We Lost Along The Way…”, and I think you’ll find it beautifully haunting.

The Real Magic Was the Friends We Lost Along the Way

Other Substacks you might like:

There are other Substacks I subscribe to that are much less known and I hope that changes. You might like some of these too:

gate(less)

It’s a Substack, but it’s super weird and I can never stop looking at it. Gate(less) is like this strange oracular journal that feels like it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere on the web. I’ve been looking at it ever since I learned of it, and I keep looking at it, and something happens and I don’t know what but it always feels good.

Go look, too:

Prayer won't keep you from getting dirty

Torchlight:

I’ve really liked everything I’ve seen thus far on Rebeka Berndt’s substack, and I really hope she writes more. Her essay last month, “Deprogramming from the Cult of Social Justice” was quite good:

Deprogramming From the Cult of Social Justice

Tiger Style Love School

Trixie Little’s substack has a very tender and sweet feeling to it. It’s not everyday you get to read about politics, magic, and personal struggles from a Burlesque dancer.

Geistic Musings

I met David Nichol in the first week of Substack Grow, or actually just before it had started. He’s another great writer who should be writing more often:

A Beautiful Resistance

My final recommendation is a project I’m directly involved with. The publisher I’ve directed for the last seven years started as an online journal, and we’ve hosted it multiple places. It’s currently at Squarespace, but we’ve decided to mirror it also on Substack because, as I said above, I’m pretty sure this is the last great refuge for meaningful writing on the internet.