at Lesley Flint Presents, hosted by Joseph Bradshaw
Rachel Levitsky is a visionary.
When I met Rachel, I persuaded her to let me turn Belladonna
into a nonprofit.
“Our strategy was later revealed
as naïve, but not completely naïve.”
She has written a novel against the arrogant notion that we
can act without context, arguing instead
that when we inevitably spill over out of ourselves we are world-building.
“We could not keep all the
particulars of it, our suffering, within the confines of our chest”
If we must risk death when we act (and we must),
“there is no outcome other than
my death”
then our actions must have purpose in order to validate to
our survival.
The book is dedicated to dissent
and to the future and its mothers.
If it is not for our food water and shelter or the food
water and shelter of others,
Alice Notley writes, “We the men
have caused a crisis of money food and shelter, the primal goods, and we the
men will fix it. You can’t help because it’s urgent. Only we the men know how
to fix the things we broke.”
then it must be FOR AN IDEA with high stakes, with skin in the game, as a sports
commentator or financial guru or NY Times
columnist would argue—
“…might not we attempt to
contribute a future less poisonous, atomized, wasting and ruined for the world
into which surely others will find themselves awakening like us, shouldering
unknown traits and ways.”
an idea about the future—though this “skin game” idiom, the
origin of which is disputed, usually connotes a financial stake, a wager or an
investment depending on your tack, while Levitsky’s novel calls for political
skin; she asks whether we are willing to stake our freedom from violence—a risk
more immediate than what money is
capable of.
Can we be activist in our nonprofit management, in our
university employment, in our personal lives? Can we be interventionist in our
editing and our event curation?
Levitsky answers yes. It may not always be fun or cute or
charming to do so, but it is powerful and it means in a higher stakes way, that is, this activism in daily life
and circled round in this challenging novel, than most of the text being
created and published today. Not just poetics of what are you doing, but a
poetics of what are you doing about.
And in terms of collaboration, who are you doing about and with.
