I’ve written three different versions of this newsletter, trying to probe past the surface of what’s really on my mind, and I keep coming back to the same idea: it takes delusion to force a paradigm shift. A staunch belief that reality is malleable, if we keep pushing the boundaries of what we've been told is impossible.
In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), a woman reads letters to a traveler. The film is a visual essay about memory filmed mostly in Japan and Guinea-Bissau. A meditation on survival between two places that sit on opposite poles of history and geography, the film features many cats. Some on the streets, others such as the Maneki Neko—otherwise known as the beckoning cat— is a symbol of abundance, wealth, even love in shrines. I’ve visited some of these shrines where people leave a wish penned on a small piece of paper, then ring a bell before walking past a horde of beckoning cats waving their paw. To a cat, not much seems impossible. They goes about their lives with non-negotiable boundaries they make known to anyone they encounter. I understand why they may be seen as harbingers of blessings. Their staunch refusal of suboptimal conditions is part of what makes them so endearing, and inspiring. They don’t compromise their comfort, safety, and most importantly, their joy.
Anyone marginalized by a system built on their oppression spends most of their waking hours internalizing a manufactured ceiling, one that insists there's an upper limit to their joy. That they must endure life as opposed to live it. And this is what makes joy deeply political: who gets to effortlessly access it by birthright, and who’s forced to fight for crumbs of it. Cynicism calcifies as a defense, perfected by years of settling for hard-won scraps. The threshold of what the marginalized deem possible is actively lowered by a system that forces them to concede for less and less and less and less. To cope, they learn to package these limitations by revisiting their aspirations to what they’re taught to call “realistic.”
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