Every Heart Carries A Beat

                By carla joy bergman and kitty lu bear

 [A short preamble by carla]

One of the last things a dear friend wrote to me before he died was “thank you for your fire in this devastated world.” Lately, I have been returning to their words over and over again, in part for the medicine they provide but also to try and catch some sparks from his radical embers because, I don’t feel like I've been doing much “fire” with my deeds or even with my words this past year, at least not in any impactful ways. But, I have come to embrace the reality that right now my writings will be fragmented pieces, but as I’ve always done, I am finding homes for these fragments in bonds together with my friends. At the outset of last year I imagined completing more solo pieces, but the reality is it is not where I am at this time…  but then again, is anything ever truly solo or completed? As I find my thoughts pouring out in fragments, I’m returning to fabulous collaborations (often with friends) because sometimes those who know us best and who we trust deeply can help remind us of the knowings we hold within us — even when it’s hard to see for ourselves (I love it best when we think and feel together anyhow!). In many ways these mosaics of writings are mutuality in action, and I think that’s pretty fucking cool. I also think that by keeping things slightly fragmented is perhaps an honest snapshot of these confusing times, or at least it is for me. I hope these fragmented shards of writings and offerings, make space for others to join the conversations, too. Think of them as an invitation to anyone who might feel inspired to take a shard or two and write something more, or create a piece of art, etc! I am excited to see where these shards go and how they alchemize.

Below is the first written offering for Fragments From The Edges of Now— co-written with my dearest punk pals, kitty lu bear. 

**

Every Heart Carries A Beat

To be a punk is to be on an ongoing journey of departure away from modernity and its institutions, where we actively reject the fictions that empire spins about social binaries that work to cut us in half and put up borders between each of us. And, for us, part of this departure is to release reason to the wind! (as Aime Cesaire once said). 

Armed with love, we return from the future that is socially constructed, where empire attempts to keep us in a fear spiral while holding our imaginations hostage for the promise of a better time. Punks know better. With these ongoing acts of departing from empire, we ascend away from certainty, dogma, and ideology. And as we fly, we take up the work of radical cartographers; mapping our way towards collective freedom, inscribing along the dotted lines:

 No Settler Futures! No Future for empire!

☑ No futures mean no right nows progressing to tomorrow when they kill us today. 

We know that being a punk — punk as a verb and as an ethos — is an embodied way of being and becoming that spits in the face of dominance and the establishment at large. And we know we need each other to keep our resolve, to not fall back in line with the world constructed to privilege the individual and to only support a few. 

☑ Aesthetics don’t save lives, fashion does not stop the fascists.

We fiercely continue to be against the dominant order so we can keep spitting in their faces and dancing on its ruins, worlding new ways of relating and becoming. 

☑ To pick up next kin is the kind of PUNK we deserve.
☑ To pick up next kin is the kind of PUNK we need.
☐ To pick up next kin is the kind of PUNK that we are.

We can’t be reduced down to a scene, although we are seen by one another. Our aesthetics arrive from within and they are rooted in the true meaning of the word — we are feeling and sensing each other and our worlds around us, then responding and doing more together. A punk is never a libertarian, even when some of those folks are cosplaying with aesthetics of black and red sewn together with patches. We see through the fascist outfits! Punks are always a we — collectively practising autonomy in the cracks of individualism, learning, failing, learning more.

☐ Our next kin is cultivated to risk and failure, pulled by the gravity of the now, knowing that we will pick them up when they fall.

When we feel ourselves being pulled away from the edges of belonging, when there are attempts to break us away from this collective we, when we are being violently thrown towards the void of normalcy and compliance (often because we need to survive).Our punk ancestors are waiting at the thresholds of these voids, sending hints and whispers, picking us up and connecting us back to our hearts-wes, because when one of us falls, we are there to pick them up. This hard as nails commitment for showing up in real-time, helps us to remember that we are never alone. Our kin-across time often comes from the shadows of our memories through stories and songs. They travel across our rememberings, moving beyond our fictitious realities, pulsating their hearts in unison as they pick us up, over and over again.

☑ They always pick us up.
☑ We will always pick them up.
☐ We always pick them up.

Our punk ancestors were and are dreamers, lovers, philosophers, writers, friends, warriors, dancers, mystics, painters, composers, alchemists, poets, tinkers, misfits, outcasts, kids, elders, and you.

To pick up next kin is to pop the helium balloons of liberalism, threatening to darken skies with gaslit death rattles of a living corpse. To pick up next kin is to materialize mutuality in the forms of resistance that smashes through the walls and the floors of a state undeserving of actualization.

To pick up next kin is to not comply in advance, to not silence our collective screams, to not steal joy from generations, to not seize the mysticism of the youth. To pick up next kin is to do no harm and take no shit, for all beloveds unknown and waiting to be known. To pick up next kin is to be PUNK out loud, across all timelines.

Like our mycelium kin, our Punk ancestors are a web of chaos whose rhythmic pulses connect across the cosmos, existing beyond binaries of light and dark, casting a spectrum of beauty, one that flashes in moments of fury, surprise, and desire.

Winding in time, falling through the cracked floor of crashing foundations, we will pick them up in dimensions unknown. We will pick up next kin as anchors that let them fall sideways through orthogonal time backwards. Dancing through dimensions, busting through the walls like cellular respiration, we will pick them up in all directions. We will pick up next kin as roots into the earth that let us fall up down left right, spiraling until the compass breaks.

Us Punks walk lines between empires “truths” of codified languages and the ineffable unknown knowings. Weaving bridges made of twigs and stones that bring us to the landscapes of weird knowings where nothing has been fully captured or seized; to a place where magic truly resides. Arriving from our hearts, we begin to form new worlds. 

We defy the stand hard that demands a heel when the stomp of the earth kicks the boots from the nest. We land on the ground, in the ground, to pick up next kind, next kindred, next kin.

Dance and spin and stomp and scream and rage and love and sweat bleed weep and fall
and fall
and fall
and fall
and fall and still we will pick up next kin.

[This is nothing for us and everything for everyone. 
For when you fall, we fall too, to stand up again together.]

Punk Mystics don’t remain at these unseized places, because amidst the chaosmosis of the many nows, and the ineffable whispers transmitting symbols directly to our hearts, we must continue to tend to the web of picking up our next kin. These are the journeys of care and love that make new worlds. This is where we bring our full selves into harmony, creating new symphonies to stomp out and supplant empires' violent noises. 

This is material joy. 

Every space carries every expression, every heart carries a beat. 

Fall to the ground to know you exist, 

to know you can risk, 

to know that when you fall, 

you are kin and 

there is no future where we aren’t standing, 

taking no shit together.

This is not goodness, 

nor is it morality. 

This is not ethics, 

nor reasonable praxis.

This is

Where we belong

Where we love

This is 

where we pick up 

(our) next kin.

***

We are Punks.

Notes:

 “Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.” Aime Cesaire

kitty lu bear (visit kitty’s website: https://www.fungifemme.com)

Featured art by Chris Bermgan

Second piece of art by Klee Benally