Commonplace Book Time Machine #1: Novus Ordo Seclorum

One of the two chapbooks I initially proposed creating in conjunction with my Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series writing residency will not be produced. Because the residency is only five weeks long, I've decided I must devote the lion's share of the period to the more substantial of the two projects, a meditation on my childhood comprehension of death and killing. Still, rather than let the preliminary work I'd done for the commonplace book chapbook go to waste, I thought I'd share a few of the scanned pages here, on Hungry Hyaena, along with some editorializing. The first of these posts follows.

+++++

2-page spread from one of my commonplace books, 2000

Just after my twenty-second birthday, I began a new commonplace book. At the time, I was living in the basement bedroom of an Alphabet City apartment in Manhattan, laboring five days a week at a Soho art gallery and, nights and weekends, drawing and painting in my bedroom or working on a solipsistic vampire novel titled, appropriately, Me. My income was meagre; I'd grown used to dinners of white rice (generously seasoned with soy sauce) and I socialized just one night a week (not counting too many hours spent watching recorded episodes of Mr. Show with my roommates). Necessarily thrifty, then, I elected not to purchase a new journal to use for the commonplace book; instead, I picked up a journal that I'd cast aside a couple of years prior after filling its early pages with adolescent agitation.

Keep the Flame Alive In 2012

2011 will be best remembered as a year of popular dissatisfaction and uprisings. Lacking a crystal ball, such instability -- especially the prospective political transitions from despotism to democracy in Egypt and Libya -- can cause acute anxiety.

As we enter 2012, it's useful to keep in mind that democracy is a pendulum that forever swings from equilibrium to imbalance and back. The uncertainty and tensions associated with the political and ideological landscape of today's Middle East are also endemic to established democracies. Lewis Lapham described the workings of a democratic government in "Democracy 101," an essay published in the April 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine.

"Democracy is a dangerous business; it allies itself with change, which engenders movement, which induces friction, which implies unhappiness, which assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of its existence. The idea collapses unless countervailing stresses oppose one another with competing weight - unless enough people stand willing to sustain the argument between the governing and the governed, between city and town, capital and labor, men and women, matter and mind. [...It] is the freedoms of thought that rescue a democracy from its stupidities and crimes, the courage of its dissenting citizens that protects it against the despotism of wealth and power backed up with platitudes and billy clubs and subprime loans."

This description should ignite fire in the belly of all United States citizens, wherever they place themselves on the political spectrum.

In late January 2009, I wrote an essay titled "Eudamonia." The piece explored the possible causes of a "bout of optimism [that] seemed remarkable in both duration and degree." That optimism is tempered today, but it still burns, despite the growth of "triumphant pessimism" among our populace. I remain optimistic because I believe in long term improvement, in two steps forward for one step back.

Let us all be devoted, active citizens in 2012, realistic, but not cynical, hopeful, but not naive, critical, but not destructive.

Image credit: uncredited photograph ripped from Care2 Make A Difference website