on inertia
a friend and I discussed activism at great length the other day. he's that rare sort who plunges into the fibrous thick of the world, clad in the armour of one who just knows that change is possible, and that he can effect it. I, on the other hand, am the sort who stands at arm's length from the world, seeing things incredulously, largely -- so largely that all I see is the enduring immutability of things, and suffer paralysis as a result. he mobilizes his energies with a passion i've rarely known: carbon emissions, consumption of meat as economic inefficiency, union politics, video piracy, fair trade, recycling, the works -- while I blame the world's inertia, vacillate uncertainly between abstract notions of legacy and abstract notions of transience, and in the meantime do, you know, absolutely nothing.
but just the other day I received an email; on the far side of the atlantic somewhere, someone had read something I had written and had, as he wrote in his email, "stole some lines for a song. hope you don't mind".
and there was an mp3 link, and a myspace page.
I do receive a lot of mail from people I've never met, readers who enjoy my writing, and even a handful of real friendships forged out of a virtual space. but listening to my words in someone else's mouth made me think of butterflies and thunderstorms, ripples, words ghosting across the oceans with a real force, a realler force than I generally understand. it was concrete, or as concrete as an mp3 can be. it was, in a very genuine sense, a sort of reality jolt sitting innocuously in my iTunes folder.
and it's through this that I came a little way towards glimpsing what animates my friend: the deeper understanding that inertia is a double-edged force, and therefore, can't be an excuse for inaction. it's both stop and go; it's what stops you starting, but it's also what doesn't let you stop once you've started. it's perpetuity manifesting as reticence. blind optimism is thinking anyone can change the world; but the simpler truth is that anyone can do, and that it isn't necessarily futile; and the simpler reality is that inaction is the battle surrendered without even unpacking the artillery. this, an antidote for the barren wasteland of nihilism too.
so, my friend has had a genuine impact on me; i have genuinely impacted on someone else; the relationships and consequences burgeon exponentially. isn't this how the world works? and how history, and art, works? in spite of history, all the politics, all the great men and all the manifestos -- why has it taken this brief song, this delicate, odd fugue of melodies, for me to start having any faith at all in individual agency?