Powerful men want you to think that intimacy and art don't matter.
On how creativity and care keep us afloat, and they always have.
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Lately I just can’t wait for the part of my day when my kid is home from school and we get to hang out. Usually our afternoon routine goes like this: put away shoes and coat, clean out backpack, wash hands. Then have a snack—lately it’s fruit and madeleine cookies (milk is her beverage of choice, mine is Diet Coke). We start an art project which usually involves pretending like we know how to use watercolors. She makes something wonderful, like a little field of tiny flowers or a village of whimsical elf huts. I make something that looks like someone spilled some paint on a napkin. Then we get down to my favorite part, where she can watch a show on TV in exchange for snuggling with me under a blanket on the couch.
If you have not snuggled under a blanket on the couch recently, I highly recommend it. We watch “Hilda,” a wonderful show based on Scandinavian fairytales, which I am forcing her to re-watch with me because it’s about a magical and kind girl who is incredibly adventurous, and who stands up for trolls (it’s about friendship and othering, really, and I also highly recommend it.) Usually during this part my daughter tries to drink some of my Diet Coke, and I give in if it means we get to snuggle a little longer.
I have become more keenly aware, lately, that this is the best part of my day. It’s so good.
And I think I’m more aware of it because I’m seeking a refuge from all the B.S. and lies that are being thrown at us right now, because it feels like some kind of antidote.
It’s hard to raise a child in these times. I mean—this is not what any of us imagined when we thought of a future that we would want to bring a child into. But also, my family life tethers me to all that really is good and lovely and worthwhile and the opposite of the lies that powerful men tell us right now.
The lies from powerful men tell us that caring for each other doesn’t matter, or that it’s weak or useless. The lies they tell us are that only money and the things that bring power and status matter, and that only those things will prevail.
Under their worldview, the scenes in our homes and with our loved ones that we know to be the matter of life are not powerful or meaningful. The resources that count are the ones that can be used for capital or to bend people to our will; anything else is weak or has no worth.
This feeling of wanting to hunker down with my child and watch kids’ shows (or shows that are ostensibly for kids), reminds me of a the time a couple years back when Ukraine was invaded and I went through a similar time of feeling heartsick and tender. If you’re an OG reader here, you might remember when I wrote about watching the show “Bluey” with my kid (and sometimes by myself) to get through this period.
What resonated with my about “Bluey” wasn’t just that the show was smart and funny and charming (which it is), but that it examined and elevated the intimacy and play of our private lives and family lives.
It treated intimacy and play as subjects worth studying.
I imagined the show’s creators, who wrote most of the early episodes during pandemic lockdown, as a source of inspiration. As I wrote then:
wrote about dark feelings and the possibility that creativity itself is a form of care. “I have found—even in the midst of a pandemic, war, environmental collapse, racial reckoning, especially in the midst of a pandemic, war, environmental collapse, racial reckoning—that weird, small projects keep me alive,” she wrote. She made collages with her daughter. She wrote poems.I think what speaks to my heart about this program at this moment is that here is a group of adults who have been living under the same and grief-streaked days of the last two-plus years, who have been playing and experimenting.
They have been waking up in the morning and drinking too much coffee like I have, and feeling heartsick over the headlines like I have, and nevertheless their imagination perks up and says: “What about a scene where a 4-year old soars through the universe, gives up the toy that she treasures most so that toy can gain freedom, and hears her mother’s voice through the infinite burning of the sun? And we score it to something like Wagner.”
This gives me a spark of hope. This is the energy that I need right now to fight end-times dark feelings.”
She quoted Iraqi artist Sundus Abdul from Take Care Your Self: The Art and Culture of Care and Liberation, who posed a question that stopped me cold:
“What is the opposite of violence?”
Her answer is that the opposite of violence isn’t simply peace, but creativity and care. Creativity, she says, “reclaims one’s energy away from destruction.”
How else do we remind ourselves and each other about our capacity for kindness and delight?
Like everyone else here, I imagine, I have had a lot of dark feelings and overwhelming anxiety lately. It’s a hard time to be on Planet Earth and witness all that we are witnessing. It’s a hard time to be raising a small child while also cultivating a positive imagination for the future and what comes next.
Unabashed creativity and an unwavering conviction that our love for each other matters feels something like the opposite of violence to me right now.
David Byrne has a weird and cool song called “I Zimbra,” (well, he has many but this one is especially weird and cool), and when I saw him perform live a few years back he explained that its lyrics were based on a nonsense poem by a Dada artist that was recorded in 1932—a recording that simply goes on in gibberish for 40 minutes. The poem was a response to the horrors of World War I, he said. They were a way of poking fun at the nonsense words and ideas that powerful men were trying to force on people back then. 1
“These artists were using nonsense to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense,” Byrne said. “Their artistic aims were to remind the world that there are people of independent minds, beyond war and nationalism, who live for different ideals.”
Sound familiar?
I have been thinking a lot the last few weeks about how to stay awake and engaged and hold myself accountable while the undertow of grief and world events sometimes feels like it’s dragging me under. And intuitively, creativity, care, and intimacy are things that I am clinging to. They are on the list of “different ideals” that I live for.
Intimacy and the domestic sphere—also known as our home lives that we share with our loved ones—layer our lives with meaning. Powerful men would like us to believe that those things are frivolous and weak, but those are lies.
Care is often unpaid, made to be invisible, and often unrecognized in our society right now. Care is not part of the language that powerful men use or share. Most of their actions seek to bury it—make us believe that it’s worthless, or worse yet…that it just doesn’t really exist.
But care creates the intimacy that is the glue between us, across generations; the thing that has lifted us across the span of time to the current moment where we still feed and clothe each other, cheer each other up, teach each other, dance with each other, keep it all going in spite of everything.
I’m writing this from a farm that my family is staying at with some friends right now. This afternoon the farm caretaker allowed us into the barn during chore time. We cleaned the stall of a cow named Buttercup and another one named Sukiyaki (okay, my favorite cow was named Chopped Cheese.) Fresh sawdust was laid down under them, and we fed them grain and hay. A half dozen squealing children entered a henhouse full of squawking chickens, and emerged with small buckets of warm brown eggs.
The milk and eggs were used to help make a big communal meal that we made while listening to music, and we shared the food sitting around big tables.
Ir was a reminder that care has always underpinned our lives. Care is where our food comes from, care is how we are fed. Shared intimacy is what stitches—is stitching—our lives together.
Don’t let anyone try to tell us otherwise.
You can see a clip of Byrne talking about “I Zimbra” here and performing it in his own weird and awesome way, and it’s totally worth watching.
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Matriarchy Report is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah, and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor at New York Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
I loved this post and the reminder from David Byrne about how to make music out of nonsense. It's like blowing a big raspberry in the face of those who would make us believe that their fear-mongering and violence are the "real" world -- when, like you say, it is creativity and care that will restore us to sanity. Thank you!!
This is beautiful. One thing that came to mind was Elon and how he evades even the most basic responsibilities of fatherhood in search of power. This man has fathered, what, 13 children? 13 beautiful little souls who have been abandoned by their father, the man with the most resources on the planet. How many parents who have lost children or had to leave their children behind would do ANYTHING for the joy of being with their children? He is incapable of seeing the value of anything except his own power to dominate and take from others.