ENSZER: How do people make a living in the world and make art? That is one of the questions that animates my research and scholarship and spills over into my friendships and everything. It ties into what is valued and how do we value people’s time and work and how does that translate in so many different ways?

WIKSWO: Perhaps one has to back up and develop a proprietary definition of both “living” and “art.” These words are mutable and highly contextual. My experience vastly improved when I spent 2015 doing this semantic exercise – during what I believed to be a major depression that has now revealed itself as a profound existential metamorphosis. And to me, living began to be equated with freedom from constraint, and art began to be equated with freedom from constraint. So I made a list of all my constraints and began to systematically demolish them. That meant leaving Brooklyn, leaving my partner, and almost entirely divesting from the artistic and social community I inhabited. Now I “live” off less than $20K, precariously, and my “art” is no longer exclusively affiliated with any institution that exercises control.

ENSZER: So I am fascinated by this reframe and the idea of what constitutes “living” and what constitutes “art”. And as always, I hear Dorothy Allison on my shoulder nattering about class. I don’t know where exactly this is going, so I’ll just type. It seems that the question of what is the definition of “living” differs in some ways based on class backgrounds. For me, having grown up in Michigan in a working-class community that was reliant on the auto industry and the advances that unions brought to families, living means being able to provide for oneself and ones family, but also it inevitably meant for me that I didn’t want to do the body-breaking work of the auto industry (or in more contemporary landscapes in Michigan service industries).

I understand your definition of freedom from constraint for both art and living, but there are also the people on my shoulder saying, look no one is free from constraint. “They” are never going to let you do certain things; don’t get too uppity thinking or talking about art; the path to being flat broke is an easy one to take. The language around the pain and challenge of living in the world from my childhood is very present. In some ways, I want art to mitigate that pain, those challenges. I don’t know what all of this means, but there was my mother (her memory a blessing—or something) on my shoulder saying, oh, this woman isn’t like you. Out there in Brooklyn. Talking about freedom. Trying to escape control. They all will control you. They will never just let you be.

WIKSWO: Whereas my grandmothers, may their memories be enigmas, were perpetually engaged in hacking the system. They were angry – one a Jewish immigrant prevented from attaining a PhD in Mathematics from Columbia because PhDs in Mathematics weren’t granted to women at Columbia, even those who had successfully defended a thesis and had all the proper credits. Or the other grandmother, who married an Amish preacher and was devastated to discover that she couldn’t shave her legs, wear colors, wear lipstick, dance, sing, or set off fireworks. They both were always seeking the monkeywrench.

You are right – there are always constraints. But something deep within me refuses to accept that without a fight to the death. My healthcare got cancelled today, so that day may come sooner rather than later. I have $4 in my bank account. I have panic attacks, and then I remember that I’m going to die so what the hell. Perhaps more of us might ruthlessly – for me, it was accompanied by desperation and a longing for suicide, so it was survivalist – examine our own perceptions of value, of our own worth, and of how we treat ourselves. There is no magic solution to making sure we have roof and food, art and soul, but we might be more likely to craft lives and work that bring a connection to the sublime rather than to a form of slavery.

ENSZER: So is capitalism a form of slavery for the workers? I don’t know. I always pause at that metaphor. On one hand, I see some merits to it, but in my life because of education and the ability to be mobile, I have not experienced the same dehumanizing aspects of capitalism that I think some of my forebears did. And I always worry about metaphors to slavery in the US so close to our history of slavery, which we still live with every day. (And you said you were the interruptor. I seem to have something to say about every paragraph.)

WIKSWO: Interruption is the spice of discourse, so hooray! I do not believe that capitalism by design is a form of slavery for the workers. I believe that, over timespace, consumer capitalism in its present form supports and upholds slavery – I am biased, perhaps, having spent many years working in anti-slavery projects, also known as human trafficking opposition. I have met real-life, present-day women who were and are slaves, and so I cannot place slavery in the United States exclusively in the past. What I saw was an economic system of commodities that could only survive if some humans are owned and not remunerated for their labor. Is that interent to the ideal of capitalism? Absolutely not. Is that inherent in the practice of capitalism? Without question. I have no ideas for anything to replace capitalism, other than potent limits on its predatory and exploitative powers.

As for me, personally, my experience growing up in the south, working against slavery, and then encountering New York City were radicalizing. It came down to (1) a radical divestment in capitalism and consumer capitalism, (2) a daily practice of self-discipline around who and what I answer to, and (3) a deliberate distancing from institutions with gatekeeping power. When I lived in New York City, I began to think I answered to the jury of beaux arts cocktail parties, and then I realized that hedge fund managers were buying all my artwork and keeping it in climate controlled storage in Jersey. But that may be a discussion for a different time.

Sumary: I think slavery is a term that, like genocide, has to be navigated very carefully, but cannot be used proprietarily by a single group. I grew up with sharecroppers who often said, slavery wasn’t over, it was just repurposed into sharecropping and the prison industrial complex. Everything I see in my adult life has underscored that slavery still exists, and that it is directly tied to unregulated consumer capitalism.

I agree – it’s a complicated term to use as metaphor, but it needs to be used, and talked about, and challenged, expanded, explored…

ENSZER: So, Q, how do you divest from the desire to be in institutions with gatekeeping power? I understand the deliberate distancing as a choice people make, but if I am totally honest, I still yearn to be in those institutions for the resources that they make available to people inside them. Having a research library at one’s fingertips is a GIFT. Being in conversation with an array of people who come in and out of these institutions is such pleasure. I miss those things. And I cannot say that there is anything deliberate about my relationships or lack thereof to institutions; it is more happenstance and a manifestation of contemporary circumstances. And sometimes that makes me sad or angry or bitter. So I still have the desire to be in institutions.

I completely appreciate the practice of self-discipline not only around who and what I answer to but also around how I do my work. That I love and appreciate being without constraints.

WIKSWO: The emphasis is divesting from the desire. In the sense of a driving motivation that is preoccupying, mesmerizing, and angled towards a goal. If I make a list of all the resources that gatekeeper institutions offer, I am happy in most – but not all – instances to benefit from them. But to me, it has to be a side-effect of my work, and not the motivation behind my work. I do not have a research library, but I post on social media asking for someone who can help me access documents, and I prefer that to having key aspects of my autonomy controlled by a university president – dean – department chair – tenure committee. I’ve met about thirty new colleagues in the Netherlands due to one social media research request, and I value what has emerged from those relationships more than I privilege making ethical sacrifices to a university.

As I’ve said, I didn’t have any formal education until high school, and had no contact with any institutions that I can recall until I was about fifteen. Perhaps I was never exposed to the process by which one devotes inherent respect or allegiance or loyalty to an institution. It always seemed they needed to earn it from me. Arrogant attitude, I know, but I have found that it goes both ways. And most of the people who have influenced me the most have had to sabotage the gates of major institutions to gain access, which makes me question – do I want to be at a party where the folx I respect have to crash? I’m being slightly facetious, but mostly not.

And the books I love were never taught in university. And the artists I’ve loved were never shown in museums or galleries. And that was directly related to identity – to blackness, or queerness, or womanness…why be a patriot for a system that hates you?

ENSZER: What constitutes a lesbian literary canon? how does one get formulated?

WIKSWO: a canon or a cannon. I’m personally disinterested in a literary canon, as it has come to be defined, since by its essence it is exclusionary. A lesbian literary canon would be troubling because an excluded community perpetuating exclusion is tatamount to an ethical crime. However, a lesbian literary cannon filled with buckshot – that’s interesting. We are a fragmented community, queers. I mean that in a good way because we are confederacies of selves over time – sexual, political, physical, aesthetic, expressive, inexpressive, and I think this panoply of culture could embrace our bits and pieces and then we have the prism that is at the root of our solidarity. Solidarity through fragmentation. Any club that would have me is one I would never want to join, etcetera.

ENSZER: Yes, love the canon or cannon move. And completely appreciate the exclusionary function of canons. And yet. I still cannot drink out of a fire hydrant. I need a glass or a water fountain. I think that in the best worlds we have many options to drink that suggest different modes of hydration. Without a canon of some sort, something that someone is proscribing, what do we rage against? Where do we start?

I think that there is function in different canon-constructing projects. Some people are never going to come to the fire hydrant or be out in the woods for the buckshot. They want the glass of water. They want the listicle of read these things because they are the best lesbian novels from the 70s or the 80s or the 20s. I appreciate that impulse. Not everyone is going to read deeply in a particular area. Some people want the highlights reel.

I am always looking for smart people in various areas where I can read or watch or think downstream from them. Where I can get their recommendations and their insights without having to sort it all out myself. So that is where I think the canon can be important.

WIKSWO: I agree with you, I just wouldn’t call that a canon. Not in the classical European sense. I think that’s dead now. Or I will work harder to kill it. I would call the Lesbian Lexicon a grassroots listicle highlights reel that should remain unregulated, and frequently disrupted by the unusual suspects.

ENSZER: What is in and out? What are the reasons for the inclusions and exclusions? You saw some of those questions in my last piece for Lambda – and I am thinking about them again in a new piece that I am writing.

WIKSWO: Your writing about the writing of Jenny Johnson and Marilyn Hacker and Renee Vivienne are – like all your writing about lesbian poetics – as gorgeous and thought-provoking as the poems themselves. Ins and outs, inclusions and exclusions seem to revolve in many ways around wildness, around divestment, around radical distancing from what contains and constricts. Discomfort is a word that’s very underestimated. Discomfort takes people to hospital, and very few humans go to hospital for entertainment, or enjoyment, or pleasure – and sadly, in my opinion, canons are typically based off being in some way digestible.

Most of the exclusions are from being the wrong kind of whatever. By not conforming to the accepted modes of conduct, whether that’s the contemporary ideal of lesbian erotics, or playing nice to the right people. Just because many of us are disenfranchised, doesn’t mean we don’t have our own communities policing us. And the number of rejections I have received from queer editors and curators who called my work “the wrong kind of queer” means that our allies are not necessarily people with whom we share an identity category. It’s all a process of ruthless reductivism, and then outliers being uncategorizable. There was an argument with my last book by Amazon regarding whether it should be lesbian fiction, or African American nonfiction. My publisher listed it as memoir. Just let that sink in.

ENSZER: yes absolutely. That is a function of canons. They do, indeed, make simpler a rich and complex eco-system of writing, thinking, and conversation.

WIKSWO: Canons do not take one to the hospital. Cannons, however, do so very efficiently. Discomforting writers, discomforting lesbians, discomforting lesbianisms all are forms of cannons, destroying comfort in order to replace it with the unknown, the sublime, the precipitous, the threatening, the unfamiliar. And we humans with our fight-flight-freeze amygdala have to actively work against categorizing something as a threat.

ENSZER: Categorizing seems at the crux of so much of these questions. Yes, resisting categorization is vital work; to me it is foundational work of feminism and queer life. At the same time, I am not anti-categorical in my being. I recognize both the constraints of a category and the pleasures of categorization.

WIKSWO: And queerness, queer women, female self-expression, female sexuality – the list goes on – are perhaps the most primal fear in our human civilization over the last few thousand years. There has been a war declared on us: a very violent, deadly war with casualities of all kinds. So I say, let’s load each and every one of us into the cannon and keep on firing away. Because even the metaphor of a lesbian cannon – is a cannon phallic, or vaginal? – is discomforting.

ENSZER: A fundamental epistemic question I think I live with in the world is the power of critique to challenge and transform our lives. I live today because of feminist and lesbian critiques of how people live in the world and how people can resist various power structures and systems of oppression in the world. At the same time, critique I find fundamentally limiting because it is focused on tearing things down and I am interested in how to build, create, imagine new and different things.

I wrote about this in a short piece at Huffington Post. I think the piece relies too much on a binary between critique and create, but I still feel the dynamic tension between those two impulses. I hope ideally the tension leads to greater productivity and insight, but sometimes it also feels unmanageable.

WIKSWO: Tension is perhaps inherently unmanageable. We need more of that – friction, tension. Otherwise there is complacency and that becomes the mobius strip that leads us right back to the conservative gatekeepers, which are as prevalent in the progressive left as in the repressive right. The less manageable, the less obedient, then the more visible. ACT UP came from that strategy and set of tactics.

ENSZER: Why is this question so important to me? I’m invested in how women and lesbians and queer women are seen as making or creating or contributing to culture. Or ways that they are doing that but are not seen.

WIKSWO You certainly are a major driving force in the seeing of queer women’s self-expression, and perhaps because you go beyond seeing into also hearing, listening, absorbing, amplifying, feeling that self-expression. My first introduction as a baby queer was my brother’s copy of Adrienne Rich’s more erotic poems during that all-important puberty. My radicalization as an eighteen year old with a modicum of sexual freedom was Monique Wittig’s Les Guerrierres. These have to be taken into the body not as other, but as fact. The Fact of a Doorframe, for all its many meanings, is Rich’s title that to my child-brain forever eroticized doorframes as sexual – a tongue of a lock in the furrow of a clasp.

ENSZER: Yes, I love doorframes, that sense of being between different worlds. Being on a threshold of something, some discovery, some new experience. I’ve been rereading Rich in the big new book of all of her poems and thinking about how metaphorically the home/domestic world poems continue to feel resonate, but her vision became so much larger, so global and powerful. I am trying to understand how the poetry works as she matures.

WIKSWO The jouissance of queer female writing that to me is most unseen is the work that is explicit, visceral, and ferocious. Thank goodness my brother developed an interest in lesbian literature or else I’d be a different person. But the very invisibility of these women’s expressions became a challenge…something like the inevitable conversation amongst teenagers in “how to find the clit.” The Fact of a Doorframe became a talismanic, erotic fact of queer female aliveness to me as a teenager in the late 1980s when much of queer culture was about death and gay men. Silence = Death, Queer = Death, and friends who wouldn’t drink from a waterfountain after me in case pussy licking gave them AIDS.

ENSZER:: Yes, I came of age at the same time and even as I raged again the linkage between queerness and death, it is profoundly marked in my subconsciousness. From the sense of being surprised and delighted about being older to seeing younger queers without that association.

WIKSWO The contrast is certainly mindboggling, as I relate stories to my undergrad and grad students as visiting professor from Mars. The young queers look at me with pity and horror as I harangue to them about my own vendetta against the grotesqueries of queerness and death, which I first encountered during a hate crime that my girlfriend and I survived – while I was recovering a well-intentioned friend gave me a stack of 1950s lesbian pulp fiction novels in which all the women were murdered, died, reprogrammed, silenced, restrained, or met some other hideous extinguishment. The timing of my life with those books was also radicalizing, since my girlfriend and I had found ourselves fighting back with knives. The university students that I meet all around the country seem entirely perplexed by this, unless they are in an identity group such as Islam or Christianity where they are still being persecuted.

My grandmother was a queer woman, a mathematician, and I watched her children erase her. She has passed away, and her visibility is that of her nine grandchildren, six of us are openly queer. All other traces of her are gone. I once hosted the poet Paul Hoover in my studio in Los Angeles, and he stood in shocked paralysis by my desk and then said, “why and how do you have a photo of my mother’s girlfriend on your desk?” It was a photo of my grandmother. They were both faculty at Sweet Briar College for women in the 1950s. I went back and taught there in 2009, as an openly queer female writer, and it was a ritual of reclamation.

ENSZER: Wow. What a powerful story!

WIKSWO: I think erasure of queer women’s self expression is a ritual in our society. And so must the reconstitution of our culture be a ritual. I think you are one of the leaders in this ritual.

ENSZER: And how can that erasure end? I think you are exactly right that erasure of queer women and queer women’s self expression is a ritual in our society. How can we interrupt that process? How can we hold on to things so that people are not forgotten. I was thrilled to read this article about Lorde in the UK. I hope that we are feeling our way to challenging some of the erasures.

There will always be some, of course. It is the drinking out of the fire hydrant issue. Not everything can be carried from generation to generation, but more has to be carried.

WIKSWO: I think there are so many emerging curators and editors who are out there searching for overlooked queer women – a project led by activists of our generation, perhaps, who did the initial excavating and need a hand in that enterprise. There are a few breadcrumbs of hope – the retroactive New York Times obituaries of erased women….the Wikipedia feminist edit-a-thons.

ENSZER: How can feminism be usefully put into conversations with questions about racial justice, economic justice, equality, liberation, liberty? Of course it is in conversation with all of those things and of course there are conflicts around all of those things. How do we sketch out this space in ways that are inclusive and meaningful?

WIKSWO: White feminism did some very, very harmful and destructive things – that has to be publicly and universally acknowledged as a fact of the feminist legacy that cannot be erased. I live in a white minority state, in a white minority county, in a white minority village, and the word feminism is understandably snorted at by women of color here, who were actively excluded and had to kick down doors that were locked by white women. There are complex contexts to this, but the fact remains that the Feminist Movement has some truth and reconciliation, some reparations and responsibilities of conscience, amends and apologies to make, and to keep doing so consistently and universally before those wounds can begin to heal.

Intersectionality is again the embrace of fragmentation over the hegemony of singular identity. So many of us fight to be recognized or seen – as well as to live and exist – as any identity and we become fiercely wedded to all that we have sacrificed and lost in the pursuit of basic existence. To some extent, we have to hold onto that while also letting go of it. To not become mono-dimensional is the dream of any liberation movement, right? To have the freedom to be n-dimensional, unrestricted, free.

ENSZER: Ah, back to the question of what constitutes life and freedom. I resonate with this. And yet. I also am fascinated by the happiness of people who live within restricted communities. Certainly for some (the queers, the feminists, the writers) insular communities never work for them, but there are people for whom living with constraints and limitations work JUST FINE. What is the difference between people for whom those constraints work and me? And I do not think the answer to that question is lifting me up to make me better. I have a profound respect for people who live where they are with honesty and integrity and embrace their place. That isn’t me, but there may be something wrong with me!

WIKSWO: And sketching out space means having very focused conversations about how we police expression within ourselves and within our identity communities. I’ve been called a bad queer more times that I can count, by other queer people. That’s absurd. And that’s only one facet of my identity prism.

While it was initially very enticing to have a lesbian bookstore or to go to the lesbian herstory section of a library, we may need to more rapidly evolve into dismantling the barbed wire that construct these identity fences, and think of ourselves as a species as an ecosystem of hybrids, none of which need to be segregated into purebloods. This is policing, blood quota, the ranked status of a lesbian who has never had sex with a cis man, and all the other forms of control and power that are existential policing.

ENSZER: I have read somewhere that more people are staying where they are in the United States. Fewer people are moving, leaving where they were born. My grandmother felt the failure of Michigan was that I moved away for work, for life. I thought life and work were at the other end of a move. She thought that life and work were where you stood. I don’t know what I think. I do know that they hybridity, the mixing up of everything, comes from moving around. From shaking things up. That’s why I have lived in four different states. And will probably move again at some point.

WIKSWO: In the United States we have such an assumption that we can go anywhere and be anything. It’s a double edged sword of colonialism as well as liberation. A gorgon’s knot. How many metaphors can I throw in to say that the idea of staying in one’s assigned spot has value, and so does coloring outside the lines. Or rather, they both have consequences, and we as a society tend to take them lightly, rather than pause to reflect on the impact and repercussions of things like one person’s self-definition is another person’s red-lined gentrification. In general, if decisions are made with conscience and ethics, we can only do what feels right for us. I start to lose myself if I do not move myself. I don’t ever plan to have a single static place of residence. But I think a lot about migration and travel as a practice of self-scrutinized ethics.

ENSZER: I was just reading today a piece about the letters of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem and the conflict between being philosophers and believing in an ethical duty to humanity as a whole vs. some type of nationalism. I found the conflict very moving and painful and I think that is a bit of a template for how I think about this question.

the article is here: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/254461/hannah-arendt-and-gershom-scholem  I bought the book. It was too expensive, but I just have to read those letters.

WIKSWO: I read that essay too, and the book is on my next-to-procure list! Thank you for introducing me to this mindbending work. I have an enormous obsession with all things Hannah Arendt to the extent that she is a regular figure in my dreams and nightmares. I’m conversing with you right now while staring at the spine of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. It’s easy to argue that those two have been in the ten-fingered handful of most important thinkers in my life. But I wonder about the conflict between ethics and nationalism. I wonder whether it’s more a capacity for discomfort, and how far one is willing to go into deep discomfort. For a philosopher-mystic who pre-emptively fled genocide, the concept of a Jewish nationalized homeland (insert, Lesbian Desert Island Utopia or Norfolk, Virginia’s attempt at a Free Black State) must have been unimaginably comforting. A place where all likeminded people can gather in spacetime.

ENSZER: Yes, and I’m interested in WHY utopias are mono in our imaginations? I think of the feminist utopian thinkers – Joanna Russ, Elana Dykewomon, Octavia Butler, June Arnold – their utopias have a mono sense about them. They are not reveling in the eclecticism of the world. And Wakanda? Loved it, but mono. I was just talking to a friend about Naomi Alderman’s THE POWER and whether it was a utopian novel or a dystopian one. I thought it was dystopian, but she argued that it was a utopia. (Have you read DISOBEDIENCE? Amazing – and also part of my fodder about people’s happiness in constrained communities).

WIKSWO But for Arendt, I think she’s more cannon than canon. She was never fainthearted in challenging the hegemonics of Jewish identity police, whether the source was Goebbels, the New Yorker magazine, the Upper West Side, Israel, or anyone. The mono-utopia is inordinately dull to me, and yet it is a stage of evolution, perhaps, where we must find ourselves in others before we can find ourselves in the universal. And staying true to oneself and one’s identity is often formed through contact with people one thinks are likeminded, only to discover that the self cannot fundamentally be part of a homogenized group. Arendt found this out the hard way, by infuriating a large portion of the so-called American Jewish community by her coverage of the Eichmann trial. A fury that continues to this day. She relentlessly stood her ground, even while ally after ally deserted and defamed her. Constraint was never her ethos.

ENSZER: I absolutely agree about Arendt, definitely more cannon than canon, but here is my question: is that because of who she is or how the world responded to her? A chicken or egg question most definitely, but one worth thinking about. Another way of asking it is, might she have been a canon if the world responded positively to smart women?

WIKSWO I like to think of her as someone ethically compelled into discomfort at levels intolerable to most.

ENSZER: YES! Like Sarah Schulman!

WIKSWO Sarah Schulman – swoon. Major Swoon. Her book The Gentrification of the Mind was hugely influential to me, and I teach it at every opportunity I have. She is a visionary whose work intersects unexpected junctures in identity, from class and queerness to Israel/Palestine and Queerness, to all sorts of rabbitholes about how newcomer artists and low-income intellectuals both positively and negatively impact established communities in major cities.  She looks at identity through a scope where the morality of “good” and “bad,” or “obedient” and “disobedient” is called into question – rightly so. I find her very reassuring, and I admire your own efforts in advancing her work.

Teaching at Yeshiva University in New York, and exhibiting my own work at the Berlin Jewish Museum and many other Jewish institutions, it’s shocking how many times I’ve been called a bad Jew. It’s as many times as I’ve been called a bad queer. Much of Schulmann’s work surrounds this kind of binary thought that plagues the left as well as the right: how we define ourselves, and how others define us, in a larger societal context.

ENSZER: Yes, so do you embrace the badness and revel in it or do you challenge it and say I’m still here. A Jew. A Queer. Without the adjectival modifier.

WIKSWO: I must admit that I revel in it for about three weeks of the month, and then for about a week I cry in public. I don’t want to be modified, but I don’t want to be denied my own identity.

ENSZER: That modification is the impulse of the canon, of course. And I just want to say, it cuts all ways. I think of Roy Cohn (and Ethel in the amazing Angels in America). A bad Jew. Clearly.

WIKSWO: I think we need to bring back the role of the heretic, along with the role of the court jester, or the joker. The disrupter. That badness is uncomfortable but someone has to do it.

ENSZER: And so this question of badness is perhaps a question of discomfort. And badness walks alongside erasure, and the category police keep everyone on the right shelves, the right ovens, the right institutions, feeding the expectations of the status quo. The only way to be inclusive is to be very, very uncomfortable. And perhaps the only way to be included is to be very, very uncomfortable.

WIKSWO: Beautifully stated. I am not Buddhist, and the “life is suffering” adage has never especially resonated with me as a cri de coeur, but “life is very, very uncomfortable” certainly does. Where is the trend out of my homestate of California that says, “be uncomfortable.” I think it’s time to start a new movement.

ENSZER: Yes, and in that discomfort, is the space for you, for Cohn, for the Jews and queers who voted for Trump. It is no utopia.

WIKSWO: Why do we need a utopia? I don’t think I’m here for a utopia. Where did that expectation even come from? It’s sort of privilege of dreamspace – what is a utopia for rocks? Perhaps a volcano. We have misdefined utopia. I don’t think it’s a place without tectonics. If it were so, nothing would be created.

ENSZER: What does it mean to have a creative practice? What does it mean to have one in this hyperspeed world that we currently live in? Is it possible to be and live on the internet and still have the time and space for a creative practice?

WIKSWO: I’m going to boomerang back to pondering underlying meaning of words that we use. Is it the internet that sucks us up, or is it the consuming difficulty of navigating a terrain that is simultaneously fractured and individualistic, while also being Orwellian high-school-group-think? I have to divulge that my earliest encounters with the internet were when I was about 10, and it was still a prototype project of the Department of Defense, and I snuck access to it through my father’s laboratory where I concocted the identity of a 35-year old engineer and had the most erotic and peculiar conversations with anonymous wierdos all over the world who also had access to the system. It never felt like a distraction. It was a wormhole, a luxurious pathway that led me far beyond my life as a very isolated child in a fundamentalist household who lived down a dirt road in an unnamed town in the rural conservative south and had no education until high school. To get to the point, I find myself creatively inspired by leading a very slow and deliberate embodied life, and then enjoying the frictive pleasures of zapping around the globe in the dubious hands of humanoid algorithms.

I lived worked and studied for a many years with a Sikh community in Los Angeles, and my teacher semi-lovingly berated me for my complaints about that city. He’d say, “You do not live in Los Angeles. You live in Quintan Wikswo.” Talk about erasure – I had erased myself into the city, and felt uncomfortable and unseen and all it took was his daily reminder that I have agency to be a cannon of self. Anything can distract us from our creative practices, but at the same time those distractions can cause the friction necessary for our creativity to catch fire.

ENSZER: yes. That is a necessary ingredient: friction for creativity to catch fire.

WIKSWO: Of course, I’m also a hypocrite, so I’m writing you from inside one of the largest remaining wilderness preserves in North America, having finally escaped Berlin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York because I found not the internet, but physical proximity to humanity to be disabling to my freedom of conceptual navigation!

For the first time ever, I live on land where the neighbors are not in spitting distance (at least for me – they might be in spitting distance for a thirteen-year-old dedicated to hocking up spit). I find the solace of space amazing. That and the birds.

ENSZER: What is the form and shape of one’s contribution in the world?

WIKSWO: It is necessary to make additional contributions, because it’s like the group dinner at an expensive restaurant. Some folks will always excuse themselves to go to the loo and not come back to pay the check. So some of us have to bring extra resources. If someone is a loo person, well, I hope it’s a temporary state. We can happily be orangutans. But then don’t complain about having bananas stolen, or your baby’s head smashed against a tree by a rival male. If we want to advance as a life form, we have to work for what we want.

ENSZER: How many books should one read in a year?

WIKSWO: As many or as few as are necessary to keep up the most uncomfortable level of discomfort.

ENSZER: How many words should one write in a day?

WIKSWO: As many or as few as are necessary to keep oneself from self-immolating. Unless one wants to experiment with self-immolation, which is, presumably, a form of self-expression and protest that does not require language.

ENSZER: What does it mean to measure life with books and words?

WIKSWO: Very little, I think. That’s heresy as a Jew. Let me ponder that – I think it means everything. It’s just that we have to question the definition of life, or books, and of words. I taught a little girl last summer who narrated her life in third person, verbally. I said she should write it down and she said, my head is a book. And many silent life forms, like rocks, tell stories. I think books and words are vastly overrated, which is why I became a writer of books.

ENSZER: Is it enough to just live life as you wish and be kind to others or is there some other contribution that is necessary?

WIKSWO Does that assume we all share certain commonalities of consciousness and conscience? I believe in human rights, and I believe all humans are created equal, but we do not all have the same purpose in being here, or in being alive, or even in being dead. I have known many brilliant people whose entire lives were lived for death – for the ability to actively leave no trace in the ecology. I don’t think kindness is necessary – it’s very much irrelevant to the majority of human beings if we are to be judged by our actions. We are a cruel species, en mass. We mostly contribute pain, whether that’s to the cow that I cook for my dinner or the friend I no longer speak to because she caused me pain. Perhaps the contribution is authenticity. To know what is beneath the persona. To know ourselves for who we are, and to take agency in changing or adapting that as we desire. To not be prisoners to fate but to forge our own lives based on conscious choices.

And sometimes that conscious choice is to accumulate as much bitcoin or human ashes as possible. And sometimes that’s to save millions of lives from genocide or erasure. But to know who one is, and what one is doing, and why, and how, and to what end… To bring as much as possible from the subconscious and unconscious minds into the conscious mind, and navigate with self-awareness…

A butterfly is a book with only two pages.

ENSZER: At one point over the summer, we have swarms of dragon flies on our property. They have four wings and are among the extraordinary creatures.

WIKSWO: murmurations!

ENSZER: For artists (and really for all sentient beings) what is the relationship between solitude and community? Why does solitude sometimes feel so lonely and despairing? Why does community sometimes feel so hurtful and isolating?

WIKSWO this is all-absorbing to me right now, and very much behind the premise of this magazine, Scry, and the people who have been drawn to it. After a few massive life transitions in the past year, I decided in January of 2018 to embrace six months of avoiding incarnate community because it had become perversely isolating. Watching the gentrification of megacity after megacity ruined my capacity to trust in community, as they seemed antagonistic. I moved into an abandoned house in the wilderness area and found myself at odds with anthills. Fire ants are quite horrid en masse.

ENSZER: Oh, yes, we have fire ants here in Florida. Another reason to protect one’s feet!

WIKSWO: One ant is quite enjoyable to spend time with, at a slight distance. And I feel the same about humans. I’m a human rights worker who dislikes humans – is that even possible? My loneliest times were in post-conflict zones where humans had literally torn one another apart.

My grandmother worked on the Manhattan Project, and then isolated herself on a mountaintop. I always figured these were causally related. When I went to Theresienstadt death camp outside Prague, I was unable to leave my room for two weeks. A mysterious young man would leave me daisies and a goulash at my door every morning – I never found out who he was. I think he was the bus driver who did the Prague to Terezin route? Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.

Despair is a constant companion for me. I don’t know how many others share that. I find comfort in those who also walk alongside despair. Scholem and Arendt, for example. Or the people murmurating in Scry. Is despair an existential condition of solitude? Or is it a recognition of the failure of community?

ENSZER: I am working on some writings about failure of community and failure of friendship and it is so sad and painful. I don’t have any easy response.

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The contributors and production of SCRY MAGAZINE is supported by the donations of entities who are compelled and/or amused by our attempt to create substantive, conceptual, curious, non-partisan public discourse in an age of dehumanizing, reductivist social media didacts and exhausting ideologues. We are working to create a space where all kinds of folx have space to murmurate, and abate the loneliness and isolation of trying to exist in a culture of superficiality and presumption. SCRY is a nexus for everyone who does our best to connect human experience to the sublime, to undertake demanding and nuanced explorations of the psyche the troubled and often belittling culture we now inhabit. We work for the values of human rights and an end to predation, for the celebration of the spirit as well as the intellect and the body – we work hard and we are grateful that you are sharing in this action towards ideals.

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If you’d like to subscribe, it’s free! You will receive an email once a month of each issue. That’s once per month, earthlings! However, murmurations are published on an ongoing basis, and the online journal will continue to evolve with things like tag clouds so that readers can follow along as ideas develop across multiple conversations. It’s a work in progress! So keep checking back or keep up with our more frequent murmurations via Facebook or Twitter.

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You can reach SCRY through emailing contact at scry magazine dot com. For PROPOSALS, please include three preoccupations, and a website or social media contact site, and if possible any material you have created that you’d like to discuss. For ADVERTISEMENTS, please describe the existential concerns of your promotion. For COMMENTARY and QUESTIONS, approach with the utmost respect and humility and without predation, hate, or abuse because these starlings don’t fly like that. For DONATIONS, please know that your contribution will be split equally between the contributors and the editor once SCRY’s start-up costs of $1,500 are met. Thank you for murmurating with us.

May your umbilical cord be the root of a life of substance and meaning, may you scry fruitfully, and may you  find comfort in looking up at the sky for the birds that are watching you reach reach reach, the stars who have sent their light to you from long ago, and the dark matter that reminds us of the beauty of what mysteries we cannot see.

HÁÁDĘ́Ę́ʼÍSH ÍIYISÍÍ NANINÁ?

háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

॥ ਜਪੁ ॥

ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥

ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש