Preoccupation
Put your body in minor places unwelcome to your body. You may start with places rented or leased to you or places in which you have a kind of tentative and half-access or right. Ten minutes under your own bed in your rental home or apartment. Then, also, fifty minutes sitting quietly on the strip at the end of the yard, the easement owned by the city and on which the city won't let you plant rosemary or carrots. If you have a job, stand in your workplace's supply closet for seven minutes longer than necessary for what task might be done. Have a picnic of apples and beer on an island in a parking lot. Sit on the bench outside of Olive Garden for a morning, reading a romance novel in a navy blue windbreaker. If you can afford to go to the doctor, do not leave the exam table until three minutes after you have been dismissed.
Dance music is closer to a true politics. Secret ballots and lots of talking and drone attacks are not a true politics, not like dance music. Those things are a pre- or post-politics. The body under dance music is the memory of the body under true politics, is the re-animated and re-vitalized polis. Under dance music there is only with the greatest resistance any kind of not moving or not body or almost never a paucity of courage. And how rare is the lonely dance music? Also how rare the dance music individualist who can remain, over time, against both the crowd and animating beat?
Sovereignty is the enemy of freedom.
To begin the practice of solidarity, approach, first, the plants, and then the animals, and then the children, and then the elderly, and then the women (both beautiful and unbeautiful), and the men (both those in suits and lacking suits) commenting first upon some shared environmental experience, and remarking upon, second, some obvious aspect of the other's gloriousness, and third, some matter only oblique and suggestive of justice, or shared suffering like disease or mortality or the world.
From Anne Boyer, My Common Heart, Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011. [PDF]