Barely Legal, the 2006 exhibit created by Banksy, was this play on the elephantine. The privilege of the loud and the vanity of the vain that overshadows the quiet. As Banksy's exhibit brought the proverbial elephant in the room in many forms. He exhibited paintings speaking towards our theatrics of terrorism disguised as heroism, depictures of colonialism and white saviorism, and the abrupt violence of capitalism settled so far in our minds of sale, desire, and the price that we have created this catapultism that throws away our hearts for the material.
Yet was what most alarming to me was Banksy's observation that there is such a romantic, alluring quality of the military, the policing powers, and the weaponry that we almost necessitate the precursors of violence through taxes and manufacturing chains. These chains not often linking ourselves to things that perpetuate violence rather than restore love. And these militarized mentalities of surveillance and policing can be understood to be outgrowths of our policy of the individual—a miasma sustained by the illusion of separation. This illusion being that we are 'individuals' separated by race, wealth, health, and nation however invented we may realize them to be, as we have familiarized ourselves with this. By leaving the intimacy of a self defined and divinely bordered with other—the recognition for how inseparate and entangled we are—our souls became fragmented from what brings life.
Yet what metaphor he brought to the stage that was so shocking to animal activists was Banksy's inclusion of a literal elephant in one of his rooms, decorated and painted in a romantic crimson red web of wallpaper with hints of gold. Those wallpapers you see in movies, castles, and mansions. As this wallpaper was gilded in a opulent gold flowery design.
To understood more deeply, this elephant in the room, we need to remember what Banksy so generously gave out to the attendees of his exhibition:
Banksy gave out these manifestos to explain his bringing of the proverbial elephant-in-the-room into the physical. And through Tai, the elephant cared for by Have Trunk Will Travel, Banksy's metaphor runs in this paint. Banksy observes that in our lives, the elephant in our rooms are painted.
These elephants painted like wallpaper, drowned out in the background of more intensified tensions, conflicts, and violence that appears to be more significant because of how loudly broadcast they are. How they so stuffed up our noses through the media, conversation, and even the silence of not talking about it. As we drown our senses in sensationalized stories that we often forget its convergence. How the elephants in our hallways, meeting rooms, and public spaces allow us to forget the elephant in our own rooms. The elephant that interpenetrates and follows us wherever we go. The room being ourself.
So, what is this elephant in our room? To use Banksy's art exposition, Barely Legal, in Los Angeles 2008, there is a dual, complimenting nature to the elephantine: the silent and small. And then the upper layer of his painting and wallpapering of elephant of our room. This exploration of the Trumpian—large and uncanny—could characteristically be an ode to the silent. As we often paint the elephants in our room because of boxed thinking—that by creating this box to think out of, we actually reconstitute the violence of thinking. We make thinking to be an escapist, fugitive notion. In which, somehow, we can think ourselves outside of the boxes. That is our self-created, concretized containers, boxes we have placed to conveniently understand reality. When we fail to realize the most fugitivity, and thus the most healing, can come from not exploring outside of the box (thinking as the box), but touching the box, knowing that we have fashioned them over generations. That we, ourselves, bore the tools that created them. And to listen to how they wail in pain as life inhibited. For we are so vicious to the boxes, as we label these boxes we need to think out of because it allows us to fall into the familiar narrative of evasion and escape. As we label climate crisis to be 'combatted' or a 'dictator' to be murdered rather than understood. In essence, boxed thinking can be compared to purchasing unfulfilling consumer goods on Amazon, it's comfortable and familiar yet we often do not realize how unfulfulling it is. As we forget how life could be engaging in intimacy with any true exchange.
For we all have the capacity to feel the gravity of the pains of the world, yet opening up to it is like unraveling the boxes that have so protected up, tragically, through the Othering and vilifying animosity that comes from our adolescent separation from life.
An Ode to Silence
To ponder and wander in the roads of silence, I want to crack an egg. For there is so something scrambled and often emulsified into our attention that our often miss it in the wholeness of our experiences. I want to break into the humpty-dumpy of spilled silence—similar to the spilled milk that often happens in our rush to eat our meals that greet the day with nourishment.
To fully understand the silent, we need to echo into the loud—an expression of the silent that forget its roots. As if we talked in silence, we would know that we are already understood, for that we is why we do not speak. We feel understood. Yet loudness allows us to use conflict and tension to fall in deeper love and relationship to life though it can also exposes us to that love through separation, isolation, and pinning ourselves into boxes of for-and-against.
For what is most salient about the Loud is how violent it's predecessors often are: we see how miss an entire forest when we observe car commercials naming life to be merely backgrounds. The elephant of the room so decorating our shiny, fancy distractions that allow us comfort, familiarity, and a sense of place, yet are these traumatized forms of traveled so entangled with the extraction of Earth's organs.
This is not to say that we can live without cars, but can we recognize that our vehicles and their metaphors of travel shown through advertisements create this elephant-in-the-room and that wallpaper effect of what is important? How these advertisements set up nature as box, to be subdued by intense, masculine, and loud trucks, off-road all-wheel drives that we forget what we are running over. The land of Earth needed relationship and relational love founded upon giving rather than taking. That we noise out the silent rivers of love that so provide for us conditionally.
And to understand the silent rivers of love, we need to venture to the violence of the loud, raging hurricanes and tsunamis we find ourselves with.
Violence is a symptom of the loud, not the expression of some mere cause, ideology or any other explanation we could fathom—as the loud vies to compartmentalize and concretize events in our shared experience in some way. And violence perpetuates when it is apprehended by an expressing: "You need to stop doing that!" as everyone acts in order to meet deeper needs, however tragically they may by expresssed. As our needs of belonging may be expressed through genocide or murder as we fail to join diverse forms of society because of how out casting and betraying many of our circles of life are. These systems that supposedly support us
As Kazu Haga, a contributor to the Yet-to-be-named network now known as 'Fierce Vulnerability' and exposer for how activism may activate injustice, once said: "We cannot shut down injustice any more than we can shut down trauma." as one can recognize that violence is trauma responses speaking to the separation one feels from greater forms of love and life. As one expresses and acts out out violence in this self-protecting of their own lives within—that need (*not deserve) love, recognition, warmth, belonging, and community. As Kazu's hand is pointing at this cratered moon of how there are holes in the way we villainized and apprehend what is violent because it comes from the Silent. To shut down, target or call out another acting out trauma is to do exactly the opposite of holding a space safe for vulnerability, sharing, and healing. As to try to shut down trauma re-embodies the trauma one seeks to alleviate. As Kazu recognizes our desperate expression of the 'you need to stop doing that!' formed in our myraid strategies of wanting to 'shut down' others is similar to wanting someone to stop expressing their and crying because of how we are uncomfortable with their display of trauma.
To turn back to activism spaces today, as whistleblowers attempt to shout out and out-communicate others in the loudness of argument and public demonstration, this re-embodies the same injustice of the Loud where we forget the silent. The silent being those places of convergence often befriended by candlelight where there are no distractions and we are most in touch with the intimacy of life and how connected we are.
For there is this silent, unspoken expression of this darkening universe: that this need for silence is wide yet is ever-present even under the Loud's breathing, striking and clapping thunder is. As we face conflicts, expressions of how congested our systems have come, and how we sometimes forget the enchantment our lungs that allows in which a few deeper breaths allow us to open to the rain. How our breath connects us in such reciprocation to life.
And if we travel down the trunk of elephantine creation, we find what is soft, silent, and the quiet elves of cells and membranes mucosa. We can find that the sphinx of larynx, there is this ancient tomb ready to be Indiana Jones'd in our exploration of what we have lost. To remember what we have deserted so long ago and forgot is a part of ourselves and this Earth so much so we could be said to be disconnected in our connection to the Internet, media, and enterprises that entertain ourselves with elephants-in-the-room so decorated with comfortable understandings.
As our vocal cords are actually coordinates of how map-lessly geographically connected we are to the quiet, soft, and supple. The gentleness of creation that allows us to lambast and project our voice outward, whether those words be coming softness and wholeness or fear, scarcity, and separation. Can we be grateful for our speech, knowing that it can connect us to our duality of life and death. All of creation felt in attuning to the quiet and silent?
For I write this, not as a meditation into some 'insight,' 'wisdom,' or even something we may 'need' to know, as we need to simply remember for what is already there. To remember we have this friendly shadow that accompanies us everywhere, allowing spaciousness to the loud so that we do not always need to engage with it screaing and wailing.
As Silence speaks as the vocal cords of whole and is often expressed by how much belonging, safety, and healing we feel in the safeties of our aloneness and solitude because of how uncomfortable we now are in company. As sometimes we are so desperate to connect and to be understood, we forget to be understanding and we wallpaperize the elephant-in-the-room in such vanity that we forget to trust what is underneath. In calling in this elephant and our boxed thinking to touch its grooved and soft body. To become intimate with all our gigantic challenges that only come to connection to us when addressed not in the languages of wallpapers or boxes but in the language of love, witnessing, and seeing out.
As even one of the industrial-modern creations trails upon this silence: how morse code forms the wholeness of language and understanding through binary. The binary of yes and no, silent and loud, and black and white that add to wholeness that can be understood. And yet despite being built upon this duality of the binary 0's and 1's, there is this oreo cookie effect of black complimenting white. This nondualistic attentionin that from the binary we can see how things connect, which is the beauty of not only binaries but of the paradox that in our conflicts of good and bad, often times we forget both sides were the heroes of their own stories. Only villainized by forming these elusive shadows that are actually illusion for we forget we are all only one big family in our binaries of creation.
For often times we see duality—how we are separated in cells as these prison cells so isolated from being family—and create this notion that reality is like a car. As we fumble and tumble through and as life, fine and non-questioning when our cars—or how we treat our own bodies or our Earthly expression-hoods—as car-hoods. Self-hoods turned vehicular because when everything works, we live life in a gaffe, as when we go into dysfunction, dysregulation, and our tires go flat, then and only then do we heal ourselves. As we need, now, to tune into the transitory spaces—those places of silence that allow us to speak volumes into life—as without that our resting within the Silent, we would never understanding the loud.
And to hearken back to this car ownership of body, we become obsessed with improving, fixing, and repairing ourselves that we forget that we are already complete, whole, and full and only that we have internalized this message of pathology from the systems of collapse we find ourselves in today. So fueled upon blame, guilt, shame, and self-love so tragically expressed as we defend ourselves from our cultures of unworthiness that we have so been enculturated with.
As there is this unsettling ode that I dearly find decolonizes my understanding of the life we are and bear. This ode that settles myself as the young fish meeting the question from an elder: "How's the water" only to be met in confusion, a distaste and un-knowing for what is real.And then being met with the realization that the ocean that was once invisible to be the life I so un-lived in the old fish's musing of "This is Water. This is what is Silent." This is the home you live, however shackled, burnt, and traumatized its home-ly qualities are (Think the devastated Earth so commericialized, extracted, and people and creatures colonized in the zoo of capitalism or catapultism)
An ode to silence for how odd and odoriferous it is that we do not grasp what is not only right under our noises, an atmosphere we are so dearly connected to and our outer hemoglobic circulation, but our noses itself and how we can sense the silence even with it is so loud:/p>
We need to travel far from home to realize what we have left.
We need to become so disoriented by our own maps to truly entwine with the uncharted.We need to orbit around starless galaxies—these uninhabitable—to slingshot to a place habitable.
Is that the task of the adolescent?
-so lamenting their own homes,
distinguishing themself in rebellion
by separating from bountiful love granted?
For there is something so loud about allowing silence in our lives today. Not in the passive bypassing sense but in the inquiry of elephants. To explore the carnival we have collectively created and expressing that 'no, we want to play in a different way.' For silence is so connected to imagination, as it allows us the ticketed entry to darkness—where shapes are only suggestive and dreams are in full display, as we lie down and gaze at the stars (however boxed they may be in our caves of living of rooms with roofs and drowned-out skies) to remember our starry constellations love all around.
There is something so loud about then embodying that imagination, formed upon the shoulders of silent giants, those Sequoiadendron giganteum, the mountains that weather our deserts and plateaus, and the innumerable amounts of silent creatures that all provide for the loudness of our lives.
Not often spoken of is the imperceptibility of the Silent. This invisible place that is not simply heard but attuned to. So I try to tune into the unsayable to reach what needs to be said. To see the lightning of the world yet to hear into its thunder—the after shock we often ignore as light travels faster than sounds. I seek to find the un-coordinating, resonance of that caboosing sound. That sound that harbor all of creation in the striking of nitrification. For there is something splendid of the thunder of silence for it lightens us to love from violence.
So I wonder, in silence, how can we tune into the Silent? How can we louden its melody so much so that our circles of creation are seen as charity. And our binaries are in parity? We need this dexterity of the Silent to tear down the wallpapers of elephants and the boxes of thinking. So can we open our hand of thought to the thunder of silence. The lightninghood of kite and key and be struck by Silence by allowing its unsettling to emerge? To feel the quiet when all we want is noise—yet all we need is silence?
As Kazu Haga reminds us from the heartfulness that comes from leading with silence, not of passive compliance or some subdued notion of permission, but of a fierce attentioning to what happens. The thunder that comes after the striking lightning of conflict, tension, and those places we find so uncomfortable:
In the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of learning “the utter uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” So, these days I’m asking myself a different set of questions, to which I don’t know the answers.
What if instead of chanting, we cry?
What if instead of holding signs with demands, we tell stories?
What if instead of yelling, we sing songs?
What if instead of anger, we lead with heartbreak?
What if we stop trying to win and start trying to heal?
What if we build a movement where nobody, even those on the “other” side, ever think to question their sense of belonging?
What if we view nonviolent action as collective trauma healing?
What if instead of our goal being to “shut it down,” we try to “open it up?” Open up our hearts and our opportunities for healing?
What if we mobilize the power needed to stop harm while cultivating the love necessary to heal it?
What would it take?
What if?