#waywardness

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Under capitalism there are so many forms of pleasure that are reproductive of the order. The forms of pleasure and joy and beauty that are also the focus here are those moments that are refusals and ruptures with the order. Again, the important question is: what does it mean to love that which can’t be loved? What does it mean to even imagine, as a poor black girl, that you might have something like a beautiful life – one that’s not about your self-annihilation, that’s not about your conformity with norms or the meagre existence to which you have been confined. That requires – is conditioned by – a certain refusal. It’s to know yourself in the world you’re a part of in radically different terms. For me that’s the miracle of everyday survival.

detail (90ºcw, erasured) ex Mrs. Henry Pott (1833-1915), her Obiter Dicta of Bacon and Shakespeare on Manners, Mind, Morals (1900) : 300 University of California copy, digitized December 11, 2007 source scan (jpg)

its index

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for information on Mary Fearon Pott, see Alan Stewart, “The Case for Bacon,” in Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare Beyond Doubt : Evidence, Argument, Controversy (2013) : 16-28 (25) and the (fascinating) wikpedia entry for her daughter Constance Mary Pott (1862–1957)

Wayward, related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild. To inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable, to be deeply aware of the gulf between where you stayed and how you might live. Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis that sustains the dispossessed. Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free. The attempt to elude capture by never settling. Not the master’s tools, but the ex-slave’s fugitive gestures, her traveling shoes. Waywardness articulates the paradox of cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confinement, flight and captivity. Wayward: to wander, to be unmoored, adrift, rambling, roving, cruising, strolling, and seeking. To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together. It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.