A Sad Development: The Erosion Of Free Speech During A Time Of Crisis

Does it make sense to write poetry when the world has grown this delirious? When people are being arrested for protesting a genocide?

The erosion of free speech has been brutal. There’s now a big hole in the language and all sorts of demons are rushing out. Demons of fear. Demons of greed. Demons of isolation. Demons of secrecy and sectarian taboos. Demons of arbitrary destruction. Demons of oil. Blood diamond demons in luxury hotels. Demons of grime and Mammon. Demons of fraud. Demons of genocidal denial. Demons of linguistic sepsis. Organ failure. System failure. Heart failure.

It's a sad development. And we were warned. We were warned by books and movies. We were warned by the philosophers and scientists of the age.

They told us that war is stupid and vile and a racket for the rich. They told us that it takes courage to live and courage to die. That life and death are one and the same and that everything appears and disappears. That change is constant. That everything is in flux. That emperors come and emperors go. That it is better to hide ignorance, but difficult to do this over wine.

They told us the universe began as an extremely dense and hot point that rapidly expanded outwards, creating the universe we observe today, the roosters crowing at dawn on Kauai, the cry of seagulls over the waves of Puget Sound, the bulbous head of a harbor seal gazing at the stream of people on the walkway, the alignment of Mercury, Venus, and Mars in early March, viewed from the sidewalk in front of the 5 Spot Café, the James Webb Space Telescope finding a black hole in the galaxy CEERS 1019, which formed only 570 million years after the Big Bang, and is unusual because it's relatively small, weighing only 9 million times the mass of the sun. Ancient galaxies, supermassive black holes, and nebulae. Globular clusters. Stellar Streams. And life on earth with fields of lavender in Provence and old barns in Wyoming, bull sharks off the coast of Zambezi and spurts of afternoon rain on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. TV. YouTube videos. Nina Simone. Billie Holiday. Carl Sagan hosting Cosmos. All manifestations of the universe. The death of a warrior. The birth of a star.

We’re aware of the universe surrounding us. We’re aware of the universe within us. We’re aware that each of us is an issuance of the universe. Ergo, we’re the universe self-aware of itself as a universe. The universe studying the universe. Which is a stunning implication. Consciousness is an inherent property of the universe. Consciousness is me typing these words and consciousness is the sun squeezing hydrogen atoms to make heat and light. Consciousness is to speech what speech is to the heat and light of the mind, boundless within a sphere of bone.  

Quantum entanglement, where particles can be linked across vast distances, could explain how consciousness might be interconnected throughout the universe. Some scientists conjecture that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s seemingly infinite ability to find relationships between things, between ideas and concepts, between waves and wind and the distant chatter of background radiation, the residue of the Big Bang.

We are, emphatically, interconnected. Every tribe, nation, country, clan, progeny, dynasty, scion, house, society, lineage, language: interconnected. Every time someone kills someone part of that someone dies with their victim.

Language parallels the evolution of species, sudden spurts of linguistic speciation rather than steady accumulations of change, thus proving Kerouac’s bop prosody and the inherent capacity of words to leap into longer and wider trajectories, dilations of thought that follow the dilations of the universe, and lead to invention and engrossing amusements, the non-linear, quantum leap of the mind unfettered by dogma, by doctrine, by state propaganda. There’s a natural exhilaration in conversation that reveals the pulse at the core of things. The giddy pleasure of allowing one’s speculations to manifest and reveal themselves in a free flow of speech is itself wildly evidenced in the eruptions and expansions of the universe, of gravitational waves undulating with the fabric of spacetime as they propagate outwards, creating suns and planets and asteroids and moons.

So how does it happen that a language shuts down? That certain words be excluded from speech? That opposing narratives can get people detained at airports, or arrested and thrown into prison? You can’t stop a universe from being a universe. And you can’t stop the truth from being the truth by forbidding certain speech. The powerful are always fearful of losing their power. They maintain power by controlling narratives. Surrounding themselves with mythologies that conform with nothing in reality, but chain the mind and tongue to a false empire maintained by force. The universe goes on expanding. The universe doesn’t stop being a universe. It’s out there. And it’s in here. Here in these words. And the breath that gives them meaning and motion.