Steven Schroeder | walking the dog the day before Karl Marx's birthday
All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. -Manifesto of the Communist Party
The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today. -August Spies
1
Helicopter circling sounds like endless war.Our eye in the sky they call it. But, more sound
than sight, it does to speech what strobe does to bodies
flowing. Frozen, it breaks, and it is all in pieces.
2
Ear to the ground in this city of scenes, silence,like a sanctuary under a sign that says
divest
disclose
repair
3
Walking into the main quad this morning feels like walking into a strange place of worship, jamais vu. I studied here and have lived on the edge for decades, but I remain an outsider, agitated, agitating, wondering now as then what a university is if not a city of scenes in a city of scenes, if not its students and its teachers engaged in the world, what it means for what it does if it is guided by principled dedication to institutional neutrality but demands that its students disassemble their structures, take down their tents, stop making scenes and depart an encampment that demands an end to genocide but does not disassemble its own institution of neutrality and depart an encampment invested in genocide, now as then. and now as then, the risks are increasing too rapidly for the status quo to hold. We are strangers and guests in a broken world. In a broken world, a neutral institution is not doing nothing. It is collaborating.4
Seamus O'Malley is an old dog learning the new trick of walking the city. A little shaky, eyes dim, ears unaccustomed to the inexplicable collisions of so many sounds. He knows the world through his nose, and he follows it home. He smells the aroma of an inverted world in this struggle against it. And I think I hear the sigh of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, a little something for the pain.
Chicago
7 May 2024 (revised 21 May 2024)
