CarwilBJ's avatarCarwilBJ's Twitter Archive—№ 35,710

    1. A word about "Rest in Power" and the periodic flare ups over who gets to use it. This phrase is brilliant and irresistible as a way to celebrate the life and death of a loved one. It tweaks the standard RIP formula in just the needed way...
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  1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
    Especially for people for whom the continuity of spirit is more political than transcendental. So for those for whom surviving in their identity was itself a victory, and for those who died in the service of struggle.
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    1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
      And, not coincidentally for those who don't fit themselves into a God-in-Heaven framework, something especially relevant for those condemned by living religious people or those embracing a "No Gods, No Masters" philosophy.
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      1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
        It spreads irresistibly first because it solves all those problems so quickly and obviously. But it's spread is also so rapidly irreversibly bc once invoke it is tied, within the hearts of those who loved them, to specific individuals.
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        1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
          As a piece of cultural creativity, this is its brillance. It's a beautiful blooming mental weed that spreads like wildfire, with a bloom that blossoms in a graveyard.
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          1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
            For such a thing, the periodic calls to return it to its originary community can only fall on the ears of those who have celebrated their loved ones with it as a kind of call to betray their own dead.
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            1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
              The request to ring fence "Rest in Power", even in the service of some specific fairness, will simply not succeed because it asks too much of the wrong people.
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              1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
                Linked for decades to set of cohering desires: Black life, trans life, life in spite of the police, life that is given in struggle, lives of settler who died in challenge to colonialism, life against the state, it has already escaped any single one of these.
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                1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
                  And I, for one, see the intermingling of these specific communities as politically essential. It was exactly that interchange that made the Bay Area that taught me this phrase actually feel like home.
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                  1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
                    Sharing a phrase in our serial moments of grief brought us together. Let reparations be a material demand, and let this phrase propagate like the beautiful verbal weed it is.
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                    1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
                      But respect its intent insofar as only those lives that would call for others to rest in their power should be honored this way.
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                      1. …in reply to @CarwilBJ
                        And respect its origin by remembering the Black and queer creativity that brought it into being. And by holding ourselves to material solidarity with those struggles.
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