I Wanna Be Big
You are not an idea. You are not a concept. You live and you breathe. You move through, in, and with your world. You are inextricably connected to almost countless other beings through sundry relationships. In a way, you—the one we identify as you specifically—are those relationships, since you makes no sense without them. You are a kind of locatable nebula who is part of an infinite nexus of nebulae. It is only when you insist on yourself, when you identify, that you freeze, become static, become nothing but an idea.
When Amy Taylor of Amyl And The Sniffers sings “Don’t Fence Me In,” I can’t help but think she has something like this in mind. She says,
Don’t fence me in/I wanna be big/I’m born to be big/So don’t fence me in/I wanna be part of everyone and everything
To be big is to become who you already are, beyond identifications. We’re not just part of some scene because “that shit’s limiting.” The world we have set up for ourselves is largely make-believe, as Taylor suggests in her lyrics. The tragedy occurs when we forget that.
When you say, “I am this or that sort of person,” you are not saying who you are. You are saying words. Those words represent, like images, something you’re aiming to seize upon, so that you can share it with others. In other words, you have shrunken. We make ourselves into bite-size pieces that can be more easily digested. Most of us would rather deal with an idea than with a person, with a brand rather than a being. An idea, a digestible frozen tidbit, can be packaged, branded, and bought and sold. When “I” is reduced to a set of words, a description, a brand, I am no longer me. There is no one there. “I” am just a word.
As long as our modes of communication are richer and more subtle than grunts or demonstrative indications, we will not avoid descriptions. Descriptions should be embraced, but only with a light touch. To describe oneself or someone else is to say “one of the sides of this person that I have witnessed is…”, with the understanding that I am just taking a snapshot of a being whose nature cannot be frozen, still, immovable, immutable. When a photographer captures a bird in flight, s/he has not captured the bird. The bird flies on and only an image remains. The descriptors are like this image. They help us get a sense of a person, but when we really and fully come to our senses, we understand the other person to be beyond the comprehension of our language, our ideas of them. It’s as if our descriptors, when handled carefully, can lead us to the real thing, the being who is ultimately beyond our grasp.
My relationship with punk rock is complicated. Classic punk has a way of insisting upon itself. It dresses itself up in leather, tattoos, mohawks, and middle fingers. It freezes itself. It makes of itself an idol. It is the nihilist. It is the political activist. It is the humorist. It is the morally self-righteous savior. But the spirit of punk is big. It threatens even these most prized and marketed ideas of punk. In a way, it undermines itself, where “itself” is just this world of frozen images, descriptors. The Descendants beat the Sniffers to the punch:
I’m not a punk; how can I be?/Show me the way to conformity/Try to be different, but it’s always the same/End up playin’ someone else’s game.
But, really, there’s no punch to get to first. This is a lifelong lesson that bears daily repetition. The desire to be big is itself a recognition that one is already big underneath all the descriptions and brands—it is itself the way back home. One is already part of everyone and everything. How can one be a punk? One can and one can’t. One can by living in and with the spirit of punk everyday, which is at the same time to let go, to surrender to one’s bigness, which is beyond punk. By embracing oneself not simply relative to others, but as a nexus of relationships to other beings, human and non-human, one becomes empty—an openness, Big Sky Country. In this way, I often think of Jazz as the Punk before Punk. What could be more punk than a collection of people whose musical trajectory is primarily improvisatory, where each performance is its own living, breathing entity? What could be more punk than taking one song and reworking it such that it becomes a new animal? What is more punk than taking just about every musical rule and bending it almost until breaking point, or else breaking the rule altogether?
[Insert photo of a mohawked Louis Armstrong]
Let’s dare to be big. Let’s dare to be who we already are—part of everyone and everything.