To break open the heart-shaped box

“I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks.” —Nirvana, “Heart-Shaped Box”

Two quick notes before we go to a Taylor Swift concert:
1. Hard to miss the launch of Substack Notes around here, but I’m not likely to be there much anytime soon. That’s not a judgment of it or anyone using it. I just know what that style of social media does to me. My brain falls apart and my writing voice decays. (Social media was a whole section I cut from last week’s essay on where I find wholeness in time, attention, and silence. It was all about cultivating what’s less frenetic, not inviting in more.)
2. The Threadable reading circle on Land Ownership is wrapping up and I’ll post the last linked essay this week on Mary Christina Wood’s Nature’s Trust. I’ll be starting a new commons-related reading circle there next week on science fiction, fantasy, identity, and belonging. (To all the new people here [hi!], this post is a brief overview of the land ownership reading project and Threadable.)

Usually, the photos I use for walking composition posts are ones I take while I’m walking around, wherever I happen to be and mostly of northwest Montana. Today’s is an exception—it’s where I was walking to: a Taylor Swift concert in Las Vegas. I have an entirely different essay in the works about sidewalks because my daughter and I walked an hour to the venue from an airport hotel (which by the way was nowhere near the airport) and took a public bus back after midnight—her idea! I’m so proud of her—and it made me get all excited again about sidewalks and public transit. Writing a book about walking and walkability instilled a deep love of public bus systems in me.

Today, I want to linger a bit on the music and experience of that concert, and more on how we carry senses of identity and how those do or do not translate into agency. How much people can yearn for self-ownership—what some call sovereignty, though I’m not sure that it means what they think it means—and what people might do to achieve it.

Also, it’s an excuse to share a terrible photo that I took from my daughter’s and my flight to Las Vegas out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We finally saw the northern lights! It’s been an off-and-on few months of attempts driving up to Glacier National Park at night, and here they were dazzling away outside as we left the Twin Cities’ skyline. The camera of course makes the colors appear brighter than they were to us, but they were truly, visibly green with just the naked eye.

So, last year on that day when Ticketmaster made a hash of selling tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (and not a good hash, like the kind of hash even Tabasco can’t rescue), my younger sister managed to get six tickets in the upper stadium cheap seats.

Before signing up for the chance to purchase them, she’d asked me if my daughter and I wanted to go with her family. I really didn’t think she had a chance of getting tickets, but I enjoy having fun with my sister and her life has been through a meat grinder the past couple years and also I do like Taylor Swift, so I said yes. A few months later, bewilderingly to me, there we all were in Las Vegas. My nieces had had outfits picked out for weeks, and the six-year-old persuaded me to paint my nails with black and glitter by offering several times to do it for me.

I’ve been to concerts before—Pearl Jam, the Ramones, Bob Dylan—but not for many years and truly nothing like this. And I might never attend something like it again, so “epic” feels like an apt description. (If Nine Inch Nails shows up anywhere nearby, though, I’m in. And I’m totally a fan of Chris La Tray’s band American Falcon, which he wrote about this week. Maybe I’ll drag a friend or two to see them in Great Falls someday.) Aside from the immersive spectacle of the whole thing—three hours! so many costume changes I lost count! SO LOUD and I loved it—it’s difficult to be in a stadium of 69,000 people who, even amidst three hours of incredible volume, managed to make lines like “Shade never made anybody less gay” and “No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me” noticeably, fiercely louder.

I couldn’t help being there, listening, singing along, feeling exhilarated at the thought of 69,000 people—a crowd dominated by young women—having a glorious time and getting dressed to the nines and carrying heads full of 17 years’ worth of Taylor Swift lyrics, and still reserving enough energy to get riled up about the oppressions that they know are happening.

Even immersed in the music and the volume and the crowd and the mesmerizing light show, I also couldn’t help wondering how so many people can have this—this clear knowledge of values and what we want the world to look like—and yet somehow, so far, not seem to be able to draw on that massive energy enough to overthrow agencies of the dominant yet minoritarian culture that seeks to strip it all away.

A weekend or two before the concert, I was up on the local ski mountain with my older local niece giving her her second ski lesson out of the two I’d promised her for her birthday. It was a beautiful day after bitter cold most of the week, the sun shining and the skiing nearing that sticky softness of spring snow.

We got in line at one of the beginner lifts for our last run, and in front of us were a man and a woman, maybe in their mid-20s. The man was wearing only a T-shirt (it was getting warm out): gold-yellow, with a large “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag on the back. On his right tricep “Proud Boy” was tattooed in large Gothic letters, all capitals. I glanced around his hips to see if he might be armed (I live in northwest Montana not to mention the United States in general; this is a concern all the time), but unless he had something tucked into his snow pants (always a possibility), he could fall while skiing down the bunny slope with minimal harm.

After that run, we skied over to the lodge parking lot where we’d eventually catch our ride home. On the way, we passed a ski instructor helping a woman who was clearly struggling. It looked like she’d possibly never been on skis before. Skiing is hard! Getting on those things the first few times is always going to feel weird and uncontrollable, and it’s a lot worse when you’re not a tiny kid with that lower center of gravity. I’ve been skiing since I was two years old and it still freaks me out sometimes.

Which is why it felt so disconcerting to look at her, clearly near tears and needing help, wearing a T-shirt that said, “F— Your Feelings,” only it was one of those that didn’t have the word, just a stick figure doing the f—ing.

Why, I wondered, would you choose to wear that shirt on a day you’re going to be somewhat helpless and dependent on someone else? Especially when you’d need that someone to specifically not f— your feelings?

I’m still wondering. What was her story? And what about the guy with the Proud Boy tattoo? Was he having fun skiing? He seemed to be. Had he been at some rally in the past year or so threatening the lives and safety of people unlike him, or unlike how he thought people should be? He was clearly a beginner skier—had people’s patience and generosity while he learned made him think any differently of some of his viewpoints?

I doubt it. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt. I’ve probably always been like that, but researching that book about walking drilled into me that really, truly, there are more people who want to do good for the world and one another than otherwise. But I also think it’s true that identity runs deep in humans. Identity might be one of the most painful and difficult things to reconsider about ourselves, and I wonder if it’s strongest when that identity is about telling other people how they should live and who they get to be. Someone who’s gotten a Proud Boy tattoo isn’t going to shake that affiliation without a hell of a lot of help and care, even if they want to. Certainly not by other people telling them to f— their feelings.

What did either of these people hope to accomplish by displaying these thoughts—the Gadsden flag and f— your feelings T-shirt—so prominently when up on the ski mountain? Fear? Pride? Power? A broken washing machine? I wish it were that last option.

Taylor Swift gave an incredible performance. All the kudos to her, it was a fabulous time and very impressive. I’m glad I painted my nails glitter-black for it. But I have to admit that I liked the opening musician—Gayle of “abcdefu” fame—even more. She was punk. Her band was loud and she rocked and my sister and I were mouthing at each other, “OMG she’s so good!” while our daughters wondered when “abcdefu” would start. Which turned out to be the least interesting of her songs, even the cover she did of that one Alanis Morissette song that she sang so much better than Alanis Morissette ever did and I don’t even like Alanis Morissette but I loved the way Gayle did it. I could have danced to her all night.

She brought me back to my first concert under very random circumstances (Pearl Jam in Missoula—I was 17 and attending a summer math camp at the University of Montana. The band sent tickets out to me and my friends hanging out hoping to hear the music from the back lawn), and dancing in the mosh pit at the Ramones, and the crazy trip to the Gorge with my sisters when we ended up throwing a rod in the family van and abandoning it in some small town in eastern Washington.

Gayle reminded me that being female at that time, the early and mid-1990s, wasn’t easy, but didn’t feel quite so full of risk as it does now. For some brief period of years, I felt like I had some power, some promise of self-determination.

I didn’t feel that in a stadium of 69,000 mostly young women having a great time. I had a great time, too, but still felt worried for all of them. Worried for all of us.

Right in front of me was a group of five friends, maybe late teens or early 20s, who I swear didn’t miss singing along to a single song the entire concert. (Me being almost exactly 30 years past that Pearl Jam concert struggled to stay away during folklore even though I like it.) Their relentless excitement together was one of my favorite things about the whole night.

The other was that girls kept coming up to my nieces and daughter asking if they could give them a beaded bracelet from the many stacked up on their arms. I imagined them channelling excitement into stringing those bracelets for weeks after school, between homework and sports practices.

I didn’t know how to reconcile that entire, head-ringing, beautifully overwhelming experience, all the joy, all the ways in which this massive audience identified with this performer and the songs she’s written (as most of her fans know, Swift’s main strength is as a lyricist, a writer) and what she stands for and stands up for; and the world where f— your feelings and Proud Boy tattoos increasingly feel like they dominate every avenue of control over our lives, at least where I live. And yet part of the whole point of this newsletter is to tackle that central problem: we all have to live with one another, socially as well as physically. How?

I keep thinking of those bracelets, how eager girls were to give them away, to share their craft as part of sharing experience and love and agency and fierce joy in being who they are and loving whoever and whatever they damn well please. Even if they’re not yet articulating those things in themselves. To say as loudly and shatteringly as possible, “No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me.” To refuse the boxes others try to force us into.

I’ve been that girl, making things to pass on for the sheer joy of it. Crafting beauty to give away in the midst of a shared experience. Something humans will always do. That’s worth fighting for—the gifts, the creating, the experiences both private and shared. The will to be free.