The First Flag

Affirmation, indictment, and essay, The First Flag resists the confines an insidious patriarchy places on our bodies, sexualities, and selves.I want to tell you about etymology, transparency, excess, spontaneity, chance, and total embodiment. That aggression is propulsion toward visionary action. That we can resolve and transform ourselves through ever-malleable tools—psychoanalysis, myth and fairy tale, divination, allegory, incantation. Raccoons, birds, trees, sticks—all sorts of Whitman’s “divine materials”—are all around me and participating in the same life moment, and if I naturally am inclined to see the world as enchanted and conscious it doesn’t seem like appropriation. I want to tell you about excesses—of the body, the excessive astral body, excretions of the body and soul. I want to offer you a transcript of my human operating system and digress about the poet’s interest in, the poet’s political obsession with, origins, truth, beauty. I want to talk about so many things, flags and Ronald Reagan and cauls and succubi and symbols and shame and dismemberment and even things like Betsy Ross and Neptune in Pisces, and in so doing defend the nature and value of this thesis I’ve birthed and this essaying I can only dream-deliver, using that collectively-invented and collaboratively-sustained ball of fire called “Language.”