Taylor Wirkus

“reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.”
― Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

“I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids."
"This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- dont tell. But that assumes most people can see."

It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit- exclaim, even- that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for?
The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul. One's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot, in any rational way, be understood. Only felt. Only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque- what we do to one another so grotesque- that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It is a disorienting thing, to keep a ledger of atrocity, to write the ugliness of each day as it happens. The months smother the months, soon the years will smother the years. Killing that might have once made front-page news slowly submit to the law of diminish returns- what is left to say but more dead, more dead?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This