◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

nobody but yourself i spent my life writing the first person singular in lowercase. Not from modesty. From precision. The self is not the largest thing in the universe. The self is one extraordinary thing among an infinite number of extraordinary things — the mud puddle in April, the moon over Greenwich Village, the specific way a woman's hands move when she is not thinking about her hands. The man who puts his name in capital letters on every building he owns has confused the size of his ego with the size of his significance. They are not the same. The spring does not know his name. The mud puddle — which knows more about joy than he will ever know — does not know his name either. I have a word for what I am watching. I invented it myself, which is the only honest way to get a word. The word is mostpeople. mostpeople have simply agreed to stop being themselves. They have traded the difficulty of being a specific irreplaceable person for the comparative ease of being a type. A type wears the right hat. A type feels what the crowd is feeling and calls it conviction. In 1917 the French military police arrested me and held me in a detention camp for three months because my letters home were not sufficiently enthusiastic about the war. In that camp I met the people that mostpeople had decided did not count. They were the most alive people I had ever met. Because the people who cannot perform the required enthusiasm are often the people who have refused to surrender what the performance requires. I want to talk about spring. Not as a metaphor. As an actual season that arrives every year whether or not anyone in power has authorized its arrival. The mud puddles come back. The particular green comes back — the green that exists for three days in April before it deepens into summer — and no one owns it. It belongs to whoever is paying attention. This is the specific thing the authoritarian cannot tolerate — the joy that belongs to no one but you. His name in gold letters against the sky. The mud puddle does not know it. The three days of that particular green refuse absolutely. To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else — this is the hardest fight any human being can fight. The fight with the internal enemy — the one that says it would be easier to wear the hat, to let the capital-letter I of the man who needs everything subsume the lowercase i of the person you actually are. That fight never ends. But I kept writing the lowercase i. Because the lowercase i is the truest thing I know — the self that finds its significance not in gold on a building but in the mud puddle in April, in the moon, in the specific way a woman's hands move when she is not thinking about her hands. the spring is coming. It does not know who won the election. Go outside. Find a mud puddle. Remember that you are not a type. Remember that the lowercase i — small, specific, irreplaceable — is worth more than all the capital letters on all the buildings of all the men who have ever needed their name in gold against the sky.