Loam Loves: March
James Davis on Death Work & Micro Movements
PHOTO BY AERAN SQUIRES
Loam Loves is a series within our Substack. Each month, we share a curated missive from one of our contributors on some of the perspectives and projects that are shaping their current praxis.
For our March missive, we’re grateful to have James Davis joining us. As a weaver and death worker, James is our “friendly neighborhood druid” whose generous weavings and writings on mortality and micro movements are a balm for many of our readers.
WHAT I’M READING
At 37, I’m starting to revisit French philosophy and social theory I first read in my late teens and early 20s to see if there are any tools that I left behind in my intellectual turn toward craft, magic, and Irish polytheism. Specifically, I have been exploring two disparate ideas through this reading.
First, I am interested in how one faces the world given multiple active genocides and the inevitability of death. I don’t think that when I cracked open Camus recently that I knew that’s what I was doing, but nonetheless, it was precisely what I ended up focused on. I mean, once you become a death worker and build an altar to death in your house, everything is sort of death work.
I feel like being a death worker makes you a counterweight to our culture’s impulse to immediately find a silver lining, focus on the positive, or emphasize taking hasty action to end the darkness in the face of difficulty. In my recent essay on The Stranger “Well, it’s all absurd, dude,” I noted that Camus’ reminder that everything is absurd is a call to drop out of how others (multinational corporations, religious institutions, and the state) want you to live your life in order to experience the reality before us.
The second question that I am exploring is mundane really: How can we use everyday life to resist capitalism and find meaning? I don’t know how this came about, but one day I came home from a bike ride and had this wild urge to know the theoretical terrain of urban geography, anthropology, and anticapitalism. I don’t agree with Camus that searching for meaning is pointless. I am a glob-darned wizard and bard, so that ship gonna’ have to sail for me. No, I think that we have tremendous capacity to push back on the institutions in our everyday lives to co-create meaning.
I am tremendously in debt to Henri Lefebrve’s “Critique of Everyday Life” in pursuing this question. His devotion to the quotidian is incredibly inspiring, especially his project to save everyday life from a bunch of folk trying to tell you that to transcend the mundane you need to buy into some wildly spectacular experience. No, you actually don’t need to buy experiences, costumes, or experience the great gelatinous GLOB to find meaning in everyday life. The meaning is ripe for the making with all the people you live around. This has been so important for me as I recalibrate my approach to life at a community-level scale through planning little quests on my bike and with my family. I stand behind what I wrote recently in my essay “The Joie De Vivre of City Life,” inspired by Lefebrve: “Let us replace all our hopes for recognition or wealth with the simple pleasure of everyday embeddedness.” I don’t know if I have ever written something so true to my own personal philosophy and I have Lefebrve to thank. Let embeddedness reign supreme.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
I was talking to tayla shanaye of Embodying the Revolution in response to a tweet she reposted on Instagram about giggling and told her that it might be shocking that I am a big giggler given that I am an “absolute dour dude on the keys (keyboard).” I know; it’s cringe to quote yourself. However, I stand resolute that I want to be the cringe that I want to see in the world and really entertain myself. Despite the death work, I am quite the jovial lad and enjoy convivial music like jambands.
Specifically, I have been listening to Umphrey’s Mcgee, a band that I have seen 26 times live over the last 20 years. I already have plans to see them this summer up in Vail and Red Rocks. I will be two-finger boogying the night away while remaining cold sober surrounded by people totally out of their gourds on recreational drugs and alcohol.
I don’t think there is anything better live than improvised music. This is especially the case for a band like Umphrey’s Mcgee who have over 1,000 unique songs and covers that they can arrange in any order to achieve any musical mood they want to capture. Couple this with the fact that they can expand most of those songs into improvised jamming that can span 5 to 20 minutes and go far afield from the original theme of the song and you have a recipe for some really interesting music. Seeing people create a new sonic world on the spot like that is a musical tonic.
WHAT I’M STILL GRIEVING
I want to be parsimonious here, because I have been grieving one fundamental thing for my whole life, and that is the failure of American democracy to deliver us representatives that act to help the poor, houseless, sick, and dispossessed and instead enrich predators that sell death, disease, and delusion.
WHAT I’M PRACTICING
I have two things I am practicing: abolition and writing about this moment.
I work in criminal justice reform, but do not believe in the institutions of jails or the police. Consequently, I am forced on a daily basis to practice abolition on the margins of these institutions by ensuring that my local government makes appropriate recommendations to change police and jail policies and procedures based on complaints of police and jail misconduct and constitutional protections. On the best of days, the work in the trenches of line items in policies means a few lives will be saved due to a practice being prohibited. Yet, most days it’s a sort of pride-swallowing exercise in learning the limits of what any one person can do to push back on a carceral society that would rather police and jail its way out of rampant inequality caused by runaway capitalism.
I don’t know if I have ever gotten to verbalize that out loud. I am always so nervous I am going to lose my job for talking about it. In my opinion, it’s the most important work to be done in our time and it’s frustrating that we have to see people killed in order to get anyone to pay attention to it. It’s truly heartbreaking. Sometimes I am so dejected that I cannot even truly take it, such as when most public officials did a quick about face from talking about funding alternatives to policing and jails to supporting an increase in police officer hires. Yet, it's the practice of abolition to show up to the work everyday and try your best to make the sort of changes that are consistent with a society where police and jails do not need to exist.
Second, I have devoted myself to continue to document what it means to be alive at this moment in time. This all started when I stopped making “content” solely on Instagram and started to build a routine around weekly writing on Substack. At the time, I really felt that Instagram was stunting my storytelling by putting some boundaries on what and how I could share. I wanted to open up my own capacity to write 1,000+ word essays that would challenge me to show up as the writer I wanted to grow into. My mission for this project used to be: tell human stories that people can relate to.
That mission has changed marginally after a year and half of weekly essays. Now, I am trying to tell human stories that are relevant to this moment that we are living in. I suppose it may be a bit of the dad or historical sociologist in me, but I feel this addendum to my mission is vital. We are at one of those historical inflexion points, not unlike the industrial revolution, where nothing will be the same moving forward. Writing my way through this moment is my way of developing modes of action in alignment with my values.
Check out the Loam Loves archives below!