New Vocabulary of Mark, Separate From Capitalism and Nationalism

Yesterday I saw a video on the New York Times Instagram of Afghanistan in the recent days. The video was of a Taliban parade as the group marked one year since they assumed power.

I was so struck by the intensity of seeing these flags — all one hundred cars driving in this parade were waving the same white flag, and the flags lined the streets too. They were everywhere.

It was such a forceful representation of a way of thinking and being that harms so many people. It felt violent and dangerous. It felt like the violent, dangerous thing was growing, duplicating, invading. It felt like the violent, dangerous thing was everywhere. Unavoidable, inevitable.

I do these thought experiments when things feel quite so bad — imagining the equal but opposite thing. So I started imagining a parade of all of us waving Eredita sailboats, and I tried to imagine what that would mean, what we would be communicating by waving those, and what the intensity of love and tenderness communicated by the repetition of that symbol would feel like as it moved through a city. What it would feel like if that was the inevitable thing.

This got me thinking about symbols in general and about how the majority of our symbols are symbols connected to capitalism or nationalism. They’re brand logos. Or flags of nations.

I got thinking about what it would feel like to develop a body of symbols, entirely disconnected from consumerism, from trade, from capitalism, or from nationalism — that instead represented the best things in the world. Symbols for love and poetry and imagination and enchantment and charm.

And symbols for very specific feelings too. Like the feeling when you wake up and your mom is downstairs making blueberry pancakes. Or the feeling of your beloved reading you a poem by a flickering candle. The feeling of your child holding your hand or of staring up into a dark sky and watching fireflies dance.

I’m still noodling on all of this, but I’m so intrigued by the idea of a vocabulary of mark that helps us articulate the ways in which we want to be living and the things we want to be turning our attention toward. Constant reminders and voluminous repetition of the things that make our insides feel both at peace and sparkly.