pflas

in her essay What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow1, Toni Cade Bambara asks: “Where are the evolved, poised-for-light adepts who will assume the task of administering power in a human interest, of redefining power as being not the privilege or class right to define, deform, and dominate but as the human responsibility to define, transform, and develop?”2

they’re here. they’re all around us. it might be you. pflas = poised-for-light adepts (for short).

poise: ‘to have (a specified) weight’ and to ‘weigh carefully, weigh out, counter-balance’

light: ‘something used for igniting’ & ‘a consideration which puts something in a certain view’

adept: ‘to come up with, arrive at.’

needing a certain weight to dance, to gather momentum, to balance. fighting weight? pflas shift their own and broader perspectives. weight part of force, of power. their allegiance to, posture of openness towards light changes the view.

and adept also means skillful. graceful. pflas, the skillful graceful ones, metabolize, refuse, dance with, sing through, laugh with the fuckery in our midst, that which is crushing, crunching, leading to despair.

when “the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, & the harmony-hushers”3 get to talking they say that is actually none of my business. and we follow suit, baffled that we were going along in the first place. when the misery or bitterness beckons them they turn away. when it knocks on their doors they stare back through the keyhole and shout no one is home!

Bambara writes, “To struggle, to develop, one needs to master ways to neutralize poisons.”4

one of my favorite pflas is Alok Vaid-Menon. i listened to a podcast they were on last week and felt positively ignited. during the conversation they shared, rhyming with Bambara, “comedy allows us to incorporate the vitriol and turn it into fabulosity a process i think of as emotional alchemy.”5

this essay is about Bambara’s short story craft, and some of her process of beginning her first novel. it’s apparent that she enjoys the company of her own characters! (what a concept). she writes about one, “She has heart to spare.”6 of the short story as a genre she writes, “The short story makes a modest appeal for attention, slips up on your blind side and wrassles you to the mat before you know what’s grabbed you.”7

similarly, Alok reflects: “no one’s in the era of truth anymore. everyone’s in the era of trying to justify their feelings through decorating them with big intellectual words but actually it’s just the words i’m scared. you know? so actually to make people realize that they’re scared, you can’t say “you’re scared” you have to make them laugh and then they can see it.”8

pflas are sneaking up on us and we’re better for it. we’re less afraid than we were. they don’t approach head on, you see ‘em dancing in the corner of your eye so zestfully that you can’t help tap your foot. can’t help but join in. pflas like energetic magnets, pulling us through the joke, toward what we suspect we were born for.