About

The Long Clasp is a metaphor that presented itself on my mis-hearing what a friend had said. I immediately envisioned two shipwrecked travelers embracing each other on their final descent in the sea, and then two lovers upholding one another through the decades of their marriage, and then a family perpetually squabbling but returning to the welcoming embrace because that’s what families do.

Human beings clasp one another in friendship.
We clasp one another in grief.
We clasp one another in violence, in battle.
We clasp one’s hand in greeting.
We clasp one another in rescue from fire, a lake.
We clasp one another in exultation.
We clasp one another in love, in sorrow, in death.

We who are now alive are children of an aeons-long history of humans trying to get along with one another, trying to live their lives among each other, seeking to reconcile the unspeakable pain with the indescribable pleasure they brought to each other. We are the current crop of humans to be locked in an endless tumble of holding on to one another that we might come to understand what it means to be alive.

We who are now alive in the US cling to each other with particular historical intensity. We are children of a dream that every one of us is born with an equal share of dignity, of worthiness, of self-agency, a dream that this country can be–will be–so governed by us as to realize that dream for ourselves and our children’s children.

But the dream was birthed in a nightmare of indigenous extirpation and commercial enslavement. Dream–Nightmare–Nightmare–Dream. A fantastical tangle of loathing and fear, of loving and hope, of bitter transcendence; seemingly impossible to unknot, frighteningly unthinkable not to try, it has suffused our souls with smothering oppression.

It is for us who are now alive to dedicate ourselves to the ever unfinished work, the great task ever remaining before us, that we shall highly resolve that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth