Christopher Brean Murray's "Crimes of the Future"

Thoughts on goofiness over time.

Crimes of the Future

Parking an opinion in cyberspace without a permit.


Listening to an unorthodox symphony.


Raising your voice to the representative of a transnational corporation.


Planting seeds in unapproved soil.


Laughing at a masterpiece in public.


Ingesting “freelance berries” picked at a mountain pass.
 

Looking someone too intently in the eye.


Sketching a beardless Jesus.
 

Copulating under a cloudburst in a windstorm.


Mimicking the voice of a newscaster.


Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep.


Conversing meanderingly for several hours on a weekday.


Commiserating with the enemy’s losses.


Goose-stepping through a graveyard in autumn.


Stroking the hair of a good-looking child.


Insinuating the limitations of science.


Kissing a foreigner at a time of war.


Taking up a musical instrument after the age of thirty.


Talking to a dog as if it were a human.


Drinking water directly from a lake or stream.


Hoarding tracts of undeveloped land.


Spreading rumors about a theme park.


Forgetting to take your medication.


Remembering the failures of your nation.


Burning the biography of a decorated historian.


Making unverifiable predictions.




from Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions, 2023)
 

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This book — Black Observatory, by Christopher Brean Murray — is one of my favorite books I’ve read in a very long time. It is insightful, jarring, playful — the kind of thing our lives deserve, something that reminds us that we are seeing clearly even when we are seeing absurdly. This poem today, I think, does that best of all.

I want to point out one thing, before I go any further, and that is that the final line of this poem — Making unverifiable predictions — does such remarkable work. Think of the poem’s title: “Crimes of the Future,” and how the poem serves as a list of things that might be made illegal in the future. Things ranging from the joyful — Copulating under a cloudburst in a windstorm — to the radical — Raising your voice to the representative of a transnational corporation. A whole poem about what is absurd and strange and beautiful and gleeful and critical, and how all of these things — our absurdity, our strangeness, our beauty, our criticism — might be made illegal in the future. And then, right at the end of this poem, there is this:

Making unverifiable predictions.

What a line within the context of this poem’s conceit. As in: in the future, even a poem such as this one — one full of unverifiable predictions — will be illegal. Even the joy that is at the heart of it. Even the play. Even the criticism. Even it all. It was when I finished this poem that I realized Murray’s work was masterful in this regard. Not just masterful in its desire to show off its insight, but masterful in its ability to simultaneously remind its reader what a poem might be worth, and why it might be worthy to defend such an art. In the face of what, you might ask? In the face of whatever. In the face of so much.

It’s funny. My students are about to go off on a one-week mid-winter break, and, for homework, I assigned my AP class a fun little thing. Or, at least, something I thought was fun. I gave them each a book from my bookshelf, and then made a list of places in NYC that I thought were worth a visit. Bookstores, museums, odd historical sites, the Staten Island Ferry. Look: if you know, you know. It’s a free boat ride on an adorably orange boat that chugs along slowly through the water and is so easy to anthropomorphize.

My students have to visit a couple of the sites — most of which are free to enter and a subway or bus ride away from anywhere in the city — and take a photo of their book at the site. When I announced this, one of my students asked the go-to question at the onset of any big assignment: well, what about extra credit? I joked that I would give extra credit to any student who, outside any museum that charged even the smallest fee, yelled — at the top of their lungs — all art should be free! Immediately after I said this, I said that I was joking, and that I did not want any of my students to put themselves in harm’s way of any fee-and-gatekeeping-loving stranger who might resort to difficult and painful measures to assert their terrible worldview on such a curious and intrinsically-caring and radical student. But, still. All art should be free. One student responded that they would yell this out anyway, regardless of the consequences.

And maybe that’s why I’m thinking of today’s poem. Specifically, this line:

Laughing at a masterpiece in public.

Such a line gets at the joy and beauty of this poem, which is a testament — sure — to the pleasures of free speech, but is, most notably, a testament to what it means to live and love and indulge oneself freely in this world. The pain at the heart of this poem is the knowledge not just that the actions listed in this poem might be taken away at some future time, but rather that we might be limited and judged in our ability to be most wholly ourselves in the future. That we might be less inclined to play, to criticize, to goose-step through a graveyard in autumn. That we might be less ourselves. And what a travesty that is.

Look again at some of the actions listed in today’s poem:

Taking up a musical instrument after the age of thirty.

Talking to a dog as if it were a human.

Conversing meanderingly for several hours on a weekday.

These are simple, ordinary actions, but also actions that are divorced from certain expectations of how one should be in the world. So much has come at the cost of progress and purpose. But there’s real joy in loitering, in meandering. In Inciting Joy, Ross Gay writes that:

joy is often imagined to be the result of organizing our closets and bookshelves or getting the new Tesla or winning the big game or acing the test or getting a promotion or getting our dishes sparkling clean. Given that joy is often imagined as the result of some accomplishment or acquisition— something nice you get out there and do; something nice you go get yourself.

Where is the room here — in our conventional definition of joy — for the meandering conversation? The goofiness of trying to talk to a dog? The foolish belief? The absurd comment? The laughter that rings in the aftermath of whatever has brought upon the laughter? Where is the room in a world where happiness is so often tied to ascent for a sense of joy that is brought out of the silliness of making fun of the status quo? Of thumbing one’s nose to the powerful? Of wondering and wandering? Yes — in our world, right now — I’d like to make room for such things. I’d rather our most ordinary and joyful absurdities not become illegal.

Maybe, too, I’m thinking about this poem because of something else that happened recently. During a professional development day where each staff member at my school was entered in a prize-winning raffle, I happened to be the winner of an Oculus Quest 2, which — if you do not know what this is (bless you) — is a virtual reality headset and gaming console of sorts. I think you need a Facebook account to use it. Or Meta, I should say.

Anyways, since I am probably the least likely person on my school’s staff to use this device, I’ve had it sitting — still boxed — on top of a bookshelf in my classroom for the past few weeks. Every so often, a student would come up to me and ask why I had it, and what I was going to do with it. When I said I didn’t want to use it — well, you can imagine. Finally, one day, after over a dozen or so students had declared their desire to have my Oculus, I sat down with a fellow teacher, and the two of us concocted an absurd and strange series of challenges — involving a test of skill, a test of will, a test of humor, and a test of kindness — that we would ask interested students to undergo in order to win the Oculus.

Needless to say, last week, we had twenty students trying to take a single sheet of paper and — without turning it into multiple sheets of paper — make it as long as they could. (Hint: you have to tear little rows into the paper without completely tearing all the way through the paper. It will then unravel, accordian-ish-like — a long spiral-like spool). Another day, these students came into my classroom after school one day and did standup routines. They baked brownies and gave them as gifts to other students in an effort to “out-kindness” their peers. It was a funny week, full of laughs and oddities, and, as it went by, I hoped that the students who were engaging with this little challenge were experiencing it in a way that I might’ve as a kid — just grateful for the stories to tell about it later.

After the challenge ended and the absolutely arbitrary scores were tallied up, one student came up to me and asked — in complete sincerity — why I was so committed to being so goofy all of the time. I took the question seriously and answered it seriously. Below is a somewhat-accurate graph I just drew that framed what I said.

I told this student that I believed that our inherent goofiness seems to decline over time (and then maybe jolt up right at the end). I told this student that, as an adult, I’ve found that it takes real, actual work to maintain an even-somewhat goofy attitude in this world. That, as I’ve gotten older, I have had to manage and calibrate my tendency toward goofiness against a societal expectation that associates goofiness with aloofness and carelessness, and seriousness with a sense of purpose and progress. I need to remind myself, over and over again, that it is okay to stand on a chair and say something. That it is okay to be so overjoyed by what someone has said that, perhaps, you fall to the ground and say man oh man oh man. That it is okay to perform — with real honesty — the deep and visceral emotions of love and joy and gratitude. To belly laugh and raise one’s voice and lower it, too. That it is okay to say oh I fucked that up or hallelujah! or to curse or to dance or to whatever it is the body wants to do in order to say I am alive; I am listening; I am in love; I am whatever the hell I am in whatever the hell this world is. That it must be okay to say you don’t know, to scream I don’t know, to scream anything sometimes, because you feel you have to. That it is okay, in other words, to refuse to calibrate yourself to the arbitrary mechanisms of society. Because there is a goof — there must be — inside you that you want to let live.

In a recent issue of The Convivial Society, recommended to me by fellow writer and friend Chuck McKeever (who writes the wonderful newsletter Tabs Open), L.M. Sacasas writes, of two fundamental beliefs:

First, that human beings are fundamentally social creatures, who desire to know and be known in the context of meaningful human relationships, ideally built on trust and mutual respect.

Second, that we live in an age of increasing loneliness and isolation in which, for far too many people, this profound human need is not being adequately met.

I read Sacasas’s thoughts this morning, and they stuck with me. Mostly, I think, because I believe they are true. But I also believe that we are not just social creatures, but creatures who enjoy engaging in acts of freedom. Freedom to play. Freedom to love. Freedom to dance. Freedom to forget. Freedom to make amends. In that freedom — our ability to choose, amongst a variety of options, any given option or behavior or action — is also our joy, our love, our personality, our so-much-ness. What makes today’s poem so brutally difficult is the sense in which it offers a future — borne out of a real understanding of our current moment — that seems to negate our personality. In the future, perhaps, we don’t really exist. Not because we aren’t alive. But because we cannot play. We cannot criticize. We cannot be most wholly ourselves.

In many ways, especially for certain people in this world, such negation of wholeness is happening. I think often of this article from 2020, which discusses the disproportionate ways in which black girls are disciplined in schools, often for behaviors that other children exhibit — for laughing, for being silly, for being children. The article discusses how, for black girls, there is a sense in which childhood has been criminalized. When they laugh, it’s too loud. When they are wholly themselves, it is too much. People are afraid of their joy, and, as such, they make their joy illegal. Some of the crimes of the future that Murray discusses in this poem today are also crimes of the present.

When our laugher is limited, and when our goofiness is limited, and when our strangeness is limited, and when our ability to laugh at masterpieces or be weird in museums or dance in graveyards or wander for a day or loiter for an hour or three or forever is limited, too — then our souls are limited. Then we are restricted to being some fundamentally different beings than ourselves. Something more by society’s eyes, sure, but something less by every other and more important standard.

I’m thinking of two very short poems by Bill Knott — “Fragment” and “Alternate Fates.” Here they both are.

Fragment

Because at least one couple is making love
Somewhere in the world at all times,
Because those two are always pressed tightly together,
Hatred can never slip between them
To come destroy us. 

Alternate Fates

What if right in
the middle of a battle
across the battlefield the wind
blew thousands of
lottery tickets, what then?

This is the kind of honesty-by-way-of-absurdity that makes me believe we do have souls, and that our souls are things that allow us to wander waywardly toward meaning, to say what then, to remember — with hope and trust and care — that at least one couple is making love somewhere in the world at all times. I read poems to remind myself of these things — not just the things that poems say, but the process by which they must arrive there. The process of honoring one’s silliness, one’s goofiness, one’s strangeness, one’s vision, one’s awareness, one’s anything in the face of a world that sometimes refuses to honor such qualities at all. I read poems as practice for having a soul. And then I go and try to live my life.

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Some Notes:

1. As I have mentioned the past few weeks, I was grateful to have an essay come out in Longreads about a month ago — about fragility, presentness, anxiety, and love. Give it a read if you’d like!

2. A recurring note: If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.