Let others wax eloquent about essences and fixed forms, ethnic identities, automobiles and Opera Houses. For Jimmie the humor was low key, bitter, and funny all at once, something on the move making you smile inwardly while trying to keep up with the shifting focus your unsettled understandings provoked.

The abyss is not semiological, but cultural, social, and racial.

I say the “notion” of the planetary, because the concept of the planetary is contested, rejected, vague and equivocal across writers and theorists working in and around social science and the humanities now.

I accepted the conditions. No one could or did force me. I told them I would go there alone. I saw the ocean in between as I slowly approached the island. I accepted the conditions, the torture.

For the elites, this might be an ungovernable world. But we still have many worlds to propagate, to live and love in comradely care.