January 2025: Ring In the Common Love of Good

"Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace."

--from "In Memoriam" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Welcome to 8th House! Here's a few helpful links if you're new in town:

• More about the vision behind 8th House
• Welcome post for paid subscribers to leave questions in the comments!
• December subscriber newsletter with Claire’s favorite grantwriting tools and tricks
• November subscriber newsletter on tactical optimism amidst post-election grief
• October’s free Q&A mailbag on grantwriting fears and red flags
• September’s free Q&A mailbag on grantwriting basics 
• September subscriber newsletter on money, power and fundraising under capitalism

This is a fundraising newsletter most of the time, but today it's also a soapbox for me to yell briefly about how everybody always quotes the least interesting parts of "In Memoriam." But before I go on, first let me say that I suspect we're all going to have Big Feelings on January 20th (Inauguration / MLK Day) and may need a place to put them. I'll be hosting a free drop-in Zoom hang that evening from 5-7 pm PST for anyone who would like to join. The agenda is a little nebulous, but may include anything from special guests dropping in to say hi and share wisdom, Q&A or open chat for venting and solidarity, or even an inauguration survival tarot spread. We'll be very informal; you're welcome to just put on your pajamas, turn off your screen, and vibe with your cat. You can RSVP through the Google Form below so I know what email address to send the Zoom link to!

We've also got two upcoming workshops on sale!

Prospect Research Workshop
January 18th (10 am - 1 pm PST)
$200
Hands-on Zoom workshop to help 8th House members learn the basics of prospect research and how to look for which grants to apply for.

Beyond Massages and Mindfulness: Taking Care of Each Other (and Ourselves) in Hard Times
February 1st (11 am - 1 pm PST)
$100
Learn new tools to address burnout on the individual, relational, and organizational level. Participants will leave with a basic plan to assess individual and organizational burnout and increase resilience personally and systemically. Facilitated by Cat Willett.

Okay! Back to Tennyson.

We all know "Ring out wild bells, to the wild sky" and "tis better to have love and lost / Than never to have loved at all", but there's a lot more in that poem we can roll up our sleeves and dig into. It's technically called "In Memoriam A.H.H.", which stands for Arthur Henry Hallam - Tennyson's best friend and his sister's fiance - who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson started writing it the year he died, and finished it seventeen years later. It's nearly three thousand lines long, in 133 cantos, and he kept adding onto it in new publications as late as 1871. It started as something intimate and personal - grief over someone he loved very much - and yet it resonated so deeply with so many different kinds of people that Queen Victoria took comfort in it after Prince Albert died, writing in her journal: "Much soothed & pleased with Tennyson's 'In Memoriam.' Only those who have suffered, as I do, can understand these beautiful poems.'

But there's more to this poem than its profound, quiet elegy, and there's more to the "Ring Out, Wild Bells" portion than what usually gets excerpted on Christmas cards. It's the rage-scream of a man living in the midst of an absolutely devastating class divide - where the wealthy and privileged hold power over everyone, where death and disease run rampant, where political corruption seeps into everything. Among the many things Tennyson would like us to "ring out," to put behind us and push forward into a different better future: 

• "false pride in place and blood"; 
• "the civic slander and the spite"; 
• "the feud of rich and poor"; 
• "a slowly dying cause, / And ancient forms of party strife”;
• “the faithless coldness of the times”;
• “the narrowing lust of gold.”

I can't stop thinking about how many of the things that enraged Tennyson about life in Great Britain in 1850 are a perfect shorthand for what we're up against as we look ahead to the approach of a new administration. (Seriously. Read the whole thing.) It is, perhaps, overly optimistic, as we batten down the hatches to weather another four years of electoral fascism, to visualize that we are ringing out anything shitty with the turn of the new year, or ringing in anything good and important. It sort of feels like the opposite, in a way . . . like we're stumbling through the last week of anything resembling stability before things like the Department of the Interior and the IRS become political weapons. (Will there even be a National Endowment for the Arts in August when I have to write my next round of grants? Who knows! What a fun game to play!) And to say, "Well, we survived his first term; we can survive his second" erases the significant number of people who didn't.

For me, I guess what I'm holding onto - and I'll admit, guys, it's tenuous - is that I know a lot of things now which I didn't know in 2016 which I hope will help. I know, for example, that Twitter is a horrible place to be during a Trump era, and I deactivated my account earlier this year. I also know that even on Bluesky, where the vibes are better, I'm prone to panicky doomscrolling when horrible things are in the news, and I'll have to proactively avoid getting buried in the daily avalanche of horrible things. Checking it right when I wake up or right before bed are bad ideas. I know that when I'm stressed, my instinct is to hibernate, but I will actually feel better if I do something or talk to people. I know that even in the best of times, our government and social institutions can fail us, and that communities taking care of each other is the best way we all get through this. I know we're conditioned to feel like fun things, or silly things, or joyful things, or campy/trashy things, are inherently unserious distractions from The Real Work, but that in fact we desperately need to be able to clock out and let our brains rest sometimes. (Season 3 of The Traitors is airing on Peacock, by the way.) I know that there's going to be a lot of scary things I have zero control over, and the only way to stave off the panic is to keep my head down as much as possible and stay focused on what I can do, the people I can help, and the changes I can make. And I know none of us are going to get through this alone.

So I hope to see you on January 20th, where we'll gather to do whatever we can do over the next four years to ring in the common love of good. Whatever this turns out to be, I'm in it with you.