A Strange Day on Planet Earth

Maybe my right eye is my beacon home. Maybe it is a thing of wonder. For certain, the journey home cannot be bought for the price of a plane ticket or bus ride. It does not pass in a few hours or in a night. The ask is everything and the return uncertain. Start here: You can no longer lie. Not even the smallest, most inconsequential lie (it isn’t).

That was the premise of a blockbuster film years ago. The protagonist could not lie. He said crude things to everyone, was an asshole. I thought then, still in high school: That is not what honesty is. But I didn’t know yet either its power to hurt; I didn’t know its cost. That the hardest thing is being honest about other people. The one who said he loved you. The one who felt, briefly, like home. Before he felt like something else.

Fourteen years after spending the night in a hotel room in Zürich — a hotel whose name and contours I cannot remember but whose sounds and alarm clock, glaring into the night, live forever on the surface of my nervous system — my body rebelled. Would no longer live with these things unspoken. Attacked itself, they say. That is a mean thing to say. Forced me to look, more accurately. My eyes adjusted for the task: an ocular autoimmune disease. My entire body recalibrated: another autoimmune disease.

What is the cost of freedom? Did I agree to pay it? Yes. I called myself an honest person. Said I cared about nothing more than the truth. In that case, the universe said, look here. And do not look away.

The road home is a lonely one. There was one other person in that hotel room and I cannot ask him to fill in the holes in my memory. Cannot ask him: Did you feel it? The moment I left my body? Did you capture any of her fragments? I cannot find them all. Cannot tell him: You taught me what it is to hate. And I will never forgive you that lesson.

I left you a long time ago but I still find you everywhere, the marks of you inside me. Was that the point? This is I did not agree to.

Just like all the previous times we had sex — me wanting it, wanting it — did not mean I agreed to that. Did the difference matter to you? Did it make it better for you? No distinction has ever mattered to me so much, and hopefully never will again.

I did not agree to have you live forever in my nervous system and immune system and mind. And so the violation does not end.

I loved you. Though I am not supposed to say that. The correct thing to say is that you tricked me and I thought I loved you. How that is meant to be better I never understood. It would only place the moment my mind betrayed me earlier in this timeline. But my mind was still mine up until the moment I left my body. We have had an uneasy relationship ever since.

I loved you and that matters because it makes your betrayal complete.

But all I really want to say to you — something that will never be safe to do — is that the relationship between men and women is this: you do what you want and we live with the consequences. Inside ourselves, in places we cannot reach. In the darkness where our cells replicate and hormones gestate, within our bone marrow and breast tissue and lymphatic fluid.

This isn’t a hopeful feminist message. I don’t want it to be true. Only now I can say, perhaps for the first time with perfect honesty, that I do not lie.

It is the prerequisite to going home. And I know that will be a new home, if I make it. Altered. I do not know for certain I will arrive, that I can bear the journey. Only that I am trying. And that I feel her there, waiting.

​​                                                             Doesn’t look like much, does it?

                                                                                                                       journal 6.27.22

“Anger” has ceased to be a sufficient word for my feelings. A meager word, a vague word, a still-compliant word. What is the word for when you want the entire male population to be forcibly castrated?

One knife, one person with no medical training: only fair, right? I mean how would that be any different than like circumcision? Since circumcision must be brought up at least once — and ideally incessantly — in every discussion, let’s just get that out of the way right now.

The niceness of women is not working out so well for us. What are we going to do: draw on cardboard, walk around a few buildings, write new songs, and maybe even knit some more hats?

I read that a “pro-life” outreach building was burned down in Colorado and I hope it’s true.

I also hope that no one was hurt.

I’m a woman, you see. We like to build things. Make things. Babies. Peace. Knitting circles. Bread.

But it is not working out for us, no. Men were not content to receive these things as gifts. They would like to control them, order them, turn our bodies into factory parts.

Between the wonderful, universal nature of women and the spoiled, violent nature of patriarchal men it seems we will always end up on the bottom. This is the kind of language men like: tops, bottoms, fucking, banging, screwing, jerking, jizzing, cuming, dumping. They luxuriate in the ugliness of their chosen and infantile reality, then tell us we couldn’t possibly understand the consequences of our decisions, of our own bodies, of the lives we still somehow deign to give them.

It’s insecurity, I know, but turns out insecurity has sharp edges. Laws. Institutions. Guns even. 6,000 years of precedent and many millions of men habituated to orgasm from women’s pain.

Then they say: I didn’t know. Okay I did know but not really. I’m not so bad. I try. I didn’t mean it. It was a joke. I’m sorry.

And we believe them. Or enough of us. Since I stopped dating men over a decade ago now I am increasingly confused on the point of their purported charms.

Or maybe I’m fundamentally no different: I still feel sorry for them. I don’t like them; I cannot understand how we are of the same species; I avoid them to the greatest extent possible. But I pity them, as I do any life form that appears to be suffering.

Whatever they say, men do not suffer in silence. After all of the talking, they find a way to take it out on us. And that is why they are never completely gone. Separatism has its limits.

That evasive age at which sexual harassment ends has not yet appeared with invisibility in her hands. I don’t want to wish away life. I don’t want to wish away fertility; it is so endlessly interesting. But every astonishing thing about us just becomes another way for them to hurt us. Another porn genre.

If we knew what was good for us we would have eradicated them long ago. As it is, this endless push-and-pull of giving the ladies some small things, then taking them away, is overshadowed by the larger question of planetary limits. How this weird little story of human existence ends is anyone’s guess, but it will be with much male violence and gnashing of teeth.

The end was written into the beginning in seems, somewhere in the Y chromosome. Never say nature lacks a sense of humor.

I haven’t read the news in many weeks. This after deciding that hum of anxiety that had become a steady chorus, pulsing through hours waking and chasing me into my sleep—until I was waking with an already throbbing heart—should probably be listened to.  October was there and waiting, and I walked silently into her arms of golden leaves and crisp shadows.  The apparitions are so bright and fleeting now, short hours before the nightly curtain falls and I am left standing in chilly starlight, skin still craving sunlight.  A month of worshiping yellow and tracing the descent of leaves and standing again and again, humbled and hushed, in the presence of mule deer: they startled from their grazing and I startled from my walking, two species staring across a void both mysterious and familiar.  Sometimes a tail flickers and they gallop, and sometimes a doe stands steadfast, ears stretching wide, staring at me incessantly as if to ask, “Who are you?” And I don’t know the answer.

Weeks of just hearing headlines from other people, and still I cry every day for the knowledge of those and all previous headlines. I have accumulated more bad news in the past year than I would rightly be able to process in a lifetime, not to mention everything that came before. The backlog of mourning seems to stretch from here to the nearest star, and yet for some time I continued in a grim trance of plucking more headlines to cram in every corner of my head—until it was hemorrhaging information and statistics and grief.

I don’t know how to live with the knowledge the oceans are dying. I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of runaway climate change. I don’t know how to live while millions of children starve. I don’t know how to live having read the true story of my own nation’s inception, of torn scalps and stolen children and lies and lies and lies. I don’t know how to live with its ongoing imperialist thrusts, the constant numb awareness of drone bombs and severed limbs and a mother being comforted by her dying eight-year-old daughter.   I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of old forests tortured and rivers suffocated, of fish packed in fetid aquafarms and sows unable to turn in their cages. I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of sweatshops and coltan mines and “child brides” and shredded clitorises. I don’t know how to live knowing of scalped mountains and the corpses of bee hives and 60 harvests left. I don’t know how to live knowing I may be one of the last generations of my species to do so.

I wasn’t taught how to live with these things. I wasn’t even taught these things. I just pulled back the curtain and instead of a bumbling old man, found a very sophisticated sociopath, whose abuses are now so normalized and pervasive they are hard to name. But we have named them with some degree of success: Patriarchy. Capitalism. Ecocide. Human supremacy. White supremacy. At the core of each, a hemorrhaging wound. We call them economies and social arrangements and even religions, but in essence I see illness, fatal illnesses of spirit that spread through trauma, rippling through generations and across continents.

I don’t know how to be well here, truly well. I only know to survive with some integrity I must return to the mountain and listen to the nonhuman voices. To remain somewhat well I must cry a lot, and give thanks, and journey to heal my own ancestral line, and try to find an answer for the mule deer. My mind finds this insufficient but my heart does not. This heart that told me to delete Facebook and burn sage every night, the heart that always returns to the mountain.

I lay on her rocks and listen to their memories; I caress her furry mullein leaves with my fingers; I talk to her trees and overhear their whispers with the wind. I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of the human story, but I still know how to do these things. My cells know. My feet somehow remember. My throat sometimes starts to form an old song with a meandering melody, as I walk among the chamisa shrubs that are now pale crowns of seeds that cling to the trail of my scarf.

And I cry again because I know so little, and my heart is so broken, and no one taught me how to live; and yet in these moments I have everything, and more than I could have imagined.  At the center of the wound is that which is deeply shattered, and yet beside this lives something forever intact.  Not even the human species could break what is most intact, though for some reason many have tried.  At the center of the wound, the Earth still waits for us; the tears pool and wait for a moment to fall; those things our cells remember call out to be remembered.  None of the headlines in all the world will tell you this, though they might bring you here.

On the mountain the chamisa is glowing, this shrub Gaia here wears like an encompassing sweater in every direction. It thoughtfully blooms in riotous yellows just as the summer wildflowers begin to fade.

The little snakes are more prolific, basking in sunny patches and swooshing away when they feel my footfalls. Some days the stream is dry and some days swollen, and I cannot understand the trickery by which the water comes and goes without correspondence to the rain. The sun sets ever more quickly and dramatically. And then in starlight I wander the surrounding roads as the land writes a love letter afresh night after night, in choruses of crickets and katydids.

Down the mountain, there are bombs in subway stations and presidents with advanced signs of dementia writing very bad haikus called “tweeting” everyone then works hard to either decipher or to believe. I continue to feel I am living in two different worlds, one sane and one that does not know what sanity is. The strange thing is that these worlds exist on the same planet—or more accurately, that a terribly silly and dangerous human simulacrum somehow sprouted on this mystical being called Earth. We remain hypnotized by our own species and its endless speaking, we who sprung so late in an evolution that had been dancing itself for billions of years.

We knew the rhythm, it seems, for some hundreds of thousands of years too. It wasn’t so long ago, perhaps 6,000 years, that the Indo-Europeans hatched a disease called patriarchy. One feature of this disease is an intense desire to spread it. It spread through war and conquest and rape and ethnic cleansing and trauma. It spread so far and so deeply most of us now call it “human nature.”

The mystery is that the disease could ever thrive here, surrounded by so many wise ancestors—be they towering pines or the blossoming, majestic citadels called mullein flowers.  Nothing else is insane.  Only us.  And feeling the contrast is the most insane thing of all.

Re-hearing Jane Caputi talk about the symbolism and blood rights of patriarchy tonight, it occurred to me that the contrast is integral to the design. Of course the system bludgeons one with such unremitting inanity and crudity, as it could never work otherwise. Against the choruses of crickets and katydids, nightly and faithfully calling us back to ourselves, it needs 24-hour cable news and fluorescent lights and cement blocks and drone bombs and endless wars to keep us in a sufficient stupor. As Gaia, even after so many years of bludgeoning, still wields the power to draw us home in a single breath.

It works with women the same way: they have to keep the pornography and talking heads and sexual harassment churning like so many coal plants, lest for a moment our cumulative self-knowing catch its breath and strike back with the force of a million vipers. So I suppose the unbearable unbearability of everything is somehow a reflection of the intense beauty of everything that came before, which the dominant powers must work tirelessly to suffocate out of us and our living memory. I could never understand why patriarchs are always so nervous (see how they react to even small protests) when they already own all the weapons and monies. But in the scent of their fear is the same knowing that we know too, of the right order of things.  It is always pressing to reassert itself, like a seed seeking the crack in cement.

For a shivering minute recently, on this mountain, I held the gaze of mule deer.  Mule deer primarily move by prancing, which more serious people call stotting—and I dare anyone to not feel dizzily euphoric when they witness it. Am I naive to think the system would wither if everyone had access to a mountaintop with swooshing small snakes and prancing mule deer?

The dangers are all around, the sister species threatening to reawaken the wild  slumbering in our cells.  So cue televisions in waiting rooms and cue traffic fumes and cue schools built like prisons and cue private property and cue the mafia euphamastically called private health insurance companies and cue monosodium glutamate and cue aspartame and cue roundup and cue twitter and cue debt and cue militarized police and cue nuclear waste and cue Paul Ryan.  Cue insanity.  Cue manufactured insanity dripping round the clock, more than one person could ever track.

So, my society is insane.  It considers disease to be health. It preaches that the ones still standing with money in the end will “win.” It hands obnoxious people with dirty money awards.  It hands rich people with dirty money more money.  It glorifies a certain image of Man while disgracing his mother, his sisters, his brothers, and all his relatives. It hates women, the most unreasonable proposition of all.  It seemingly hates pure air and water and the original peoples and all good things.  It bombs anything that might puncture the empire walls.

Meanwhile the light has a golden edge in these pre-Equinox days, and the stars have a stronger pulse on these moonless nights, and the trees speak constantly, waiting for someone to listen.

So I pray to remember what health is. I pray for the mule deer and the mullein flowers and the tiny succulents and the grandmother pines. I pray everyone meet a piece of land that keeps them honest.

SaveSave

Walking the side of a mountain after a thunderstorm, I have never seen the high desert so green.  As the sun disrobes from a block of gray clouds, wet leaves preen in the returning light.

Yet to even think the word “green” at this moment feels a lie, a stunted word to cover a universe of throbbing photosynthetic bursts, each deserving of its own word, in need of new libraries and temples of words.

I almost forget how to think for a whole hour—or that thing we call thinking, a compulsive recitation of pasts and futures and credit card balances.  I almost forget, or is it remember, swept into this universe of beings with other preoccupations so much more interesting than my own.  I feel myself a stupid infant here, stumbling along in thin skin among ancestors that calmly absorb each raindrop and plunge deeper: and for a moment I can feel the triumphant thrust of those roots.

The wind sends cascades of latent raindrops onto my head and soaking into the fabric my shoes, those shoes made of materials I cannot name, knowing not where they came from or where they will go.  Nor do I know the names of most of the relatives I pass here, a consequence of spending most hours locked in a monoculture of human thoughts and human deeds and human offenses.

But they do not shove me out; it’s not in the nature of a plant to be stingy, this much I know. Even to these unseeing eyes they show off each impossible curl, whispering my dulled senses back to feeling, speaking the sleeping animal within me awake.

I forget several human lies and I remember the original truth: in this exchange we name carbon for oxygen there is a deeper bond that can never be entirely muted from knowing. In one popular story they say God breathed into Adam, a strange cover for this superior miracle in which the plants breathed into and gave us life.  This afternoon my cells remember, the very DNA seeming to coil anew in pure gratitude, resinging its place in an ancient chorus, a small note in a song that preceded and will surely continue us.

Caught up in that ancient melody, I almost forget the thing called thinking.  Almost.

After a time I crawl back into a metal beast burning gasoline in its belly and go back down the mountain.  For a time it stays with me, the knowing of the rightness of it all, the feeling of myself as a small organism in a universal web, the web which is my home.

But then there are parking meters and intersections and strangers … the shock of strangers in their strangeness, the strangeness I only feel in presence of my own species, which is the strangest thing of all.  The men I pass look at me in a certain way and all the subtle senses that had just been aflame begin to shut down one by one, like a line of switches inside me firmly pressed down.

I am back in a world of rectangles, and I have never been so aware of how unlovely it is, a temple built via the sinew and blood of a million species just to worship money, that god made in the image of man, that god that breathes through an unholy spirit called cement.  This cement didn’t grow, it didn’t even come from here, and as if in its own silent revolt it is inclined to tear and bubble, always needing to be smothered and smothered over again.  I can’t remember why I’m here or what I do here; I can’t remember why I must come down the mountain and rejoin this sad story of money and cement … I only know that long ago they took away my knowing of how to live outside it.

In the metal beast I listen to a podcast about psychedelic plants, but it isn’t for knowledge: it is a desperate attempt to regain the feeling of being at home in the web. But the more furiosly I grasp at the thread, the further it unravels.

I am back down the mountain now, in a rectangular room looking at pictures of the mountain I took on this thing called an I-phone, another rectangle made through some bad magic.  The pictures are rectangles and reflect nothing of myself in the web, the feeling of my DNA coiling around my own center.

My ancestors are buried far from here, across different lands and across oceans.  The place I call home is rented out by the month, with money as profits for a man I will never meet.  When I look out the window I see flourescent signs from a strip mall positively glaring at me, as if they too resent being left on, wanting an evening’s respite from their own light. When I open the window I hear the unhappy roar of more metals beasts … the metal beasts that seem to breed in silent cement lots, annually producing what they call another “generation.”  I can’t remember why we live like this, but I also can’t remember what came before.

I am back down the mountain now, in a rectangular building with its own letters and numbers: if I typed those digits into this cobalt-laden rectangle people across the world could pull up its latitude and longitude—with pictures!—on Google Maps, just like that. … Right here I am, so tirelessly chronicled and counted, but then I have no idea where I am at all.

Walking this path with the sun a few inches from the horizon.  Were there people?  Mostly there seemed to be dogs.  They strain their leashes, and the people shout.  And the dogs shout at each other.  And then they shout at the dogs in the surrounding houses, and then the dogs in the surrounding houses start shouting at each other.  Also children, squealing, straying.  And bikes.  And joggers plodding by, seemingly seeing nothing as they gasp for breath.

But if you walk long enough you will see the dogs and their people leave, and the children vanish, and the joggers dissolve, and the bikes become intermittent, until each is a whirling apparition of lights.  Even the west wind dulls to a tender whisper.  And if you keep walking still, you will meet the object of your desire: twilight.

I do not feel the earth going to sleep here in the final blush of daytime, but waking up.  There is stillness, yes, but do you feel the pulsing all around?  It is the air crying out for starlight.  We have all stopped talking to the sun: instead now only deep listening to the moon.

It is March and twilight in March in the high desert is its own universe, one that should fill mouths and dreams and imaginations for generations.  The earth is still brown and in direct light looks brittle, but look again.  Ostara is moving, and at twilight I hear her siren call until my blood is pulsing in time with the melting mountain snow.

I am her disciple, her devotee, her child, her shadow. I feel the pressure of the swelling tree buds in my arms, memorize the shape of every blade of grass in its thrust, and impress the smell of surging water into my cells.  Nothing has changed, and yet everything is new, and old, and new again.  Even under cement, the soil sings and speaks of spring.  They say Bede made up Ostara but I know better.  I have met her on this path: a snake green as new leaves, whose dance wakes up the entire world.

After a fraught week, I was resuscitated via drinking a salted margarita and watching the third season of Chef’s Table.  It takes itself rather seriously but I don’t mind, as I also take it seriously and am inclined to cry at the climaxes of its so-serious cinematography.

I am left thinking: Perhaps we should never have appealed to the hearts of the capitalists, but their stomachs.  For surely, if they had any normal lust for food, we could never have gotten here?

There will be no layered honey cakes without honey, and no honey without bees, and no bees if we continue to dump pesticides about like dishwater.  There could be no perfect kimchi without cabbage, which is inclined to taste better when grown—as Jeong Kwan does—next to a forest, in amity with the billions of neighbor insects.  And nothing at all without fecund soil, the soil that is being stripped so quickly the U.N. estimates we have only sixty harvests left.

So they don’t care for women, or men who aren’t rich, or winged species and the sister bacteria encasing it all.  But if only, if only, they cared enough about food, perhaps we might have been spared this sixth mass extinction?

Yes, if Scott Pruitt and Charles Koch were sufficiently glutonous, I can’t believe they would be conspiring to kill the soil and the trees and all the rest of us.

If only for a love of honey.

Image: modified still from Chef’s Table, created by David Gelb for Netflix

Moving.  I’ve lived in over 25 apartments in some 15 years, but this is the first modern one.  There is a closet in the kitchen, two closets in the living area, a closet in the bathroom, and a closet in the bedroom.  I keep walking around opening and closing the closets, counting them.  This is a novel sensation.  The materials are rather cheap here, but the fact everything is relatively new and works—without any apparent entry points for rainwater—is giving me a high.

Tragically no garden dirt for anyone: we all have tiny cement balconies.  When I walk through the whole complex, from beginning to end, I start to get vertigo, thinking my little home is just one cloned block among hundreds.  I do this as little as possible.

This was shared anonymously on Facebook yesterday:

Today, I talked back to a man who touched me in the street without my permission. It doesn’t matter what I said. What matters is that he grabbed me by the back of the head, called me a whore, and threw me into a wall. … The details are irrelevant. I will tell you that this happened in the middle of the afternoon. I will tell you that there were onlookers who did nothing to help. I will tell you that as I crawled around on the sidewalk, feeling for my dropped glasses, nobody came to help. I will tell you that as I walked away, shaking, bleeding from my mouth, nobody offered to walk me home. … I will tell you this isn’t the first time.

The angriest I have ever seen grown men is when I have talked back to street harassers. The crooning voice and narrowed eyes instantly morph into shouts and bulging faces, their shoulders expanding like a mast. Men are so loud when they shout; even when I shout back, I hear my voice higher and smaller, and I cannot project enough to cover that embarrassing ring of fear.

I never spoke back because I thought it wise or prudent or bold or empowering for anyone: It was not a thought at all, just an overpowering sense I could not take it one more fucking time. In the moment, I feared if that bludgeoned part of myself was walked over again without a fight, it might never rise again. And the terror of becoming unknown to myself, in those pulsing seconds, overcame the dread of external violence.

These are the “choices” women have on the streets: To speak and confront the violence, or stay silent and internalize the violence. The violence will be with you one way or the other, pick a poison.  And I was lucky that — beyond the shouting and posturing, and that one wiry man who continued to circle me like a cat for several minutes — the violence remained in their voices, remained in the postures, remained in the compressed air that followed me home, as I cut a strange pattern of streets, walking and trembling until I could be certain I was not followed.

Recently this woman spoke back and the violence did not stay a posture; it shoved her against a wall and bloodied her mouth. She says: “I expect to get hurt again. I expect to be hit by more men in my lifetime. I expect to be called names and threatened. I anticipate it. It has happened enough for me to anticipate it. And still, I was not prepared.”

But one cannot be prepared, unless only leaving home in full defensive gear, never smiling or stopping to admire the rosebushes, just waiting for the next ambush. That is, assuming you have the physical capacity for that pose, and no children or strollers, and also no grocery bags or library books, and no inclination to wander along deserted sidewalks enjoying a long phone conversation with your sister in Pennsylvania.

Alternately, walk with a man who could be perceived as a threat or your lover, or preferably both. Alternately, try to pass for a man. Alternately, spend hours researching whether a knife will make you more or less safe, before making a decision you will forever doubt. Alternately, get dropped off directly at the door. Throughout, shut up or prepare to taste blood in your mouth. Or if none of this appeals, don’t leave your house. Assuming you have a street address, and aren’t one of those homeless women who hides from street violence so effectively that you are also uncounted. We have nothing to say to you.

So here in this sixteenth year of the twenty-first century, as people increasingly applaud “choices” for women, I would simply like to ask where these choices reside and how precisely I can access them. Because speaking or muteness, anger or depression, pepper spray or Uber: I do not see choices, only coping mechanisms. And as long as the threat of male violence permeates our minds sleeping and waking — as present as the atmosphere encompassing this planet — there can only be the “anticipation of being hurt again,” the angling to get a better view beyond the bars.

Squint enough, run hard enough, turn the headphones loud enough, for a moment you can pretend those shafts of steel are not at your elbow. But speak up to the next man getting off at the sight of your fear, and you will remember that cement wall is never far from the back of your head.

Image: Piranesi, “Prisons,” via Art Gallery ErgsArt on flickr