anomalies as contagion: data for mapping the inevitable-evolution towards geomatricene

here in the geomatricene/cthulucene, researchers are poets, storytellers, artists, witches, weavers, healers, prophets. we creatures cannot fathom a time when researchers were soldiers, enforcers, tax collectors, thieves, mercenaries, court-jesters. but they were. a strange time, to be sure, the anthropocene (aka the plantationocene, or the capitalocene: an era confined within linear time.

i call myself weaver. here is of one the threads i would like to illuminate of someone i found to be a strange anomaly. over time more and more anomalies revealed themselves to me, and so i began collecting data to weave with. it was as if these anomalies were a contagion that eventually led to the inevitable-evolution (this name is contested. people argue whether it was preordained or manufactured. prophetic, consequence, or cyborg. i subscribe to those in the combination camp).

the transition from the anthropocene to the geomatricene/cthulucene is blurry, of course: we don't subscribe to static categories as researchers used to. the transition is especially blurry if you map the data linearly (an archaic methodology--only storytellers interested in studying linearity practice this methodology these days). these days we map everything cyclically. much more elegant. and alive.

the glitches these anomalies made were simultaneously small and large, and the people of in-time did not have the multi-scalar technology that we do today to map the connections of impact. here is my memo for one thread of the fabric, an anomaly i call #536c who is an ancestor of a coweaver of mine (although they marginally prefer artist over weaver):

that day she realized in her reflections on her re-entry into the orbit of the machinery that she was listening across spacetime -- listening circuitously [she did not know the shape of cyclical listening yet--the brains of those in the upside down (what they called the global north) had not yet evolved enough to register spiral temporalities] listening to trees, hearing the echoes of insight and wisdom from those who came before her. [i am unsure the origin of her anomaly. was it genetic or environmental? more research to be conducted on tracing the contagion's journey. perhaps there is no singular patient zero, but multiple. in any case, that day was likely not her first symptom of the anomaly, but it might be her first serious engagement with it. after all, today we have evolved additional senses and during the anthropocene they only had five. sometimes they toyed with the idea of a sixth, mostly in jest. they didn't know the emergence of the proto-sixth sense was already well underway in the ama, haenyo, bajau, and moken (subspecies) within the homo (genus) hydroians (species)--mostly in the littoral biomes of chrysia--what the thieving researchers called the orient or asia. frankly in my humble opinion it was the soldier researchers with their violent and backwards ways of unbeing who delayed--or rather, obstructed--the revelation of the sixth sense]. 

she felt it surround-sound style, bass rumbling in her bones, the hairs in her spiral snail cochlea attuning to alien frequencies, the hairs on her skin rising like little antenna. in her writings transcriptions [they are not really original writings. because what here is new? they are but reverberations. although unoriginal, she was, however, contributing to the forthcoming inevitable-evolution. that is no small feat.] about more-than-human kin and her curiosities about what-could-be/what-ought-to-be/what-is-in-other-worlds/what-is-but-just-not-here/yet/, she felt she was on the right path. where it led, she did not know. but she knew another her was already there [my coweaver, the artist]. so in her bones, she began to sense the diffraction of indeterminate futures, a static shadowy glitch signifying diagonal dimensions she had no access to. little did she know what was to come. [is this a primitive precursor for sense evolution?]

that day she also learned that scientists are working on generating artificial gravity so that they may better accommodate human life in space, if temporarily. if a scyborg is only analytically meaningful when it is momentarily entangled with the machine, she realized then that maybe, in the time she is in the machine's gravitational vacuum (because there is no air, no life) she might assemble/magnetize with others to manufacture and magnify artificial gravity. for some life for herself and others. glitch, virus, specter, wraith. a wench with a wrench. ready for some calculated mischief. [is it in the magnetic, spiral assemblage that the anomaly was transmitted? but of course it is.]

___

in response to Esther, la paperson, Gumbs, Haraway, & Barad

this started as an attempt to describe what it feels like to read someone's work only to hear echoes of your own. the rest fell out of my brain (gushed out, birthed; unbidden, feverish, like a bewitching) in response to the following questions: in the same vein as what our past selves might think of our present selves, what might our descendants, say about us? can/will research(ers) evolve and if so, what do they know that we don't, or that we are on the verge of beginning to know? or beginning to be? what is the scale of impact beyond our immediate technologies of knowing? 

harvesting fog

 it's called "fog harvesting" when redwoods condense moisture from the air (what witchcraft?) to both absorb and to manufacture rain for the life sheltered below. what lessons might we learn from this ancient technology? it teaches us of intra-dependency rather than inter-dependency; the trees, the fog, the understory perhaps are not individual units but is blurred life, singular. do they mourn when melting glaciers halfway across the planet make air, less air? hot air, less air, rising waters, less oxygen, more fury, less life. can the trees grieve if there is no moisture to cry with? hot air rises like the way greed bloats to colonize the space in our lungs. the way greed tells us it is giving us more (it is a cancer) while giving us less (it is a toxin).

can the trees mourn if there is no life to mourn for? can they live if there is no grief? can we grieve in order to live? out of their/our grief, can we manufacture something to nourish more life? can we harvest the fog in some science fiction cyborg manner? is it life that we will then create or something else altogether?

 

fugitivity, refusal, subterfuge, sabotage, infiltration, strategy, renegade, insurgency, outlaw, refugee, elusive, evasive

not a soldier redux: sorceress; and on scale

grief doesn't make me fragile -- you can come near me, the specter of grief is not a fog you'll get lost in or a ghost who wants to make you look silly or a toxic poisonous cloud. grief is that which holds up my spine. i will not disintegrate at your touch. maybe, actually, my relationship with grief is an invitation and portal to life. i am not a soldier but a sorceress, and grief is the magical dust that allows me to listen, commune between worlds. come, breathe: grief will not fight you. she will wait until you're ready. grief is the watercolor that makes visible the presence of an absence -- it allows us to see colors others cannot see, yet. one day we all see the colors. it hurts though, as your eyes adjust; it may take some time. i'm sorry it hurts and i'm sorry it takes time. she's not trying to hurt you, though, and eventually when you let her in she will refashion you so that you may travel through time: time will stretch, stop, speed up, distort, rewind. you will become otherworldly. and then others, too, will think you fragile when it is actually the brittle ones, the fearful petrified ones endanger of extinction, who cannot traverse the metaphysics of time. you are not brittle -- grief has made you fluid and solid and air: you exist in multiple states and spaces and times! how wondrous and painful and beautiful.

 __

what is empire in the presence of the ocean?

a sand castle, hastily erected, promptly overwhelmed by waves of judgment. the ocean heeds the verdict of the moon who tells her that the sand is liminal and ever changing, not to be corralled or petrified into prison walls. prison walls, too, will one day be reclaimed by the earth as the sea reclaims the sand. recently, i learned that nations are using sand to suffocate coral to lay claim to territory. how granular do they want to get in measuring coastlines? they call it land reclamation. i call it death which begets death. because did they know that as coral reefs die, the algae that give them their vibrant color (read: life) flee, leaving whiteness (read: death) behind. even the corals know the language of white supremacy culture. after all, the chemicals in coral polyps (which are marine invertebrates, animals, relatives) contain medicines for cancer, neurological disorders, inflammation. did the despots and tyrants, the machinators of death, think more-than-human kin would help them erect empire? silly. the coral warned us what would happen on our death rampage - and here we are, fighting ocean and moon and earth to rush towards ruin. who do we think we are? maybe we are the ruin and refuse. may grief have mercy on us. maybe grief will have mercy on us. maybe, grieve.

what is empire in the presence of a bristlecone pine? 

a wave of army ants "swarm raiding" the jungle floors like the rabid violent carnivorous hivemind that they are, flushing out terrified prey. their worker ants, however, only live a few months to a year. they may even catch themselves in a "death spiral," following each other's pheromone trails until they are dead. like ice agents of empire--violent, temporary, futile--decaying itself from inside out. the bristlecone pine has 5000 rings of slow life. how many death spirals has she seen in her lifetime and what can she teach us about how to survive empires? an astronomer in her own right after 5000 years of conversing with the skies, what does she know about the heavens and its own spirals of life and death? if i were to mirror my body to the bristlecone pine, to lean against her gnarled, architectural trunk, what would i hear? she, indomitable and witty, whispers to me the medicinal genetic code for resisting the disease of it all. and to have some sly style while doing so.

so much

i didn't know that my body could hold so much. daily needles, manufactured egg development, mega bloating. an empty sac--is it empty or just too small to see?--waiting, grief, emptiness, fullness, lostness, crying, so much crying, so much waiting, the strength and knowledge to push, to expel--am i allowed to say no? stay. when my womb is silent and opaque and mysterious and inaccessible to me, how do i stay connected to my center?

 ________

"Might we strive to leave some beauty for those who come after us? What kind of individual and collective healing work do we need to do? By interrogating our forebears and embarking on Sankofa journeys, in our healing we might make some beauty to help ourselves and our descendents navigate a hostile world… some beauty as a shield, weapon, salve, refuge, technology, map, paintbrush, magic spell, theory, portal. And in the beauty of our healing and our noticing and listening, are we not already sending vibrations across time, weaving gifts for those who will come after us, and seeding otherwise worlds?"
 
just because you cannot fathom otherwise ways of being and relating, of refusing without disconnecting, of setting boundaries without splicing yourself, doesn't mean i am chained to the shape of your scars. just because this is the language you feel you must speak to make yourself known doesn't mean i too must mangle my tongue and distort my vocal chords to sing (die, conform, assimilate) with the choir. who are you yelling at, anyways? are they listening to you? do your appeals work? do you feel safe? i suppose you are surviving. or you believe you are surviving. do you feel free? 
 
where are you gesturing at me from so urgently and seriously? i cannot hear you behind the windows you stand behind. there is a door, you know. if not a door a window or a crack, or imagine you can phase through the wall to join me outside. i'm here playing.

i'm learning from Black feminists who teach me how to terraform, submerge this topography of domination. did you know, in their blood they synthesized alchemy to grow life from the refuse? or despite of it. lesson one was how to send our nerves into the ground and get online with mycelium networks. fungi know all the secrets of composting death to engineer life (maybe they are the real scientists). lesson two was how to grow gills in my neck and filters in my ribs, to breathe through the deluge of tears and oil we juiced from the blood of glaciers and fossils. lesson three was how to hollow out my bones so that i am more air than water, so that i may listen to the hum of electricity in the air, an invisible grid and magnetic compass which maps out freedom in all directions. don't misunderstand, though: hollow bones do not mean emptiness. they have lattice for structure and strength, coursing blood for substance and oxygen as spirit and life--that alchemy, remember? antigravity, antidomination. and always we commune with the trees, they teach us theory. they drink sunlight and exhale freedom into our lungs.