anomalies as contagion memo 10

many days she felt unwell. specifically it was violent nauseating whiplash. as the tissues of her body acclimated in staccato fits and starts to the evolution-gift, she found herself out of sorts, out of sync, out of time, out of place, out of body. it was sensory overload, often. the evolution caused her body to experience time differently: there was no longer a linear past-present-future but an everything-everywhere-all-at-once. she had to learn how to toggle between scales of attention, like how our eyes adjust between the micro and the macro, between light and dark. one particular technology of that time, the camera, is a helpful analogy; different lenses provided different perspectives. photographers might use lens with fast apertures to foreground a certain subject while blurring the background into indistinct disks of dreamy colors and soft gradients. they might use the tilt-shift lens, which manipulates the planes of focus, creating the effect of miniaturizing everything. they might even use holography to split beams of light, capturing two moments and creating a three-dimensional re-presentation in two-dimensional form. it wasn't just her eyes learning to toggle across scales but her ears, nose, tongue, the hairs on her arm and the back of her neck, the nerves humming throughout.

the more feedback she had to adjust to, the less words she had readily available--the more strain she felt to attend to multiple simultaneous realities. in the midst of a conversation, her attention was drawn instead to the five deer grazing in the underbrush or the tiny iridescent beetle down the way, the bombs across the world. the clicking cicadas in the canopy of the oak trees whose leaves were feeding the western tussock moth caterpillar undulating lazily with its colorful bristles erect. the website trafficking drugs to assault women on camera. the bright blue scrub jay with its round white belly, and the high-pitched ruby-throated hummingbirds zipping about. the prattling on of people around her vying for attention from the gatekeeper-researchers. morning light spilling around the small girth of young redwood trees. the yelling of someone on the trail called the jungle and the crowing roosters. the iridescent feathers of large wild turkey roaming about. astronauts re-acclimating to gravity; their poetic ballads from the far side of the moon attempting to distract from the smell of schools and hospitals in smoking rubble. the startled baby garter snake. the smell of rain soaked earth and freshly uprooted invasive grasses, fading from her hands.  the ruptures fractures fissures ripping arresting of relationship, the sound of urgency and crisis-doing/thinking, the sound of dissociation and disconnection, of trauma transporting bodies out of time and place. 

so she found her attention recoiling into her body like a turtle, seeking the safety and comfort of bodily sensation. once it was quiet enough she could hear the hum of her nervous system and the drum of her heart and the waves in her ears.

thinking with: glissant (tremors), whyte (crisis epistemology), sound of silence podcast from unexplainable

anomalies as contagion, memo 09

before the inevitable-evolution, the thieving-researchers were only just beginning to make out the shadowy contours of intergenerational metaphysics. they called it epigenetics. they put their individual names on papers, jostling to be first, vying to claim knowledge that was never theirs to begin with. meanwhile the indigenous mothers of old smiled a small smile and continued tending to their gardens and the young, unbothered by the noise. it is not surprising that the one who learned that butterflies can pass down memories to the next generation was a child--a child who viewed these butterflies as friends. our more-than-human kin are always telling stories. it is the children who are listening.

there was a time recently when my coworker, the descendant of #536c, began to cry. heartbreaking, shuddering, hiccuping cries. blotchy, flushed, red-cheeked cries. it lasted about two weeks. we know it was an ancestor in her, or multiple ancestors, speaking something precious to her: their own pain, resurfacing for air. after they were done the air around her was fragrant as if it had just rained.

 

prompt: joe nagai, math trauma

anomalies as contagion: memo 08

she felt especially out of place those days. it was most pronounced when the tax collectors, thieves, and spirit-murderers sought to restrain and contain her, to make her palatable, knowable, legible, controllable, exploitable, ownable, killable. captured. pinned down. for dissection. there was an arching sharpness in her bones that felt uncontainable; dangerous. like the wolverine frog who tenses its muscles to thrust broken bones through skin to maim its enemies, trusting that its tissues would heal. how it sacrifices some comfort to fight for its safety. or the bone collector caterpillar, picking through the remains of the dead, the aftermath of a carnage, to curate armor for itself as it hides itself from the view of its spider landlord, biding its time to become a moth. there was dangerous knowledge in her bones meant to protect her.

but just like ice, formed when it needs to be in response to certain conditions--slick, sharp, slippery--her body also knew when it was time to be a cloud, storm, ocean, river. or rather, her body was all of it, all the time: like how clouds are full of fecundity, potential, multiplicity, whimsy, life, unpredictability. how storms are full of danger, force, energy, unpredictability. how oceans are vast and mysterious--worship or be subsumed. how rivers are not singular units; they are movements and stillness, singing and giggling. how fog is everywhere, gathering on your skin and seeping into your lungs. the water in her knew how to be a part of. a part of collective, story, community, relations. unpredictable unpredictable unpredictable! do not perceive me, her body screamed. do not pin me down! do not constrain me!

she was visited by a jumping spider. two, in fact; the first one she shook off, startled. the second one, she leaned in, curious to see the red dots on his back as if to ask, who are you? he giggled and jumped away; nope! no naming me. he told her to trust her intuition and jump! for he is one who needs no web; all knowledge stored in the hydraulic pressure in his legs. store the knowledge, that energy, trust yourself, jump.

prompt: top-down hierarchical education, ethnography as extraction and betrayal and violence, bottom-up education, anti-celebrity culture in academia 

tentacled snake medicine

i don’t want to be legible

i don’t do this to be employable
                                deployable

i want to become water
    –dissolve into queer relation
    to confound the Researcher

we are a snake slipping through his killing hands
    evading explication, extraction, his exacting dismembering science
we evolved tentacles to detect bs and flip the script
    we, predator, predate you

fellow spirits, he dare not deadname us
    for we are busy smirking, shrieking with belly-cramping laughter, casting spells
    (he can’t stand it ‘cause he don’t get it--our defiance, noncompliance
        watch out yall, all he knows is violence)

    we are busy healing parched lands
        mending, re-membering,
        nourishing, restoring

what other states can water reorganize into on other worlds?
    we’ll show you. join us

 

 (img from denver zoo)

 

anomalies as contagion: memo 07

the enforcer-researcher's illness had progressed quite severely; it had been calcified in his bones long before he met #536c, and every interaction between the two was mediated by his blindness and deafness. it was as if he moved about the world with a perpetual veil covering his eyes, and the only way he could move about space was to project his inner world upon others. he was blithely unaware of how severe his logorrhea was, and could not see the pitying glances laden with tolerance and a sort of tired, resigned pity.

anomalies as contagion: memo 06

 

in the capitalocene, they used to frequently use the phrase, "we're running out of time." they used it on the daily in any and every situation. they used it without thinking. our language reveals so much about our relationship to time because today we say, "we're being policed by time." meaning, we can find refuge.

this new phrase was only possible because several generations ago, the immortal jellyfish (medusozoa) decided it was right to share with us the genetic instructions for reshaping our relationship to time. we do not know why they decided to do so, because humans were actively destroying the world (and themselves) and many humans felt it wise to let the destruction happen so as to end it all. they (rightfully) assumed that more-than-human kin were tired, but perhaps were wrong in assuming how the more-than-human kin would respond. it's unhelpful to map human conceptions onto more-than-human bodies... like the jellyfish, for example. the jellyfish was the one who made the final call (it makes sense that they consulted others, but we're not sure how many they consulted. perhaps everyone was in on it... more-than-human kin rarely make decisions alone. that's a recipe for mutual death). the jellyfish's gift was the last puzzle piece that pushed humanity past the precipice through the inevitable-evolution. we were never the same afterwards.

the genetic technology they gifted us rewired our cells to relate differently to time. we cannot rewind time to the extent that the jellyfish can, but we can pause it momentarily. we can see fissures that become openings into a pocket in time where we may find refuge together, and rewatch the last 5-10 minutes that had just occurred. these pocket time portals do not change what happened. when we emerge we reenter the river of time just as before.

the gift was not instantaneously rolled out, however; they conducted a few waves of alpha tests among select few, followed by a large scale beta test. those that did not survive the beta test did not join us in the cthulucene. #536c was part of the initial alpha test waves.

it took anywhere from 4-7 years for the entirety of the body's cells to completely transition out of time. one of the first side effects was called shadow glitching. here's my chronographic memo describing #536c's first noticeable symptoms:

she glitched. her shadow would momentarily separate from her, lagging in spacetime. at first she didn't notice, especially if it happened in the forest or at the beach because the shadows of the trees and ever-shifting sand hid the evidence from view. the first time she noticed it was while she was walking in a part of her neighborhood where there were no trees. she jumped furtively in the air (checking first to see if there was anyone around to witness her bizarre behavior), walked in some meandering circles, staring at the unmoving dark shape on the ground. before she could squat down to touch it, it was already attached to her feet. it was quite startling and unnerving. she chalked it up to some strange physics phenomenon and lack of sleep.

over the next several years, however, she began to glitch more and more. eventually she discovered that if she aligned herself at a very particular angle with the frozen shadow, she could see a fissure in the air that she could step into/through. she initially couldn't discern any pattern for why and when they happened. she felt that she was surely going insane, but was curious nonetheless. she began to experiment: what happens if someone is near me when it happens? can they see it too? what happens if/when i step inside? how long is the pocket open for? and eventually: can i bring others inside with me? it turns out, yes, however from the other person's perspective, it just felt like she was asking them to stand somewhere specific. good thing she was clever and quickly began bringing her camera around with her as an excuse: "i'm just practicing spontaneous portraiture in different lighting contexts." her unwitting participants never caught on. upon leaving the pocket, they always experienced an intense wave of deja vu, and for a fleeting moment they might have felt more settled within themselves. slower. their cells were more aligned. few were conscious of it though (as they were not learned students of their own bodies).

the more glitching she experienced, the more shadows she left around the world. they are mostly indiscernible to regular eyes but we use special goggles to assist in adjusting the sensitivity of our eyes so that we may be more attuned to notice the shadows. frankly they're a pain in the ass to track down on their own, but thankfully i have the help of the photos she took (the person she photographed cannot be seen in the photo, of course; they are hidden within the time pocket). these shadows tell the story of just one of the layered stages of the inevitable-evolution: how humans adapted to the jellyfish's gift and invitation to become disrupters of capitalist time and visionaries for otherwise worlds. 

____________

in response to linear capitalist time, "running out of time," wanting to slow down. inspired by joshua's sharing of wanting to respond to the too-quick moments of micro-violence, and the shadows that hiroshima and nagasaki left.

anomalies as contagion: memo 05

#536c is an ancestor (seven generations back) of a friend of mine. i see my friend as a fellow weaver, but she sees herself more specifically as artist-weaver: one who uses art to weave across time. my friend graciously consented to helping me with my research, and participated in some body-listening sessions using our watery technology. we looked at what was happening in her body while she was in the midst of her art practices, and we isolated for the particular fibers and nerves in her body that were genetically mapped from #536c. these fibers and nerves told us that they were attuned to a specific dissonant frequency. when they register this frequency, they activate a system-wide response in my friend's body to create. we are in the process of visualizing the situations that might trigger this frequency so we don't have any conclusive evidence yet, but so far we think it has something to do with uneven power dynamics or relations. we also don't believe this frequency originated in #536c herself but rather her ancestors... we don't quite know yet. how did this lineage learn to create beauty in the midst of or in response to moments of incongruence, hypocrisy, harm?

 ______

wondering about what is it about me that makes me frequently at odds with ppl in power. but maybe it's not me. it's the box they want to put me in

things older than ice

things older than ice, in ascending order:
koi fish in that little pond at the mall who i never thought twice to say hello to
alex the parrot who said "be good, i love you"
me, a 90s baby
most likely you
a box of my childhood knick-knacks
the first approved contraceptive skin patch
the first draft of the human genome project
Google
knowledge of accelerating expansion of universe
the civil rights act of 1964
the wisdom of our forebears
the greenland shark, who wait to become mothers
the bristlecone pine, who has seen the rise and fall of 200 empires. or more
the honey mushroom in oregon, heftier than 200 gray whales
the glass sponge, a sister in our lineage
all of our matrilineal dna from mitochondrial eve
hydras, who know not death

ice is not inevitable
ice is not permanent
ice is not indissoluble

view from the atltitude of the chthulucene: memo 04

we have the technology today to map the memory of water across multiple scales of time and space. the vibrations of its molecules tell us stories of where it's been, who it's been and who it is and who it's becoming, how it has traversed terrains of destruction and creation both. it sings of tales from other worlds, and of how we healed from the capitalocene, and how we thus have the instructions to weather other spills. we use this technology today to trace sickness and listen for medicines on the other side of the planet, but before they had this technology, they couldn't heal the 17+ million suffering from what they called long covid. they couldn't hear what the water was telling them all along, and so our kin tried to warn them first.

first to take up this task was the wise-one, an african gray parrot they named alex (short for avian language experiment. how minimizing.) his name was actually odideré, whose parting words were "you be good, i love you." humans debated this for decades, missing the point altogether. i salute odideré's courage to submit himself under their greedy dissecting eyes for thirty years; i don't know who clipped his wings to begin with. did he consent in order to undertake this humiliating lifelong assignment? was it a gesture of good faith? or was it coerced, upon which he became a martyr or saint of sorts, to deliver this message to the humans? in any case, odideré gifted them an invitation to listen and evolve, and they desecrated it with their conferences and press releases and research grants. of course they were enamored with odideré, but in their simpering reverence he remained object and not subject.

odideré's mantle was inherited by our trickster kin raccoon dog named mangut, who felt her rage spill forcefully and unapologetically in the form of a gift, coughed up from her lungs rattling with the promise of death, life, and transformation. her spittle was an ecotone, a liminal space between worlds. she was not as patient as odideré (she figured odideré gave them thirty years) and so she waited a mere two months before she jump-started the evolution of what came to be 17 million. 7 million returned to the earth and waters. like odideré, the trickster mangut invited people to transform: before she became an ancestor, she said, "you can do things differently."

unfortunately, people disregarded her invitation. while they treated odideré with a strange romanticization, they stoned mangut with stories of disgust, thus reaping the condition they called long covid. we call this hydroempathy, not unlike lauren olamina's hyperempathy. because we are all made of Water, and if Water is sick, we are sick too. mangut did warn them.

those that mangut invited for transformation through hydroempathy experienced chest pain and shortness of breath. that was the penguin of the Kawésqar peoples, dying from a swallowed mask (they called her Magellanic. but we reject this name, as he had no right to name and claim her. she existed long before he was even born). dizziness, brain fog, and anxiety was the Kawésqar penguin, an emerging climate refugee, disoriented as she tried to navigate the glitching ecotone between land and sea. humans had made both land and sea untenable, interfering with her sacred task as spiritual messenger between ecosystems. what did they expect? the depression was the world's collective grieving of 400 white storks who left us too soon, taking new beginnings with them. the symptoms were endless. the waters linked hydroempathetic people online into a network of shared suffering across, with, and within oceans.

it was out of mangut's ecotone--her maligned bodily fluids, the indigestible illness that the capitalocene bequeathed to her--that the fuzzy outline of a new world shimmered momentarily. since mangut, there were more spiritual messengers and guides who followed in odideré and mangut's lineage to continue weaving transient portals, whether or not the humans would/could listen. #536c and the 17+ million were starting to listen.

 

prompt: combine posthumanism, becoming-water, ecotone; hyperempathy syndrome; materialistic origins of ideologies (barbara fields' terrain/satellite analogy), covid, parrot, body as doorway 

anomalies as contagion: memo 03

i recently had to consult my colleague who is a historian of epidemiology in the plantationocene/capitalocene era. while researching #536c, her frequent encounters with enforcer-resarchers piqued my curiosity. my colleague told me that the enforcer-researchers were the saddest prisoners around. they were ill with a disease that can only be contracted within their own castle walls. the disease etiology is unquestionably in the fragmentation of one's mindbodyspirit, caused by a bacteria which is now extinct. the incubation period of this bacteria is debated, but emerging evidence seems to point to a positive correlation between time spent within certain castle walls and the speed of deterioration in the patient.

once the patient was symptomatic, the disease process proceeded as follows: symptoms started with dissociation and subsequent delusions and paranoia. without appropriate interventions at this stage, the patient quickly succumbed to blindness, deafness, and compulsive logorrhea in the form of unsolicited monologues (more like diatribes) sprinkled with an alarming number of neologisms. eventually, they either became immobile or had severe ataxia. their delusions and paranoia, at this point, would've been so severe that they've been reported to feverishly chant the phrase, "i must prove myself. you must prove yourself. it's coming for us." they also were frequently defensive and resistant to attention from healers and caretakers. it was almost as if the bacteria rewired their brain and immune system to launch allergic reactions at the slightest hint of anything that might remotely make them well again.

their disease made them very difficult to be around, and they often experienced social isolation as a result. the affected tended to congregate together (we don't know if this was by necessity, if it was inevitable due to living within those same castle walls, or if the disease actually attracted them to each other). in any case, it is baffling because they also greatly disliked each other.

my colleague reported that we don't believe the disease was necessarily transmitted from person to person, but if an unaffected individual interacted with symptomatic individuals within castle walls for an extended period, the likelihood of contracting it increased exponentially.

this data made me all the more interested in #536c and others like her. how did they avoid this illness? did something make them immune?

(several days later, my colleague realized that attributing the disease etiology to castle walls was perhaps a spurious association. it was beyond the castle walls, too. maybe the bacteria proliferated in castle walls was a special strain, but it turns out it was rampant everywhere. there's a reason it was called the capitalocene, after all.) 

anomalies as contagion: memo 02

the enforcer-researcher insisted on linearity. it was simpler, cleaner. less scary, easier to control and manipulate. this was evidence that he could not hear the trees, could not commune with the skies. we do not know what he liked to think of himself as, but we do know that his actions were that of disassembly, not of creation. i'd venture to guess that he thought of himself as an undercover agent researcher. i don't know what revolution he was waiting for, though, because he waited until the castle walls crumbled and by then it was too late. i suspect/theorize that the more fear laced around and choked one's veins and arteries, the less likely they were to experience the inevitable-evolution. they would be left behind. a fading remnant of the anthropocene. people walk past their figures in museums today with disinterested nods and pursed lips as they hurry to more interesting exhibits.

the exhibit curators, to no fault of their own, have done little work archiving interactions between the fearful ones and those who eventually evolved. how did they interact? impact each other? in some notes i found of anomaly #536c's written frustrations, i believe that the enforcer-researcher did not know that the more he insisted--the more pressure he sought to exert on her to mold, to constrain, to corral--the more fecund of an environment he was inadvertently constructing for her evolution. a happy accident, surely. others he successfully molded to learn the language of compliance. of survival, but of the sad sort. she, however, already had the ingredients within her; she did not know that she was activating a dormant script written from within the pressures of the hydrothermal vents by ancestors who knew what it meant to birth impossible life. in some ways, we have the enforcer-researcher to thank for helping to unlock the script that set us free. an inheritance he unfortunately could not enjoy. perhaps we ought to rewrite the plaque in his exhibit, to thank him for playing a role in our ancestor's inevitable-evolution.