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.