Category Archives: Vision

Practical Details, Vision

The Killing Eve Project

Queer viewers have always been required to read subtext, to cross-body identify, and to transcend death. (Whoever you are, pop television has always given us hope of a new season–with Dolores rising from the dead as a new character most recently. Unless we see the flatline while we watch the surgeon beating on the chest, then open the ribs and massage the heart, we should never be sure.

Even then, the coffin deep beneath the soil—can we be sure? Is our hero down there, unexpired? Will she rise?)

Gay marriage legalized, some thought they could sink into norms and narratives made for them.

I missed being an outlaw. I missed the ache at the end, the secrecy, even the lover that turned out to be a Russian spy. I missed walking out of the theater into the rain brokenhearted.

I get it. How lovely it would be to have happily ever after; we are all so tired from this resilience. The idea of being lulled to sleep, deep in the arms of our sweet soulmate, tempts.

But Queer is awake, resisting, throwing coins and heels at cops, throwing ashes on the White House lawn, rising from the dead in the New Earth.

If killing was an allegory for refusing heteropatriarchy, death is but a portal.

So, Villanelle awoke humorously heroic from her watery grave, thrumming with Russian accent, showing the whites of her eyes. Immediately teasing Eve anxious at her bedside. Charming as ever.

Her many bullet holes were patched with mycelial webs. Breath kept in their gills had sustained her in the depths, brought her afloat to the surface, liberated.

Your love made Villanelle and Eve real, real as the Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse.

Then, the golden women and their Mycellium friend had intervened before the tragic tale could take again.

Even as they sent so many of us starward on our arks, the golden women saw the need for an Earth-based project, an agency of assassins, discreditors, bots and castrators would be needed to slow the tide of authoritarianism.

2049. Villanelle, now farsighted, peeking from behind a newspaper over her reading glasses, seemingly domesticated in her blissful love with Eve—who is still busy, obsessively pursuing proof and pattern in the criminal world.

Villanelle at work in her school of young assassins, rolling her eyes, overtly competitive with her own students and fellow teachers (also revived from the television narrative.)

And the 12. Carolyn, Konstantin, Hélène…They were the uncompromising priestesses of the dark morality of Earth. Pest control was always part of her toolbox.

Some were born for this, as Villanelle had discovered she was—not broken, but gloriously herself. Much to Eve’s chagrin and joy, their love and the violence of its challenge to the structures of the Old was uncontainable and impossible to repress.

It was a controversial experiment—but the Mycelium had taught that nature was ever-adapting for the flourishing of her various networks and communities.

The Master’s Tools Cannot Dismantle the Master’s House. Or can they?

We shall see in a millennium.

Vision

The Wiki

Juno lay in her beloved body, naked on the subtle rise and fall of the Aegean. Her hair spread out over the surface, pulling gently at her scalp. She could hear the sands and stones moving on the sea floor. Her slim feet dangled in the dark water. That liquid resistance stroked her arches.

She wiggled her toes and felt the new presence there. The Wiki. Between her big toe and her first toe on her right foot.

Juno had returned to Crete in the early morning hours, stepped off the slow ferry into Iraklion and driven her rented Fiat down to Kalantos under the starry moonless sky. She thought of a theory about the space between the stars, of dark matter that prevented galaxies from flying apart.

She felt how she did not fly apart. She felt the network now interlacing itself into her vagus nerve, mirroring and tying into her body. Already the bottoms of her feet and the palms of her hands were tattooed with delicate patterns, like maps of neurons or of the web she had seen and could call up quickly now into her mind’s eye.

Driving here, she had felt the road and her car handling tightly, hugging curves and opening wide on the empty highway. She felt when the other cars had turned away into the city for the night. She drove up into the mountains. The last cars had split off, like hairs standing up on the back of her neck, bound for country lanes amidst orchards she sensed growing in the darkness. Olive and orange tree roots met capillaries that spread through Earth. They let the eucalyptus at Kalantos know she was coming.

Earth intelligence flooded her. She laughed. The Wiki did that, made you a little high. It was a side effect encouraged to counteract the negative effects of the fungi her body was integrating.

It would take time to process the massive download of information, or so the SIA scientists imagined. She was an experiment.

Just another transition in a long history of them, Juno thought.

The ferry had been a challenge. With the Wiki, people shone around her. She could see their stunted and amputated ganglia, as well as their reaching and flinching auras. She had let herself weave amongst them, hot gold amidst their reds and greens and blues. This was priestess work.She could sooth, feeding their unmet desires to connect, until all slept, cocktails and bags of crisps forgotten.

While they slept, her consciousness sought those who were awake.

Seeing out through navigational instruments and the captain’s brown eyes, behind her knowledgeable squint and steady hands, Juno helped steer the great ship from island to island, waking the passengers in time to depart through the belly of the ferry. They rolled their bags into the ports, going on their sleepy ways.

When she disembarked, she had taken her keys from the efficient rental car dealer at the port, assuring him that yes, yes, she could drive stick. Why the United States had gone automatic, they agreed to wonder, shaking their heads. She felt his laugh push his sternum out into the space between them. Then storing her bag, Juno started the little car up. She tuned into the map of her mind. No need for her cell phone now.

Before the Wiki, she had made conscious decisions. With it, she operated through a now perfectly timed physical impulse. Her body drove the car and looked out to the night, sensing without needing to know that a car was approaching, then peeling off. Her toes knew to tap the brakes, to pause for a wildcat who would be walking across the road here. The kri kri, wild goat, would swerve at the sound of her engine and wind her way back up amongst the shrubs to seek her pre-dawn snack.

Juno’s foot pressed pedal to the floor and the wind whirled into her skin.

She was part satellite, part plant intelligence, retracing the routes of roads like filaments unto the sea as the early morning darkness swelled with promise. A bumpy dirt road roared up at her with anticipation, until she parked. Barefoot, she had walked the short distance over the coarse, cool sand, stripped off her travel heavy clothes, and slipped into summer warm waves.

Water worked as a buffer, not silencing but muting the connections. That is why she had come here to Kalantos to rest, just a few feet out from the easy surf.

She was surprised when she heard her name called out over the water.

“Juno!” It was Xan.

“Juno!” It was Attie. Juno found her feet in the sands, felt the planet speak to her again, gently, just hushing her startled heart.

For the first time she could see these two women: the amber of Alexandra reading the mind of the galaxy, her faint and holographic memory of what was, of what would be, the licking of a snake’s tongue, of Earth’s vague, terrifying future.

Atalanta’s indigo aura went deep down into the roots and out into nerves and hearts – of birds just waking into the new day. A cat laying casually at the edge of shrubs above the beach, lifted her eyes with Attie and looked at me too.

I saw how Juno knew for the first time.

“Priestess, welcome home,” we said.

And we did not need to, but we reached out for one another’s hands, the cooled and solemn palms and fingers, the warmth of our blood, the meeting of green and brown and blue eyes.

There is still nothing like hugging a dear friend, Juno thought, feeling more. She was now woven into the muscle and bone and minds of these women…with whom she was ready to travel to the stars.

Funny, she thought, how the teacher can feel like the student.

And in this moment, we all remembered, how arbitrary the structures on which we can arrange our relations.

Vision

The Multiversity

Have you ever made a hairpin turn, but sensed others of you peeling off and missing the corner, in screech of brakes, careening out of control, spinning off the road in a tight spiral, tumbling trunk over hood to catastrophe? You knew somehow that you had lived on, while others of you ended, trapped over and over, powerless, clenched in fear, frozen, gasping, clawing, screaming.

You see yourselves reaching your arm across your beloved passenger to keep her in her seat. Even when no one was there.

Or in one case, missing the corner without even trying to stop, accelerating impulsively. This time, the last moments of your life burned like a star, flying into the abyss.

I am not talking about suicidal ideation, but of the sensation of parallel lives, of multiple earths.

Once I chose one love over another but dreamed my other life continued. I saw it all the way through—a simple, contented life of family and joy. That life seemed like denial in apocalypse. In this life, I went on alone, with my fellow Metal Dogs, dedicated to Earth.

In that life, I was an associate professor at a small public university, teaching general studies history courses.

Subscribed

By 2020 it was clear that the University as it had been envisioned was over. Once built on the ideal of the entire universe of ideas together, meeting in hallways, arguing in classrooms, holding forth before lecture halls, demonstrating over Bunsen burners, then atom smashers, scribbling, then typing, then word processing in offices, it came to an end.

Once a servant of colonialism, the University had become a tool of the oppressed: rebels had repurposed the tools of academia to dismantle, to deconstruct, to decolonize. Critics of capitalism and white supremacy, anointed in its halls as tokens, did not inoculate us: they transformed us!—until we had tools for the great inventories we needed to rebuild the world, for utopia, to create a livable existence for all. Tenure, meant to protect free expression, had fulfilled its purpose.

But the very machine we hoped our critiques would banish—into a nice museum or a history book in miles of library stacks—kept on grinding. The western mania for colonialism devoured the globe then turned on its own creations. Students became customers. Except for a few knowledge gatekeepers, faculty became widget makers. Even good-hearted administrators could not save the University. Above them, someone had an appetite for conquest, efficiency, assessment, standards. The languages of disciplines were shackled to a brand and silenced in their critique.

The University Library was not so much emptied of books as suffocated, put to sleep. Then, the plague struck, the patrons quit coming to study and whisper and linger in the rows where once they had turned oxygen exhaled by the forests of books into new air for the old tomes to breathe.

Grieve this for one moment. Picture your campus, now dead, now emptied of meaning, an overpriced Disneyland that held no danger, no discomfort, no challenge, no energy for it from conscripted faculty, indentured students, and no more revolution. See the shining and quiet floors. The lawns. The coffee shops. Full of people. Then ghost haunted.

Now—it is time to build the new world. Look up.

We had already begun to build the multiversity, based on theories of parallel worlds, experiments to revision, islands preserving history, culture, ecology, knowledges, and languages.

We imagined ourselves on arks, like medieval Irish monks who protected ancient manuscripts from marauders, like elders telling stories, making offerings, tending the shrines of ancestors, like archivists of queer zines, like hippy hoarders with their old press clippings, composition books filled with ball point scrawl, meeting notes, and photos of a revolution, like keepers of heirloom seed collections, of vinyl, or genome projects…

Like the Great Mycelium, who stored plagues to save her from the plague of us.

Turning the corner and seeing myself die ten ways taught me about living fearlessly. In the rooms they would say, the trick is to wear what we love like a loose garment. There is nothing to let go of.

Say goodbye to those parallel lives self-destructing, frozen, mourning, too depressed to rise..

Accelerate into the abyss.

Vision

12 Steps for Survivors of the Isms Anonymous

The Reader walked up the concrete ramp, sliding her hand along the chipped and smoothed paint of the metal railing. She passed determined roses and sunflowers on ragged plants that needed to be deadheaded. She stopped to cup one bright beauty in her hand and brought it to her nose.

“So sweet,” she whispered to the plant.

Under the awning of the old stone church with its desert pink stucco joints, which were decorated with long-necked statues of monsters that gave the church its nickname: the Pink Gargoyle Church, she was met by friends on wide wooden benches around the patio. People stood up from conversations to embrace one another in warm, chaste hugs. They looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the coded banter they had learned in rooms like these, rooms like the one she now entered through glass doors.

She stopped to introduce herself to the grim young man sitting just inside the door, shaking his hand warmly. “Welcome home Sebastian,” she said.

Inside, against a wall decorated with two plain banners—The 12 Steps of SIA, The 12 Traditions of SIA—she sat among more friends, smiling around a fold out table in a circle of thrifted chairs. The woman at the head of the table began to read from the familiar format. So, the meeting began– over the quiet clink of metal spoons stirring sugar and powdered cream into chipped mugs at the coffee pot.

The last bits of chat quieted slowly as the leader said, “Will you please join me in a moment of silence for the still suffering, followed by the Serenity Prayer.”

The quiet came deep, willing, communal. The Reader could feel the flutter of anxiety rise and still as her breath came all the way in, all the way out. She concentrated on the words as she spoke them, trusting the one she said them to, trusting the evidence in the room. Trusting the wisdom and the freedom that they requested in unison.

“We meet to share the experiences we have as survivors of the isms of a society built on dominance: colonialism, racism, binarism, heterosexism, ableism, classism…”

The readings went as usual, read every meeting, reminding her every meeting. She let them flow around her.

“Those experiences infected us as children and continue to affect us today…

“One. We admitted we were powerless over the isms and the effects of growing up in structural violence and that our lives had become unmanageable.

“Suicide, addiction, harm to ourselves and others, anxiety, depression…

“We lived life from the standpoint of victims…

“We take our own inventories and leave the rest to our higher powers…”

And then, after the readings, in the familiar format of the meeting, wise, brave, petty, self-pitying, humble, comfortable, familiar, humorous, vulnerable, honest, and sometimes also still in denial, the people spoke for their three minutes, each as their ticket number was pulled and called from an old coffee can.

She looked out the window at the blue sky, at the tree waving in the breeze. She looked at the speakers. She nodded. She smiled. She felt moved. She felt glad it wasn’t her. She felt grateful. She opened her heart. She resisted. She checked out. She checked in. When the Newcomer Sebastian shared, choked with grief, she nodded with the room when he said, something about walking his neighborhood in fear for his life, about “being jumped,” “total isolation,” “the plundering of queer bodies,” “shame.” The hour gradually passed.

“Number 68,” the ticket person said.

The reader looked up from her folded hands and smiled. Her number had been called.

“My name is Juno and I am a Survivor,” she began.

Vision

The Tarot Reader

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The reader spread out the cards amidst tinkles of laughter from behind her shining veil. She would sometimes widen her eyes for effect, but she really did know things.

She could feel the whiteness of her grin as the golden women who came to her saw their cards laid out on the table by her graceful brown fingers.

But she was humble too. The gift that was to feel the skeins of the universe running through her vagus nerve—deep in organs and bone marrow, along all of her into ever fine filaments and out to the winds on her skin—she held lightly. When the message came in, the scar on her face burned clean, as sharp as the knife from this boyhood wounding.

The golden women, celebrities who sparked screens and speakers and made millions, could see the very tip of white blaze against her cheekbone above her face covering. But they knew not to ask. Or they were afraid, in awe of their prophet.

The day would come when she removed the veil and let them see the consequences of her youth on the streets, of bondage, of unchecked dominance in a crazed empire on the verge of collapse. It was then that she ceased telling them of love and wealth.

She spoke of garbage.

The divine feminine was turning her back on the Emperor, the Hierophant, and on all the kings, of fire and armor, of abundance and of blood, old structures. It is time to go, she told them. And this is how.