Monthly Archives: September 2020

Practical Details

My Phoenicians

Crete, at our little school. 2028.

The arks now above us, planted with the “seeds” of everything on Earth. Some cultivated, much stored for when we return in a millennium. Somehow our SIA scientists and the Great Mycelium had found a way to freeze the genetic material of an entire planet in tiny packets that could bloom again.

Like those sea monkeys advertised in comic books when we were kids.

Each ark began five miles across, made of repurposed garbage, of space junk too, and of broken stars, fragments of other apocalypses captured in asteroid fields.

Five miles across: massive scale for a ship, but such small containers for a desperate world.

When the fires of 2020 blazed through the Pacific Northwest, I thought of Australia the winter before. The Amazon the summer before that. We collectors grieved wilderness that raised us, places we had touched, creatures we had heard rustling there. Birds.

Or a place where bright flowers had yearly bloomed. I would look for that shock of orange paintbrush. But these seeds were burned out beneath the blackness left behind a brighter orange, within the green heart of flames. They were probably already choked in dust of drought before the blaze was even set.

But by 2019, Juno and the scientists of SIA were already ready. They had been combing those woods for years, carrying it all gently, lovingly, down into labs underground. They were discrete, disinterested in attention, and humble about their ingenuity. Members shared intellectual property long held in traditions, locked in stories and old ways of being with the land.

I joined the collectors on Crete soon after, shipping down from Athens on a slow ferry that dropped me off in the middle of the night. I sat upside all day upon the dark blue seas, as my polarized glasses made purple glitter of the Aegean turning aside, made brilliant white the foam. I arrived weary, wind whipped and wild—as I liked to be.

Crete felt like an ancient homecoming.

The more I studied, the more I understood why. Our purpose, the great cycles of history and consciousness, also opened like the sea there will: suddenly to aquamarine shallows like sea beasts that heaved gently on rocks burned gold in Aegean sunlight.

I would lay on my back in the surf at Kalantos Beach and remember Theseus arriving and leaving Crete. And before him, Phoenicians, the clever sailors who fished the Mediterranean for art and good trade.

My Phoenicians carried the tiny turtle islands, earth seeds, up into the heavens on ships that all believed transported garbage. They secreted them away on those temporary satellites, our arks, until we were ready to join them.

Meanwhile, I was part of a team of knowledge collectors, archivists, historians, and educators for schools of the refugees of capitalism, of climate change, of authoritarianism, of militarism, of colonialism, of toxic masculinity and white supremacy. Children who had come across the dark seas, in the night, at great cost and their mothers, their queer uncles, their trans-aunts.

We are all orphans of these forces we called the isms, all survivors. From our suffering and our healing we developed curriculum for the newcomers to our shores—in hopes of healing trauma, lest we build from it and build new monsters.

How to transform survivalism into utopias? This would be our project.

We would try and try many ways, fail, and try again. But the children remembered and they taught us much of the time before birth. We began to piece the great hologram together, the faint complete picture on each of the elements that made us, becoming clearer.

In a practical sense, we were creating a massive database. We were learning and saving all the tongues of our planet to keep them safe and return them one day, to let them loose on Earth’s winds long after we died and went into the soil to feed the Great Mycelium of our arks.

Our priestesses would carry the knowledge we gathered and the visions we dreamed on tiny implants that woke their minds, wove them back into the collective consciousness.

We would be remembered forever there.

As would Earth.

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.