The things we prefer not to think of

I come from a place in the world that does not like to think of itself as being in the world. Truth be told, it is not particularly interested in being part of this nation, but it puts up a good show of it, nonetheless. It sings the songs; it casts the votes; it genuflects before the flag and the troops. But typically we think we are out here on our own. This is the Wild West. Whatever we are, whatever we have, we did it ourselves. No one helped us. And, since no one helped us and look what we’ve accomplished, why should we help you? This is Iowa. This is the Midwest. A place where, if you strangled yourself with your own bootstraps most people probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. We are calm, if not demure. We spare ourselves the bother of getting involved. Until, of course, we don’t. Iowa is the first state in the United States to cast something like a vote in the presidential primaries, and this gives it something like influence, something like a reputation, at least as it comes to matters of state. During the primaries, Iowans do not vote, per se, but they do make their voices heard. They engage in a process that is called caucusing, which is insane. But I love it. This is what happens. Basically, everyone gets together in a room somewhere, on some evening. It is usually in the winter, well after the harvest, and late enough in the day that the dairy farmers can attend. In that room, they proceed to divide themselves up by political parties. The members of said political parties then begin to argue amongst themselves about which of the available candidates are preferable, and for what reasons. Different camps begin to take shape. The members of one camp begin to lobby the members of other camps, hoping to achieve something like a majority. Somewhere, along the way, the people in the room talk about the parties and about policy, about what the party should stand for, and what they want to see their elected officials do. Meanwhile, journalists from local and national media outlets stand by, monitoring the melee, shaking their heads in wonderment at the absurdity of it all, while still very carefully parsing the words of the old woman in Dubuque who thinks Donald Trump is a stone cold genius American patriot because he managed to convince an Australian to build a janky reality show around him and around the premise that he single handedly built the borough of Manhattan and that you too could have dinner at 21 if only you worked for him, never suspecting that 21 is an irrelevant gaucherie and no one eats there who really matters. Somehow, out of this mess, Iowans decide who they want to nominate to run for president of the United States. To be clear: The United States is a country that is only one of five that has the legal right, under international law, to control–and manufacture–nuclear weapons. (In total, at least nine countries do, but let's not get too worked up about that just now.) And yet, this is how our politics works. Yes. This is nonsense, but it makes for a fun night out. It makes for interesting bedfellows and arresting diversions. Once, when I was suffering through my first Democratic Party caucus in 1996, my grandmother proposed that support for an English-only amendment–to both the state and the federal constitution–be added to the party’s platform. It fell to a man we all called “Sleepy” to explain to her why this was unacceptable and unnecessary. My grandmother, whose grandparents did not speak English and whose mother had only a very elementary command of the language, did not look kindly on those immigrants from Central America who were mucking things up for those of us whose relatives arrived when they were supposed to, which was in the later years of the nineteenth century. Also, despite the fact that the Spanish-speaking immigrants who arrived in Iowa in the 1990s were largely people who had been displaced by US-stoked civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, she and everyone else called them “Mexicans,” because we could find Mexico on a map. The small places did not matter so much. Which, of course, says something about who we were, who we are, and how we think of ourselves. We are from a small place and we don't much matter. Somehow it always managed to escape our notice that we were deeply involved in the business of electing the leader of the ostensibly free world. A world that had once been very openly hostile to our relations, the Irish and the Middeleuropeans who got here too late and brought their superstitions and their Catholicism and their general quixoticism. We Midwesterners are not a people that appreciates irony. We did not understand that Lake Woebegone was a joke. So yeah. Iowa is in the world. We pretend not to notice it. Or we pretend to pretend. One is never entirely sure what exactly is going on here. Pretty much every generation of my family, on both sides, up to the present day, has had at least one member who fought in a foreign war. Until I went to Spain in the year 2000, this was pretty much the only way any of the members of my family ever left the country. My parents were 46 and 56 the first time they traveled by air, and that was just to come to New York, the place that I had lodged myself for much of my adult life. The world was always here. We just preferred not to think too hard about it. It was a problem for somebody else.

Five rials in the tackle

Of the milder pathologies enjoyed by my family, perhaps the mildest is the compulsion to save. Magpies among the hominids, we assemble our nests from odds and ends, the things that we find, that arrive before us; the things that fascinate us, the things that we cannot give up. The more charming word for this phenomenon is preservation, but to call what we do preservation would imply that there is some sort of strategy or business model that would valorize the ensemble. There is not. We are collectors, and we have no time for a plan. A less dignified word for this practice might be hoarding, but we are not hoarders. We are instinctive antiquarians, faithful to the intention of the antique, unbound from convention and design. Disciples of the leftovers, acolytes of the refuse, we see the otherwise inconspicuous value in what has been left behind, the value in the forgotten. However one chooses to describe this condition, this way of relating to the world, the point is that we save the things that otherwise might have been overlooked, the things that might have been mislaid; things that, in being mislaid, are condemned to evanescence, to be lost, to be denied the privilege of purpose and of meaning.. It is a melancholy habit, to be sure, the saving of things; a way of dwelling with the pasts we cannot quite bring ourselves to part with, a way of reckoning with the anxiety that attends our inevitable lurch into the future. This is why sometimes these things loom larger than we had expected. This is why sometimes, just as the night descends, the things we save, the things that have been saved, afford us unlikely avenues for reflection, for discovery. When the dusk has exhausted itself and the clouds have not yet consumed the stars, sometimes the things we save allow us, perhaps, to think of new ways we might save ourselves. My grandmother was an inveterate saver. She kept a shadow box on her wall in which she preserved artifacts of her children, her parents, her grandparents. It held homemade Christmas cards scrawled in impish crayon; rosaries brought from the old world to the new, brought from Rome and Amsterdam and Bremen, places she had never been and would never go, plastic beads once sanctified by the blessings offered by long dead popes. My grandfather brought one of these from Rome. He was on leave from the war, and like a good Catholic he went to Italy and he bought a rosary outside of San Pietro. It would come to rest in the box. It was made out of mother of pearl, which is like pearl, but not. Mother of pearl is a lie. We will get to this. There were also books of matches decorated, made over as unassuming gifts from her younger children; there was a small vial of dirt from the farm on which my grandmother raised her family, the farm my great-grandfather had carved into the ground which a previous generation had stolen from the Sauks. In the shadow box, she kept the things that were especially precious to her, the things with which she wished to be buried. I very desperately wanted to keep the rosaries from Bohemia, but it was made clear to me, at some point, that these were not things that would be passed on. They were destined to return to the earth, to be preserved in the decision to let them be lost. I preserve the compulsions of my grandmother in my own erratic collection of sacred beads: misbahah from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria; rosaries from Damascus and Qana, from the house where Saint Paul was baptized and the site upon which Jesus turned water into wine; the unblessed beads from my first communion; the three strings of polyethylene baubles that are dedicated to my three orixas. These I too keep in a box. This box is one I bought in Cairo. It is handmade. It holds the objects I cannot surrender, the photos of dead friends and the mass cards from their funerals, the dried corn that spilled from the train the car crashed into when those three kids were killed. The wildflower seeds I was supposed to plant, that were meant to be a living memorial to the one that was gone who died far far far too young. In looking over her things, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that my grandmother had a striking preoccupation with money. She kept years and years of checkbook registers, she kept the canceled checks that my grandfather had written to the state, quarterly installments in payment of sales taxes he owed in 1969. In yet another box, she squirreled away the diaries in which her mother, my great-grandmother, kept the record of the hours she had worked and for whom, how much the families for whom she kept house had paid her, or how much they owed. It should be said: I am insanely proud that my Grandma Waalk was a maid. That she gave life to we spoiled children of better times is close to astonishing. But let us move on. The somewhat crude actuarial figures of my great-grandmother now find their contemporary expression through my mother and my sister, both of whom work as financial analysts and financial planners, their genius in the design of estates, the equations that allow for the accumulation, preservation, and transfer of wealth, of that which will be bequeathed, and how it will be distributed. When my great-grandmother died, she had $3.36 to her name, dimes and pennies and quarters stowed away in her small coin purse, which she kept inside a slightly larger coin purse, both with the characteristic coin purse clasp. I know this because my grandmother kept these things, the purses and the money, and she left behind a note. She itemized the contents of these purses; she wanted to make sure the accounts were balanced, that we knew how much was there, that her mother’s bequest had not been recklessly mismanaged. It was still there for us, she wanted us to know. It was always there if we needed it. In addition to her preoccupation with accountancy, my grandmother collected what she considered the more exotic forms of specie. There are countless silver dollars and memorial half-dollar coins in her tackle, the coins that were struck with images of Kennedy and Eisenhower and the moon shot; there are sheaves of two-dollar bills, the Toms that bear the image of Mr. Jefferson, that are now apparently totems among Second Amendment extremists and pro-gun enthusiasts. Folded within these more familiar currencies are currencies from abroad, mostly bills that returned to Iowa with my grandfather after his term of service in the Korean War, when he was stationed in Germany and the Netherlands. Among these, there are three bills that are particularly conspicuous. There is a note issued by the Central Bank of China, dated 1930. There is a five franc note issued by the State Bank of Morocco, dating from roughly the same period. And, perhaps most peculiar, there is a five rial note, issued by the central bank of Iran. The writing on the note is composed in Perso-Arabic script, and it is emblazoned with an image of the young Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who looks like kind of a snack. While there are numbers on the bill there is no obvious date, yet based on the portrait of Pahlavi, it is likely that it was printed around 1944, just three years after Pahlavi's ascension to the throne. On the left side of the bill, handwritten in pencil, in cursive Roman characters, is a brief legend. It reads: “5 rials,” “value–15 cts,” “Abadan”. This is in my grandfather's handwriting. I had never seen this bill before. Almost all the artifacts my mother had preserved of my grandmother were things that my grandmother had shown me while she was still alive, including her collection of foreign coins, all of which came with a backstory, usually about the men in my family who had been drafted into the service and sent abroad. To the best of my knowledge, however, none of the men in my family had served in North Africa or the Middle East. Until my sister went on study abroad, no one in the family had been to China. I was certainly the first person in my family, on either side, to attempt to make a life abroad that did not also involve the military. And while I've been to Morocco, I don't have any stories to tell about it. As far as I know, no one in the family had any stories that came from these places, or in which these places were mentioned. Among those generations who went to war, returning GIs were neither inclined nor encouraged to talk about their experiences. If not for 'MASH' it is likely the Korean War would have been forgotten altogether. Nonetheless, certain details would of course slip through the miasmatics of trauma. We had certain pieces of the puzzle. This, however, was just strange. That someone in my family–that people who were alive in my lifetime–could have made it to Morocco and China and Iran, and that there would not be some faint shimmering of anecdote that survived them, something that had passed through the layers of battle fatigue and the amnesias of war, seemed unlikely, if not impossible. Where did this money come from? How did it get into the hands of my grandparents? The most likely explanation is that it found its way to them entirely by chance, that someone my grandfather knew, some comrade in arms in Germany, happened to pass it along to him, an uncommon memento of their service together. My grandfather never much talked about the war, and when he did it usually concerned his time on base in Germany, or the brief period he was reassigned to the Netherlands in the wake of the North Sea Flood of January 1953. There were few stories except those about Jonesy, his good friend who might well have been the only black person my grandfather ever knew or for whom he had a good word. Collectively, our family knows little of John Thomas Grady’s term of service, but we know that he never once mentioned any place more exotic than Bavaria. We know that he was drafted and sent abroad in 1951; he was discharged and returned to Iowa sometime in September 1953, about six weeks after the Armistice that ended the Korean War. My grandparents were married that October, late in the month. Before Halloween. Before the Day of the Dead. As it concerns this piece of Iranian currency, how my grandfather came to possess it, and why it ends up here, shuffled between inconsequential relics of all too common financial hardships–the artistry involved in managing a burgeoning household when income is next to nothing–these dates are enormously important. Not perhaps with respect to the masterful housewifery of my grandmother, but for what her archival chicanery suggests about the unavoidably disordered remnants of our shared pasts, of the unconscious as the voracious collector of things that disturb our best efforts at fashioning order, about the consequences of those things we cannot acknowledge, much less confront. And It says many things about the next seventy years of global politics. Probably many things it does not mean to say. What falls between July 27 and September 1953? A lot of stuff, to be sure, but if you’re Iranian, or if you know anything about the history of Iran or the history of the modern Middle East, what is most relevant is probably this: From August 15 to August 19, 1953, the United States and Britain, through the offices of the CIA and MI-6, helped to orchestrate a coup by which Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, was deposed. As Prime Minister, Mosaddegh had nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which had been largely under British control since at least the end of the first World War, and he had threatened a take-over of US munitions manufactories in the south, in the port cities of the Persian Gulf, where the US had built an aircraft assemblies in the years after WWII, in the brief period before the Cold War when the US was still selling weapons to the Soviets. By January 1953, as my grandfather was deployed to Holland, ostensibly to help shore up the dikes after the flooding of the North Sea, Eisenhower and Churchill had decided that nationalization of Iranian energy production was such a grave threat to US and British interests in the Middle East that the Iranian government needed to be overthrown. And so, Operation Ajax, or Operation Boot, was put into motion. Mossadegh was ousted, eventually tried and convicted of something that was probably made up, and placed under house arrest in Ahmadabad until his death in 1967. In the aftermath of the coup, General Fazlollah Zehedi was installed as head of the government, and the Shah assumed ever greater authority over affairs of state. Under the Shah, after 1953, the policies that concerned the nationalization of Iran’s energy sector were reversed. British Petroleum stepped in as the primary actor in Iran’s energy sector, with other US and European corporations taking the remainder. To ensure the security of the Shah’s rule and the expropriative designs of Britain and the US, in 1957, the new government formed the SAVAK, the CIA-trained Iranian secret police force that would go on to violently suppress all dissent until it was dissolved during the revolution of 1979. Despite decades of human rights violations, the violent suppression of democratic movements for republican government, and the wildly imperious overreach of monarchical authority, British and American governments would continue to support the Shah, so long as the Shah pursued policies that were conducive to the maintenance of Anglo-American dominance over the Iranian energy industry, until the revolution of 1979, until the return of Khomeini, until the embassies and the hostages. But this is what comes later. In 1953, in the months my grandfather cannot be accounted for, the city Abadan was at the center of this conflict. And somehow he had money that he knew to be from there. In Arabic, 'abadan' means 'never'. As in, 'we speak of it never'. What are the things we never speak of? Is Abadan our never-neverland? Was my grandpa in the CIA? Who knows, and what does it matter? The coup happened, Iran was scarred. That is what is important. The evidence of my grandfather's involvement is circumstantial, but compelling nonetheless. He never talked about these things. I have to wonder: Are there reasons why he couldn't? It seems impossible that he was an agent; but then, I was casually recruited, too, once upon a time, so why not? Recruitment, as far as I know, as far as my experience would suggest, is generally, and largely, a casual matter. Do agents ever know what they are doing, what ends they serve? Some do, of course. But did the men on my rooftop in Beirut know why they were surveying Sharia Adel al-Solh with a telescope at nighttime in June 2022? Did they know that Edward Said's sister lived just down the street? Had they seen the CIA file on Vanessa and her time with Arafat, or that she and I and Doyle once drank together at Gruen at Gefinor before heading down to Abou Elie? I'm pretty sure Ketaʿ El Amn El Watani has a file on me; at least, they knew that I was supposed to be traveling with my ex when they stopped him for questioning in Doha when he was flying to the United States to apply for political asylum, which is something we had only told to US diplomatic personnel in Beirut. We who live in Karakas guard our secrets too well for them to find out what we know, and those things we don't. But to the matter of the family, my family, to those of us in Iowa: What does this silence mean? What did my grandfather do? And what does it do when his silence about what he did gets passed on to subsequent generations? What does it do to the rest of us?

The tenth plague, the eagle, and the rock

Another way of saying the tenth plague founded the Jewish people is that the tenth plague founded monotheism; or, that the tenth plague is an allegory for the foundations of monotheism in much the way the story of the Black Plague is an allegory of capitalism emerging for itself by strangling the slumbering figure of medieval feudalism in its bedclothes. After violently suppressing the baroque polytheism of traditional Egyptian religion, Aton monotheism was itself violently suppressed. The unavoidable mutuality of life, of all lives, respirant and inert, necessitates that we are, together, forever engaged in the negotiation of what constitutes the domain of what is permissible, of socially acceptable pleasures and the means of their satisfaction. The concept of God is one way of conceiving a mutually acceptable end to our desires, the ultimate form of their satisfaction, the form through which all desires will be sated. Still, if for we sorry creatures, satisfaction is something can never be attained–indeed, if the impossibility of satisfaction is the condition that sustains those of us cursed with desire, those who necessarily consign themselves to a world that is soaked in pain, is our dissatisfaction with the stories not part of the design? It this not why we seek, but also why we rest? Is this not the lesson in the rock? What little scholars have been able to discern about the historical suppression of the Sun God and his preservation among the Hebrews who fled from Egypt to Canaan invites us to consider the relationship between the eagle and the rock, between all that is solid and that refuses to give, and all of those things that will not yield. Of pleasure, happiness, and the desire to remain still. “The eagle that has his young look into the sun and requires that they should not be dazzled by its light is behaving, then, like a descendent of the sun, submitting his children to the ancestral trial. And when Schreber lays claim to being able to being able to look into the sun unpunished and without being dazzled he has retrieved the mythological expression for his filial relationship to the sun as a symbol of the father.” Schreber knew these things; Schreber tried to tell us. God the father, God the son, God the holy spirit: three and one and one and three. All is ephemeral but ephemerality takes different guises. All endings are beginnings. All beginnings are endings, but nothing ever really ends. People once killed each other over these things. People are still killing each other over these things. On the Mississippi, the eagles are dying of lead poisoning. In Palestine, in Lebanon, in Syria, much the same might be said.

Saint Joan

But these are not the old ways; these are the new. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.” A pentatonic, a dissonance, the monster is a collection of tones that barely tolerate one another. The mask. The mask. With the music comes the mask and the eyes, the eyes. He wants to hear the eyes. He hears the vibration of the scar, the frequency at which this unstrung cello vibrates. Resonant, sonorous, the scar seeks its bow, camel hair against unwilling flesh, untuned sorrow. You see the blood, the blood and the pool, cerulean blue with clouds of crimson. Two days, five seizures. A dream a delusion a fantasy of jackboots, of handcuffs and rubber bands and shreds of cotton, a choir of nurses a chorale of police. This is my aria, or is it a solo. How can I perform with my wrists tied to the bed when I wake on the floor of the airport, Leo’s rainbow beside me, six fireman bending over me, a leash and a dog and the gendarmerie, my audience. Do you know where you are? You don’t know what happened? You don’t need to know what happened? Stigmata present. A present of stigmata. More things about which I am not permitted to speak. But this is what it feels like: There are spasms in my teeth. My legs twitch, my jaw locks. I fall to the ground and no one can tell if I am alive. Slowly, slowly the face of a young woman comes into focus. She is an emissary from the gendarme. I do not trust her, I do not believe in her. The brave men stand back while she clears their path. The brave men are afraid of me and this is before the stigmata; this is before the thumbprint of the beast. And then you wake up and it’s America. You wake up outside in America. Gotta get up gotta get up before the morning comes. Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me. Make it easy for me just a little while. Monday, Nebraska. Freight. The Train. Boxcar Willie and the Banshees. The Irish dragged the banshees here to terrify the Sioux. They succeeded only in scaring themselves, their children, and their animals. The Indians did not know the language of the banshees, but it did not matter. They had their own evening wraiths, and the banshees had no interest in their affairs. For the Indians, the living dead were of greater concern. The whiteness of the shroud, of the grave, is nowhere near as forbidding as the whiteness of the skin, of the teeth and the litany of lies that spill from their mouths, as if even the most casual untruth cannot bear to share space with the radiance of the spirit. The monster hears the story in the wailing of the train. It cannot it will not restrain itself. The monster is compelled to ride the train as freight, but it cannot plug up its ears. Whoever made him did not know what he was doing, and he hears every sound, smells every smell, but he is not allowed to see. And somehow he knows there is much to see. He can hear the scar, he can feel its vibration. Somehow he knows it is a map. How he knows this, he does not know. But he knows that he is the progeny of a demented cartographer. The rock, the river, and the tree are less inviting than he had hoped. He has come from France. He has crossed the Arctic circle. He has seen the ice of Lapland. There were no tiny men. There were no magical deer. The world begins to take some kind of shape. The monster is learning not to fear the wrath of saline, the injunction not to look back. What he will do with this knowledge remains to be seen. Looking back, what will he see? What is there to be seen? He knows that he is being followed. He has heard the footsteps of his pursuer; he has come to know his stride. What is it that he wants? What does the pursuer want? The map, the scar, the record of where the monster has been. The prophecy of what yet may come. I am at the river and I feel nothing. Despite its majesty, it is nothing but a hollow, the shape of something lost, of an attachment undone. I had assumed coming back here would awaken something else, something other than the creature. But now, there is only the echo of the sadness once carried along by the current, once breaking around these islands, breaking upon these banks. Now littered with boutique contrivances, bordered by a concrete path wandered by dim-witted eccentrics, the river has been robbed of its voice, its sorrow. Even in the dying light, the embers of fall now lit in the trees of the islands. If it sings, I cannot hear it. This is alarming but not without precedent. The first time I saw the Nile I found it underwhelming too. The Nile, when I met it, seemed a collector of stories. The Mississippi set its stories to music and invited all to dance. Only on subsequent trips to Egypt did the Nile begin to open up. Frozen, the colossus of lions at the base of the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, forever braced in preparation for the kill, they started to speak to me. They started to roar. Perhaps this is why I cannot hear the Mississippi. Perhaps Yemanja is upset. Perhaps I need to go to the Amazon. A new water, a new baptism. I will wash away my collection of sins by casting them upon the water. You do not know what disaster will come upon the land. Of the five, I remember only the first. This is the only one during which I did not pass out. There have been others, but I do not remember them either, except in retrospect, as reconstructions. With the first in Paris, I feel my jaw come unhinged, I feel it move through my neck and my head and remember knowing that I was never going to be okay again. I remember the contortions in my face, my visage taking the appearance of a terracotta satyr bellowing throughout some antique drama. This too is Hamlet: a play within a play within a play. No hay banda. Es una grabacion. It is a tape recording. Llorando. Llorando. The puzzle box and the key. Dora and the jewels. Speech is of course forbidden, but you have no idea how difficult it is to write these things down. Once written they are indelible. Speech might be recorded but somehow it remains porous and inexact. Recording sound is not quite the same thing as manipulating surfaces, tracing the shape assigned a vibration. Speech is alluring, writing is conspicuous. Both are beautiful, but one moves with purpose. Jealous of each other, speech is forgiving; the written is cruel and demanding. While the breath will disperse, ink is indelible. Whatever form it takes, the written always leaves a trace. Writing things down is a way of keeping the wound open. On this business of place, a moment, a feeling, an interlude: “This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised….I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.” In “The White Album,” Joan Didion sorts through the texture of her experience, the emotional peculiarities of her life between 1966 and 1971. Immediately following her willful exile to New York, these are the first years after her return to California, to home. Yet, in these years she finds herself less a refugee restored to her rightful estate than a sojourner in a doubly uncanny place, the Sacramento of her youth supplanted by the eternal now of Los Angeles, a post-war Los Angeles pulled apart by concrete thoroughfares meant not for people but for machines, cameras, set dressing, dolly tracks, klieg lights, cars. The phoenix of Hollywood is about to be born, the New rising from the Old, and Didion is there, a somewhat unsteady bystander who just happened to wander into the scene of the egg and the hatching. Something is happening. Something is being born. The old rules no longer apply. Meyer is dead. Selznick is dead. Goldwyn and Warner are not dead but they might as well be. And without them, who was there to tell the story, who was there to tell us what the story should be. “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience.” A trick of the light, of reels and motors and threads of celluloid, still pictures come alive; the pictures are moving and we are still but the image comes alive, the light dances. That is cinema. That is Hollywood. There is sequence and flow and flow emerges from structure, the delicate work of splicing pictures into certain patterns, deliberately arranged so to advance a beautiful lie. The stories themselves of course are lies but we get lost in them anyway, captives bound with scraps of velvet. We know the ending before we begin, and most of the time it does not matter because this is what we want. But now we find the pages in the script have been shuffled. When the still pictures are scrambled, montage returns to its makers, to its visionaries, to Vertov and Eisenstein, to the recusal of cinema from the administration of time. Illness removes us from society and, as such, it removes us, inevitably, from time, and time is the miasma that cinema exhales. Didion returns, throughout her work, to the figure of montage as a way of conceptualizing illnesses, those symptoms that wind their way through the mind, the body, and the social. Illness is presented routinely as both metaphor and theme, a topic Didion will return to over and again as she searches for a language through which to understand her own mental and physical ailments, as well as the relationship between her illnesses and the world in which she finds herself cast adrift. “The White Album” is, above all, an account of the circumstances surrounding an event that Didion is careful not to characterize as a nervous breakdown, but that most certainly was, leading to her stay in a psychiatric hospital in Santa Monica sometime in the summer of 1968. The circumstances of that breakdown become part of a larger story about Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s, to Los Angeles and the counterculture, to California, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, J. Paul Getty, and Patty Hearst; to symptoms of a social disorder unprecedented in her American experience. Even disdainful of cant, Didion eschews the popular psychological euphemisms that still float through the blood of our necrotic culture, instead turning to the clinical language of the report compiled by her doctors upon her entrance to the hospital. She quotes the report at length. Her doctors, she reports, describe her as “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive,” exhibiting the tendencies of “a personality in process of disintegration.” Having entered the hospital complaining of “vertigo, nausea and a feeling she was going to pass out,” the doctors in Santa Monica put her on Elavil, a trycyclic antidepressant developed by Merck and approved by the FDA in 1961. She is instructed to take 20 milligrams, three times a day. Didion leaves no further account of her time in the psychiatric ward, nor does she describe any of the side effects associated with the long term use of Elavil, most of which I recognize in myself. Until it was decertified by the FDA in 2000, Elavil had been associated with a range of symptoms, from mild to severe, abnormal drowsiness and weight gain to tremors, spasms, and seizures, as well as fainting and “developing a mask-like face,” a condition in which one felt one’s features as frozen, the muscles shaping one’s countenance conspicuously immobilized. This inventory, and my now long-term reliance on antidepressants, does nothing to improve my opinion of psychopharmacology, or the equivalent forms of cognitive behavioral therapy with which its wares are often paired. Fluoxetine, branded in the US as Prozac, is associated with a similar raft of symptoms, from nausea and vomiting, stuffy nose and heartburn, to fainting, irregular heartbeat, and seizures. The correlation between the worst of my physical symptoms is striking. Still. The bipolar predates the medications, just as assuredly as Didion’s nausea and paranoia was present long before she entered the hospital in Santa Monica. In “The White Album,” Didion neglects to mention that 1966–the year she associates with the beginning of her deterioration–is the year her daughter was born. Let us begin again.

We need to go through Paris

This is a digest of the plague year; of its derangements; of a person and a society deranged. It is a digest of their implications, their repetitions. I begin with this indulgence of autobiography because I am trying to understand the repetitions which I find myself indulging, far from willfully. I begin with Lebanon because that is where I am, the place I call home; the place I wrestle with calling home, the place to which I hold no claim but nonetheless somehow claims me, that lays claim to so many who do and do not belong here, but nonetheless find themselves here, heir to the histories of those many generations of exiles and refugees that, at one time or another, found themselves quarantined on the shores of this land, the banks of this sea. I begin with Lebanon because here there is some unspoken pain we are all trying to master, some loss that cannot be born. This is the chronicle of the dreamwork that is the marrow of this fragile structure, this congruence of fluidities that none of us are particularly disposed to celebrate despite the love that sutures people to place and to one another, but that is, in this instance, is wholly unsterile, bacteria-ridden, toxic. But to get to Lebanon, we need to go through Paris. Let us not delay. It was the delays that got me into this mess in the first place. At the end of August, I found myself in Paris, en route from Beirut to Minneapolis, to Omaha, and Iowa. An uncommon journey, it included layovers in Amsterdam and Chicago, and still miles to go upon arrival. Twice before, in that year, I had been barred from flights because of Covid procedures that were improperly met, once because my paperwork was insufficient, once because–deep in the summer–I arrived at the airport drenched in sweat. This, I was told, was a symptom, and though my tests were all negative and my shots up to date, for the well being of all involved, for the airline, it seemed best if I kept my feet on the ground. When, weeks later, I finally succeeded in escaping Hamra, I found myself flagged for extra security at every checkpoint along the way. Before being allowed to leave Beirut, I had to pay a fine of one and a half million lira because I had overstayed my visa by one day. Or, if you want to get really specific about it, I had overstayed my residency permit by about eight hours. Because of the long-term devaluation of the Lebanese pound that began as punishment for the 2019 revolution of the people, the sadistic counter-revolutionary design of the gangster capitalists, at the time, the street value of one and a half million lira was approximately fifty US dollars. As I write this, at the end of October, it hovers nearer to thirty-five. Bank holdups are now an everyday feature of life in Lebanon. Depositors arm themselves so they might collect that which they have stowed in their savings, that which, by administrative fiat, they are now routinely denied. Many of the people who have pulled off these heists are now hailed as heroes; the media has stopped printing their names, whether to preserve the anonymity of those accused or to forestall the glory and the adulation, it is hard to know. Much about my leaving Beirut felt like an abandonment, the unhappy divorce of codependent partners, a separation between people who were not yet ready to be apart. I had left my home, my friends, my bank account, my stuff, my cat. I had given away my books. The tapestry from Djemila was gone. At the time of my leaving, the chandelier I had bought in Cairo still hung from the ceiling of my forlorn apartment, but the space of my life had been otherwise robbed of all pretense of ambiance. Still I was loath for it to stay behind, lost in the cavernous maw of my home, feckless and alone. A hulking piece of perforated tin, I had once wielded this chandelier as a weapon during a police riot near the 6 October Bridge in Cairo at a spot just beyond the Egyptian Museum. Once faithful friends, these relics are now my forsaken children. These desertions, moreover, were compounded the desolation of my work, my abandonment by the institutions through which I had made my life, the places that, long after the abuse had begun, I could not help but think of as home. In the year before I left, I had begun to collapse, to pass out, in public and at home. Sometimes there were paramedics, sometimes I was found by a delivery boy. Occasionally, there were stitches. By the time I got to Paris I had long since abandoned myself, and that is when the seizures began. Over two days wandering the airport, I had five seizures that I can remember, each one more grave than the one before; during at least one of these I was physically assaulted and my belongings–my wallet, my passport, my computer, sheaves of notes I had taken while researching my next project–were stolen. After, I entered into a fugue, enclosed in a density of misapprehensions. Passed out in a pool of piss and blood, all but naked, I was picked up by the police. They took me into custody. Coming from Beirut, bound for Amsterdam, completely absent from the world, they likely thought I was high, that I had gotten bored while muling captagon and had dipped into my stash. If nothing else, I presented a danger to myself and to others. Fully, legitimately psychotic, absolutely convinced that I had become part of some elaborate psy-ops experiment, I was certain that I had been mistaken for somebody who knew things. While I was being questioned, I was bound and beaten. I was dosed with morphine. This could not really be France, I reasoned, because nobody in France could possibly wear such dismally shabby uniforms as my tormentors; and certainly, no one in France could have been as fat as the one who liked to punch me in the face. After some time, and the intervention of someone higher up the chain of command, I was taken, eventually, in an ambulance, on a wild joyride through the streets of Paris. I was delivered to a hospital, where I was held in the emergency ward, again bound, for another thirty-six hours. At some point, my mother arrived after an emergency flight from the United States. After convening with security at the airport, she was able to find the hospital in which I was held. The attending physician announced her before she came into the room. My first words upon seeing her were: “You look like my mother but you are not her.” Let me try this again.

L'etranger

To be a settler is to be always foreign to the land you call home. You have not been asked into the house so you cannot enter, but you make yourself a nuisance anyway.

The crimes of the trees

The world is large. They have made it small. The question of home, the salty and the sweet. The trees at home are gone, denuded by the philistines who took the house. Still, Oxossi waits for you by the trees. In dreams he attacks, his beak splintering the pane that separates you. Glass recurs again and over again. Windows, windshields, broken and shattered, the metamorphosis of Hamra after the explosion, the now glistening streets flooded with the shards of hope, of the confidence, the trick now exposed. We are not safe, we are not well. The glass was a promise. Something has changed but nothing has changed. The trees of Hamra must remain hidden lest they tempt the bonecutters, the petrol-fevered osteotones yielded against wood, making kindling, making lumber, the cruel substance of a different sort of kin. He keeps his distance, but Oxossi alights in these trees as well, so near to the doomed sea, so far from the necrotic river, choked with the blood of cattle. Oxossi knows how to act, but he also know how to wait. It is a potent spice, this blend. For Oxossi, the roads cannot be blocked because he can fly. The migration of the raptors and the waterfowl. The eagles return to Iowa, to the Driftless, because the abundance of riparian tide pools makes for thin ice and dull fish. They come to hunt. I do not know how the eagle became emblematic of America but it seems entirely appropriate that such a beautiful predator should bear this weight. Their murders are premeditated. Vicious children in a merciless sky, they stalk the river, they speak with the clouds. The geese are another matter. They lack the fortitude of the raptors, and they would prefer not to prey. But as the winter comes, the snow threatens the timothy, and the eagles assume command, driving the geese from their homes, an imperious, occupying power that does not know how else to be. Living chiefly off prairie grasses, the geese have been robbed of their most cherished aliment by the settlers and their implements of iron and steel, but these arrangements are new, and likely temporary. One day the settlers will be gone, but the eagles and the ice are ancient enemies. This place, these hills, these valleys, their home, was made by the ice and to ice it will, it must, return. When the ice comes, the eagles go on the attack. The geese are wise enough to retreat. Very few of us take the lesson. And then you wake up and it’s America. You stumble outside and it’s America. You wake up and it’s Dubuque, of all places; you are disoriented and you do not know how you got there. This is not sarcasm or spite. The anterograde amnesia means that you do not distinguish one moment from another, and memory is a comfort you are not allowed. I have the luxury of forgetfulness, yet I wear my unconscious on the outside. I am sitting at a table once owned by my great-grandmother; I am looking at the toy pistol made by her husband, my wastrel great-grandfather, for their doomed son, a child who did not survive the Depression. Above that, is a flourish of graceful Arabic, a painting made for me by a student in Algiers. The student who painted it was named Farid. Ten years after he was in my class he would reach out to tell me that he and his wife had a son and they had named him Adam. The crime of Adam was the theft of knowledge. Of course I would choose to compound that sin, to sow that seed. For me, the tree is still there but the garden is closed. It was never that welcoming to begin with. Now it is overgrown and wretched. The grapes go unharvested, wine seeps into the soil. Next to the painting is a portrait of Maya Deren, beckoning with the mirror and the knife. A devotional candle sits on an inlaid box from Cairo. The candle is dedicated to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. The box holds beads, rosaries, photos and all the other small things I cannot bring myself to surrender. Pandora in reverse, all the evil things are collected here. On the floor, a carpet from Iran, from Beluchestan. I found it in Beirut. Neither the rug from Djemila or the ceramics from Granada made it back. The bowls from Spain were shattered in transit, but there are tea glasses from Aleppo. The glasses are green, blown from the broken remains of old beer bottles. Again with the broken glass. Here are the notes that were torn out of my bag in Paris, the annotations I had made of some now abandoned book. The book was written by Sami Hermez, who uses the phrases “the perpetual coming events” and “the events” to talk about the threat of military violence as a strategy of governance and class dominion in Lebanon. They were scattered around me when the police found me. Now, they sit on the table that is my desk. They are in a frame. They are dotted with blood. The ‘t’s are uncrossed but the eyes are dotted. The war is always about to happen.

This travesty of grass

You frighten people. Live with it. * * * The times are hopeless. But something has happened. Something is moving. You cannot hear it, yet. But something is happening. And many things are yet to happen. We do not know what it will be. Or where this will end. The way is trecherous but the roads cannot have been blocked because the trails are not yet cut. Moreover, the prairie is still here. It is not wild and it was never wild and we should not pretend otherwise. As with iron, oak, and ballast, this abomination that calls itself grass, this is a novelty, a travesty, a parasite; it sucks at the marrow of all that is beneath us, the life of the dead and the life of all the things we cannot see, the lives through which we consume the air and the sun. What is below is much greater than the thing we call history, but for now that word will have to do. What is below is intransigent. Nonetheless it is still. Still. It is the eye of the tempest, the heart of the inland sea. The prairie lies in wait. * * * The world is large. They have made it small. The question of home, the salty and the sweet. Oxossi waits for you by the trees. The roads cannot be blocked because he can fly.

Some silly things I considered

The healing that occupies Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony unfolds through the story of Tayo, a young man from Laguna Pueblo, after his return to New Mexico in the years immediately following the Second World War. Having been interred by Japanese forces on “some nameless Pacific island,” Tayo returns home overcome by malarial hallucinations, and suffering from what his doctors refer to, dismissively, as “battle fatigue.” After suffering the dank humidity of the sweltering Pacific, with rain that “grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching to the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands,” Tayo becomes convinced that his prayers are the cause of the drought that now plagues Laguna Pueblo. “Wherever he looked, Tayo could see the consequences of his praying; the gray mule grew gaunt, and the goat and kid had to wander farther and farther each day to find weeds or dry shrubs to eat.” Meanwhile, Tayo perceives himself as “white smoke,” an invisible being without form, body or consciousness, vulnerable to the capricious whims of the atmosphere. “It [takes] a great deal of energy to be a human being,” Silko’s narrator relates, “and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.” As indicated, in the novel, Tayo’s illness occurs within a larger ecosystem of disease and death, one that infects both the land and its people, underscoring the condition of their mutuality. Neither this condition nor this disease should be taken as figurative or metaphorical; they are substantive, insofar as they treat the materiality of an embattled indigenous sovereignty, and the iterative virality of settler counter-sovereignty. In the novel, this virality composes the substance of a new mode of relationality, one that reconstitutes intimacies among multifarious forms of life across multiple dimensions of space and time. While initially addressing the symptoms of Tayo’s disease within the argot of mid-twentieth century medicine, Silko herself is far more interested in producing an epidemiology that encompasses these substantive materialities, tracing the forms of “witchery” by which “human beings were [made] one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things…” This clan, she writes, has been “united by a circle of death that [has] devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.” Throughout the novel, Silko describes the conditions of this intimacy as an entanglement, one that snares Tayo’s thoughts, as well as the meaning of words and names. “But the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants…[N]ow the feelings were twisted, tangled roots, and all the names for the source of this growth were buried under English words, out of reach. And the people would have no peace and…no rest until the entanglement had been unwound to the source.” Here, “fifth world” names the unfolding present of Pueblo cosmology, the terrain of the still-becoming, and the domain of the witchery of colonial encounter. As above, the entanglement of Tayo’s thoughts is coextensive with the entanglement of these different worlds, and their different words; this is referenced, throughout the novel, as Tayo hears Spanish words bleed into Laguna and English bleed into Japanese, one language growing into another like a formidable banyan, the dead words of others taunting him across time and space. The realization that these entanglements are inextricable—part of the unbearable becoming of a new mode of planetary intimacy—is ultimately the condition of Tayo’s recovery. “He cried at the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.” Gathering these stories “into a single prayer bundle that would bring peace to all of them” Tayo concludes his ceremony. “He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.” Staged at an abandoned uranium mine near Laguna Pueblo, this scene situates the manifestation of Tayo’s disease—as well as the conditions of his recovery—within a chronotope of ruin and restoration that encompasses a multitude of interlocking temporalities and scales. Rendering the expression of settler counter-sovereignty within a constellation that includes the ongoing desecration of Native places and conditions of debility, the inconceivable desolation of nuclear test sites at Los Alamos and Bikini Atoll, and the radioactive debris of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ceremony sketches an irregular figure that nonetheless describes the nuclear permutations of colonialism after empire. Here, nuclear should be taken as a description of those manifestations of colonialism that embrace both the distended spatiotemporal forms wrought by the use of atomic weapons, as well as those that inhere in the less spectacular realm of the subatomic; the ways, in other words, in which colonial processes significantly contribute to the reconstitution of matter as a system of mutually-constitutive dependencies. The novel describes such dependencies during an early encounter Tayo and the healer Ku’oosh, who tells him, simply, “[t]his world is fragile,” before going on to evoke the implication of word and thought and matter as elements in a larger contest over the manifestation of worlds. The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists along, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said in this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. Here, Silko further develops the trope of entanglement, while gesturing at the material filaments which, in the Laguna account of creation, manifest and sustain the relations that constitute the substance of matter. Throughout her oeuvre, here and in later works, Silko sustains the conceit that matter itself is resistant and resisting, defiant of the categorical impositions placed upon it, as well as corresponding alterations of innate geophysical processes. Indeed, throughout Ceremony, Silko pulls upon Pueblo stories of Creation, weaving them into Tayo’s narrative, and revealing them to be cosubstantial with the realization of thought, form, and matter. “Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears….Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now. I’m telling you the story she is thinking.” While Tayo’s illness is one symptom of an underlying disease that eats away at what Paula Gunn Allen has characterized as the mathematical identity between the people and the land as manifestations of the same substance, here, Silko draws upon Laguna Pueblo cosmology to compose a braided ontology, one in which people, place, and narrative are condensed into a single figure, each term inextricable from the other. In constellating otherwise distinct spatiotemporal manifestations of colonialism, Silko’s narrative evokes such a figure, activating their potentiality as evental sites, zones from which to contest the hegemony of the imperial nomos, unfolding a new story from within the material fragments of empire; a story in which all are bound together as “a single prayer bundle [bringing] peace to all…” Taken from this perspective, one might read Ceremony as an instance of what Gerald Vizenor has called a “landfill meditation,” the conscientious refusal of the notion of refuse, and of re-connecting the fact of refuse in capitalism to the ontology of the refuser. “Once upon a time taking out the garbage was an event in our lives, a state of being connected to action. We were part of the rituals connecting us to the earth, from the places food grew, through the house and our bodies, and then back to the earth. Garbage was real, part of creation, not an objective invasion of cans and cartons. “Refuse meditation turns the mind back to the earth through the visions of real waste….We are the garbage, the waste, we make it and dump it, to be separated from it is a cancer causing delusion….We cannot separate ourselves, clean and perfect, from the trash we dump out back in the can. Clean is a vision of internal trash, not a mere separation.” Here, Vizenor develops the notion of landfill meditation to promote a mode of being-in-relation that abjures disposability as a condition of the culture of capitalism, a culture that necessarily produces both objects and people as disposable items, the condition Michelle Yates has referred to as the “human-as-waste.” For Vizenor, “human-as-waste” might as well name the figure of the Indian as a subject constituted in relation to overlapping colonial discourses; both terms designate the subject of a necropolitics that is less interested in spectacular acts of killing than in the slow deterioration of bodily capacity, the destruction of physical substance as a matter of social neglect. The existence of refuse as trash, the production of trash as an integral component of the reproduction and expansion of capital, is here categorically implicated in what Sylvia Wynter has characterized as the negligent refusal of the earth, the body and the flesh, in favor of the deracinated intellect, with spirit understood to be constituted through transcendence of the material. Vizenor’s landfill meditations are meant to reconfigure our relation to disposability, to recall disposability as part of a larger sense of the sacred or the ceremonial, in which the spiritual is experienced in and through the integrity of the material. In rhetorically gesturing at notions of material entanglement, these works draw upon and extend a mode of being in relation that Elizabeth Povinelli has described as geontological: that is, a mode of being through relation to terrestrial substance as a living archive of kinship and community, one that must be perpetually served and renewed, and through which people organize their relations to multiple worlds. Geontology, in this sense, gestures at an ecological rendering of geology, one that perceives in geology a planetary metabolic that embraces entanglements between multiple forms of life, as well as the terrestrial substance which preserves and sustains them. Silko’s many references to Pueblo creation myths, from this perspective, should not be taken as instances of mere intertexual citation, but rather as coextensive with ongoing processes of terrestrial renewal and sedimentation in and through narration. Here, of most immediate relevance, is that moment in the Acoma Pueblo creation myth where Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman and Spider, directs the making of the mountains. "She told them to remember the words she was going to say. They were to say ‘Kaweshtima kot (North Mountain), appear in the north, and we will always know you to be in that direction. Tsichtinako [sic] also pointed out an article in the basket that she named ya’oni (stone) and instructed them to throw the stone to the North direction as they spoke the words. When they did so, a big mountain appeared in the North. After they did this, Tsichtinako instructed them to do the same thing in the West, but to name this montain Tsipina kot, and in the South, naming it Da’otyuma kot, and in the East, naming it G’uchana kot." In the Acoma creation myth, the making of the mountains dramatizes the relations that obtain among multifarious forms of plant, animal, and human life, as well as the elemental processes that sustain them, manifesting the sacred in multiple forms of material substance. Situated to the cardinal directions, the mountains orient the community in relation to the sacred, which provides them with sustenance, just as assuredly as the forms of plant and animal life that are sustained by the mountains. Moreover, in their verticality, the making of the mountains echoes the ascent of the sisters from the dark underworld of their gestation to the world of the light, along the umbilical pine that draws together the two worlds. From this perspective, one might read Tayo’s descent into the cave as a return to the womb of the world, and his healing part of the birth of a world that is still in the process of becoming. Silko’s Ceremony, in this sense, becomes a parable of sovereignty and survivance, the projection of a futurity outside the punishing register of capital, linked to the reclamation of “tradition” as a living mode of being-in-relation. While I believe that indigenous sovereignty provides a necessary framework through which to approach the question of American decolonization, this evocation of geontology as it relates to the manifestation of Pueblo sovereignty is offered to better highlight enduring conditions of invasion and injury under settler colonialism and empire. Within this schema, the realization of indigenous autonomy and self-determination present themselves, for settlers, as limits on the capacity to engage sovereignty as such a framework, insofar as sovereignty implies a depth and specificity of kinship relations—here understood as extended familial and clan relations that run counter to the matrix of heteropatriarchal reproduction—far in excess of mere professional or political affiliation. Sovereignty, in other words, implies a realm of indigenous self-determination and autonomy that should not be instrumentalized by the settler, without a careful engagement with questions of indigenous self-representation and self-determination. Nonetheless, insofar as indigenous sovereignty presents an unimpeachable barrier to the realization of settler counter-sovereignty, it compels settlers to account for their own ontological conditions of possibility, especially as those relate to conditions of invasion and injury. Here, invasion is meant to echo Patrick Wolfe’s argument that settler societies are sustained by a structure of invasion, where invasion is understood not as a punctual or reversible process, but inherent to the very conditions and reproduction of everyday life.

It is a tape recording

When I wrote my book I was trying to find something that had gone missing; I was trying to account for a phenomenon that seems to me to pose an all too immediate threat to the social body, at all times but most especially in this moment, and to the myriad forms of life with which we share this planet. The psychoanalytic term for the phenomenon I hoped to describe is “negative hallucination.” For psychoanalysis, "negative hallucination" describes a condition in which a person cannot see another person or an object that should be immediately available to the field of sense perception. We have likely all found ourselves in a situation in which we are desperately searching for some small, seemingly inconsequential object—our wallet, a set of keys—only to discover that it is sitting right that, out in the open, on our desk, or the kitchen table, perfectly obvious to anyone in full command of their senses. To paraphrase mothers everywhere, the concept of negative hallucination is one way we might talk about those moments when we cannot see what is right in front of our face, instances often accompanied by the admonition that we would lose our heads if they weren’t screwed on. We might also think about this term in relation to the blindnesses impede our ability to understand ourselves and our relationships to those around us, particularly as it concerns negative emotional dynamics. A person enduring some form of abuse is often the least capable of recognizing that abuse, yet is incredibly adept at elaborating a fantasy of happiness that disguises the fact of intolerable misery. In this instance, the negative fantasy I hoped to examine concerned the enduring unrecognizability of indigenous presence within the culture of settler colonialism, a negative fantasy that we might extend to include a wide range of historical fantasies that touch upon and obfuscate the dialectics of capital, nation, and empire. While I am fully aware that I am by no means the first person to address myself to such concerns, it has been my hope that, by approaching the culture of settler colonialism through interpretive methods resonant with techniques of drawn from psychoanalytic dialogue, one might reconsider the wide ranging social consequences of that refusal, inasmuch as they are the unavoidable patrimony of we crises bedeviled moderns. Like psychoanalysis, this process is necessarily interminable, and one reaches conclusions advisedly, with great trepidation and deep reserves of caution. To claim certainty with respect to any such endeavor as the one I propose is not only an expression of sublime hubris, it betrays what to me seems to be a near foundational principle of any worthwhile intellectual or political endeavor; namely, that we cannot know, beforehand, the consequences of our choices, what we chose to do, or not to do, what to say, or what we leave unspoken. In short, we do not know where the path will lead. To believe we know is to indulge a fantasy of control that is not only presumptuous but ultimately destructive. It is to wander perilously close to psychosis, to tempt a complete shattering of the skein of lies we must tell ourselves so that we might endure. The denial of aggression may succeed in momentarily keeping aggression at bay, but like a silt choked river after the punishing rain, it will eventually find an outlet. I speak of psychosis tentatively, but with some small degree of expertise in the matter, having undergone a psychotic break not all that long ago. The circumstances of this break are too numerous to parse, and not necessarily germane; nonetheless, I would like it known that this break occurred on the eve of my return to the United States after a period of nearly fifteen years living abroad. I was well on my way to being crazy long before this trip began, yet something about the idea that I was going home, triggered a most violent physical and emotional response. While in the Paris airport, I experienced a series of seizures; during the last of these, I was assaulted, stripped of my clothes and my belongings, and left alone in a pool of piss and blood. When I was later found, I was taken into police custody, handcuffed to a chair, interrogated and beaten, before eventually being dosed with morphine to make me compliant. After what seemed like several hours, I was taken to a nearby hospital, where I was outfitted with a catheter and a pick-line, tied to my bed frame, and injected with further doses of who knows what. Long before the injections or the beatings, however, I had slipped into an impenetrable fugue. I was absolutely convinced that I was part of some horrible experiment in enhanced interrogation techniques; that the police and their lackeys were trying to get some piece of information from me; that they had mistaken me for somebody who knew things. Eventually, I began to entertain this notion, to take it seriously; not because I had come to accept the terms of the reality that was being presented to me, but because I was more and more convinced that none of what was happening was real; that, if not a dream, I was likely trapped in some bad long-form improv; and that, as such, I could say anything I wanted to as long as I was agreeable, and as long as what I said somehow advanced the story we were all telling. Lost in the throes of a most vivid hallucination, I decided to provoke the muses, and to approach the whole situation as if it were best regarded as an opportunity for anarchic creativity; for flamboyant wordplay; for comedy. It is this aspect of my psychosis that I want to highlight because I believe it has something to say with respect to the social and psychic dynamics of settler colonialism. By definition, the word psychosis describes a break with reality, a pronounced absence of sense that luxuriates in the hallucinatory. This was certainly one of the most glaring elements of my evening among the gendarmes. What I find more worthy of note, however, is the sheer delight I came to take in these most peculiar of circumstances; a delight underwritten by the ways in which the hallucination takes on the characteristics of luxury by relieving the subject of the burden of the symbolic; as well as the ways in which my running monologue constituted an attempt at reparation, at recovery; a reaching for the symbolic in which one signifier would again resonate with another and another, constituting a chain of meaning, of sense, of reality. Spinning a yarn, I found my place in the web, even as the finding constituted another instance of forgetting, of drawing together a new unreality. Indeed, one might notice that, by the end of this ordeal, even as I was being crushed to the floor under the heel of some fearsome jackboot, I was enjoying myself hugely, if only because the whole thing was just hysterically funny. Words became narcotic, simultaneously analgesic and stimulant, a breath of cocaine that allowed me to carry on with my delusion, to live within the terms of my psychosis, to ignore the residues of the emotional and physical damage that preceded it, and those new forms of pain that would most certainly emerge in its wake. I had made it back to the river but I had not anticipated the strength of the current. The image is not incidental. Part of the story acknowledged by but largely untold in The Corpse in the Kitchen is the story of the Mississippi River as an extraordinary feat of industrial engineering; the story of how the historical river has been remade, its geophysical dynamics grafted into the body of the nation so to better facilitate the realization of surplus-value. Even before the advent of the steam boat, settlers sought ways to manage the river and its rate of flow; hoping, on the one hand, to make the Mississippi safe for commercial navigation, while envisioning techniques by which to manage the inevitability of the seasonal flooding that posed a obstacle to the commercial development of the river valley, whether that development be agricultural or industrial. Subtracting general operating costs, as of 2021, at some $210 million, the largest single dedicated appropriation granted the US Army Corps of Engineers remains the management of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which does not include an additional $77 million for flood protection, or the discretionary emergency funding allocated in the event of a cataclysmic natural disaster. Of course, the history of the industrial engineering of the river over the past two centuries has been one of near constant catastrophe, wiping out ancient ecosystems and the forms of life they sustained, dooming hundreds of species to the brink of extinction, and dooming those forms of human life that took shape on its banks to the ponderous routine of industrial scale flooding. The slow violence done to the river over two hundred years is instructive. It is evidence and allegory, an object lesson in the prose of counter-sovereignty as it infests the substance of everyday life, drawing out the geophysical consequences of the lies we tell as they overwhelm the story that is unfolding around us, as they render us incapable of reading the most obvious cues, even as we might remain sensitive to certain pervasive dynamics we might characterize as mood. This is about the dynamics of feeling, about the feeling of a place and what the place is telling us, about how the living and the dead, the animate and the inert, manifest the sensibility of a place.

It is a screaming

A pentatonic, a dissonance, the monster is a collection of tones that barely tolerate one another. The mask. The mask. With the music comes the mask and the eyes, the eyes. He wants to hear the eyes. He hears the vibration of the scar, the frequency at which this unstrung cello vibrates. Resonant, sonorous, the scar seeks its bow, camel hair against unwilling flesh, untuned sorrow. * * * More things about which I am not permitted to speak. But this is what it feels like: There are spasms in my teeth. My legs twitch, my jaw locks. I fall to the ground and no one can tell if I am alive. Slowly, slowly the face of a young woman comes into focus. She is an emissary from the gendarme. I do not trust her, I do not believe in her. The brave men stand back while she clears their path. The brave men are afraid of me and this is before the stigmata; this is before the thumbprint of the beast. * * * And then you wake up and it’s America. You wake up outside in America. Gotta get up gotta get up before the morning comes. Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me. Make it easy for me just for a little while. Monday, Nebraska. Freight. The Train. Boxcar Willie and the Banshees. The Irish dragged the banshees here to terrify the Sioux. They succeeded only in scaring themselves, their children, and their animals. The Indians did not know the language of the banshees, but it did not matter. They had their own evening wraiths, and the banshees had no interest in their affairs. For the Indians, the living dead were of greater concern. The whiteness of the shroud, of the grave, is nowhere near as forbidding as the whiteness of the skin, of the teeth and the litany of lies that spill from their mouths, as if even the most casual untruth cannot bear to share space with the radiance of the spirit. The monster hears the story in the wailing of the train. It cannot it will not restrain itself. The monster is compelled to ride the train as freight, but it cannot plug up its ears. Whoever made him did not know what he was doing, and he hears every sound, smells every smell, but he is not allowed to see. And somehow he knows there is much to see. He can hear the scar, he can feel its vibration. Somehow he knows it is a map. How he knows this, he does not know. But he knows that he is the progeny of a demented cartographer. The rock, the river, and the tree are less inviting that he had hoped. He has come from France. He has crossed the Arctic circle. He has seen the ice of Lapland. There were no tiny men. There were no magical deer. The world begins to take some kind of shape. The monster is learning not to fear the wrath of saline, the injunction not to look back. What he will do with this knowledge remains to be seen. Looking back, what will he see? What is there to be seen? He knows that he is being followed. He has heard the footsteps of his pursuer; he has come to know his stride. What is it that he wants? What does the pursuer want? The map, the scar, the record of where the monster has been. The prophecy of what yet may come. I am at the river and I feel nothing. Despite its majesty, it is nothing but a hollow, the shape of something lost, of an attachment undone. I had assumed coming back here would awaken something else, something other than the creature. But now, there is only the echo of the sadness once carried along by the current, once breaking around these islands, breaking upon these banks. Now littered with boutique contrivances, bordered by a concrete path wandered by dim-witted eccentrics, the river has been robbed of its voice, its sorrow. Even in the dying light, the embers of fall now lit in the trees of the islands. If it sings, I cannot hear it. This is alarming but not without precedent. The first time I saw the Nile I found it underwhelming too. The Nile, when I met it, seemed a collector of stories. The Mississippi set its stories to music and invited all to dance. Only on subsequent trips to Egypt did the Nile begin to open up. Frozen, the colossus of lions at the base of the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, forever braced in preparation for the kill, they started to speak to me. They started to roar. Perhaps this is why I cannot hear the Mississippi. Perhaps Yemanja is upset. Perhaps I need to go to the Amazon. A new water, a new baptism. I will wash away my collection of sins by casting them upon the water. You do not know what disaster will come upon the land.

A short history of uranium mining.

This reading of extractive enterprise, debris, and debility should be thought of as coextensive with what one might call a geology of empire; that is, it develops an analytic that reads the multifarious cultural manifestations of colonialism and capital through the fact of their geophysical eventuality. (Also, I will never be as amazing as Manu.) Here, the reading I develop is meant to resonate with Eyal Weizman’s work on the relationship between colonialism and climate change, and the ongoing physical devastation of places and populations around the planet. For Weizman, colonial regimes have not only contributed to ongoing processes of environmental degradation, they have authorized and legitimated themselves through reference to their status as agents of proper land management and environmental stewardship, over and against indigenous populations who are painted, inevitably, as incapable of properly harnessing the land and its resources. Here, too, the temporal and spatial registers suggested by such an approach defy conventional renderings of geopolitical frontiers, or normative modes of historical analysis. Indeed, as a global geophysical process, the unfolding of the Anthropocene has been coextensive with the temporal and spatial parameters of capital and empire; their histories, in other words, are inextricable from one another, just as their manifestation within history is bound to the reification of space, time, and “nature” as elements of a process of capital accumulation. As Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have recently argued, the most compelling data regarding the eventuality of the Anthropocene draws together a range of geophysical samples which suggest climate change began with the advent of extended contact between Europe and the Americas. Not only did this period see the transfer and transformation of distinct biota, the introduction of new plant and animal populations, it brought together different viral forms and immunologies, eventually precipitating the mass death of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. With the decimation of the indigenous population, cultivated land throughout the Americas returned to forest, prompting a calamitous drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and precipitating what climate scientists have identified as a “little ice age.” As such, Weitzman’s approach to the study of colonialism and climate change might best be understood as one piece of a specific history of modernity, where modernity is understood as the cultural logic of capital realizing itself through the expansion of empire. ` What, of course, distinguishes empire as a social formation coextensive with the topos of the modern is its implication with the history of race as a mechanism of labor discipline. As Lewis and Maslin’s work suggests, the conditions that precipitated the mass death of the sixteenth century were those of a rapaciously extractive form of capital accumulation, one predicated upon the desire to expand and consolidate Castillian hegemony over Iberia and parts of North Africa. These conditions were, in turn, attached to a proto-capitalist, nascently biopolitical mode of statecraft which sought to secure its own continuity through ongoing intervention in the lives of its subject populations. As an extension of practices tied to the Reconquista and the flourishing of the Inquisition, during this period, notions of faith, biology, blood, and purity coalesced into a toxic stew which would eventually travel under the name “race,” a shorthand by which to fix as immutable the “natural inferiority” of subject populations, to transform notions of religious difference into biological destiny. The notion of race, from this perspective, might be thought of, more broadly, as a piece of the reification of nature—and of religion—the production of nature as resource to be colonized, exploited, and consumed—and the emergence of religion as a technique for the annunciation of the secular as the terrain of capital accumulation. Moreover, the concept of race might be itself read, in this sense, as a peculiar form of imperial detritus, a mode of bodily colonization and extraction that bears its own complicated relationship to geophysicality and the production and exhaustion of populations as resources. In this story, I approach the concept of race as a form of toxic debris, while reading the materiality of race through the social distribution of bodies and toxicities. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued, race has no meaningful substance, but rather is begat by racism, itself understood as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Uranium extraction in the Southwest began many decades before the atomic age. Initially concentrated on Navajo lands near Four Corners, uranium ores were one of the inevitable byproducts of carnotite mining, itself the source of large concentrations of radium. First isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, radium found almost immediate application in the field of medicine, supplementing the recently discovered x-ray as a means of treatment for various chronic and incurable diseases, from cancer to lupus, tuberculosis, and gout. Supply from Four Corners fed this early wave of experimentation with radiation therapy, until its unregulated commercial exploitation in the patent medicine and nascent “health” industries made clear its most deleterious side effects. By the start of World War I, radium from the Four Corners mines was also being used in the phosphorescent paint employed by watch-makers to highlight luminous watch dials for use in the dark of trench warfare. If the nineteenth century saw a slow and steady expansion of the state and its war machine over an ever-more rationalized sense of space and the distribution of force over a field of battle, irradiated watch dials allowed for a similar extension of command over time, the capacity to coordinate attacks between entrenched antagonists even under cover of night. The war machine would later give impetus to an expanded market in another of the primary byproducts derived from carnotite ore, mineral vanadium. First discovered by Mexican chemist Andres Manuel del Rio, in 1801, vanadium was, for much of the nineteenth century, a mineral curiosity, notably largely for the wide range of colors produced by its salts. By the late nineteenth century, vanadium was being added to the hulls of warships to shore them up and defend against explosive projectiles. By the dawn of the twentieth century, metallurgists had begun experimenting with its application in the production of steel alloys. They found that the introduction of small amounts of vanadium to steel created a far harder, and more resilient, steel alloy; an alloy which was soon applied to a wide array of industrial processes. The first extensive use of vanadium steel in commercial production came with the introduction of the Ford Model T, in 1908. Because vanadium steel was light, relative to other steel alloys, it enabled Ford to solve the dilemma of the “weight-to-power ratio” that had plagued other attempts at bringing automobiles to a wider commercial market. Crucial components of the Model T could be made to bear up under greater expenditures of energy, thus allowing the Model T to propel itself with greater speed, and less inertia. Ford’s adaptation of vanadium steel to automotive production would yield enormous dividends for both the war machine and the industries to which it was symbiotically tethered. During World War II, demand for vanadium and vanadium steel skyrocketed, while economists worried over the capacity of the US vanadium industry to meet the demand wrought by a global projection of US military power. It was, of course, in the context of World War II that the US government first became interested in the uranium deposits of the greater Southwest. That these were in in proximity to Los Alamos—site of the national laboratory tasked with the development of a nuclear weapon—was, at least initially, a happy coincidence. The majority of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project was, in fact, drawn from the Eldorodo Gold Mines near Port Hope, Ontario, and the Shinkolobwe mine in what was then the Belgian Congo. Fearing American dependency on foreign supplies of uranium, the officer overseeing operations at Los Alamos, General Leslie Groves, purchased the uranium stockpiles of the US Vanadium Corporation. Because uranium ore was primarily a byproduct of carnotite mining, the first uranium industries in the United States grew up around the carnotite mines of southern Colorado; yet, as the hot war with Germany and Japan gave over to the Cold War between the US and the Soviets, the field of uranium extraction expanded to meet the growing demands of nuclear proliferation and the arms race. During the earliest years of the Cold War, uranium mining spread through New Mexico and Arizona, with some of the largest and most productive mines located in Laguna lands near Albuquerque. Until the mid-1970s, Laguna lands produced nearly fourteen percent of the uranium at use in the United States, even as the uranium industry expanded to consume lands sacred to the Acoma, the Najavo, the Hopi, and the Zuni. Uranium mining proved an immediate economic boon to the indigenous communities of the greater Southwest. Its long-term consequence with respect to the health of those communities has been more difficult to gauge. As Gina Stuart-Richardson has indicated, as a commercial industry, uranium mining is propelled by a market-based conception of value that can little appreciate questions related to historical preservation. For Stuart-Richardson, “historical preservation” provides a rubric, from within the juridical calculus of the settler state, whereby indigenous communities assert themselves as subjects of the land that emerge from a sense of their ontological implication with its geophysicality. “Native people see themselves as coming from lands that are imbued with sacredness, and then eventually returning to that land in a cycle that is as old as the generations who have inhabited it…” she writes, “[L]and plays [a role] in identity creation, and how the ways one views the land can substantially affect the way identities are created.” As wrought by industrial mining, the material alteration of the geophysical processes enfolded within the topography of the greater Southwest taxes conditions of indigenous survivance. While survivance at is broadest indicates a form of communal health in which the affective circuits that constitute subjectivity are threatened through a massively destructive intervention upon terrestrial substance, in this instance, such renderings of health are clearly bound up with questions of the physical capacity, debility, and debilitation of indigenous peoples as embodied subjects. Uranium mining, after all, does not simply alter the physical shape of the terrain; rather, such alterations are coextensive with the radioactivity mining uncovers, and the radioactive wastes it leaves behind.