Captain Van brings concurrent global yet intimate perspectives on core conflicts and contradictions that our society navigates. Her inquiries bring truly singular literary form and voice to complex conversations that often exist beyond the gaze of dominant hegemonic thinking – about gender, the military, and the tectonic Venn diagram where those prismatic and often enigmatic identities meet. Outsider culture is insider culture, and vice versa in Van’s writing. She creates windows and doors within the confines of airless spaces, offering bracing inhalations of fresh air where such opportunities to breathe are least expected.

SCRY Magazine and S.C.R.Y. (Scry Creative Residencies) are delighted and honored to announce the inaugural SCRY Fellow, Reinetta “Van” Vaneendenburg (Captain, U.S. Navy, Ret.) who will be working in the field of Literature and Intermedia Art during Winter 2023. Captain Van brings concurrent global yet intimate perspectives on core conflicts and contradictions that our society navigates. Her inquiries bring truly singular literary form and voice to complex conversations that often exist beyond the gaze of dominant hegemonic thinking – about gender, the military, and the tectonic Venn diagram where those prismatic and often enigmatic identities meet. Outsider culture is insider culture, and vice versa in Van’s writing. She creates windows and doors within the confines of airless spaces, offering bracing inhalations of fresh air where such opportunities to breathe are least expected.

Interrupting categories and disturbing all cliches she encounters, Van’s work surrounds issues such as identity and historical perspective in hybrid forms. Her perspective is visual as well as verbal, and introduces image and graphics to her essays, poems, creative nonfiction, and hybrid form prose. Hers is a seasoned journey of surprises that she greets with curiosity as well as the searingly dry wit of concern.

For her SCRY residency, Captain Van is documenting the transition of women in uniform from support to warfighter roles, drawing on her own and others’ military experiences. Van served as an analyst and historian during her thirty-plus year naval career, retiring as a captain. Her contributions to society, national security, and literature form a substantial body of work in both the private and public worlds.

Van has an MS from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has presented a core workshop at &NOW at University of Washington.

A Jersey girl, she worked summers on Ford Motor Company’s assembly line and, after living oversees three times and visiting thirty countries, calls Norfolk, Virginia, home.

The post INAUGURAL SCRY FELLOW IN LITERATURE: Captain Reinetta “Van” Vaneendenburg ////// //// gender + the military + the tectonic Venn diagram appeared first on Scry Magazine.

SCRY Residencies identify birds whose psyche, work, and flight pattern would be enticed by a fully funded nesting place in the wilds of rural New York – residing as a life form amidst life forms, including bears, panthers, boars, falcons, black snakes, and varied nebulae and quasars. There is a superb vista of Orion, as well as a telescope, a river, a treehouse, and carnivorous worms. Three multidisciplinary artist studios and private grooming areas support interdependence and isolation. This free ranging free time attracts birds with a commitment to investigating matters of conscience and social impact, unbounded within boundaries that are boundless.

– Murmurator Wikswo at Scry Magazine

SCRY MAGAZINE is agog to introduce the launch of its nesting migration program: SCRY ARTIST RESIDENCIES. This newly unfettered program has left the mindnest of its eggmakers and will take flight via the ideas and trajectories of wayward wings. SCRY awards fully-funded residencies to invited Fellows who will take up solo residence in the forests and rivers of rural New York. SCRY Fellows are offered nests with independent studios and fully equipped private living spaces amongst the feathered living legacies of the black bear, the particle accelerator, the Great Migration, the Haudenosaunee, the goshawk, the Underground Railroad, lake effect snow, the Hudson River, General Sullivan’s Campaign of Genocide, the grey wolf, and more.

SCRY Residencies focus on advancing the work of artists engaged in inhabiting and re-inhabiting, envisioning and revisioning their own direct experiential encounters with human and civil rights pursuits. Fellows live within an immersive environment cross-pollinated by dusty, fuzzy, squiggly, and otherwise topographically compelling ecologies of species in nature. On their own initiative and intuition, rationality and strategy, Fellows define their own participation in interrupting the over-civilized interstates of culture, with footpaths and flightpaths, hedgerows and rip tides that offer entry and exit into lesser-known trajectories of existence. It is a time of solitude, communion, and encounter with whatever is called in, called up, called down, called over time and space, and echoes in the mountains with the ravens.

From magpie-making of personal archives to essays, poems, photographs, silkscreens, creative nonfiction, music, sound art, video, installation, ecological engagements, media, and other forms, SCRY Residencies celebrates the complex lives of those who live in service to higher ideals of the panoptic venn diagrams of freedom, equity, internal agency, mouse teeth, rags, bones, balls of earth, love, passion, the sublime and the abyss, and spacetime.

Fellows are considered via a self-nomination process that begins with forging a relationship with SCRY MAGAZINE through murmurations, contributed thought and essay, and sweat equity in n-dimensions.

The Inaugural SCRY Fellow in Literature for 2023 is Captain Van.

The post SCRY RESIDENCY FELLOWSHIPS 2023 ///// murmurations winged + nested appeared first on Scry Magazine.

In the murmuration below, we fly through these and other skies.

Selene dePackh is a queer, physically disabled neurodivergent who forefronts marginalized characters in her writing. She’s been a visual artist most of her professional life; her credits include the cover illustration and design for The Biopolitcs of Disability by Mitchell & Snyder.

Her novel Troubleshooting (Glitch in the System series) has been taught in several Disability Studies programs across the country. Kirkus says of it and its narrator, “There are few protagonists in sci-fi—or literature in general—that present an autistic perspective with such specificity and pathos. The explorations of ableism and sexuality in a claustrophobic cyberpunk setting make this unlike anything most readers will have encountered before.”  

Her genre-fluid noir short fiction has recently or will soon in appear in the anthologies Spoon Knife, SYNTH#2, Recognize Fascism and Nightside Codex as well as Weird Whispers magazine. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the Identities issue of Shooter, and Heavy Feather Review.

And, dear readers – welcome. If you’d like to participate, please send us a note.

Be aware – there is much in this murmuration that may require a fuller research on your part, such as the Harvard Brain Bank, DTRA, Aktion T4, and other institutions, programs, and locations. Rather than providing links, SCRY is happy to offer agency to you to look it up yourself. The ethical statement behind this is that too often, the othered are expected to explain ourselves. Well, SCRY doesn’t feel like doing that today. And neither do I.

– Quintan Ana Wikswo

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SCRY: We have found common terrain in neurological rabbitholes – the one that springs to mind is the random (or not?) discovery on social media that both of us have been approached by brain harvesters. My brain is actually worth more than I am alive. I don’t know if you wrote that, or I did.

DEPACKH: I have as my Facebook page personal quote that as an autistic, I resent being worth more as a dissection specimen than alive. There’s a person in my adopted city who has been involved in shady things connected to a “youth facility” for neurodivergent misfits but who still gets abundant funding, promotes “art events” for compliant autistics, and stalks us without showing true colors.

This person has (or had as of a year ago, the last time I could stomach a search) a page on the Autism $peaks website outlining appropriate techniques for approaching parents for pre-mortem donation commitments (by written contract) of their children’s brains. Considering autistics have an average lifespan variously measured at 32 or 54 depending on the study, and a ninefold suicide rate, while A$ siphons funds away from services that might actually extend autistic lifespans and increase quality of life, it’s fertile ground they’re plowing. We call the ones who run the brain program the zombies, but the whole organization is vampiric.

SCRY: Yes. It is an underworld of predation upon neurodivergents that is operating in a kind of open secrecy. So much is problematic here – the fact that it is so out of the realm of believability is a major impediment to stopping this brain farming. When it happened to me, I gained no traction. I mentioned this to my parents, who refused to believe that I was approached. I found myself offended that they didn’t think my brain was worth studying, while I was also offended that I was not believed, while I was also offended that Harvard finds it acceptable to openly solicit the purchase of my brain. And then terrified that I could have – or might – lose agency over my brain because my parents could decide to do anything they wish with it, should I become sufficiently disabled.

I went to an attorney for an advance directive, which is something many of us need to know to do in order that our wishes be respected.

I am angry that I was so furious that I burned the letter. I wanted it far away from me. I never thought I’d need to produce it later as proof to others that I’m not lying.

And I think that that bundle of rather horrible and hideous juxtaposed thoughts form a lot of the discomfort I have around being disabled in this society – the fact that we are both valued and valued, believed and disbelieved. We are the Schrodinger’s Earthlings: simultaneously four incompatible states of being. It’s arguable that most communities targeted by normalizers are in this same situation. I think of the body souvenirs that have yet to be repatriated – or cannot be repatriated to their nations/peoples of origin.

The basement of the Vienna Anthropology Museum is filled with old banana boxes gathered by Nazis and kept in deep storage. When I made a film about it a few years ago, where the normalizers had cut little peepholes out of the banana boxes so that various femurs (exceptionally long) could fit into the carton, several prominent disability rights activists on faculty at UCLA told me that this was impossible because all the remains had been returned.

Thinking of myself as a member of a non-normalized community, and proudly if exhaustedly non-normalized, I wonder whether if our brains had to be in a jar, whose hands would we want to hold them? The hands of Schrödinger, perhaps?

DEPACKH: …or Schrödinger’s aliens. I forget exactly when we first began corresponding, but it was around then that the Carnegie Natural History Museum in my adopted city of Pittsburgh discovered that the head of a human figure in one of its most famous taxidermy exhibits, a wildly Edward Said-esque nightmare diorama of an Arab man on camelback being attacked by lions, was built on a purloined human skull. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-a-real-human-skull-in-a-museum-diorama

I’m hoping not to have my grave robbed before I’m in it.

SCRY: There is a phenomenon – there’s actually a word for it which I shall have to look up – of false graves. We all know by now, I’d reckon, that the consternation around obscured gravesites is a global issue. However, I am interested in my false lifespan, my false capacity. I feel oftentimes as a neurodivergent that I have been falsely buried. It is already assumed that I will commit suicide, due to statistics. It is already assumed, due to statistics, that I will die young.

Once upon a time, I had a then-step-mother-in-law. Let’s call her Ellen Grush. One Thanksgiving in rural Oregon, my then-partner and I were riding in the back seat of her car. She stopped the car, turned to me, and said, “Quintan, I have spent a great deal of time researching temporal lobe epilepsy and would like to make it very clear that we are aware that you will be in the mid- to late- stages of dementia by age 40. Owen and I have discussed that you will likely need to be institutionalized for full-time care by age 45. I want you to be aware that despite being married to our child, the family will not support this expense.”

Ellen was a polio survivor, and a psychologist. Owen, my then-father-in-law, was a diabetic and a psychiatrist. Ellen experienced post-polio complications for much of her life. Owen was frequently hospitalized for his own complications. Whether they self-identified as disabled, I do not know. But according to the medical establishment, they were disabled.

At sixty, they estimated her own lifespans to be near-infinite. Yet they had done the research and mathematical and financial calculations to know that I would need to be thrown to the wolves in about ten years time.

We assume that other disabled folks are our allies. And I have not found that to be the case, especially when it comes to institutions. You mention Autism Speaks, and there are four or five prominent epilepsy associations that are just as punitive, mercenary, and more enemy than advocate.

DEPACKH: Like any other marginalized group, the disability community can be divided along its fault lines of self-interest. The deepest fissure is opened by those who proudly assert that there’s “nothing wrong with their minds.”

That can rive me down my own fracture lines at times, given that I’m progressively physically disabled by Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a progressive connective tissue breakdown that rides the same genetic rung as autism and a seizure disorder that will get me eventually if my heart doesn’t split the way my dad’s did.

SCRY: Yes. The common co-occurence of seizure disorder in neurodivergence is disgracefully under-researched and mis-researched. I can’t help but add, since we’re discussing prominent institutions, that last week I had a seizure in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was escorted out in a wheelchair – but not without some consternation that I might have faked it all so I could steal things and hide them in a wheelchair.

It is perverse that simply living one’s life as neurodivergent, the normie cloud of suspicion, disbelief, disrespect, and distrust make even the simplest situations opaque and volatile. 

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SCRY: Another rabbithole we have discovered, and I sense that we have deeper to go here, is that we are both the daughters of physicists from the Department of Defense and various advanced institutes and entities, who served in the Navy, who worked on radar systems, and the list goes on. Your father’s obituary contains a lot of common elements to my (living) father’s life, such as wildly prescient inventions.

I’d like to hear you talk about your father’s life.  My father, with help of my tiny six year old fingers, discovered the magnetic field of the human nervous system, especially the heart. I was born at Stanford, in the hospital maybe a mile from SLAC, the Stanford Linear Particle Accelerator.

I do remember his SQUID magnetometer meant that after he’d extracted the nerves from a lobster brain, we could eat it for dinner. I grew up in his labs at Stanford and Vanderbilt, and various other places where he did collaborative work.

DEPACKH: My dad spent his entire working life at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He graduated the University of Chicago with an engineering degree at the age of 17 and was drafted directly into the Navy as part of the WWII weapons development effort.

He did travel extensively as part of his work and kept close contact with several colleagues at Livermore. He was invited to work with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos but turned it down for reasons of conscience, choosing instead to work on defensive radar systems during WWII.

SCRY: Our families’ paths very nearly crossed generations ago, then. Because many of my family in various branches of science worked under Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. I scored very high on engineering tests as a high schooler but was very wary of the ethics of animal experiments, military work, and some of the values that would be at stake for me if I followed the family footsteps.

My great-aunt and -uncle and grandfather did not turn down Oppenheimer job offers. I think they thought it was the culmination of their intelligence and educational hard work. Muriel went on to some very distressing Uranium extraction projects as a highly placed Director at the US Atomic Energy Commission, and eventually directed much of what has now destroyed the ecologies of the Navajo Nation, and so on and so forth.

The destruction list goes on nearly infinitely, but I do believe that she (and my other family members working on the Manhattan Project) found it some of the most intellectually fulfilling work possible. The cost to the subsequent generations is a bit searing.

DEPACKH:  It’s interesting that the biggest “risk” factor for autism is supposedly having an engineer for a parent. The neighborhoods in and around Cold War Era DC military/scientific facilities have been fertile breeding ground for my neuro-peers.

SCRY: I too continue to meet other children of parents who worked at Cold War sites, and the children of my father’s physicist peers. There is absolutely a thumbprint of neurodivergence – I lived near Los Alamos off and on for much of my life so that site in particular has brought me close to descendant children whose brains are very much like my own. I don’t think any of us have an easy time around the normalizing forces. One of whom, Peter Carillo Fuller, became a dear friend over many decades, like me had extensive neurodivergence, was brilliant, and committed suicide in the spring of 2007.

DEPACKH: NRL [Naval Research Lab] was fertile ground for my father—I don’t think there’s any way a person with his background could have the career he did now. He became head of the Electron Beams Branch there when I was quite young. I remember him working until 8PM, when he would come home for dinner, read to me before bed (first book Homer’s Odyssey, second David Copperfield, third Bullfinch’s Mythology)—and then go back to work.

He also showed me the magic of the darkroom, and gave me handtools, a soldering iron, etc.—these are what I owe him. Neither of us was comfortable with my being female as the thing was defined at the time. He was also diagnosed as what was then called manic depressive and would no doubt have been picked up on by the “early intervention” autism dragnet of today—whereupon he would have been subjected to forcible socialization and been stripped of his brilliance.

SCRY: I would say the same about my father, who also taught me basic electronics, soldering, welding, and how to use a men’s urinal because the physics building did not have a women’s bathroom.

He spent his teen years on an army cot in the physics labs because he had already earned his PhD from Stanford by 21. He was a child in college. I doubt he would have been seen as intelligent now, but instead most likely problematic, and dosed. He has a variety of unusual characteristics in his personality and had he been normalized, they would have all been wiped out. But perhaps the world we are in now needs scientists to be normalized as well as the rest of us, whereas before there were figures such as Einstein and others who could be strange, or active in politics in a way that academia no longer permits.

Civilians – much less non-scientists – will never know the extent to which these large corporate, government, and contracted universities collaborate with warfare, warfighting, and other Department of Defense programs. I cannot hazard a guess regarding how many scientists employed at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) or DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency for weapons of mass destruction) and related agencies are uncompromised, but most are certainly fully aware that the research and development has questionable applications in terms of weapons application.

But it’s hard to know for certain where collaboration and opposition can be separated. In my experience, the lines can appear abruptly, and it is very difficult to navigate that boundary between what you might find professional compelling but ethically compromised. As a human rights fieldworker and strategist, first responder and program developer, I have walked away from far more assignments than I have accepted, and there was always a kind of nasty values aspect to those choices – the cognitive impact of determining one’s participation in highly complex systems in which millions of lives hang in the balance.

Making decisions that have mass destruction at stake – the life or death of strangers for perhaps hundreds of years in the future…it can be shattering.

That’s why there are so many sites for psychiatric care for workers of this nature. Not enough, I’d argue. I know many people who have been assigned to these mental health rehabilitation facilities in order to maintain security clearances, return to the field, or simply become functional. But I also know more who were quickly dispatched and ejected from the system, leaving them to manage their trauma without resources of any kind.

DEPACKH: My father went into his most drastic manic psychosis while at a CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] planning conference in Basel. After that he became more iconoclastic and finally lost his security clearance when he was arrested on the Justice Department steps protesting the Vietnam War.

He died at 68 on his own terms.  Since then, a basilisk (the coat of arms of Basel, Switzerland) sometimes appears in my dreams to herald seismic changes in my life.

SCRY: Switzerland is horrifying for its cleanliness, which hides a wealth of dirty business. My Swiss basilisk is the bear in the pit in Bern, over top the CERN tunnels. It’s been there for thousands of years – each time the bear dies, another is sent down into the hole. I identified with this bear when I was at CERN. As Aimé Cesaire writes, Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing … a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

I was at CERN during its construction and your father’s response makes sense within that community. It is a place of power that is difficult to explain, much less comprehend. What’s emerging in our murmuration is the role of offspring, of generational anguish at these scientific sites.

There is a magic and a magical realism and a horror and an internal screaming with these fathers, and a sadness. Perhaps the same could be said of many of us, but I do think in physics it is a bit unique because as a child one has the sense that one’s father is in direct contact with a cosmos that is invisible and incomprehensible to others.

Probably more difficult in children of military research physicists. Where ethics have genocidal repercussions if not deeply considered. And where often the ends of their careers bring them to knowledge that makes it difficult to support life. Or, the desire to support life inadvertently – or necessarily – causes them to end lives.

As for the role of eerie generational impact at governmental scientific research sites – at CERN I was in a relationship with a dark matter physicist Dr. Vittorio Palmieri who was a project manager in the early days of CERN. We had unprotected sex in the particle collider before it was fully operational.

The morning afterwards he became terrified that if I got pregnant, the baby would be born with some sort of brain abnormality because of the work they were doing there. I was a bit disoriented by this, but said I was not going to prevent a pregnancy solely on the reason of the child having potential neurodivergence.

At first, I thought he was just being paranoid, and then, under the pretext of a nice trip to Geneva, he took me to a Swiss abortionist and they tried to force the morning after pill down my throat. And the outcome was that I fled, I faked my grandmother’s death certificate, and caught the next bereavement flight home to Philadelphia on Swiss Air, which kindly upgraded me and my conjecturally subhuman fetus to first class.

DEPACKH: I hope to hear the outcome.

SCRY: Well, I have no offspring, both by choice and by biology, but I am a rhizome. I doubt that’s human. At times, I have no desire to be considered human. And yet the alternative…we know humans are on a spectrum in which some of us are subhuman.

Years of Nazi-hunting and projects and research into Aktion T4 and Dr. Plecker and Dr. Priddy in Virginia and other eugenicists made that very clear. It’s a history we all know – most of us know – gracias to the Holocaust. But I’m not sure it’s fully explored what that means – and that includes what it means logically to the person who knows they are categorized as subhuman, but also what it feels like, and what the first- second- third-order consequences of that feeling-knowledge-experience matrix include.

Because there are consequences – maybe being sent to a special school, maybe having a fetus aborted without your consent, and the list goes on. But what are the strategies and tactics behind the indoctrination whereby some of us know that we are subhuman.

DEPACKH: I’ve had an instinctive response to this concept for most of my life, but when I was tapped by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (sister of Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder) to illustrate and design the cover of their book The Biopolitics of Disability, I began to learn the language and dialectic of it as a subject of study. So far as I know, the figure with CP I developed for that project remains the only accurate artistic (not medical) 3D model of a physically disabled person.

Around that time, I began to develop friendships in the online autistic community, where one often only learns that one’s conversation partner doesn’t use spoken language and requires an aide for basic functions days or months after one has made the initial acquaintance. My impression from talking to #actuallyautistic people who have dealt with the consequences of appearing to be barely sentient is that they have a profoundly different understanding of humanity.

To me, the ghastly descriptions of what autistic perception “must be like” that one can find in texts that are still used in training practitioners of Applied Behavior Analysis are written by people who lack a basic sense of empathetic humanity. This is an area where people who have been the subjects of this so-called therapy are actively shunned and denigrated by the profession that was developed to ostensibly serve them when they speak up about the damage it does. It’s small wonder there’s such a horrendous suicide rate within my tribe.

So much of the harm caused to beautiful autistic minds comes from lazy, utilitarian, monolithic capitalist doctrine, where a person must be a conveniently fungible unit of labor. Einstein didn’t speak until he was four—what would have happened if he wasn’t allowed to dance in that wordless space as his mind developed? Would he be just another future suicide statistic living in a gray fog of drugged exhaustion, told he was broken and unworthy so much that anyone who mimed treating him with human dignity would get a gold star and a pat on the head from the system?

SCRY: It was life altering to interact with the Harvard Brain Bank – I felt hunted. Someone took the time to track me down and fill out the necessary paperwork to request the purchase of my brain post-mortem. Who was that person who typed up that letter. I’d like to go have lunch with them. Or something. Maybe not lunch. There was no evidence of empathetic humanity there, more like a big game trophy hunter longing to pose with the decapitated head of an endangered species.

DEPACKH: Echoes of that—I mentioned earlier about the zombie leader who hunts in my city—the backstory on how I knew this person is that I met them through my art and my work as a curator. I came across as fairly well-behaved in our early meetings, and they situated themselves to pursue a “friendship” or as much of a one as a high-level autism charity-machine official can have with a mere autistic. This person, as I said, had many connections at this lofty level throughout my city, several of whom were mutual acquaintances.

This group of professionals invited John Elder Robison to speak, and I was invited to sit in the audience as a suitably presentable domesticated autistic, in the interests of performing diversity and inclusion. Another member of the group of professionals had come to a somewhat clearer idea of what I was and noted that I’d put myself in the front row, in front of the neurosurgeons and therapists waiting to hear JER speak of how his tragically defective brain had been briefly raised to humanity by being riddled with random magnetic waves. I was ready to question him on the ethics of researchers who would bombard someone’s vital organ with unregulated but powerful forces that were known to cause significant, unplanned and unknown consequences to basic function. A statue was just removed from Central Park of someone who held similar attitudes about less-than-humans and the virtues of experimenting on them.

Anyway, by some mysterious oversight, JER was permitted to ramble on until the end of the allotted time, so there could be no Q&A period. The presence of a well-dressed autistic, clearly ready for debate, was enough for the event planners to decide all the neurosurgeons and therapists wouldn’t get their chance to interact with the “self-narrating zoo exhibit” (to use autistic activist Jim Sinclair’s term for what’s expected of tame autistics.) I’d already planned to meet the zombie leader for lunch to discuss the event in the following week, but somehow those plans never materialized…

SCRY: This all requires moles in the system, but once those of us who are high functioning are identified and our cover blown, all opportunities to speak are abruptly removed. Eventually – not too far into the future – neurodivergents will make up the majority of the US population, when we factor in neurological changes in an aging Baby Boomer population, and neuroqueer Millenials and younger.

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SCRY: Your project M/Other tongues surrounds a lot of underseen and crucial nodes – the one that first snagged me is the relationships between special schools for indigenous youth and for autistic youth. And part of that delta of snagged branches and rivulets – your point that the experience of school normalcy persecution segregation isolation campaigns places many of us in this delta. Whether we are placed in remedial schools for troubled youth, or schools for the children of swiss diplomats, or schools for neurodivergent, or schools to assimilate Native Americans…this is a process of sorting and separating that nonetheless places us in the same riverbed, with the same water source, but apart from each other. At the bottom of gullies and arroyos, canyons and valleys where we can hear each other calling out, sometimes, but aren’t brought together.

DEPACKH: I’ve approached this question from so many angles… my epiphany came at a bleak point in my life a couple of years after my autism diagnosis. I was dutifully going through therapy with a “recognized expert in the field” because I had burned out yet again. I was short of money, and one of the few things I had to sell was my diagnosis. I participated in a study hosted through two local universities which involved multiple approaches to autism diagnosis. I was being scanned in an MRI machine, and it dawned on me as I lay there motionless while my aberrances were being defined in 3-dimensional space that my brain was being mapped like a new frontier ripe for colonial exploitation. I’ve discussed in many places how my own background of privilege and experience of disability has given me insight into the workings of the machinery from both ends of the examining lens.

Of course, “divide and conquer” has been the doctrine and strategy of imperialism from the start. We can’t be permitted to speak to one another, because then we might become more a more powerful resistance. The recent political tides have made telling this story legibly all the more urgent. I’ve turned my attention almost completely toward fiction and illustration in the hope of being more accessible. I never thought I’d find myself described as a science fiction writer, but here I am beside Huxley and Orwell in the low-rent district of literature. If the partitions can be bridged by the lowest common denominator of popular communication, then that’s where I’ll start building.  

SCRY: I was homeschooled until high school, and every time I ask my parents why I get a different response. My memory is going to kindergarden in rural Tennessee and being punished for bringing chicken bones soaked in vinegar as my show and tell. I was so excited to show everyone how they would bounce if you dropped them on the floor, but apparently it targeted me as a witch and a psychopath. I also remember falling for a boy named Bubba who was cognitively impaired and sobbing through class while he was bullied – not only was he “abnormal” at this school by nature of his brain, but also because his family was living in poverty and they used laundry detergent for bathing because their food stamps only bought one cleanser. Apparently, my friendship with him, and my crying when others bullied him, was enough to give me too many worrisome marks against me. Yet when I asked my mother this week why they sued the state of Tennessee to prevent me from going to school until high school, she said, “because i was holding you one day when you were six weeks old and you looked at me and it was clear you knew things that others didn’t, and I was worried about you being taught that was wrong.”

DEPACKH: How wonderful that you were perceived. I don’t see anything inconsistent in these answers—only that each is a different perspective on the same reality. I went through a similar experience of social indoctrination, but only found relief when I left home at fourteen and refused to return until I was pulled from the school system. It would have been too embarrassing to my mother to have me hunted down by a truant officer, so other arrangements were hastily and discreetly made.

SCRY: Othering is an act. It’s a concept, and it’s a strategy, and it’s a tactic, and an action. Othering is an entire ecological system, and I’m not sure we pull it apart into its component parts critically enough.

I find that by default most folks tend to turn othering into something binary, akin to good and evil. These are the Others, and these are Us. Or These are the Otherers, and We are the Othered. When in my experience, I’ve been othered by just about everyone. I’ve not felt welcomed in any community that, technically, I fit into. This is a constant harangue of mine, but if we look at the System of Othering without assigning the usual suspects, and we actually look inward at how our own community does it to each other, we might find clues that are helpful.

DEPACKH: I couldn’t agree more. I used as the banner for my activist page the image at the end of the second Invasion of the Body Snatchers of Donald Sutherland pointing into the camera—I don’t think many of my more Madam Defarge-inclined peers saw all the facets of what I was saying with that.

Autistics who can “pass” often live in fear of being outed, and those who have been outed then turn on their fellows by call-out for perceived infractions against the ever-shrinking community until a few are left in each impotent, isolated group, huddled with each other, rolling their eyes in paranoia and screeching at those enemies enough like themselves to be within their reach.

Thus, the mission of the imperialist is accomplished without him having done anything more than training them properly.

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SCRY: Although I only became digitally acquainted with you a few years ago, and I don’t recall how our social media paths crossed, I’ve delved a bit into your book THE NEW PANOPTICON and again I discover the eerie similarities in the work we have both undertaken – contemporary as well as historical.

My projects CHARITÉ, MOUNTAIN SWEEP, THE TINY URN, and about five other projects are ongoing pieces that center around experiments on neurodivergent children in Germany, Austria, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and several other sites. I discovered a mass grave at a hospital in Virginia where my great-grandfather was experimented upon. The list goes on. I feel a tangible sense of other neuroqueers calling to me across time.

DEPACKH: Yet natural selection keeps creating us as the world destroys us. One of my more brilliant peers, a robotics/AI developer and my first “toaster oven” for converting an outcast nerd into a proud autistic, is of the opinion that autism and some other forms of neurodiversity are nature’s attempt to evolve a new form of loading intelligence into the finite form of the fetus, hence our out-of-synch neural development as compared to what are deemed normal benchmarks.

I don’t know if you’re referring to the Willard suitcase project in New York http://www.suitcaseexhibit.org/index.php?section=about&subsection=suitcases  – it was one of the ah-hah moments I had when I was talking with my Seneca (Haudenosaunee) friend about it and the graveyard of children at the site of the old Carlisle Indian School, and how harrowingly resonant the harmonies those two sites sang to each other were, in the buried history of our culture. I do not think anything could be more terrifying to the social structure than to have those notes become pure enough to vibrate its posts and beams into instability.

SCRY: What is your writing trajectory at this point in spacetime?

DEPACKH: I’ve begun to write more fiction, both dystopian/speculative noir and weird/horror because it allows a deeper palette for depicting these structures. Get Out, Us, and Sorry to Bother You have gotten to places a straightforward journalistic analysis of the interlocking systems of exploitation and oppression can’t reach.

I hope someday to get back into the nonfiction projects, but right now I’m enjoying the freedom of throwing my subjects into a funhouse hall of mirrors. Perhaps I’ll do an autofiction in the style of House of Leaves, but, I hope, more readable.

SCRY: Readabilty is murky terrain. I’ve never found my books difficult, but they tend to be polarized by people who find them completely opaque, and those to whom they are clear blue skies. I love that we didn’t meet over our literary work, but that instead our neuroqueerness brought us into phasespace together, and we found commonalities across many membranes.

DEPACKH: I don’t have a clear memory of precisely how we initially intersected either, but I do know how deeply I was taken with your book A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be and the way I was struck by how much of that terrible resonance it contained. I know when I saw your name, I jumped at making the connection.

You delve into places I’ve allowed myself to be trained into leaving implicit. I’ve learned from mentors who have been brilliant in leading me to say my truth in a certain way, and the price I’ve paid for that facility is in the wells and the soarings of poetic language I’ve had to leave languish in the field. I’ve killed so many iridescent darlings in the service of expected narrative pace, it’s like having become accustomed to the routine murders of pests in the garden and thus lost the wonder in their lives I had as a child.

Your work called to me to remember a part of myself that still needs to steal the fruit.

SCRY: If there is a cosmic fruit tree, I think we both are bandits in the name of liberation.

The post MURMURATION WITH SELENE DEPACKH: on Brain Banks, Neurodivergence, CERN, and Robbing the Graves of the Living appeared first on Scry Magazine.

How can the margin be in between? Doesn’t that indicate that the margin is at the center? Yes. And that is Scry.

Scry is a site for n-dimensional, non-didactic exploration. Yet as much as the armchair can be seductive, to many of us it is a luxury, and we live in a realm of direct, personal experience in which our primal responses – as well as deliberate decisions – are often made on the fly, perhaps under duress. SCRY likes to conceive of this as “resting” or “theoretical” or “passive” ethics, versus “pressurized ethics.” Kicking people into our amygdala is not an armchair activity. It involves a forensic analysis of how our fight flee faun freeze bypass that frontal cortex where things like ethics reside.

Welcome. If you’d like to participate, please send us a note.

This murmuration with Jacob Appel traverses his experiences as a triage emergency room psychiatrist, a playright and novelist, and an existential interlocutor. Jacob M. Appel is the author of four literary novels, nine short story collections, an essay collection, a cozy mystery, a thriller and a volume of poetry. Jacob is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and an attending physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, Beth Israel Hospital, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City.  At Mount Sinai, he designed and teaches the ethics curriculum for the first and second year medical students, lectures in the psychiatric clerkship, and runs the ethics courses for the psychiatry residents.  He also established and supervises a creative writing elective for the medical students. His books can be accessed through www.workman.com/products/who-says-youre-dead and www.blacklawrencepress.com/authors/jacob-m-appel. He invites you to email him at j a c o b m a p p e l at gmail dot com.

This murmuration commences…

– Quintan Ana Wikswo

SCRY: Welcome to our flight paths here at SCRY, where your contributions to our knowledge of the skies and its tides are very much appreciated. Shall we begin?

APPEL: As a bioethicist who writes about ethics in both fiction and nonfiction, I figured I’d mention five ethics topics that fascinate me but don’t interest many others.

SCRY: Your list is compelling. Being obsessive ethicists ourselves here at Scry, we often start at the most identifiable end and work backwards. Perhaps the conundrum that incites interest is the climax, the catastrophe, the juncture at which ethical infractions have occurred? It is intriguing to start an analysis before the apex (gorilla saves cat from tree), but often the early indicators of ethical rubrics in an individual don’t show up – or gain attention – until after pressure has been applied and the crisis point is reached.

All that aside, we are quite taken by your interest in malingering, which was the fifth topic in your list.

APPEL: My academic work focuses on the subject of people who feign medical or psychiatric illness, a subject that I find fascinating, but that most other people are not interested in. 

SCRY: What do you find fascinating about feigning illness?

APPEL:  Malingering appears to be a universal phenomenon in all societies.  Odysseus does it to avoid service in Troy and the Biblical David to avoid the wrath of King Saul.  At the same time, it comes in almost infinite varieties, as varied as human illness itself.  But detecting malingering is part public service, part game-like challenge.  It is one of the few opportunities for the modern physician to play Sherlock Holmes on a daily basis.

SCRY: Do you have a working theory on why the ethics of malingering is sidelined in your field? And we’re curious whether it has a history of being dismissed or centered depending on cultural needs. For example, malingering has been a consuming trope during slavery in the United States, and any time there has been a military draft.

APPEL:  The major current causes are economic ones:  No pharmaceutical company has an incentive to fund research on malingering, no investigator gets promoted for studying it and hospitals get paid just as much if they treat malingerers as if they treat real patients; sometimes they even save money.  Everybody comes out ahead—except the taxpayers and people with genuine illnesses.

SCRY: So you have an interest in sorting out the real from the passing. Those who are truly ill, and those who make illness a kind of drag performance. Do you think you are, as a professional, capable of knowing anyone’s psyche sufficiently to conduct that sorting process? So many human urges are a tangle of conscious, subconscious, and utterly unconscious drives.

APPEL:  There are definitely cases that straddle the line between malingering and factitious disorder, as well as patient who malinger some symptoms but are truly sick with others.  For instance, I have encountered patients with schizophrenia who are hearing disturbing voices, but lie and claim to be suicidal, because they fear the doctors won’t take them as seriously unless they appear to be a danger to themselves or others.  But many cases of malingering are very clear cut; once one discovers the outside motive, the entire story seems to write itself.

SCRY: Can you elaborate on how a malingerer is diagnosed? To me, the figure is a trickster one. I think of malingerers within Nazi-occupied Europe, who used it as a means to undermine the Reich without directly committing a crime of disloyalty. Or malingering in an exploitative worksite, or in any site/situation where rapid progress towards stated goals would advance the success rate of something objectionable to that individual.

In one example, someone is told to round up all the wolves for cattle companies and eliminate them. This person decides to drive slowly, forget to bring enough traps or poisons or weapons, and so forth. To the cattle rancher, this person is a malingerer and ethically abominable. To those who are attempting to reintroduce biodiversity, that person is heroic and engaging in ethics-based civil disobedience. Ethically admirable.

APPEL:  Malingering can be adaptive or maladaptive, ethical or unethical.  Prisoners-of-war who malinger in an effort to secure better rations are the quintessential example of ethical malingering.  Many children feign sickness to avoid school; sometimes romantic partners do so to avoid sex. 

There are two common ways to diagnose malingering: one is to ask the subject a series of questions that could be signs of illness and one that is not. So in psychiatry, I might ask a sequence that includes:  Do you hear voices?  Do you see visions?  Do you believe any of your relatives to be automobiles. The latter is not a symptom of any known mental illness, so the patient who says, Oh yes, Uncle Fred was a Buick is lying.  Similarly, I often administer games of memory in which someone with no memory should score random change (50%); if the subject scores significantly below chance or even 0%, it means they know they right answers and are intentionally choosing the wrong answers to appear impaired.  You’d be surprised how many malingerers fall for that trick.

SCRY: That’s an enlightening and surprising basic diagnostic process, and one of which I was totally unaware. I have PTSD and temporal lobe epilepsy, and I have found myself in the psych ER on multiple occasions. I was never asked questions like that – there was rather a sense of whether I was an addict (bad player) or an earnest type who needed to be diverted to either neurology triage or psych triage. It’s always seemed a toss of the coin where I ended up. I never faked any responses – since these are “legitimate” diagnoses, but I always sensed deep skepticism, and I wonder what diagnostics I missed while in an impaired state. Now I have a medic alert bracelet that sends me to neurology.

There is a spiritual aspect to distress, and one that can be one of the most sublime of the human condition: purity of existential survival. Legitimate distress can result in many kinds of violence – towards the self, often, in the case of suicide. But faking distress is honestly something I’ve never considered, and my first – perhaps primitive response – is to feel angry that anyone in a fully legitimate, self-aware state of full sanity would perform this. Because that’s a bit of a luxury, and disrespectful at bet. If I decide to engage my empathy, I question, is the faking of illness in itself an illness? Perhaps of sociopathy?

APPEL:  What exactly constitutes an illness is sociologically defined—as is how society chooses to address it.  We view alcoholism as a disease now, but we still punish drunk drivers.  Is pedophilia a disease?  No sane person, I assume, would choose to have sexual desire toward children, yet we tend to view such individuals as evil rather than sick.  So depending on one’s vantage point, malingering may be a form of antisocial behavior, and one might classify antisocial behavior and sociopathy, in turn, as pathology.

SCRY: You have written a great deal about malingerers in several of your novels. First of all, could you offer us a reading list of your works that you would like to be elevated? I am often frustrated that readers select my work by the algorithm of a search engine, rather than the texts that I feel are the cornerstones of my creative expression.

APPEL:   My favorite works include several of my short story collections (Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets, Einstein’s Beach House, Amazing Things Are Happening Here) and my ethics essays in Phoning Home and Who Says You’re Dead?  I will gladly send samples of my work for free in PDF to anyone who requests them via email to jacobmappel @ gmail dot com

SCRY: Now we have a good reading list. So, the second question. As writers, we live with our characters in a very intimate manner, in most instances. What role does malingering have in your literary work? As characters? As devices? As sites for exploration? Or…

APPEL:  Malingering plays a role in my novel, Millard Salter’s Last Day.  Several of my story collections deal with dishonesty in medicine and healthcare more broadly, including those in Einstein’s Beach House.  My thriller, Mask of Sanity, is about sociopathy. 

SCRY: As we delve into malingering, you question how society “should or could address the problem — which is probably the most expensive problem in the country that nobody is talking about.” I ask whether you have proposed strategies and tactics for this. But what overshadows that is the word “expensive.”

This is an n-dimensional matrix of questions for you. I’m intrigued that you cite fiscal impact as a core detriment of harboring malingerers. I don’t dispute the point – it’s critical to the analysis. Why do you privilege economic impact? Is there an impact cluster? Is it hierarchical? For instance, malingering can impact authority/power, humanitarian/safety (someone dies because the EMT decides to clean his ears before administering triage care), and dozens of other factors.

APPEL:  Healthcare dollars are finite. I think it’s important to remember that each malingering patient we treat or hospitalize is money not spent of a real patient, dollars not devoted to someone’s mammogram or flu shot.  And often the goals of the malingerers could be addressed much more cheaply as well.  Why admit a patient to the hospital for $4000 a night when you can rent them a room at a luxury hotel for 10% of that?

SCRY: I initially interpreted your selection process as somewhat more sinister. But now I understand that eliminating hustlers and con artists is a form of human rights application. What a bitter task falls to the triage agent. Do you feel any concern, as a diagnostician, that you have made serious errors when you have approved or denied service?

APPEL:  We always give patients the benefit of the doubt.  If I’m sure you’re malingering but I can’t prove it, I still provide care.  Only when I can prove fairly convincingly that a patient is malingering (I know the motive, have evidence of lying, often a previous history of malingering, implausible symptoms, etc.) do I confront them.  Many malingerers then confess, which makes discharging them much easier…

SCRY:  You told SCRY about your curiosity surrounding subjectively, what does it feel like to be a malingerer?

APPEL:   Malingerers, like real patients, come in all shapes and sizes.  Many are desperate—but in my thinking, there is a difference between being desperate for a meal or a place to sleep and being desperate to avoid one’s loan shark or child support payments or armed robbery trial. Every malingerer has a story to tell; unfortunately, many doctors never dig deep enough to reach the real story.

SCRY: Intriguing. Yes. There is a predatory, quite abusive element to those examples. Within my professional specialization in human rights work, outsiders can often see me as callous in my assessment of a case. But there are red flags that are probably only visible to me, and those indicate a degree of pathology, a wolf trying to seem a sheep.

APPEL:  When I started out in psychiatry, I was very hesitant to diagnose malingering and was fooled many times.  Over the years, it becomes second nature—just like any other skillset.  I often can sense whether they patient is feigning long before I establish this with empirical evidence. 

SCRY: Have there been assessment analyses of identified malingerers? Is there a diagnostic taxonomy of malingerers? Offering “Quintan” as a subject, she was in 2008 accurately accused of malingering on preparing an annual report for a large human rights nonprofit.

The reason “Quintan” cited for malingering was that gathering core data for the annual report involved close, extended interaction with a fellow vice president who was a rampant sexual harasser. Laziness was not a factor – the root source of the malingering dwelt in the amygdala “freeze” instinct. Rather than confront the ethical violations by a predatory colleague (fight), or quit the job (flee), or just try to make nice (faun), malingering was a primitive but moderately effective survival tactic.

As for what it felt like, “Quintan” felt anxiety, fear, joy, guilt, shame, and rage as primary emotions. It’s important to note that “Quintan’s” freeze response was only partly conscious. It was not until they were accused of malingering and threatened with disciplinary action that the subconscious or unconscious mind conveyed to the conscious mind “hey, I’m not doing this report because I don’t want to be assaulted and then have to deal with the human resources repercussions and safety issues of retaliation.”

APPEL:  There are many different technical classification schemes, and I have published academic work on the subject, but I prefer a much simpler one in practice.  There are “soft” malingerers who represent failures of the social service system or some other duty that we have to our fellow human beings, and there are “hard” malingerers who feign illness for a nefarious purpose, such as their legal obligations or to steal equipment from the hospital.   For the former, we should have compassion—although we should not provide unnecessary medical care.  The latter are basically engaged in stealing from the sick and should be treated accordingly.

SCRY: I have another subjective question about feelings, while we’re on the wire. I’ll return to your comment about malingering and sexual or intimate relationships. For example, a case study in which a spouse neglects celebrating the partner’s birthday. The assumption may be that this spouse was a simple case of malingering – too lazy, disorganized, selfish, and inconsiderate to go to the effort to remember something of value. But after a decade, the spouse confesses to a therapist that it was an intentional act of harm and retribution. The malingering spouse had been quite content to take shelter under the umbrella of “malingering” rather than express uncomfortable feelings. The question for you is, this kind of everyday malingering can either be questioned or accepted. Which do you recommend?

APPEL: The key to relationships is to approach each set of facts individually.  Each human dyad is unique.  Sometimes, questioning will be in order.  Other times, the circumstances will call for acceptance.  That is the “art” in the art and science of medicine.

SCRY: Would a viable strategy for reducing malingering in our society be a mass education campaign about how to navigate complex emotion without being driven by the more primitive survival instincts of the amygdala? In other words, to move society towards a healthier toolkit for managing uncomfortable emotions?

APPEL:   The best solution would be to offer people the resources they need (food, shelter, human connection) outside the medical system.

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SCRY: Indeed. Moving backwards, let’s murmurate a bit about your fourth preoccupation: social disconnection.

APPEL: We are increasingly an alienated society afflicted with an epidemic of loneliness, a culture that bowls alone, so to speak, and then brands the consequences of that disconnection to be mental illness.  As a psychiatrist who writes about mental health in both fiction and nonfiction, I am distressed at how we have created such structures and continue to perpetuate them, even though they render many people miserable and benefit almost no one.  

SCRY: The degree of human misery is limitless, and perhaps its complexity and scope is only visible to first responders such as yourself, myself, and others who inhabit the field of responding to abject distress.

I will approach this by beginning at the end – as I mentioned, the very best place to start, contrary to Fraulein Maria in The Sound of Music, who advocates that starting at the very beginning is the very best place to start. She sings this because the Von Trapp children are confused by the complexity of learning to sing, and so they refuse to sing at all until she simplifies the process.

I’ve always been intrigued by Julie Andrews’ body language in this scene – the children are frozen and unresponsive, she tosses up her hands in a gesture of frustration and cannot conceal a sigh of disappointment. Fine, the body language suggests, this won’t be as fun for me, but let’s just get things really simple for you kids. Upon saying, Doe, A Deer, A Female Deer, the Austrian county gentry become comfortable, and everyone sings together. Community! An end to the bilateral alienation!

APPEL:  If only the world were like a Rogers & Hammerstein musical!

SCRY: Rogers & Hammerstein are rather sinister figures in my opinion. I think they are more than a bit reductivist, and very fertile mass graves for naïve performances of simplified ethics. So to restate the question without musical theater analogies, do you think the complexity of human connection is simply too overwhelming and nuanced and discomforting than most people can navigate?

APPEL:   Rogers and Hammerstein can indeed prove sinister.  The plot of “Oklahoma!,” for instance, rest upon mocking a mentally ill farmhand.  As for human connecting, I think the vast majority of people desire to connect and have the capacity to do so.  Often what they lack is simply the environment to fulfill these goals.

SCRY: Could social alienation and loneliness be a factor of disconnection caused by being overwhelmed by how to socialize? How to locate and cohabit complex sites? Perhaps it is a mental health problem – a lack in our society to administer basic effective training in simple social interactions that are mutually rewarding. I never talked to any white people when I grew up in the South because I was afraid they were in the Klan. Perhaps if we had all had a picnic…if we all just learned to get along…wait, that’s a joke. Sort of. In something of an aside, my disconnection was absolutely considered a mental illness. In fact, I was trying to avoid being harmed.

Later, when my psychiatrist forced me to socialize, I was beaten up. I found this to be most unfair. When I expressed the associated feelings, I was given a prescription for Risperdal. And the Klan boys who beat me up went out for hamburgers or something fun like that.  

APPEL:  I can’t argue with the suggestion that people should learn how to socialize and connect better.  But I fear the deeper problem is structural:  we have systematically eliminated the institutions that help people connect and the pathways for connection.  The urban block of neighbors who know each other, the homogenous church or synagogue, the job that is a lifetime guarantee, the village pump.  Of course, there were downsides to these institutions as well.  In the shtetl, my family had lots of connection, but the cost was rigid social order and xenophobia.  I would like to think there could be a path toward a healthy balance.

SCRY: The downsides were and are often fatal for social outliers. I longed to join a kibbutz when I was a child, but after living in a dormitory and in the queer ghetto of Sydney, Australia, I became a skeptic of intentional communities. I am interested in movements like The Nap Ministry, that simply provides sites for people to nap in public spaces. Is it possible to create sites for interaction in which people can commune without cohesiveness? That was specifically my intention in creating this magazine. As a site for substantive interaction without an overarching policed ideology.

As artists, our works can form these sites. I had an exhibition in the Berlin Jewish Museum where, I was told, there was an unprecedented number of repeat visitors. When the docents asked return visitors why they kept coming back, the answer was that it served as a site for them to think about the topic of the exhibition with others who were also preoccupied by the subject. In collaboration with the architects and designers, had created – with intention – an exhibit with softer lighting, and extra benches, and chair clusters. I think books can work that way, yet we often read in isolation.

You write plays, you write books, and you are a tangible figure in an emergency room. All of these are potential sites for communion.

APPEL:  Yes, I confess I am probably more dependent on human connection than most.  Literature and theater are two powerful ways to connect with people, both as a creator and as reader or spectator.  Many of my stories and plays, in fact, are about the struggle for connection.

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SCRY: Your third fascination is “incorruptible people” which is very high up on my list of fascinations so here it is our hinge point in a set of five.

APPEL:  There is good evidence at a certain subset of people simply cannot be compelled, no matter how strong the duress, into violating their core principles. For instance, in the famed Milgram experiment, some participants backed out at the onset. This is also a theme of many major works of fiction. We spend lots of time studying the moral transgressors, but much less figuring out what makes incorruptible people incorruptible.

SCRY: Could you murmurate a bit about the Milgram experiment?

APPEL:  I imagine many of your readers are familiar with the Milgram experiment. Yet the take home messages is generally that “people follow orders”; I think the take-home message is the opposite. A subject of people don’t follow orders if they view them as unethical.  If we could figure out who those people are, and why, that would be a major step toward improving life for all of us.

SCRY: I believe the data is there, but it is not easily accessible to most people. The military has long made this a priority. There is a large body of classified data from the psych experiments of ethics conducted upon concentration camp prisoners by psychiatrists from the Charité Hospital in Berlin.

APPEL: I will trust you on the specifics.  More generally, I have no doubt that there is much more psychological data in the world that the average person—myself included—as access to. 

SCRY: You mention duress. It’s hardly worth advocating for anyone’s character until one has witnessed their behavior during distress. How strong is the duress? In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, there is the scale of Subjective Units of Distress (0-100) paired with the Scale of Distress Tolerance (0-100). If someone had a 90 sense of distress, and a 95 of distress tolerance, they would be able to withstand most pressures. But the two scales work in concert. And that model is one in which distress tolerance is a trained tool. Similar to SERE training for Special Services or Special Forces training.

You may recall a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O’Toole is bored as a junior analyst in Cairo and passes the time extinguishing matches between his thumb and forefinger. A rather jolly fellow British operative enters the room and tries the same thing, yells, and says something like, Golly, Larry, Doesn’t That Hurt? To which Lawrence/O’Toole – sanguine and desultory – says, Of Course It Hurts. The Trick Is Not To Mind.

APPEL:  Most people have a breaking point, but history is populated with those who do not.  Joan of Arc.  Nathan Hale.  The early Christian Martyrs.  How much duress would break the majority of people has not been studied.  It’s hard to imagine an IRB approving a controlled trial.

SCRY: Again, I invoke the research conducted by the Charité Hospital – later declared war crimes, but by the standards of the Nazi psychiatrists, it was perfectly reasonable scientifically sound research. And it has been studied, but the results are considered classified material to civilians.

APPEL:  I fear one doesn’t have to go to Germany to discover unsettling research that investigators believed to be ethical. I highly recommend Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid for those who would like a powerful primer.

SCRY: Do you have working theories on what makes incorruptible people incorruptible? Or is all that locked away in the classified files at Fort Bragg and Nuremberg and the back offices of Peron, Pinochet, and Salazar. Joking. Sort of. Not really.

APPEL:  The answer is that nobody knows. 

SCRY: I just can’t help but disagree with you there.

APPEL: Presumably some combination of genetics and upbringing, but precisely which combination of gene and what particular formative experiences remain unclear.

SCRY: A short story and performance work of mine published in Tin House surrounds the case of Gerhart Kretchmar, an infant whose parents decided to have a Nazi doctor inject a fatal overdose due to the infant’s physical and developmental disabilities. There was extensive research and discussion within the eugenicists of that era – conversations that continue today – about whether those were parents who were corrupted by the purity ideals of the Third Reich, or whether the parents were incorruptible in their belief in compassionate euthanasia.

As someone who would have, as a child with epilepsy, been executed under Aktion T4, I have little capacity for objectivity on this. My immediate thoughts are that I would on the whole prefer to retain the agency for assisted suicide later on, if I decided my life was unworthy of life, rather than surrender that unilateral authority to others.

APPEL:  Assisted suicide or aid in dying is a valuable tool that offers comfort to many terminally-ill patients as a last resort, whether or not they use it.  Pediatric euthanasia is a distinctive phenomenon. 

I have been a strong defender of the Groningen Protocol, a Dutch policy that permits such terminations in extreme cases.  But these cases should be limited to those infants and young children who are so sick that they have no prospect of reaching adulthood to make their own decisions and will suffer terribly in the days or weeks they have remaining.  No mainstream ethicist today would ever endorse euthanizing a child with epilepsy.   

SCRY: I think that in certain cultures, mainstream ethicists would. I had a consultation regarding a potential pregnancy, and the Swiss gynecologist as explicit in her rage at me even possibly being pregnant, because it was not my right to introduce a child with epilepsy into society.

This has become something of a countdown, which was absolutely not my intention. Therefore, instead of moving to your second obsession, let’s skip to your first and then backtrack.

APPEL:  You are the boss.  I just work here.

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SCRY: Your first sacrificial lamb on the altar of SCRY was scientific fraud.

APPEL:  Much attention has been paid recently to the reproducibility crisis in science and scientific fraud, but nobody seems to be asking what about our scientific culture creates the environment for this to occur. 

SCRY: Yes. And you also pondered, “has science always been afflicted with this level of fraud or did something change?”   I have more than a few toes in research science, and was at a physics conference as a mole and overheard a few conversations. I pressed the participants on their theories, and one of them emailed me a rather satisfyingly imposing link-list to studies that said much of the fraud in US-based scientific research is because “American science” has been corrupted over time by the influx of scientists – especially junior scientists – from Communist, Nazi, and Authoritarian regimes in which there was no training about separating “politics” and “ideology” from “the truth” or “data.” And that furthermore, these ethically-untethered refugees in the field of science were so frightened of negative repercussions that they felt faking results to survive was a necessary evil, and perhaps not evil at all.

I offer no commentary here, but ask for yours. 

APPEL:   I am doubtful of that theory.  There certainly have been scientists of all different authoritarian persuasions in our laboratories over the years, but never the majority.  And the major figures in these scandals from Bettelheim to Rosenhan tended to be anti-authoritarian in their outlooks.  I fear the driving force is not ideology, but laziness and greed.  Not sure which is worse.

SCRY: You also wondered whether it is “a selection effect or a treatment effect (ie. are we attracting the wrong people to science or are we doing something to make them go awry.)” The studies suggested that authoritarian regimes with state-sponsored scientific programs probably argues that it’s a treatment effect. I think of the mass arrests at the Physics Institute in Moscow this autumn. For undisclosed reasons, the intelligence agencies of Russia decided to both eliminate and intimidate a group of physicists.

Presuming they are freed, it may well be possible that they would attempt to emigrate or seek asylum outside of Russia. They might be very attractive in terms of other nations who would have the opportunity to select them. This suggests a selection effect – a scientific community in a different nation might find their skills enticing, but be comprehensively unprepared for complex PTSD, trauma-rooted behaviors, and other quite human phenomena in these scientists that could impact the research.  

APPEL:  That suggests a treatment affect in that particular case.  But I think the overall verdict remains unclear.

SCRY: You return often to a certain opacity, and I question whether the opacity is by social design. Yet – moving on. You also asked how we can “change the culture of science to reduce the desire to cheat?” Like malingering, is there a diagnostic model to pull apart the taxonomies within the broadly-labeled term, “cheat”?

Is cheating a rather clear cut, condemnable urge, or is there also an underlying or adjacent system of survival urges that make cheating “more bad” or “less bad.”

APPEL:  I don’t know if this has been studied, but my guess is there are people who set out to commit fraud and people who start off merely cutting corners and soon find themselves sliding down a slippery slope.  I am reminded of the wisdom that one cannot lie to one’s spouse only once; similarly, fraud begets more fraud.

SCRY: Now we get to the juicy stuff – discipline and punishment. You asked, “What can we do to fix this beyond simply more detection and punitive measures?” One theory might be a series of mandatory certification trainings designed to weed out narcissists and so-called sociopaths, and simply unify the workers at all levels of the scientific community into a single official ideology – a code of conduct. Rules of engagement. Ethics courses are taught in nearly every doctoral program, but I wonder about that curriculum and methodology. It certainly isn’t working.

APPEL:  Our system is not working in this regard.  It may even be counterproductive, weeding out the wheat and promoting the chaff.  What is needed now is some deep soul searching…..

SCRY: Deep soul searching does not typically receive research funding sufficient to satisfy a tenure committee. Perhaps this should change. I digress. But I am passionate about soul searching being a prioritized site, which it is not. Taking time for grief, for ethical conundrums, for existential perplexities is an indicator of social malfunction, rather than a crucial journey of the human condition.

I’m going to launch DOD, DARPA, DTRA (military income streams) and corporate income streams into the conversation as perhaps having a distortion effect on research. I’ll keep it easy by offering climate change research sponsored by non-renewable energy conglomerates. Violence and aggression research supported by the NRA. Gender-specific healthcare research sponsored by religious ideologies inside charitable foundation. Is the money not clean enough? Does it contaminate the data?

APPEL:   I think it’s certainly true that various forces bias research.  That being said, I think the influence on the content of studies is much less of a problem than the influence upon which topics are studied in the first place.  The organizations and entities you mention help set the agenda.  That is where their true power lies.

SCRY: Agency is not, therefore, driven by a legitimate needs assessment, but rather warped by tertiary agendae.

APPEL:  In many instances.  Sometime with the best of intentions, other times less so.  All research reflects the agenda of a series of players – the investigator, the funding entity, etc.  Even a needs assessment is the product of biased perspectives.   I fear there are no easy solutions here.

(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)

SCRY: Our climax is your second point. That’s sufficiently byzantine to satisfy my dislike for predictable structure. Your second overlooked obsession is, as you say, “the boundary between sanity and madness.”

APPEL:  I am always struck by how close we all walk to the edge, a theme in my fiction, and how only a small push — a minor setback — can topple a person down a mountainside into a state of irrationality or desperation.  I deal with this every day in my work in the psychiatric emergency room and it provides the basic for a number of my stories including the most well-known, La Tristesse des Herissons, about a man driven to the brink of madness by a depressed hedgehog.

SCRY: That’s eerie, because one of the childhood anecdotes I pull out in dull moments is the psychological counseling I had because our neighbors mistook my pet hedgehog for a pest, shot it, froze it, and later served it to me in a stew while my mother was hospitalized. Starving due to my father’s ability to only reconstitute dehydrated mashed potatoes from the navy surplus store, I gobbled it up before I was told the source of meat. Now I’m having flashbacks, and I can’t recall our larger point. Let me gather myself. Okay. How only a small push can topple a person into an impaired state of being.

APPEL:  We are all very vulnerable. That is the human condition.

SCRY: Yet we can push others. I was a visiting professor in ethics at Yeshiva University, and a topic of several workshops was a project I made (performance, essay, poem, photographic series) about the women who were held prisoner in the rape brothels of concentration camps. The interrogating faculty posited that those women should have been urged to commit suicide rather than be defiled. To me, that represents a series of nested pushes over the edge. Both as a sexual assault survivor, and as someone who knew some of these female survivors personally during my work with them – it felt callous that a theoretical ethicist could tell me – and them – that they should have made the superior ethical choice of suicide.

APPEL:  Yes, I don’t see how anyone can reasonably urge such a choice upon others under such circumstances.  At the same time, I would certainly not judge these women if they did choose to take their own lives.  Some situations are so horrific that they justify a wide range of human response.

SCRY: Can you murmurate a bit about this hedgehog story of yours, and others that surround this vulnerability to leaping or being pushed off into the typically fatal abyss?

APPEL:  I figured you would ask about the hedgehog story (La Tristesse des Herissons).  Almost everybody does.

SCRY: Scry is indeed almost everybody. Almost. Here, we consider the body a rhizome. But please, do carry on.

APPEL:  It is one of a number of my stories in which characters operate on the brink of chaos.  My favorite of them is “The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street” in which a middle-aged lawyer is driven to the edge by his widowed mother’s insistence upon sunbathing in her yard without a shirt. 

SCRY: As lured as I am by the politics of public breast exposure, I will keep focused. What drew you to psych triage in a hospital setting?

APPEL:  I love my job.  It’s fascinating and I meet extremely interesting people with amazing stories.  The frustrating part is that, because I’m a psychiatrist, I can’t share their stories.

SCRY: What keeps you there? Could you walk away without survivor guilt?

APPEL:  They keep the doors locked.  It’s hard to escape. 

SCRY: That is so true. I have always been mesmerized by the double paned glass in between which is a venetian blind – this is common in psych units. And so often, I found dead flies in between the layers of glass. It’s quite confusing.

I was psych hospitalized as a teenager for PTSD after a sexual assault. The unit was really quite helpful, and kind, and helpful, and I was not in a hurry to leave. This is perhaps rather rare. But I did want to see if I could escape the locked ward and stole the key to the elevator that released access to the lobby. I called the unit from the lobby, quite pleased with myself, but requesting that they take me back. I just wanted to prove to everyone that I could leave whenever I wanted, and was there by choice. Could you leave if you wanted?

APPEL:   In the short term, I could manage to leave the locked unit.  But just like you, I’d be back sooner or later.  I think I’m wedded forever to the psychiatric ER, for better or worse,

SCRY: Do we truly all walk that close to the edge? Are we all equal in that regard?

APPEL:  Sort of like Orwell’s animals in Animal Farm, we all walk equally close to the edge, and yet some of us walk closer than others.

SCRY: Ad infinitum, fellow traveler.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jacob Appel’s first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, won the 2012 Dundee International Book Award and was published by Cargo.  His short story collection, Scouting for the Reaper, won the 2012 Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2014.  His essay collection, Phoning Home (University of South Carolina Press, 2015) won the Eric Hoffer Book Award.  Other recent volumes include Einstein’s Beach House (Butler University/Pressgang, 2014), Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets (Black Lawrence, 2015), The Magic Laundry (Snake Nation, 2015), Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana (Black Lawrence, 2016), The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street (Augsburg College/Howling Bird, 2016), The Mask of Sanity (Permanent Press, 2017), Millard Salter’s Last Day (Simon & Schuster, 2017), The Liar’s Asylum (Black Lawrence, 2017), The Amazing Mr. Morality (Vandalia/West Virginia University, 2018) and Amazing Things Are Happening Here (Black Lawrence, 2019).  Four of these collections received starred reviews from Kirkus.  Both Scouting for the Reaper and Miracles and Conundrums were on Small Press Distribution’s best seller list for over a year.  A volume of ethics dilemmas for laypeople, Who Says You’re Dead?,  is forthcoming with Algonquin.

Jacob’s short fiction has appeared in more than two hundred literary journals including Agni, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner,  Southwest Review, Subtropics, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and West Branch.  His prose has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Prize, the North American Review’s Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Missouri Review’s Editor’s Prize, the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, the Briar Cliff Review’s Short Fiction Prize, the Salem College Center for Women Writers’ Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, the Dana Award, the H. E. Francis Prize, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award for Fiction, an Elizabeth George Fellowship, a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writers Grant, residencies at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center, and the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award on four separate occasions.  He has been awarded first prize in the annual William Faulkner-William Wisdom competition in four distinct categories—essay, short story, novella and novel—making him the only author ever to achieve such honors.  His writing has been short-listed for the O. Henry Award (2001), Best American Short Stories (2007, 2008, 2013), Best American Nonrequired Reading (2007, 2008), Best American Mystery Stories (2009, 2013), Best American Essays (2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017), and the Pushcart Prize anthology (2005, 2006, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019).  Jacob’s stage plays have been performed at New York’s Theatre Row, Manhattan Repertory Theatre, Adrienne Theatre (Philadelphia), Detroit Repertory Theatre, Heller Theater (Tulsa), Curtain Players (Columbus), Epilogue Players (Indianapolis), Open State Theatre (Pittsburgh), Intentional Theatre (New London), Little Theatre of Alexandria and elsewhere.

He serves on the medical school’s admissions committee and the hospital’s institutional review board.  In 2018, he was appointed Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry.  Prior to joining the faculty at Mount Sinai, Jacob taught most recently at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City, and at Yeshiva College, where he was the writer-in-residence.  He was honored with Brown’s Undergraduate Council of Students Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003.   He formerly held academic appointments at Pace University, Hunter College, William Paterson University, Manhattan College, Columbia University and New York University.  Jacob holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown, an M.S. in bioethics from Albany Medical College, an M.A. and an M.Phil. from Columbia, an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. from N.Y.U. and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.  He also publishes in the field of bioethics and contributes regularly to such publications as the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the Hastings Center Report and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.  His essays on the nexus of law and medicine have appeared in The New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Detroit Free Press, Orlando Sentinel, The Providence Journal and many regional newspapers.

The post MURMURATION WITH JACOB APPEL: Bioethics of Passing, Hedgehogs, and Buicks in the Psychiatric Emergency Rooms of America appeared first on Scry Magazine.

I first met Mickenberg when we were enjoying my bourbon flask over smokes near the grave of Katrina Trask at Yaddo, although we weren’t at the time aware that we were near the gravesite, or that our paths would continue to cross for centuries to come. I remember it was around four am, we were both relatively intoxicated with what was happening to our brains within the sinister October beauty of no moon and the incessant spectre of Sylvia Plath and Patricia Highsmith, whose desks and spirits were nearby, as replete with manic energy as ourselves. We had arrived to a cadre of all women – perhaps there were one or two men there, but not within of the witches’ circle that began to form at that time. We were possessed and elated, elated by our own intellectual independence and the emerging surprises in our respective projects – her screenplay Egg, and my book The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far.

Perhaps most of all we bonded over the spirits of the thwarted women who preceded us at Yaddo – an artist residency sacred to us both for its championship of independent and often outcast women of art, many of whose blood and tears were shed at Yaddo for the same reason as ours: the alchemy of an experience of autonomy and freedom, of unfetteredness, of what it means to be released from domestic obligations, existential censorship, and the agency to create without restriction.

Shortly thereafter, we became neighbors in the West Village by coincidence mixed with destiny, and have intersected and bisected at other late night fireworks displays along the Hudson River pansexual commerce park and strange gatherings of wildlings that were more wormholes into a different era of the West Village when it was a place of chaos and the sublime than the capitalist consumer styxian hellscape that is the manhattan artist cocktail party.

Mickenberg is a gift to humanity, and I hope if the craft that delivered her to this planet ever retrieves her, it takes me too.

(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)

WIKSWO: You have expressed some preoccupation with starting an Emotional Labor Movement. What are the strategies and tactics involved in forming that, and what results do you envision?

MICKENBERG: I don’t remember where I first read about the term Emotional Labor, but this Guardian article has a good explanation.

The term was a revelation to me. Suddenly I felt the weight of it on me. I saw how I was compensating for other people and detracting from my own work as a result.

I felt the full weight of the underappreciated, expected, uncompensated and devalued work our mothers and foremothers still do: being more human and creating a kinder, gentler world, but also compensating for other people, stopping them from being fully human, and depriving the world of what we all could be instead.

It’s time we took a look at the value emotion has for society, and for us, and at the way we choose to allocate our resources.

An Emotional Labor Movement begins by expanding the definition of Emotional Labor in dictionaries and on Wikipedia.

WIKSWO: What comes next?

MICKENBERG: Next, is a wildcat strike, a month-long cleanse where we surrender our emotional labor.

Because we need to have a re-set.

The Emotional Labor Movement demands that we stop doing things for other people and see what happens if we stop worrying and stop compensating and stop answering for people we care about and let them do it themselves.

Some of the slogans from the ELM are:

QUIT COMPENSATING.

LET THEM WORRY ABOUT IT.

LET PEOPLE WRITE THEIR OWN THANK YOU NOTES.

JUST DON’T DO IT.

WIKSWO: Why step off the sidewalk for a white lady in Biloxi when you have fought for your country and lost loved ones in the trenches of Germany? Why do it? Why ever step off that sidewalk again? Because someone is there with a rope waiting for your neck, that’s why. So as long as there are folx who benefit from the emotional labor of others, there will be violence from them when that supply chain is interrupted.

MICKENBERG: In trying to assign value to emotional labor, do you think we need to consider how it feels to be the recipient of emotional labor?

WIKSWO: Sure. But most people who give emotional labor don’t receive it. If we consider the economic model of emotional labor, it is a sweatshop, it is a form of forced labor, it is a form of slavery. We traffick in unpaid emotional laborers, and they are chopped up and left in a dumpster when they stop being useful. I think there’s usually contempt and anger and betrayal when the slaves rebel.

How does it feel to be the recipient of emotional labor? FAN FUCKING TASTIC. But why notice. It’s so nice to be comfortable as the recipient of emotional labor in your Forever 21 clothes with the servant fanning away the flies with a clutch of ostrich feathers. Are there feelings there? Yes. Typically entitlement. Typically ugly feelings.

So maybe I’ll change my mind and say, yes, let those who are the emotional labor workers take some time to seriously ponder the feelings of the recipients of emotional labor. I’m sure it would be radicalizing. Maybe there’s no going back unless there is equity. And i don’t mean equality, but equity. Justice, parity, remuneration, appreciation, compensation, and so forth.

MICKENBERG: Women are conditioned to expect emotional labor from other women and to not expect it from men. We see it as part of being a good person. It’s hard for us to let it go and feel good. It is valuable to us.

WIKSWO: One of the advantages of being queer at a young age is that I was able to see how much higher my standards were for women, and much more lax they were for men. It really changed me. Now economic systems of emotional labor makes me even more angry. I refuse to give it away as though it’s my duty because of my gender identity. That’s a contract I never signed. But I keep finding myself sliding into it, or facing tremendous anger from others when I try to make my own way in that economy. I’m deemed abrasive for not giving it away for free. I am happy to give kindness. But giving away serious emotional labor is killing me. And many others, of all genders.

MICKENBERG: But we can’t give it freely anymore, or enjoy the benefits it should give us, without recognition, awareness and re-evaluation of the role it plays in our lives, the demands it puts on our time and its value to us.

Giving up our emotional labor, even temporarily, will change us:

We might stop doing things that don’t give us pleasure.

We might stop expecting anyone to do emotional labor on behalf of others.

We might appreciate the work generations of emotional laborers have done, and still do, to make the world a livable place, to make our relationships deeper, our families closer, to clarify and sustain the higher purposes of our decisions.

We also might find that we are doing emotional labor to compensate for the fact that we are not doing the work we really want to do: That we’re using it to feed our egos, to avoid shame by our peers, to provide us with a sense of self when, by surrendering some of this energy, we could serve the world in greater ways that could make us all happier in the process.

We might let others succeed at practicing it more instead of criticizing their efforts or becoming jealous of their treading on our territory. Maybe we’ll step back and let them become more whole.

And maybe we’ll reclaim our emotional labor as something valuable that we allocate to the most deserving, dire or reciprocal or rewarding situations.

The results I envision from the ELM are self-respect, gratitude, empathy and honesty.

I envision workplaces and industries that value emotional labor and reward it.

I see a new crop of jobs that take positive contribution to the world as a primary driver so that people can love their work wholly and so that all labor is seen and valued and is not separate from the world of caring.

I envision an enormous sense of relief from everyone. From those unburdened by expectation, and from those who now have the space to take up the mantle of caring now that someone else isn’t doing that on their behalf.

Even more important are the results I can’t envision.

Women have been burdened by so many things, for so long, that every time I see another woman succeeding, it makes me wildly emotional.

I can’t help but think of all of the lost stories and projects and ideas and discoveries and inventions and political change that have been lost to us all because women picked up the slack and made it easier for men to focus.

The Emotional Labor Movement should result in the importance of feeling, rather than productivity, as the central driver of being human.

WIKSWO: In an Emotional Labor Movement, what would be the organizing principles and methods?

 MICKENBERG: Its organizing principles are:

1. Just let them do it.
2. Stop fighting the patriarchy! Start appreciating the matriarchy!
3. And Maxine Waters’ brilliant: Reclaiming My Time.

We need to just let them do it. So we can focus on what we want to do and what we’re capable of doing that has never been done before; not what we feel we need to do or should do or are expected to do.

We need to raise the bar for ourselves about what makes us feel good – so we can do for others on a much greater scale than being thoughtful.

We have to stop this hazing process of expecting girls, or other women, to do the things that seem expected of us. We need to stop resenting them when they don’t do them. We have to see their resistance as the resistance.

We need to acknowledge the Emotional Labor that’s given us this opportunity by appreciating the matriarchy.

One ELM project I’m starting is called IN HER HAND. It’s a crowd-sourced installation that collects our mothers’ handwritten cards, signed by them, on behalf of others, in the graceful cursive of their day.

We need to value emotional labor equally in everyone and reward it with gratitude and respect for it, rather than meeting it with ever more expectation.

Women are great protectors. We need to also be great protectors of our time.

Because its value has only just started to be understood, especially by us.

WIKSWO: Are there any emotions that you feel would quickly gain primacy in the ELM? 

I think the emotions of the movement will be anger, gratitude, longing, and happiness.

First, anger at injustice and at the devaluation of sensitivity and caring.

Then a flood of gratitude and respect for emotional laborers.

Next will come a longing, by all of us, for a more feeling and compassionate society.

Last, will come a wave of powerful intuition, honesty, liberation of thought, individualism, fulfilled potential and a model for happiness that is a well-rounded external and internal life for everyone.

WIKSWO: And likewise, which emotions do you envision as being difficult to organize around?

MICKENBERG: I think the emotion that’s hardest to organize around is guilt.

WIKSWO: My mother says I was born without the capacity for guilt. She was a preacher. I’m a heretic Chassidic Sikh. I don’t know if I feel guilt, but the emotion that is hardest to organize around is a feeling of ethical and moral sanctity, and the difficulty in assessing whether or not one is adhering to one’s own moral code. I feel a responsibility to do emotional labor for certain people, certain communities, in certain circumstances. I have had to create my own code over time of when I will and will not labor, and for whom, and when and why. It’s very complicated. My mother may be right. I may not be cursed with guilt, just with ideosyncratic morals. (I always misspell ideosyncratic out of loyalty to my brother because that’s how he lost the National Spelling Bee in the 1980s. I’ve always found policing spelling to be very objectionable, and this is my conscientious objection).

MICKENBERG: What’s the difference between feeling someone’s emotional labor and someone’s emotion?

WIKSWO: Communion, equity, empathy, humility, gratitude, and awareness of self-ish-ness mean that you are feeling someone’s emotional labor. Feeling someone’s emotion means that you are closely searching through your database of experienced or imagined emotions to find one that best approximates that of what you presume someone else is experiencing or imagining.

Sharing someone’s emotion is perhaps the most powerful shamatic or mystical experience there is. And that is a blending of selves, rather than a system of currency or exchange. It’s divine union.

MICKENBERG: It’s easy to get angry and say we’ll stop caring. To say we want to just throw in the towel. But then it’s in our nature to wash that towel and fold it and to rub each other’s shining wet hair, and to wrap each other up and build fires for each other and watch each other’s cheeks get warm in the light.

We need these pleasures of making each other happy and safe and loved. We all need to love and be loved. We need to acknowledge that desire exists in all of us.

That’s the outcome that matters most – and should in any movement – to liberate our loving natures.

WIKSWO: Shedding is something that has emerged as a theme in your work and also in your life, which is its own work. I have an enormous collection of snake skins, shedded, and a tattoo of a shedded snake skin on my right hand. What is the underlying impetus for shedding? 

MICKENBERG: Shedding is an act of necessary growth.

Survival. That’s the impetus for it.

WIKSWO: Is it worthwhile to retain that which has been shed, or to leave it behind?

MICKENBERG: Snakes leave their skins behind. Creatures with exoskeletons leave them behind when their protection doesn’t serve them anymore.

In a way, it’s arrogant to think of what we’ve shed as being our cast-off, our property, our responsibility, or ours in any way.

It’s not fully letting it go. It’s drawing from it without giving it nourishment in return.

Shedding is where you and something diverge. It is not part of you any more than anything else in the universe is. It has freedom from you now.

I love sheds. I like the stuff that’s in sheds. Marigold seeds and nails in coffee cans. I like the light that comes through the cracks and the shelter from the wind and the industriousness you feel in a shed, alone, fixing things, growing things, building things.

I admire the jazz practice of woodshedding: secluding yourself and focusing and emerging more masterful as a result.

WIKSWO: We are both passionate about tumbleweeds, which are the desert shedding itself. The tumbleweeds are typically totally dry by the early spring, and break off at the roots leaving the roots to regrow another tumbleweed for the coming season. I usually sleep under tumbleweeds…well, I always sleep under tumbleweeds. Here in New Mexico, they are a hazard on the road because despite their apparent fragility, they can actually pierce key elements of a driveshaft, which is why my 1982 automobile’s wheel broke off while I was driving last month. To me, many things that are shed appear to be quite fragile…snakeskins, tumbleweeds, skin cells, hair, cicada shells…and yet there is a ferocity that belies their visual manifestation.

MICKENBERG: My appreciation for tumbleweeds unearthed when I made TUMBLEWEED IN A BOX DOT COM, a buddy-road-existential movie in which poets S.A. Griffin and Scott Wannberg create a business catching and exporting the inspiring, resilient, untethered tumbleweeds that are the bouncing balls to follow in the song that is the California desert.

I love their prickly ferocity. Their let-loose-ness when the new pushes through and needs their nutrients. A move from being rooted to being carried on the winds. A life, or a death, of freedom and adventure. A total letting go.

WIKSWO: We gravitate towards their qualities in the same way. You are the only other person besides myself who keeps tumbleweeds as beloved houseguests, roommates, and companions. Although my tumbleweeds typically hang over my bed, her tumbleweed received, a believe, a white marble column from the New Jersey Turnpike, although it’s probably actually an etruscan temple fragment. Either way, you are funnier than I am, but we have the same hair, and I’ve slept in your bed when you weren’t at home and had the best dreams of my life. To me, your dwelling place, wherever it is, has represented a kind of hard-won, ethically-complex but heroic freedom. I haven’t encountered anyone who approaches your unique nuance in the practice and thought around freedom of various kinds.

MICKENBERG: Tumbleweeds represent a freedom from need. A freedom from growth as a primary goal.

Complete freedom to tumble and to surrender to the winds and to be self-contained. Freedom from vulnerability and dependency and roots and hunger.

An existence of total acceptance and liberation from the pull of life.

Freedom to be prickly, to be left alone and be windblown.

WIKSWO: In an earlier murmuration, you invoked THE IDEA OF THE VALUE OF IDEAS AS AN IDEA. Does this have implications for THE IDEA OF DEVALUING IDEAS AS AN IDEA?

Devaluing ideas feels like the way of the world.

Pooping on things is a surefire way to gain respect. Meanwhile, negativity just kills everything in its path.

People are always pooping on ideas, and taking their power away, or calling them good or bad. As though saying no is more powerful than an idea. And the sad thing is, it usually winds up being the case. Naysayers somehow have more sway than yaysayers. Yaysayers are so unsung.

I hate it when people say, “That’s actually a good idea.”

As though their filter is more powerful or important than your idea.

It’s amazing that, when you share an idea, other people seem to automatically assume the role of gatekeeper. It’s depressing, insulting and we should all see gatekeeping as the act of insecurity and inability to create that it is.

Gatekeepers need to get off the fence.

Judging is not an appropriate way to respond to the generosity and vulnerability of sharing.

Judging ideas is worthless next to appreciating them and cultivating them.

The cultivation of ideas is so unsung and it is such a valuable feeling for all involved.

Expressing enthusiasm for an idea, helping it exist, feeding it with positivity, deepening its intention, helping the person who has it, just as you are doing in this interview, and with this magazine, is a deeply creative act.

Distributors, producers, collectors, fans, academics, fabricators, educators, fans and makers, encouragers of all kinds are the people who make this world sing.

Building and acknowledging an idea’s power and potential… connecting it and grounding it and giving it every amount of space … that’s the ticket.

I think people wind up holding their greatest ideas close their vests because they know how vulnerable ideas are to negativity and judgment and because they’re worried about someone stealing their ideas.

That becomes a block to great conversations.

WIKSWO: And what are some strategies for addressing this?

MICKENBERG: One idea I have to nip that issue in the bud is the Conversational Copyright ©©.

To protect your ideas and your hilarious remarks you just say, “Conversational Copyright.” From then on, if people share your quip, they need to credit you: ©© Quintan Wikswo.

WIKSWO: You always have more than one tactic. Please share the various flanking strategies.

MICKENBERG: Another idea is the Idea Seed Bank where you can register your idea and people can go to the idea bank and make any of those ideas happen.

The registrant would get credit and compensation, the Idea Seed Bank would get a cut and would reinvest that money in outreach to help encourage people to share their ideas, and the ideas would happen and everyone would benefit.

Of course the system of credit needs to change. We need to all feel both less territorial and more invested in all good ideas.

So many people have so many great ideas that never happen because they just don’t know how to realize them, or they don’t have the right resources, or they just like having ideas but they’re not so hot on the follow through.

I think it’d be a much happier world if people could get their ideas out there, and help each other realize them, without fear or cynicism or skepticism or greed, with more fun and space for absurdity and idealism and consideration for the highest shared goals.

WIKSWO: What ideas do you think are most undervalued in the societies and cultures we currently navigate?

The most undervalued ideas are the idealistic ideas. They’re the most important ideas to have and I think most people stop even trying to think about them.

WIKSWO: Using a wormhole, what devalued ideas of the so-called “distant past” would you carry back to the present day – or the future – and present as valuable? Perhaps even invaluable?

This is hard to answer because the world changes according to previously valued ideas.

I think the important thing is to have new ideas, born of necessity for what exists now.

Then it’s a pleasure to accrue strength by finding the antecedents for those ideas; because all great ideas have a deep well of support and desire. To be curious about, and to learn from our intellectual and emotional peers from all cultures and all periods of time is part of the realization of an idea. Then the momentum of making that idea into reality with the full support of the wave of desire that humankind has had by longing for it for so long… that’s what makes an idea so powerful: because it is so deeply and truly necessary and desired.

That said, some devalued ideas that I think need to be valued and carried into the future are free libraries, individualism, aestheticism, nomadism, witchcraft, woodshedding and hermitages.

MICKENBERG: What is a great idea? What’s great about it? What is greatness?

WIKSWO: Total disruption in the force. Total revelation that the fabric of the known has been folded, spindled, and twisted into something foreign. Alien. Other.

WIKSWO: On that auspicious note, murmurate a bit about Hermette Magazine.

MICKENBERG: Hermette is an aspirational lifestyle magazine for lady hermits.

It launches a whole genre: anti-social media.

Hermette Magazine can help us connect to the fantasy of an ideal life where we leave the material world behind.

Being a lady hermit is hard to pull off. It’s hard to shed the emotional labor, which is why we need a magazine to amp the glamour of nada.

Hermette provides a way to disconnect from the clamor of the social networks, from the pull of feeling needed. It’s a way to connect to your own isolation.

It “lion-ness-izes” star loners, shy people, astronomers, philosophers, nature lovers, grouches, asexuals, foragers, individualists, outcasts, woodshedders, and barren babes.

It has recipes like foraged mussels and watercress salad for one.

It launches a sense of style that ranges from nudity to deep experimentation to not caring that your pants are on backwards.

It reads separation anxiety as separation envy and lets us loose.

It helps women cultivate clarity, perspective, detachment and deep thought.

It explores the revelations, the big ideas, and the deep thinking that can happen only when you dip a naked toe into the ocean of possibility.

It celebrates the twelve volume reading situations. The listening to of one thing for weeks on end. The unrelated. The absurd. The self-directed. The internal debates.

It’s isolation porn. Photos of hermitages and huts and hideouts. The foraged dinners by candlelight. The windblown hairstyles avec weeds.

There are rants. There are essays. There are illustrations. There is fiction.

It comes out only when it feels like it.

It has a website but it’s private; you must subscribe to it or find the magazine somewhere because it will be “distributed,” a.k.a. left in funny places in the hopes that you find it so it doesn’t have to find you.

The point is to create a new feminine ideal: aloneness with your thoughts.

Will actual lady hermits subscribe? Do real musicians read Musician magazine?

It’s kind of a hilarious notion- the idea that any lady hermit would care about having community or support for what she does.

Because the beauty of being a Hermette is never worrying about fitting in or being accepted.

That’s what makes it so “aspirational.”

Hermette Magazine also does away with the editorial we. Rather than saying “our” Hermette coins a more fierce and feline-like determiner: “mrour.”

Mrour motto at Hermette Magazine is: There’s a hermit inside all of us waiting to stay in.

WIKSWO: Isolation is a divine state, and it lingers over the abyss in a way that can be either terrifying or comforting, or both at the same time. Isolation has long been considered critical for mystics and those who want communion with the otherwise unimaginable aspects of the cosmos – this includes physicists as well as what we might call spiritual figures. I’ve always been fascinated by the Anchorites – women who chose to be walled up in towers connected to churches, with a small portal for food and waste, and a high hole through which to hear whatever happens in the nave. I think I would have likely been either an assassin or an anchorite, and perhaps both. Choosing ones own visibility as a woman is very challenging.

MICKENBERG: Is isolation all it’s cracked up to be?

WIKSWO: Social obligations for women and for the neurodivergent and for anyone who is forced into a social persona are especially difficult to detoxify from as an isolationist. Ripping off the persona hurts like a tomahawk but when there’s nobody around to police it, does it really need to be there anymore? Is it a vestigial organ that needs to go? I’d say yes, unless perhaps you are a sociopath in which case, please, seek help.

For people whose persona involves a forced obedience, a forced system of codes for behavior and action, then we need to be able to remove it.

We need practice removing it, and we need to learn the strategies and tactics for removing our personas, lest we begin to believe that they are us.

Maybe we have to put the mask back on sometimes.

But a mask is made to be taken off. And too many people never feel the wild wind on our bare faces.

There is a miasma of expectation both internal and external, conditioned over epochs, for many of us to be welcoming, nurturing, and entertaining and above all, agents of comfort and service. As a hostess, a mother, a worker, an obedient brown person, a likeable queer, an attractive cripple – this goes back to the Emotional Labor Movement, but I would call it the Manhattan Cocktail Party Complex. Like the capitalist industrialist complex. Without many of us shoving that mask persona on our souls, making efforts to work on our congenial physical appearances and social personas to lubricate the genitalia of the fucking human community, it would all collapse.

Let it collapse. Let it all go down. In a big, sticky, splooshy orgasmic slimy mess of masklessness.

Isolation, forced or chosen, removes these mask addictions and policings from the realm of possibility.

There have been many times in my life where I have imposed a total isolation period on myself. Some was intentional, and some was not. Recently, I embarked on a chosen five month period of physical and geographical isolation, which I am currently four months into, and have found it to be searingly painful but highly rewarding as I have detoxified and gone through withdrawal symptoms from exposure to other humans. Almost like radiation burns. They will leave permanent damage, but there is a way to heal them. And that is being alone in one way or another. Or abstaining from certain kinds of gregariousness.

But yes. It is more than it is cracked up to be. I don’t think it’s possible to have a complete human experience without regular periods of intense isolation. There is simply no other way to reach that altered state.

MICKENBERG: Have you had less-than-ideal Hermette experiences?

WIKSWO: I love less than ideal experiences after they are over. My best experiences are typically less than ideal. So I don’t know how to answer that question other than as a contrarian. My Hermette experiences that at the time were viewed as less than ideal were when I was in isolation while I was kidnapped…while I was institutionalized in a solitary environment for post traumatic stress disorder…while I was alone as a young person and unable to fit into a society that was unable to process my experiences as a young female survivor of violence.

But those periods of complete isolation – social exile, existential exile, have become the spine of my presence on the planet. I think it’s what has helped me see ghosts, to see what is unseen. Because I know what it’s like to be unseen, and I can taste the flavor and smell it when it is near. And usually the unseen is what matters most to me. Going through periods of being invisible, unseen, hidden, kidnapped, disappeared, vanished? It’s a luxury to go through life thinking that others truly care about looking for us. Now I know that it’s a luxury, and I don’t take it for granted, nor do I depend on it or expect it or need it for my ego, my professional fulfillment, and various other things.

That would be pathologized or problematized as some flaw in me, but I disagree. I feel a deep communion with the disappeared, and the kind of intimacy possible when invisible is essential to understanding other kinds of intimacy.

For example, I’m just barely young enough to remember the life-or-death consequences of not being closeted. How queerness forced a kind of invisibility, a kind of total disappearance, such that situations in which one became visible to a lover, or another queer person, were moments of abject joy.

Being exiled is also necessary. Being a heretic. Being actively cast out of a community, or the community. I was for a time cast out formally of my family due to revealing rampant multigenerational physical and sexual exploitation and abuse, and for a time I was cast out formally from a white queer community called Wingspan in a smallminded rural town on the border called Tucson. For a time I was outcast in two different geographical communities for not adhering to the racial codes prescribed for me – Nashville, and Bavaria. I could go on. But I won’t.

In all these instances, I had objected to the accepted rules and mores that one had to ascribe to in order to belong, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes just because it never occurred to me that compliance was mandatory.

And then, I was summoned – by the director and staff of the LGBTQIA+ Center, by the Mayor of the town of Schwandorf, by scores of family members in Virginia – and told, here are ultimatums for behaviors and acceptable actions that you must abide by to be in our midst.

These mandates were absolutely untenable and unethical. I honestly would rather have died than to have adhered to them.

Thus, I became a heretic. It was lonely. I was hated. But that’s okay. It’s not like that at the moment, and if and when it happens again I know how to find my center.

So perhaps those would be seen as less than ideal Hermette situations, but I am patriotic about them. They are in my blood now and I would never give up what I saw.

MICKENBERG: Are you getting close to the isolation you want to attract?

WIKSWO: I am getting close to finding a community in which isolation is not considered a pathology, in which the pleasures of isolation are cherished. Saying “a community of isolation” is hilarious, because they are antithetical. But if I know rationally that there are other isolationists, then I realise that isolation is also a state of mind. I can be isolated in Times Square, and I enjoy that. Isolation is an emotion, a state of being, no different than feeling joy or communion or hate or violence.

It’s important that isolation not be frightening. So in that sense, I am able to attract courage, and so, yes.

MICKENBERG: I love the concept of a tattoo of the shed snakeskin. So shedding is something you really hold onto.

WIKSWO: It’s another antithetical contradiction. It’s also a tattoo that I got to match the tint of my own skin color, so unless I am particularly sun-exposed or sun-exiled, it’s nearly invisible. Why get an invisible tattoo of something that has been left behind? The only people who notice my snakeskin tattoo at this point are people who are rare to find indeed. Although when it was fresh and looked like serious self-mutilation, I liked to frighten social entrepreneurs in Dumbo lofts by pretending to be the elevator girl. It was pretty fun. It was a welcome respite from working on art about genocide.

Anyway. Moving on.

For a long time, perhaps by coincidence, girlfriends would give me shed snakeskins and shortly afterwards, we would break up. I presume there was not a cabal of lovers who all drew from the same jar of skins and handed them to me as a totem of what was to come. But I think there was a sense that one of us, usually me, had outgrown the skin we were in. And that sensation is not something that can be left behind.

Outgrowing something means you don’t fit back into it, but at one point you did, so it’s inside you. That knowledge that growth is possible, and the kind of growth that forces you to no longer fit into what you once did.

I see no reason to discard the scars or evidence of that. Likewise, there’s no real reason to keep it. I have a locket filled with the discarded baby teeth of my now-deceased cats. I have a jar filled with the discarded claws of my now-deceased cats. I have a small box filled with the discarded whiskers of my wolf.

I think of them as victory talismans. When my wolf goes out on the hunt and she snarls and explores and adventures, and she comes back and loses a whisker because she’s stuck her head into something that snapped it off, I know she learned something new. I am inspired by that.

When I look down at my hand and see the snakeskin, I know that it is my destiny and my personality to outgrow everything. So I am never surprised. I don’t mistake growth for leprosy. Evolution is not a disease.

MICKENBERG: Do you think forgetting things is unwanted shedding? And that we are surrounded by a kind of psychic dog hair the older we get?

WIKSWO: I’ve talked a bit here and elsewhere about my brain abnormalities, or my neurodivergence or neuroqueerness. I have long noticed a tendency for three things:

One, the erasure of short term memory, typically irretrievable, and definitely attributable to fried neurons…or during a neurological incident, I can lose memory of English and only have access to French and German and Yiddish and a bit of Sumerian. So the brain simply created a different road to a different destination. Very entertaining. I’m okay with that. I enjoy it most of the time, through the fear and disorientation. I like that my brain is in many ways autonomous to my consciousness, although that’s perilous terrain. A conversation for another day.

Two, the erasure of long term memories, typically irretrievable, and attributable to either trauma or disgust – in these cases, witnesses remember things for me and I am surprised to hear them, don’t identify with them at all, and have little interest in their perspectives on what I may have experienced. Occassionally I have to go back and triangulate between multiple witnesses and if the stories match up, then I’ll accept it as part of my life. But reality is very bendable anyway, so why sweat the small stuff. If i’ve forgotten, then it will come back if and when it decides to. Usually with terrible timing, at the most importune circumstances, when it will cause the most disruption. But disruption to the status quo is a good thing, as is discomforting the conservative nature of the conscious brain which is usually a coward and hates to feel afraid or unsafe. Fuck that.

But the third category I find most marvelous – that’s when the brain itself decides to get rid of shit that doesn’t matter, low hanging fruit, stuff that’s taking up storage space and has to go. And so the brain just judiciously discards them and completely bypasses the conscious mind. And I’m okay with that. I like that in terms of evolution, that which is no longer needed is naturally discarded. It’s certainly the most painless way to do it.

MICKENBERG:Do you believe that there should be a term for a woman who is being used to bring token femininity to a project? Like a beard, but maybe a falsie?

WIKSWO: Yes I do. Beard and falsie are satisfying words for this phenomenon. I suggest: MY CUNT IS NOT YOUR YACHT. That’s more a phrase than a term.

MICKENBERG: Do you find yourself getting really angry and then really happy and not knowing which to trust because both feel so right? 

WIKSWO: This is where we must bow our heads or off our caps to the Berzerkers, or the Norse Shapestrongs. I do find myself, as a shapestronger, becoming angry and happy simultaneously and while it is frightening to others sometimes, and I think it’s a state of being that is best achieved with very sturdy and well-considered boundaries, it is like the best fuck in the world when you get it right, which is rare if ever. Pansexual vedic ejaculate all over the place. Shapestronger. Stronger than anything that needs a shape. Limitless. Boundless. Transcending all extremes and meeting in the middle in pure strength of soul.

The post MURMURATION WITH RISA MICKENBERG: THE EMOTIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT & HERMETTE: an aspirational lifestyle magazine for lady hermits appeared first on Scry Magazine.

She joins me in a conversation in which I asked her to share a constellation of perambulations that keep her up at night and get her up in the morning. What she sent back to me was an exquisite series of questions that reminded me of Audre Lorde’s Self-Questionnaire. While my conversation with Jen will follow, I invite participants to scry into Kutler’s evocative questions and reply at your own pleasure…using our contact page if you wish!

Please scroll down for the conversation between Jen and me.

KUTLER: JEN KUTLER’S MURMURATIONS: AN APOCALYPSE SUPPORT GROUP:

((We are living in the end of the world and no one is talking about it as something that requires grieving))

((What lengths would you go to in order to ensure that you will always be loved?))

((I saw myself participating in things I found to be immoral in order to keep a family happy enough that they might adopt me.))

((I cannot survive without a familial love, even if its from a “chosen family”))

((Short term gestures to keep this love are often against my best interest in the long run))

((I don’t internalize the values of those I depend on, but the values I practice when trying to earn and keep their love))

((People often ask for things in desperation that are not what they want or need. Desperation clumsily encodes messages which are meant to be sabotaged))

((This might refer to a person who compulsively posts selfies on social media or a person who is involved in social justice causes more than they can emotionally, financially or physically afford and cannot manage their mental health properly))

((Attempts to decode desperation on social media could look like finding a question that the social media post would answer. What does the person attempt to satisfy internally by posting this selfie? You take the thing you they are trying to portray themselves as and you find the statement that asks the question they are trying to answer))

<<“Wait but in the end is she worthy of love?”>> Be authentic, don’t give up. Love yourself first.>>

((Is all compulsive/addiction behavior decoded as a need for love and to be lifted from isolation?))

((What is required for someone to open themselves up to emotional information?))

((What would an emotional information network look like? ))

((Emotional development and childhood exposure to healthy emotional practices are what dictate a person’s entire live, from grades in school, self esteem and success in relationships and career.))

((We learn to operate cars, computers, silverware, washing machines but never with our emotions))

((You learn from your family of origin or you don’t)) ((Or you learn wrong))

((What if a car would only go forward if you felt content))

((What if something required two people to feel the same emotion together in order to be operated?))

<< Art talk is too exclusive. In order to make artistic concepts accessible to everyone, we should be able to say the same thing in simpler terms. Art should be available to everyone regardless of economic standing and the same should go for how educated people speak about art, don’t you think? (I do not consider myself to be a stupid person but I never got a degree in art so I have trouble getting through books about art and manifestos by artists that use complex language for no reason >>

<< Economies of kindness — Small business owners that I know will stop engaging with a customer if the customer displays a lack of respect or empathy. Its downright inspiring. On a large scale this could be revolutionary >>

WIKSWO: And here follows my own responses and mumurations with Jen’s transmogrifying questions.

KUTLER: ((We are living in the end of the world and no one is talking about it as something that requires grieving))

QW: The grief is a vortex that spins in alternating directions – a whirlpool with a converse riptide. It seems to me a process of opposites, of the tearing of sutures or ligaments, this ripping of viscera from cavity, the subsequent craving of cavity, of viscera, of things that will no longer fit, contains that can no longer contain.

KUTLER: What lengths would you go to in order to ensure that you will always be loved?

WIKSWO: No lengths, in theory. In practice, the equation for me requires a lover. To always be loved by a lover, one must pace the length of one’s full true self. Or else it isn’t love.

KUTLER: ((I saw myself participating in things I found to be immoral in order to keep a family happy enough that they might adopt me.))

WIKSWO: The morality of love is Solomonic. Solomon’s second name was Jedidiah – the divider named both “peace” and “beloved” holds the knife to bisect an infant.  He was said to be able to speak the language of animals. As a child, I spent sleepless winter nights in the freezing doghouse attempting to learn the language of my dog so that, if necessary, I could live in her society if my family abandoned me. I also had two names. These are the two parts of us – one which will sacrifice anything at any cost to attain love; the other which experiences [dis/honorable] pain over the [ruthless?] sacrifice that the [desperate?] pursuit entails…

KUTLER: ((I cannot survive without a familial love, even if its from a “chosen family”))

WIKSWO: What are the tactics you employ for your survival?

KUTLER: ((Short term gestures to keep this love are often against my best interest in the long run))

WIKSWO: When you say your best interest, does that interest include, or does it dismiss, the interests of your beloved? When you say “short term” and “long run,” what role does time have in the earning of love, or its sustenance?

KUTLER: ((I don’t internalize the values of those I depend on, but the values I practice when trying to earn and keep their love))

WIKSWO: Practice, earn and keep are a form of discipline. Time over space, action over time, the occupation of space and time as a job. The job is to gain love, but one succeed with or without ethics. The ethics of love are something we consider often in a mechanical manner – calibrated off a system of religion, learned values, experience, control and power – without deliberately taking time to distill our own actual values of love. These are often values revealed in action, and if we cannot see our actions, we cannot see how we love. Perhaps because of this short term thinking – the emergency thinking in which we do not use our higher or peripheral vision/s – there is not sufficient time to really become deliberate. And to me, love may be an instinct, it may be a compulsion, but it must certainly be a deliberate act. An act that requires deliberateness, and deliberation.

KUTLER: ((People often ask for things in desperation that are not what they want or need. Desperation clumsily encodes messages which are meant to be sabotaged))

WIKSWO: Saboteurs engage in deliberate subversion, destruction, impedance. If desperation is inherent in this deliberate act, where does clumsiness come in? Is clumsiness the most likely result of desperation? Or is it a willful refusal to see, a deliberate refusal to analyze the benefit-to-risk ratio? I consider the suicide bomber as a deliberate act, but somewhat clumsy.

The message encoded includes, but is not limited to:
(a) my life is not worth living without what I want or need
(b) my life is so important that I value it equally to what I want and do not have, and thus must die
(c) the lives of others are unimportant in comparison to what I want or need
(d) the lives of others are so important that they must be sacrificed for me to get what I want or need

And what you say of the desperate, clumsy message encoded for the purpose of being impeded – the cry for help, in simplistic terms. But in part, I think perhaps it is a test. Of whether there is any force or entity (the beloved, a deity, the enemy, the family, the desired) that will take the time to pick through the bloody carnage of that clumsy desperation to see what is truly being demanded.

KUTLER: ((This might refer to a person who compulsively posts selfies on social media or a person who is involved in social justice causes more than they can emotionally, financially or physically afford and cannot manage their mental health properly))

WIKSWO: Something that emerges for me is how we consider the degree of consciousness behind this compulsion. Is this unconscious action, semi-conscious, sub-conscious, conscious? A compulsion deliberately exiled to a box which the person refuses to unlock, much less acknowledge, yet built the box and opened it and put something in it and then locked it away? Is this an automatic act? And is the act one towards which we are sympathetic – i.e. there is too much pain in confronting the compulsion, and we feel empathy for that pain. Or perhaps we think that their pain would be a luxury, like a bigot refusing to examine their behaviors that harm others. How much does a witness or outsider need to know the impetus behind the compulsion?

This idea of the motivational lacunae of others is fascinating, because we can pick apart someone else but largely based only on supposition and our own theories, and we have our own lacunae that go into that process of analysis. The assumptions inherent in believing we know someone better than they know themselves. Jung versus Freud, perhaps: the dream that has the pre-determined meaning, or the dream whose meaning can only be known to the dreamer.

KUTLER: ((Attempts to decode desperation on social media could look like finding a question that the social media post would answer. What does the person attempt to satisfy internally by posting this selfie? You take the thing you they are trying to portray themselves as and you find the statement that asks the question they are trying to answer))

WIKSWO: There is a sleuth quality to being the bystander on social media. I think of it as a spy network, with the intention of each player being somewhat opaque. There is the Stasi, which we think of as watching and action upon the behaviors of others with ill intent and fatal judgement. And there is the French Resistance, which we think of as based in liberation, freedom, justice. I will take us back to Solomon and Jedidiah, and the baby – who let’s say was actually cut in half. How can we make the attempt to decode desperation on social media without cutting people into halves, whereas the geometry and mathematics of intent are more complicated on a moral level.

KUTLER: <<“Wait but in the end is she worthy of love?”>> Be authentic, don’t give up. Love yourself first.

WIKSWO: Exactly. The bystander, actor, witness, agent, spy – the enterprise is one of judging, asking questions from the outside, such as is this [person] authentic, or is this [person] a performance of authenticity? You ask the question, “wait, but in the end is she worthy of love?” and I wonder whether there are any answers to be given. If it’s a pale green room with a door that locks only on the outside, can those answers be given by force? I think of prison or captivity writing, and all the words that have been scribed by people who are in a limbo of being proven guilty of something, or are waiting to be proven innocent or guilty, dependent on the justice system. Are all of us worthy of love? and by whom? By ourselves? Is General Sherman and President Andrew Jackson worthy of love – with or without factoring in the Trail of Tears, or the pillaging of the south for the end of slavery which resulted in a pillaging of the ideal of freedom?

Maybe it is less important to be loved than to be questioned. Maybe it is more important to question from within a state of love for self and others. Maybe love is, in fact, something that we must earn based upon our actions, deliberate or otherwise. Perhaps unconditional love requires the box of secret monsters that cannot be let out. The monsters are isolated. Must they be disciplined and punished for love to proceed as planned?

KUTLER: ((Is all compulsive/addiction behavior decoded as a need for love and to be lifted from isolation?))

WIKSWO: This assumes that love and an end to isolation are universal goals. I cannot imagine that such goals are shared by all humanity, unless we are talking about sadism. Sadism is a kind of love – the love to hurt, the love to cause injury and pain. But sadism is not by definition an addiction, it is an act which may or may not be an addiction. Is the genocidal architect a compulsive addict in their love to design death camps and their desire to unite with those who also want to design death camps? I don’t believe that love is universal. To my thinking, love is simply one of the elements on the periodic table and can be included or excluded as a pure element or one which combines with others, or does come into the equation at all…many people can live an entire life devoid of that element.

KUTLER: ((What is required for someone to open themselves up to emotional information?))

WIKSWO: To be suspended over the infinite abyss. And to have believed, for enough time to matter, that there was no escape from the infinite plunge into the infinite abyss.

KUTLER: ((What would an emotional information network look like? ))

WIKSWO: The nervous system, but with sensory inputs and outputs that are not yet known to human beings. We are operating in a vast lacunae in which we assume that our knowledge and information is complete until we find something that suggests a more distant event horizon. And we either shut our eyes and hide in the closet, throw things, or figure out how to move on with humility and curiosity. I enjoy reading out of date science books not because I like to gloat, but because I like to be reminded that much of what surrounds us, controls us, navigates through and to us, is inaccurate. And this messiness is comforting. We aren’t yet, as a species, at a point where we find that chaos a comfort. Perhaps we will have to be more comfortable with chaos in order to access an emotional information network. 

KUTLER: ((Emotional development and childhood exposure to healthy emotional practices are what dictate a person’s entire live, from grades in school, self esteem and success in relationships and career.))

WIKSWO: I had a therapist who said that each year a child survives without trauma means that normal human development will occur unimpeded. This was quite disheartening. And then one must question the idea of normal. And so perhaps self-esteem, healthiness, success are also terms that require questioning. Surviving – or not surviving – attempts at destruction are measured by calipers of normalcy. And yet none of us are truly healthy or normal. I would like to disrupt the entire assessment system – of all cultures, because I haven’t found one yet that seems to give sufficient succor to those in the most pain – and find a new one in which we aren’t measured by our functionality. We are not machines.

KUTLER: ((We learn to operate cars, computers, silverware, washing machines but never with our emotions))

WIKSWO: In my households, everything has always been primarily operated by the emotions. I’m not sure what implications that entails. 

KUTLER: ((You learn from your family of origin or you don’t))

WIKSWO: Agreed. I would also say that we have a few junctures to learn: first from our family of origin, then after the exodus from family household, we learn from the families we choose or who choose us. My second family of origin was African American civil rights workers. My third family of origin was drag queens and combat vets. Family over spacetime, learning over spacetime.

KUTLER: ((Or you learn wrong))

WIKSWO: I learn wrong almost always. Because what I think I am supposed to learn is rarely what I actually end up learning. Mostly this is unrest. The frictions between expectations (my family will provide me with security and safety) versus actuality (my family will provide me with a variety of tactics for navigating trauma). It’s possible that we work from the assumption that comfort results from learning, and discomfort results from learning wrong. When it’s probably the opposite. The most learning occurs with the most anxiety and upheaval, messiness and grief. 

KUTLER: ((What if a car would only go forward if you felt content))

WIKSWO: I feel that that directly pertains to contemporary America, where the craving for comfort is so intense that if cars would only go forward if we were content, we might not go anywhere. Is contentment desirable? What if one person’s contentment comes as a result of suffering – or, worse, exploitation or perpetration of injustice – of someone else? 

KUTLER: ((What if something required two people to feel the same emotion together in order to be operated?))

WIKSWO: That would frighten me. I am uncomfortable with unity. This is not inherently a positive attribute. I get worried when a multiplicity of humans are urged into systems where cohesion is a requisite of functionality. Where we must be all of a kind, or all on the same page, or all for one one for all. 

KUTLER: Art talk is too exclusive. In order to make artistic concepts accessible to everyone, we should be able to say the same thing in simpler terms. Art should be available to everyone regardless of economic standing and the same should go for how educated people speak about art, don’t you think? (I do not consider myself to be a stupid person but I never got a degree in art so I have trouble getting through books about art and manifestos by artists that use complex language for no reason).

WIKSWO: This is thorny. The good things about thorns is that there is lots to get caught on, tangled on, where one has to pause and sort oneself out of the snarl. I would again say that ideally art is a fundamental form of self-expression, and barriers should not be erected with the sole purpose of exclusion. Either excluding someone from the right to self-expression, or to the access of self-expression. There is zero doubt that the rules of the art world (and each discipline and institution and industry of the art world has its own rules) are mostly intended to sort people. What you wear, how you speak…

I got an MFA later in life, but earlier in life I went through extensive accent eradication so that I could speak proper English. Thus, when I turned to the MFA in Creative Writing seeking an enhancement of my abilities and thereby greater enfranchisement, I was often criticized for my unconventional forms of English useage. So what was at first intended to make me less excluded (learning to speak and pronounce proper upper class American English) was completely seen through and derided when I went out to be enfranchised. There is an intentional segregation that I think is more about mobs controlling what is proper and improper.

Maybe this brings us back to intention. The use of complex language is actually enjoyable, necessary, and pleasurable to some people. Other people use complex language as a locked gate – you can only enter the sublime enfranchised art place if you can both understand and articulate in this arcane form of proprietary language. It perhaps depends upon the intention of the system of people who use any kind of language – is their goal to exclude, or does exclusion simply happen because one cannot run without first walking and before that crawling. I would like to understand quantum physics but it requires some physicists writing at a complexity that is beyond me so that they can expand their field, and it requires other people taking the time to make quantum physics something moderately comprehensible to someone without special training.

The worrisome thing about art talk is that if one believes, as I do, that art is self-expression, then all barriers must be addressed in some form or another for a diversity of folx to engage in human interaction. Most artists who are not interested in erecting barriers are interested in a sort of generosity. Where the exchange is not about having the money to pay the entrance cost, but some other form of currency.

KUTLER: Economies of kindness — Small business owners that I know will stop engaging with a customer if the customer displays a lack of respect or empathy. Its downright inspiring. On a large scale this could be revolutionary.

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May your umbilical cord be the root of a life of substance and meaning, may you scry fruitfully, and may you  find comfort in looking up at the sky for the birds that are watching you reach reach reach, the stars who have sent their light to you from long ago, and the dark matter that reminds us of the beauty of what mysteries we cannot see.

HÁÁDĘ́Ę́ʼÍSH ÍIYISÍÍ NANINÁ?

háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

॥ ਜਪੁ ॥

ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥

ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש

The post A MURMURATION WITH JEN KUTLER :: AN APOCALYPSE SUPPORT GROUP appeared first on Scry Magazine.

But orbits being as they are, predictable yet enigmatic, Vriezen and I discovered commonalities of aesthetics, geopolitics, human rights activism, artistic conceptualism, and mathematics. He is a nuanced murmurator, and his ponderings about obscurity as a tool have transformed my approach to nearly everything. And our conversation about Ogoniland, African NGOs, the Niger Delta, and Royal Dutch Shell opened windows into commonalities of resources, and the value and precariousness of obscurity as a strategy, a tactic, and a source of potential energy for both repression and liberation.

Samuel Vriezen is an Amsterdam-based composer and insatiable thinker who has written many works for chamber ensembles that have been performed worldwide. Vriezen’s work shows an interest in non-standard ways of organizing performer coordination and interaction and in exploring the panoramic contrapuntal possibilities that such methods of ensemble playing give. His website is a listening vortex, so after reading this conversation, pull out a pair of headphones, close your eyes, and tune in to his works that expand horizons far past the vanishing point.

Vriezen is also a poet and a pianist. He has written many text compositions (or polyphonic poems), and his writing (including poetry, translations and essays) has been published in many literary journals including the Dutch Parmentier, the Flemish yang and the French Action Poétique. As a pianist, he is most known for his unique virtuoso rendition of Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue. Together with Dante Boon, Vriezen produced the CD recording of Johnson’s Symmetries on Karnatic Lab Records.

VRIEZEN: I love the idea of scrying, since it combines the notion of bringing forth of what is occluded with a sense of magic. So it’s natural to think in terms of the undervisible and the underdiscussed.

WIKSWO: Occlusion is one of the best words – afsluiting in Dutch, if I’m not mistaken? It fills the mouth differently. Occlusion is hard and sharply articulated, with tongue and teeth gnashing, and afsluiting seems entirely slippery, involving the lips and a lot of sneakiness. In dentistry, it refers to the “the bringing of the opposing surfaces of the teeth of the two jaws into contact.” For our purposes, generally, it means stopping, blocking, closing up, closing off.

Scrying is frictive. There is friction against the surface that prevents knowledge, sight, vision, information, and the friction causes the surface to shift in such a way that what is hidden is revealed.

VRIEZEN: One theme that has been on my mind recently was quite related to that but in an almost opposed way. I was planning an essay, that I ended up not managing to write, commissioned around the theme of media and the public. I had in fact just completed an extensive book of essays called ‘Netwerk in eclips’, which was organized around the theme of how network structures (such as in social media, but in many other forms as well) create poetics and ways of dealing with the world that can at one and the same time be emancipatory (non-hierarchical, etc), but also will always have to miss out on things – because you can’t see what the network technology you dispose of will not let you see. Thus, networks span entire worlds but they also always eclipse some (or are eclipsed by what they can’t know).

WIKSWO: You can’t see what […] you dispose of will not let you see. It’s fascinating to think of our own garbage being invisible to us, and furthermore that what our decision to throw something away is a decision to make something invisible. Because algorithms filter, and the people behind the coding of the algorithms filter, and the users filter, and time itself filters, commerce filters, analysts of our identities filter (“this is only of interest to Latinx men and we have decided you are not a Latinx man nor would you share his interests”), time filters (for every moment we are not consuming data, there is data that is not seen), space filters (if we do not have access to wireless or devices, we are excluded from the visible), our brains filter at many levels – the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, the unconscious mind, the deep brain, the root amygdala that filters threats and danger, pleasure and desire.

So there are are potentially unlimited nodes of filtration, yet extremely limited means to over-ride that filtration. Certainly, if the filters are to be created, altered, or eliminated, that requires a vast amount of effort, which means even more time and deliberate, conscious decision-making.

It also means that things can fall through cracks intentionally as well as unintentionally. Deliberate obscurity. I think of the erasure of any trace of the existence of certain intelligence operatives or special forces warfighters. Or a former employer of mine who engaged an anti-publicist to make sure our work went unnoticed. Obscurity can be a tactic that supports many different strategies – from the honorable to the dishonorable.

VRIEZEN: Absolutely, there’s all that! Maybe the paradox that I was most interested in, though, is that our very techniques of being open to the world – the networks we build up, completely open-structured and rhizomatic as the case may be, may also close things off. If I reach out to A, B, and C, and they again reach out to X, Y, Z and X’, Y’, Z’ and X’’, Y’’, Z’’, my extended network may end up so open as to touch the entire world.

But this precise process sets up hierarchies – in that D turns out to be on a far chain, for example, or not linked up at all. In other words, not even the extended network world can ever be entire.

WIKSWO: Exciting and frustrating…

VRIEZEN: After finishing the book, I started to get more interested in obscurity as such. I was trying to understand how the obscure, that which is undervisible, could actually at times condition what is public – but on condition of not being brought out in the open. As if lines of force are never really out there in the world, but subtend it, and condition it only on the basis of remaining not quite there.

WIKSWO: Lines of force are very potent whether they are visible or invisible – again, any strategy of force is only as strong as its tactics. And sometimes force wants to be seen: the crushed streets of Vilnius after the Soviet military parade tanks crushed them took nearly a year to repair, and during that time a very visible line of force was unobscurable. Today, the roads are re-paved and hence the line of force is obscured, but anyone who inhabits the Baltic states adjoining Russia are quite aware of these lines, regardless of whether they are hidden.

I love your use of the word subtend in this context – it derives from the Latin subtendere, from sub- ‘under’ + tendere ‘stretch.’  Like fascia that connects muscles to tendon and bone. We rarely think of it, but are constantly under its force or else we would separate into separated structural components. A leg would spontaneously fall off. Lines of force that stretch under us, and hold things in place that we may not ever be aware of. As you say, it’s not quite there. It’s there, but not quite.

I also think of my various processes of fieldwork in human rights violation zones, and exploring the ecology and topography of land will reveal certain things. I learned to look to see how trees are bent to see if roads were there. How variations in the soil elevation can indicate military earthworks, or graves. How certain plants are typically only found in iron-rich soil – that’s been a tactic for finding more than a few mass graves. You look for where the plants are clustered, and then notice if there is an absence of those plants in the surrounding vicinity.

VRIEZEN: Now, this is a really complicated theme to write about. Because the moment you bring something out, does it still work? Or does it become one more thing in the world, at the price of relinquishing some of its secret powers?

WIKSWO: To me, this is a function of time. There has to be a conscious strategy around time. Allowing something to be hidden on a timeline is critical in many situations – spilling secrets without a larger plan can endanger the overall goal of the mission by putting people into danger, and it can alert perpetrators to obscure evidence.

There is definitely power in secrecy – a sort of condensed energy that is contained and compressed into a small space. That’s tangible power. When the secret is released, it can be released in such a way that the power is dissipated and dissolves ineffectively, or without function or consequence. Or the secret can be released and its force, or power, be directed towards an intent. For example, whistleblowers who have to know the exact point at which the release of a secret’s power is most potent.

VRIEZEN: I wonder if that might mean that some part of the secret has to remain withdrawn. I guess even whistleblowers, in order to be effective, have to stage the leaking of their secret in the right way – which means providing it with a public front end, so to speak, which suggests that a less public rear end might somehow subsist, too. If only because it will incite a, hopefully productive, type of paranoia in the public. “If all this could have happened without our knowing the first thing about it, then what else is there?” At the very least, you can never know whether there’s more you don’t know. But this is perhaps primarily a metaphysical musing.

WIKSWO: Of course this brings to mind various fieldwork experiences, where I used secrets to draw attention to secrets. If I used Stalin-era cameras to photograph an unmarked KBG torture facility, the only people who would literally see what I was doing were people who knew (a) what a KBG standard issue camera looks like and (b) why I might be focusing on that particular building. Therefore, I could use secrecy and signs to attract a particular demographic of people I would otherwise be unable to find. Once the connections were made, information could be exchanged, and then the power of the secret increased so that later on, when revealed, it was done in a deliberate method within a deliberate strategy with deliberate consequences.

However, if I had stood in front of the building with a sign that said THIS IS A FORMER KGB TORTURE FACILITY, that would have released the power of that secret into a rather diffused blast of knowledge that could quickly dissipate, could not be directed or controlled, and introduced more chaos.

I love your invocation of secret powers – your idea that making a secret into something mundane can remove its potency. There are ways of keeping things on a need-to-know basis, and I am fascinated beyond limit by how that can be done. There is a South Carolina Sea Island where a particular plantation was used for recreational sport hunting of enslaved Africans, and the killing of the slave typically happened when the white planters drove the slave towards the sea. So on this particular island, there is a bottle tree maintained at that site. In African-American sea island Gullah culture, a bottle tree is created specifically to capture evil in glass bottles. Most white people think they are decorative. So rather than endangering a community by protesting the site itself, activists in secret put up a tree that serves as a warning, a memorial, a means of protection, of witnessing, of remembering, of exposure. But it’s all still secret.

VRIEZEN: That’s a striking example, in that I would say that the capturing of evil, too, has a dynamic of working with what is occluded and what is out in the open. It’s very interesting that glass could have this function.

For me, one point of entry into all this was my research into the history and politics of ecocidal pollution by oil interests in the Niger Delta, which I have been working on for a radio play – but also, because my loved one was working for some years for an environmental activist organization that was trying to bring out the story of Niger Delta pollution in order to put legal pressure on Royal Dutch Shell for a lawsuit held in The Netherlands, on behalf of certain farmers from the Goi, Oruma and Ikot Ada Udo communities in Ogoniland. Researching this history, I became impressed with the many levels at which obscurity plays a vital role, in this particular case but also in its general historical background, to the extent that a lack of public transparency is the medium within which it seems to live at all.

WIKSWO: What was the strategy for bringing out this story? Or rather, stories? I can’t imagine that the complexities of Ogoniland contexts would be familiar to Dutch citizens – certainly not any kind of fully inclusive, prismatic, intersectional context that hasn’t already been filtered through a process of accessibility to white Europeans, or consumers of Shell Oil…

VRIEZEN: Well, the issues around Shell have been kept in the news diligently for decades – particularly since the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other “Ogoni Nine” in the 90s by dictator Sani Abacha, something that Shell may still be held co-accountable for. Here, I greatly admire Amnesty International, who have refused to close this case, and keep trying to bring it to court.

WIKSWO: One of my earliest employers in 1988 was Amnesty International, the International branch not the US branch. We accomplished so much in an era much like today when autocratic governments were committing some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. And yet I left in 1993 following a class-action lawsuit led by my colleague Bailey Grey and I surrounding rampant sexual harassment, discrimination, and sexual assault that went all the way up the chain of command to the international director.

We told stories that needed to be known, but AI as an NGO silenced at least fifty percent of its membership from talking about the abuses of its own predators. This was hugely enlightening about the role of international aid and human rights agencies to call out the demons of others, but not of themselves.

Because of our coalition, Amnesty International had to create one of the first legally binding international sexual harassment policies, under great internal protest.

Yet at the same time, we were publicizing crimes that would never otherwise have been known. It was tricky to live in that liminal space where we were helping and hurting. Talk about obscurity as both tactic for oppression and liberation…

At any rate, in your experience with Amnesty International and other efforts to resist these crimes in Nigeria, how successful do you think they were in keeping Shell, the Ogoni Nine, and Sani Abacha under pressure?

VRIEZEN: So quite a bit of the story is vaguely known to the public. But a lot is also practically unknowable, in that reliable knowledge infrastructures are very difficult to set up in a zone that is so deeply affected by strife, and where often even to gather information you’ll probably need some sort of protection from an interested party.

WIKSWO: It’s too bad that mercenaries aren’t more readily available to support the safety of people working against predators. We might get better data if we could hire predators to keep us safe from predators. How accurate or complete do you think is the information making its way to a global community?

VRIEZEN: I have noticed that scholarly work by local experts, too, has to rely on very incomplete data. Not to mention that I realized that there are also all sorts of complex dynamics happening within and among the local peoples themselves.

In the end, I chose not to bring out ‘the story’ so much as draw its outlines in a negative and speculative way. I do have one Ogoni character at the centre – a woman who was actually bearing witness about the oil leaks in her community for a Dutch TV audience. Unfortunately, the footage was never used, but I had her words spoken in the radio play. Around her voice, I have organized three other voices, who only ask ‘what if?’-questions. These questions are basically ever more historical variations on the primal question, ‘how could this have happened? and could it have been otherwise?’ These voices are not locals, but they enact my own distance from the story and try to construct the narrative space for it, though entirely out of a subjunctive mode of narrating. My wager is that this negative narrative space then implies thousands of actors across centuries of history for listeners. There aren’t quite filled in, but could be, maybe will be some day. Say, if groups like Amnesty keep going at their cases.

WIKSWO: I think this conjuring, or scrying of voices that you are doing – as a composer and as an activist – is quite compelling. Negative narrative space is at the core of work around obscured or silenced atrocities, because it is an accurate and tangible representation of the negative space that is left out of the official story.

VRIEZEN: As it is, the obscurity of the situation presents practical problems for activism, as it is precisely the intention of activists to ‘translate’ these histories into the public medium of transparency, which will allow them to get a handle on what happens over there, and fight towards justice.

Yet this at the same time requires molding the story to certain narrative formats (e.g. the television documentary) which can obscure the high level of complexity of these histories.

In a sense, they have to obscure the obscurity.

WIKSWO: This was my final blow in deciding to no longer work as a field writer and strategist for NGOs – non-governmental human rights organizations. It became agonizing to watch the filtration happen as I became immersed in such volatile and complex contexts – for one thing, I realized that reductivism was actually causing tremendous harm to all involved. Practical, tangible harm as well as ethical and moral harm. Secondly, there are always people behind everything, and any trust and reciprocity that I might build to work with both perpetrators and victims was entirely dependent upon how trustworthy my employers were. If they decided to “shape” a “story” in a certain way, I was powerless to control how my own work made its way into the media, into public policy, into military decisions, and so forth.

Obscuring the obscurity is a tool that should not be placed in the hands of anyone – institutionally or individually – who is not repelled by reductivism. I think reductivism is highly attractive for a myriad of reasons. Reduced means easily expressed, easily digested, easily distributed, easily argued, easily defended, easily used as a versatile tool, easily manipulated. And that’s profoundly attractive to agents of power who do not have the best interests of humanitarian justice at heart.

The primary reason behind forming SCRY is to pull apart the notion of obscurity, invisibility, and occlusion to see where the strategy is involved. What are the tactics and outcomes. How are these forces, or powers, actually activated? Is it always malevolent?

I think of the physics concept of potential energy. There is enormous potential energy in the state of obscurity. And I do think of it as a state, as well as an action, as well as a force, a tool, a tactic…

VRIEZEN: I also noticed that obscurity is in fact a generator of power mechanisms, both oppressive ones and, I find myself wondering, potentially liberating ones too?

For example, it is important for Shell to be able to cast doubt on the origins of oil leaks. They make essential use of the fact that there is such lack of clarity about precise events in the region in order to evade accountability.

Conversely, local resisting organizations also exist within an obscure region, where it is not always decidable whether they are ‘true’ emancipatory movements, gangs, mercenaries, ethnic interest groups, or anything in between (as actors may also shift allegiance in very fluid ways – which can also be understood as pure personal survival tactic).

WIKSWO: You bring up a very important fact of obscurity being a survival tactic. When I was in North Africa, Tunisian friends would sit in their fifty year old cars chatting at the impromtu gas stations, which were just large colorful plastic jugs of gasoline stacked up for sale to pour directly into your tank. Armored SUVs with Libyan plates would fly past, all shiny and expensive, and my friends would say, thank goodness we don’t have anything here that anyone wants. And they were talking about oil, uranium, and other resources that their neighbors Algeria and Libya had. Because the obscurity meant that they could be invisible to foreign and domestic powers who would exploit the citizens at any cost.

Yet the Magreb or North Africa, or Africa in general contains a network of parties that, as you say, have largely obscure missions and counter-missions, and sub-missions and cover-missions, filled with people who range from the most powerful in the world to the most powerless. This is true of any place that contains desirable and valuable exploitable resources. Reductivist humanitarian efforts that attempt any kind of deliberate revelation of secrets in that region seemed – and still seems – to me to be truly idiotic.

But then, perhaps idiocy is a deliberate tool of colonialism.

To ignore any kind of inherent complexity in indigenous contexts and then just plead ignorance or good intentions when the trail of destruction leaves generations of dead bodies in its wake? There are nearly as many casualties brought about by the reductivism of humanitarian agencies as the deliberate harm caused by other players. And this is tragic, because it also lets us know that humanitarian agencies have been almost entirely polluted by colonialist tactics, because we haven’t taken the time to sit down in complex context and refuse to use the familiar tools.

I think the French, Dutch, and British in Africa definitely exploited secrecy as well as willful ignorance, willful obscurity, willful occlusion. These are tactics refined over centuries. What’s concerning, as an American, is that the youthfulness of our nation means that our overlapping ignorance and innocent affords us more deniability, and it’s easier to evade accountability. I’m not sure I shared a single opinion during my time there, simply because I was unable to formulate any that I thought were accurate. It was impossible for me to navigate the secrets.

VRIEZEN: Besides willful occlusion there was also the colonial imposition of transparency! In South-East Nigeria, for instance, the British wreaked havoc on existing social structures by installing what they called ‘indirect rule’, creating local power hierarchies where none existed. This is of course a violent form of making-transparent to Empire.

WIKSWO: Making-transparent to Empire as violence. You are spot on.

VRIEZEN: On reading more about the history of the region, I became aware that social structures were often highly dependent on levels of secrecy – such as cults, playing important roles in social life, which today having become models for all sorts of informal power structures, including student organizations, gangs, as well as the use of magic.

WIKSWO: Levels of secrecy is intriguing – we can visualize this as a hierarchical structure, like a tower with multiple floors. But in truth, it’s a quantum topology. Or a quantum mechanics environment that is unfamiliar to what most people consider as a normal structure. But like a brane, or a wormhole, or  in which  we can visualize it as an n-dimensional matrix, in which the navigation is not lateral but rather highly dynamic. Like a brane, or a wormhole, or a Hilbert Space where the rules of navigation around the unknown are, well, largely unknown.

That’s certainly not dissimilar to the practice of magic. The search for dark matter architectures – seeing what we cannot see by noticing the light that is obscured by it. If you simply rip away the unseen, the darkness, then all that knowledge and information contained in the darkness is lost.

VRIEZEN: Reading the novels of Chinua Achebe, you can for instance see the vital role of masks of the ancestor cults as a social force in historical Igboland – and it is precisely when the mask is violently challenged that colonial Christianity gets to assert itself and its regimes of visibility over existing structure.

But I realized that power formations always seem to have this element of the hidden – the mask, the ritual, the code of communication, but also the deal, or the executive order that can be made public because it leaves lots of room for interpretation, but those for whom it is intended will decipher its true intent. This way obscurity can trump the transparency of the document.

WIKSWO: Somehow this reminds me of queer history as well, and of multi-racial history, where ideas of “passing” and “realness” were practiced in order to maintain secrecy of someone’s private identity. Being in a relationship with a female warfighter during don’t-ask-don’t-tell meant that she and I had to create a complicated set of secret identities, overlaid with masks, and then more masks. There was something incredibly romantic and intimate about that process: we shared a state of being together that was ours alone. Of course, it was also completely repressive. We had other couple friends who were queer and in active service, and the signaling that we sent to identify and protect each other would have been completely invisible to anyone outside the queer military underground.

Without romanticizing it, it was romantic – a kind of tryst that felt sacred. It contained a kind of power, even though the overriding elephant in the room was that we lacked a huge amount of power. We had to hide. Yet in that hiding, a culture emerged that I have never seen the equal of. A level of trust-building, tenderness, intimacy that was lost when we were, in essence, liberated.

This sounds like I’m romanticizing our own oppression. I just think for all the progressives who scolded me for not being “out of the closet,” they were not seeing everything I could see.

VRIEZEN: Which presents some intriguing conundrums. We on the left tend to like transparency, analysis, theorizing, bringing things to light. Then we’re real moderns. And this is maybe our best weapon, but it requires the public sphere to acknowledge our sense of justice and to have the power to express it in the first place. Which has to be established – another fight entirely, which, I think, might well have to make use of tactics that themselves make use of the powers of obscurity as a generative moment.

WIKSWO: Outing someone is a violent act. And yet the left will espouse nonviolence at every conceivable opportunity. And then commit violence, but because it is not with a gun… I can probably best illustrate this with an example. Earlham is a Quaker college in Indiana, with core values of transparency, honesty, truth, simplicity, and nonviolence. There were persistent issues of sexual violence on campus, and someone decided it would be a good idea in the name of transparency, honesty, truth, simplicity, and nonviolence to hold a gathering in which all survivors of sexual predation were asked to stand up and tell our stories. Wonderful, right? Presto – we are no longer suffering in silence.

Of course what happened is that the gathering drew perpetrators, who had a hit list of every student on campus who was especially vulnerable to predatory abuse. And so many students who stood up were targeted and selected and later attacked – some quite violently – because this simplistic view of transparency as a weapon against oppression was bullshit. The weapon was loaded and brandished about irresponsibly by untrained people who could not support our safety, our well-being, and had no sense of consequence.

The weapon would have been perhaps better used to ask all the predators to stand up. That would have achieved completely different outcomes and consequences. But it never occurred to them. So these tools we have, most of them are completely corrupted by the very people we are trying to fight. And so we simply perpetuate injustice, all the while telling ourselves that we are furthering justice.

VRIEZEN: After all, we want to influence the future, to make it more just. But it is precisely the future that cannot be precisely outlined, that must therefore be cut out of the stuff of obscurity.

Here is where I really like your magazine title. Scrying is not just the bringing to light of a hidden reality – though such documentary labor is definitely of vital importance – but it is also trying to glimpse a future – as well as the resonances of those pasts (or the timelines of what could have been) that are lost to documentary tactics.

WIKSWO:  So many lovely images – glimpsing a future out of the resonances of the past. Like the light from a supernova. Another lovely image, to cut the future out of the stuff of obscurity. The unknown that has no defined or contained shape, only partial glimpses of a curve here, an angle there, a glitter of shadow and light.

I chose to begin scrying with people who I believe can offer alternatives to fate, and guide us more towards a destiny. Fate is what happens when consequence follows consequence, a perpetuation of the past into the present into the future, a Möbius strip of repetition. Destiny is when we exercise agency – as you say, to influence the future and make it more just.

When we consider those who scry – shamans, prophets, seeresses, sibyls – there is a distinguishing line between those who “tell” the future because they have seen it, and those who speak to the present in such a way as to influence the future. And I am most interested in the second. It’s dynamic, and fluid, and permits free will as well as demands accountability.

Leaving the future obscure means leaving options open. Means the map is not yet made. The territory is as yet uncharted. It is unoccupied. It is uncolonized. It is in a state of liberation, but there is an event horizon where we can poison it with our ills, or we can let its obscurity inspire us to think of new alternatives. To call something that does not exist into being.

VRIEZEN: What I wonder is, can dealing with the secret, the obscure, and giving its powers their due respect, also somehow help us glimpse a more just future into being?

WIKSWO: I think respecting the unknown and pausing at its threshold to gain self-knowledge, context, and humility is critical to a more just future. Admitting ignorance but not celebrating it. Seeing secrets but not ripping them apart. There is a sacredness to the abyss, or the void, or the event horizon where one must prepare oneself to be honorable as one passes over the threshold. And rather than plowing forward with arrogance of incomplete knowledge, it would be an improvement to hesitate, give respect, express humility, and pay homage to the unknown as we unite with it.

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May your umbilical cord be the root of a life of substance and meaning, may you scry fruitfully, and may you  find comfort in looking up at the sky for the birds that are watching you reach reach reach, the stars who have sent their light to you from long ago, and the dark matter that reminds us of the beauty of what mysteries we cannot see.

HÁÁDĘ́Ę́ʼÍSH ÍIYISÍÍ NANINÁ?

háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

॥ ਜਪੁ ॥

ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥

ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש

The post A MURMURATION WITH SAMUEL VRIEZEN :: OBSCURITY AS STRATEGY & TACTIC appeared first on Scry Magazine.

MONA WASHINGTON: Hhm. I don’t really think of myself as an activist. I think of myself as someone who sometimes gets so pissed off or apathetic, that I feel compelled to do something besides complain.

WIKSWO: Well, your complaining is an art form, and that’s high praise. But I’ve loved that you never stop there – you haul yourself out of the abyss and take action. You were and are a tremendous inspiration – when we met I was first transitioning from civil- and human-rights work into a newfound artist means of expression. You were instrumental as a mentor for how to combine sociopolitical ethics with artmaking, and later – as I endured seemingly limitless bigotry and harassment in Europe – you really were my primary support mechanism both validating the racism I encountered in Russia, Germany, and other European countries, and urging me onwards to continue my work undistracted by opposition and criticism.

WASHINGTON: And I remember you engaged in serious conversations with everyone there: poets, novelists, …everyone. Loved those dinners. I don’t remember any BS small talk with you. Straight ahead to big ideas and searching for solutions.

WIKSWO: Those were some of the most astonishingly loving, demanding dinners I’ve ever experienced. We were blessed. You don’t trifle with small talk, and you raised the bar for all of us. It just takes one! I’ve long admired you for you tenacity, perseverance, and unique vision of identity and belonging, activism and voiceful participation in the global conversation about respect, dignity, and necessity for human rights. In particular, your commitment to both humanism and African-American civil rights place you at an invaluable nexus for where we go from here.

For those of you who haven’t met her until now, Mona is a  committed Non-Essentialist, a global thinker and activist, and also deeply rooted in the American legacies and their roots to colonialism, to Europe, and to the entrenched pathways of silencing, repressing, unsilencing, and liberation.

WASHINGTON: You are kind Quintan. I don’t think I do all that, but I do love change, and those bits of Serendipity that lead me to you. That was a great residency.

WIKSWO: It was lucky for me. It is safe to say that a few months later I would have locked myself into my room in Prague and starved to death had you not persistently reached out to me and checked on my physical and emotional well-being, urged me onwards, believing in me at a time when really, honestly, nobody else did – the nitty gritty, outspoken, and often gruesome, hurtful, and personally demanding work that is the pursuit of universal human rights and simply walking down the street in placed where you’re hated.

WASHINGTON: Now is not the place or time, but believe when me when I say I am simply paying It forward. No one gets anything done in this world without other people.

WIKSWO: Mona is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Harvard Law School. Mona is a proud member of Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA). Her plays have been performed in New York, Philadelphia, Rome, and Paris. She’s been awarded fellowships at The Djerassi Foundation, The Dora Maar House (Provence, France), The Ucross Foundation, and The Jack Kerouac House, amongst others.

And with that preamble, which does not begin to convey the sheer potency of her energetic, spiritual, artistic, intellectual, and existential force, we begin our murmuration with the icon known as Mona.

WASHINGTON:  Icon? Girl….OK, so where should we start? I think we were discussing ideas that inform our writing and artistic practices. Some days I’m conscious of writing about one issue, and then after I feel like everything is jumbled. Maybe that’s why I write plays. One of the ways I can begin to deal with clashing values is through different characters. When I revise, I usually end up refining one of the three themes below in my writing. A friend pointed that out to me. I had no idea. I constantly think about these questions in one form or another.

WIKSWO: That’s the irritating beauty of a preoccupation – the way they have of inserting themselves into daily life. I’m impressed that you can hone them down to three. What’s the first one?

WASHINGTON: I rail against Essentialism, but I always have to confront the tension between ideas, values, and the physical and find some way to resolve the tension so that I can make the moment or situation intelligible. The way we move through space, and I suppose arguably time, is the via the physical.  After all, regardless of my intentions, I’m not a disembodied spirit. We all have different containers, or earth suits, as my cousin says, but the physical so often gets in the way of  my acquiring knowledge.

WIKSWO: My understanding is that Essentialism is part of Ontology – the study of anything that is “real,” that relates to “being” and “reality.” Just those terms themselves are problematic, because they require definition and subsequent policing. In a somewhat homogeneous society where there is a hegemonic belief system, doubtless that was easier. But we have a new era where we can’t simply erase all realities or definition of being except for one set forth in ancient Greece.

Essentialism demands a definition, or a container, of “realness.” And all definitions are created by humans, and all containers are policed by humans. So again, we have a problem of hegemonic human control over the very definition of life.

WASHINGTON: I agree.

WIKSWO: You say that you are not a disembodied spirit. Yet my experience of you is quite frequently as a disembodied spirit. You live as a memory – I recall our time together at the Ragdale artist residency, as well as a lunch or two in the East Village. You also live as a moral value to me – when I was being threatened by Nazis in Bavaria in 2010-2014, your commitment to resistance and self-value and fighting back, your habits of seeing others being persecuted and your sense of shared responsibility that we all unite against perpetrators of bigotry – that was, to me, a disembodied Mona. If you were not contained in an earth suit, your ideas would still be alive to me.

WASHINGTON: But the container, the vessel, the skin and bones, are only that and not values in and of themselves.

WIKSWO: Your container is extremely kinetic. You have tremendous charisma even without saying a word. Ok – end of interruption. Your presence has presence. Ok now I’m really done interrupting.

WASHINGTON: How do I balance common sense –  i.e., I am walking in the sun with my blonde godson. Do I lather him with SPF? Of course I put heavy duty block on him. I am addressing the physical condition and the need to take care of his skin. I’m not assuming he holds certain values.

WIKSWO: I don’t see any particular connection between earth suit and what inhabits it. There is care and maintenance involved, and we all come with different earthsuits, which also change over time and space. I used to have feeling in my chin, but nerve damage means I can no longer feel it. My earth suit has areas of numbness, my earthsuit does not require sunscreen, my earthsuit influences how others perceive me, and so those factors have an impact on my spirit.

WASHINGTON: But I think your earthsuit does need sunscreen. Doesn’t it? I wear sunscreen.

WIKSWO: I do not and have never worn sunscreen, your honor.  Due to my ongoing weird genetic and neurological makeup I dump vitamin D and I have a lot of melanin that starves without sunshine, so it’s actually unhealthy when I get pale or when the UVA or UVB is blocked. I’ll probably die of cancer but it’s probably better than a neurological seizure.

WASHINGTON: I’m not anti-sunshine. I’m just anti-wrinkles and anti-cancer.

WIKSWO: I was born wrinkled. I was like a misfit pink origami. I don’t sunburn but I do windburn. Quite horribly. Absolutely. I became extremely ill after living in the north of Europe for some time, and the bloodwork they did said all sorts of strange things about melanin and D and I basically don’t burn and there is apparently a medical answer for that.

But I think earth suits contain far more mysteries than we can imagine. For example, my earth suit has several large non-pigmented places on it – they are entirely symmetrical, so in once instance I have two large white patches on both forearms, both in the exact same spot. They burn, but the rest of my skin does not.

But you are speaking about presumption surrounding the physical, the earth suit, and how much we are defined by its fundamental biological needs, and how much it fails to represent who we are as spirits, I think. This to me is really the recurring problem because we live in a physical form that is almost always coded by others in ways that permeate everything. They are complex clothing, and there are obvious things we know about them – women who live with men who do not do housework is a direct result of earthsuit conditioning, arguably – and so much we don’t.

I have never liked my earthsuit. I wish I did. I always felt Janelle Monae archandroid or something, not especially or entirely human. Maybe it will take me longer to get used to being inside the body glove, as. But that may be sociocultural freedoms, and not the actual chromosomes that I covet. (And I have a ferocious braincrush on Janelle Monae. Janelle, are you reading?) But see, I’m interrupting again. Back to your point –

WASHINGTON: But the physical can bring so much pleasure. Our valuation of  the physical is what gets jacked up.  If we skipped around the world and dropped in on many communities and homes, the division of labor would be different–performed by different physical bodies.

WIKSWO: But I do believe that we have the ability to cultivate the spirit, the consciousness in a way that completely shortcircuits the suit we are in.

For one thing, we can cultivate tactics like bilocation that give us a bit of a holiday, depending upon where we bi-locate.

Shamans can often change earth suits.

Various life forms can radically modify their ability to be seen or unseen. Ghosts and souls can find garments that make them visible.

Especially today, when earthsuits are very modifiable. We can come close to changing skin color, we can change hair texture, we can supplement our bodies with implants and devices, we can change our gender, and so forth. These options were not available to previous eras. I think it has become far less simple to say that earthsuit and consciousness cannot be separated.

WASHINGTON: I do think that we are all in some way biologically predisposed to certain behaviors, and I can never avoid the nature versus nurture debate. (BTW, The Bad Seed is one of my favorite films.)

And to be clear, for me there are times when there is nothing to do but grab onto the collective physical, and try to use it to fight for rights and values.

WIKSWO: Amen.

WASHINGTON: But that’s different. When I do that, I am doing it as a self-aware choice. I am standing with certain people, outwardly defined and self defined, but/and embraced by me, nonetheless. At least in part so that I can survive collectively. I can work with others.

We can initiate and share a response to the ways in which society projects values onto and abstracts from our bodies.

I am always interested in nomenclature and identity. Whether some words can be changed from a negative to a positive connotation, and for whom. I don’t think I will ever be able to accept certain words as positive. Not the N word or the C word or the F word, for example. I know that others may be capable of subverting the meaning and making a new meaning using the same word, and I accept that they do. But there is too big a gap for me to bridge, to change the meaning enough so I can send it out of me with a positive intention.

I just can’t, or feel that I can’t.

WIKSWO: Nomenclature is an apt word for it. I don’t think words can lose their legacy, their fate, their destiny – we can add to it, or shift it slightly, but those words were born containing a certain intent.

In upcoming murmurations on SCRY, we’ll be conversing a good bit about translations and multiplicities of language, hybrid languages, and non translatable languages and how I think that does give us some cause for excitement about expanding beyond the cultural limits of a sole language. Learning smatterings of Navajo, Tohono O’odham, German, French, and so forth were explosive to my neurology and my concept of meaning.

There are aspects, like first languages, that come to define us, but we do have freedom of choice (like not being the Ugly American who screams loudly at people who do not speak English hoping that verbal intimidation will help get the point across because..well, you know the rest.) Anyway, I have a Sikh teacher who says we are each a product of (a) our earthsuit (b) our dna/ancestry (c) our consciousness on this planet. And that fate is what happens when you don’t intervene with any of them, and destiny is what can be achieved when you learn to exercise agency over your own consciousness. I am sympathetic to that philosophy.

W: Me too.

WIKSWO: Two factors that are relatively – and definitely relatively – fixed, and one factor, our consciousness, that I believe we have ample opportunities over and over and over and over again throughout our lives to direct. For better or worse, some folx have more or less agency in society than others, but our individual consciousnesses, arguably, can be liberated by our own selves. It’s just more complicated for those at the far ends of the spectrum.

An example: I interacted with a Bavarian woman who made the conscious choice to take a topless selfie in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei gates at Dachau. Her friends encouraged her, thus influencing her choice. I reminded her of the value of respect at a place of death, and she replied that she was proud of what her family had done to establish and operate the death camp. But there was a decisive moment where she had two options for her conscious behavior of what she would do in her earthsuit, and she chose to take a nude photo by a gas chamber.

Another example: I interacted with a Bavarian man whose father was the SS officer who murdered the inhabitants of my ancestors’ village. When he learned that some of my family lived in that village, he asked permission to discuss the moral complexities. His wife came over and said, this is not an appropriate conversation. I said nothing. He said to me, I would hope that there is some way that my remorse can make healing possible for you.

WASHINGTON: That silence must have been deafening.

WIKSWO: There is as much power in silence, when used with firm intention, as there is in speech. I’m glad I have the ability now to choose strategically.

These two people were both German, they were both Bavarian, they were both from upper class Munich families, from multigenerational Nazi families, their DNA, their ancestry, their culture, their skin color, their religion, their ethnicity, and their earthsuits were nearly indistinguishable apart from gender. However, their consciousness made them absolutely different people, with very little in common in terms of consciousness. And that was revealed in the moment where they paused, exerted self-agency, and made a decision.

WASHINGTON: Yes.

WIKSWO: I arrived in Germany with animosity towards the descendants of Nazis, and realized repeatedly that this was absurd because the earthsuit does not equal the consciousness.

WASHINGTON: My second point: who speaks for whom? I am so tired of folks conflating themselves or allowing 3^rd parties  to do so with others in a group, especially those groups defined and put upon by others.

I don’t mean elected spokespeople from within a group. I mean self appointed spokespeople, or people receptive when someone else describes them and treats them as such.

I feel this dilemma daily. Sometimes, I think that we are most afraid of  the differences among ourselves within groups that are facing societal hostility and hate. To fight together and to resist, we first have to know and trust each other. But how do we do that?

There’s not always time to sit around and discuss our views and opinions. It’s easy to fall into some normative vision of what a real X is, or what a true Y should do in the face of this, that, or the other. I don’t find paradigms like those useful, especially when you have a multifactor reality in play.

I am more concerned about eradicating the hate and its consequences, and then letting everyone do and be what they want. To even be able to imagine what they want without the hate confining them.

I don’t want to replace one ideological straight jacket with another.

WIKSWO: I think intersectionality as a concept is being tragically misapplied.

WASHINGTON: Me too….and ‘me too’.

WIKSWO: Did I mention that strategic repetition is another effective tactic, along with tactical silence and tactic speech?

To me, intersectionality means that we all have a possibly infinite series of identity descriptors, but it’s misapplied as a police state. Intersectionality means we each have the agency to exercise the many components that comprise us, we finally have the capacity for self-definition, and we can reject the boxes and categories that define membership in a group.

It also means that we are not obligated to be policed by anyone standing around that box. And yet especially in the last year, I have never been harassed by so many alleged allies and colleagues questioning my right to be myself.

I delivered a public lecture recently and an audience member complained that I was white. The curator replied that I was actually mixed race white and black. We were seconds away from the “one drop” conversation when I asked the attendee, would it have changed the situation if you had asked me my race? And she said yes, but that would have been rude.

These situations are impossible. After the curator defined me as part Black, I watched the audience member examine my earthsuit for racial indicators, and focused on my manicure (two inch acrylic nails in gold glitter), my hair (dark brown, extremely curly, extremely large), and my jewelry (a lot of it, all gold and large) and saw her decide that the nails and the hair and gold jewelry were proof of her conception of what a mixed race black-white woman might be. It was horrifying and continues to distress me.

WASHINGTON: I’ve run into similar situations. Not a pleasant experience, but understandable. What’s a fix? You should have told them you were passing. Kidding…sort of.

WIKSWO: Sort of, indeed. I have found, quite recently, a large online family tree that includes photos of my family from the 1930s, and a brother stands next to a brother and one is very dark and the other could definitely pass. The passing brother died of an STD in a brothel, but the visibly African-American brother went on to help found a major university and became a civil rights leader in D.C. so there is complexity there.

The universal assumption by all races who hear my story is that the passing side of the family was successful, had college educations, and were wealthy. However, I have yet to find one of my passing relatives who is any of those three, but the dark-skinned relatives all earned college degrees and were community leaders.

That assumption – and its universality – drives me crazy, even though I understand the horrors and complexities of racial passing legacies, and gender passing legacies, but I do feel it on a personal this-is-me-this-is-now level, especially when I get policed around passing.

For decades I never even mentioned being mixed race because I was sick of the grossness that came my way. I didn’t want to lose my respect for people I cared about. And now that I’m open about it, I am accustomed to losing respect for a wide range of people. And I get persistently frustrated when people ask me, almost on a daily basis, what is your race? what are you? 

And then rarely believe me no matter what answer I give.

WASHINGTON: It’s good to have rehearsed answers when someone asks you an offensive question. I often reply with ‘Why do you ask?’

WIKSWO: But then they respond with something even more offensive. Maybe it’s because I don’t look like most of the things I am, for instance I’m part Sikh by choice, and so people say the most hateful things thinking that a Sikh person isn’t around to hear.

Most often, what happens to me is that people from within and without my multiple identity categories confront me on being a “bad” example of whatever they think I am, or whatever I say I am. I am told by feminists and by misogynists that I am not the right kind of woman. I am told by queer communities and heteronormative communities that my sexuality is incorrect. I am told by Jewish and non-Jewish, African-American and non-African-American, disabled and non-disabled people that BOTH my consciousness and how I wear my earthsuit does not conform to the accepted definitions.

WASHINGTON: I hear you. I’ve had some Black folks tell me that they don’t think James Baldwin is a good example for young Black boys because he’s gay. Why am I ‘always posting his quotes’, or Audre Lorde’s. Then, what do I do? I try to consciously choose how much energy I am going to spend interacting with someone who says something like that, but I feel that if nothing else, I have to let them know I think their homophobia is jacked and why.

I won’t get into my many disagreements with white women who are ‘feminists’, but suffice it to say that there are some women who consider Lady MacBeth a role model. No joke.

WIKSWO: I think it’s impossible to have much of any substantive interaction with white feminists until there has been substantial reparations made for the legacy of bigotry within white feminism. I was fortunate that my introduction to feminism was black and Latinx feminism, and that I didn’t encounter “white” feminism until college, and I found it shocking. I don’t think most white feminists have any awareness of the legacy they invoke and the betrayals their predecessors committed – I hope it’s ignorance, anyway. But there is a need for reparations by white feminists, and part of that is not getting into arguments before they have done their homework on some of the more hateful roots of the movement. Women and men of color paid a high price for the successes of white feminism, in my humble opinion, and that is an injustice that has to be openly admitted. Either way, I’ve always been a heretic feminist in most settings, even though I am a feminist.

WASHINGTON: I recently had someone write to tell me that I was the “wrong” kind of Black person to run a certain Facebook page because I’m not  ‘Afrocentric’ enough. I asked for an explanation of the term ‘Afrocentric’ and they became angry.

WIKSWO: Right – because they don’t want to take the time to stop and pull apart the prism of Afrocentricity and deal with the complexity. It’s easier to reduce everything to a buzzword, and then refuse to define it. Or define it by what it’s not: Mona is NOT Afrocentric. And then derail the conversation by making it about you, and not about their concept of the ideology. Confronted with you saying, “yes I am,” or “what makes you say that?” then real effort and work is required of them to think instead of repeat or regurgitate or exclude.

And that is why humanity disappoints me, because we run away from the puzzle, the conundrum, the mystery.

In terms of the identity police, it happens very rapidly that one can be rejected by everyone, and then there is literally no place to exist, no community to inhabit, except on one’s own terms. Which requires a preternatural level of confidence and tenacity. Unless one is willing to radically alter one’s consciousness and one’s earthsuit to obey our own internal police, who come not only from the XYPD but also from within our alleged allies. I have lost patience with internal policing beyond what I thought was possible.

WASHINGTON: Preach.  You know, the white mainstream media thinks that certain people speak for all Blacks. Same with gay folks. Why? Convenience. And some self-appointed folks accept the label and claim to speak for everyone. I am talking now about individuals. I’d appreciate people qualifying their positions and being honest about the fact that they do not speak for all members in a group.

But, we both know that some people don’t seem like they are able to speak at all. No one listening. No one is helping their narratives to gain attention. Muslim voices are being blocked, and twisted when people do “get” the opportunity to speak. I was really impressed with the Parkland antiviolence/gun group young people who connected with students from Chicago. Letting and helping the Chicago students get their voices out there. That is such an important bridge.

WIKSWO: Convenience. That is such a defining feature of our culture. Our use of imprecise language also fails us completely. The adjectives, adverbs, nouns that describe (or attempt to contain) us are falsely defined. The very linguistics of identity is rotten to the core. “Black” or “Jewish” or “Afrocentric” or “Muslim” or “White” is not something that can be contained in a hegemonic definition. And I know this because I’m always told that I’ve come incorrect.

WASHINGTON: Right.

WIKSWO: Which means there is a “correct” _______ : woman, queer, jew, epileptic, activist, feminist, human rights worker, wife, mutt, mixed race, white, black…

Whoever it is someone wants to represent them – I’m not her. Who is she? Not me. Who gets to say who she is? Nobody I want to spend time with. Who approves her adjective? Can she get a verification permit to use that adjective? Where is the locus of this police force?

Everybody hates the police, but lots of folks want to wear the badge and carry the gun if it means they get to be the autocratic boss who makes up laws to enforce and hurts others with impunity.

Public announcement: anyone who expects me to be their symbol for anything will be tragically disappointed. I will let that person down. Because I, like the rest of us, am not an object. And trying to make us into objects is a very vicious experiment.

WASHINGTON: Which  leads me to……my third point. What is my responsibility? I know it is not enough to just plead a case of cultural sensitivity because I can’t put down someone else’s culture. That amounts to not doing anything and not even trying to analyze power and position in other paradigms.  I find that unacceptable for me.

Even after a good faith attempt to study other cultures, I’m left with acknowledging my ignorance. But still, when I’m an “Outsider,” and I choose to listen to someone in an oppressed group and I know it is one person, or a group—I am always thinking that maybe I am missing hearing from others in the group.

So, am I really listening for an echo of my own thoughts? My own values?

WIKSWO: That’s a potent image – listening for an echo of one’s own thoughts. Is it important that the person being listened to is oppressed? Or do we listen for echoes of ourselves in every aspect of our lives, from the humans we meet to the style of toilet bowl brush we choose?

To me, it comes down to whether an individual needs reassurance of who they are from others – yes or no. And does an individual need their values to be supported by others – yes or no. However we answer those questions determines how we choose to act. With resistance, with tolerance, with eyes closed, with violence, with shame, aggression, guilt, sympathy, pride….

WASHINGTON: If I interact with a Somali woman and she tells me she chooses female circumcision and is aware (or even not) of what I see as health risks and I’m aware that what she sees as social benefits, then I think I should respect that—with some qualification.

At the very least, I think I should question why I think it is appropriate to think of her in this way, apart from the totality of who she is within her culture.

WIKSWO: Human as object, object as ideology, and then we can no longer be alive. We are reduced to being one inert object to be acted upon.

WASHINGTON: A one factor or one action analysis is weak.

I do not think that my obligation as a human being stops at my discomfort in knowing that my Western, Christian values are part of who I am and that I disagree with someone from another culture.

Basically, because someone is from one culture or group, I do not automatically elevate them to being an expert on anything other than their own, individual life, as we all are.

WIKSWO: That’s a very important consideration, to neither elevate nor denigrate. Romanticize nor ostracize. Fetishize nor excoriate. It’s a tightrope walk.

WASHINGTON: I have to become more comfortable with the fact that I have, and do, and will make mistakes. I don’t accept that my avoiding my discomfort in confronting conflicting values is more important than trying to help people, even if we have stepped into long narratives of privileged or not.

I may not like it, but many of my encounters where I do have people pushing my values back at me because I am not sufficiently ‘authentic’, are fruitful. I don’t want to ignore suffering, very real suffering that I probably can’t imagine, because I am afraid of being criticized. My gender views have changed for the better because I have been and I am being constantly challenged.

WIKSWO: I find the call-out, call-in culture very painful but there is no question that it yields fruit, if at the very least to hold a mirror, even a warped mirror, up to my face and say, this is how you are being perceived. Then I can decide, is that accurate? do I care? Should I change? Can I change? And the answer is different each time. I feel a lot of anger, a lot of it. But I’m also learning to not react to my own anger without a great deal of deliberation and intention. I will say, I would always rather be asked a question, even intrusive, than for someone to just assume anything about who I am.

WASHINGTON: But, how personal is too personal for me to ask, question? And, perhaps more importantly, how is it not? What an arrogant Western vibe to think that I know more about another culture. Doesn’t [the Somali woman]  know her own mind?  Yes, she does.

So, where is the line between my respect for another’s culture, my (perhaps?) Western idea of health and safety, and plain old arrogance?  I am starting to think I simply need a little more courage. The courage to ensure that I am not trying to promote change based on false equivalencies. And that happens. Way too much.

I don’t think I am excused from trying to unravel my interaction and value differences with someone from another country. That’s not acceptable for me. And part of the unacceptability comes from my knowledge that some voices are amplified and some muffled.

I’m not trying to interact with other folks on a Johnny One Note level. Outsiders whose values are the same as Insiders can create wonderful, ameliorative change.

International pressure helped African Americans gain civil rights, and international pressure helped Black South Africans gain their freedom.

WIKSWO: This is a topic worthy of further murmuration for sure. There is a passage from Paul Celan – I’m not sure whether it was originally in German, French, or English – that he wrote in 1948.

“Though I had known the journey would be strenuous, I worried when I had to enter one of the roads alone, without a guide. One of the roads! There were innumerable, all inviting, all offering me different new eyes to look at the beautiful wilderness on the other, deeper side of existence. No wonder that, in this moment when I still had my own stubborn old eyes, I tried to make comparisons in order to be able to choose. My mouth, however, placed higher than my eyes and bolder for having often spoken in my sleep, had moved ahead and mocked me: ‘Well, old identity­ monger, what did you see and recognize, you brave doctor of tautology? What could you recognize, tell me, along this unfamiliar road? An also­-tree or almost-tree, right? You had better haul up a pair of eyes from the bottom of your soul and put them on your chest: then you’ll find out what is happening here.’

I think this passage is so self-critical and also so self-forgiving, and a kind of profoundly compassionate but unrelentingly disciplinary message to himself about how to navigate existence.  To me that’s very much what you are talking about.

WASHINGTON: So, yes Quintan. I try to own my Western, African-American values.  I’ve disagreed with many feminists concerning their approach to FGM which erases agency and culture. I have also disagreed with feminists who say nothing because they are afraid of  being accused of racism and Western domination. Yes, what some Western folks see as ‘mutilation’ is what others see as their normal, and/or normative selves, and the reverse is true.  I don’t always need to get into an extended who speaks for whom conversation with myself or others. But none of that demands my silence or inaction. I need to listen more, if anything.

Finding out what voices might be suppressed from within that group? Or what voices are amplified by forces I can’t imagine. I am horrified at what some of the western ersatz Christians are doing in African countries, stirring up hate. Really disgusting.  And yet, they are obviously acceptable to some part of the population in respective countries, for various reasons.

And that fact that I am criticizing a practice in a different culture doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t criticize at all. For example, I don’t agree with the death penalty anywhere, and that includes killing gay people because of homophobia. Period. And I will tell anyone anywhere that, and I have.

I can acknowledge the fact that in some ways I am a Double Outsider (cisgender and American), but then what? Acknowledging my blind points and faults yes, but conceding my ignorance isn’t mutually exclusive with my doing something to stop others’ pain. For me, it can’t be. Change can be so sloppy.

And I have immediately been put into the but-you’re not a part of the culture, you can’t have this view, your opinion doesn’t count situations. But it does. I am also against Bride burning. I don’t have to be Indian or Pakistani to be against Bride burning.

I did a student internship in Somalia, and I realized that I often steer conversation away from international relations and East Africa, because people want to discuss that film…”Captain Phillips”. And that’s fine on some level,  but invariably, people seem slow to listen to my experience and discount my high regard for so many people I met there.  Many people do not want to hear anything even slightly ‘positive’ about Muslim cultures.

I have seen Conservatives uphold Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s view of Somalia. Yes, of course. She has her views and is entitled to them, but I was there for six months and I–an Outsider—came away with a much different description and narrative. And, when I’ve talked to Somalis in Rome and here in the U.S., they too think that her description is skewed. I would not ever ask her or anyone else to stifle their narrative. But I also will not overlook the fact that she and her story is being championed by Conservatives. Here we go. Could it be that the Somalis I met there, and outside of Somalia are my self-selected people so we are just echoing each other?    

The Islamophobia in the West is outrageous. I have tried to become more vocal against Christianism.

WIKSWO: Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are two persistent beasts that have hunted down Muslims and Jews since the formation of the Roman Catholic Church. After the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and complicity in the Holocaust, there is an incumbent responsibility in the Catholic Church to admit that much of the hate was stirred up by their teachings, their writings, and their laws. And, without question, their evangelical colonization that brought hatred of Islam and Judaism to every square inch of the earth. Protestants of course share in this, but the scars  and consequences of the Crusades and the Inquisition are abundant in our daily headlines. They travelled the world, and they condemned and murdered.

And yes, I know that calling out the Roman Catholic Church is complex. But I don’t think centuries of crimes against humanity and genocide can go without reparations, any more than white feminism can.

WASHINGTON: Would I listen to a woman from another country who comes to my town, and tells me that I am damaging myself as a woman, and not a real woman, because I have not given birth? Heck. I get that here. People telling other folks how to use their body parts and for what purposes.

I have a friend here who is an ardent Intactivist, and he is very strongly against forced male circumcision. He feels it is genital mutilation and should be outlawed on babies. I’ve learned so much from my discussions and  interaction with him.

WIKSWO: Living in Africa presented me with similar conundrums. But so does my trip to the local grocery store. I rarely find myself like-minded with other humans. As for moral responsibility, I will return again to my Chabad Jewish tendencies and say, we must be a people of questions, not a people of answers. And answers are best left to the individual – although even that is a western ideal. It can be considered quite selfish and arrogant to put the individual above the community.

I’ve chewed over my relationship with the Bavarian man whose father murdered my family – traumatizing things like him showing me photographs from the village after his father arrived, things like him buying me dinner and complimenting my textured hair, things like riding in his mercedes on the autobahn and drinking his family’s schnapps late at night when neither of us could sleep for the pain of ancestry. And all I keep thinking was, he ASKED me if it was okay to talk about it. I could have said no. Or he could have just decided to talk about it regardless of my consent. I do respect him for asking, and in general I think asking someone if they are open to a conversation is perhaps the only ethical place to begin.

WASHINGTON:  Yep. I went to an Orthodox brit milha (bris) a few years ago. The Rabbi used his mouth to finish the circumcision. Did it cross my mind that the procedure was less than hygienic? Hell yes. Did I object? Hell no. Do I take communion from the same cup as other folks in church? Yes. Do I think it’s hygienic? Hell no.

WIKSWO: I don’t want to assume why you made that decision, but were I to hypothesize, I’d suggest that you said nothing because you chose to attend an Orthodox bris, and by so doing you chose to respect the stated rules of their community. However, you also chose to go to Somalia as far as I know, and yet it sounds that there was more of a moral conflict.

WASHINGTON: I did.

WIKSWO: Why? I could be misunderstanding you, but both are ethnic practices that alter the earthsuit for religious reasons, yet come into conflict with Western ideas of health – or the integrity of the earthsuit – and its primacy over the integrity of the consciousness.

WASHINGTON: Yes. It’s  easy to be a pain in the as*  Western person with Western values without taking a step back to try to untangle where the conflicting values are created and where they reside.

For me, the effort and the discomfort are necessary. It can’t mean I do nothing. It can’t.

WIKSWO: From your mouth to G-d’s ear, and may neither you nor HaShem contract herpes from the encounter. Yes, yes, yaaaaaaas.  I learned – through being confronted time and again – to shut up when I’m out of my range of experience, because I know I’ll be ignorant.  Muslim North Africa, Germany, Russia, South America, the Tohono O’Odham Nation…all these places forced me to see with spider eyes. Meaning, the two I had were not sufficient. My vision was too limited to presume anything.

The work visa process is interesting, because I had to be invited in all these cases. I could not impose myself on those Nations without their permission to enter.

WASHINGTON: Which isn’t necessarily bad.

WIKSWO: Agreed. Borders are, as we know, another snarl in human society, but boundaries are interesting things when they prompt humility. And borders can be barriers, but they can also present refuge. A boundary, in and of itself, is not “bad.” It’s how the boundary is applied, and to whom, and to what purpose and effect, and with what short- and long-term consequences.

This is the significance of context, and knowledge, and that to me requires time, it requires space, and it requires questions. An investment of time in learning and self-educating before opinionating, and the effort to have a sincere encounter with the space of another person or culture.

WASHINGTON: You wouldn’t believe the people who only wanted to talk about FGM (female genital mutilation) when I returned from Somalia, but knew nothing else about the country. They were reluctant to believe that I had such a wonderful experience in a Muslim country. I told them I felt safer in Somalia, than I do here. Same thing in Morocco.

WIKSWO: Absolutely no doubt that I felt safest in Muslim North Africa in many ways, although I was in a strange predicament: at the time, I had been in the sun quite a bit and was very dark, with dark long curly hair – I was also observing certain Jewish and Muslim customs and thus wore long skirts, long shirts, and wore a shawl over my hair, and I drove a car and travelled alone.

WASHINGTON: I’m sure to them, you looked and acted like a mixed symbol in those places. Wait–you ARE a mixed symbol!

WIKSWO: Right! And some people found that thrilling, and others found it abhorrent. I spoke French, I spoke a little Arabic, but had learned French from Africans who did not speak elite Parisian French so my accent sounded a bit local. All this added up to the conclusion by the Muslim men I met that I must be half-Tunisian, half-white, and concurrently a bad Muslim and a bad White European. I was scolded much more than the European blonde women, white, who wore short shorts and bikini tops in public or went bare-breasted on the beach.

WASHINGTON: Tell me about it. I think in some cultures white women, especially those wearing bikinis are simply dismissed as outside of cultural redemption.

WIKSWO: Yes.

WASHINGTON: Not much is expected of them morally, but all are aware that men of color yelling at and putting hands on a white woman anywhere might bring Missy Anne consequences to themselves and their communities.

WIKSWO: It’s rather hideous to watch, especially when you are mixed or hybrid enough culturally to fully take in the larger context and see the inherent conflict between two cultures. Here’s an example. When I lived in Brooklyn, I got into many confrontations with white feminists who were upset when men didn’t move out of their way on the sidewalk. Totally understandable. Sidewalks should be shared. But then I’d have to ask, are you talking about white men, or black men? Because where I grew up, African-American men (and women) were expected to step completely off the sidewalk when a white woman walked past. So a white woman in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, who thinks she is asserting her feminism by refusing to make way for a Black man is at the same time inflicting a legacy of lynch-culture privilege because she hasn’t stopped to decode the looks she’s getting.  And then she buys her $14 latte and wonders why the locals are so rude. And maybe nobody is talking about it to her. I see signals being given. Is that because I’m mixed?

I’d see all the South Carolina license plates in Bed Stuy and Clinton Hill (because it costs a fortune to register NY plates, so why not do it at grandma’s?) and think, every time that white woman thinks she’s exercising sidewalk liberation freedom she is also perpetuating sidewalk persecution. It’s jaw dropping.

WASHINGTON: I remember during my internship, camping with some white, European expats on Somalia’s lovely beaches. Among the women, I was wore the most modest swimsuit: one piece. Once, a policeman saw us from a distance and came over and started gesturing to me and yelling.

There were about ten other people there, all white. We all ended up being held in a local administrative court until someone from the police bureau went into Mogadishu and confirmed that we were who we said we were. After I started talking back to him, I’m pretty sure the policeman knew what I wasn’t—Somalian, but he wasn’t sure of who I was–African-American.

I think he didn’t like the idea that he couldn’t readily place me in a context familiar to him, as a Black woman. I didn’t appreciate being accused of prostitution, but Quintan I was flattered that the policeman, at least at a distance thought, I looked Somali. Somalians are some beautiful people.  Wish I had a longish graceful neck…I could go on and on.

I encountered some identification and assessment issues in Jerusalem too. I was walking along near a museum, and an Israeli soldier stopped me. I’m pretty sure he thought I was an African Muslim pilgrim. Then I opened my mouth. Travel has been so important to my development. Assumptions about identity and societal placement.

WIKSWO: Growing up mixed, queer, Jewish in the South was like traveling every time I left the house. I was a foreigner everywhere. I think traveling outside the U.S. has been vital to me because I don’t feel that same pain of being rejected by my homeland.

Because they were presumed to be disrespectful and/or following their own cultural mores, whereas I was presumed to be intentionally sabotaging a way of life that I partially belonged to.

The major benefit of living in North Africa is that while I attracted the censure of certain traditionalists, I also attracted the attention of other North Africans who were mixed race, who didn’t quite fit in for a variety of reasons, who were queer, or Tuareg, or Bedoin, or Berber, or this or that that wasn’t quite “right” and the love and solidarity they extended towards me was like no other.

WASHINGTON: That’s great.

WIKSWO: I made very candid, intimately friendly relationships with people who wanted very much to talk about identity, and self-presentation, and these outcasts made my time living there enormously rich. I was approached by many Tunisian Muslim feminists who were working underground on issues of domestic violence, and that was powerful. But when I left to go back to the United States, I will never forget how frightened everyone was for me. It’s so unsafe! You’ll be killed! Something terrible will happen to you! We watch American TV – you have Special Victims Unit and CSI and the way women are treated there is horrible.

WASHINGTON: Exactly!

WIKSWO: Meanwhile, many Americans were counting the days until my return, convinced that I was in horrible danger. And as you say, unwilling to believe that I felt very comfortable there. And then these are also queer liberals who advocate for a Palestinian State without demanding that queerness be legalized – isn’t that a betrayal of one part of the self to empower a different part of the self? Isn’t that throwing one’s own legs under the bus? Is there any self-awareness around this? I helped set up safe houses in Texas for queer Muslims who were running for their lives because they’d been caught in a homosexual act and all Muslims were condemned, and then worked in Arizona setting up safe houses for queer white kids who were running for their lives for the same reasons and yet all Christians weren’t condemned…my mind is exploding right now, still.

WASHINGTON: I have had people tell me I’m “brainwashed”, and that I must not have met ‘real Muslims’. Doesn’t matter that I repeatedly tell them about my wonderful Muslim friends and their families, and ask them to address their Islamophobia.

WIKSWO: I do not understand Islamophobia but it’s rampant and slippery to confront. Islamophobia and anti-semitism are both so similar – this series of assumptions about an entire global community of people who span a thousand different belief systems within Islam or Judaism, and yet there is this rabid, very hurtful, very hate-based need to make us all the same.

WASHINGTON: I think both are rooted in Christianism and I use the label pejoratively.

WIKSWO: And asking folx to talk about their prejudices or bigotries against Jews and Muslims invokes this absolute rage. People expect their bigotry to be greeted with a nod and agreement? That’s scary.

WASHINGTON: Right. Tell me this, what does ‘I don’t mean to be politically incorrect’ mean? The phrase usually prefaces a jacked up comment. Why do folks say that?

I think it’s a way to say ‘I want to say something that is jacked and I can’t defend my bad values, so don’t yell at me because I am prefacing my ___ism, with an acknowledgement that I know how hurtful my views are.’

WIKSWO: It’s code. Like it’s your opportunity to say, ok, you’re safe here to be hateful.

WASHINGTON: Like getting brownie points or a pass for admitting culpability. Like my Mom says, “the diagnosis isn’t the cure.” A guy said to me once, “I don’t mean to be politically incorrect but she really is a C.” I will never ever forget that.

WIKSWO: I can understand people who say something quite specific, and experiential, such as “I find many Quaker Christian communities very troubling because their nonviolent ethos often means they allow perpetrators in their midst.” Or, “Much of the KKK activity has always been based out of certain North Alabama fundamentalist Christian churches,” There is a specificity there, ideally based on facts. That can be supported. But it’s not even rational to say, “All Christians are racist fanatics.” And yet we hear “Jew” or “Muslim” and some cartoon image infects people’s minds and the worst things come out of their mouths in the most innocent way, as though it’s perfectly fine to hold all Jewish or Israeli people personally, collectively, and individually responsible for the policies of Netanyahu, or equate all Muslim people or Afghan Muslims with the tactics of Isil.

WASHINGTON: Another example, I hate it when people say, “I’m not anti-Semitic. I agree with the rabbis in Brooklyn who think Israel is an abomination.” You know on the surface it may seem like they agree, but you also know that some of them are anti-Semitic and full of BS and hiding behind the views of  .001% in an oppressed group and that is precisely why they play up the few.

So, what is that about? Someone saying that they can’t be racist because they like Clarence Thomas is silly.  “I don’t hate Black people. I like Clarence Thomas. He’s Black… and so on…” You know how that goes.

WIKSWO: The greatest luxury is when someone has the patience to actually educate us in a complex, comprehensive way – whether that’s about the enormous diversity of belief, ancestry, experience, ethnicity in Jewish communities, or the coded language and dissection of microaggressions against African-Americans. I use the word luxury because anytime someone stops to educate me, I am taking up their time. I choose very carefully who I bother to explain aspects of my cultures to – mostly, to people who seriously, actually, want to expand and evolve and grow. And what is mainstream Jewish thought? Or mainstream Black thought? or mainstream feminist thought? Or Queer thought? I really don’t have any idea. I suppose I get very nervous when I hear echoes. You know me enough from our colleagueship over the years that I can be an abrasive, bombastic, sanctimonious pain in the butt.

WASHINGTON: Tenacity combined with energy is a virtue.

WIKSWO: I’m painfully aware of that, yet once I go to the trouble to form an opinion I tend to hold to it very closely. It takes me a long, long time to make a decision. I think that in general, we don’t say “I don’t know” often enough. Or, “I’m still trying to figure that one out,” or “I can see various sides and can’t reduce my opinions to a single ideology.” This is the timespace issue – is there a way that we can insert more timespace into our ignorances? My Catholic girlfriend growing up had a t-shirt that said “please be patience. God isn’t finished with me yet.” I think about that shirt all the time. And the idea that a sacred being can present itself to us at any moment, disguised as a mere mortal, but presenting us with a test of character.

WASHINGTON: Absolutely.

WIKSWO: I almost strangled someone at the gas station this morning and had to pretend that they were an angel in disguise. I’m not proud of myself. I made a million assumptions about him, and he made a million about me, and we were nearly yelling at each other because we heard no echo of ourselves. But if he had agreed with me, I would have been suspicious because I don’t think I come to most of my beliefs by any way that could be shared by another person.

I’m not sure I’m being coherent.

WASHINGTON: No, you are. And if you had unlimited amounts of time and energy, you both might have some genuine respect for one another.

WIKSWO: I am trying to express my consternation that I do not want to be a fixed entity, I want life and time and place and experience to change me for the better, to make me a more ethically impeccable person. “A petty consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” wrote Emerson. It’s always troubled me.

Sometimes as an activist, I see myself unchanged from who I was when I worked for MLK’s protégées at SCLC at fifteen, and these were battle scarred people who had lost folks at Selma and Birmingham and everywhere else. And I thought yes, you risk your life to fight for respect.

And sometimes I think, when I sit in therapy for PTSD and work on my own battle wounds, who was that child who thought it would be so easy? It’s not easy. It’s seering. And what I admired in the veterans what that they had walked through fire, and I didn’t even know it yet. I must have seemed so…vulnerable? Like they knew folks would try to kill me at some point, but I thought I was this invincible kid, and they didn’t want to destroy that idealism.

WASHINGTON: [My fourth point]: I hear you, but we change. We must, even reluctantly. I am so proud of these young folks fighting against this crazy gun violence. They are guiding this country toward sanity. They’re reaching across income and race and all kinds of barriers that could stop them. I am impressed and energized. I’m not sure of where this change came from, but I’m glad? Adults always seem to ignore young folks.

Our national dialogue is being refreshed by students. I always joke with a friend of mine that when the Revolution comes, I hope I’ll be wearing nice lipstick. And regardless of my lipstick, when change comes, and it will, what will I want to preserve?

How do I know what to do to make sure that my efforts go toward some lovely teleological end that I share with others?

WIKSWO: I’m trying to spend time away from the usual suspects. I have always lived in megacities – Los Angeles, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Dallas – and comforted myself that I was immersed in diversity. But my last decade in New York City made me suspicious that it was a place where I would have the freedom to change. I couldn’t. I was roped in because someone wants to judge you on the G train in two seconds.

The density of other humans felt like a cage – their judgements, their everythings. So I ran off to the desert to hear myself, and try to sort out my voice from the voices of others, while not shutting out either party. And I wear lipstick every morning, and I never leave the house. Just in case the revolution arrives. I’m into purple and blue-violet right now.

WASHINGTON: Yes!

WIKSWO: I keep coming back to the hypothesis that maybe the only way we can grow is to get outside of our crack in the pavement. I have to be around people who are unfamiliar to me in their values and thinking. I was surrounded too long by the other members of a choir I no longer trust. Not when I’m called out by an ally for being the wrong kind of me.

WASHINGTON: So, in the immediacy of  now, where and how does my discernment begin? And what is the balance between theory and reality. I think I’m a forgiving person, but certainly not as much as I think I am.  So, what’s the gap between my normative professed goals and reality, and what can I do to fix it? All I know for certain is that I need to expect some discomfort.  I find some changes painful. That’s not going to stop.

WIKSWO: I hear you on the forgiveness. I don’t think it’s a very valuable virtue. I’d rather say, “I understand.” But I won’t forgive. Some things are unforgivable. That doesn’t mean I need to curse or damn someone, but the best I can hope for is to arrive at a place where I understand why they did what they did, even though I despise it.

I also dislike the virtue of hope. Hope without action is a crime against humanity. Being told to hope is a con game, a deception.

Similarly, I have lost faith in simplicity. I simply don’t think it exists – I think something very similar to an infinitely-sided prism exists, and if we are fortunate, and we work hard, we gain access to more of the refracted information. But there is always going to be most of the spectrum shooting right past me. So I’m assuming that in the void or abyss where simplicity once was, all I have left is personal ethics.

And those had better work in a void, because I am ready for a revolution that entails the end of predators. And that’s all I care about. Moving this species beyond predators and prey. It’s been a couple thousand million years (I don’t know, I didn’t learn about evolution until I was 20) and I think we can make a leap now.

WASHINGTON: Go Quintan. Go, go, go Quintan.

WIKSWO: I love you. We will create Norfolk Vortex. Countdown beginning, Major Mona.

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קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש

The post A MURMURATION WITH MONA WASHINGTON :: ON THE TELEOLOGY OF ECHOES appeared first on Scry Magazine.

ENSZER: How do people make a living in the world and make art? That is one of the questions that animates my research and scholarship and spills over into my friendships and everything. It ties into what is valued and how do we value people’s time and work and how does that translate in so many different ways?

WIKSWO: Perhaps one has to back up and develop a proprietary definition of both “living” and “art.” These words are mutable and highly contextual. My experience vastly improved when I spent 2015 doing this semantic exercise – during what I believed to be a major depression that has now revealed itself as a profound existential metamorphosis. And to me, living began to be equated with freedom from constraint, and art began to be equated with freedom from constraint. So I made a list of all my constraints and began to systematically demolish them. That meant leaving Brooklyn, leaving my partner, and almost entirely divesting from the artistic and social community I inhabited. Now I “live” off less than $20K, precariously, and my “art” is no longer exclusively affiliated with any institution that exercises control.

ENSZER: So I am fascinated by this reframe and the idea of what constitutes “living” and what constitutes “art”. And as always, I hear Dorothy Allison on my shoulder nattering about class. I don’t know where exactly this is going, so I’ll just type. It seems that the question of what is the definition of “living” differs in some ways based on class backgrounds. For me, having grown up in Michigan in a working-class community that was reliant on the auto industry and the advances that unions brought to families, living means being able to provide for oneself and ones family, but also it inevitably meant for me that I didn’t want to do the body-breaking work of the auto industry (or in more contemporary landscapes in Michigan service industries).

I understand your definition of freedom from constraint for both art and living, but there are also the people on my shoulder saying, look no one is free from constraint. “They” are never going to let you do certain things; don’t get too uppity thinking or talking about art; the path to being flat broke is an easy one to take. The language around the pain and challenge of living in the world from my childhood is very present. In some ways, I want art to mitigate that pain, those challenges. I don’t know what all of this means, but there was my mother (her memory a blessing—or something) on my shoulder saying, oh, this woman isn’t like you. Out there in Brooklyn. Talking about freedom. Trying to escape control. They all will control you. They will never just let you be.

WIKSWO: Whereas my grandmothers, may their memories be enigmas, were perpetually engaged in hacking the system. They were angry – one a Jewish immigrant prevented from attaining a PhD in Mathematics from Columbia because PhDs in Mathematics weren’t granted to women at Columbia, even those who had successfully defended a thesis and had all the proper credits. Or the other grandmother, who married an Amish preacher and was devastated to discover that she couldn’t shave her legs, wear colors, wear lipstick, dance, sing, or set off fireworks. They both were always seeking the monkeywrench.

You are right – there are always constraints. But something deep within me refuses to accept that without a fight to the death. My healthcare got cancelled today, so that day may come sooner rather than later. I have $4 in my bank account. I have panic attacks, and then I remember that I’m going to die so what the hell. Perhaps more of us might ruthlessly – for me, it was accompanied by desperation and a longing for suicide, so it was survivalist – examine our own perceptions of value, of our own worth, and of how we treat ourselves. There is no magic solution to making sure we have roof and food, art and soul, but we might be more likely to craft lives and work that bring a connection to the sublime rather than to a form of slavery.

ENSZER: So is capitalism a form of slavery for the workers? I don’t know. I always pause at that metaphor. On one hand, I see some merits to it, but in my life because of education and the ability to be mobile, I have not experienced the same dehumanizing aspects of capitalism that I think some of my forebears did. And I always worry about metaphors to slavery in the US so close to our history of slavery, which we still live with every day. (And you said you were the interruptor. I seem to have something to say about every paragraph.)

WIKSWO: Interruption is the spice of discourse, so hooray! I do not believe that capitalism by design is a form of slavery for the workers. I believe that, over timespace, consumer capitalism in its present form supports and upholds slavery – I am biased, perhaps, having spent many years working in anti-slavery projects, also known as human trafficking opposition. I have met real-life, present-day women who were and are slaves, and so I cannot place slavery in the United States exclusively in the past. What I saw was an economic system of commodities that could only survive if some humans are owned and not remunerated for their labor. Is that interent to the ideal of capitalism? Absolutely not. Is that inherent in the practice of capitalism? Without question. I have no ideas for anything to replace capitalism, other than potent limits on its predatory and exploitative powers.

As for me, personally, my experience growing up in the south, working against slavery, and then encountering New York City were radicalizing. It came down to (1) a radical divestment in capitalism and consumer capitalism, (2) a daily practice of self-discipline around who and what I answer to, and (3) a deliberate distancing from institutions with gatekeeping power. When I lived in New York City, I began to think I answered to the jury of beaux arts cocktail parties, and then I realized that hedge fund managers were buying all my artwork and keeping it in climate controlled storage in Jersey. But that may be a discussion for a different time.

Sumary: I think slavery is a term that, like genocide, has to be navigated very carefully, but cannot be used proprietarily by a single group. I grew up with sharecroppers who often said, slavery wasn’t over, it was just repurposed into sharecropping and the prison industrial complex. Everything I see in my adult life has underscored that slavery still exists, and that it is directly tied to unregulated consumer capitalism.

I agree – it’s a complicated term to use as metaphor, but it needs to be used, and talked about, and challenged, expanded, explored…

ENSZER: So, Q, how do you divest from the desire to be in institutions with gatekeeping power? I understand the deliberate distancing as a choice people make, but if I am totally honest, I still yearn to be in those institutions for the resources that they make available to people inside them. Having a research library at one’s fingertips is a GIFT. Being in conversation with an array of people who come in and out of these institutions is such pleasure. I miss those things. And I cannot say that there is anything deliberate about my relationships or lack thereof to institutions; it is more happenstance and a manifestation of contemporary circumstances. And sometimes that makes me sad or angry or bitter. So I still have the desire to be in institutions.

I completely appreciate the practice of self-discipline not only around who and what I answer to but also around how I do my work. That I love and appreciate being without constraints.

WIKSWO: The emphasis is divesting from the desire. In the sense of a driving motivation that is preoccupying, mesmerizing, and angled towards a goal. If I make a list of all the resources that gatekeeper institutions offer, I am happy in most – but not all – instances to benefit from them. But to me, it has to be a side-effect of my work, and not the motivation behind my work. I do not have a research library, but I post on social media asking for someone who can help me access documents, and I prefer that to having key aspects of my autonomy controlled by a university president – dean – department chair – tenure committee. I’ve met about thirty new colleagues in the Netherlands due to one social media research request, and I value what has emerged from those relationships more than I privilege making ethical sacrifices to a university.

As I’ve said, I didn’t have any formal education until high school, and had no contact with any institutions that I can recall until I was about fifteen. Perhaps I was never exposed to the process by which one devotes inherent respect or allegiance or loyalty to an institution. It always seemed they needed to earn it from me. Arrogant attitude, I know, but I have found that it goes both ways. And most of the people who have influenced me the most have had to sabotage the gates of major institutions to gain access, which makes me question – do I want to be at a party where the folx I respect have to crash? I’m being slightly facetious, but mostly not.

And the books I love were never taught in university. And the artists I’ve loved were never shown in museums or galleries. And that was directly related to identity – to blackness, or queerness, or womanness…why be a patriot for a system that hates you?

ENSZER: What constitutes a lesbian literary canon? how does one get formulated?

WIKSWO: a canon or a cannon. I’m personally disinterested in a literary canon, as it has come to be defined, since by its essence it is exclusionary. A lesbian literary canon would be troubling because an excluded community perpetuating exclusion is tatamount to an ethical crime. However, a lesbian literary cannon filled with buckshot – that’s interesting. We are a fragmented community, queers. I mean that in a good way because we are confederacies of selves over time – sexual, political, physical, aesthetic, expressive, inexpressive, and I think this panoply of culture could embrace our bits and pieces and then we have the prism that is at the root of our solidarity. Solidarity through fragmentation. Any club that would have me is one I would never want to join, etcetera.

ENSZER: Yes, love the canon or cannon move. And completely appreciate the exclusionary function of canons. And yet. I still cannot drink out of a fire hydrant. I need a glass or a water fountain. I think that in the best worlds we have many options to drink that suggest different modes of hydration. Without a canon of some sort, something that someone is proscribing, what do we rage against? Where do we start?

I think that there is function in different canon-constructing projects. Some people are never going to come to the fire hydrant or be out in the woods for the buckshot. They want the glass of water. They want the listicle of read these things because they are the best lesbian novels from the 70s or the 80s or the 20s. I appreciate that impulse. Not everyone is going to read deeply in a particular area. Some people want the highlights reel.

I am always looking for smart people in various areas where I can read or watch or think downstream from them. Where I can get their recommendations and their insights without having to sort it all out myself. So that is where I think the canon can be important.

WIKSWO: I agree with you, I just wouldn’t call that a canon. Not in the classical European sense. I think that’s dead now. Or I will work harder to kill it. I would call the Lesbian Lexicon a grassroots listicle highlights reel that should remain unregulated, and frequently disrupted by the unusual suspects.

ENSZER: What is in and out? What are the reasons for the inclusions and exclusions? You saw some of those questions in my last piece for Lambda – and I am thinking about them again in a new piece that I am writing.

WIKSWO: Your writing about the writing of Jenny Johnson and Marilyn Hacker and Renee Vivienne are – like all your writing about lesbian poetics – as gorgeous and thought-provoking as the poems themselves. Ins and outs, inclusions and exclusions seem to revolve in many ways around wildness, around divestment, around radical distancing from what contains and constricts. Discomfort is a word that’s very underestimated. Discomfort takes people to hospital, and very few humans go to hospital for entertainment, or enjoyment, or pleasure – and sadly, in my opinion, canons are typically based off being in some way digestible.

Most of the exclusions are from being the wrong kind of whatever. By not conforming to the accepted modes of conduct, whether that’s the contemporary ideal of lesbian erotics, or playing nice to the right people. Just because many of us are disenfranchised, doesn’t mean we don’t have our own communities policing us. And the number of rejections I have received from queer editors and curators who called my work “the wrong kind of queer” means that our allies are not necessarily people with whom we share an identity category. It’s all a process of ruthless reductivism, and then outliers being uncategorizable. There was an argument with my last book by Amazon regarding whether it should be lesbian fiction, or African American nonfiction. My publisher listed it as memoir. Just let that sink in.

ENSZER: yes absolutely. That is a function of canons. They do, indeed, make simpler a rich and complex eco-system of writing, thinking, and conversation.

WIKSWO: Canons do not take one to the hospital. Cannons, however, do so very efficiently. Discomforting writers, discomforting lesbians, discomforting lesbianisms all are forms of cannons, destroying comfort in order to replace it with the unknown, the sublime, the precipitous, the threatening, the unfamiliar. And we humans with our fight-flight-freeze amygdala have to actively work against categorizing something as a threat.

ENSZER: Categorizing seems at the crux of so much of these questions. Yes, resisting categorization is vital work; to me it is foundational work of feminism and queer life. At the same time, I am not anti-categorical in my being. I recognize both the constraints of a category and the pleasures of categorization.

WIKSWO: And queerness, queer women, female self-expression, female sexuality – the list goes on – are perhaps the most primal fear in our human civilization over the last few thousand years. There has been a war declared on us: a very violent, deadly war with casualities of all kinds. So I say, let’s load each and every one of us into the cannon and keep on firing away. Because even the metaphor of a lesbian cannon – is a cannon phallic, or vaginal? – is discomforting.

ENSZER: A fundamental epistemic question I think I live with in the world is the power of critique to challenge and transform our lives. I live today because of feminist and lesbian critiques of how people live in the world and how people can resist various power structures and systems of oppression in the world. At the same time, critique I find fundamentally limiting because it is focused on tearing things down and I am interested in how to build, create, imagine new and different things.

I wrote about this in a short piece at Huffington Post. I think the piece relies too much on a binary between critique and create, but I still feel the dynamic tension between those two impulses. I hope ideally the tension leads to greater productivity and insight, but sometimes it also feels unmanageable.

WIKSWO: Tension is perhaps inherently unmanageable. We need more of that – friction, tension. Otherwise there is complacency and that becomes the mobius strip that leads us right back to the conservative gatekeepers, which are as prevalent in the progressive left as in the repressive right. The less manageable, the less obedient, then the more visible. ACT UP came from that strategy and set of tactics.

ENSZER: Why is this question so important to me? I’m invested in how women and lesbians and queer women are seen as making or creating or contributing to culture. Or ways that they are doing that but are not seen.

WIKSWO You certainly are a major driving force in the seeing of queer women’s self-expression, and perhaps because you go beyond seeing into also hearing, listening, absorbing, amplifying, feeling that self-expression. My first introduction as a baby queer was my brother’s copy of Adrienne Rich’s more erotic poems during that all-important puberty. My radicalization as an eighteen year old with a modicum of sexual freedom was Monique Wittig’s Les Guerrierres. These have to be taken into the body not as other, but as fact. The Fact of a Doorframe, for all its many meanings, is Rich’s title that to my child-brain forever eroticized doorframes as sexual – a tongue of a lock in the furrow of a clasp.

ENSZER: Yes, I love doorframes, that sense of being between different worlds. Being on a threshold of something, some discovery, some new experience. I’ve been rereading Rich in the big new book of all of her poems and thinking about how metaphorically the home/domestic world poems continue to feel resonate, but her vision became so much larger, so global and powerful. I am trying to understand how the poetry works as she matures.

WIKSWO The jouissance of queer female writing that to me is most unseen is the work that is explicit, visceral, and ferocious. Thank goodness my brother developed an interest in lesbian literature or else I’d be a different person. But the very invisibility of these women’s expressions became a challenge…something like the inevitable conversation amongst teenagers in “how to find the clit.” The Fact of a Doorframe became a talismanic, erotic fact of queer female aliveness to me as a teenager in the late 1980s when much of queer culture was about death and gay men. Silence = Death, Queer = Death, and friends who wouldn’t drink from a waterfountain after me in case pussy licking gave them AIDS.

ENSZER:: Yes, I came of age at the same time and even as I raged again the linkage between queerness and death, it is profoundly marked in my subconsciousness. From the sense of being surprised and delighted about being older to seeing younger queers without that association.

WIKSWO The contrast is certainly mindboggling, as I relate stories to my undergrad and grad students as visiting professor from Mars. The young queers look at me with pity and horror as I harangue to them about my own vendetta against the grotesqueries of queerness and death, which I first encountered during a hate crime that my girlfriend and I survived – while I was recovering a well-intentioned friend gave me a stack of 1950s lesbian pulp fiction novels in which all the women were murdered, died, reprogrammed, silenced, restrained, or met some other hideous extinguishment. The timing of my life with those books was also radicalizing, since my girlfriend and I had found ourselves fighting back with knives. The university students that I meet all around the country seem entirely perplexed by this, unless they are in an identity group such as Islam or Christianity where they are still being persecuted.

My grandmother was a queer woman, a mathematician, and I watched her children erase her. She has passed away, and her visibility is that of her nine grandchildren, six of us are openly queer. All other traces of her are gone. I once hosted the poet Paul Hoover in my studio in Los Angeles, and he stood in shocked paralysis by my desk and then said, “why and how do you have a photo of my mother’s girlfriend on your desk?” It was a photo of my grandmother. They were both faculty at Sweet Briar College for women in the 1950s. I went back and taught there in 2009, as an openly queer female writer, and it was a ritual of reclamation.

ENSZER: Wow. What a powerful story!

WIKSWO: I think erasure of queer women’s self expression is a ritual in our society. And so must the reconstitution of our culture be a ritual. I think you are one of the leaders in this ritual.

ENSZER: And how can that erasure end? I think you are exactly right that erasure of queer women and queer women’s self expression is a ritual in our society. How can we interrupt that process? How can we hold on to things so that people are not forgotten. I was thrilled to read this article about Lorde in the UK. I hope that we are feeling our way to challenging some of the erasures.

There will always be some, of course. It is the drinking out of the fire hydrant issue. Not everything can be carried from generation to generation, but more has to be carried.

WIKSWO: I think there are so many emerging curators and editors who are out there searching for overlooked queer women – a project led by activists of our generation, perhaps, who did the initial excavating and need a hand in that enterprise. There are a few breadcrumbs of hope – the retroactive New York Times obituaries of erased women….the Wikipedia feminist edit-a-thons.

ENSZER: How can feminism be usefully put into conversations with questions about racial justice, economic justice, equality, liberation, liberty? Of course it is in conversation with all of those things and of course there are conflicts around all of those things. How do we sketch out this space in ways that are inclusive and meaningful?

WIKSWO: White feminism did some very, very harmful and destructive things – that has to be publicly and universally acknowledged as a fact of the feminist legacy that cannot be erased. I live in a white minority state, in a white minority county, in a white minority village, and the word feminism is understandably snorted at by women of color here, who were actively excluded and had to kick down doors that were locked by white women. There are complex contexts to this, but the fact remains that the Feminist Movement has some truth and reconciliation, some reparations and responsibilities of conscience, amends and apologies to make, and to keep doing so consistently and universally before those wounds can begin to heal.

Intersectionality is again the embrace of fragmentation over the hegemony of singular identity. So many of us fight to be recognized or seen – as well as to live and exist – as any identity and we become fiercely wedded to all that we have sacrificed and lost in the pursuit of basic existence. To some extent, we have to hold onto that while also letting go of it. To not become mono-dimensional is the dream of any liberation movement, right? To have the freedom to be n-dimensional, unrestricted, free.

ENSZER: Ah, back to the question of what constitutes life and freedom. I resonate with this. And yet. I also am fascinated by the happiness of people who live within restricted communities. Certainly for some (the queers, the feminists, the writers) insular communities never work for them, but there are people for whom living with constraints and limitations work JUST FINE. What is the difference between people for whom those constraints work and me? And I do not think the answer to that question is lifting me up to make me better. I have a profound respect for people who live where they are with honesty and integrity and embrace their place. That isn’t me, but there may be something wrong with me!

WIKSWO: And sketching out space means having very focused conversations about how we police expression within ourselves and within our identity communities. I’ve been called a bad queer more times that I can count, by other queer people. That’s absurd. And that’s only one facet of my identity prism.

While it was initially very enticing to have a lesbian bookstore or to go to the lesbian herstory section of a library, we may need to more rapidly evolve into dismantling the barbed wire that construct these identity fences, and think of ourselves as a species as an ecosystem of hybrids, none of which need to be segregated into purebloods. This is policing, blood quota, the ranked status of a lesbian who has never had sex with a cis man, and all the other forms of control and power that are existential policing.

ENSZER: I have read somewhere that more people are staying where they are in the United States. Fewer people are moving, leaving where they were born. My grandmother felt the failure of Michigan was that I moved away for work, for life. I thought life and work were at the other end of a move. She thought that life and work were where you stood. I don’t know what I think. I do know that they hybridity, the mixing up of everything, comes from moving around. From shaking things up. That’s why I have lived in four different states. And will probably move again at some point.

WIKSWO: In the United States we have such an assumption that we can go anywhere and be anything. It’s a double edged sword of colonialism as well as liberation. A gorgon’s knot. How many metaphors can I throw in to say that the idea of staying in one’s assigned spot has value, and so does coloring outside the lines. Or rather, they both have consequences, and we as a society tend to take them lightly, rather than pause to reflect on the impact and repercussions of things like one person’s self-definition is another person’s red-lined gentrification. In general, if decisions are made with conscience and ethics, we can only do what feels right for us. I start to lose myself if I do not move myself. I don’t ever plan to have a single static place of residence. But I think a lot about migration and travel as a practice of self-scrutinized ethics.

ENSZER: I was just reading today a piece about the letters of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem and the conflict between being philosophers and believing in an ethical duty to humanity as a whole vs. some type of nationalism. I found the conflict very moving and painful and I think that is a bit of a template for how I think about this question.

the article is here: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/254461/hannah-arendt-and-gershom-scholem  I bought the book. It was too expensive, but I just have to read those letters.

WIKSWO: I read that essay too, and the book is on my next-to-procure list! Thank you for introducing me to this mindbending work. I have an enormous obsession with all things Hannah Arendt to the extent that she is a regular figure in my dreams and nightmares. I’m conversing with you right now while staring at the spine of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. It’s easy to argue that those two have been in the ten-fingered handful of most important thinkers in my life. But I wonder about the conflict between ethics and nationalism. I wonder whether it’s more a capacity for discomfort, and how far one is willing to go into deep discomfort. For a philosopher-mystic who pre-emptively fled genocide, the concept of a Jewish nationalized homeland (insert, Lesbian Desert Island Utopia or Norfolk, Virginia’s attempt at a Free Black State) must have been unimaginably comforting. A place where all likeminded people can gather in spacetime.

ENSZER: Yes, and I’m interested in WHY utopias are mono in our imaginations? I think of the feminist utopian thinkers – Joanna Russ, Elana Dykewomon, Octavia Butler, June Arnold – their utopias have a mono sense about them. They are not reveling in the eclecticism of the world. And Wakanda? Loved it, but mono. I was just talking to a friend about Naomi Alderman’s THE POWER and whether it was a utopian novel or a dystopian one. I thought it was dystopian, but she argued that it was a utopia. (Have you read DISOBEDIENCE? Amazing – and also part of my fodder about people’s happiness in constrained communities).

WIKSWO But for Arendt, I think she’s more cannon than canon. She was never fainthearted in challenging the hegemonics of Jewish identity police, whether the source was Goebbels, the New Yorker magazine, the Upper West Side, Israel, or anyone. The mono-utopia is inordinately dull to me, and yet it is a stage of evolution, perhaps, where we must find ourselves in others before we can find ourselves in the universal. And staying true to oneself and one’s identity is often formed through contact with people one thinks are likeminded, only to discover that the self cannot fundamentally be part of a homogenized group. Arendt found this out the hard way, by infuriating a large portion of the so-called American Jewish community by her coverage of the Eichmann trial. A fury that continues to this day. She relentlessly stood her ground, even while ally after ally deserted and defamed her. Constraint was never her ethos.

ENSZER: I absolutely agree about Arendt, definitely more cannon than canon, but here is my question: is that because of who she is or how the world responded to her? A chicken or egg question most definitely, but one worth thinking about. Another way of asking it is, might she have been a canon if the world responded positively to smart women?

WIKSWO I like to think of her as someone ethically compelled into discomfort at levels intolerable to most.

ENSZER: YES! Like Sarah Schulman!

WIKSWO Sarah Schulman – swoon. Major Swoon. Her book The Gentrification of the Mind was hugely influential to me, and I teach it at every opportunity I have. She is a visionary whose work intersects unexpected junctures in identity, from class and queerness to Israel/Palestine and Queerness, to all sorts of rabbitholes about how newcomer artists and low-income intellectuals both positively and negatively impact established communities in major cities.  She looks at identity through a scope where the morality of “good” and “bad,” or “obedient” and “disobedient” is called into question – rightly so. I find her very reassuring, and I admire your own efforts in advancing her work.

Teaching at Yeshiva University in New York, and exhibiting my own work at the Berlin Jewish Museum and many other Jewish institutions, it’s shocking how many times I’ve been called a bad Jew. It’s as many times as I’ve been called a bad queer. Much of Schulmann’s work surrounds this kind of binary thought that plagues the left as well as the right: how we define ourselves, and how others define us, in a larger societal context.

ENSZER: Yes, so do you embrace the badness and revel in it or do you challenge it and say I’m still here. A Jew. A Queer. Without the adjectival modifier.

WIKSWO: I must admit that I revel in it for about three weeks of the month, and then for about a week I cry in public. I don’t want to be modified, but I don’t want to be denied my own identity.

ENSZER: That modification is the impulse of the canon, of course. And I just want to say, it cuts all ways. I think of Roy Cohn (and Ethel in the amazing Angels in America). A bad Jew. Clearly.

WIKSWO: I think we need to bring back the role of the heretic, along with the role of the court jester, or the joker. The disrupter. That badness is uncomfortable but someone has to do it.

ENSZER: And so this question of badness is perhaps a question of discomfort. And badness walks alongside erasure, and the category police keep everyone on the right shelves, the right ovens, the right institutions, feeding the expectations of the status quo. The only way to be inclusive is to be very, very uncomfortable. And perhaps the only way to be included is to be very, very uncomfortable.

WIKSWO: Beautifully stated. I am not Buddhist, and the “life is suffering” adage has never especially resonated with me as a cri de coeur, but “life is very, very uncomfortable” certainly does. Where is the trend out of my homestate of California that says, “be uncomfortable.” I think it’s time to start a new movement.

ENSZER: Yes, and in that discomfort, is the space for you, for Cohn, for the Jews and queers who voted for Trump. It is no utopia.

WIKSWO: Why do we need a utopia? I don’t think I’m here for a utopia. Where did that expectation even come from? It’s sort of privilege of dreamspace – what is a utopia for rocks? Perhaps a volcano. We have misdefined utopia. I don’t think it’s a place without tectonics. If it were so, nothing would be created.

ENSZER: What does it mean to have a creative practice? What does it mean to have one in this hyperspeed world that we currently live in? Is it possible to be and live on the internet and still have the time and space for a creative practice?

WIKSWO: I’m going to boomerang back to pondering underlying meaning of words that we use. Is it the internet that sucks us up, or is it the consuming difficulty of navigating a terrain that is simultaneously fractured and individualistic, while also being Orwellian high-school-group-think? I have to divulge that my earliest encounters with the internet were when I was about 10, and it was still a prototype project of the Department of Defense, and I snuck access to it through my father’s laboratory where I concocted the identity of a 35-year old engineer and had the most erotic and peculiar conversations with anonymous wierdos all over the world who also had access to the system. It never felt like a distraction. It was a wormhole, a luxurious pathway that led me far beyond my life as a very isolated child in a fundamentalist household who lived down a dirt road in an unnamed town in the rural conservative south and had no education until high school. To get to the point, I find myself creatively inspired by leading a very slow and deliberate embodied life, and then enjoying the frictive pleasures of zapping around the globe in the dubious hands of humanoid algorithms.

I lived worked and studied for a many years with a Sikh community in Los Angeles, and my teacher semi-lovingly berated me for my complaints about that city. He’d say, “You do not live in Los Angeles. You live in Quintan Wikswo.” Talk about erasure – I had erased myself into the city, and felt uncomfortable and unseen and all it took was his daily reminder that I have agency to be a cannon of self. Anything can distract us from our creative practices, but at the same time those distractions can cause the friction necessary for our creativity to catch fire.

ENSZER: yes. That is a necessary ingredient: friction for creativity to catch fire.

WIKSWO: Of course, I’m also a hypocrite, so I’m writing you from inside one of the largest remaining wilderness preserves in North America, having finally escaped Berlin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York because I found not the internet, but physical proximity to humanity to be disabling to my freedom of conceptual navigation!

For the first time ever, I live on land where the neighbors are not in spitting distance (at least for me – they might be in spitting distance for a thirteen-year-old dedicated to hocking up spit). I find the solace of space amazing. That and the birds.

ENSZER: What is the form and shape of one’s contribution in the world?

WIKSWO: It is necessary to make additional contributions, because it’s like the group dinner at an expensive restaurant. Some folks will always excuse themselves to go to the loo and not come back to pay the check. So some of us have to bring extra resources. If someone is a loo person, well, I hope it’s a temporary state. We can happily be orangutans. But then don’t complain about having bananas stolen, or your baby’s head smashed against a tree by a rival male. If we want to advance as a life form, we have to work for what we want.

ENSZER: How many books should one read in a year?

WIKSWO: As many or as few as are necessary to keep up the most uncomfortable level of discomfort.

ENSZER: How many words should one write in a day?

WIKSWO: As many or as few as are necessary to keep oneself from self-immolating. Unless one wants to experiment with self-immolation, which is, presumably, a form of self-expression and protest that does not require language.

ENSZER: What does it mean to measure life with books and words?

WIKSWO: Very little, I think. That’s heresy as a Jew. Let me ponder that – I think it means everything. It’s just that we have to question the definition of life, or books, and of words. I taught a little girl last summer who narrated her life in third person, verbally. I said she should write it down and she said, my head is a book. And many silent life forms, like rocks, tell stories. I think books and words are vastly overrated, which is why I became a writer of books.

ENSZER: Is it enough to just live life as you wish and be kind to others or is there some other contribution that is necessary?

WIKSWO Does that assume we all share certain commonalities of consciousness and conscience? I believe in human rights, and I believe all humans are created equal, but we do not all have the same purpose in being here, or in being alive, or even in being dead. I have known many brilliant people whose entire lives were lived for death – for the ability to actively leave no trace in the ecology. I don’t think kindness is necessary – it’s very much irrelevant to the majority of human beings if we are to be judged by our actions. We are a cruel species, en mass. We mostly contribute pain, whether that’s to the cow that I cook for my dinner or the friend I no longer speak to because she caused me pain. Perhaps the contribution is authenticity. To know what is beneath the persona. To know ourselves for who we are, and to take agency in changing or adapting that as we desire. To not be prisoners to fate but to forge our own lives based on conscious choices.

And sometimes that conscious choice is to accumulate as much bitcoin or human ashes as possible. And sometimes that’s to save millions of lives from genocide or erasure. But to know who one is, and what one is doing, and why, and how, and to what end… To bring as much as possible from the subconscious and unconscious minds into the conscious mind, and navigate with self-awareness…

A butterfly is a book with only two pages.

ENSZER: At one point over the summer, we have swarms of dragon flies on our property. They have four wings and are among the extraordinary creatures.

WIKSWO: murmurations!

ENSZER: For artists (and really for all sentient beings) what is the relationship between solitude and community? Why does solitude sometimes feel so lonely and despairing? Why does community sometimes feel so hurtful and isolating?

WIKSWO this is all-absorbing to me right now, and very much behind the premise of this magazine, Scry, and the people who have been drawn to it. After a few massive life transitions in the past year, I decided in January of 2018 to embrace six months of avoiding incarnate community because it had become perversely isolating. Watching the gentrification of megacity after megacity ruined my capacity to trust in community, as they seemed antagonistic. I moved into an abandoned house in the wilderness area and found myself at odds with anthills. Fire ants are quite horrid en masse.

ENSZER: Oh, yes, we have fire ants here in Florida. Another reason to protect one’s feet!

WIKSWO: One ant is quite enjoyable to spend time with, at a slight distance. And I feel the same about humans. I’m a human rights worker who dislikes humans – is that even possible? My loneliest times were in post-conflict zones where humans had literally torn one another apart.

My grandmother worked on the Manhattan Project, and then isolated herself on a mountaintop. I always figured these were causally related. When I went to Theresienstadt death camp outside Prague, I was unable to leave my room for two weeks. A mysterious young man would leave me daisies and a goulash at my door every morning – I never found out who he was. I think he was the bus driver who did the Prague to Terezin route? Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.

Despair is a constant companion for me. I don’t know how many others share that. I find comfort in those who also walk alongside despair. Scholem and Arendt, for example. Or the people murmurating in Scry. Is despair an existential condition of solitude? Or is it a recognition of the failure of community?

ENSZER: I am working on some writings about failure of community and failure of friendship and it is so sad and painful. I don’t have any easy response.

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The contributors and production of SCRY MAGAZINE is supported by the donations of entities who are compelled and/or amused by our attempt to create substantive, conceptual, curious, non-partisan public discourse in an age of dehumanizing, reductivist social media didacts and exhausting ideologues. We are working to create a space where all kinds of folx have space to murmurate, and abate the loneliness and isolation of trying to exist in a culture of superficiality and presumption. SCRY is a nexus for everyone who does our best to connect human experience to the sublime, to undertake demanding and nuanced explorations of the psyche the troubled and often belittling culture we now inhabit. We work for the values of human rights and an end to predation, for the celebration of the spirit as well as the intellect and the body – we work hard and we are grateful that you are sharing in this action towards ideals.

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If you’d like to subscribe, it’s free! You will receive an email once a month of each issue. That’s once per month, earthlings! However, murmurations are published on an ongoing basis, and the online journal will continue to evolve with things like tag clouds so that readers can follow along as ideas develop across multiple conversations. It’s a work in progress! So keep checking back or keep up with our more frequent murmurations via Facebook or Twitter.

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You can reach SCRY through emailing contact at scry magazine dot com. For PROPOSALS, please include three preoccupations, and a website or social media contact site, and if possible any material you have created that you’d like to discuss. For ADVERTISEMENTS, please describe the existential concerns of your promotion. For COMMENTARY and QUESTIONS, approach with the utmost respect and humility and without predation, hate, or abuse because these starlings don’t fly like that. For DONATIONS, please know that your contribution will be split equally between the contributors and the editor once SCRY’s start-up costs of $1,500 are met. Thank you for murmurating with us.

May your umbilical cord be the root of a life of substance and meaning, may you scry fruitfully, and may you  find comfort in looking up at the sky for the birds that are watching you reach reach reach, the stars who have sent their light to you from long ago, and the dark matter that reminds us of the beauty of what mysteries we cannot see.

HÁÁDĘ́Ę́ʼÍSH ÍIYISÍÍ NANINÁ?

háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

॥ ਜਪੁ ॥

ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥

ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש

The post A MURMURATION WITH JULIE R ENSZER :: DRINKING FROM THE LESBIAN CA[N]NON appeared first on Scry Magazine.