under everything (2021)

In the wake of the stilling of our species and the cooling down of our machines, chthonic forces reveal themselves through the cracks in the pavement. A world awake, unchained, the reins which usually hold it back starkly visible and you can’t help but question their integrity, the righteousness of their trajectory (given that all trajectories seem to lead to mass extinction). You notice the forces within yourself also trying to break free: a jittery nervousness, your heart a coiled spring, your monkey brain chattering away at the back of your brain louder than the words in your head, your eyes fogging and burning from the soft hum of blue light emanating out of the screen. What are these forces that are unseen, but have always been flowing like an underground river, which reveal themselves when civilisation hushes?
Drop down to your hands and knees and listen to the trickling.
Where do things go once they are trimmed away to prettify the land, to smooth our smooth lines? Do they go dormant… or do they begin to die a second kind of death?

You don’t know when it will hit you

– on a walk with friends,

in the call of a seabird

through the city at night,

speckles of cow parsley

like a sudden snowfall –

it is an awareness of the cycle, the seasons,

the endless swirling of wildness careening

off into the distance

and swinging back with such force.

A spoonful of honey on the tongue to offset the bitterness.

A constellation of nettle stings on your child’s goatlike knees

– the sensation of having been here before,

of the rote repetition of these actions tethering you to the Earth’s turnings.

A moment of seasonality, change, the heady scent at the start of spring,

the sound of bees buzzing,

the first swift of the year

arriving later than before –

the cycle shifts,

cascades.

127 million years ago,

that ginkgo tree down the road grew leaves every spring and dropped fruit every autumn and shone in glistening beauty every time it rained, and even after the dinosaurs stopped eating its fruit it continued to grow its leaves and lose them and make fruit (just in case the dinosaurs came back, for it had no eyes with which to see that they had all gone) and it was friends with only itself and its family and it began to lose its shimmer, because it was all alone as only one kind of life, all its connections severed like fields of frayed red threads.

127 million years later it was found again, by men, women, monks, cultivated for its rarity and beauty,

and patience.

1 kilometre from where the atom bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, 6 ginkgo trees remained
(and remain) standing strong, healthy, patient, frayed red threads slowly reaching.

iiiiiiiiiii~~~

You walk along – again – a well-trodden path,

its curves and surfaces worked into your

memory like the grooves of your skin.

Maybe there has been a sudden rainfall,

perhaps

just time,

and suddenly the world has made itself anew – you feel embarrassed not to have noticed, missed the memo, left your tangled crown of laurel and ivy on the marble mantelpiece.

He comes home crying, yet you know something is wrong even before you hear his breathy sobs, or the key rattling against the keyhole.

His skinny legs are a constellation of nettle stings, a bright red milky way of hot blood pressing the surface of his skin. his throat is hoarse with histaminic breaths, little body flooded with unpleasant hormones shouting WARNING WARNING like the body is a starship undergoing systems failure and the mind a frightened captain flailing uselessly at the controls. you sit him down, hand him a sugary drink, rest his caprine knees and tell him you’ll grab some dock leaves from the garden while mirror neurons tickle your cheeks with prickles of tears. The poison and the panacea lay together in a marshy bed (like yin and yang) at the wild end of the garden where the snails and hogweed reign supreme. Sometimes toads pass through. Someone told you once that it was a myth that dock leaves soothe nettle stings, but you believe in the power of myth and so never looked it up.

An insect traverses the continent of your body.

Remember as a child how you could imagine your body so large,

come careening through the clear air as a long-necked dinosaur to pluck

steamed trees of broccoli between your scaled jaws!

And at other times you’d be a thumb-sized forest-kin,

sleeping on beds of moss, drinking tea on toadstalls,

eating grapes like a watermelon!

The bounty of the earth increased a thousandfold

along with its mysteries, wonders, dangers.

Sometimes now you make yourself weightless with vertigo

by zipping in and out of these different scales. Bask in the

psychedelic sublimity of being both tiny and interconnected.

Object to hyperobject to the stratosphere looking down

you watch as tendrils of light stretch like lichen

across this damp stone you call Earth,

where, held taut in that palindromic state of grief

and rebirth, you slam your open palm

onto the unsuspecting insect

and it shatters into an ocean of broken parts.

Here we are, where the bottom of the tail and the fang-rimmed mouth meet (with jaws dislocated and stomach distended as we voraciously slither around our prey); the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega; the sphere of your world reduced down to a flat circle (though these days it feels more like a straight line: bed to kitchen, kitchen to car door, home to work, and repeat, zipping up and down a well-worn palindrome) - the cycle of your life bowls over and over itself endlessly as the 400 billion star-rich milky way bowls herself over and over towards the end of the universe.

Cycles do not mean repetition, sameness, or lack of growth. For the Fon people of Benin, the snake held its own tail to protect the world from collapsing under the weight of all the people, animals, mountains, rivers, plants. For Plato, the ouroboros meant self-destruction as much as it meant self-reliance. Its deadly fangs slowly poison its own tail as its venom sacs endlessly generate its own antidote until the equilibrium snaps! Or perhaps, even, it is dissolving one end of itself in stomach acid at the same rate as it is growing.

Regardless, here we are on the tipping point between continuation and surrender; a choice between two curses: continue as we know (and better the devil you know!) with injustice, exploitation, the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, an unacceptance of the Other written into our traditions and constitutions; or jump ship from those old ideals as if our world were on the line (as if!). Feed the snake its own tail until it can’t handle the weight of the Earth, or let the cycle take hold of and change us too. Night falls, the seasons change; the horizon line curls away from us and the snake of the world slithers ever onwards.

i awake with the rain,

and in the din of the dawning,

i stretch my million reaching limbs

through the cacophonous dirt.

hold me down until

the soil tastes of home once more.

hold me down until

the surface glistens with light, unhindered.

Nothing stays buried, so while we uproot trees and coal and mud and shit and bones, we’ll also dig inside the layers of our selves. We’ll trowel through our histories, excavate our ancestors. We’ll become tangled in roots and mycorrhizal fungi, hold and be held in oil and underwater rivers and lava pools in which tiny bears live, slip down into the cool cave where ochre encrusted handprints pepper the walls. Down there with the weeds and the worms and the rats and the germs. Hold me down until I can remember the weight of the Earth.