The G-word

My eyes are spent with tears; my heart is in tumult; my being melts away over the ruin...- Lamentations 2:11

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. - Audre Lorde

Part 1: I do not know how to enter the wound of Israel Palestine.

---

I’d like to say something here first about the interconnectedness of all beings. As you read, please try not to roll your eyes.

If you do roll your eyes, that’s also okay too. It just proves my point, actually.

You roll your eyes because you saw someone else roll their eyes after some other hippy said something similar to what I’m about to say, and the person you saw roll their eyes was someone you trusted, someone whose opinion matters to you, someone you imitate and whose choreography you unconsciously follow.

Have you ever noticed that you do this?

Everyone does.

Not because we’re simps or subject to mind control.

We don’t have minds.

What we rudely call “our” minds is a territory we inhabit; it is not our property. We do not own it.

Mind is an extended cognitive embodied web that exists between us and within us and it is, at the same time, more than us.

Mind is a web that exists between me and you as you read this text.

Mind exists between you and all life forms. It is there when the smell of a rosemary bush makes you swoon, or a windstorms compels you and your family to evacuate in search of higher ground.

You internalize the looks and gestures that others make toward you and you make those gestures in turn. You’ve been doing this all your life. This is Mind.

You walk the way your mother walks and you’ve got some of her speech patterns inside you too.

This is Mind.

You are, after all, fundamentally an animal and this is what animals are. But you’ve forgotten the fundamentally symbiotic nature of your existence because you’ve become domesticated into believing you’re an isolated individual.

And in domestic life, the unutterably gorgeous, spontaneity of your own nature is hidden, just out of sight, from your moment-to-moment awareness.

The only reason you’re breathing right now is because the trees are converting light from the sun into oxygen. You’re inhaling this oxygen into your lungs, heart, and spleen right now, but you forget this regularly, on a daily basis, because you’ve been trained to forget.

You and your parents and their parents before them and their parents before them have been raised on the doctrine of the Enlightenment which says that the material, natural world is dead and conquerable by reason, and though this may seem benign to you or even desirable if you’re an academic type, what this means and what has actually been preached from the pulpit all this time, for the past 400 years in the global North, is that your flesh, the very soil itself, is dead and lifeless and a heap of trash you ought to numb, escape, and transcend.

Now, this doctrine is ultimately unsustainable and if it seems like world governments, institutions, and systems of authority around you are crumbling, it’s because they are, and it’s because the 400-year old doctrine of the Enlightenment is coming to an end.

Maybe you’ve grown accustomed to folks talking about escaping the earth and Musk heading to Mars.

Maybe you’ve become so used to seeing phallic skyscrapers donned with the motto Excelsior, Ever Upward! light up the nighttime sky, that you never stopped to notice how weird and cancerous it is that our economic systems insist on growth at all costs.

But let me tell you, it is cancerous, it is the language of modernity, and it is coming to an end.

Our zeitgeist has trained us all to seek transcendence, to fly away, and to disassociate from the source that birthed us into being. It has taught us not to give thanks for the good green earth, not to be present in all that we do, “from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread,” but to center our life around the pursuit of a post-life, post-earth heaven in which we will escape our dirty, morbid flesh and finally obtain a restful, peaceful, spotless salvation.¹

Ah sweet salvation!

If you fancy yourself atheist, you may think this old time religious sensibility escapes you but where do you think the language of “saving money” comes from?

The doctrine of salvation, silly.

This is what I mean by Mind. The syntax you use to make sense of the world precedes you. It came before you.

It was shaped in part by the Protestant work Ethic, that great strand of ancestral life juice still flowing, imperceptible to the average eye, through these United States and terraforming the way you relate to yourself, to money, and to your neighbor.

The doctrine of salvation is in our obsession with superheroes who always save the day and defeat the monsters and have a blockbuster film out every summer.

We are all shaped by this, include me too.

I am not preaching from on high. This piece is a struggle sesh. I am writing within a crucible and at times I glimpse the facile nature of the doctrine of salvation, how it’s tortured me, how it continues to torture us all, and how it is coming to an end.

Because you and I are neither clean nor pure nor saved.

We are vertebrates mammal who breathe because the trees make it so. If we were to try and trace the origin of water we would have to sail through the galaxy and keep sailing through to the end of time.

You can never pin yourself down.

This is the nature of Mind.

You are a human in a more-than-human world that makes you possible. This fact alone should be miracle enough for you to stop whatever you are doing and praise:

…Think [of] others’ concepts of you in their heads, their memories of you, the notebooks you’ve written in, the things you’ve created online; all creation, physical or otherwise, is essentially your extended consciousness. It’s a sinewy, webbing thing that moves with the wind at the same time as it moves you — an oddly bi-directional exchange.

-Bloodlet the Robot

Wild right?

You do not possess a mind. Mind possesses you.

Scientists at MIT have discovered that if a spider’s web is broken, the spider will start to exhibit stroke-like tendencies. The web is an extension of the spider’s cognition. The cognition is not solely in the spider’s brain or body but outside of it as well.

This is Mind. This is the interconnected nature of all things.

You are an extension of Earth’s cognition in human form.

So everything you do, it’s basically like the Earth is doing that thing.

Even the words I’m writing on this page right now are composed of letters that began as symbols that were drawn in the sand by ancient tribes to trace the bodies of the animals and life forms that passed them by.

The ecologist David Abram wrote about this in Spell of the Sensuous:

“The name of the Semitic letter ‘met’ is also the Hebrew word for ‘water’; the letter, which later became our own letter M, was drawn as a series of waves: mmmm…

The Hebrew letter qoph, which is also the Hebrew term for “monkey,” was drawn as a circle intersected by a long, dangling, tail. Our letter Q retains a sense of this simple picture.”

This is the interconnected nature of all things. This is Mind.

Abram also describes this phenomenon in the Koyukon, one of the native tribes of Alaska, and how the land itself informs their hunting practices:

Much as humans communicate not only with audible utterances but with visible movements and gestures, so the land also speaks to the Koyukon through visible gestures and signs. The way a raven flies in the wind, swerving or gliding upside down, may indicate success or failure in the hunt; the movements of other animals may indicate the presence of danger, or the approach of a storm, or that the spring thaw will come early this year. The assumption, common to alphabetic culture, that ‘reading omens’ is a superstitious and utterly irrational activity, prevents us from recognizing the practical importance, for foraging peoples, of such careful attention to the behavior of the natural surroundings.

The land has her rhythms and you are formed from her raw materials. The calcium and iron in you are her.

So, you echo what is echoed in you, and you dance to the song that is danced in you, through your ancestors.

And sometimes, if you hear the same tempo over and over again down through the ages, you’ll get so used to hearing it that that sound will get a hold on you and just the sheer thought of opening yourself up to a different tempo will feel like it would be the worse thing in the world so you keep on moving to the same beat, in the same way you’ve always moved, and you think its unique to you, you think it makes you “who you are” so you over-identify with it and you don’t stop to realize that thousands of people and millions of trees and a shit ton of soil all came before you and helped terraform you into the being you are and you are just the earth becoming more and more of herself.

Everything you see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and do is simply the earth becoming more and more of herself.

This is true of all things.

Including genocide.

---

Part 2: Webs of Relations

I do not know if what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide.

I don’t think it is.

But it could be.

I’m partial to a particular side, you know.

I think most people have a hard time admitting this. But this year I’m making it a point to tell the truth. And besides, everything comes from the earth, including how bias becomes us.

What is happening in Gaza is pretty ghastly;

but I totally understand why the word genocide is taboo in many of the circles I find myself in.

I don’t think the average person understands why so many Jews bristle when they hear the word, so let me try and explain.

This all has a lot to do with the way Mind works and a pretty powerful system that’s come out of the Earth’s core: Christianity.

There has always been a particularly powerful brand of Christianity that worshiped light and hated the dark.

Even now as you’re reading this, you might be going, Well Chloé isn’t darkness bad?

But this metaphor of “darkness = bad” is a framing you’ve inherited.

After all, its the dark soil that a seed needs to be transformed into fruit. No mud, no lotus.

But in the global north, we’ve inherited a worldview that’s out of balance and we’ve been taught to view human flesh as sinful, wretched, backwards and evil; and historically, we’ve associated certain categories of humans — including people of African descent, women and Jews — with that evil.

It’s important you know this because it directly impacts the war in Gaza.

In Medieval times, because they were considered dark, Jews couldn’t own land, were confined to ghettos, had to wear specific clothing, and were forced to serve as tax collectors for rulers who later turned on them.

In Spain in the 6th and 7th centuries, Jewish children were regularly kidnapped from their parents and raised as Christians. That is Handmaid’s Tale level shit.

In Faith and Fratricide:The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s writes that the Jewish community was “systematically cast as villains in Christian Europe, and forced to perpetually play the role of the monster, their presence necessary to the Christian drama, not as neighbors, but as eternal pariahs."

And this was happening all before the Holocaust, for hundreds of years in Europe.

Imagine that for hundreds of years, a global empire painted you as a monster, decreed you a stain on the earth, and broadcast this message out wherever it ruled and singled out your grandparents and their grandparents before them and their grandparents before them and the ones before them too and whipped everyone else in the land into a frenzy and encouraged them to unwind and let loose by casually lynching your family members every spring all because the human beings among you didn’t know how to metabolize, alchemize, and transmute their own pain, so instead, they projected it onto you.

Imagine.

Imagine having to carry that level of shame and exile in your veins for centuries.

Imagine being told over and over and over again you are a monster for centuries.

You know what would happen?

You would probably become a monster.

This is how Mind works. Thoughts create reality.

And sometimes I think to myself that Palestinians couldn’t possibly fathom this.

Surely this wound is deeper than the Nakba, no?

But then I remember that the human beings are not grid lines, we are not logical, we are not a matter of getting from point a to point b; we are winding, circular, spiraling, and paradoxical, and maybe because of this, in some way, Palestinians are some of the few humans on this earth who can understand, who know how it feels to be branded a monster and to “turn grotesque with rage”.²

So if you want to accuse the Israeli government of committing genocide, please be my guest. I am not offended. (Really, I am mostly done with taking offense these days.)

But know that when you do, you’re striking the spider’s web and causing it to have a stroke. You have been molded by those who have come before you, including your ancestors, some of whom were colonialists and builders of empire who forced others to play the performative role of monster and become scapegoats for the ignorance of the people.

Christians have been colonizers. Muslims have been colonizers. Jews have been colonizers. Black people have been colonizers. White people have been colonizers. Atheists have been colonizers.

All of us have colonized the earth in some form or another, and when we forget to honor the interconnected nature of all things, we do it again.

The chord we strike when we accuse Israel of genocide has been played before we were born; playing it again re-triggers a deep and swollen, festering wound of violent aloneness and abandonment that never healed in the Jewish community.

When we make this accusation, Jews remember that they were branded monsters and then murdered for it again and again and again, and again, and from a certain point of view — one shrouded in pain — after a while, it feels better to become the monster who murders rather than stay the one who is murdered.

I am not writing to you now of ethics or justice.

I am writing to you of pain and trembling, of human flesh in torture chambers and the way it protrudes and overflows and reacts — conditioned by millions of years of evolution — to violence with its own violent tremors in the dark;

I am writing to you of fight-or-flight nervous system responses that are not bound by rationality or the pure, black-and-white bifurcated slogans of “most moral army on earth” and “terrorist organization,” or “evil zionist pig” and “oppressed Palestinian” that we use as cheap slogans to keep the monster at bay.

You cannot keep the monster at bay because the monster is in you.

You are not pure; you are not the bright white light Enlightenment taught you to pursue, and you are not good.

You are the mud and the lotus flower.

You were named human after the latin word humus, meaning living soil.

And you must learn how to alchemize your dirt and your pain into sanctuary.

This as I see it is our only task as humans living outside of a territory that has informed how we think, speak and relate to each other for thousands of years.

This is all I can do outside of the maddening vortex that is the Holy Land: Build holy land elsewhere by building sanctuary.

Sanctuary is not the same as protest.

It is not Martin Luther hammering his 95 theses to the door.

It is not the goddess of Victory promising you a win over your enemies.

It is a different posture and choreography altogether.

It is not the act of standing up in defiance,

but of laying down on the earth and mourning,

and of learning to greet the beastly, haggard dirty monster within you, and lay alms at her feet.

This is Soul Work and it is what we must start doing, right now.

No nation state on earth can replace this work. No political ideology or structure, not even the vessel of citizenship can save us from the hard, messy, diligent work of falling to the ground.

Soul work has not happened yet in our lifetime, at least not en masse. Perhaps it never will. We are all well weaned, after all, on the gospel of victory. It will be difficult for us to give up our desire to defeat the monsters we carry inside our bones.

But if we do not figure out how to do this, the war in Gaza will continue.

Because as long as we are trying to vanquish the darkness, we will, paradoxically, banish its child, the light.

---

Part 3: For the Children of Gaza