You are not an individual.

Book of Revelations, 2025

“The emergent picture is that we are truly monstrous, composite all the way down and that if we were to meet the meaty dimensions of our bodies, we would be frightened by just how unwieldy identities are.” - Bayo Akomolafe

Once, I asked chat GPT to describe to me the stones and metals that terraform my Apple computer. Before then, it had never dawned on me that the reason Culture calls Silicon Valley “Silicon Valley” is because the semiconductors used to power our microchips come from silicon, and that silicon is sand.

Silicon is quartz.

Silicon is the crystalline dust of long eroded mountains, weathered and worn down by wind, water, and mother time.

So, when you opened up your computer to read this, and as I typed this up for you, both of us entered into the realm of sand.

This entering, this process of relating is inescapable. It is not an “act” of relating. It is not contingent upon you choosing to relate. Relationship precedes you, it makes you what you are, it comes before your conscious awareness, and it is the matrix, the womb, the context from which your conscious awareness emerges.

You are not the isolated, atomized, autonomous scientist modernity has led you to believe you are — or ought to be — looking down from your lonely ivory tower, separate from the substance in your petri dish. The bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses that make up your microbial realm is a Process that envelops and in-forms you — not the other way around. And one day it will overtake you completely.

In a world where we have been led to believe that we are masters of our fate, destined to bend the moral arc of the universe towards Justice, fated to move always in the direction of Progress, this observation may seem like a terror. What I am describing is apocalyptic, an upending of the world I thought I knew. And notions of apocalypse have always nightmarishly haunted our species with speculative visions of bloodlust, destruction, rampage, and death.

I was taught this story as a child. “Be on the lookout for the return of Jesus” was mantra in the Church I grew up in; and Jesus was presented as a kind of original mold for the hero in the hero’s journey. You didn’t want to be left out of his kingdom when he returned to the earth, so you’d better do what he (or, more accurately, what the church’s interpretation of the King James Bible) said. Else you’d be damned to an eternal hell of suffering.

But “apocalypse” simply means “unveiling.” And though there is always a death that takes place in unveilings — or in the realization that what you thought was stable is in fact illusive, is a Trickster, is constantly on the move — there is also a grace that is emergent in this discovery, and which only comes by learning how to fall to the ground.

By asking you to notice that your solitary lonely identity as “Individual” is illusory, what I am really inviting you to do is to learn how to fall to the ground.

Of course, we were taught as children to avoid this at all costs. First we learn to crawl then to walk, then to run. God forbid we fall. So embarrassing. If we are lucky and bright like Elon Musk, we might even learn to fly.

But I think what is called for instead at this late apocalyptic hour is to learn how to fall.

Not to rise, not to phallically ascend, not to join Superman in the sun, but to fall to the ground, to Mother, of which our earthly flesh is composite.

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The other day I was having lunch with a dear friend and he asked me about the meaning of apocalypse and its terrible implications. I told him that growing up, it was terrible to hear and to fear and suffer from the nightmarish predictions of the end of days as depicted in the Book of Revelation.

But, on the other hand, I was born in Louisiana, which is Bayou territory, Swamp territory, Hurricane country, a realm lurking with all kind of microbial murmurings that have shaped me. I wondered out loud if these microbes created a territory ripe for melancholy in me, which when intersecting with the story of an old dude named John having a psychedelic encounter on the isle of Patmos — an isle allegedly teeming with mushrooms— alchemized into sorrow in ways that were far more pronounced in me than in my sisters.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, — one of my favorite Disney films — the opening song is sung by a Jester (of course it is) who asks “who is the monster and who is the man”? Today I’m beginning to hear another song that can be asked: where does the microbe end and I begin? Where does the sand end and the computing processor begin? Where, to riff off Martin Buber, is I and where is Thou?

I’ve been spending a lot of time meditating on the words of Bayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian poet, philosopher, and recovering psychologist who asks these profound questions. He tells the story of the Yoruban god Eshu, a trickster god who decided not to kill the European enslavers as they penetrated Africa in the 16th century but to steal away onto the ships as they sailed across the bowels of the Atlantic Ocean onto the new world to creolize the Americas.

Perhaps it is his Yoruban accent that makes him so compelling but I think it is more the case that the questions he asks describes me far more than the progressive religion of forward movement on the “left” and the conservative cult worship of the past, both of which are rooted in a misapprehension of Man as the cosmic body around which all other bodies revolve.

Akomolafe has been described as charismatic but more than this, he sounds deeply familiar to me as if somewhere in my ancestral heritage there is a Yoruban crack in the pavement of my postmodern Puritan-American pedigree.

He reminds me of Albert Murray in many ways but goes even further. For Murray, the Afro-American was someone who exemplified the archetype of “Stylizer,” playing with whatever life threw him, master of what James Carse called “the Infinite Game.”

But for Akomolafe, man is not the only player and to pretend otherwise, to pretend that we are the only fully conscious beings in the world, to pretend that the imposition of human will onto “dead” matter is the proper epistemology to travel with in the world will set us up for rude awakenings.

Another way to say this is to ask not what role we play in shaping silicon but what role Silicon plays in shaping us. It is to notice the thrush of Wind moving the chimes outside my door, the affects of the sound on my physical form as I type this, and the fact that by listening I am participating in this process, not imposing my will upon it.

This is what it means to fall to the ground; it is to expand your level of attentiveness and, simultaneously, to invert it. It is to notice that your sense of separation is an illusion and to shift your gaze to the perennially unfolding contexts through which “you” and “I” emerge.

This is not a PSA for rainbows and butterflies. It does not make for smooth sailing nor will it signal sanity. To the contrary: It is an invitation to ask, as Akomolafe does, what role sugar cane played in the slave trade, not as a dead piece of matter but as a conscious actor imposing itself and shaping our very notion of “white” and “black” bodies.

There is no answer here but that is the point. Can you allow your senses to be frustrated? Can you live the question you already are, just as Rilke invites you to?

Since 2020, one of the responses to the excesses of identity politics has been to insist on the reality of the individual and on his rights and responsibilities as subject-citizen. Conventional wisdom says that when mob rule threatens to undo us, shift focus from the tribe to the individual.

But man is tribal, is anima, is animal. Man is process. We breathe only because trees and sun and photosynthesis — beings and procedures that exist outside of our protocols and notions of will power — make it so. If we cannot exist without the trees, where does the tree end and you begin?

You are fiber and liquid, vegetable and microbial, wind instrument, tall glass of water separating sediment from urine, endocrine system spinning up grains of sand, process, relational, shaped and shaping all at once.

You are, in other words, beyond legibility, and though the state, try as it might, may seek to, indeed should seek to protect you, it will always, ultimately fail at this task because it sees you only as individual, subject-citizens and it obscures the fact that you are so much more.

So consider this post to be the first of my many challenges to you to come into earnest relationship with the reality that you are so much more. Your identity is always in flux, always the product of encounter with Other. What politics can we dare to dream up through this deeper knowing?

You were enlisted in this divine play the moment you were born and you had no choice in the matter.

Because you are not an individual.

“I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.” - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man