Photo by Pınar
Foreword: Some may say it’s unwise to say anything definitive about nature (or queerness, for that matter). here is the thing about that: Not to bite the hand that fed us…not to condone essentializing (especially by those who control the majority of the narratives)…but f*ck the part of postmodern thought that makes us afraid to take a stand… that makes us complacent. Truth is relative, but so are we, we *relate.* So we float, down this stream, alongside our truth. that’s how relativity and truth can exist at once. Truth exists within time and space. Here’s ours, now.
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If warfare is also psychological & informational
and if it’s the new means by which we will be fucked with/
we will resist invasions and ambushes in the form of stories, spells, dreams that re-frame, re-inscribe, re-late (the root of the word relate means to bring or carry something back).
we will wage mythopoetic guerrilla warfare in reaction to widespread political terror and disenchantment.
we will tell our stories to dis-arm & seed-bomb with the green tendrils of our humanity
we will imagine a future when dominant culture can no longer imagine one.
we will be #dreampunks.
supreme authority can not imagine its own de-centering or demise, except in the form of un-analyzed hatred and otherization of people. that is what passes for its “imagination.”
we, as trans and non-binary folx (& all marginalized folx) are used to living forward into the unknown.
we are used to maybe expecting our own untimely demise.
we have been there and done that.
we have reimagined our bodies, we have experienced our desire or our joy as something sacred, to be transmitted not always through biological reproduction, but through other means.
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apocalyptic times require movement between worlds. between institutions, cultures, genders.
the wild ones know it — they (like the “eastern coyote”) hybridize when their habitats break down. they walk between species. (hybridization is distinct from assimilation)
apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψις) actually means an uncovering, a revealing, not an ultimate end.
the center was always fed by the edges, that’s the secret they don’t want us to know.
people argue about gender and bathrooms, and turn us into a tool for their own transformation.
we become tools for them to think with [to paraphrase Peter Brown’s “men use women to think with”]
in the meantime, what do we think with? dream about?
finding the space to dream is a radical act right now.
and dreaming with the land (and informed by more-than-human relationships) is an endangered ancestral skill.
(just like grieving—the two are coupled)
too often now we forget our dreams because the images in mainstream media are stronger than our dreams.
that is not just psychological warfare, it is war against the soul.
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You who walk on the edges—know that you are well equipped to be with mystery.
We tend mystery when dominant culture sees it as inconvenient. (They would build a wall to keep it out.)
Now, they would be healed by apprenticing to it—to the unknown, to fear of death, to fear of identity loss. Like the white supremacists who are grasping for identity™ while sneering at ours.
some say Western society is experiencing a failure of imagination. an inability to dream new futures.
funny because I don’t feel a loss of imagination at all. I feel an excess of it. Maybe that’s what happens though. Maybe when the cultures of control lose their future, pretty much everyone else disempowered by that system gains a future.
and anyways, the in-between ones and the Others and other-than-humans among us know how to live without a future.
we have been through despair while they are digging their heels on the way into her inevitable vortex.
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when we lost the thread of our futures, we wander with the more-than-human world, with the land.
Then we remember that there are billions of futures in this world.
And only a tiny sliver of them are human.
Maybe that’s what they are scared of.
Photo by So