Our mother grows angry Retribution will be swift We squander her soil and suck out her sweet black blood to burn it We turned money into God and salivate over opportunities to crumple and crinkle our souls for that paper, that gold Money has spent us Left us in small boxes, dark rooms, bright screens, empty tombs Left investing our time in hollow philosophies To placate the fear of our bodies returning back into our mother Demand awakening But the path we have taken has rotted Ignite, stand upright, conduct yourself like lightning because The retribution will be swift
—Tanya Tagaq / “Retribution”
What I’m Reading:
“Nature, for me, was a way of taking me out of my own mental chaos, and the surroundings that fed into that. But I always tell people it doesn’t have to be hiking. It can be any activity, or just a place in nature that’s quiet. A place to confront your demons or your darkness and a way to take steps towards growth.”
— Jesse Cody, to Nate Weitzer / “Thru-hiker Jesse Cody is going the distance for mental health” / The Boston Globe
Words float up the stairs like so many childhood letter magnets. Endgame, civilization, catastrophe, humanitarian.
— Megan Hunter / The End We Start From
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
— Paul Kingsnorth / The Dark Mountain Manifesto
Throughout the year we exist in dazzling drought. When the rare cloudburst occurs, we complain about getting caught and drenched in the rain.
— Harryette Mullen / Urban Tumbleweed
Evidence from long-lived marine sponges suggests that the planet has already passed 1.5 °C — a milestone of global warming that nations pledged to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate agreement . . . and is on track to surpass 2 °C in the next few years.”
— Bianca Nogrady / “The world has warmed 1.5 °C, according to 300-year-old sponges” / Nature
A farcical and inhuman history turned us into “brown” people and “Hispanics” and “illegal aliens” and “spics.” But when we spend time living inside that history, and untangling the roots of the racist ideas about us, we can feel stronger and more centered. We can see that the insults directed at us have increased the more dependent the country has become on our labor.
— Hector Tobar / Our Migrant Souls
Makeshift sign. Uncle Sam white as the lines on the flag in hand mouths love it or leave it. You must admire the gall of white men in carjacked country … … How does one undrown from the incivility of this world?
— Niki Herd / “The Stuff of Hollywood”
I have read that, when someone knows they are going to die, the world becomes acutely itself.
— Megan Hunter / The End We Start From
What I’m Listening To:
This is all a hallway to another empty room but you can’t go without me Who will save you from the darkness in me?
— Birthmark / “Snowflake in My Palm (Not for Long)”
Tarnish your creativity. Spout rejoinders on repeat and impress your casual acquaintances during cocktail circles. Piddle about in aimless banter. Don’t glow, but please wear your goalkeeper stilettos and your mattock face. Speak in errant arpeggios—say much: mean nothing. You are the epitome 21st century stylist. The earth grows green, without really greening—it’s just a bunch of Cyanobacteria clogging our oceans and waterways: farm run-off, stimulants, depressants, and tinges of lead and mercury addenda for all—and take those nitrogen-fertilizer-carbon-bomb bon-bons for humanity as a chaser. Drink up! Bring scissors and rungs. Climb the ladder of life as you cut the helixes free from your DNA strands. Bring your lighters, goalposts and mattresses. We’ll provide the stillbirths and paradigm mutations. We’ll make all the medical journals! Use this cut-up to center your clergy. They don’t pay much mind anyway—they’ve got the godheads on the payroll. Otptional covenants for those in sequins and lamé. The brighter the better—be an endless go-getter. Get yourself got in the land of plentiful weapons and manifest destiny. Better yet, stay home.
What I’m Reading:
Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline. I am drenched in is-ness.
The cat runs from underneath the bed and stands sentry below the window.
Crunching glass at the top of the window behind the blinds.
A squirrel?
No, an otter.
A tree otter? you say.
Errant, from the gnarled oak, I say.
We have a backyard that is simultaneously outside and inside the house.
This otter scurries down the tree and up on the bed.
The otter tunnels below the bed, behind the blinds, and up and out of the house.
The cat, stupefied and seconds late, jumps up swiping at air and catches its claws on the blind — hangs there — nonplussed.
Hey! There’s a hole in Thee Window where the outside world flows in and out.
A tall, lanky man jogs through the edge of our bedroom, out for his morning run with his equally tall and lanky greyhound, and right out through the hall.
We have leaks in the house.
Holes.
The otter is back, but I stand firm and stare it down from the other side of the window.
Now it’s a groundhog.
Now it’s an otter again.
You complain. You don’t want kingdom animalia running through the house.
The otter and I stare each other down.
A standoff.
A walk-off.
What I’m Reading:
I’ve wrestled angelic beings and the nine lives of pathological compulsion. I have sworn an oath against the roman calendar and its derivative mutations.
We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in.
— N. Scott Momaday / “One: The Dawn” / Earth Keeper
When the great herds of buffalo drifted like a vast tide of rainwater over the green plains, it was a wonderful thing to see. But there came a day when the land was strewn with the flayed and rotting remains of those innumerable animals, slain for sport or for nothing but their hides. The Kiowas grieved and went hungry, and it was the human spirit that hungered most. It was a time of profound shame, and the worst thing of all was that the killers knew no shame.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
The earth is not impervious to the presence of man. We humans have inflicted terrible wounds upon the earth. The scars are everywhere visible, even here where Dragonfly brought up the sun and where I was given my sacred name. The arbor is now a ruin, for it came into the hands of uncaring and visionless people.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
But it is the present and the possibilities of a future that must concern us. Ours is a damaged world. We humans have done the damage, and we must be held to account. We have suffered a poverty of the imagination, a loss of innocence.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
How many lifeless things are placed each day between us and the living earth? A friend in Brooklyn told me that his little son had gone out to watch workmen breaking up a sidewalk. He was fascinated to see earth under the cement. He had never seen it before.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
Are we to witness the eclipse of our civilization? Or are we to take the chance?
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
N. Scott Momaday
February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024
What I’m Listening To:
I’m going to the soul hole, and I’m never coming back Never coming back
The Tuneless Ballad of Rostay Toonany and Chemo Destrapè
Clowns and claustrophobes both. Masters of microbes and microbiomes—and bonhomie. Too much probiotic nonsense squelching their wheelhouse one day, and they took to fisticuffs.
Oh, what a dastardly day for all! The day the two friends took to whinging, winging and knuckles. The magpies alighted on the witch alder to watch. The eastern cottontail hare trained their mysterious obsidian eyes on the row. The red efts and copperheads ignored each other in utter transfixion—neologisms were created for the event—so rare it was.
Rostay Toonany landed sharp jabs, but Chemo Destrapè eager to be done with the punch-out threw a barrage of roundhouse lefts and uppercuts and dinged Rostay’s temporal lobe—bumping about in his skull—trebly charged, in a timbre of orange and reds.
The bestiary cackled, hissed, and meeped.
It was bitter-cold day that—the day of the bust-up. But Chemo’s arms were raised forevermore in victory and infamy—the day the protozoan roared.
What I’m Reading:
A man disguised as a baggy cow steals twenty-six gallons of milk from Walmart, then gives it all to strangers outside the store.
Convinced you’re lost, laying there in that Amazonian outpost — covered by a mosquito net — the masses of mosquitoes, a deluge through the open windows. All that keeps you from complete ruination is the scrim of heavenly white fabric — as shear as your head feels, as empty of answers on how to get back. Your stomach roils with an invasion that can’t be stopped.
The stomach virus eats away at you from the inside, gnawing at the stuff of life within — at the hole in your heart glued over with spit and spent cartridges.
The siege inside lays waste to you, filling you up with legions of your own dead cells that are conscripted and committed to the front as fast the virus can kill them. And it kills them.
It kills them all.
A malarial waft, an unseen hand spreads hot unguent on your forehead.
Then a thick fetid smell: a melange of upturned earth with carcass of marmoset, and capybara.
(All I can say is… stop. Stop!)
Your time nears conclusion.
What I’m Reading:
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
— Adam Zagajewski / “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”
