the binocular vision, the grasping-hand, flat teeth, reverie, grief, mourning, string,
the capacity for psychological violence, opposable thumbs, intentional deceit
which implies an understanding of the interiority of others, unabashed versus
abashed sexuality, red/green optical photoreceptor cells evolved for seeing fruit.
yr not from around here. what is there to drink. this steep cliff in you. hold out
your hands. bend over to pick up the hard, pitted plums that the wind shook down. the sky
scrapers of Dubai, of Chengdu, of Cape Town and Moscow and Chicago, they are
not waiting for you. maybe if you have family they are waiting for you. or
a loved one, in some distant place, or in the kitchen, by a window. a dog at home maybe.
the spontaneous transference of love. I don’t know. “across the fruited plain”
the iris, limp. the cattails, drug. the ethanol production of the heartland. morbid
fantasy of Eden. pair bonds, kinship systems, maternal care of offspring, mother infant
mutual eye-gazing. the Missouri meets the Mississippi in St. Louis. ritualized burial. white
pelicans migrate over the midwest. the eels in American rivers are all female, they breed
in the Sargasso Sea and swim across the open ocean, transparent, and up our rivers
“almost to the headwaters” “until they are stopped by a dam or natural obstruction”.
the first bulletproof vests were made of silk. the house sparrow, the European
starling, the rock pigeon (1st domesticated in Egypt circa 3,000 bce) the mute swan,
the cattle egret, the house finch. the complex irrigation systems of the
Pueblo peoples. There are many ways to name the land. the Spanish
planted crosses and baptized the earth in the name of their King. In WW2, the silky,
soft white fluff of seeds from milkweed pods was used to fill life preservers for American
troops. children gathered it in Minnesota. the things you say to yourself at evening, when
the wind picks up from the west. there are fires in California. There are fires in Ontario.
The Amazon is burning. some pinecones remain dormant until opened by fire.
[some categories exist in some societies in which category members] “do not come together
for any purpose, or own any property in common, or share rights and obligations
with one another.” how many Romes are there, on top of Rome. bipedalism,
symbolic thought, ochre drawn figures on rock. what divides a thing from itself,
the rise and fall of. I have never held a rosary. I understand the impulse for self-flagellation,
a heated tip of steel, a thorn. “across the fruited” the game and fish commission
re-introduced (non-native) elk to the upper Buffalo River National Forest
in 1913, and again in 1981. the basic assumption that all human beings feel things.
sorrow, grief, pleasure, anger, jealousy, many kinds of love, delight. taste, touch,
smell, sight, sound. the sensation of being a body, and of being a body in the world,
and of being around other bodies also in the world, together. male dominance hierarchy
structures differ in different ape species in direct relation to social-sexual mating structures.
humans and our ritualized, sanctified, or clandestine sexual encounters, taboos, etc.
descent structures in societies. lands held “in common”. the relationship between physical
and psychological pain. Lucy, we call her, is presumed to be female solely on the basis of
her small stature. the wheel the lever the ratchet weaving the stone penis the clay figure
smelting iron math mythology the steam engine gasoline extraction from crude oil
the mars rover, etc. the blinking satellites at night, from wherever you are, the airplanes.
Cattle lay down before it rains. “Nature abounds with structures made by animals
other than humans.” I stand in my friend’s kitchen, I’m drunk, and I’m eating his soup
right from the pot. The way the light is, in houses. ritualized food-sharing among kin and
non-kin reinforces the structures of social bonds in human and non-human primates. the
word “domestic”. to make “a home” [here]. There are wild giant silk moths in North
America, but the Silkworm moth, which eats only the leaves of the white mulberry tree, has
been fully domesticated and cannot survive in the “wild.” I hope your dog is waiting for
you. or that your children call you, or that you get to see someone you miss, very soon.
the zebra mussels, the emerald ash borer, the woodwasp, the gypsy moth, the light brown
apple moth. roads where no roads had been. so we can get there. I drive to the river, I am
fishing for eels tonight. Aristotle thought eels arose spontaneously from mud.
footprints of ancient humans, side by side. they are making for the forest.
all animals seek safety. most mammals seek safety for themselves and their offspring.
maternal care of infants provided the neurological basis for evolving pro-social, distinct
“Theory of Mind”: the consciousness of others consciousness; to anticipate the possible
needs and desires of another. this is the foundation of self reflexive consciousness and the
prerequisite for symbolic thought. The rotation of the human pelvis either necessitated, or
was made possible by, the assistance of others during childbirth. the unconscious gesture,
the reciprocal motion, joint attention: a human will follow the gaze of another human to see
what the other is looking at. this ape hand signal is universal: a hand out, palm up. the belle
forche pipeline leak. the KeystoneXL pipeline leak, the Union Pacific oil train fire. I watch
the geese fly south, again. there is someone I miss and I tell him I am sending them south to
him. we have swung down from the trees. we walk on sidewalks and drive cars and kiss
each other goodbye. Kin-recognition “is known to be widespread among insects, birds, and
mammals”: naked mole rats, Japanese quails (preference for mating with first cousins) the
desert isopod. we come up with things that will give each other pleasure. we like to give
each other pleasure. also we inflict pain. some studies indicate that we like to inflict pain,
that it gives us pleasure. there are many ideas about Justice. I don’t know. most rivers in
North America are stocked with fish from hatcheries, to support sport fishing. swimming
in the Gulf: the distant lights of giant floating oil rigs, islands of machinery, some pelicans.
I saw a lake in Mexico and on its white sand beach, all around, thousands of dead fish.
I don’t know why they were dead. If a freight train leaves Dubuque on a windy day, if we
are inconsolable, I don’t know. Elephants mourn their dead. The god and the gods
and the godfearing and the godless alike mourned their dead. Societies often have complex
systems in place to determine who should mourned which dead. Here is a jar of honey. Here
is a jar of wine. I would lay roses at their feet, the mothers, I would lay roses at the feet
of the mothers, grieving. no human is chaste. we see colors, patterns. Oliver Saks, who had
as burgers, studied ferns, because he was revolted by the lewd vulgarity of flowers. many
people are haunted by the spirits of their ancestors, many cultures think lineage is to be
maintained. the hummingbirds beak, the monarch’s proboscis. The generations of grass
into corn. The philosopher on the radio says that the only thing as human as humanity is
inhumanity. The phosphoresce in the bay in Vieques, the highest concentration of
bioluminescent algae on earth. If you pee in it the jellyfish sting your legs. if you ask why
the jellyfish are stinging your legs, everyone will know you peed. structures of belonging:
kinship, descent, vows, corporate holdings, determine belonging. where what violence is
directed, along what lines, what it delimits, reveals or obscures. a millennia ago, the rising
sea levels and a drier climate reduced the available freshwater supply on St. Paul island, off
the Alaskan coast; this means that the last of the wooly mammoths died of thirst. whom can
kill whom, for humans, is a matter largely decided by the state. Just because you say
something doesn’t make it true. “that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights” it
took 300 years for the loose confederacy of independent tribes united under Romulus to form
the coalition of clan chiefs that would become the Roman Senate. the concept of “virginity”
and the concept of “duty” and the universal (?) sensation of social shame. there has never
been one moment. scientists cant even settle on a definition of “species”. sometimes when I
am hitting something with a rock I can feel how far we have yet to go, my ape hands, the
wine bottle, the lithium ion battery, the intel-core processor, the aerodynamics of flight. that
cranial ridge! that upright posture! those feet! symbolic logic, vivacious sexualities, the
ability to ferment fruit, skydive, clone lambs, mourn our dead. “That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed” First, we take our specimens, then you can bury the rest of your dead. with a
fossil record going back 2.5 million years, migratory sandhill cranes “occupy a vast range
that includes Russia (Siberia), Canada, the United States, and Mexico.” claw print bigger
than my palm on the banks of the Iowa; these birds are so big that the juveniles are called
colts. The catfish aren’t biting the somewhat rotten chicken gizzard I got from the grocery
store but that probably came from a Tyson chicken packing plant in Arkansas, so I go back
to the apartment I’m renting and make eggplant from the same store that says it was grown
in Mexico with olive oil that my mother says is probably made with artificial olive flavor
but if you can’t tell the difference, why get upset? “the Buddhists don’t get upset” she says.
The countries in Europe are small for a reason. I don’t think the United States are likely to
stay united, historically or statistically speaking. most social structures of any peoples
determine who can move where, along what trajectory. what is most human: to transcend
the human. pianos and calculus and prosthetic limbs. the predominate weather patterns in
north America are from west to east. it is windy; the wind, which gathered speed over the
plains of Nebraska and Kansas, is moving east. I tell my mother, on the phone, “I’m
sending you some wind, it should be there in three days, sorry” “exposure to the elements” is
one of the ways in which we let people die. The Romans, specifically, did not like to be
contaminated by the act of killing, even of a guilty party— people would be ordered to kill
themselves, or left to starve to death on their own. this french philosopher Girrard sets up a
dichotomy of the function of justice as that which brings the society back into equilibrium,
quelling the self-perpetuating nature of violence, versus a justice that seeks to punish the
guilty, thus isolating and removing the violence to an “outside” of society. One is restorative
and the other is punitive. “prisons do not disappear social problems” writes Angela Davis,
“they disappear human beings.” For the Hua people, there is a contaminating poisonousness
to menstrual blood and sperm and there are very specific rules about when and where and
how the sexes can and can’t intermingle; however, once a man has grown old, he is said to
be “like a woman” and once a woman stops being fertile and has already born children, she
is said to become “like a man” and gains access to male-only spaces and decision making.
Gender in this culture, in some sense then, is “for the young”. I tell this to my friend who is
on a high dose of testosterone and his response is “Hormones are poison”. Once on earth
there were dragonflies the size of eagles, because of an excess of oxygen in the atmosphere.
you hold out your arms, like this, to demonstrate their size. the wandering albatross,
Diomedea exulans, has a wingspan up to 11ft. without testosterone, the eunuch’s bones
grow longer. the loss of bone density in microgravity causes problems for astronauts
returning to the gravity of earth. it seems likely that this planet will become uninhabitable
for humans, in the grand scheme of things, sooner or later. Everyone alive on earth is
descended from Africans who evolved in the Rift Valley roughly, at the time of writing this,
2,500 generations ago. we are a young species. we don’t know how to hold in our hands the
tools we have made. Ur fell, and Alexandria, Jericho of the trumpets, Rome, Yinxu of the
oracle bones, Babylon “and where we wept”— O New York, Los Angeles, Lagos, Delphi,
Shanghai, Mexico City, intercontinental airlines, I don’t care that Notre Dame caught fire,
the Great Fire of 1910 in Idaho and Montana burned through 3 million acres, twice in the
history of earth the entire globe was covered with ice for 10 million years. it snowed last
night in Iowa, I woke up with the sunlight glittering on the snow shook down from the trees
in the air. I am driving home to Arkansas today and I am bringing the wind with me. it is
almost the month that my dad died in. my friend says he believes in god but not in a god that
is, in any way, interested in, or influencing of, humans or life or anything. so what, I ask, is
the point of this “belief”. If I believed in god it would be Gods, and Angels, and Heaven and
an afterlife, the pearly gates, the streets of gold, the whole absurd shebang, so everyone
would get to see everyone they love again. fuck a god that can’t do that. the thing about a
blowjob is the extreme perversity of Christianity becomes so obviously apparent. The
Egyptians, with their irrigation system in a land of perpetual sun, Herodotus says, made fun
of the Greeks for having to beg their moody gods for rain. The effects of oxytocin on the
limbic systems of mammals, the photosynthetic cells opening up on the surface of the leaves,
the mycellial networks linking tree to fungal body to tree. the floating islands of trash in the
ocean and the residue from pit mining and the coal workers who still haven’t been paid. the
freight lines that run trains through the sunflower fields of the Dakotas, the rice-fields of
Arkansas, the GM workers on strike, the riots in Hong Kong, the uprising in Haiti, the
American troops guarding oil fields in Saudi Arabia, the aerial footage of the migration of
antelopes across the northern plains: slow down. it is easy to get overwhelmed. when
people freeze to death the last thing they do is take off all their clothes and start running.
The roman dogs of war were neopolitan mastiffs (google them). The man on the radio is
talking about how societies reconcile with “the present legacies of past injustices” the
question of “what to do with the Valley of the Fallen”. “when the e-waste piles up and the
cobaltmines run dry” what then? where are you going. how will you get there. how do you
know how to be safe. who has access to what safety. Uranium mining in Utah and Nebraska
“results in the unavoidable radioactive contamination of the environment by solid, liquid and
gaseous wastes”. The incidences of cancer spike nearby and along watersheds downriver of
uranium mines. there is no way to contain movement of things on this earth, or of things
into the future. In the United States, at the time of writing this, there are 532 superfund sites
on tribal land. One site, a productive lead and zinc mine, on Quapaw land in Oklahoma, was
deemed “too toxic to clean up.” and residents were paid to leave. “Was thine heart wrung
with longing for thy land” the chorus asks, when the herald returns and Troy is fallen, is
“razed to earth”. sometimes I wonder if the greeks, or soldiers, or warriors, had a different
concept and somehow therefor a different experience of the sensation of pain. I imagine the
brutality of the violence done to bodies in hand to hand combat like in the descriptions of
war and I don’t understand. I don’t understand how one could compel ones body forward to
the guillotine or how to comprehend enduring torture. I guess one doesn’t survive a
crucifixion, but I try to imagine it for the amount of time it takes to die, how ones mind
could exist through that pain. Once, with my dad, I went to the ruins of Troy and looked out
at the grassy rolling land where a harbour had been and we tried to imagine the boats and the
water and the battlements around, but mostly I could just see the rocks and the grass and the
blue sky and then we left. the remote-controlled drones in the blue sky are in contact with
the satellites in the upper atmosphere which are in contact with people in a room somewhere
and presumably those people have families and addresses. presumably they eat breakfast
and engage in ritualized sexual behaviours and post things on the internet and walk outside
under that same (?) sky. A group of artists in Pakistan are making giant posters of the faces
of children who have been killed by drone strikes in their country. the posters are lain in
fields, looking up, so that a helicopter, say, looking down, would see their faces. the zebra
mantis shrimp have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. a hawk eye can see 8
times as far as a human eye, and are said to be larger in volume than their brain, by weight.
On the internet I see a picture of chimpanzees mourning the death of the robotic monkey that
researches put in their cage to record behavioral data. I see a picture on the internet of a lion
with the head of a chimpanzee in her mouth, face facing out. the early humans followed a
coastal route from eastern Africa north, and eastward. another group went north following
the steppes. their movement was shaped over eons by the natural barriers of mountains and
deserts. this was later. the sea level was lower, that’s why we haven’t found much
archeological evidence of this costal migration but the map traced by genetics tells a clear
story, this book about genetics says. the ruins not discovered now buried under coral and
sandbars and the rising ocean. the endocrine effects of sex or grooming or being around
other people. the anguish which is the chemical withdrawal from that. humans build
structures to live inside “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness”. It is estimated that 1,000 generations of early humans lived in those caves; first
on the shore: the deepest sediment layers excavated reveal shells, then later the waters
receded and the caves opened onto plains; the higher sediment layers reflect this in pollen
deposits and the types of bones. the geometries of america as seen from an airplane and how
those geometries change to indicate land use, population density and relationships to natural
features; combine circles in flat fields, bridges or dams, the tiny 3dimensional verticality of
“the urban metropolis.” How many languages are spoken in Brooklyn, in Des Moines, in
Tuscaloosa, in Salt Lake City, in Abilene & Laramie & Biloxi. how big are your oysters in
the Gulf, or along the pacific coast, or in the Chesapeake bay? I used to think it was dumb
that the Native Americans used shells for currency, their only value being that they are
pretty, and then I realized the same about gold, a soft and useless metal. the human drive to
adornment is one of our deepest human traits, it probably precedes abstract thought and
spoken language by millennia. what, to an ape, is beautiful? we don’t know yet. we don’t
know the neural mechanism for that sensation, the hormones that control it. it costs 50$ to
get into the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is a very specific violence that cuts in a very
specific way. How would my life change under a military dictatorship? I can’t imagine the
anguish of being separated from your children, of having them killed or locked up or having
them overdose or die in a car crash or be given away. I think of all my friends that I love in
their houses in distant cities with their things and their different kinds of sufferings. Hannah
Arendt says “speech is what makes man a political being” but I think she is wrong.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is driving armed tanks through Queens. Venice is
flooding. I drive through a blizzard to visit my friend in Wisconsin. he lives in a yellow
house on a block with other houses and beyond that is more blocks on all sides with houses
on them all divided by small streets. he lives with his wife and two kids and they make Thai
food and the baby laughs and laughs and there is snow on the ground. spaceX is releasing so
many drone satellites that space in orbit around earth is getting crowded. Venice is a city
built on water of course it’s flooding. the geese are flying south over the highway in the
setting sun and the cold air. I am not sending them to anybody, they are their own geese
with their ancient trajectory of migration and cycles of return. the geometrical stability of
the shape of the pyramids means that those are the structures still standing.