if we do not hang together

A long time ago in a town called Cordoba there was a young music teacher named Abbas. Abbas was earnest, ambitious, well-known around town. Abbas was consumed with an obsession that nearly ended his life.

Abbas was utterly obsessed with the notion that, like the birds, he could fly.
Now, there are a lot of crags around Cordoba, and a lot of birds, so there was plenty for young Abbas to pay attention to. He had a keen eye and an inventor's zeal. He was certain that he would be the first human being to soar among the clouds, the very first to ascend to the heavens. He would leave behind this great crusher gravity, remove his feet from the earth, and dance up with the gulls and eagles. He would be gone from down here, from his prosaic music-teaching existence, and ascend past the height of poetry to somewhere newer, better, that none of his fellows could go. Like a falling angel's opposite number, he would blaze up toward Heaven.

Abbas watched the birds. He made sketches. He began to spend every waking moment nursing his idea, sleeping with it held close when he could sleep. Wood and cloth took shape by his workbench, changing every day with some new addition, some adjustment of the curves. He would collect feathers, and attach them to it wherever he could. And finally Abbas had a pair of wings, a great sail he could strap to himself and fly away with. So he made the announcement: everyone from far and wide should show up to the cliffs outside of town tomorrow afternoon, because for the first time in human history, a man would fly like a bird.

Now, in that day and age, there wasn't much to do around Cordoba that didn't involve hard work and sheep. And when the choice is your day's labor, or a spectating at a grandiose tragedy, most human beings don't have a difficult time choosing.

The hour came, and there was Abbas; some say on the roof of a tower, some say with his feet firmly planted on the cliff-top. His miraculous wings were strapped to his back. And, depending on who you listen to, he was naked, and had glued feathers all over his body. Abbas made his announcement. And then he made his leap.

Abbas and his wings soared, but they didn't get to Heaven. The man transfigured sailed in a straight line for the length of three football fields, by all accounts, over grass and trees and houses and an astonished crowd. And it was only then that Abbas realized, in a flash of insight, that he had forgotten one feature in his design, had passed over one function of a flying machine that ought be considered earlier than late into its maiden flight.
He hadn't thought to design it to land.

The music teacher came to Earth again with a sickening crunch, alive but broken in the wreckage of his miraculous wings. And in his long convalescence, Abbas had plenty of time to modify his design, to become obsessed with newer, better wings, wings that had a tail like a bird's attached, a mechanism for steering and slowing down so a flying man could safely return home to the ground. The trouble was, Abbas couldn't get a running start any more. He could barely walk. And there were, shockingly, no volunteers to test the new pinions, and they mouldered, unused.

Abbas ibn Firnas didn't get to Heaven. He did not make it, alone, to the dome of the blue sky, there to leave behind a normal life forever. But he did have another hobby, and a new obsession. Abbas couldn't get up to Heaven, but he could bring a piece of it down.

So he ground lenses. He built telescopes. And, immersed in study, surrounded by skeptics, Abbas began a new masterwork: an intricate planetarium, one that would bring the stars and the planets close enough for anyone to touch, not just one flying man with a broken dream. It had to be perfect. It had to mimic the wheeling of the constellations, the positions of the Sun and Moon, even the weather. He worked on it, day and night, with his back and legs aching from old disappointments.

Abbas wasn't a young man forever, but by the time he was an old man, there it was: a piece of the sky brought down for everyone to see, a bit of Heaven you could get close to with your feet still on the ground. And by all accounts, he died happy.

That planetarium is gone, but it can still instruct us. Too many of us think if we can leave our fellows behind, if we can just make our devices perfect, we can escape from our human contexts. We can get out of where and what we are, and get to our own Heaven, so long as we're willing to leave everyone else behind. We can make our one pair of wings and ascend. As it turns out, some of us even manage to fly a ways, to soar over houses and mud and gravity, over oppression and degradation, over our own histories. We manage for a little while to separate ourselves out and get close to what we want.
And then it all comes crashing down, and there's nobody there to catch us, there's nobody there willing to carry on our schemes for us, there's nobody who understands what we were trying to do. And it's our fault. We didn't include them from the first. We didn't explain it. We didn't want their help, or their contagion, or the embarrassment of association with them. We wanted to get ours, and get away, and buy that ticket to the skies.

There is another way. It means not getting everything we want, sometimes. It means tinkering with the dream, a little. It means giving up flying away from all the dirt and rock we stand on, and seeing what can be done down here. It means letting go the notion that, alone, we can leave behind others and escape context and history. It means working for each other, not just ourselves.

We can bring some of that Heaven to each other, instead of running for it alone. We can build it, right here where we stand, if only we can set aside the self-centered obsessions for a moment and take stock of what we have. We can sacrifice that lone flight into the wild blue in exchange for making a better world that all of us can share, one with joys for the folk who don't have the privilege of spending days and months building personal flying machines. We can look past the privilege of miraculous wings and devote ourselves to a greater, deeper, more long-lived miracle: creating edifices on the ground that elevate all people. Not everyone has the money and time and material to buy their own wings and workshops. Not everyone can climb a cliff to begin with, let alone wearing nothing but feathers and pride. Why do we keep thinking that it will work to abandon those around us and, by so doing, buy our way to the gates of Paradise? Why do so many of us forget how much we can all see if we just join hands, take up our tools, and dream together?

There are many of us with a half-finished pair of wings in the yard, a new design set aside for far too long, the wreckage of one that didn't work out, the broken bits of past disappointments and hurts. The one thing that can heal those wounds is community. It is solidarity. It is letting others in and joining with them to contribute to something larger than our own comfort and ambition. It is choosing to use what privilege we do have to give more people access to what, before, was far out of reach. Let others invent the hang glider and the airplane and the Tower of Babel. Let us instead turn our brilliance toward something that can be shared, and that, because of its collective strength and firm human foundation, is much harder to knock down.

a note

Hey, so I'm suddenly getting a whole lot of traffic from a Willamette University message board that appears to be linked to a class. It's all headed toward "The Seam of Skin and Scales."

Welcome, Willamette students. ...any of you care to let me in on what's going on over there?

comfort

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed--with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun." --Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 (NRSV)

I woke up to bad news today. It didn't stop coming.

It was a bad story, and badly told. But the point is straightforward: another sister murdered today. Another name for the Day of Remembrance. Another young trans woman of color, stabbed to death. Another voice we're never going to hear again. Another world, another way, another life, stomped on and punctured and torn open ragged and wet and, in the end, missing.

And another set of jeering, contemptuous onlookers. Another bunch of cops whose first sympathy is with that poor, traumatized ex-convict who stabbed her to death and got her blood all over him, poor shaken guy, duped, tricked, threatened, violated even, though God no, it's no reason to murder someone, it's just, well, you can understand why he would. Another crew of reporters willing to sensationalize and abuse the story of another murder victim, to spin it and twist it until she brought it all on herself, until all the facts of her life and hopes and dreams and loves, her favorite foods, her warm breath, her days and nights and days again--until all of those are reduced down to nothing but a list of exploitable physical flaws, a flock of whispers and insults, a splashy, lurid headline. Until it's all just her shoes and her measurements and a name and idea she worked so hard to leave behind, as though the past years of her own making, besides the snide references to her breasts, can be undone--chipped from the record of history like the name of a hated pharaoh or a long-since-disappeared political rival, scrubbed clean from anyone's having to deal with the complexities of her situation.
Until the public can be satisfied that it's finished the murderer's job. He ripped her breath and blood out of her, after all, but her body remained, in an abandoned pile of meat and bone and contemptible breast implants. Her name remained. Her memory remained, even in neighbors who assumed she could only have so many callers because she must be a whore like all her kind, even in family far away, even in the simple things left behind in her Bronx apartment.

We couldn't have that. We couldn't allow that residue to stay on our daily concrete.
There's nothing new under the sun, okay? But we erase what we cannot stand to remember was here, as best we can. We turn the hose on those sticky bloodstains and try desperately to fence the stolen goods, patch up the places where it's obvious something is missing, make sense of the fact that a twenty-five-year-old woman was here just the other Saturday, laughing, a cheerful fixture of the neighborhood if anything's to be believed in those reports, and now she's not, she's a statistic, she's a corpse, and we can't even afford her the dignity of having been complicated. Because it's not enough that a man more than a decade her senior, with a criminal record, seems to think it was appropriate for him to commit brutal murder, or that for many onlookers, he's the hero of the story. We need to make it make sense. We need to make her make sense. We need a reason that a person might do such a thing to another person, and the truth is just so hard to look at--the truth, and our whole society's complicity in that truth--that we have to turn it inside-out and make it her fault, not his, not ours, just in order to preserve the fragile avoidance of the fact that this world can be terrifying, that it's the people who respond to not seeing what they want to see with knives who often have those knives ready, that those on the bottom fighting for a chance to just scrape out a safe, warm place in this world more often than not do not get that place. The breaking is there, the breach in what ought to be, and we cannot look at it, so we have to sweep at the edges of it, put its weight on those who aren't ourselves, and make them carry the burden of their own oppression so we don't have to know that they are like us, and that we are like them, in how quickly our own breath can be torn out.

We all might die alone. But some of us have to be ground and ground and ground down into the ground so the rest of us can feel a little better about our own chances at avoiding it. We have to make them more alone, even in death. We have to take away their names and their dignity. We have to take away even the chance that they might be mourned as real human beings who are gone and never coming back, who are missed by loved ones somewhere, who meant something. A murder is incomplete, and we cannot stand ending on an unresolved chord. We all have to join together and finish it, so the eyes of the murdered cannot accuse us in our sleep.

We do this to each other.

We did this to Sanesha Stewart, who is dead.

We did this to so many. We could do it to me, tomorrow. How many of you would know, in another obituary about a deceitful boy with breasts who had it coming, that these words were mine, and that I was gone? But the dead are not, indeed, more fortunate than the living, though perhaps they are more comfortable. Oppression still weighs on those of us with breath, but we have a chance to look it in the eye. We have the chance to put our hands against it and push. And maybe this is not enough. Maybe it doesn't make up for our hard days, and our hungry children, and our bruises from the business end of injustice after injustice. Maybe this is all vanity, and chasing after the wind.

The living don't have the luxury to care, because we're here, and most of us plan on going on living. And it wasn't enough for Sanesha Stewart, but it might be enough for me. Or you. Or someone you never knew had it coming until they ended so senselessly that some stranger decided to tell you they deserved it, just to finish that job. In the end, it's still better to light a candle than curse the darkness, even in the face of a darkness that viciously extinguishes candle after candle, light after light, because it has to be done. And we can do it together, we can stop this erasure, we can stop this sacrilege, we can stop losing more and more family, until maybe we can put down the nausea and see the dead waiting for us to pull it together and give them reason to rest.

It has been a long day, full of worry and sorrow and grief and fear. But I'm not alone, and I still have my name, and I still have breath to lend to this, and we can do this so long as we remember that we're not alone, any of us.

I will hold my partner a little more tightly, tonight.
Keep safe, everyone.

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken." --Ecc. 4:9-12

in making-up-for-the-weather news

Despite many efforts to block it, Oregon finally has domestic partnerships that are, in all but name, equivalent to marriage.

Here's the ruling.

We're got miles yet to go, but today, for just a moment, I'm going to sit and be proud to be an Oregonian. I was there cheering for the very first same-sex marriages in Oregon, and I was there for the heartbreak of having marriage equality shortly after taken away. The other night I saw a woman twice my age weep openly that this was even on the table and could be rallied for. And we did it.
We did it.


A contrite and deferent hat-tip to the ever-wise Sam at Xyre.

hanging around in the lost and found

If you're a student of ancient history, you've probably stumbled across silphium, or something like it.
Silphium is all over the literature of the ancient Mediterranean. It was used extensively by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and probably the Phoenicians and the Berbers and other North Africans--that is, anyone near enough to the areas it could be found to grab a handful. And "extensively" is not an exaggeration: the Hellenes record using silphium as a sovereign remedy for everything from headaches to fevers, as a birth control and an abortifacient, even as a popular cooking spice. An entire city's economy ran on it, and ran well. It was pictured on currency, pastoral pieces were written about people harvesting it, ancient doctors raved about its myriad uses. It was considered priceless.

There trouble is, we don't know what silphium was.

We know silphium was a plant that grew wild around the Mediterranean, especially along the African coast, and that it was hard to cultivate its most potent varieties in any kind of quantity, so it was encouraged to grow wild all over the place. We have rough pictures of it, stamped on coins and painted on pottery. We have descriptions of the way it was processed down into medicine, down to the ungodly reek that potsfull of its resin produced. We even now have documents pointing out other plants that some of its proponents believed were similar or related to it; asafoetida, which we still have, was considered a poor substitute by Roman physicians, for instance. But none of those ancient readers felt the need to identify which plant silphium was in any detail.

The trouble for those of us now reading is that there was never any need to explain what silphium was, or describe it in detail, because it was so ubiquitous that it must have seemed silly to do so. Nobody in a modern conversation or a modern novel hands a bottle of aspirin to a friend, pausing to note, 'This is an aspirin pill, a small bit of compressed powder of synthesized willow salic, a chemical derived from the bark of the willow tree. We use it as an anti-inflammatory and painkiller despite its deleterious effects on the liver and stomach.' And indeed, few of us reaching for that bottle of pills know where aspirin comes from. It's everywhere. There's no need to know; you can trust that the people who made it knew what they were doing and where they got it, and that when you put it on your grocery list, whoever reads it will know what you mean. Casually describing the rest of it comes off as redundant, pretentious, and unnatural.
We know where silphium fits in the ancient Mediterranean. We have a rough idea of what it might have looked like, a few snatches about the smell, some idea of other plants related to it. We can guess, with reasonable accuracy, that it was probably an extinct relative of fennel and parsley, of all things. But nobody felt the need to leave us an elaborate map pointing at where to find this sovereign remedy, this popular cure-all. They assumed it would always be around, and that our parents would be able to tell us, and their parents tell them. And somewhere around a thousand and a half years ago, that got shaken up, and it was gone forever, due to overcultivation, or desertification of the southern Mediterranean, or simple neglect. Maybe there's still a few clumps of it in Tunisia that someone drives by every day without knowing.

History is full of these things, no matter where you go, things we can circle around, draw rough outlines of, even make very good educated guesses about. But we don't have them any more, and we're different people now, and nobody thought to leave us careful instructions because they just assumed that what they had would always be there. There's an entire genre of Song Dynasty Chinese poetry that's really song lyrics, but we don't have the tunes any more in part because they were so popular they didn't need to be written down. There are buried cities that periodically turn up all over Arabia that we don't even know the names of, any more--huge capitals of trade and art just vanished, when once everyone knew where to go to find them.

When I first began my transition, I searched desperately for context. I grew up in a small town surrounded by miles and miles of sagebrush and juniper and lava rock, where storms would come rolling down from the north and have nothing to stop them for the length of another three states. Nobody gave me patterns for what I was going through. Nobody gave me a starting place. I was off the map. So being who I am, I ran for the library, and I pulled out every book I could. And in between all of the autobiographies and sociology and theory, I was shocked to discover that there were all these rough pictures, throughout history, of people going through something that looked similar.

It wasn't the same, I later found out. They had other cultural contexts, in different times and places, with different tools and ideas to manage what looked very much like gendered lives outside of a biology-bound binary. I looked, though, at those stone tablets, at those translated manuscripts, at those colonialist records of destruction, and I found not only people familiar to me, but societies that had places for them.
Often enough, it wasn't explicit. There were words that were considered hard to translate, or that had no English equivalent at all. There were pictures of people who didn't seem like the other men or women in their societies. There were references, here and there, to crossing boundaries of physical sex. There were records of social and work roles. Some were more complete and detailed, though often colored with the confusion and disgust of colonizers and cultural imperialists. Some were the vaguest of conjectures. Some were just indications of where certain kind of people fit, how they dressed, what they ate, what they did, who they loved, without specifying who they were; why do so? Everyone knew who was being talked about. It was elementary.
Like many before me, I ran up against too many missing pieces to get those shattered pieces of human life back. Even extant examples of living, breathing people in parts of the world far from me were irrevocably altered by colonization, globalization, and the inevitable turning of time, and I found little desire to exacerbate that process with my own intellectual invasions. I had substitutes to find, and bits of culture or idea that, by crude replication or convergent evolution, performed similar work in my own cultural context, in my own life. There were relatives in that family tree I could cobble together. But those histories, no matter how important and how much they informed my own approaches, were histories. What they recorded was gone for good, and even if I could take it back I in most cases had no right to. Ci songs had gone tuneless. Silphium was extinct, or missing, but certainly out of reach forever, and something else would have to take its place if its kernel could not be found hiding somewhere. Whatever was left of it was changed enough to be unrecognizable, buried under centuries of sand and silence.

Somewhere in there desertification set in, or maybe over-farming, or maybe unsustainable harvests, or maybe simple neglect. Maybe it was just wholesale murder. One way or another, the gears and tides of history moved on, and something our ancestors or their neighbors had--had so much of they took it for granted, that they never felt the need to explain it for posterity because it was elementary, because it was easy, because it would always be around, because it was so normal as to be an absurd object of study--went away and didn't come back.
There were cures that disappeared, people there stopped being room for, solidarities that were so commonplace as to be unremarkable until they dissolved into dust or were stomped into oblivion.
Some of them we need now, and we find that empty space, between the potsherds and the pastoral poetry, where once was something that could have done us some good. And we're left with the task of finding it again, or finding replacements. Human stories and human objects and human lives were lost. How do we rebuild? How do we cobble together new cultural spaces, new cure-alls, new places to fit something that we ourselves will someday take for granted so thoroughly that our descendants will scratch their heads and wonder what we're talking about?
And when we rebuild--how do we preserve it? How do we take these tools and keep them safe so our descendants will know what they were, and be able to make use of them? How can I describe my life, and written where, so that it will be helpful to those who come after? How can we make our hearts' work stick, our solidarities solid? How can we make sure our replacements don't need replacing?

There were times and there are places not my own, where someone like me might find a place that looks like home. I, and others like me, am tasked with finding something that works for me and for those on whose behalf I've chosen to work in the here and now. We have to cultivate, and harvest, cures for our own society's stumblings and sicknesses. And if we succeed so thoroughly that what we distill is accessible to everyone, what then? How do we weather history? How do we keep the places we build, the growth we achieve, the linked arms and shared voices we hold together from losing their meaning the more they grow?

Maybe we need to start by looking at what's already been lost. Maybe we need to understand what's missing and that much of what we ourselves become will someday go missing, too, and that it's up to us to make sure the important parts are still there for those who will come after us. Maybe it's just a matter of not assuming that these things we hold dear will be there when we're gone, and doing a little more work to make sure that even if our own fields are someday empty of them, that they grow wild somewhere else.