(originally published in print February 2024)
My problem with deserve is that it makes us really good at giving love to people we like. People we think deserve it. And fuck anyone else, and that's not real, real love. That's still love in the field of power.
If we can understand that the structures we live in are implicit aspects of our conception and construction of the world, then we can begin to see our own participation in the system of vertical power.
And by that I mean: hierarchies, superlatives, etc.1 If we are comparing two things, weighing one against the other, then we will naturally flatten the two into representation through a single aspect or aspects, isolated and amplified.
Wholeness is at best ignored, and at worst refused in favor of a symbol, a shorthand, A tidy conclusion.
But the practice is flawed from the start. This is where we start to see things as we are, because who is thinking? Who is the “I” that assigns, weighs, decides?
I've never found much use for identifiers, really. And am, at best, wary of using identity as a path to political power, which is not to say that I oppose identity as a category of motivating change, especially when it comes to rights of heretofore marginalized populations.
I want to note that this is not a comment on anyone who finds identifiers/identity incredibly useful or vital, even. This is just me reporting from my experience.
My experience as a white, cis-het, lower-middle-class, female emigrant. Kidding.
No, what I mean when I say that is that the words that have been given to me to apply to my lived experience in order to make sense of it have felt useful only insofar as they told me what other people thought, felt or found useful.
How the world might now see me. Victim. Survivor. One is technically accurate in a legal sense, the other feels more like the rote conclusion of a Lifetime movie.
One turns me into a cause, the other into a paragon of inspiration. One represents the broken, the other tells us that even what's broken can once again be whole and better than ever.
Either way, I’m reduced to an object, flattened into a category for other people’s easy thinking. But, I don’t really feel encapsulated or represented by that language. Probably not by any language on offer, because my experience is shifting, kaleidoscopic. The upshot of finding myself in fragments: the pieces make beautiful pictures in overlap and recombination, they move ceaselessly.
And this one thing is sure: if rape wasn't my undoing, something else would have been. Maybe it's foolish of me to get so hung up on the set of particulars instead of just cleaning up the mess.
But we don't want to just clean up the mess. We want to punish it, purify it, banish the mess, and all the messes it bears.
Because we haven't accepted that messes will happen. That life is a process, that love is a difficult verb. Love asks us to go beyond what we like, beyond what pleases and comforts us.
It amazes me how ready people are to fight each other, to kill each other even. When they could love each other instead.2
Love happens out beyond the field of power.
Beyond right and wrong.3
In the myth of the fall, Eve’s choice to eat from the apple of knowledge of good and evil opened the road that finds us here today, flooded with, assailed by that same knowledge.
In another life, she was Pandora, lifting the lid on the box of all things.
Something that I never really paid attention to until just now, making sure I accurately remembered the name of the infamous tree with its forbidden fruit, is the wording of the thing. “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of. For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)
Big Bluebeard4 energy coming off God on this one.
Casting Eve in the role of the parade of curious wives opening the door to the heart of darkness, again and again and again.
Poor Eve. She took the bite that changed everything.
The bite heard round the world, newly divided.
She didn't divide the world itself with one little apple. Unity remains at the ground of all being. No, the fallout came in the form of awareness. Of consciousness that there was even any problem to begin with.
Awareness of mortality and the fear that accompanies the idea of ceasing to exist.
Awareness of division. The curse of trying to map out and identify smaller and smaller things so that they can leave the chaos of mystery behind for a cosy little home in the known.
In that moment, so the story goes, we become aware of our own “I”ness, our own differentiation from all else. For Eve, the apple, and its aftermath, created the conditions of alienation. For us, it's capitalism and postmodernity.
Everybody’s gonna get it in the end.
Good, better, best. Or in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Easy for me to say, I know. Or rather, easier said than done.
“Out beyond ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.”—Rumi
Fairy tale by Charles Perrault about a man with ever growing collection of curious, dead wives.
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