On Re-Animation

Happy Halloween!!

Since there’s truly nothing spookier (bad spooky) than the way that white, colonial frameworks attempt to sever the being-ness and aliveness of the more-than-human world, this week we’re talking about re-animating the world and the self (good spooky).

In 2019, I was getting ready to start grad school, leaving my job, moving apartments, and having a slow-boiling gender crisis. A wrongness, a discomfort, a sense of “not-this” bubbled up from somewhere inside me. Suddenly the way I moved through the world, and the way others engaged with me, felt wrong. This sense was a voice that felt both me and not me.

I’ve talked in this newsletter before about encounters with others that may destabilize our sense of self. But what about encounters with something strange and unknown inside ourselves–what does that do to our sense of who we are?

The idea of “listening to yourself” is, I think, a weird one, or a wyrd one. Who or what, exactly, are you listening to? Who is doing the listening? And if you’re going to listen, what else will the listening ask of you? An openness to hearing things your conscious mind might not like? A commitment to following through on what you hear? A letting go of some measure of control over what runs your life and who knows what’s best? A shifting of your sense of self and your understanding of where your thoughts and directions come from?

During this time, I was also spending a lot of time reading within the Black radical tradition. Writers like Christina Sharpe, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Fred Moten taught me about the ways that a white, Western conception of humanity is built on the exclusion of other bodies, other voices, and the denial of the messiness of our entanglement with the world. The category of “humanity” determines what and who we see as deserving of being-ness, of deserving to be listened to.

When we encounter something strange, something that’s not name-able in the frameworks available to us, we can try to dominate and conquer it. We can try to maintain our illusion of control over our sense of self. Or we can treat it like another being and listen, allow it to EXIST, and allow it to change how we see ourselves. The experiences I was having asked me to look at what parts of myself I was cutting off and ignoring in the name of maintaining my own sense of rational, grasp-able humanity. Then they asked me what parts of the world I was cutting off and ignoring. What parts I assumed, or had been told, didn’t have voices and being-ness.

Learning to re-animate the world has been horrifying and energizing. It means that I’m no longer a separate body moving through a dead world. It’s made me feel miles less lonely. It’s also been extremely destabilizing. Naming and categorizing and ontologically un-aliving things is a way of trying to control them, a way of trying to be safe. Realizing that the rest of the world is present in a way that I can learn from, but not fully know, and certainly cannot control, is terrifying.

Learning this at the same time that I was experiencing myself as strange meant that it wasn’t just the outside world that became weirdly alive, it was my internal world too. I see this commitment to the strangeness of the self as the essence of queerness–not searching for another stable identity to cling to, but listening to the strangeness as it moves and changes. It’s such a relief to not know who I am.

And it’s put me on a journey of learning entirely new skills for being in relationship and listening. My rational-human-being skills won’t cut it. More on this next time, I hope.

In the meantime, have another grave, as a treat.