chaos critters
martinesque
by manjula martin
The night of a lightning storm in August in California I woke up terrified, and I watched the too-close spears shatter the sky: Aries or Mars very upset, fire from darkness, splintering this land; and I knew it wasn't possible for the trees to all survive this. Nor the humans. I spent the rest of the morning and then the rest of the day packing my "go bag," which is a term I hate, but I also hate the alternate,"bug-out bag," which makes me think of "preppers," which makes me think of racist separatists. I spent the morning packing the bag without an appropriate moniker, then the light dawned and it was grey, then there was a very small amount of rain, and more thunder, and it felt for a moment like August in Pennsylvania that summer trip when I was 15 and away from the West for the first time and the thunder rolled across green lawns every afternoon and two different boys wanted to kiss me. But this moisture was surface, limited, I knew. Untraceable.
After it became light out, my partner and I went to our favorite outdoor cafe and got bagels and lox as a treat, and then for the rest of the day we packed more: got the first aid kit finally put together, bought new batteries for the flashlight, got our passports and money and insurance bill and the hard copy draft of my novel and the backpacking equipment and the book called Where There Is No Doctor. We joked that we weren't sure whether we were packing for an evacuation or an apocalypse and really don't they go together, one after another, perhaps?
The lightning fires started that morning, but they were deep in the natural places and so humans didn't really know about them for another day, and then another day after that the evacuation warnings came to me at my home in Sonoma County, one of many counties receiving a steady stream of beeps and buzzes, through a variety of channels. We weren't "mandatory—get out now" but we were "warning—be ready, like, seriously" and the fire wasn't that far away, about 10 miles north. People kept saying fire has never crossed the river though, they were saying it over and over, as though it were a prayer, it has never happened, it would be unprecedented for the fire to go from there to here. And I nodded and said something about wind patterns, but I have also been alive in the forest in Sonoma County, California, for the past four years now, and I understand that unprecedented is no longer a phrase that carries weight or safety inside it. Unprecedented is irrelevant; very recent history shows very clearly that things can happen even if they have not happened before. And based on this and based on previous evacuation experiences, we left before "warning" became "mandatory" and before traffic became deadly. We went to stay with friends in another county, somewhat breaking pandemic protocol, and then drove two hours south of "our" fire through the molasses smoke of several other fires belonging to several other counties, in order to co-evacuate with my dad and stepmom in a weird little beach rental in my hometown, where at the same time there was another unprecedented fire burning away all the wood of my childhood heart, the land on which I was born.
Eventually we went home again and our house didn't burn down, this time. The immediate area where I live has not burned in a very long time, maybe 100 years? There is a burned-out redwood stump in our yard and a few more on the trail up the hill, and there are thriving matilija poppies, so fire has happened here, but nothing big or noted in records for a very long time. The area is mixed conifer forest: redwoods but also so so many new doug firs and dull orange explosions of suddenly-dead oak trees everywhere, so much tree death that your shoes are crunchy with their dead parts when you come home from walking anywhere. Some of my neighbors think that, like the river, the fact that we've "never" burned is protection, precedent, proof somehow that the particular arrangement of climate and landscape here is simply not prone to catching on fire. As previously noted, I live in California in the climate of the year 2020, and I'm a bit of a pragmatist anyway, so I tend to go the other way; I think it's likely, probable, that we will burn. And maybe soon. But we didn't burn this time, and after the immediate danger to my direct area passed, we went home. Then there was more fire, in more places; then the day of no sky; then the weeks of smoke, fires up and down the crest of the Pacific; then the even-newer fire, which spread across the only sliver of land that didn't burn in the previous terrible years of terrible fires and into the nearest city, which did partially burn in the previous terribles. There was more packing, then more relief that it didn't come this far west, it didn't cross the freeway this time. Then I realized I live this way: inside endless days of awe, with the ashes of trees and animals and people and homes falling on me. Then for a few anomalous days it was crisp and blue inland and there was fog at the beach again. A little chilly at night. Today, the remnants of entire ecosystems swirl again like glad, new snow in the air outside, where I do not go.
On Yom Kippur, a friend from the city came up and we went to the beach, where the sea stretched out dully under the smoke ceiling of the sky. We wore white, as is tradition, and in the photos my friend snapped we look like an indie rock band or a really cool end-of-the-world cult: in both scenarios we appear somewhat taken aback at having realized our potential a bit early. I am not Jewish but my partner is; he was raised socialist but not religious, and in recent years he has begun to re-learn about some of the stories and the traditions of his ancestors, and so I have been learning too. I love receiving these teachings this way: someone else reads the big old book and then, possibly after smoking a joint, relates it back to me with a socialist-environmentalist slant. In the week between Rosh Hashanah (the new year) and Yom Kippur (the day of, well, atonement feels so Catholic, I'll go with reckoning), one takes stock of the past year and takes responsibility for the harm one has caused or the ways in which one has failed, and these days of reckoning and taking stock are traditionally called the days of awe. My friend from the city brought a book with her called This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, which is a sort of zen meditation on the significance of and potential in the days of awe In These Times, and I leafed through it, and I was taken with a phrase that the author uses in the introduction, in which he describes Yom Kippur as a day of "rehearsing our own death." You wear white (a shroud), you are as the dead are, you fast and do not fornicate, you contemplate what you've done and not done in your life, and you rehearse your own death. (I'm sure I am not explaining Yom Kippur well and as a half-shiksa I apologize, but you get the gist). This is what the fires feel like to me, this escalating replacement of Autumn with a season of extended destruction and dread, especially amid the endless repetition of now-established pandemic routines and restrictions, especially among the eternally renewing cycles of surprise and denial among a populace faced with the onslaught of racist fascist rule, all of which inevitably leads me to the inescapable suspicion that I am living in Historic times even though I do not particularly care to do so: We are rehearsing our own deaths. Pack the bags, feel the fear, obliterate, release, refresh.
A certain road by my house, which is one of two potential evacuation routes from my home, both of which lead to the same winding, forested, two-lane highway, is rimmed with bay trees that have grown into tunnels above the road, kissing in the sky above you as you navigate the bumps at 15 mph. Every time I drive down this road I picture the trees aflame, sparks whirling in the devil wind, embers everywhere, falling, onto my car window. I can easily picture this because I have seen countless videos of it from people who live very near to me or in places with similar environments. Every time this movie plays in my head, I rehearse my own death.
Which is not to say that I am fatalistically convinced I will die in a fire. I understand the relative risks of my situation and like many people who find themselves living in what is now widely known as the wildland-urban interface in California, I am not quite sure what to do, or if there is anything to be done. (And I don't want to freak out my parents, who read this newsletter, hi guys, we're okay). What I mean when I say I am rehearsing my own death is that this is a larger rehearsal for a bigger show: this is what humans are doing and thinking about as we become fully inside the era of climate chaos, the clearly predicted downslope of the Anthropocene.
All of which is to say, I guess I just thought there would be a bit more time before this happened. We all knew this was coming in our brains even if in our emotions we couldn't handle the fact of it. We all know it's coming in our bodies, a great disturbance in the force, the forces, unprecedented. But climate chaos isn't coming anymore; it's here. What do I do?
After we de-evacuated in August it felt difficult to care for my house or my life. I had some vacation time, previously scheduled, during which I feverishly worked on my book, which involves a natural disaster, but there was still something that felt rote about it, obligatory: performing the tasks of my life. And I did not want to clean or cook or fix the ceiling fan or even garden, much, although I couldn't really go outside anyway. I have since gone outside, although I have not fixed the fan, and another heat wave is now here, another red flag warning today, so I'm inside again, and that subterranean reluctance that has been with me since August still weighs me down, makes me slow.
I am thinking about how to live in this era. Not how to survive, which will happen or not happen and is probably not really something in my control, honestly, I mean have you seen fire? hurricanes? the ocean? But I'm thinking if I do survive, and my varied privileges give me a much better chance of doing so than many, although less than some, then how do I live a life? Put another way: I figure I have anywhere between two days and ten years before my house burns down. So, until then, how do I want to be?
I want to be lighter on my feet, have less stuff, be more flexible, less bogged down in the physicality of permanence. I would like not to be afraid all the time, I would like to continue creating art and beauty while the world burns, and I would like also to be humble in the face of forces far greater than myself. I would like to be like a surfer.
I am curious about whether it's possible to allow oneself to float willingly in chaos and instability at this time, when everything already feels uprooted, demolished, anyway. I don't mean I want to do something stupid. I sleep with a head lamp and car keys by my bed, I fear large waves, I have a mortgage that I intend to keep paying, etc. It's more about... how do I live, now? How do I stop trying to STOP THIS HAPPENING and stop pretending THIS NEVER HAPPENS and actually accept that it is happening. Because this is happening. I'm not being hyperbolic. What is happening in the West is legitimately happening, and it's terrifying. Nations do and will fail, the structures of this particular society and also the literal structures of this particular planet are changing, and that's largely the fault of the humans, yes, but also it's where we live, how we live, and we are going to be caught up in its chaos no matter fucking what.
And so there is something that feels entirely appropriate about accepting the chaos of the unknown at a time of chaos. Like, maybe it's actually harder to try and hold on to security, to schedules and systems and institutions, which is what 99% of america seems to be doing right now in our trifecta moment of climate chaos/pandemic/racist fascism. We have already memorized the part of the play where we learn what we did wrong. Zoom zoom.
If instead of getting up every day and enacting a theater of what I think the world should still be like, because I happened to grow up and live during this tiny part of human existence where some humans (and only certain humans!) felt a sense of stability, felt like we could build walls and roofs and structures that would keep out the chaos of the planet beneath us, that would render us exceptional among critters, felt that even, ha, we could control what happens to us—if instead, I just admit that I too am a little chaos critter, what would happen?
The day that it was chilly, the fog soaked the ash into the wood of our deck. I woke up in grey that was moist and for a moment felt as though autumn still existed. Having recently been in the Sierras. I thought about marmots, and how they just cuddle all winter. I mean, I assume they cuddle. In the warm months they have one job and that is to get fat and ready, and so they work hard and they eat as much as possible, and then when it becomes violent outside, when the chaos of winter in mountains envelopes them, they stay in their little shelters and just give themselves over to their powerlessness and, I think—I like to think—they cuddle.
All I'm saying is that we are chaos critters, we humans, we all are. Always have been. Maybe we can remember, re-learn how to be so again?
xox
m.
After it became light out, my partner and I went to our favorite outdoor cafe and got bagels and lox as a treat, and then for the rest of the day we packed more: got the first aid kit finally put together, bought new batteries for the flashlight, got our passports and money and insurance bill and the hard copy draft of my novel and the backpacking equipment and the book called Where There Is No Doctor. We joked that we weren't sure whether we were packing for an evacuation or an apocalypse and really don't they go together, one after another, perhaps?
The lightning fires started that morning, but they were deep in the natural places and so humans didn't really know about them for another day, and then another day after that the evacuation warnings came to me at my home in Sonoma County, one of many counties receiving a steady stream of beeps and buzzes, through a variety of channels. We weren't "mandatory—get out now" but we were "warning—be ready, like, seriously" and the fire wasn't that far away, about 10 miles north. People kept saying fire has never crossed the river though, they were saying it over and over, as though it were a prayer, it has never happened, it would be unprecedented for the fire to go from there to here. And I nodded and said something about wind patterns, but I have also been alive in the forest in Sonoma County, California, for the past four years now, and I understand that unprecedented is no longer a phrase that carries weight or safety inside it. Unprecedented is irrelevant; very recent history shows very clearly that things can happen even if they have not happened before. And based on this and based on previous evacuation experiences, we left before "warning" became "mandatory" and before traffic became deadly. We went to stay with friends in another county, somewhat breaking pandemic protocol, and then drove two hours south of "our" fire through the molasses smoke of several other fires belonging to several other counties, in order to co-evacuate with my dad and stepmom in a weird little beach rental in my hometown, where at the same time there was another unprecedented fire burning away all the wood of my childhood heart, the land on which I was born.
Eventually we went home again and our house didn't burn down, this time. The immediate area where I live has not burned in a very long time, maybe 100 years? There is a burned-out redwood stump in our yard and a few more on the trail up the hill, and there are thriving matilija poppies, so fire has happened here, but nothing big or noted in records for a very long time. The area is mixed conifer forest: redwoods but also so so many new doug firs and dull orange explosions of suddenly-dead oak trees everywhere, so much tree death that your shoes are crunchy with their dead parts when you come home from walking anywhere. Some of my neighbors think that, like the river, the fact that we've "never" burned is protection, precedent, proof somehow that the particular arrangement of climate and landscape here is simply not prone to catching on fire. As previously noted, I live in California in the climate of the year 2020, and I'm a bit of a pragmatist anyway, so I tend to go the other way; I think it's likely, probable, that we will burn. And maybe soon. But we didn't burn this time, and after the immediate danger to my direct area passed, we went home. Then there was more fire, in more places; then the day of no sky; then the weeks of smoke, fires up and down the crest of the Pacific; then the even-newer fire, which spread across the only sliver of land that didn't burn in the previous terrible years of terrible fires and into the nearest city, which did partially burn in the previous terribles. There was more packing, then more relief that it didn't come this far west, it didn't cross the freeway this time. Then I realized I live this way: inside endless days of awe, with the ashes of trees and animals and people and homes falling on me. Then for a few anomalous days it was crisp and blue inland and there was fog at the beach again. A little chilly at night. Today, the remnants of entire ecosystems swirl again like glad, new snow in the air outside, where I do not go.
On Yom Kippur, a friend from the city came up and we went to the beach, where the sea stretched out dully under the smoke ceiling of the sky. We wore white, as is tradition, and in the photos my friend snapped we look like an indie rock band or a really cool end-of-the-world cult: in both scenarios we appear somewhat taken aback at having realized our potential a bit early. I am not Jewish but my partner is; he was raised socialist but not religious, and in recent years he has begun to re-learn about some of the stories and the traditions of his ancestors, and so I have been learning too. I love receiving these teachings this way: someone else reads the big old book and then, possibly after smoking a joint, relates it back to me with a socialist-environmentalist slant. In the week between Rosh Hashanah (the new year) and Yom Kippur (the day of, well, atonement feels so Catholic, I'll go with reckoning), one takes stock of the past year and takes responsibility for the harm one has caused or the ways in which one has failed, and these days of reckoning and taking stock are traditionally called the days of awe. My friend from the city brought a book with her called This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, which is a sort of zen meditation on the significance of and potential in the days of awe In These Times, and I leafed through it, and I was taken with a phrase that the author uses in the introduction, in which he describes Yom Kippur as a day of "rehearsing our own death." You wear white (a shroud), you are as the dead are, you fast and do not fornicate, you contemplate what you've done and not done in your life, and you rehearse your own death. (I'm sure I am not explaining Yom Kippur well and as a half-shiksa I apologize, but you get the gist). This is what the fires feel like to me, this escalating replacement of Autumn with a season of extended destruction and dread, especially amid the endless repetition of now-established pandemic routines and restrictions, especially among the eternally renewing cycles of surprise and denial among a populace faced with the onslaught of racist fascist rule, all of which inevitably leads me to the inescapable suspicion that I am living in Historic times even though I do not particularly care to do so: We are rehearsing our own deaths. Pack the bags, feel the fear, obliterate, release, refresh.
A certain road by my house, which is one of two potential evacuation routes from my home, both of which lead to the same winding, forested, two-lane highway, is rimmed with bay trees that have grown into tunnels above the road, kissing in the sky above you as you navigate the bumps at 15 mph. Every time I drive down this road I picture the trees aflame, sparks whirling in the devil wind, embers everywhere, falling, onto my car window. I can easily picture this because I have seen countless videos of it from people who live very near to me or in places with similar environments. Every time this movie plays in my head, I rehearse my own death.
Which is not to say that I am fatalistically convinced I will die in a fire. I understand the relative risks of my situation and like many people who find themselves living in what is now widely known as the wildland-urban interface in California, I am not quite sure what to do, or if there is anything to be done. (And I don't want to freak out my parents, who read this newsletter, hi guys, we're okay). What I mean when I say I am rehearsing my own death is that this is a larger rehearsal for a bigger show: this is what humans are doing and thinking about as we become fully inside the era of climate chaos, the clearly predicted downslope of the Anthropocene.
All of which is to say, I guess I just thought there would be a bit more time before this happened. We all knew this was coming in our brains even if in our emotions we couldn't handle the fact of it. We all know it's coming in our bodies, a great disturbance in the force, the forces, unprecedented. But climate chaos isn't coming anymore; it's here. What do I do?
After we de-evacuated in August it felt difficult to care for my house or my life. I had some vacation time, previously scheduled, during which I feverishly worked on my book, which involves a natural disaster, but there was still something that felt rote about it, obligatory: performing the tasks of my life. And I did not want to clean or cook or fix the ceiling fan or even garden, much, although I couldn't really go outside anyway. I have since gone outside, although I have not fixed the fan, and another heat wave is now here, another red flag warning today, so I'm inside again, and that subterranean reluctance that has been with me since August still weighs me down, makes me slow.
I am thinking about how to live in this era. Not how to survive, which will happen or not happen and is probably not really something in my control, honestly, I mean have you seen fire? hurricanes? the ocean? But I'm thinking if I do survive, and my varied privileges give me a much better chance of doing so than many, although less than some, then how do I live a life? Put another way: I figure I have anywhere between two days and ten years before my house burns down. So, until then, how do I want to be?
I want to be lighter on my feet, have less stuff, be more flexible, less bogged down in the physicality of permanence. I would like not to be afraid all the time, I would like to continue creating art and beauty while the world burns, and I would like also to be humble in the face of forces far greater than myself. I would like to be like a surfer.
I am curious about whether it's possible to allow oneself to float willingly in chaos and instability at this time, when everything already feels uprooted, demolished, anyway. I don't mean I want to do something stupid. I sleep with a head lamp and car keys by my bed, I fear large waves, I have a mortgage that I intend to keep paying, etc. It's more about... how do I live, now? How do I stop trying to STOP THIS HAPPENING and stop pretending THIS NEVER HAPPENS and actually accept that it is happening. Because this is happening. I'm not being hyperbolic. What is happening in the West is legitimately happening, and it's terrifying. Nations do and will fail, the structures of this particular society and also the literal structures of this particular planet are changing, and that's largely the fault of the humans, yes, but also it's where we live, how we live, and we are going to be caught up in its chaos no matter fucking what.
And so there is something that feels entirely appropriate about accepting the chaos of the unknown at a time of chaos. Like, maybe it's actually harder to try and hold on to security, to schedules and systems and institutions, which is what 99% of america seems to be doing right now in our trifecta moment of climate chaos/pandemic/racist fascism. We have already memorized the part of the play where we learn what we did wrong. Zoom zoom.
If instead of getting up every day and enacting a theater of what I think the world should still be like, because I happened to grow up and live during this tiny part of human existence where some humans (and only certain humans!) felt a sense of stability, felt like we could build walls and roofs and structures that would keep out the chaos of the planet beneath us, that would render us exceptional among critters, felt that even, ha, we could control what happens to us—if instead, I just admit that I too am a little chaos critter, what would happen?
The day that it was chilly, the fog soaked the ash into the wood of our deck. I woke up in grey that was moist and for a moment felt as though autumn still existed. Having recently been in the Sierras. I thought about marmots, and how they just cuddle all winter. I mean, I assume they cuddle. In the warm months they have one job and that is to get fat and ready, and so they work hard and they eat as much as possible, and then when it becomes violent outside, when the chaos of winter in mountains envelopes them, they stay in their little shelters and just give themselves over to their powerlessness and, I think—I like to think—they cuddle.
All I'm saying is that we are chaos critters, we humans, we all are. Always have been. Maybe we can remember, re-learn how to be so again?
xox
m.
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