light leaning, late october:
martinesque
by manjula martin
It was a season of death in a year of death in a culture bent on ignoring death, within a national body politic that was consumed with the gobbling up of itself by a death cult called oil, capital, empire. The growing terrestrial darkness of late autumn was a time to honor and speak with the dead, to acknowledge the spiritual elements beyond human grasp. It was a time to dress in costumes befitting the myths of one’s particular culture and venture into darkness unafraid. In farms and gardens the harvest was over and it was time to turn under summer’s spent crops. Fields were left to dry out or were plowed into dirt. Piles of dead matter accrued between flower beds. The cycle continued.
For me, every moment was consumed with waiting. Max and I texted and talked most days, but I was lonely. I was waiting for him to return so I could sleep again. I felt like waiting was all I did: waiting for the next fire to spark, for rain to arrive, for my pain to break down the barriers of the corporeal and push me deeper into the wilds of myself.
Something about the season led to the sense that the reality I was experiencing was not the only layer of existence. I had often heard the term veil used to describe a feeling of thinness that was common at this time of year. The veil was like a gauze curtain, a porous border between lived experience and experiences beyond life. Ten years earlier when my grandmother had been dying of Alzheimer’s, my mom sent me videos from her bedside. My grandmother was not a particularly spiritual woman; she was a sophisticate and an art curator; she loved nice things. In the video she was in bed in her room at the residential care facility. She wasn’t looking at the camera or at my mom. Instead her gaze was fixed on a point both near and far, as though she were admiring a landscape that only she could see. She was talking in a manner that some might call speaking in tongues: her voice trembled and rose in a babbling singsong that sounded not random or diseased but like language, only it was a language I couldn’t understand. She’s visiting the other side, my mom said, she’s been going back and forth. The veil—that delicate boundary—was growing thinner. She died soon after.
I had found that people I knew who had experienced health crises tended to be more attuned to the subtext of mortality coursing through the living world. After being under general anesthesia for my first surgery, I said to a nurse, still high, that I had been to the other side. She laughed but didn’t disagree. In the experience of having my heart and brain functions slowed to the point of nonresponse, I had temporarily slipped through the veil, or at least been veil-adjacent. With each subsequent procedure, every time my consciousness was offline, I came back from the other side feeling a strong sense of disorientation that often took weeks to go away. Like a bad dream that lingered in body and mind, though my recollection was nebulous I knew it had happened.
In the western woods, as the light fell lower behind the trees, the veil became thinner. Other boundaries wavered too. There were rumors of alarming developments in the state of on-the-ground politics. Max reported back from Nevada that people were being mean to canvassers in ways he’d never seen. He’d been yelled at during house visits by residents who rifled off insults and right-wing talking points taken verbatim from TV programs. One volunteer had to be sent home when he started saying violent things about women and declared himself red-pilled. Out in the field, a white man in a suburb had pulled a gun on a volunteer, a Black woman, when she approached his house to discuss the election. There was talk among other friends who were canvassing in swing states: no matter who won, we should be prepared for some sort of mass violence on Election Day. And there were rumors that fascists might try to stage an insurrection, possibly occupying government buildings en masse. Whatever was going to happen on Election Day, it was obvious that the United States was marching toward discord.
At the same time, politics, culture, and economic structures were barreling onward, refusing to acknowledge, let alone mourn, the dead of Covid. This denial of grief had dovetailed with the ongoing denial of climate collapse, that suicidal capacity of Western humanism that seemed bent on doubling down, betting everything on exploitative economies rather than admit it wasn’t working. Health policy had become politics, politics had become religion, and nobody believed anything except what they already believed.
The above is from my book. It’s about autumn 2020; i wrote it in 2022/2023 but i could have written it yesterday. For the last couple weeks i have been home recovering after a surgery, having undertaking yet again that journey to a medicated Hades. My partner is again canvassing in Nevada, where even the failures of capital that are written all over every busted out window, every dinky condo, each delivery warehouse complex and brandished front-door weapon, cannot mask the way the river shapes the town and the desert hills around it.
I’m still recovering, my brain still shadowy and underworldly, and there is a lot happening. So i’ll do the newsletter stuff in sorta list-style:
“Must even our pleasure gardens be subject to the human fetish for more?” I wrote a piece for The New Yorker’s “Onward and Upward in the Garden” column, which is nbd, just literally a life goal. It’s about failure in the garden, via my apple trees, which bear no fruit, and honestly in this socioeconomic ecosystem i cannot blame them: The Rebellion of a Fruitless Apple Tree.
If you enjoy reading about gardens, you might also dig my recent review of Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, a book i enjoyed but also wanted more from.
Whilst recovering, i’m doing a lot of napping and watching and listening. No writing, and not much physical reading, because my head hurts a lot. (i’m fine, the procedure went as expected). I’m watching Six Feet Under again (see also death, above) and also the new Interview with a Vampire show (which is good so far?! and seems sufficiently gay, at long last!) and the shiksa show with Kirsten Bell and Seth Cohen and the Greek myth remix Kaos which I can’t help but be into because i was raised on this book.
I’m listening to Rachel Kushner’s and Miranda July’s new books, read by the authors, and one thing i’ve noticed since i started listening to audiobooks is that they’re … funnier. I guess humor moves through the ears differently than it does the eyes. Anyway, since i narrated my own audiobook i have a whole new respect for audiobooks and now i love them maybe?
A few weeks ago i drove through the State of Jefferson while listening to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which was perhaps not a good thing to do in terms of my own mental health but i recommend the book. i didn’t think it would tell me anything i didn’t already know, but it did. It’s really helping me frame what is happening in the world right now. The book came out in 2023, but for me it is one of the books of 2024.
Yesterday, someone i know told me that she gave my book to her father, who is 85 years old and experiencing dementia. He read it and really liked it. Then, a few months later, he read it again, having forgotten that he’d read it before, and asked her, “have you read this book, The Last Fire Season? It’s so good!” He liked it, she said, even more this time. That’s damn better than any “best books of 2024” list, any day.
“Imagine the power to transmit a grief so massive across centuries in the line of a cloud, in the color of a night.” Always read Sarah McCarry.
I signed this letter. If you’re a writer, you can sign it too.
Next week i’m doing an event with two writers i respect very much, Lauren Markham and Rita Bullwinkel, at the most beautiful library in the world (and one of the only things i truly miss about San Francisco) the Mechanics Institute Library. Tickets cost $15 but if you use the code “mechanics” when registering, they cost $5, which seems very reasonable. Come talk with us about defiance and writing and fucking up the status quo of genre. It’ll be, as the kids say, fire, and i can also pretty much guarantee we will all be wearing awesome outfits.
After that i’ll be in conversation with Obi Kaufmann, author of the California Field Atlas series, for this Heyday Books series. It’s members only, i’m told, but maybe you are already a member or have been meaning to join, they publish good stuff!
And in mid-November i’ll be back in SF doing a Litquake Aftershocks craft talk: Climate Change and Activism Across Genres.
Then i’m going to Mexico for six weeks. More on that later, perhaps.
thx for reading, i hope our names are near each other on the blacklist,
- m.
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