soaked

one of the main ideas of my entire writing practice is that we are all profoundly and inescapably porous, penetrable, open—the big we, every thing that is. the sea the air the stone the virus the bird the slug the body the mouth the nose. all of them open windows that cannot be closed. this is true of the tiniest building blocks of material physical reality to the most abstract complex ideologies and politics and every thing in between. no thing is just one thing.


at least since the so-called enlightenment western philosophy has tended to think of people, things, and minds as sealed-off little spaceships that nothing can get in or out of. one of the fundamental blocks of a large chunk of western philosophy is descartes’ very boring and paranoid “i think therefore i am.” descartes imagines an “evil demon” that can somehow deceive a conscious thinking person about the entire world, we could be tricked into thinking we see a sunset or hear a loved one speaking. the contents of what we perceive could be totally false. but, he argues, there is something under this, the fact that there is someone to be deceived, there is a thinking “i”. descartes concludes that the only thing that he can be one hundred percent sure of existing is that thinking i. this privilege doesnt even extend to others, they could be deceptions as well. the only thing a person can be sure of is that some part of them thinks and that the thinking part exists. very nifty, rené.

here is our little spaceship, the uncrackable nut, that the self exists independent of what it can perceive. hundreds of years later, we are still stewing in this idea, most of us in the west are raised with this base assumption that we are separate from the world around us, that the world stays out. the impenetrable self is the reason we are shocked to discover the “microbiome”—that we are full of germs that arent “us”. we are shocked to discover that there are remnants of dna from ancient viruses hanging around in our own genetic code. we are shocked to discover we are full of microplastics. i’d even say its the reason straight men are so anxious about getting fucked in the ass.

we have this assumption that things stay put, that a rock stays being a rock, that there is a difference between a fox and a bacteria and they stay out of one anothers business. this even goes back to the pesky greeks and their ideal forms, that there is some deeply true rock-ness or fox-ness that cannot be separated from the thing itself. it is clear, even in a physical material sense, that every thing is totally soaked in other things. bodies absorb toxins, water absorbs gasses, bacteria can be infected by viruses.

i need a metaphysics founded on the truth that shit gets everywhere all the time no matter what you do. no matter how hard you try, the living room is still going to get dusty. i need this metaphysics to expand to a physics, a psychology, an economics, a politics. we are constantly in contact with things, ideas, people around us, and there is no way to be in contact with something without being changed by it.

let’s touch that down for a second by talking about smell. our general intuition is that when we smell something, we are a discrete person smelling an abstract odor. put differently, no one thinks of smelling a cup of coffee as being in contact with or changed by the coffee. but smell relies on physical bits of chemicals getting into our nose and sticking to certain cells that “tell us” that we’re smelling. you cant smell something without touching and being touched by it. a very morbid example is diethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. it has a sweet smell. if you are smelling it, however, you have already let enough into your body to risk irreversible harm to your brain. to smell is to be touched, to be at risk, to be penetrated. likewise, there are lasers strong enough that by the time you see the light from one, you’ve damaged your eyes. touching acid is enough to get burned. there is no way out, to exist is to be touched, to be open to the world.

for me, this is *the* truth about why and how the world exists. there is not one pure thing, any where. there is not a single thing that can escape from being touched, from being full of some thing else. i hope i haven’t been too abstract or too concrete, this stuff sometimes makes me feel like a lunatic waving my arms and shouting about how i have it all figured out and that people need to know the truth about how things are, showing off my corkboard and my red string and pushpins. but i feel a deep need to honor the tangle, the mess, to honor that i am drenched in the world around me. and to still fix my heart on grace, on love, on goodness for all the things in this world.

the opposite of the mess is the order, and it is impossible to enforce order without harm. this is where i can draw out a political outlook. we can even start at the physical. if we demand that things must be pure, that they must be one thing apiece, we do harm. if we demand to be human only, and not have bodies full of germs, we would totally wreck our digestive tract and our immune systems. instead of impure coexisting, we’d be shitting our pants and constantly ill. if we insist that things stay separate, we insist that people stay where they belong, we build borders to keep them there and shoot bomb and imprison anyone who tries to cross them. where exactly things “belong” is totally dependant on social context, but its why people starve while others buy yachts—wealth needs to stay where it belongs, where it is earned. contrast this with an economics of mutual aid, in the historical anarchist sense. instead of upholding order and purity, an economy is decentralized, messy, based on voluntary association and distribution of resources to meet needs. wealth is not pure, it doesn’t belong to anyone. instead it gets everywhere, it goes where it does the most good.

maybe i’m in the weeds a little. i feel very passionately about this, in my poetry i feel like i write these ideas again and again. i planned to write this essay about oceans, actually. but hey, shit gets everywhere and i can’t write about one thing without writing about everything. (oceans are next on the agenda, though). i know i’ll keep coming back to these ideas, so i’ll leave off today by saying honor the bacteria in your gut, honor the smell of rain in your nose, honor the families and freedom fighters who bravely resist and cross any border that is imposed upon them, honor the tangle and the dirt and the holiness that comes with it, and honor every living thing that lives with you. bless this mess baby!

until every living being is free

h.v.a.