self possession
One of the immensely valuable things I’ve learned from reading Indigenous writers and history (shout-out to Anita Heiss, Evelyn Araluen, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terese Marie Mailhot, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Bruce Pascoe, David Treuer, Stephen Graham Jones, N. Scott Momaday and many more) is that looking at the United States and the Commonwealth of Australia and seeing colonial regimes that are fundamentally illegitimate is a real and viable option available to you at any time. Instead of doomscrolling, just think: Turtle Island. My shoulders immediately relax and I can breathe more easily. This land has seen empires rise and fall. This, too, shall pass.
This world is a network, not a hierarchy. You can tell by the immense amount of work and energy that pours into maintaining hierarchies. The empire really really wants to monopolize your attention because the second you notice it’s a party trick, it loses its power. Bullies hate knowing they peaked in high school. Billionaires are shit-scared of death, which is even a little bit poignant. The empire is a house which like all houses is only a temporary shelter against the rain. Water will find its way in.
Two obvious objections present themselves. First, isn’t this nihilism? I think it’s actually a bit closer to existentialism. And I’m not advocating for giving up on life and lying in bed being depressed, because I’ve tried that and it’s boring. Anyway the whole premise of this objection is, if not maintaining the empire then what? Which is more totalizing empire thinking, because it turns out there’s lots of things that are not the empire and a lot of them are really great.
For example: Charlie and I got to visit the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center. It’s amazing, a museum in a circular building that emphasizes the cyclical nature of indigenous time by, among other things, grouping artefacts by meaning and not chronology. This curatorial choice underscores the tenacity and continuity of a culture that succeeded in beating back the Spanish invasion and that endures to this day. Plus they have fry bread tacos in the cafeteria.
If not empire then how about ceremony? The rituals of maintenance, attending to the cycle of the years, tending to the land. Gardening, emptying the dishwasher, going to church. Or how about art? Making things or singing or moving your body around outside the relentless coercion marketplace. Forming relationships with particular wild or domestic animals. Being, just for the pleasure of it.
The second objection is that if you don’t consider imperial law legitimate, the empire’s goons can come and snatch you off the streets or shoot you in the face, which: yes. They do that. (Or the flip side of this argument, which is that as an immensely privileged white lady, I can afford to say that the empire is bullshit. Also true.) But while I was in Albuquerque I finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Holocaust memoirs by their nature are drenched in survivor guilt, and the glib reading of this is that the good ones died and that a person had to do bad things to live. But Frankl digs deeper. To him even death in the camps could be a victory to the people who held onto their sense of self. When he talked about this sense of self I recognized it in myself as the person who thinks that we as Westerners should honour treaties with indigenous people or shut the fuck up. The person who can immediately disregard any argument that comes from a terf. The person who likes books and horses and Jeremy, and who is me.
A self is an amazing thing to have. A serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world, and so on. As I get older I spend more and more time enjoying consciousness for its own sake. All the middle aged cliches: learning the names of my backyard birds, closing my eyes the better to hear the music, drawing not to show other people what I’ve drawn but to find out what I am looking at, and whether my hand can cooperate with my eyes. When I was young and skinny it took me a long time to learn to float, but now that I’m old and buoyant I can simply lean back into the water and let the earth hold me in her cupped hands. That’s how it feels to me to have my self.
Trans people have taught me what suffering taught Viktor Frankl: that there’s a whole universe inside me that the empire can’t take away unless I yield it. The things I know to be true about myself: my treasure. My secret heart is both the only thing I have and, in the end, the only thing worth having. Find out what matters to you in this life and marvel at it. The stars over Wilbur Hot Springs, so thick and bright they were like rain. A lush-furred coyote outside Bandelier that turned to look at me with its dark golden eyes. The thirty years I’ve spent in cahoots with Jeremy: our witty and clever large adult children. What are the chances? All of it is astonishing. Worth it, despite despite despite.
