—after Janine de Novais, Martha Crawford, Nina Hatfield, Gogo Khayela, Catherine May, Elena Solano | Return to the Root, Session 1: Turning the Soil, 2.24.2024

It is winter 2024.

So often the weather clashes with the seasons we were taught in school—the climate is more dangerous than our maps & calendars suggest, even when cloaked in sunny mildness or pleasantry. Overlapping infectious pandemics excuse one another with their commonness—the establishment recognizes the folly of mitigating viral proliferation, while erasing the magic tempered within every fool. Fascism is not emerging, but normalized—on national holidays, self-proclaimed leftists civilly share tables with bigots & zionists, despite or because of their relation through blood. Innumerable thousands of wondrous kids are routinely & impersonally dismembered by an AI missile targeting system nicknamed “The Gospel”—the little ones’ punishment for their aliveness in proximity to oil & water.

The exposed truth of momentous, accelerating colonial death is colliding with the marketed lie of plastic, everlasting capitalist life. Denial is getting harder & harder to justify within reason. So many abandon feeling altogether, cowering behind suicidal pragmatism. Still, others struggle to dis-invest from hierarchy, individualism, whiteness, neuroconformity, ableism, patriarchy, racism, capital, & stasis. The fearful, desirous rebels who shirk civility to resist their nuclear familial rulers risk exile in the aftermath of every revolutionary attempt.

We are not crazy—we are mad, with purpose. Our rageful, regenerative attention is attuned to the rupturing of worldly coherence. We obsess over the loving possibility radiating through fissures in the known.

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In a fragmented memory from 2018, when I was a graduate student, my teacher, the poet Natalie Diaz, leans on a table at the back of our classroom & curls both her hands. One hand she turns over top of the other. The cloaking top hand she names context; the cupping bottom hand she names conditions. The course is called [Ante] Workshop: Theories of Risk & Critique. We study John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Thinking Hand—& so much more. Through artful expression, we study relationship.

In the present, my class notes are misplaced in a box beneath the bed atop which I write & sleep & dream. This bed does not belong to me.

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Conditions I have come to conceive of as inescapable underlying truths, life’s divine & terrible core, immutable spiritual connection, a timeless omnipresent underworld—birth & death are conditions; earth, air, water, & fire are conditions; grief & desire are conditions; thresholds are conditions. Context, meanwhile, I hold as timebound constructions that ornament & conceal conditions, institutional interpretations of the raw roots of being, overcultural filters ascribed to reality—maternity wards & embalmment are context; microplastics are context; the top 40 chart is context; borders are context.

Said another way, conditions are systemic & ontological; context is structural, epistemological.

Or: Systems are the undeniable, conditional underworld, the fluid environment itself; structures are the fallible, contextual overculture, the tools composed from & imposed on the environment.

Through this lexical lens, misnomers abound. The capitalist economic “system,” for example, is contradictory to sustaining any robust, biodiverse ecosystem. Likewise, the depravity of every criminal justice “system” contradicts the biological miracle of each respiratory system. These state apparatuses are linguistically airbrushed to appear natural.

But not all structures are extractive & dominating—not every fleeting sketch of order constricts the unbounded canvas of cosmic harmony. Where a tree is a system, a bird's nest is a structure. Where a forest is a system, a deer path is a structure. Where weather is a system, a forecast is a structure. Where the body is a system, the self is a structure.

How many ways might I reiterate myself before risking the vast wilds of a question?

Return to the root!

Here, I wonder: How might we synthesize our structures with systems—context with conditions, overculture with underworld—in the spirit of sustained mutuality? How might we ground ourselves in the unknowable, liminal, permeable space where curled hands meet in remembrance?