Environmental Theory

I.

My fellow Americans: We are no strangers to war.

Your patience grows thin. Drugs, Terror, Afghanistan. Progress seems impossible. What happened to wars we could win?

I tell you, we do not know whom we fight.

I tell you truly, we do not know our enemy. We do not see what stands before us, chopping away at our territories, taking the lives of our children. We do not see the force that has plotted against us from the beginning of time. I say to you, we are fighting the wrong war.

II.

I wish to propose, very simply, war against that which causes most harm. From this day forth, I declare war against that which we already know to fear.

First: the Gulf of Mexico. My fellow Americans, I tell you that these wild waters are the enemy. Ignore their insidious propaganda campaign; the media were too easily won. Why would we protect that which is slowly stealing our land? Were Mexico encroaching on our territory so consistently, so brazenly, would we stand by and watch? And yet you say “Protect the Gulf.” I say to you that waters attack in stealth and secret, but they know what they do.

But water is only part of the problem. My fellow Americans, I say that the environment is the enemy. In our hearts we know to fear it. But we are America; we believe that something corrupted can be saved. And amen I say to you that yes, the corrupted shall be saved, but only once they are cleansed! Think of Germany. Think of Japan. Think of flags flying, think of governments falling; think of what has been built by America, in all places and at all times, as we create in our own image.

Now think of a nation that oppresses its own. Think of incoming implosions promising instability. Think of chemical imbalances and governmental imbalances; think of structures of power so convoluted that no one is ever in charge and no one is ever represented. Think of a failed state eating away at itself from the inside.

III.

I say to you: The Environment! She steals our land, She steals our lives, She threatens our energy security more than any dictator ever could, and yet we still pledge our allegiance! My fellow Americans, I will not stand by. I will not watch as She strips us of acres of land, encroaches on our coastlines, causes our crops to wither and our houses to burn. I will not stand by and watch.

I will stand with America, for America, and I ask you to stand beside me. Together we will root out the evil seed at the core of Her insidious will, Her hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanoes and earthquakes, Her variations on violence and devastation. Her bitter symphony shall be silenced, and together we shall create once again, in our own image. Join with me as we dethrone Her tyranny and gain a new ally. This is the war we were born to fight. She will not be resurrected till She is destroyed!

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A Demented Waltz with Dead Russian Officials

How you play is you can either choose a Russian official or a dead author. Everyone wants to be an official because it’s more exciting. Usually Ivan the Terrible gets picked first, and then Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin and all the more recent ones, and if you go down the row and people start running out of Russian officials they know about, or if they named one that didn’t exist, they can be either a boyar or a bureaucrat and they have to stand on the other side of the room. The kids who have been playing for the longest usually aren’t boyars because if you’ve been playing long enough you start collecting the names of Russians and listening to the ones other people pick, so there’s seniority.

There are usually fewer authors, but there’s always a Dostoevsky and a Tolstoy and sometimes a Gogol. You only need a few authors, anyway.

Now here’s how it works: everyone lines up, the officials on one side of the room, the boyars and bureaucrats on the other side. The authors stand in the middle. The game doesn’t begin until an author walks up to an official and denounces them, and then that official has to try to throw the author in Siberia, so they join hands and the weird part is they waltz, but they’re both pushing at each other, and the official is trying to push the author to the northern end of the room, which is Siberia, and the author is trying to push the official to the boyars and bureaucrats who are all standing with one hand against the wall and reaching, because if you’re a boyar and you touch an official then you get to throw the official in Siberia and then take his position on the other wall. Then maybe someone will come up and denounce you and you can waltz with them for a while. The goal is to get all the authors thrown in Siberia, which is why it’s not very fun to be an author.

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8:00 PM

At this moment I prefer nothing to wrapping my arms about her in the dark while her nightlight shines shadows on the ceiling between the ghosts of stick-on stars. There is something delicious about a Beethoven piano sonata punctuated by slow, small, sleepy breaths.

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On Pronouns

She cries nebulas, every sob is something enormous and hazy and vaguely spherical, that’s how I know things aren’t going to be okay, and also she starts apologizing a lot, like “I’m sorry, I’m okay, really,” like it’s all absolute bullshit and we both know it but she feels the need to say it anyway, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and I’m like “No really it’s okay” and then “Why are you apologizing” and then “Damn it I don’t actually care that you’re crying, like do you think this is going to ruin my day because really it isn’t, I mean it’s actually kind of nice when people cry sometimes instead of sighing vaguely and staring over your shoulder” and this is the part where she gets to the pronouns like “he, it, they,” I don’t know if it’s always the same problem or what, I don’t know if she’s hiding this one really enormous secret or maybe it’s always something so stupid she doesn’t want to admit it because she never gets past he, it, they, and when it’s all over she says she’s fine and dries her eyes and says “thanks for listening thanks for talking to me” and I say “no problem any time I’m not bothered at all no not even remotely bothered,” and I don’t know but nights like these I always end up sobbing into my pillow with some infuriatingly vague pronoun ringing in my head, bell-like, tragic, he, it, they. Every problem of hers I try to swallow, it always burns and bubbles on the way up. All of these pronouns are stuck in my throat.

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One night, in this very house, a child was born dead. A man stared out of his window while his wife screamed. That was the first time snow fell on this town.

A stillborn waterbaby lies between his mother’s legs; the midwife slices the umbilical cord with a washed knife. The mother screams. The bedsheets are red, but her blood can still be seen dark and glistening against saffron. The sheets are drenched. It was a bloody birth. The midwife hums a song from her childhood she remembers out of nowhere as she calmly rinses off the small corpse; the man stares out the window. The child is cleaned and deposited in a small wooden box. The mother’s screams slowly shift from pain to recognition of her loss.

There is another child in the house, aside from the one that lies breathless in a wooden box. This child came out of a womb breathing, and his mother did not scream nearly so loud, but the man at the window, he was screaming then, because his new son’s skin was dark the men who live on the water. The man at the window had come from the North; he and his brother had come to this land as buyers, searching for exotic books they could sell for a profit at home. It is rumored that he keeps, or kept, another wife in the North, some light-haired blue-eyed woman with a clear, cold gaze like her husband’s; his eyes are clear now as he stares at the box that holds his wife’s second failure.

Rich red-brown eyes twisted with pain, clouded with tears, she sobs and writhes with a hopeless fury, throwing herself against the sheets. The gaze of her husband holds the calm of a judge who has decided to remain impartial. She knows he is thinking of the men on the water. She knows he is thinking that he married something ruined. And they will continue this dance, she knows; year after year she will continue to have failed.

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We got lost in the labyrinth at three in the morning. Wandered in, looked around, tried to wander out but, guess what, there is no way out of the labyrinth at three in the morning. When you get to the center you can sleep; until then you just wander and wander and wander till your feet ache and your legs burn and you cramp up everywhere and want to double over but three in the morning labyrinths are powerful and invasive and they loop in and around you till you hardly know what’s you and what’s alien and your entire body feels like a wound or a mistake and you just want to lie down but your mind goes on and on and on and it’s three in the morning and your thoughts haven’t thought themselves out yet and all of the night stretched out before you, mile after mile after mile.

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After a while you learn to tell when colors are pretending. You’ll see them everywhere: violent streaks of amethyst, lustrous tongues of jade looking like radioactive angel vomit splattered against walls. Sapphire winding around itself like a mad scientist’s depiction of a double helix, writhing and thrashing and breaking apart like a many-headed hydra, strangled through its own dark and unpredictable fury but always somehow managing to rise phoenix-like from the abyss inside itself it barely manages to contain—you’ll know. You’ll see it leaking out of the intricate crystal structure it builds to imprison its passion. You’ll see, and it will revolt you, but you won’t be able to stop watching. And when you stop being disgusted you will want more.

I promise now to never say that this is a good idea, what you are going to do someday. But I know you are going to do it. So here’s how:

Follow the colors. They won’t lead you in any kind of straight line; they’re far too clever for that. If you try to follow them like you’d follow signs or arrows they’ll only lead you in circles. Yes, it’s far better for you in the long run, but you won’t believe that. You’ll be frustrated. You’ll grind your teeth and bite your lip and your nails will dig into your palms so far that they’ll bleed. You’ll want to go to the place where they live, so listen: You’ll only get there if you become insane. If you abandon every logical structure, every concept of beginning and end, so that every second feels like an eternity on your skin, so you hear texture and bleed vision and everything in your head becomes hopelessly abstract and self-referential. If you’re going to follow their convoluted and recursive pathways there is no other way.

Simply allow yourself to be fascinated and absorbed. Give yourself over to abandoning all unease and allowing yourself to be possessed. Let dark-bright tendrils lick at your wrists like a thousand kitten tongues, and remind yourself not to fight. Give yourself over as something soft seeps upwards into your mind, massaging your spine into contortions you never imagined possible.

Reader, I may not know who you are, but I know where you’ll go. Inwards, always inwards, into the place inside yourself that still remembers what it was like to be a tiny star-speck in seemingly infinite space. Into the colors of nausea and delirium. Every author writes for an intended audience, no? Well, here’s my secret: I left those winding trails you’ll follow when I dove into myself. I painted the walls, I scrawled on the trees, I secreted a glistening slime of knowledge, and now I am planting this seed in your mind. And you read on, you think with relief it is not me, and you will believe this until it is too late and I’ve woven round you the dark threads in which I too am entangled. You have already fallen in love with half-heard whispers and tenuous promises of something blindingly true and realer-than-real. You’ve found it on shelves and in sounds that make your spine shudder. I will never say this is a good idea, what you are about to do. But then you’ve already begun, haven’t you?

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