An Emerging Cosmos
I read books is small clusters. Sometimes I pretend I’m reading and naming new constellations, new myths to live and die by. After all, isn’t that what humans have always done? The year 2024 brought with it brutalities and calamities we haven’t the language for—privately and globally. I’ve noticed lately that we are in dire need of letting go of some stories, so that others might rise, like ocean waves remaking continents, like rivers cutting through canyons. Forgive me for thinking this way. It helps. Stories shapeshift and let loose from the moorings of time. Among the many books I read, two new constellations got born in my body:
The Constellation Earthsea, after Ursula K. Le Guin
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, by Marcia Bjornerud sits atop a collection of rocks I have gathered where the Salmon River estuary meets the Pacific ocean. I collect rocks as a survival strategy. Like some people who also take comfort in small collections they need near their bodies, I curate rock collections all around me in my writing room—so as not to overpopulate the house. I talk to the rocks. I ask them questions about life, earth, death, love. From Marcia Bjornerud’s book I feel a geo-eros forming around my know-nothingness. I don’t need to know more. I need to finish learning how to feel my way through existence as a tiny sediment of existence.
Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water put a tragedy and a fairytale in my lap. Some of my blood tracks back to Baltic, so this idea made sense to me. In his storytelling, history becomes intimate and epic at the same time. The story of the ocean rising, for example, is woven through with the need for grandmothers to keep telling stories to their grandchildren. With the lines on an elder’s hands mapping out a different kind of history of humans on the planet. Memory curls around ecology. I kept thinking, this is a way not only to tell the story of climate change, but to hear it. Heart first.
Ice, Meghann Riepenhoff’s book of cyanotype prints of frozen landscapes, made from and in the waters of creeks, oceans, ponds, and rivers display ice forming on photographic paper, moves an image at a time. Frozen water reminds me that shapeshifting is always possible. An essay by a dear friend—Rebecca Solnit—is woven through the epic stills, as if language might inhabit our reading and viewing differently. As background. As periphery. As trace. As crystalline structure.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong carries the trace of human alongside the stories of what we can learn from animal sensory perceptions. The word I was left with was “wonder.” How puny humans can be when they purposefully forget that they are but one species among multitudes. To begin to listen to the story of non-human existence may be our greatest challenge and our best chance at survival—an ethos of co-existence that puts the planet first, and gathers the inhabitants by mutually respected habitats.
The Constellation Whale Heart
Shockingly, I cheated. I received an advanced copy of Omar El Akkad’s brilliant book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. I will read anything Omar El Akkad ever writes. This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon—from the beginning—blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide—a love born between the very peoples we have always colonized and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s 2022 book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals speaks in a language I understand. I am a child of waters. But then we all are, before the breach. Her queering of the story of both humans and marine mammals is nothing less than teaching us all how to breathe into the everything that is coming, differently.
Camille Dungy’s beautiful book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden almost read like a spell to me, if by “spell” we could mean sacred secular prayer or poem for cultivating a deep possible relationship to the ground under all our feet, diasporic feet, rooted feet, displaced feet, feet of the dead and the living and the very dirt we touch and till with our hands.
I have come to re-read Janice Lee’s novel Imagine a Death once a year, every year, since its publication. I re-read her book because hope. I re-read her book because love. I re-read her book because death, because life, because animals and objects around us every moment of existence, helping us to carry pain, time, desire, helping us to carry our humanity—brief flash. There is no end in death but beginning.
Donika Kelly’s book of poems The Renunciations may have changed the course of my life. More precisely: her poems carry the possibility of laying down the stories we have carried too long so that we may reach for life alongside others. More precisely than that: to be saved has a hundred different meanings, none of which originate from the sanctioned stories we have inherited—to be saved is to build something. A raft. A house. A de-remembered and re-made memory of being come loose from the generations of trauma that threaten to devour us.
Lastly, Joy Harjo’s book of poems Weaving Sundown in Scarlet Light, a collection of 50 poems from across 50 years of her work, made me sit down and stare at trees for several hours. I’ve read everything Joy Harjo has ever written (this is true for most authors who become beloved to me. I just re-read them into forever). Choosing 50 poems from one’s lifework reminds me that writers exist on a temporal plane, in physical form, until we do not, and all we leave are words. May some of the words become song as we transform into stardust.
These are examples of new constellations that get born in my body as I read. This is what reading means to me. May the old maps burn and create compost for beginning again, as many against as it takes, not for me, but for those—human and nonhuman—who will survive us.
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