Preface to preface

[A much-summarized version of the original of this essay was published in Clarín, a very well known newspaper in Argentina, and currently consists of my main claim to fame (for better or worse). The essay here presented is a sort of “Director´s Cut” of the Clarín article.

This is my most personal piece of writing published, representing me coming to terms with around 21 years of my life. I hope the ideas passed around here can be of use to people and help explain my ideas.]

Preface

I’m quite clumsy when I speak. Not only do I have a slight stutter (I’ve had problems with modulation and enunciation most of my life), but I also often struggle to realize when I should be speaking, or when I say the wrong thing, etc. It’s easier for me if I prepare.

I was diagnosed at a very young age, at 3 years old, because I hadn’t started talking yet. My diagnosis was “Pervasive Developmental Disorder,” which is a diagnosis that no longer exists and was used to group autism with a couple of other conditions.

I was left orphaned of a diagnosis, which shows that a psychiatric document cannot summarize a person’s life, and that psychological science is far less accurate than it would like to appear.

I’m quite clumsy when I speak, so as compensation I had to learn to write well1. I developed a verbose style to show off my intellectual gifts.

Since I don’t believe in the distinction between the personal and the political, in this text, alongside my personal arguments, I will share my personal experience with autism and otherness. I don’t intend to represent all autistic people, people with disabilities, or anyone else; I simply want to offer a small glimpse into what it’s like to live with the autistic position.

Intro

This text assumes the reader has at least a basic understanding of the medical facts about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Autism is not an illness, cannot be “caught” or caused, and can take a variety of forms.2 It is primarily characterized by communication difficulties and repetitive behaviors. Studying the neurobiological functioning of autism is complex, as it depends on how the brain interacts with the outside world, which is very difficult to analyze. Rather than a single experience of autism, a single autistic position, there is a plurality of autisms (I will return to this later).

Autism is a completely natural variation in human beings. Yes, it constitutes a disability, but there are two points to consider:

1. Just because autism is a disability doesn’t make it inherently negative or unnatural. Much of what arises in nature can be negative in certain contexts. For example, people with white skin have less resistance to sunlight than those with dark skin. Would we say that having white skin is a flaw?

2. To a large extent, autism is a disability due to our social context. The social model of disability3 is essentially correct when it comes to autism. This is not to diminish the real problems an autistic individual has due to their symptoms, but to emphasize that the social context of autism is due to the unfavorable biological situation being framed within a social situation of oppression. This is an oppressive situation because this alienation is socially amplified.

In short, we could describe autism (the autistic condition itself) as an information processing disorder. Hence the more stereotypical symptoms (sensitivity to certain sensory stimuli, etc.) but also the most difficult to understand: the difficulty with social interactions.

Let me explain it this way to the non-autistic reader: Imagine that all of culture is a massive play. Most people receive some kind of script, tailored to their specific role, but which may contain errors or gaps. However, all these scripts are based on a single, overarching script, of which a certain level of familiarity is generally expected.

Autistic people do not receive a script.

Now, it’s important to emphasize that everyone occasionally experiences setbacks in their relationships with others. If this weren’t the case, 80% of neurotypical people wouldn’t suffer because of love. It’s just that those without autism can experience these issues more spontaneously and are socialized to better adapt. Autistic individuals are forced to try to rationalize the most irrational phenomenon of existence: human relationships.

Having explained that, what mainly matters to me is autism as a political identity.

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex,4 trying to put her personal experience into context with the situation of oppression of women, she reflected on the identity of women as follows:

“She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”

And Madame de Beauvoir elaborates:

“It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women. [...] The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an original Mitsein, and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: cleavage of society by sex is not possible. This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other.”

If women suffer due to a biological condition, autistic individuals suffer doubly5, depending on how disabling a particular autistic experience is. Several factors come into play in the interaction between two or more autistic individuals: their ability to mask their symptoms, their experiences with autism, and the categories they belong to beyond autism. In any case, we cannot say that there is a single “unity” among autistic people. Even Uta Firth, one of the pioneering researchers in the contemporary study of autism, who doubts the existence of a “spectrum,” acknowledges the great variability within autism.6

Regarding the concept of autism as a whole, one might consider Asperger’s, the subtype of autism that once had its own diagnosis. This became entrenched in the popular imagination as the type of autism that produced antisocial geniuses and the likes of Sheldon Cooper. The fact that this is no longer a recognized diagnosis and that Hans Asperger was a “questionable” individual (if not a Nazi sympathizer) is irrelevant. The point is that I don’t believe it’s productive for the debate about autism to divide it in a Manichean way into “good” autism and “bad” autism. And this expectation of an “autistic genius with Asperger’s” serves to erase the large number of autistic individuals who have low or moderate support needs but are not “geniuses.”

Beauvoir refuses to accept that oppression is a biological destiny for women, and we can too. If humanity were truly governed by Nature, we would still be living in caves today.

Autism is becoming increasingly recognized, and this leads us to consider the social context of autism. If we want to change the social standing of autistic people, we must be able to accurately identify their social context.

Personal interlude I

For many years I have found it difficult to talk about autism in depth.

First, being diagnosed autistic in 2007 in a godforsaken city in the Republic of Argentina was like being diagnosed as a Martian, so I have always been out of place.

Second, I always rejected the idea of ​​having to define myself by things that were imposed on me instead of defining myself by my own choices.

When I was younger, I hated the idea of ​​being considered “abnormal.” I took a narcissistic pride in my intellectual abilities. But oppressors have always treated reason as their monopoly, and this has been used for some of humanity’s worst atrocities (the Holocaust, slavery, etc.), in the name of bringing reason to the reasonless, of “bringing civilization to barbarism.”

Seeing that autism continues to be a part of how I am perceived, given that autism is part of a deeper social problem, I wish to be able to analyze it. Furthermore, I wish to present the autistic individual as a viable political actor, to give autism the gift of theory.

To combat the fear of autism, we must be able to discuss it freely, abandoning the conditioning that makes autism something humiliating. “Shame must change sides.”

Social context of autism

Our culture is built around a dualism, the contradiction between the Subject and the Object. When a human being embodies the Object, in this essay they will be called “the Other.”7

What interests me is a Foucauldian concept of the Subject, where it is relational and defined by the power it wields within a modern capitalist society. This Subject is formed through a vast network of institutions that need to control the population and knowledge, classifying them into binaries (this is how the power of psychiatry over mental illness, medicine over bodies, etc., is maintained).8

The Subject is the protagonist of reality, the model with which the individual must identify. The Other is something strange and unknown, but the Subject can only exist insofar as this Other exists. The Subject needs the Other to constitute itself, and, moreover, it needs to be able to dominate this Other.

The existence of the Subject is proven by its capacity to think and to form society through thought; therefore, the Other is irrationality, the lack of thought, Nature.

From each individual’s perspective, everyone is a Subject. But not all Subjects are equal: certain categories of individuals receive greater subjectivity, one might say, they are more recognized as Subjects by society.

Certain categories of individuals embody the Other in particular: women, Black people, homosexuals, etc. This division begins with the division of labor and expands throughout history, crystallizing within the framework of a class society. That is to say, depending on one’s position in the social division of labor, one can more fully embody the position of Subject.

In truth, the Other-Subject is the internalization of the oppressors and the oppressed.9 The Other does not have the benefit of thinking about their own reality; they are a subaltern, their consciousness is that of a failed version of the main Subject: women think through the man (and spectator) they have introjected, proletarians vote like bourgeois, etc. These ingrained habitus10 cause people to act based on this pattern, mostly remaining within their categories.

In other words, the Subject-Other is the conceptualization of the two sides of a social relation. These social relations are governed by the commodity fetishism which subordinates every aspect of society to a fixation on things, to the objectification of the human being. And for this reason, the Other is assimilated to the Object.

In today’s world, it is not possible to literally possess another human being, but the flip side of this is that it is possible to possess a human being in all other aspects of life by conceptualizing them as mere commodities to be possessed, which is what allows the status of the Other.

This means that when the Subject relates to the Other, it is based on wanting to obtain something, to acquire possession. In their interactions, the Subject seeks to mold the Other into a commodity.

What does this have to do with autism?

The autistic individual is particularly compelled to assume the position of the Other, literally failing to interact socially in a normal way. The Species decrees that certain individuals cannot easily assimilate into the social fabric. There are two layers to autistic alienation: original alienation and social alienation.

Mexican author Berenice Vargas García refers to the cultural artifacting that serves to place autistic individuals in a position of being seen as “pseudo-human mentally ill” as the “autistic reason”.11 The author points out that we should be critical of stereotypes that autistic people are inherently unempathetic and isolated, noting that this construct is part of a certain conceptualization not only of the subject itself, but of the idea of ​​humanity.

But for the moment, autistic people cannot even form a group to create their own subject parallel to the hegemonic one of society: autistic people have no shared history, class, or culture. They barely share a common experience, since each person sees autism differently. It would be impossible to create an Autistic Party.

Under these circumstances, How can autistic people free themselves, break free from the mold of the Other, without being able to constitute themselves as a group?

Personal interlude II

I am an incredibly privileged person: I was born into the comfortable petit bourgeoisie, I have little need for support regarding autism, and I do not have an intellectual disability.

However, autism affects me in these ways: My mannerisms seem strange to others, I don’t empathize spontaneously, I have trouble identifying my own emotions, I have trouble remembering faces, I am extremely obsessive as a result of rigid thought patterns, I am very particular about a variety of things including my schedules, possibly more things that I find difficult to identify because for me this is normal life.

Even so, I see my mission as helping because of my privilege, which I initially tried to do through NGO activism supported by my father (which I later criticize), later as a party militant (which had its ups and downs).

Why do I try to help if I’m so privileged? Maybe I am an ethical egoist and I believe the most beneficial thing for me in the long term is improving the social context.

Even from this privileged position, I have had the opportunity to experience firsthand the ways in which the Subject usually relates to the Other, which I would summarize in the following modalities:

1. Open contempt and hatred, doing everything possible to destroy the Other. The Subject is offended that the Other dares to exist in his world, and they show it.

The first time I was called “mentally ill” I was under 10 years old. I’ve been lucky enough not to experience this often.

2. Opportunistic contempt: Sacrificing the Other to gain a better position in relation to the rest of the community. Discrimination plays a significant role in uniting the privileged, emphasizing that they are not like those others.

The only time I was actively discriminated against in my adult life (passive discrimination is another matter entirely) was when a classmate told one of our professors a passionate and fabricated story about “my problems” and how she was helping me. All to make herself look good.

3. The contempt of ignorance: In certain contexts, this can be the cruelest of all, as it consists of denying the existence of the Other. The Other is seen as uncomfortable in the social environment, so they are ignored; their attempts to communicate and attract attention are met with silence. Thus, even if oppressed individuals try to change their situation, they may gain nothing.

And what emotion do these experiences inspire in one?

It inspires a deep rage and anger, total and absolute rage, against the oppressors, against oneself, against the world. But this rage, used correctly, can be a driving force for changing reality.

Share

And how can the oppressed free themselves?

When a sufficient number of those who have been molded into the Other decide to free themselves, by constituting themselves as coherent actors (archetypally under the leadership of a party) and thus reversing the Subject-Other relationship, it can generally be said that there are two options for what can happen:

1. The new group defeats the old one, reversing the dynamic or creating a new group that takes the place of the Other. This can be relatively progressive historically, as in the case of the defeat of the feudal lords by the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution, but it does not eliminate the basis of the original situation.

   This can be seen in the situation of the Jews after the establishment of the State of Israel: Holocaust survivors became the colonial masters of the new pariahs, the Palestinians. The Jew’s position of otherness was not abolished, it was merely filled by another group.

2. The new group destroys the basis of distinction, and the distinction between Subject and Other is abolished. In this case, individuals can now relate to each other on the basis of being persons.

For autistic individuals, liberation of the first kind is impossible, as there is no foundation for a coherent group structure. Individuals may achieve liberation in this way, but only among the most privileged members of the autistic category, and even then, it would truly be by becoming part of the already existing hegemony of the Subject.

To see a form of autism domesticated by the hegemony of the Subject, we can look at common representations of autism in popular culture, such as Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory or Shaun Murphy from The Good Doctor. The stereotypical autistic character in mass culture is a traditionally privileged man of genius, but with zero social skills. This is because the Subject’s narcissism is so profound that even when he displays an instance of the Other, it must be in a form vaguely similar to the Subject and that is useful or satisfying to him.12

Beyond the cultural sphere, the inability of autistic individuals to self-constitute led to the preponderance of activism groups focused on autism issues, made up entirely of parents of autistic people, such as that of my father, German Augusto Guglieri, who founded the group “TEA Red Interior.”13

At best, these activists are naive and ineffective, but well-intentioned (like my progenitor), and at worst they are the work of people resentful because their relatives are not the merchandise they wanted, perpetuating even more objectification.

The problem with these groups is that they are forms of middle-class activism. They cannot challenge the deeper dynamics, they cannot link the autistic struggle with others, and therefore they are limited to media stunts and legislative reforms that sometimes do more harm than good. They are uncoordinated actions by small property owners.

Occasionally, a specific autistic individual emerges from these circles, as was the case with Greta Thunberg or even the author of this essay, but this does not necessarily indicate any organization within the broader autistic community. In other words, these individuals cannot be agents of social change because they lack an organic connection to a wider community.

These forms of activism do not constitute true politicization because they fail to connect autism to broader social change and to other groups within society. Any change achieved is minor or superficial.

In truth, the solution to the problems of autism is politicizing the autistic struggle, politicization in the Frantz Fanon sense:14

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

Personal interlude III

I spent many years living an alienated life, unable to connect with my peers. They didn’t understand me, and therefore avoided contact with me. But I don’t hold a grudge against them, because “it’s hard to hate someone if you know they’re going to die someday.” We were all acting in accordance with deeper habitus.

But I wasn’t a complete saint either. A wall of narcissism prevented me from connecting with the others; in my opinion, they were barely human beings, given how little we had in common. Being a pariah can be an extremely narcissistic experience: those who primarily understand objectification will see others in the same way.

The tragedy of objectification is that when a person is valued only for one aspect of their being, there is only one difference between that and not valuing them at all: That single aspect is the difference between being an object and being nothing at all.

Conclusion: A place in social-political life for autism

In reality, the existence of the Subject and the Other is merely illusory.

It is true that the oppressed subaltern thinks with the oppressor within, but it is also true that the oppressor depends on whom he oppresses; he carries his greatest enemy within. The white man fears the black man within.15 Man despises the woman within himself. The oppressed are the negative space surrounding the oppressor, and if the oppressor were to get too close to that space, he risks dissipating.

The petty bourgeois and bourgeois seek at all costs to avoid close contact with the poor, with the proletariat. The status of the oppressor is, at least unconsciously, constantly threatened. It is the master-slave dialectic. Therefore, the Subject and the Other are truly two sides of the same coin.

Besides, what oppressor isn’t also a victim in some specific life context? The middle-class woman is herself oppressed by her husband, who is in turn oppressed by his boss. We are all half victims, half perpetrators.

Let’s apply this to autism: Autism, like all mental diagnoses, does not possess the same epistemological status as physical illnesses or viruses. We cannot “grab” autism and display it. In other words, autism is primarily a series of symptoms, a description of data and behaviors.

One of the great discoveries of psychoanalysis is that “mental illness” is a matter of degree. There are no “entirely healthy” people, because we all carry out a certain level of repression; rather, there are people who suffer repression to varying degrees.

Being neurotypical is not a fixed state either; there is no such thing as a “normal brain.”16 The psychological and biological functioning of human beings is far too complex to be confined to a single mold. The neurotypical being is an ideal, an illusion around which culture is built. And the same is true of every oppressive category.

Autism only became a category in contemporary times because previously there was no social context where the list of symptoms that constitute autism needed to be labeled as such; there was no need to create autism17 (because if a category is imposed instead of decided by a group that constitutes itself as such, it is invented in the most direct sense of the word).

I’m not saying that before the contemporary era the world was wonderful for those who would be diagnosed with autism today; what I mean is that in a social context with stronger community ties (as opposed to our current atomized lives), a single person shouldn’t depend so much on their own abilities (social or otherwise), that a simpler and more isolated world would be less stimulating, that a cognitive disability might not be so noticeable in an area where there is a generalized almost nonexistent cultural level, etc.

Yes, objectively there is a series of symptoms that constitute autism, but the category of “autism” itself, like all concepts in the social sciences, consists of the combination of a fact with a certain level of ideology.

And how can autistic individuals respond to the current social context, where they are autistic? The default option is to live an alienated, lonely, passive life.

But an alienated life is not a life: It is death.

The other option is to seek assimilation and belonging at all costs, with varying degrees of success. As I mentioned before, isolated individuals may assimilate, but others try desperately and fail, or end up in even worse situations of alienation. They subscribe to extremist ideologies, join cults, or enter into abusive relationships. Sadly, they remain objects.

As I wrote before, just like all the other groups that have tried to break free, the autistic person can liberate themself by becoming a political actor. This means making a deep commitment to the world (which is what politics means: living in society and seeking to change the world), uniting with the deepest layers of otherness. As I have tried to demonstrate throughout this text, we cannot separate the situation of autistic people from the way society is constituted and all the other groups that comprise it.

First of all, if there are individuals who cannot assimilate to society, those people are cultural heroes. To assimilate to an oppressive and decadent society is, to an extent, to accept such oppression and decadence. This “inadaptation” must be cultivated and refined for social change.

But how specifically can autistic people do this, given their inability to form a group? By becoming avatars of the Other.

Since autistic individuals cannot form their own isolated group, they must be part of and join in the struggles of others. Lacking the same instinctive sense of belonging, autistic individuals may be ideally suited to question the established order, to ask the questions that others don’t dare to ask.

What I mean is that autistic people should take on a role in society similar to that of critical philosophers, remembering that the Subject-Other division is illusory and false. Their original alienation can be a blessing.

This role can be of great help in our political organizations, social movements, parties, unions, etc. If they interpret their role well, they can help combat the sectarianism, factionalism, and bureaucratization that arise when a political organization becomes the driving force behind the ideas of individual leaders (that is, when the Subject-Other division is recreated within them). Autistic people have a position to take in socio-political life.

If these organizations are flexible enough and well-run, if they truly represent broad layers of reality rather than isolated sects, they will be able to accept an autistic member and give them the tools to develop and participate in the struggle.

Ultimately, why couldn’t an autistic person participate in political organization? José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party, couldn’t walk (and died from complications related to his disability). Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, was a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.

Of course, this role as representatives of the Other cannot be (and shouldn’t be) solely carried out by autistic individuals; if we want to reject the dualistic distinction, we cannot fall into essentialism. But autistic people can use their alienation as a key to this role.

I might be asked what role autistic people who truly suffer from the condition more than I do, to the point where it is genuinely difficult or impossible for them to fully participate in society, can play. It’s a good question, to which I only have a partial answer: Since this potential role of autistic people isn’t exclusive to them, others could indirectly represent them by taking on this role.

What we need is an eroticism of social change (in the sense that we need policies that can incorporate eros). We need individuals to be able to confront one another beyond the categories that society has imposed upon them. We need to erase the division between the individual and the community (since a community is simply the sum of many people), by reminding the individual that they are always part of a community: the community of people, since true freedom consists of relating to one another as people and not as things.

As I have tried to prove by showing that the autistic person’s position derives from deep structures in our society, total social change cannot occur without a transformation of all aspects of life. The situation of autism will only fundamentally change if we change the situation of everyone.

However, what we can do is plant the seeds that will one day grow into trees, even though we don’t know if we’ll ever see those trees grow. We can live less alienated lives, confront each other as fellow human beings instead of as the Other, and in that way, gradually build social change for the whole.

Subscribe now

Illustration via Dansk Jävlarna.

A significant part of my gender identity and presentation is the reclaimation of a simple media concept: fag = villain.

You see it all the time, and the concept is introduced very early on. If a man is evil, there’s often a mincing, prissy, delicate nature to him. He moves his hands a certain way, is careful of his clothes, has catty remarks, and may even have more obvious makeup than his heroic male counterparts (all actors wear makeup, and this may be implied in animated designs as well). Though Disney is famous for it, even Shrek – the film series that loved mocking it – falls into this trap as well. Three of Shrek's antagonists are men who are in some way either effeminate or emasculated, fussy with their clothes or hair even if they are physically formidable.

More mature media is just as guilty, and it gets away with more. Joel Cairo is not only prissy, he gets to outright mime fellatio. The crossdressers graduate from jokes to killers. Though the threat, couched in metaphor, implication, and off screen inferences doesn’t need to wait long.

This is, indeed, inescapable. Even such a man who is meant to be complex, leaning positive (he is never simply a hero), will be seen through suspicion. Said suspicion will, too, be tied to his actions, even if he is never untoward in them. What a creep he was in this scene, the audience gleefully remarks… as he does little more than flirt or mince. How horrible, comes the gasp, as hair and bodies are fussed over, pulled from the dreary muck of gender norms.

This weighs on me more heavily at some times than others. It is primarily, a coping mechanism for the internal fear that I am evil, predatory, and depraved. This is a deep-rooted fear, and I adore evil queens of all sorts, including the human ones.

It’s not a given that evil is human… There’s a German song based on one of Goethe’s most famous poems titled Erlkönig, about father riding at night with his son behind him on the horse. The child sees and hears the titular elf king calling for him, but his father sees nothing and assures him nothing is there. Upon arriving home, the son is dead.

There is no explicit homophobic or erotic element in the story. Indeed, the story makes an effort to mention that the elf king promises his daughters to the boy. But it’s not the daughters that menace him. It is the king who menaces him with the promise of sex (which inflames my neurotic trauma in a different way). Perhaps my reaction upon learning this is only evidence of how deep the wounds of explicit association go.

If an older man with no wife interacts with your son, he will infect the boy, and the interest simply cannot be well-intentioned. The acceptable story can only slice up real life, and serve the most desirable pieces. It is not a pure lie (especially not for fairy boys, who live hounded by; youth to be accepted, the desire to conquer them, and many other devils), but it is a lie by omission.

After all, the implication, created by a wife shaped lacuna, is that the man has no taste for women. He seeks out boys because of some animal urge. This is not true. Those who seek much younger partners do not do so because of simple hunger, “twisted” away from its “natural” course. It’s a hunger for power.

This hunting is by no means unique to little fairy boys either; it is directed at girls too. There is yet another key to both these facts. Both are socially sanctioned by pockets of society. Not the majority, no, but by far too many. Even those who do not explicitly sanction these things buy into their echoes: for the fairy to be acceptable, they must not age. When the queen gets wrinkles, send him to the nunnery. These things are not seen as attractive in the effeminate creature, and the effeminate creature must be attractive to be allowed in public. Or else, he must be relegated outside of sex entirely.

The feeling evoked in me, at a time when I am likened to a contagion, and when “widows” “mourn” their partners, should be easy to infer. I am sitting on the porch, yelling to my mother, something is there, something is there. Something inside me is calling out to what’s there, I am becoming. She says, no, nothing is there, you do not want to become. As she steps out onto the porch, there is no daughter: I have become. I pretend to be a daughter for another year, saving money for a binder, cutting my hair, before sitting her and my grandmother down and saying once more: I am becoming. There is no daughter. I do not know that name. She cries. As I am becoming, she cries and mourns and subtly asks, give me my daughter back. Give me my daughter-mother-wife back.

I say, who?

When I was 16 or 17, my literature class had an assignment where we were supposed to write a personal piece- I forget the prompt, but it was vague enough that while most other people in my class wrote real, memoir style pieces, I wrote a fiction story about being accosted by an other self. She screamed at me that I had stolen her life, changed her, with my madness and my limp wrists and my gender. I was the changeling.

The fear in the changeling story- from a modern perspective about autism- is that something “took” your child from you, and you need to get them back. This leads to extremes. In the past you’d expose a baby by the side of a lake or bathe them with foxglove. Today, you see parents giving kids bleach enemas. However, you also see this with trans people. This ranges from the social contagion fear (which is “cured” by isolation), and in “trans widow” groups (groups of usually cis women who were married to closeted or egg trans women, who regard these women as “dead” upon their coming out).

In both instances, there is a sense of ownership over the other person. They were something that belonged to you, that was stolen from you by not behaving the way you wanted. And the “thing”, the person, may try to behave, may try to please these people who claim ownership, but they never succeed fully. It is impossible to succeed fully. For one thing, you often don’t understand what it is you’re supposed to do, and struggle to grasp why you need to do it. For another, obedience often leaves scars on the mind. It causes you to do things that are uncomfortable or painful, and erodes you over time. To tie it back to villains again- uncharitably, this sounds almost like a curse, doesn’t it? You have some hidden, depraved drive, and you can hide in your human skin, but eventually, you won’t be able to keep up. Out you burst, into the light, and then the mayhem starts. This framing is more commonly applied to trans and trans coded villains, of course, and less to autistic ones, but it’s not a hypothetical.

When you call a man effeminate, you may call him a fairy or say he’s “fae”. The latter, personally, contains more connotations of a sissy who may not necessarily hit back and have an honorable fight with you, but whatever he does will be worse.1 Of the fairy who takes the child, rather than the fairy that can be killed by a flyswatter. Mulgarath in his tattered silks of years long gone rather than Tinkerbell (her Disney Incarnation, anyway).

Of madness.

After all, what is more terrible? Being a bit mad, laughing at a funeral, kissing another man- aren’t they all the same, and aren’t they all wretched?

Growing up, I had two primary ways of stimming. Playing with my hair, particularly rubbing it over my lips, was one. The other was pacing. I still enjoy both. The former is innocently perceived: it makes me seem stupid, apparently, and some see it as unhygienic, but that’s fine to be to some extent. Pacing, however, is not. Perhaps the combination of the fact that I often mutter to myself (usually about something I’m writing) and have a serious expression while doing so is more off putting than the motion itself. A relative once likened it to a tiger she’d seen at the zoo. She meant it as a compliment, but the message I received was: This behavior is menacing (supported by the previous reaction of others), something about your natural body is animal in a way mine is not, and as we had an argument over her using racially charged language while discussing my father that was fetishistic a few hours before, that there was an exotic and conquering appeal to me. (I once wrote a poem about that too; I took the skin of a jackal to be contrary. Scavenging animals are a little less appealing to the masses). Suffice to say: I have struggled to feel human.

The fae are inhuman. They laugh at sad times, they cry at joyous ones. They have their own rules for what is appropriate. They are offended at strange things because the gesture carries a different meaning in their eyes. They see things you do not, hear things you do not. “Normal” food is ash in the mouths of those acclimated to them- who’s to say that food outside the traditional offerings of honey and similar is not the same for them (in the realm of metaphor, anyway)?

Subscribe now

There’s a concept album I occasionally fuck around with the lyrics for, with a song about this very topic, and the chorus contains the lines “three and six/I’ve never been more than a bundle of sticks”. The numbers are the amount of letters in two words: fae and faggot. A faggot is a bundle of sticks, of course, and some people believe the folk etymology that the slur comes from burning queer men (and those perceived as such). Some claim a similar historical phenomenon regarding changelings- particularly for me, the novel “the Moorchild”.

The main character of the novel is the moorchild, or changeling, herself, named Saaski by her human family. She is primarily visually distinguished; she has too long hands and feet, her skin is dark in contrast to her blonde hair, which is textured. She has a human father and a supernatural mother, which is why she was seen as disfavorable enough to trade for someone else. Neither world is one she quite “looks right” in. She is uninterested in most other children; but her appearance comes first. When people look at you and call you a freak, of course you hardly care to speak to them. Unlike other art dealing with such lonely “girls,” such as the horror movie Excision, I did not pick up on a gendered theme (though perhaps it is owed another reading, as I last read it when I did not know what I was), but the racial reading is clear, and there is a case to be made for an autistic reading. Saaski is unusually obsessed with her father’s bagpipe, and plays it whenever she can; she prefers the isolation of the moors with the company of livestock to other chores (who hardly care how loudly she plays). One can view this as both a special interest and as a form of stimming.

Saaski’s dark skin connects her to the Romani/Traveller coded characters in the story who come to her village from time to time. These characters aren’t subject to quite the same scorn as in real life- for one thing, their children play with the village children. However, it does subtly remind the reader of Saaski’s displacement. These are literal outsiders. They don’t live in the village. They just visit occasionally. Similarly, Saaski is not of the village. Both of them are easy to visually pick out, not from familiarity, but the lack of it. The villagers gradually become more and more intolerant of this, culminating in a threat to throw her into a ceremonial bonfire. Saaski, of course, escapes- but before she does, she rescues her parent’s “real child”. And while Saaski is racialized in an ambiguously European, quasi-Irish village, those who racialized her were themselves racialized.

If you listen to the podcast Lore produced by Aaron Manke, you may remember a woman named Bridget Cleary (Bríd Uí Chléirigh) who was murdered by her husband because he thought she was a changeling. What Manke leaves out in his telling is the political afterlife of this tale; after all, his listeners are here for the morbid excision of their daily anxiety. I say this not wholly derisively; the urge to purge one’s terror through the recounting of the extremely violent is natural, and as someone who grew up terrified of death, I did the same from a very young age.

However, this morbid excision is precisely what made Brigid’s death useful as a political tool of English colonization. Its details are appalling, but the listener is drawn to depravity on foreign shores. Distance and/or time make indulgence in the tale safe by varying degrees. Taking a story from such a distance means those who chose to transmit it can use it to influence how you think of those from the place it happened in- and who will you be to know differently? Even in this Information Era, misinformation spreads. And search engines increasingly degrade in quality, newspapers paywall their sites, and junk information is algorithmically copied to dozens of sites. In the 19th century, the situation was even worse.

Bridget Cleary was a married woman, aged 26 years old when she died. Her marriage lasted 8 years, with no children. During her marriage, she lived with her parents instead of her husband, and had financial independence. She was educated in literacy, basic math, and middle class manners. Upon her mother’s death, her father became her responsibility and the three moved in together. Her husband, compared to their milieu of the rural Irish working class, was more educated and trained in a skilled trade. Being a cooper had made him a good deal of money, including after he’d moved in with his wife and father in law. Both dressed well, in a more middle class manner than was typical. Middle class Irish and those aspiring to their position often scorned traditions like wakes, beliefs in fairy lore, etc. The day after her husband killed Bridget, he confessed to two friends and a priest what he and several other men had done. The priest and his friends were shocked- one of his friends tried to get him to bury his wife properly, and the whole group could only conclude Michael Cleary had gone mad. The Irish public too, condemned the affair.

The story of poor Bridget, an independent woman burned to death by her husband who believed she was replaced by a changeling, was easy to spread and easy to twist from a tragedy of European (and global) misogyny, to evidence of a uniquely Irish depravity. Look at these Irish and their strange, violent beliefs! Look at how terrible their men are to their women! Unlike these upright British, who see women as pure and- oh, pay no mind to Spring-heel Jack and Mr. Ripper, they’re just having a chat about work.

Cleary’s death was specifically used to go against Home Rule in Ireland.2 Two bills had already been introduced by William Gladstone, and defeated. This was part of decades of violence between landowners, tenants, and the evicted- which already caused papers owned by Unionists to scoff at the idea of Irish Home Rule. Much was made about if the Irish were intelligent enough to rule themselves, and intelligence came up again and again in the case. Tory-Unionist newspapers explicitly connected Cleary and the Home Rule as the Land Bill, a related measure, came up. Anti-Black comparisons were made, effectively saying the Irish were even more barbaric than the English perception of the Khoekhoe people, then commonly called Hottentot. This comparison between the Irish and Khoekhoe was loaded, as it was also made not long the first Home Rule bill of 1886 was defeated. Other comparisons stated the local people were “in the moral and intellectual condition of Dahomey [Benin]”, that it was precisely what was expected of “savage tribes”3.

A herbal doctor, who may have never met Bridget, though he’d prescribed for her, was initially dragged into the fray and seen particularly poorly by the public. Newspapers described him as a witch-doctor, a medicine man- words typically reserved for African and Native American healers, respectively, and the former being rather derogatory. “Fairy belief” was presented as uniquely Irish and strange- despite many elements of it being popular across Europe, and even beyond Europe.

It is taken as fact that her husband and the 9 witnesses believed she was a fairy, and strongly suggested their behavior would have been not simply recognized, but representative, in many recountings. When Michael Cleary tried to get his friend to come with him to a ringfort to rescue Bridget (at that point, dead) from the fairies, the man relayed in his account that no one took the mystical association of ringforts seriously. His recount of the idea, however, is not the common one. Instead, Mary Simpson’s recount, which is more detailed, is. Mary, notably, was a Protestant Episcopalian, and an outsider among their village due to Irish political tensions.4 All written records we have- even Irish records, which were aware precisely of how this could be used, a tension all who know the violence of another’s gaze and all who know those that view safety in the arms of power understand- of the crime is coverage influenced by colonialism. It happened. All of it happened.

Mary Simpson’s husband was a property defense protector- basically a goon for a landlord during a time when large swathes of Irish people were being evicted and subject to rent hikes. They were commonly physically attacked or boycotted by the populace; this era is in fact, where the word comes from. Suffice to say, it’s very interesting that her account is the one closest to what was said by Manke. Despite this, the Clearys were on good terms with the Simpsons. Another account that uncritically presented a belief in fairies was The Nationalist, a newspaper, which was clearly influenced by the romantic nationalism of people like Yeats. It called the belief quackery as it did so. Previous accounts of deaths (usually children) and injuries caused by attempts to deal with supposed changelings also frequently have others, in and outside their milieu, look upon those guilty as insane, or as speaking in metaphor/euphemism. To say something like “you look like something the fairies left” would at the time, typically be taken as a way of simply saying someone does not look well. A man “making a fairy of” his wife could simply mean he’s been negligent, distant, or even physically abusive. A wife convincing her husband she was a changeling could be leveraged to halt his negative behavior. And to say “she went away with the fairies,” could well mean “she’s been having an affair” or even “it’s none of your business and I won’t say anything more on the matter”.

This episode was one of the six chosen to be adapted to TV, though to my understanding, this adaptation was less objectionable. Manke’s telling, though it mentions similar stories existing in Europe, only recounts Irish examples. It presents these examples as just common belief, and does not discuss how the perpetrators of violence against accused changelings were perceived by others. It does not discuss how a “changeling” could serve as an excuse to abuse and humiliate, or how certain details suggest some of the treatment was ritualized punishment for Bridget’s rumored affair with Mr. Simpson and general arrogance deemed inappropriate to a woman. It presents the belief in fairy forts as entirely and always genuine, and most egregiously, says Jack Dunne uncritically believed Bridget was a changeling, implies he sanctioned killing her, and that Dennis Ganey treated her. He also provides a repulsive account of Ganey’s treatments, designed to engender the same disgust we have for treatments using leeches.

Dunne provided the account of Michael’s claim that Bridget would appear at a fairy fort on a white horse, the one that bluntly stated his incredulity. He himself lived near a fairy fort. He was also a storyteller, which gave him authority. His belief in the fairy lore he told and the spells he was reported to know (likely traditional Irish charms, essentially a counterpart to prayer) is difficult to discern from the record; two famous storytellers of his time themselves wove in themes of skepticism in their work. Testimonies about him and Michael are all complicated by family ties and jealousy, and Johanna Burke (the key witness) lied at least once in testimony, and had many inconsistencies. How certain Dunne was in calling Bridget a changeling is in doubt. Ganey was the herb doctor that may have never met Bridget. Many of the herbal cures Ganey knew did involve plants which could be used medically, as well as ineffective cures. The use of fire may or may not have been part of the cure; Bridget remarked that Michael had threatened to burn her months before, and Dunne expressed unsurety that it was part of the cure even though he actively participated in its use prior to the murder. Dunne was not present at the murder, and ultimately Michael was the only one who burned Bridget to death. Everyone else at the scene spoke or, in the case of Mary Kennedy, acted against Michael that night. Dunne seemed just as disturbed by her death as the priest. The cottage the Clearys lived in, regarded as more or less “haunted” by the previous tenant due to being on top of a fairy fort, was one they themselves had applied for previously- making it likely the “haunting” was a scam they created to get rid of a rival. The Clearys, as aspiring middle class, may have had waning belief in the Good Neighbors, though Bridget’s mother may have had similar knowledge to Dunne that was passed down. Michael only turned to herbs after the doctor he sought refused to come for three days and finally showed up drunk, and claimed others had convinced him Bridget was a changeling. In retrospect, he even called Ganey a quack. Belief and disbelief are a fluctuating, complicated notion. Manke focuses on the horror of belief in his telling, yet he misses this.

Another failing in this focus on belief is that, in placing belief as the primary monster, we obscure that belief did not matter. Perhaps Michael Cleary really believed Bridget was a changeling when he set her chemise on fire and doused her in lamp oil. Perhaps Jack Dunne believed she was a changeling when he and the Kennedy brothers helped Michael by shaking her, restraining her as she was force fed, and holding her above the fireplace grate in the days prior. Perhaps all this was a consciously understood opportunity for ritualized misogyny. Perhaps it was subconscious misogyny that caused the main people trying to protect and support Bridget in the last weeks of her life to be women. Perhaps it was between the two. Regardless, Bridget Cleary, a real woman, was really tortured and killed. By relying on stereotypes of Irish culture, we obscure this.

The TV adaptation already is leagues better by opening with a similar case from America, more effectively communicating to the viewer the global nature of the social factors around Cleary’s death. I used to listen to Lore. By the time the adaption announced who would play Cleary, it had 61 episodes. That is the power of a changeling story, and we would do well to remember that.

Leave a comment

There is another layer of politics to the identification of autistics (often, in my experience, American) with changelings, which is the presumption of violence. For every story of a changeling (typically a disabled child) left by a lake or bathed in foxglove or yes, burnt among bundles of faggots, there is a story of those who are mad and closer to G-d as direct consequence. This has also been leered at by English colonists; the tradition of folk saints (wali) in countries such as Egypt invited easy scorn. Where the locals saw men touched by divinity, the English, who believe themselves enlightened, saw scammers begging for money and those who were “deranged” (sometimes with the implication that the latter deserved money as much as the former- not at all). We assume the past was violent to us because we are accustomed to violence now, and indeed, the past has been violence.

Jack Dunne, as a storyteller, as a man living by a fairy fort, was disabled, with a bad leg. He was said to be “ridden by the fairies”. The disabled, eccentric, and reclusive were often said to be “in the fairies” or have been among them for a time. This didn’t buy you respect, but leveraging it effectively would get people to leave you alone. They’d be cautious of you. Traditional storytellers and herb doctors too, were often physically disabled. And Dunne, as a storyteller, did get respect among the rural working class, and would have had it guaranteed not a decade earlier. In his life, though, as can be seen by the Clearys, people aspired to the middle class, and with that meant leaving behind old tradition.

In all these instances- disability, queerness, racialization- there is some element of external imposition. None of these states is unnatural, yet many operate under the assumption that they are, if only by seeing them as something outside “normal” and therefore needing adjectives with which to specify them. This is the root of the real anger some people have with words like abled, straight, white/localized terms referring to a predominantly white and often Anglo social group. They see an underlying insult in being named, a stripping of their status as normal. In becoming particulars, they see a threat in becoming that which they once excluded, which unintentionally acknowledges how exclusion must be constructed. You will naturally become disabled if you live long enough. People just are queer sometimes. Cultures other than white ones naturally developed, and are not a different species. Similarly- to be religious for a moment- of course nature has spirits. Another element of my kinship with the idea of a “fairy”, or the Good Neighbors, is that we are both demonized. It is in being outside normal societal categories- or rather, to have someone else’s imposed upon you- that can one gains a perspective on how false these categories are. By nature of existing, one can realize how unnatural ones own “unnatural-ness” is.

But then, as now, there is joy. To be outside the established social mode- - is no walk in the park. But the outsiderness gives you something valuable in the way you see and understand the world, even if you aren’t recognized for it. When you find others like you, you can build something new. You can even, at times, break the social mode open. Those who live by it rarely look at the break directly, but they are also near helpless to reseal it. They can suppress, but they can’t make people forget.

Illustration via Dansk Jävlarna.

Introduction

One of the biggest problems with the communist movement is that we know where we want to go, but we don’t know how. We all know we want a communist society, without classes, money, or the state, but we don’t know what specific steps to take to get there. Reform or revolution? Socialism in one country or permanent revolution? These were some of the debates that arose historically.

Therefore, many communists devote themselves to reflecting on the transition from capitalism to communism. Obviously, this leads to disagreements about what can be considered “socialism” (understood as the transition from capitalism to communism), which leads many communists to identify with one another based on which specific examples of societies that have claimed to be socialist they support, or if they don´t support any.

Was the USSR socialist? Is China? Is Cuba socialist? Is North Korea socialist? Is Venezuela socialist? Is Sentinel Island socialist? Is Antarctica socialist? This is discussed cyclically.

My working hypothesis is that all of these discussions are actually wrongly posed, because they are looking at it the wrong way. In other words, the equations are flawed because the numbers used are incorrect.

What I propose is that we need to rethink how we conceive of socialist transition beyond what I consider to be a flawed theory of a “socialist mode of production”,1 which leads to not being able to see the important aspects of socialist transition clearly. That is, socialist transition has no dialectic…

But I get ahead of myself. Before we can talk about the concept of socialist mode of production proper, we need to examine Marxist historiography on transition more in depth.

History

Most Marxists lack a coherent view of historical materialism and therefore lack a full conceptualization of history. Many view modern and premodern history as completely separate. For example, they will believe that modes of production only change with revolutions, but that in a given country, the old mode ceased to exist peacefully.2

Part of my approach aims to help unify the historical materialist model, attempting to explain changes beyond a schematic version of the phases and revolutions model. This does not mean that I completely reject the idea of ​​revolutions and phases, but I do want to make them more complex.

The historical example with which I want to compare socialism is the transition from feudalism to capitalism or mercantilism, understood as the transitional period between feudalism and capitalism where merchant capital predominated and developed alongside proletarianization.

Anyone familiar with historical materialism knows that the basic framework of historical materialism is: from classless society/primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and eventually communism. Obviously, the theory is more complicated than this framework; even in the writings of Marx and Engels, they discuss other types of phases, and an important part of their theory is how capitalism lays the groundwork for communism. Another important part is that changes in modes of production are caused by changes in the productive forces (the capacity to produce and the level of technology), which I discuss more in the next section.

But more generally, what is historical development? The “classical” style of historiography (in the style of Leopold von Ranke) would say that history is the succession of stages where society goes from barbarism to a higher, democratic bourgeois civilization. Marxism is of course opposed to this view (Marx´s historiography was ahead of its time) but it did not stop several of its followers, such as the Mensheviks (who did literally believe backwards countries were fated to become advanced bourgeois ones), from taking on parts of this approach.

In my view, history is a multitude of processes, which compete and fight with each other, and most importantly, eventually converge. These processes are the work of human beings acting within their socially determined environment, shaping it and being shaped by it. Stages aren´t bad per se, but only make sense insofar they exist to explain processes, and on their own aren’t worth much. To see history this way is to see it as a total history, a “history-problem”, a conceptualisation championed for example by the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale magazine.

Capitalism proper begins with the Industrial Revolution, but before this, there was a “germination” of capitalism due to mercantilism, which lasted approximately from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

But in fact, the multitude of processes which make up capitalism began to turn through all of human society.3 Only around the Industrial Revolution did they (proletarization, primitive accumulation, etc etc) begin to be developed freely. Before, these were blocked or restricted by other processes. Both slavery and imperialism precede capitalism, but are given a new life under it. Arrighi had a similar idea, as he claimed Great Britain was the first capitalist great power because it fused capitalism with imperialism.4

Unicausality doesn’t exist in history, only a multitude of competing processes.

In the last section of “Poverty of Philosophy” Marx says:

In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the greater efforts.5

(Emphasis mine.)

Marx and Engels viewed absolutism, that is, the feudal political system in the era of mercantilism, as a hybrid regime between the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords (as Engels mentions in “The Origin of the Family”). However, historian Perry Anderson offers a better analysis, arguing that under absolutism, feudal society and therefore the power of the feudal lords were maintained, but that absolutism was the form the feudal state took in response to the growing power of the bourgeoisie.6

Eventually, the Industrial Revolution emerged from mercantilism, and with it, the “Double Revolution”, in Hobsbawm´s terms. Here we are fully on capitalist terrain. However, it cannot be said that mercantilism was its own separate mode of production, since in it the class balance only partially changed, i.e. the bourgeoisie did not take full power.

Let´s see how Engels describes the bourgeois revolutions in his article “Karl Marx”:

When the towns arose and with them a separate handicraft industry and commercial intercourse, at first internal and later international, the urban bourgeoisie developed, and already during the Middle Ages achieved, in struggle with the nobility, its inclusion in the feudal order as likewise a privileged estate. But with the discovery of the extra-European world, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, this bourgeoisie acquired a far more extensive sphere of trade and therewith a new spur for its industry; in the most important branches handicrafts were supplanted by manufacture, now on a factory scale, and this again was supplanted by large-scale industry, which had become possible owing to the discoveries of the previous century, especially that of the steam-engine. Large-scale industry, in its turn, reacted on trade by driving out the old manual labour in backward countries, and creating the present-day new means of communication: steam-engines, railways, electric telegraphy, in the more developed ones. Thus the bourgeoisie came more and more to combine social wealth and social power in its hands, while it still for a long period remained excluded from political power, which was in the hands of the nobility and the monarchy supported by the nobility. But at a certain stage — in France since the Great Revolution — it also conquered political power, and now in turn became the ruling class over the proletariat and small peasants.

(Emphasis mine).

That is to say, before taking power through revolution, the bourgeoisie developed its power within feudalism.

To clarify, I’m not suggesting a kind of reformism where the proletariat should focus on growing in power within capitalism. What’s striking is that, taking these quotes into account, we can see that Marx and Engels conceptualized the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a gradual development (which was consistent with their dialectical philosophy).

However, there is something that distinguishes the capitalist system from previous systems: its total international form as a world-system, where capitalism and the capitalist world-system are one and the same. Which is to say, capitalism isn´t made up of several regional interlocking plural capitalist economics, but is rather one single system.

Being international, the entire globe ends up under the domination of capitalism; capitalism is completed when the world-system is fully constituted. Therefore, fighting capitalism is also fighting the world-system it forms.

All of this shows that the reality and theory of the transition between modes of production is somewhat more complex than the common scheme, which in itself is nothing new. But my argument is that if there was a period of maturation of capitalism into capitalism proper, within what was the feudal system, the same can be said of communism.

Developing the question further, what distinguishes one mode of production from another? There are many ways we can define the question, but I will try to simplify it with one main measure: the amount of power a particular class has over society. Thus, the more power the feudal lords have, the more feudal the society; the more power the capitalists have, the more capitalist the society; and the more power the workers have, the more socialist/communist the society. The difference with all other previous modes of production is that once they have full power, the proletariat can abolish the entire class system. (Of course, we cannot measure the different modes of production exactly in degrees, but this is for illustrative purposes.)7

Therefore, before taking power, a class must develop (it must “constitute itself as a class”) within the society in which it emerges. This was easier for the bourgeoisie within feudalism due to its estate-based, organicist, and decentralized nature, but it is not possible for the proletariat within capitalism, since within it, the conditions of the proletariat are never assured (unlike those of the peasants). This means that there is a limit to how much the proletariat can be co-opted, and partially explains the greater number of revolutionary attempts in capitalism compared to the long history of feudalism.

However, to completely destroy capitalism, the proletariat needs to destroy its world-system. That is, for the proletariat, the analogue of early bourgeois mercantile expansion is the attainment of state power through revolutions, because capitalism cannot integrate the proletariat as a class. If for the bourgeoisie, bourgeois revolutions were its crowning glory, for the proletariat, they are the midpoint of the struggle.

If the history of the bourgeoisie had two phases (constituting itself as a class within feudalism and carrying out revolutions), so too did the proletariat, but two different ones (constituting itself as a class and seizing state power, in order to then destroy the capitalist world-system.)

Therefore, the proletariat only completes its development by destroying the global dimension of capitalism and establishing communism throughout the world. This process is gradual, as the Leninist theses of the “unequal development of capitalism” explains that revolutions are much more likely to break out in the weak links of the capitalist chain.

On another note on revolutions and revolutionary processes, I think we should take note of already existing elements in society which have the potential to converge to create revolutionary change (for example, some communal links that exist in societies which regained more cultural background from the pre capitalist era) but without overestimating them (as the narodinki did with the traditional Russian communes). Paraphrasing Benjamin,8 we could say we have a duty to rescue the past, i.e the historical processes which began in the past that can serve as signs towards a post capitalist society. Communism will be the convergence of a multitude of processes.

Now, we will briefly examine classical Marxist writings on the transition to communism.

The ancient writings

How did the idea of socialist mode of production come to be solidified?

Most obviously, the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin do posit a transition between capitalism and communism that is not immediate. This is in fact one of the major things that distinguish communism from anarchism or older socialist variants like Blanquism.

I’ll be brief on this issue because Marx and Engels were never very clear about the future communist society and the transition to it, which makes sense, since they didn’t want to dictate what the revolution should be like, as the utopian socialists did.

Let’s see “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, where Marx is most explicit on the issue:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

and

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

On the political regime:

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Although it’s ambiguous enough that this “transitional period” can be taken to be the socialist mode of production (as it’s usually interpreted), I also think it’s possible to take my point of view, that there is no “middle stage” between capitalism and communism. Politically, it’s interesting that several authors make a distinction between the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and socialism, but in political terms, Marx only mentions the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a form of state.

Lenin identified “the first phase of communist society,” which Marx mentions, with socialism. I feel this is perhaps taking Marx’s writing too literally, but Lenin was still able to understand that socialism was the beginning of the development of communism, not a completely separate stage.9

However, Lenin also introduced the other theory that goes hand in hand with the theory of the socialist mode of production: the theory of the transition to socialism through state capitalism (which, according to Lenin, was the prelude to socialism). Like a matryoshka doll, phases keep appearing.

In reality, these two theories arise from the productive forces thesis: the focus on the development of productive forces to change the mode of production. In the previous section, I briefly discussed how, in Marxist historiography, it is developments in the productive forces that generate changes in society.

The productive forces theory does have a basis in reality: It is difficult to run a society if it cannot sustain itself and is technologically backward. Furthermore, this conception is supported by some passages from Marx and Engels, such as this one from “Principles of Communism.”:

17 Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

In this passage, Engels clearly places the development of the productive forces as the primary task of the revolution. This makes sense if we consider the context of Marx and Engels: they focused on the core capitalist countries (albeit at a time when these had not yet fully developed). In their conceptualization, the focus on the development of the productive forces was likely an initial but short-lived phase of the proletarian revolution.

However, the revolutions did not occur in these countries, but rather in countries with limited industrial development, where naturally developing the productive forces would be a more arduous task.

Several of these states formed the socialist bloc, and obviously did not operate like normal capitalist countries. Therefore, it was reasonable to consider them their own mode of production.

Share

Conclusion

Returning to the topic of the tasks of the proletarian revolution, it is one thing to emphasize productive development, and another to equate this development with the ultimate goal of communism. This is what ended up happening in the Soviet Union, where Khrushchev even said that it was possible for the Soviet Union to achieve communism on its own. This was in line with the broader state socialist project.

The USSR officially began to consider itself within the socialist mode of production during Stalin’s rule, after years of civil war and famine. Stalin sometimes, paradoxically, declared that under socialism there was no class struggle and that under socialism, the class struggle intensified (which led to the purges). This makes perfect sense considering the government’s need to legitimize itself.

Imagine you are a peasant in Eastern Europe who spent years fighting for revolution: Would you rather hear that after years you have achieved socialism or that you are now in the slow transition from capitalism to communism, a transition you will likely never see completed in your lifetime?

Industrializing the USSR (”developing the productive forces”) was a practical necessity, so this goal became the way to achieve socialism.

To clarify, I am not suggesting some kind of conspiracy on the part of communist leaders to hide True Marxist Theory. I am simply saying that political positions are adopted for practical reasons.

In certain respects, planning does offer better production than capitalism, as it is a rational system rather than the irrational capitalist one. This can be seen in the rapid industrialization that countries adopted a model of this type and in the adoption of state capitalism measures by many post-colonial countries. But capitalism will always have the advantage until communism achieves its final victory, since capitalism has an entire world-system and can simply exploit workers further to intensify production.

In other words, communism must be more than a development model.

In my view, several groups in the 20th century managed to independently develop partial answers to the question of advancing socialism after seizing state power, but as they did not converge, a way to solve the riddle was not synthesized. It is now our duty to have these streams converge.

In a following essay, I plan on continuing this line of investigation, detailing how I believe the transition to communism should be conceptualized.

Coda

[I originally wrote a first version essay to come to terms with the communist parties style marxism-leninism I swore allegiance to from the ages of 18-19. As such, it´s a “Dear John” letter to this tradition.

I did not fully reject my previous views as a simple negation, by swearing full allegiance to another tradition. Rather, I wished to extract what had drawn me to it and try to escape the dogmas which have plagued Marxism since the 20th century.

My full break came centered on the idea of socialist transition, on what we are fighting from.

In this new version of the essay, I changed the obnoxious writing style, toned down the WSA terminology (I was going through a phase when I wrote the first draft), revised the bibliography and changed some unnecessarily polemical aspects.]

Leave a comment

Illustration via Dansk Jävlarna.

In drafting this book playlist, I spent six months trying to come up with a better title than “comforting black comedies.” Obviously, I failed. So let me say from the outset that the comfort you’ll get here is the comfort you get from an older friend saying, “The news is scarier now than when I was your age.” It’s affirmation without reassurance. As you suspected, the present is always the last moment of history, and we’ll never know the future. We’re doomed to drive into that long night together, the whole of humanity in one ship, workers and three-armed businessmen alike.

It will all make sense in time.

#1 Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei Yamashita

I acquired this book in the basement of my local record store, a biome where — I am given to understand — Coffee House Press flocks winter, making their nests and rearing their young. The remarkable used-books-in-record-store niche allows well-written books to live many more generations than the average Barnes & Noble perfect-bound edition. Whereas “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest” might be sold back to the record store 10 times, a James Patterson will die of bookworms long before it reaches 2 resales.1

At first, “Through the Arc of the Rainforest” comes off as, perhaps, a bit too convinced of its cleverness. Soon, though, its relentless rhytmn draws the reader in. I once knew a brilliant musician, a choir director, who told me that all art is about setting up patterns to break them. In music, for example, this can be achieved through alternating beats and pauses — the strategic use of negative space.

He suggested that, the next time I noticed a particular page of a novel I liked, that I should try to dissect why. Was it, perhaps, an unusual page, breaking some sort of series? Longer than the previous three, or shorter? Or did it have a rythmnic arc all its own, beginning quietly but ending loudly?

I have used this test to great effect, and it reveals a lot about “Rain Forest.” As J.M.R. said in conversation about it, “I admire how willing [Yamashita] is to just tell you about catastrophically important developments in 1-2 pages.” Every event is told in roughly the same number of words, from one character’s death to another’s mother, now living with him in a fancy high rise apartment, insisting on washing her clothes in the river and beating them clean.

In terms of tempo, this means “Rain Forest” marches to the beat of a drum. It is relentless. We learn enough about the narrative chain to feel invested, but never enough to feel like we know very much at all. The whole world is dream-like, affected by rules of causation that we — like the characters themselves — never quite understand.

A final word. The characters each have something vividly strange about them — the story is narrated by a ball floating in front of one of the protagonist’s foreheads — but they live their lives perfectly ordinarily. As much as they can, anyway. In Yamashita’s deft telling, having a third arm seems no less strange than leaving your phone at home and getting seperation anxiety. Modernity makes strangers of us all.

Subscribe now

#2 Severance by Ling Ma

A quiet, grounded take on the zombie apocalypse, “Severance” recounts a New Yorker’s life during an Earth-shattering pandemic. The disease, a fungal infection hailing from Shenzhen, causes the infected to repeat their habits, over and over, until they die of exhaustion. Until it takes hold of the world, our protagonist Candace Chen is already living a massively repetitive life, in her work at a publishing house designing Bibles. In a twist of fate, the pandemic wrenches her out of her routine.

“Severance” was published in 2018, two years before that sudden uptick in pandemic fiction which shall remain nameless, and has no relation to the other sci-fi story about toxic work cultures named Severance that you may have encountered. These similarities, in addition to literally being a New York Novel, threaten to obfuscate what makes “Severance” special. As an immortal being, I have already read plenty of books about pandemics, metropolises, and seen Apple TV’s Severance. “Severance” stands out.

I am a disembodied horse-ghost usually only visible to humans on one day of the calendar year. This headache aside, I spend most of my days wandering cities, forests, and suitably abandoned buildings, comfortable in the knowledge that no one can see me. Candace enjoys a similar peace of mind. Thanks to New York’s increasing emptiness, she is free to once again pursue art — in her case, photographing the empty city streets. Truly a kindred spirit.

As Candace drifts through her daily life and meets other survivors, her thoughts often drift back to the before-times. “Severance” handles its time skips adroitly, telling Candace’s story in a perfectly linear fashion, even as the dates slide back and forth, past and future.

Perhaps the stand-out moment of the novel comes when Candace takes a business trip to Shenzhen, before the pandemic erupts. The representative of an American publishing house, heritage speaker of a different Mandarin, Candace is a ghost here, too. Told with a cutting precision, the reader must reformulate not only their view of the Shen Fever, but the very object in their hands.

#3 Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada

The cover of any Tawada in English is branded by blurbs calling the book, “Delightfully strange.” Or “off-beat.” They had might as well just say “quirky” and move on.

To stickle, I don’t find Tawada’s worlds all that strange. Strange things happen in them, to be certain, but then I expect as much when I pick up a novel. Rather, the surreal is taken for granted in Tawada’s works, as normal to her characters as fiber-optic cable is to moderns. When we learn, for example, that air travel is unpopular in “Scattered All Over the Earth”’s zeitgeist, the narration spends only a paragraph explaining it. No one needs to move that fast anymore, it’s said: long-distance travel is done by boat instead.

These delightful little details are akin to spotting a robin on a spring day. Little details fill Hiruko’s journey with the everyday splendor one encounters when they look closely at the World. The nature of her quest is simple: to find another Japanese speaker in Europe after Honshu sank to the bottom of the sea. This calamity is only briefly mentioned. Hiruko’s life is in the present, finding a way forward.

“Scattered All Over the Earth” is the first in a trilogy, and Hiruko only narrates a few chapters. Generally, I find POV switches hackneyed excuses to tell the reader everything and withhold no mystery, but it’s not so in “Scattered.” Each POV character is fascinating, adding new dimensions to Hiruko’s story.

In this synopsis as in the others, I wish to avoid giving too many particulars about the plot. I will finish this segment by saying simply that Hiruko finds her answer in a person she might not have considered a speaker of Japanese before the calamity. This is part and parcel of what makes “Scattered” special. Unlike so much speculative fiction, it avoids assuming that old constructs will carry into the future, and instead formulates a subtly new World, beautiful and tragic in equal measure.

Share

Why Read These, Instead of the News?

First, be honest with yourself. Are you reading the news, or are you opening the articles you’ve been shown? Being a well-informed citizen is an entirely different matter to doomscrolling, wherein the doomed reads only the articles reccomended by their corner of the Internet. Learning about a small cross-section of the World and mistaking it for the totality is a risky business. Whatever lacunae exist in the worldview you’ve created serve to manipulate you.

Anyone can lie to you about what you don’t know — all the easier when you’ve decided that you don’t need to know, that those facts are poisonous to you. The algorithim isn’t piloted with benevolent intent. It hasn’t selectively created your alternate universe because it wants to keep you informed. It wants to sell you ads. When you are ignorant, it can play the role both of teacher and ragebaiter, both roles reinforcing the other, wire mother and cloth mother selling adspace on your eyes.

My personal vendettas against a certain now-deceased yellow journalist aside, the newspapers don’t mean to lie. They simply can’t tell the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway, for only so many words will fit in the space allotted. Online — this wondrous realm where my interns claim to distribute my works — should have been exempt, but for reasons beyond our scope here, it too has trended towards short articles as the longest popular writing. How much of the World can you describe in 1,500 words?

Even focused on a single subject, an article can only say so much. In order to answer, say, “why did bombs fall yesterday?”, an author must choose only a few items from a long list of explanations: what (some of) the victims think, what (some of) the aggressors think,2 geopolitics, the Fibonnaci sequencing of history, simple hatred… Whatever they leave out is up to you to learn, and it won’t be in an article. To draw a cup out of the ocean’s understanding, you must read a book.

Of course, none of these books are non-fiction. What place does fiction have in the hunt for truth?

This, like many questions about fiction, is fundamentally unanswerable. Art’s purpose remains undescribed, despite thousands of years of discussion on the topic. In spite of not knowing, still we create. I am inclined to believe that art allows us a kind of wakeful dreaming, cleansing the world as dreams cleanse the mind.

Fiction is a mode of play-pretend. In its bounds, you live life as another person, shedding your reality like dirty laundry. What is it like to be a criminal? The shyest, most risk-averse human imaginable can make a pretty good guess, given a book and a bit of time. And what would it be like if an entire ecosystem disappeared? A whole country? What if the world-system collapsed overnight?

These are unanswerable questions. They can be explored, quite profitably, through non-fiction. Even scholars, however, have to speculate, and there is no need to let one group of people have a monopoly on imagining the future.

Leave a comment

Woodcut by John Greenwood.

My job takes me to strange places. The other week I found myself bouncing along the muddy, unpaved roads of a Punta Gorda suburb in search of faulty wells. East of this suburb stretches the barren patchwork of cowfields that dominates Central Florida. Just to the west, on the other hand, is the kind of Florida you’d imagine seeing on TV in the 1950s, all palm-lined, technicolor-paradise streets.

On the surface, my suburb seems to do all it can to distance itself from sunny opulence. The roads are dirt and pothole-ridden. People ride around on tractors and in big muddy Fords. Most of the lots have some kind of livestock living on them, goats, pigs, even emus. Not enough to count as farming, mind. Enough to think of yourself as a farmer.

The lots are large. On them sit multistory, custom houses, set far back from the road. They’re all gated and fenced, wood, iron, or hedge-over-barbed-wire so tall and solid you can’t see into the property. Gee, don’t they know some of us have to get in there to look at their wells? Many of the gates have signs on them. “BEWARE OF DOG, NO TRESPASSING, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.” Multiple gates have copies of a sign proclaiming, “WARNING: ARMED CRAZY REDNECK LIVES HERE” with stencils of handguns, or variations on the theme of “MY HOME SECURITY SYSTEM IS AN ASSAULT RIFLE.” One bears a life-sized cutout of a man pointing a gun at the reader.

Lots of American flags, too. At one house, standing tall on one side of the gate, is a Libertarian flag, and on the other, a blue lives matter flag.

Oh, God, guys… I have to drop the detached reporter act. This shit is so stupid it’s funny. It’s funny that the dudes living in multistory houses a five-minute drive from Sunseeker Resort are so proud to call themselves rednecks. It’s funny to watch them LARPing as ranchers. Buddy, come on.

But sitting there on those unpaved roads, looking up the long, forbidding driveways… I have to think. The lots are so large, the fences so high, the houses so huge they seem like fortresses, there in that little suburb of Punta Gorda. A man’s home is his castle — the sentiment so pervades the atmosphere of the suburb I can almost smell it. I can’t help but think it would take a long time to run from one of these properties on foot, even if you could manage to get over the fence. Not that that’s a metric. But I think on it.

My brown coworker doesn’t come to this neighborhood.

How many of these people homeschool their kids, I wonder? Homeschooling is a big thing in Florida, in the palm-stucco-TV suburbs and in these. Some kids never go to public school, never hear from teachers who think differently than their parents, never get the chance to compare their home lives to those of their peers. I don’t know any of the kids who live here. Only that these are not properties that encourage children to play kickball in the cul-de-sac with their neighbors. This is not signage that bids the extended family, “Welcome in.”

I think Americans, economically-comfortable Americans, have a hard time reckoning with the absolute pervasiveness of child abuse — emotional, physical, sexual — in our society. I mean, the simple acknowledgement of this reality, the pain that exists on the periphery of everything, feels bad. Like finding out there’s a sinkhole beneath your house. Like the coyote running off a cliff, looking down for a moment before he falls. But flinching from that pain, or resenting the people who force your attention to it, does nothing to cure it. Can we at least agree to see what is in front of us?

I see a very tall fence.

What the constant chirping about “Parents’ Rights” seems to miss completely (or to obfuscate, if we decide not to hold ourselves to good-faith interpretations) is that a child’s adult family members, who have near-complete control over them, and upon whom they depend for all survival needs, are far and away the people most likely to hurt and exploit them. We allow parents to dictate what their children learn, where they go, who they know, what women are good for, what we think of “those people,” unquestioned. In all discussions of a child’s wellbeing, the sanctity of the family, the household, is held absolute.

I cannot see through some of these fences. They are designed, signed, to ensure no one sees what goes on behind them. A man’s home is his castle. I hope it is also his wife’s. His children’s. I have absolutely no way to know. I am looking for wells. I am staring at the gate and down the barrel of the cartoon gun.

Anyway, let’s talk about Wuthering Heights.

I. The Spectre of White Heathcliff

First, I need to get the elephant out of the room — I have not watched Emerald Fennell’s movie, and I don’t intend to. Nothing that I’ve heard or seen about this adaptation — “adaptation”? — makes me think that watching it would be a good use of the scant hours I have on Earth1 (Heather Parry’s piece on it includes some great analysis of class and character in the source material, although I disagree with some of her points for reasons that will become clear in a moment).

However, it was debate about the movie that first put Wuthering Heights on my radar. When I saw people raging against Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff, I was intrigued; I’ve long been interested in portrayals of race in classic literature2. I assumed, however, that perhaps Heathcliff was only described as a bit olive in the book (in the vein of Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester), or that his race might be a subtle detail missed by most readers. I assumed that people were merely participating in the time-honored tradition of overreacting online.

Good lord, was I wrong!

Having read the book, it’s completely baffling now to see otherwise-good analyses of Wuthering Heights continue to assert that Heathcliff could be white. I mean, I respect ambiguity, and I respect coming at a character from different angles, but… he simply isn’t. He’s not. The book repeatedly slaps you in the face with the fact that he’s not. Indeed, I was quite shocked by how unambiguous Heathcliff’s nonwhiteness is. For example:

In his introductory scene, he’s described as a “dark-skinned gipsy.”

When he is first brought into the Earnshaw family after Mr. Earnshaw picks him up off the street, the man says of him, “it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil,” and it’s noted that he doesn’t speak English, but instead “some gibberish that nobody could understand.”

Speculating about Heathcliff’s origins, Nelly, a servant and the narrator for the majority of the book, says to him, “Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen.” Later, another character identifies him as “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.”

Heathcliff himself contrasts his appearance to that of Edgar Linton, saying, “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be! […] In other words, I must wish for Edgar Linton’s great blue eyes and even forehead. I do—and that won’t help me to them.”

One of the things that alienates Heathcliff from his son, Linton (names in this book are complicated), is the boy’s lack of resemblance to him (paleness). When Heathcliff sees that he has offended Linton, he says, “Now, don’t wince and colour up! Though it is something to see you have not white blood.”

There are many other examples — Heathcliff’s dark coloring, black eyes, and black hair are constantly referenced, and he’s described as a “gipsy” many times.

The most striking instance in the book relating to Heathcliff’s race, though, is his introduction to the Lintons. In this scene, he and Cathy, still children, are watching the Linton children through a window. When they hear them laughing, the Lintons let their dog out of the house, and it bites Cathy. Heathcliff follows as a servant carries her into the house. The servant instantly assumes he is a thief: “’And there’s a lad here,’ he added, making a clutch at me, ‘who looks an out-and-outer! […] Hold your tongue, you foul-mouthed thief, you! you shall go to the gallows for this. Mr. Linton, sir, don’t lay by your gun.’” Mr. Linton, a magistrate, goes on to say, “Don’t be afraid, it is but a boy—yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face; would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features?” (emphasis mine), and his daughter, Isabella, says, “Frightful thing! Put him in the cellar, papa. He’s exactly like the son of the fortune-teller that stole my tame pheasant.”

They do not know who Heathcliff is, or whose family he comes from, or that he was found as an orphan. These comments are based solely upon their first impression. Sure, he and Cathy were spying — but the Lintons’ instant leap to assumptions of criminality and threats of hanging, which they themselves tie explicitly to Heathcliff’s appearance, makes it clear, especially in context of previous descriptions of Heathcliff, that this interaction is colored by his, well, color.

I want to emphasize this again: Would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features?

Heathcliff’s race is not incidental, not a passing detail, nor an isolated point of intrigue. It is central to his character, central to his interactions, and central to the thematic underpinnings of the book. The prejudice Heathcliff faces actively transforms him from the stoic, inoffensive boy Mr. Earnshaw brought home to the violent, vengeful patriarch who dominates later years. There is no other word for what Heathcliff faces but racialization; removing the idea of race from all of the above excerpts, and from Heathcliff’s character arc, render them nonsensical. He is othered, scorned, and abused on the basis of his dark features. This is text.

But… it is sort of ambiguous, isn’t it? We never get a clear answer as to Heathcliff’s ethnic origins. Maybe he could be, as many people argue, “Black Irish,” or simply an ordinary black-eyed European, a dark, tempestuous, sexy Mr. Rochester type and nothing more. This is classic British literature, after all. Why are you reading into it? It’s much more likely that all of the characters are white. A British woman back then wouldn’t have any reason to write about a brown man, any reason at all to reckon with hierarchies of race. British people in the 19th century didn’t have any interaction with, say, Indian people.

I’ll stop being an dick. People do make informed demographic arguments; sure, it’s historically plausible for Heathcliff to be Irish. Irish people themselves weren’t always considered White, so he could still face prejudice, historically, even if that would mean he is not a person of color in the modern sense.

Now, I could engage on these terms, and argue that Earnshaw picks Heathcliff up at a port that was used heavily in the slave trade — it’s equally plausible, I could say, that he’s African, or South Asian, or Native American, and none of these are explicitly disproved. What matters to the story’s themes, I could say, is the process of racializion and othering that he undergoes; it does not matter if he would check the Caucasian box on a modern American census — he is racialized, indisputably, within the narrative.

But arguing semantics and historical demographics requires me to concede that Heathcliff is ambiguously white or not-white in the modern sense — and I do not concede that. Because, fundamentally, it requires me to believe that Brontë did not intentionally tell the story she told. It requires me to dismiss all of the excerpts I cited above as meaning nothing in particular, the recurring topic of Heathcliff’s color as speaking to no broader historical realities; it requires me to cut Wuthering Heights off from all possibility of global colonial allegory. Most of all, it requires me to believe that when Brontë describes Heathcliff’s skin as “dark,” she meant something other than what she wrote.

II. Reading What’s On the Page

It seems to me that many of the people writing about Wuthering Heights — in this moment and in the past — have a near-pathological compulsion to reimagine the narrative as catering to their own ideas of what it should or could be about.

This sounds harsh. There is always, of course, a certain degree of subjectivity to any piece of art based upon the ideas that a reader brings to it. However… for instance, here’s an essay arguing that Wuthering Heights is about coal, using a sky-high level of abstraction to link it to Heathcliff’s “prehistorical” outsider status — but explicitly choosing not to consider race. Meanwhile, in order to argue that Wuthering Heights is about race and class disparities, you can just… cite the multiple specific and narratively-relevant instances of race and class disparity.

I mean, there’s a difference between reading into certain aspects of a story — there’s certainly an interesting ecological angle to be explored in Wuthering Heights! — and dismissing one of the central ideas of the text in favor of those analyses.

In Heathcliff as bog creature: racialized ecologies in Wuthering Heights, Emma Soberano writes, “Critics take interest in Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity not for what it tells us about race but for the symbolic register […] I thus propose reading and taking seriously race in Wuthering Heights, not as a symbol but as race.“

I see this issue constantly in the “is it a love story” debate. On the one hand, for anyone to imagine Wuthering Heights as a simple forbidden romance is baffling; it’s really a demoralizing, wretched read3, and I can’t picture anyone thinking it’s appealing as a romance besides perhaps the 14-year-olds reading it for school (and while I have the utmost respect for 14-year-olds’ startling tastes, we must acknowledge that this is not an interpretation for adults).

On the other hand, there’s a strangely holier-than-thou equal-and-opposite crowd who insist that only fools think Wuthering Heights has an aspect of romance at all. Heathcliff is a monstrous villain, obsessive and abusive, and his relationship with Cathy is toxic and codependent from the start. Reading romance in it is insane! This take-haver sometimes goes on to proclaim that the book’s ending, enshrined by the union of cousins Cathy Jr. and Hareton Earnshaw and the death of the infamous Heathcliff, represents a sort of healing from the scars of generational trauma, a return to a right state.

The thing is… that’s… uh… not the story.4

I don’t particularly want to play the Heathcliff redeemer here. He’s a great character, but he totally sucks; he’s abusive to his wife and child, manipulative, myopic. However, I’m kind of forced into that role, because it’s the best jumping-off point for a discussion of the mistakes that I see people make so often in interpreting this text.

For instance, I’ve been shocked to see, in scholarly and in casual analysis of Wuthering Heights, that it is often taken as a given that Heathcliff commits marital rape against his wife Isabella (the essay by Sobrano that I quoted above does this). To be clear, it’s a distinct possibility; it’s clear as can be their marriage was awful. However, it is at no point made explicit that sexual assault occurred, nor is it even heavily implied. I mean, it’s possible for pregnancy to result from an abusive relationship without out-and-out rape involved — I’ve had friends in this situation! Heathcliff himself even says that, at least at first, “No brutality disgusted her.” Whether their relationship was physically abusive is also somewhat ambiguous; in Nelly’s telling, Isabella, after souring on Heathcliff, heavily implies that it was, while Heathcliff says he has “avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest right to claim a separation.”

I am not saying that rape was definitively not involved. I think it’s quite… telling… though, that the absolute worst interpretation of Heathcliff’s behavior is the one audiences widely take as a given (…Remind you of any of the scenes I’ve quoted so far?).

This happens constantly. In my opinion it’s related to a key issue certain readings of the text: namely, taking the words of the narrators at face value.

See, Wuthering Heights has a really interesting framing device. There’s the first-person narrator, Lockwood, but the majority of the Earnshaw/Linton story is told to the readers and to Lockwood by Nelly, a gossipy servant. Within Nelly’s narrative, large chunks of the story are told to her by other parties.

Events are not relayed through an all-knowing, detached reporter; instead, most come through double-and-triple layers of unreliable, biased people talking about events long-passed. We cannot be certain at all about what Heathcliff did or didn’t do, how awful Cathy really was as a child, whether parents were cruel or kind — all of the information we receive, except for Lockwood’s firsthand accounts of his own interactions with Heathcliff, is hearsay.

But wait, wait — wasn’t I just saying that people should take descriptions of Heathcliff literally? How can I then go on to argue that readers shouldn’t believe descriptions of events?

The key issue here is intentionality.

For example, the argument that we as an audience are supposed to understand Nelly’s narration as describing events exactly as they happened, to the letter, requires us to assume that Brontë created all of these twisty layers of narration across multiple chapters and took care to emphasize Nelly’s gossipy and judgemental nature just… cuz? As, like, set dressing?

It seems obvious to assume that an author chooses to include details in her work deliberately. But, when it comes to discussion of Wuthering Heights, this assumption does not seem to be operating.

Let’s return to the “is it romantic or not” question. Is Heathcliff an irredeemable monster5? Well, I’m not here to litigate that. However, I have seen multiple people cite a particular instance: Of course he’s irredeemable! He hung his wife’s dog! Some people even say he killed the dog.

Which… A, crucially misses the fact that the dog is not dead. Specifically, Nelly found it “suspended by a handkerchief, and nearly at its last gasp” (not specified to have been hung by the neck) and then “quickly released the animal.” A minute later, it’s running around and barking. Heathcliff himself later brags about hanging it — indeed, as an adult, he has a habit of playing up his own violence and brutality — but, of the many accusations we can level at Heathcliff, “tying a dog up with a handkerchief, maybe or maybe not by the neck” is neither the most definite nor the most severe.

To be clear, I’m not dismissing animal abuse, and this is just one example of Heathcliff’s overall suckage. What I want to draw your attention to, though, is the fact that Brontë chose to specify that the dog did not die. She chose not to make Heathcliff the killer of his wife’s yappy little dog. Sure, maybe he meant to kill it and just didn’t manage to, as many Reddit warriors claim — but that’s a shockingly Watsonian explanation, isn’t it? If he had killed the dog it would be narratively inconsequential, still just another cruelty in his list of cruelties… but he specifically didn’t kill it. If the point is that Heathcliff is just an outright, inhuman villain, why not have him kill the dog?

Why, also, include the scene were Heathcliff catches the infant Hareton after his deranged father drops him from a balcony, saving his life? Hareton grows to love Heathcliff because he saved his life when his own father would have killed him. Brontë does not hesitate to showcase Hindley’s brutality, and in a point-for-point contest of the two characters’ terrible acts, Hindley would surely come out ahead. Even Hareton takes his own casual foray into dog-hanging.

To be honest, I found a different interaction between Heathcliff and animals more memorable than the dog-hanging. Right before he receives the news of Cathy’s death, he stands “leant against an old ash-tree, his hat off, and his hair soaked with the dew that had gathered on the budded branches, and fell pattering round him. He had been standing a long time in that position, for I saw a pair of ousels passing and repassing scarcely three feet from him, busy in building their nest, and regarding his proximity no more than that of a piece of timber.” It’s striking, the way he’s able to blend with nature, the way the birds are at peace near him. The contrasts between Heathcliff’s bursts of aggression and his moments of serenity, between the tolerant boy he was and the angry man he became, exist for a reason. The moments where he is cruel and abrasive, the moments where his actions fall short of that professed cruelty, and the moments where they don’t, are all presented, through many obscuring layers, for our consideration.

We should, y’know, consider them.

Though this isn’t a love story, there is a romance at the heart of it. There is genuine love in the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy — otherwise, what are we to do with all those heartwrenching laments of one for the other? There is also a real element of fantasy to it; is it not appealing, just a bit, to think of someone being so devoted to you that they scorn all people in favor of you, devote their life to vengeance on those who caged you, and even tried to follow you beyond the grave? As BDM writes in a new piece for The New York Times, “For those whose hearts crave the bleakness of the wilderness, for whom love represents not a pair of doves or a box of chocolates but two hawks stooped to kill, Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ will remain waiting to be read.”

At the same time as it appeals, it horrifies. Obsession has two sides, the allure, the violence. This is the point.

On that same token, I think one of the most disconcerting claims about Wuthering Heights is that it has a happy ending — that the cycle of abuse ends with the death of Heathcliff and the happy union between Catherine and Hareton. There are many reasons why I disagree with this, but it annoys me most on a pedantic level that people claim the story of the second generation represents a “breaking of the cycle” when 2/3 of the characters are literally named after characters of the previous generation (Catherine and Linton).

@antiquatedomensHahaha where’d you get that Heathcliff buddy? #heathcliff #wutheringheights #catherineearnshaw #emilybronte #gothicliterature

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Are we to assume Brontë just did that for laughs? Just to make it more confusing to talk about the book? Are we to assume that this section of the book being centered upon on an incestuous love triangle between all the offspring of the previous generation simply… doesn’t mean anything? Cousin marriages may have been (debatably) normal “back then,” and incest a staple of Gothic literature — ok, fine — but does that mean we must dismiss it as entirely devoid of thematic significance?

Also, what cycle is apparently broken here? It remains the case that the wealthy heirs of these estates are neglected/abandoned by their parents or orphaned, that they have virtually no contact with outside society, and that they fall in love with each other mostly because there’s no one else around who will express affection for them (Catherine’s father essentially forbids her to venture outside of their estate).

Then, at the apex of Heathcliff’s rise to power, the height of his villainy, when he has control of the estates and all the heirs of the Earnshaws and Lintons under his thumb… he doesn’t do anything. After years of work, of grief and rage and petty torments, he doesn’t have the will to bring whatever his master plan actually was to fruition. In his own words:

“It is a poor conclusion, is it not?” he observed, having brooded a while on the scene he had just witnessed: “an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.”

If the story was really a cut-and-dry narrative about how there was this one guy who sucked really bad and was evil and he destroyed the happiness of these families, but then he died and it’s okay now :D … why in the world would it end like this, with Heathcliff being simply unable to cause the misery he’d aimed at? Why would he have been such a likeable child, painstakingly shown to be molded into a snarling, vengeful man by the prejudice he faced at every turn?

Also, that story would be BORING. And if Brontë had wanted to write a banal, uncomplicated narrative about an evil guy, I trust she had the skill to do it.

The story we have instead is genius. The way the details all weave together, the webs of implication and half-truths and hypocrisies… it’s an impeccably crafted narrative. Nothing is simple set dressing. The very ground, the moor itself, is woven into a rich thematic tapestry of nature, artifice, and alienation.

What my complaint boils down to is that a lot of the arguments surrounding this text require you to assume that Brontë includes details for no deeper reason than to include them, with no aspiration toward broader political or philosophical themes. At the extreme end of this tendency you have Emerald Fennell’s hetslop movie. However, many critics of the movie do the exact same thing, failing to recognize Heathcliff’s race as thematically important and failing to see anything but toxicity in his relationship with Cathy. Both require you to straight-up ignore huge chunks of the text, a significant portion of its thematic ambitions, and also its complicated narrative structure based on hearsay, hipocrisies, and doublespeak.

Brontë didn’t go through all the trouble of creating this framing device just cuz. She didn’t name Heathcliff’s own son after his rival just cuz, or pair off Catherine and Hareton just cuz. She was capable of recognizing that the things done to certain characters were deplorable even when her narrators did not, and that’s the entire point of the story.

And it seems like no one even notices what a feat she achieved. They’re too busy bickering over whether Heathcliff represents a woman’s bodice-ripper fantasy or not, or whether classic writers can be trusted to have written the words they meant to write.

I mean, good lord. Would it kill you people to believe Brontë knew what she was doing?

III. The Case [for/against] Cathy

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper.

If we can agree that the layers of unreliable narrators color the version of the story we receive, then arriving at a “true” judgment of a character’s actions is impossible. We’re forced to puzzle out the broad shapes of what “really” happened from a tangle of multiple characters’ testimonies and judgments.

(Can we take a moment to appreciate how fun this is? Nothing “really” happened at all, but Brontë has created such a sublime shadow-play.)

The only time readers hear from Cathy Earnshaw directly is when Lockwood reads a few pages of her childhood diary. Otherwise, she appears only as narrated by Nelly.

Nelly characterizes Cathy is as a wild and spoiled child, and is rarely charitable in her descriptions. Still, we’re able to get a sense, corroborated by the testimony of Cathy’s diary, of a childhood characterized by repression, isolation, the constant correction (verbal or physical) of any hint of willfulness, and punitive religious instruction.

It seems that Cathy was a feisty and independent child, and unmistakably a landlord’s daughter. To be honest, as someone who has had friends with BPD, Cathy is familiar to me. I don’t want to spend a long time arguing this point — if you know, you know. No, I’m not saying Brontë had a modern diagnosis in mind when writing her. But certain types of people have always existed, and it is reasonable for an author to have described them without having the ideas of modern psychology onhand.

Maybe a pious, stable, obedient girl would have been able to grow up in these circumstances without making quite so many enemies. But, nevertheless, is Cathy wrong for bucking against unreasonable restraints? If people interpret your every action as defiant, regardless of intent, you might reasonably give up trying to please them.

For those who aren’t picking up what I’m putting down, I’ll put it bluntly: Would Nelly, Joseph, and everyone else have disapproved of Cathy’s personality so much if she had been a boy?

Readers of classic literature have this tendency to ideologically roleplay as people of that time. Sometimes this is necessary — you can’t really enjoy The Illiad without sort of buying into the moral code it operates under, nor can you make sense of Moby Dick without taking into account contemporary attitudes about race. However, sometimes I think this goes too far, assuming a uniformity of attitudes among people at a given time and working off of incomplete information about those prevailing attitudes (Clearly Wuthering Heights isn’t about race. People didn’t understand racism back then the way we do now. It’s a product of its time6). Donning the mantle of Victorian sensibilities, readers agree that Cathy’s behavior is inappropriate, and that she is as much a monster as Heathcliff. She’s a flirt and a brat. Clearly the narrative means to condemn her.

But does it condemn her? Do the words written on the page, independent of whatever ideas we readers have about the attitudes of the 1840s, weave a narrative in which Cathy is no more than a moral warning, a spectacle of toxicity whose caprices bring about her own downfall?

Well, clearly my answer isn’t yes, but it’s also not no.

We see the emotional environment in which Cathy and Heathcliff grow up, repressive, punitive, anemic. And in this dreary place, Cathy dares to have spirit. She dares to want things. She commits the cardinal sin of wanting friendship, wanting adventure, wanting Heathcliff. She and Heathcliff, constantly subject to vicious racism (”a kindness to the country to hang him at once”), have the audacity to gravitate toward each other… being literally the only two kids around.

To be honest, I can’t fathom reading this book and thinking it’s as simple as that Cathy and Heathcliff were just bad people, and through their bad natures ruined a peaceful slice of life. It’s the strictures of class, whiteness, and patriarchy that leeched the life out of them.

Yes, I’m onto some SJW shit now. But you’ve made it this far — you’re buckled in, and you’ll go where I damn well please to take you.

My sympathy for Cathy is complicated, because, in the end, she caves. She makes the choice to marry Edgar Linton, the man whom this propriety she’s railed against her whole life dictates she should marry, because to do otherwise would be to renounce her status entirely. She caves to the pressure to be the white, rich wife of a white, rich man, instead of following her human impulses, her soul, towards Heathcliff. Even though she’s railed against the dictates of society her entire life, when the moment comes to abandon them, she doesn’t. She chooses Edgar Linton, and it’s the wound that bleeds across the remainder of the story.

I don’t see a lot of discussion about the precise manner of Cathy’s death. Which is surprising, because it’s one of the most horrific things in the book.

People die of a broken heart quite often in classic literature. Coupled with childbirth, that’s sort of what happens to Cathy. It could be easy to call it melodrama, weakness, and Cathy is self-aware about that. She says, “Supposing at twelve years old I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association […] and been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger: an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world.[…] Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed?”

You can claim Cathy deserved what she got, either because of her wild and selfish nature or her choice to marry Linton. But the account we receive of what happened to her is, on its face, horrifying.

Nelly doesn’t condemn the way Cathy’s psychological deterioration is handled. Indeed, she’s annoyed with Cathy to the last. However, looking at the literal events she lays out, what I see is: A mentally unstable woman is locked in a room for months following a nervous breakdown, starving herself, suicidal, miserable, and out of touch with reality7. Eventually, she weakens herself so much that she wastes away and then dies in childbirth.

I mean… that’s rest cure shit!

After the horror of Cathy’s death, Linton is distant from their daughter for a few days, but then comes to love her. And… keeps her isolated for years, forbidding her to go beyond the Grange or explore the moors. Of course she falls in love with her cousin as soon as she meets him. He’s the only boy she’s met!

If we don’t pretend that people writing in the 1800s understood nothing about empathy, and nothing about the effects of isolation, how can we possibly view this narrative as a simple “don’t be like these people” story, or Cathy and Heathcliff as characters meant only for scorn?

Might we instead have to acknowledge, maybe, that Heathcliff was right to be a little mad?

Brontë wrote sympathetic characters. We are invited to resonate with Cathy’s free spirit, with Heathcliff’s otherness. We are invited to suffer alongside them. We are invited to see beauty in their love for each other. Without that beauty, without that sympathy, there would be no tragedy, because there would be nothing lost.

And the point is to show us what’s lost.

IV. Place and Alienation

As an ecologist, something that fascinates me in fiction is when nature fills the role of divinity. It happens in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and even in the video game Disco Elysium8. Characters’ relationships to the ecosystem represent separation from or submission to the whole of life; the closest they can come to apotheosis is by surrendering themselves to something great and unknowable.

The moors take on an important role in Wuthering Heights. They are more than a frame, do more than provide the stark, distinctive atmosphere. Nature reaches into the narrative, enveloping Heathcliff at the news of Cathy’s death, scaffolding the final line: “I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

In childhood, Heathcliff and Cathy ramble freely out across the moors. On her deathbed, Cathy cries, “I wish I were out of doors!” and flings open the window of her room to feel the icy air. She says, “I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

There are the moors, and Cathy’s spirit; then, there are the interiors of the great houses, Mrs. Linton, separate from all she was and all that was her soul.

She dreams, “Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

She and Heathcliff were separated from nature, that of the ecosystem and of their own humanity, in order to live wanting, miserable lives in fine houses and then die. If there is a happy ending to be had, the state of the Earnshaws and Lintons remaining has nothing to do with it. It is the return of Cathy and Heathcliff to the moors.

The central matter of Wuthering Heights is alienation — by society, from each other, from nature. I do not think anything about these ideas has to be changed or simplified in order to be highly relevant to audiences in the modern day.

V. Conclusions

I did not expect Wuthering Heights to break my heart. I certainly did not expect it to be what it was. It is a complicated, tragic, and, indeed, very political tapestry. It is as sharp in its discussions of class, race, and patriarchy as it is in its explorations of desire and obsession. You can get as mad as you want at me about making it political, but this stuff is there. Ignoring it does a disservice to the book and to its author.

It is egregious, and misses the point, not to understand Heathcliff as man of color. It renders inert what is otherwise a live current that runs throughout Wuthering Heights. This book is predicated on his otherness. It’s predicated on, more than that, the sublimation of diversity – meaning here simply “difference” — by the social power of wealth and whiteness. Removing that dimension adds nothing and takes so much away.

This is such a bleak, frustrating story because all of the suffering in it comes from pointless exclusion and from the doctrine of how people should be. None of this had to happen. It’s not that Heathcliff is a demon and Cathy is a bitch. They are human. They’re not necessarily good people. But the core of the narrative is the making of these people into monsters, a ghost and a devil, by crushing them into a society that cannot accommodate them.

That’s the level I have to engage with this book on. Because, otherwise, I cannot grasp any substance in it. I do not understand how people come to love Wuthering Heights without seeing it as political, without recognizing it for the masterful portrayal it is of the suffocation of humanity within the strictures of class.

Suffocation — in service of what? In service of keeping the house. Respectability — but who’s there to respect this? The countryside is empty, the houses barely staffed. The life of a wealthy landlord seems to be a miserable, empty, personless place that eats and destroys any spark of humanity that comes into it. The whole narrative is about people betraying and destroying themselves — and their children — for nothing. Cathy chooses Edgar, Edgar keeps their daughter confined, Heathcliff makes his fortune only to come back to the place where he began; they make themselves miserable only in order to maintain their miserable lives.

I feel like this remains as relevant today as it was in the 19th century. The rich are miserable, the people living in accordance with “traditional values” are defensive and repressed, and yet they are all compelled to maintain such lives. For what?

In all of Wuthering Heights, nobody really takes a step back and thinks, like, why is it so wrong for this girl to love this boy? Why is it so wrong for him to be here? Why is it wrong for her to have a spirit, to roam, to want?

The treatment Heathcliff and Cathy face is prima facie horrible. The fact that Heathcliff turns into such a terrible tyrant does not negate the abuse. Indeed, oppression often makes worse people of its victims — as for any animal, repeated violence will make a person unpleasant, paranoid, cornered, and bitey. Sometimes everybody being mean to you will render you indisposed to be kind in return. Understanding this is, I think, crucial to actually helping people who have been oppressed. Heathcliff’s victimhood in no way makes up for the things that he does to this second generation, especially his own son, but this context is what makes his later actions coherent with the broader themes of the book. Something set the rock rolling.

In the end, Heathcliff became exactly what everybody always told him he was. Yet… really, not even as demonic as that. He never killed anyone. He never drove a knife through Linton’s chest (and I would’ve been tempted to). He didn’t end up ruining either of the families he’d intended to ruin. He created oppressive, draining environments for the people in his care, and yet that was exactly what was done to him. When he was a child, they said they should hang him before he grew into his features. Can you imagine? They told him he was not human, and so of course he did not act humanely.

This is the tragedy.

It is the essence of my understanding of Heathcliff. A young boy was thrown into a society in which the basic operating principle is the maintenance of wealthy, white, patriarchal power, and the machine crunched him up and spit him out as it was designed to do. When he returns to wreak havoc on that society, he is not some outside threatening force, but its own natural result. He is the shadow of white upper-class society. We are invited to analyze what created him9.

In the end, the system wins out. The same patterns repeat. We’re left with the children of the same people, with the same names, served by the same servants, living in the same houses. The disruption is over; the blood of the outsider has been excised from the line. The tenants pay their rents, the white man loves the white woman in the castle on the hill, and this world carries on in its peaceful, incestuous tradition.

VI.

I idle in a driveway of the Florida suburb, on the land that less than a century ago was swamp. The flag hangs limp above the mechanized gate, blue stripe bright on black. I crane and stretch to see through the bars of the fence, to see the house, to see the place where the water swells from deep underground.

Subscribe now

Share

BTW — the audiobook of Wuthering Heights is free on Libby, and you can access the full text online here. In case it’s not clear, I loved this book, and I highly recommend checking it out.

This is a guest post by the immensely talented Jaye Kaplan. Find more of their work on Instagram.

Instagram

Subscribe now

Years ago, in my many hours of reading about random topics, particularly about less-than-mainstream Jewish spirituality, I came across an interesting throw away sentence. In “The Hebrew Priestess”, Hammer mentioned the theory that Judith is in some way based on Anat, and that Judith has an Egyptian origin. Later, I read Neal Wall’s “The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic myth”, and as I wrestled with my rage at the author and fascination at the discovery he himself did not appreciate, I realized that perhaps there had been a transmasculine figure hiding in plain sight. And better yet, one who, like me, was alienated from the idea of transmasculinity.

Judith is the protagonist of a non-canonical book of Jewish scripture (though Judith is still culturally important to many Jews, and used to feature in Hanukkah celebrations). Nominally, Judith is a woman. Specifically, Judith is a childless widow, whose husband left them enough money and property to support themself for the rest of their life. The claim to fame of the story is how Judith seduces and kills Holofrenes, an invading general that threatens the ancient kingdom of Israel.

Anat is a Canaanite divinity and nominally a goddess, commonly considered to be a “virgin warrior goddess of love”, though this is disputed academically. Walls, in his analysis of the previous academic literature on Anat and presentation of his own opinion, argues that while Anat is certainly a warrior and a “virgin”, they aren’t a love goddess. At times some of his arguments to this end come off as contrarian. For example, he argues Anat and Baal didn’t have a sexual relationship in mythology, but one of the fragments he disputes because it doesn’t directly name Anat is hard to interpret any other way. The two main myths Anat features in are the story of Baal’s death and resurrection, and the Tale of Aqhat [Walls].1

A word before we go further: even if Anat and Judith do not have a proven direct connection that does not mean that comparing them is without value. I do not write most of my self published religious essays based only on an academic perspective. Academic research enhances them, but they are a mix of academic and devotional perspectives. The intention of comparing the two is not necessarily to prove something to the field of religious history; it is to see what we can learn by examining two figures that arose from the same region, albeit at different times.

Anat’s personality is suited to a warrior. They are strong willed, skilled in violence, and not shy about using it. One of Anat’s Ugaritic epithets is “Anat the Destroyer”. This personality is integral to interpreting their gender. Their temper is directly connected to a performance of man-ness. When Anat threatens to break El’s head open, the older god responds by remarking how much like a man Anat is. Walls, being a contrarian, translates away from the obvious and claims that stem for man actually means Anat is “uncontrollable”, referencing a possible Hebrew cognate. This is generally the theme of his book focusing on the then current research about Anat and their mythic function: simultaneously he brings up evidence strongly indicating Anat’s gender variance, but views Anat through his own cispatriarchal lens, and does not separate either his own patriarchal mindset or the Ugaritic one from analyzing Anat. The word “confused” or “confused gender identity” appears frequently in Walls.

In the Tale of Aqhat, Anat’s desire to be a man, to embody the masculine role, is embodied by the desire for a beautifully crafted bow. They offer to buy it from a mortal prince (Aqhat) but he declines. At first he tells Anat of the divine craftsman who made it for him as a gift, saying Anat should commission a new bow, but when Anat persists, he becomes rude, asking “what does a woman need with a bow?” For this, Anat seduces and then murders him. It is, however, all for naught: the bow is lost in the sea, and Aqhat’s death has a supernatural ripple effect, causing a massive famine. The bow is connected to both masculinity and fertility; in a West Asian context an object can itself be magically and symbolically connected to gender, with Ishtar (another war god) turning men into women by taking their bows and giving them spindles instead. Anat makes no commentary from the surviving fragments we have about questioning what a woman or man’s role is, and they do not assert their right “as a woman” to pursue what a man can. [Walls]

What Anat wants for themself is a symbol of manhood, to be the rightful owner of it, without the corruption of a craftsman making something with a woman in mind. Anat does not want to buy the bow. Anat wants to have been divinely given a “bow”- Anat wants for the other gods to have made them a man from birth. The text makes Anat’s gender the problem. This “woman”, desiring to be a man, not only causes disaster, but is doomed to failure. The symbol of manhood Anat desired is destroyed by his attempt to possess it. Anat is punished under patriarchy for going too far in his quest for manhood. It is one thing when Anat enacts violence that benefits cis men, as he does in avenging Baal; it’s another when Anat enacts violence for himself. This is not me projecting: this is the interpretation furthered by Walls himself. “Anat threatens the basic social fabric of the patriarchal culture as well as the life of Aqhat. Indeed, Anat’s ambiguous gender results in the death of not just any masculine male but in the demise of the royal heir. The suffering of the entire society is reflected in Aqhat through the languishing of nature in sympathy with Aqhat’s fate.” [Walls]

As Anat kills Aqhat, Judith kills Holofrenes. By killing Holofrenes, under the patriarchal system that we live in where combat is a man’s world, Judith proves themself to be “more” man than all the men in their city. It is only after Judith kills him that anyone else dares to take up arms and fight his now disorganized army. Further, beheading Holofernes has been interpreted as a metaphorical castration (Lewis).2 Similarly, Anat’s killing of Aqhat, because of the phallic image of the bow, can also be seen as castration [Walls].

Judith’s gender is even more conspicuous due to their position as a widow and as an adult “woman” without children. The fact that their name is Judith- literally “Jewish woman”- almost comes off as a reminder that we should definitely be thinking of Judith as a woman and not contemplate the gender transgressions too much, akin to Zeus taking a moment to scold Aphrodite for being present in battle.

While Anat never gives any indication that they feel anything other than revelry in their cosmetics, clothes, and makeup, this is not true for Judith. Judith prefers to live in an ascetic manner. This is also familiar to me from an Egyptian context as there are a few early Christian saints, some of them Coptic, who are transmasc. The most notable of these is Hilarion,: Hilarion was a child of the Roman Emperor. He chose to run away from home to a remote monastery in Egypt, claiming to be a eunuch and devoting himself to religion as a monk. He requested to be buried in his clothes and bedding so that no one would know his birth sex; unfortunately, one person knew of it anyway and spilled the beans.

A monastic or otherwise ascetic life occurs repeatedly in these early Christian transmasc stories, and it is no accident that it would be appealing from the perspective of the saints. Asceticism frequently involves casting away “frivolous” things (which, under patriarchy, often targets feminine ecotremont) and fasting. Fasting, especially to the extent sometimes depicted in art of saints, makes the body appear more androgynous by decreasing body fat. This is still an issue in trans spaces, with some trans people having eating disorders spurred on by dysphoria. And Judith is indeed, described as doing extensive fasting on every day except Shabbat and the day before, the new moon and the day before, and feast days. Judith does all this long past the religious requirement as a widow, indicating a preference for this lifestyle. While Lewis argues this is an expression of piety, this does not separate it from transgender performance, as is the case with Hilarion taking on a male name and living as a man while also living an ascetic life.

There is still some slight parallel to this in Anat’s identity as a hunter. Both hunters and ascetics live apart from society. In the ancient Mediterranean, hunter figures could be connected to both celibacy and hypersexuality. Such figures sometimes explicitly refused to take part in normative gender roles, and goddesses associated with the hunt or wild often were favored by women and “eunuchs”, i.e. a large category of gender variant people. [Walls] In Egypt, another goddess compared to Anat, Hathor/Sekhmet, is described as having “women-men” honoring them in procession- likely the contemporary way to describe gender variant people. [Egypt’s Returning Goddesses by Edward P. Butler] Elsewhere, texts refer to “men-women” in the context of goddess worship. [DePauw, Notes on Transgressing Gender Boundaries in Ancient Egypt] This terminology also reflects Anat’s “Male Lady” title. Unfortunately I do not have access to the original papyrus or a transliteration here, so I cannot confirm if the word used elsewhere for some trans people (man-woman) is used as Anat’s title.

Anat was also popular enough to be worshipped in Egypt- by both pagan Egyptians and Jewish Egyptians. Anat’s epithet “the Male Lady” is furthered as Anat is referenced as wearing a combination of women and men’s clothes, and being “a woman who acts like a warrior” [walls and the Chester Beatty Papyrus VII]. In Egypt, Anat is sometimes depicted as married- interestingly, to Set. Set is a god associated with chaos, war, and storms and as such was equated to Levantine storm gods, which may explain part of their association. Set is also notable, however, for being the only deity of the pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian pantheon that definitely has a queer sexuality. The god Anat is wed to by the Egyptians is the one that we know has sex with both men and women; in one sense this “brings Anat in” to the normative gender expectations of a woman, but in another it preserves Anat’s gender variance by matching them to a god whose sexuality (and possibly gender) is itself, “other” and non-reproductive. In fact, the very text that describes Anat’s masculine dress is one that discusses Anat and Set having sex (possibly non-consensually). Anat was popular among the Elephantine Jews, where they called them Anat-Yahu. Anat does not seem to otherwise appear in Jewish literature or culture, despite attempts to uncover such references (van der Toorn).3 However, the discovery of a figure of them in Gaza, Palestine means they were not unknown to Jews or Canaanites in Antiquity.

It is dubiously possible that Anat-Yahu is referenced indirectly in scripture. Jeremiah condemns a group of Jews for worshipping the “Queen of Heaven” (a title held by many goddesses), some of which had moved to Egypt. He prophesies their doom. This group of Jews tells him to sod off, and their fate is never mentioned again- giving no indication Jeremiah’s prophecy coming to pass. Jeremiah lived in the 7th and 6th century (not quite contemporary to the function of the Elephantine Temple; its earliest record is 525BC, while he died in 570BC) but most of Jeremiah was composed later, with the relevant section possibly being written as early as 540.

While the more likely identification with a “Queen of Heaven” worshipped by pre-monotheistic Jews would be Asherah or Astarte, who are more strongly associated with such a title, the mention of Egypt is conspicuous. No worship of Asherah or Astarte is known among Egyptian Jews; however, worship of Anat is. Additionally, all three are sometimes called “Lady of Heaven” in Egyptian texts. While Anat is not a “woman”, feminine titles are often still given to them due to how their gender has been perceived in cisheteropatriarchal society. One interpretation I have read was that this “Queen of Heaven” was not so much another god as it was the identification of G-d as “feminine”.

We know little about how “Anat-Yahu” was perceived. While the hyphenated name is commonly interpreted as “Anat of Yahu”, it is also possible that it was intended to refer to a hybrid deity- similar to the common Egyptian practice of blending two gods to create figures such as “Isis Aphrodite”. While some have assumed that the Elephantine Jews would have been very guarded against outside influences (van der Toorn), the fact they intermarried with native Egyptians and swore oaths with the names of other gods makes this seem less likely. The idea of Anat here being a hypostasis (essentially, an emanation, the way Kali is often an emanation of Durga or the way a square is a rectangle) is currently rejected, but without religious literature to analyse I think this is hasty. Just because a religious practice is true among a group of people in one region does not mean it will necessarily be true for the same group of people in a different region, hundreds of years later and exposed to new ideas. Even if not historically true, it can be interesting to contemplate in a modern theological context.

With this, we return to our beginning. Is Judith based on Anat? Did Judith come from an Egyptian context?

I find the argument that Judith was based on Anat, or that they are in some other way related through a fusion of ideas in Egypt as it was first fully presented problematic: for example, the original theory mentions a community of Jews of Samaria at Leontopolis, which does not occur until the time of the Oniad Temple centuries later (and, these Jews were not specifically from Samaria). This is used to argue that Judith was first written at Elephantine and translated into Greek around 146 BC to encourage Oniad Jews to defend their temple as they had defended the Elephantine Temple, presuming the two communities are connected and that therefore the Oniads remembered and cherished Elephantine. This completely lacks evidence. While the letter between Onias and the Pharaoh implied there were localized Jewish temples in Egypt (part of Onias’ persuasion to build his is as a centralizing measure) no known Oniad literature references Elephantine. The two temples are in completely different parts of Egypt, and the Elephantine Temple was likely destroyed around the beginning of the 4th century BC. The supposition that some Jews of Elephantine had descendants that later integrated into the Oniad community is possible, but currently unproven. Even if such a thing did happen, the memory of Elephantine may have been distorted or lost, and it is dubious if any religious tales would have survived the interim.

The reformulated theory rests on slightly different grounds. It does posit that some or all of the Jews of Elephantine originated in Samaria, and notes that Judith is sometimes analyzed as being pro-Samaritan. The context of what “Samaritan” meant, however, is completely different before and after the rule of Cyrus the Great. Going by the Rabbinic history, the difference between Samaritans and Jews arose when Jews returned from Exile under the rule of Cyrus. The Samaritans claim an earlier date during the life of Eli in the 11th century BC [Fried].4 Archeologically there seems to have been continued cohabitation and no severe schism into the Achaemenid period. However, with the establishment of the Samaritan Temple, a rift seems to have grown until a Hasmonean destroyed the Temple, setting the schism into stone [Knoppers].5 This is not implausible, as Anat was likely more popular further north in the Levant around the region of Syria and Samaria (now Northern Palestine) (van der Toorn). This argument is furthered by finding parallels to Anat and Astarte in the story of Deborah and Jael, which has a northern origin and resonates with the story of Judith. These parallels as argued are plausible but not absolute.

The problems arise as the reformed theory argues that Judith reflects the events of the destruction of the Elephantine and Oniad Temples, and that “Jerusalem” in Judith metaphorically refers to any city with a temple. There simply is no specific parallel aside from a threat to a temple. We have little information to clarify exactly how the Elephantine Temple ceased operation, but it likely was not an invasion-type event. The closure of the Oniad Temple was done by the Romans, making it more similar, but it isn’t clear what was going on in the community of Oniads at the time or how the Romans who came to destroy it interacted with them. Finally, I find the idea that Oniad or Elephantine Jews would use “Jerusalem” that way dubious. Two of the literary works we have that likely originate among the Oniads (Joseph and Asenath; 3 Maccabees) are not at all shy about identifying their events with Egypt and referencing a Jewish temple in Egypt. 3 Maccabees does use parallelism between events in Jerusalem and Egypt, but it does not call the site of the Egyptian temple mentioned near the end “Jerusalem”.

As for the additional evidence: The presence of Assyrians at Elephantine and in Judith is indeed notable. The Elephantine Jews were likely displaced by the Assyrians and mainly served the Persian Empire, and Judith portrays antagonism between Jews and Assyrians. The Jewish women of Elephantine did enjoy more egalitarian status (and, I would add, there is some implication of Oniads also giving women a more equal status) that would lead to “female” protagonists in religious tales. The rest of the evidence simply isn’t very strong. At most, the reformulated theory proves Judith likely had a northern author and was influenced by Deborah and Jael, and that the latter two were also influenced by Anat. It doesn’t prove a direct connection between Judith and Anat, and it doesn’t prove Judith was originally written in Egypt.

What constitutes being a woman? Ignoring its obsession with genitals, the cisheterosexual world responds: a mother, a wife, an “angel of the house”. A woman who does not marry is “incomplete”, imagined as a miserable spinster who will die alone. For this reason, there are many lesbians who are nonbinary: society does not view them as “real women”, and they primarily understand themselves as lesbians. In the early days of sexology, this also held true- gay men and women were “inverts”, and gay women were sometimes described as having men’s souls. This was not rejected at the time: Radclyffe Hall wrote “The Well of Loneliness” as a lesbian. The protagonist of the book is a masculine lesbian who identifies as an invert, just as Hall did. In avoiding men and breaking from the heterosexuality binary, one may no longer be considered a “woman”.

Girl is not the same gender as woman either; they have different expectations, dress differently, and in some cases it is not just that girl is not the same gender as woman, but that “child”, regardless of assigned sex, is its own gender.

Widow and virgin are both different genders from “woman”, though they are connected to womanhood by society. Virgin for Anat may have meant “unwed adult/adolscent assigned female at birth” and not a virgin as we see it today. Whether unwed or widowed, both occupy a unique space of freedom. Anat has their own palace and while possibly having sex, never gives themself in marriage in the Levant and is never controlled by a cis man. Judith, once widowed, may seduce a man, but chooses to never remarry despite having many suitors. This does not indicate they dislike men. It is instead, a strategic choice to reduce the influence and control of cis men over their lives. The benefits of marriage- wealth, economic stability- don’t matter for a virgin god or a wealthy widow.

Virginity and widowhood are both defined by the absence of a man. To a cisheteropatriarchal world, the man and the woman are opposites that must be contained in separate bodies, idealized as being almost different species. More than that, a woman is only truly a woman when attached to a man (the same is also true vice versa, but because of patriarchy men often have a little more freedom to disrupt this).

Additionally, the different stages of life have temporal genders. Such reasoning is behind the circumcision of both boys and girls for certain Sudanese people; children have their own gender and must be “made” men or women by removing a body part viewed as being of the opposite gender. I would further argue that “widow” is also a different gender from “woman”, though one can move between states more readily. Widows also have traditionally dressed differently, behave differently, and have different social expectations and obligations. Often a widow is expected to become a woman again (pending various factors like her age) and adopt the dress and behaviors of women once more. A widow who refuses to do so, in spite of marriage offers, is making a choice about gender.

Anat is also tied to widows, or at least mourning. In the Baal cycle, Anat hears of Baal’s death and searches for his corpse. Upon finding it, they put on a loincloth of sackcloth, gouged at their face, arms, chest, and back, and loudly cried out at the injustice. Anat carries his body to an appropriate resting place, buries him, and sacrifices animals of multiple kinds (70 wild oxen, 70 bulls, 70 sheep, etc) in his honor. Anat spends a significant time wandering in grief before challenging Mot (the god of death) in combat, killing him and restoring Baal to life [Walls].

Anat is sometimes interpreted as having a beard, and the line about gashing at the face is also sometimes translated as cutting a beard. The Ugaritic word “dqn” can mean either chin or beard, so which meaning was intended is functionally impossible to determine. [Walls] I have seen a Palestinian artist fuse the two ideas, by depicting a mourning and vengeful Anat with chin tattoos that were designed to evoke the idea of a beard. This may be owed as well to the fact that in the Levant and Egypt, the word for face tattoos commonly seen on women is deq/dakk (this artist having a different gender interpretation of Anat).

Lewis refers to Judith as performing “widow-drag”, something that Anat also does. They both wear sackcloth wrapped around their thighs and over their genitals while mourning men who are close to them, something which indicates a sexual unavailability. The performance of widow is both connected to and separate from womanhood, as it is the conspicuous absence of a man from a “woman’s” life due to death. In widowhood, Judith is also protected from having to participate in cisheteropatriarchal society as there is a very obvious reason why they are unwed, and it would be at least gauche to intrude upon it. Judith’s childless widowhood also allows them to perform their role as heroic seducer without the audience or other characters feeling shamed or uncomfortable. If Judith’s husband still lived, he’d have lost face. This would be the same for any children. If Judith was a virgin, they would be subject to harsher social judgment (Lewis). Anat can be a virgin and a seducer because they are a god, and gods can get away with many things; however it is also relevant to note that the most prominent depiction of Anat as a seducer is the one where Anat is shamed and punished, rather than being cautiously celebrated for being useful.

Judith’s prayer for G-d to make them successful in deceit is enhanced by a transgender reading. Judith is asking G-d to help them successfully pass as a woman, a presentation they do not normally take- the ascetic vs the seductress. Some argue that Judith succeeds not because they take on masculine traits, but because they successfully parody womanhood. Both can be true. Judith succeeds both because of their masculinity and because they successfully conceal it to perform “high femme drag” (Lewis). And again- it is truly drag, as Judith does not present themself this way in their normal life, and never “returns” to doing so.

While Lewis claims Judith stops the “widow drag”, this is only based on the absence of it being mentioned in the conclusion of the Book of Judith. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The clothes and jewelry used in deceiving Holofernes are items that Judith owned, but ones that they only wore while their husband was still alive, which does not mean Judith enjoyed wearing them. Husbands can, and frequently do (even today) exert control over the gender presentation of “wives”.

While the suitors seeking Judith are portrayed positively by the text, it is also possible to read them as trying to bring Judith back to a more normative femininity. After all, Judith’s performance of gender saves them, but it also insults them. Judith’s choice to live a fairly ascetic life in no way invites such attention. Judith has chosen to live in relative isolation with only their household for company. In a way, Judith’s warriorhood and widowhood are both expressions society expects to be temporally bound- after a time and certain conditions are met, Judith is meant to put them away. They are no longer useful to broader society. But Judith never remarries.

Several themes also connect Anat (and by extension, possibly Judith) to other figures. Anat is commonly compared to the goddesses Durga and Kali, due to some of the themes in Anat’s literary depiction and striking imagery. I have tried researching to see if I can establish a definite connection between Anat and Durga or Anat and Kali: unfortunately all I could come up with is that it was plausible, as there were ancient trade routes between multiple parts of India and West Asia in an appropriate time period, and there was evidence of linguistic influence, but there is currently no proof regarding religious diffusion.

Like Anat, Durga (a pre-Aryan goddess) is sometimes a virginal warrior, who at least partially claims the status of manhood. Durga kills men who seek to engage her sexually. According to one scholar, “...she replied that she wanted to kill him, not sleep with him—that she had become a woman in the first place only in order to kill him; that, although she did not appear to be a man, she had a man’s nature and was merely assuming a woman’s form because he had asked to be killed by a woman.” In this variation of the story, Durga is rather directly, a man in a woman’s body. He is also intentionally killing a man (Mahisa) because he is causing violence and trouble. Mahisa comes out to meet Durga, who laughs at him and beheads him [Walls].

At other times, Durga induces Mahisa to meet by saying her family will only let her marry a man who defeats her in battle. Like Anat, Durga manipulates his lust intentionally. Both seem aware of how patriarchal society views their virginity, as itself “erotic” and “enticing”, and both use it to kill disrespectful men. In the dynamic of shakti, where goddesses typically give their male consort their power, Durga stands out as a “goddess” who instead drains the power from the men she kills and refuses to give it to a man. At least, until Durga was identified as an aspect of the goddess Parvati, made into a wife, and assimilated. Similarly, Anat’s virgin status is complicated by the fact that they are sometimes called the “wife” of Baal or another similar storm god. Unlike Anat, there is no popular myth where Durga’s unrestrained and independent character is villainized [Walls]. Today, Durga is often seen as a young woman married off to a lout of a husband, only coming home to her mother briefly once a year. There is still a gender commentary going on, but not a story of transgression [OFFS].6

Kali, on the other hand, is frequently depicted as a mother. Interestingly, both Kali and Anat are described as wearing the arms or hands of their slain enemies as a belt around their waists, wearing their severed heads, and wading in blood and gore from their slaughter. For Anat, this was accompanied by wearing perfume, henna, kohl, and fine clothes. They both enjoy the battlefield. Unlike Anat or Durga, Kali is not typically described as beautiful. Her hair is disheveled, she does not wear beautiful clothes, and she is sometimes depicted with bloodshot eyes and an emaciated body. Her mouth is open to display a lolling tongue and sometimes fangs, and she may be depicted drinking blood. She was more marginal than Durga for a longer period of time, but eventually was subsumed into mainstream religious custom in the same way: indeed, Kali is often seen as an aspect of Durga. Part of this subsumption and assignment of roles like wife or mother is that celibacy was viewed as cosmically dangerous as it built up power within the self and was associated with drought [Walls]. In the modern hotbed of Kali veneration, Bengal, she is most commonly seen as “mother” [OFFS].

While Anat is never depicted as a mother (Egyptian sources even describe Anat as infertile), like Kali, Anat has been depicted breastfeeding [Walls]. Notably, Judith has no children. In the context of the ancient Mediterranean, this positions Judith outside the gender binary as both men and women are generally expected to produce children (as seen in Genesis).

The ways in which Walls belittled Anat hurt me very personally, because details of Anat resonated with me. Because I’m autistic, I sometimes struggle with my rage, a fact only worsened by being an abuse survivor and a transgender faggot in a society that disdains me. Even the bow- I took archery at YMCA summer camp, and at 4-H, but I was ostracized by the boys there. I didn’t have access to an archery range or teacher. I’ve never developed the skill beyond novelty; yet a bow and two arrows still sit in my room, just in case. The extent of the belittling goes so far as even this: “In the same manner, Anat does not completely overcome her feminine identity in Ugaritic symbolism. She remains a female regardless of her striving towards androgyny in gender. Indeed, one may posit her confused sexual and gender identity as the root of her aggressive character and volatile emotions. Anat is the divine adolescent female trapped in her tomboy image.” Walls uses the patriarchal insistence on using feminine terms for Anat as proof of what Anat really is, while also calling Anat’s desire to be something else childish and dangerous. He goes as far to state, “Her sex is female, but her gender is ambiguous”, demonstrating an understanding of the “sex =/= gender” idea commonly used to explain to cis people what being transgender is.

Someone being viewed as a woman by a patriarchal society isn’t necessarily one. I likely will never pass as a cis man (not without cosmetic surgeries that even most trans people don’t get), nor do I wish to. That’s not the point of transitioning, not for me. Who cares if I am legible to cisgender people? There are always those who “don’t get it”. The best I can hope for is not to be noticed at all, when it comes to them. And to do that, I would need to pass. I did not transition for the pleasure of others. I transitioned for my own pleasure, to bring forth the shape I wanted; I went against the desire of others!

Sizhen’s essay outlining the idea of the Gender Ternary (the three genders are, particularly in our current society, 3 genders: Power, Not Power, and Subaltern) and most importantly, the issue of Ideological Manhood, is relevant to Anat’s role in the Tale of Aqhat. In seeking manhood while failing to achieve it (such as by still delighting in femme past times like cosmetics and in possessing an incorrect body), Anat is punished personally and cosmically. However, it is less obvious in Anat’s role in the Baal cycle or Judith’s role. Tentatively, I argue that in these works, the Subaltern gender is selectively celebrated as useful beyond its utility as a punishment. Judith and Anat’s warlike character- which spiritually comes from their status as independent “females” in marginal social roles- is made useful in defending either a character of the Power gender or broader society. An issue brought up with Sizhen’s essay is that it does not outline the specifics of the punitive nature of subaltern gender and does not define how subaltern genders operate within relations of reproductive and domestic labor, despite mentioning both. Or hell, how even they even operate in labor in general. Adding the discussion of selective celebration is an attempt to address some of the questions of punishment and labor.

It is not entirely unheard of for those of the Subaltern gender to be selectively celebrated, particularly for some capacity their gender is understood to bestow. Indeed, this may be integral to the social role they occupy. Probably the most well known are the transfeminine community of the hijra, who in a post colonial context are sometimes degraded, slandered, and feared alongside the continuation of their ritual duties and ability to bring blessings. This celebration does not dispel the social status of their gender. In fact, it heightens the awareness of their status; in contrasting their reception inside and outside the honored context, in reliance upon this honor for survival because they have little social standing outside it, in the Otherness linked to their subalternization being the very reasoning given for this honor.7 This is paralleled in other classes, such as the status of Black Tunisians and Egyptians in stambeli, zar, or other spiritual and religious ceremonies. This celebration can itself be couched in the languages of fetish or stigma as well. The marginalization and celebration are sometimes even explicitly connected: for hijras, many believe that the powers of hijras are a compensation for the pain they endure of being rejected by family and unable to have biological children, a divine protection .[Among the Eunuchs]

Relevant to this and my disconnect with “transmasc” as a community is that, according to Sizhen’s theory, one can become Subaltern by refusing to adopt “Ideological Manhood”, i.e. becoming a man of the Power gender by adopting patriarchal thinking. A lot of discussion of anti-transmasc bigotry on some level theorizes exclusion from Ideological Manhood as a key feature of that bigotry without deconstruction. It’s a man’s “right” to be allowed into Ideological Manhood, and naturally, we need not consider women in this matter. This is seen in terms like “virilmisia” and “virilization” to describe anti-transmasculinity- virility as a central issue excludes the effeminate (if it does not outright see effeminacy as punishment by conflating it with emasculatization). Virility as a definition of masculinity is based around the idea of a man as a warrior, masculine fertile, and a paragon of what a man should be- under specific auspices. For a trans man to want to be virile is for him to aspire to Ideological Manhood. The effeminate by contrast, is not masculinely fertile, and if they are a warrior, it is framed as unnatural or duplicitous in some way. For example, an effeminate character may use tricks (such as an ambush) or poison to win a battle. Perhaps they lure their opponent to an isolated place. Perhaps they get him drunk before cutting off his head.

While there is limited evidence to suggest whether or not Anat’s Subaltern gender status is partly due to a rejection of Ideological Manhood, this is relevant to Judith. In Judith’s prayer to G-d in chapter 9, Judith invokes their ancestor, Simeon. Specifically, Judith speaks of the time he massacred many men for the crime of one of them raping Dinah (conspicuously, also a “transmasc” figure). However, Judith also mentions the many women taken captive, who were likely raped as well. Though Judith is a warrior and takes on the mantle of violence, as a gender subaltern they still have an allegiance to women and cannot fully praise their ancestor.

This does not contradict reading Judith as trans. Many queer men (cis and trans) have a sense of allyship to women. Gayboys and women alike suffer under patriarchal power. Another disconnect I have from many transmascs is a difficulty in understanding that “cis” queer men experience sexual violence and abuse the way trans men do. The indirect invocation of Dinah is part of this allyship of queer men and women: like the women, Dinah is subject to sexual violence despite being described as a “na’ar” (a young man) and the midrash that Dinah and Joseph were switched in the womb so that Leah would bear a daughter, as she prays for. As a result, Joseph is understood as being effeminate (and I have written a midrash examining Joseph as transfeminine), wearing makeup, women’s clothes, and styling their hair. Dinah is not as foregrounded, but the contrast to Joseph and to Rebecca (also called a na’ar, and like Dinah, having a habit of going out alone in defiance of gender norms, as well as being deliberately described as physically strong) along with the soul swap, creates implications about Dinah’s behavior. While the exact reason and events of Shechem’s rape of Dinah are unknown, it is possible that Dinah’s gender made them a more appealing target. This, to my mind, is certainly true when Potiphera’s wife attempts to assault Joseph.

Transmasc is occasionally useful to me as a shorthand, but not as an identity or a community. I have mentioned that rejection of men, or being outside their access, impacts one’s gender under cisheteropatriarchy when one is supposed to be a woman. A man who desires men and acts effeminately is also rejected from manhood. Part of my disconnect from “transmascs” is not only refusal of a patriarchal ideology, or me having a kinship with women, or understanding my experiences are actually quite similar to cis gayboys… I simply find, that for all the progress we’ve made, many transmascs don’t fully accept fags.

Truscum (trans people who believe in a strictly medical view of trans-ness, and view people who are nonbinary or do not desire to “fully transition” as faking) are something I rarely see these days, but when I first came out they were a significant issue. I never was part of their ranks: I was called ill and deranged. Long hair, feminine clothes, sewing, and so on are suspicious traits and interests to have if you “want to be a man”.

And frankly, it isn’t even just transmascs. No one in the trans community- in the QUEER community, because cis queer men do this too- is fully comfortable with effeminate men. We don’t exist, or we’re only fetish objects, or we do gender wrong and need to be fixed. It’s okay if you’re pretending and take off the faggotry (or not, it varies) but never if you mean it.

My point being- Anat and Judith, like me, are too effeminate to be “men” under these standards too.

That’s all it is, really. I think they’re like me. And I feel alienated. So it’s comforting.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

(Warning for animal death.)

Subscribe now

Share

[Introductory note by the author and translator: The good peoples of Dead Horse Press asked me to collaborate with them, and thus I decided to contribute an essay of my making. This one I originally wrote as part of my work as a student activist in Argentina, for an as of yet unpublished pamphlet-fanzine. It references the current political situation in Argentina, and for further effect the reader should imagine they are argentine while reading it. If they already are, no further steps are needed.

This essay deals with a variety of my reflections on my work organizing, both good and bad.]

There’s a common sympathetic criticism of the left: that leftist ideas are too complicated for the average person to understand and accept. How can we expect a lifelong worker to grasp concepts like “financial capital” or “commodity fetishism”? Are we sociopaths or something?

This is also linked to an (understandable) anti-intellectual sentiment (against academics, members of the liberal professions—in short, those primarily engaged in intellectual rather than manual labor) coming from the “common people.” This sentiment arises from the fact that intellectual workers are traditionally a sector of the petty bourgeoisie, which privileges them over the proletariat engaged in manual labor (i.e., the contradiction between intellectual and manual labor). Historically, manual labor has always been subordinate to intellectual labor; the ancient Greeks despised all manual work as the work of slaves, and this legacy was adopted by later European societies. This, coupled with a “banking” education system designed to suppress any kind of critical thinking, often leads to distrust of intellectuals.

The response from some sectors and organizations on the left basically consists of dumbing down ourselves and our objectives.1 They say: let’s simplify our ideas, abandon theoretical work and focus solely on mass work, and attack intellectuals. In short, they embrace anti-intellectualism.

This line is anti-democratic and authoritarian. It disguises itself as populist, but it’s the bureaucrats’ line.This is because it leads to a series of strategic errors.

Being an author based in Argentina, I will address some matters pertaining specifically for work in Argentina.

First, in Argentina, people don’t need to be told they should resist. In 2001, ordinary people literally brought down a government. In 2018, millions mobilized for abortion rights, and since Milei took office, there have been thousands of protests. We don’t live in Chile, where the working class is completely subjugated, or in the United States, where people don’t protest because a large sector of the population are labour aristocrats. People don’t need some activist riding a white horse to tell them they have to fight.

Another distinctive feature of our country is that teachers (though originally a segment of the petty bourgeoisie) and students are proletarianized sectors, which is not the case in all countries. We can see this in the massive scale of the demand for public education. By participating in anti-intellectualism, we risk alienating a potential base of support based on prejudice. Because having a general hostility toward intellectual work is a prejudice, even if it has some basis in reality, and a prejudice cannot guide policy.

What’s needed is to convince people (of their own volition) that our ideas are good. There’s no easy way to achieve this, so it’s not as popular as treating workers as if they were literally mentally challenged.

Second point: If we can’t even achieve the minimum level of people understanding our ideas, how are we going to achieve our more ambitious goals of establishing a world economy not run on imperialist plunder and pillage? Goals that, of course, we cannot achieve without popular support.

We must be able to discuss and communicate our ideas effectively—in other words, to engage in dialogue. Ultimately, discussion only frightens us if we are unsure of our own opinions and our ability to defend them. If you can argue properly, there’s no need to fear dialogue. And if you can’t argue properly, you need to research and develop your ideas further until you can.

Third, the complexity of our ideas is not a problem, it is an advantage. Let me explain.

Most existing ideologies have been very simplistic. What is nationalism? The idea that one is a member of a nation and deserves recognition. This is very simplistic, and yet nationalism is the most successful ideology of the modern era. What is Catholic doctrine based on? That the Bible contains divine truth. And yet it has guided European society.

And why are anti-imperialist and socialist ideas so complex? Because they are an attempt to create a knowledge of the whole; they are a guide to transforming the entire world.

Yes, this is difficult to learn, but nothing worthwhile in life is easy. Again,this is the first difficulty that foreshadows all the other difficulties of changing the world. We shouldn’t be afraid of learning and of striving to learn.

Let’s return to some more concrete issues and some difficulties of political organization.

The libertarian movement in Argentina has a peculiarity: It is made up of people who mostly have no knowledge of political theory (there are no libertarian reading groups, no economic seminars on deregulation), but at the same time they claim to be believers in the ideology of anarcho-capitalism, that is, they make a certain appeal to theory.

The combination of this level of fanaticism with this level of ignorance turns them into a modern-day Khmer Rouge (who were the backbone of Pol Pot’s regime that killed millions in Cambodia and persecuted intellectuals): extremely violent people (though thankfully they haven’t committed genocide) ideologically driven by a cause they barely understand and who detest intellectuals (we can see as an example the numerous attacks on culture and education carried out by libertarian militants). Fortunately, they are the hard core of Milei’s support, rather than the majority of the population.

What I want to raise is, if we create a political project that doesn’t value knowledge and theory, are we creating left-wing mileists? Is that something desirable?

If our enemies reject theory, knowledge, and culture, we must take up those banners, not stoop to their level.

We also have another potential internal problem, the Holy See, the curia.

During the height of the Catholic Church, European society was (theoretically) divided into three orders: nobles, priests, and peasants. The nobles waged war, the peasants farmed, and the priests prayed—that is, they were thinkers. This represented a rather crude form of the social division of labor and the subjugation of intellectual and manual labor.

The core of Catholic ideology was made up by the Holy Scriptures, which could only be interpreted by theologians. Monks spent their lives copying these scriptures, but they were not allowed to interpret them.

What am I getting at? That we must be careful within our own organizations not to neglect theoretical education to avoid creating a situation where only a very select group has the right to think and reflect.

We must recover the ideas of Paulo Freire, who considered that revolutionary leadership should be in a constant process of educating the masses in order to raise their consciousness (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 69):

And a revolutionary leader must keep in mind the idea of ​​being able to pass on their position, of having someone else take their place; we cannot have leaders in immutable positions. Our goal should be that every member of the masses has a real possibility of reaching leadership, achieving a socialization of power. And knowledge is yet another form of power.

Therefore, we must give every member the right to express their opinion, the right to give their own interpretations of ideas, to disagree.

In conclusion, I can say that the central argument of this text is the idea that theoretical development and free discussion are key to emancipatory policies and they should not be neglected.

If you liked this post, you’ll love Santi’s substack:

Santi's publication

And ours too, of course:

Subscribe now

Share

The common advice on Substack seems to be that, in order to build up a following, you need to post regularly. But, hey, some of us are working jobs! Some of us are pouring all of our writing time into novels that won’t see the light of day for years1! Some of us… just don’t have that much to say, honestly.

But what if you didn’t have to do it alone?

If you saw our recent letter from the editor, you may be wondering… what the hell is Dead Horse? Who is this strange, unknowable deity that seems to pull the strings, and who are the “interns” that make her offerings of fiction and essays?

Well, I’m sworn to secrecy regarding the Horse. But I can tell you about this Substack.

Dead Horse Press isn’t a magazine. We’re not an award. We’re a group of people with a variety of interests and a lot of things to write – be they short stories, opinion pieces, or historical deep-dives into gender-bending fashion. With a rotation of regular and one-off contributors, we’re able to create a regular Substack presence without overtaxing any individual writer, building up a collective audience in a range of different interest areas. We’re also able to help each other brainstorm, draft, discuss, and edit – here, writing doesn’t have to be a lonely process.

The idea is simple: get enough people churning out an essay every once in a while, and you’ll be able to maintain a regular posting schedule. Isn’t the Dead Horse smart? (All hail).

So… are you interested in joining her?

Become a contributor

This is not a submission process. You won’t send us a complete piece, get accepted/rejected, and then never hear from us again. We’re looking to collaborate.

So, whether you’re interested in making regular posts or just getting eyes on that one essay that’s been stuck in your craw, we’d love to hear from you!

If you want to get involved, shoot an email to deadhorsepress@proton.me with a pitch for an essay, short story, or other kind of post. We’ll talk it over with you, and if it seems like it would please the Dead Horse, we’ll help you workshop it, schedule it, and then send it out to our subscribers. We’ll also share the post around on other social media platforms. Once that post is complete, and if it seems like a good fit, you’ll have the option to join our Discord server and become a regular contributor.

Substack doesn’t have to be a zero-sum attention game. Together, we can create a creative ecosystem where writers can rely on a regular audience for their work, get feedback and support from other invested writers, build a following collaboratively, and – hopefully – expose each other to new and strange ideas.

Share

Subscribe now

Thank you for so generously supporting my interns’ unauthorized goof-off project.

No, really, I insist.

Of course, I might have liked to have some help binding my magnum opus on the local geomancy, the auspicious streetcar routes, and their recent devastation at the hands of Ford et. al. (So much for local concerns, eh Zeke?) But it’s completely alright, and I am not mad at all. For one, I have recently been introduced to “computers,” which J.M. insists may significantly reduce the amount of time needed to release my opus. I remain intrigued by this possibility.

I never quite took to the movable type presses — wretched machines — and had no need of their modest speed boost, as I can scribe at a rate far outstripping any puny human. Apparently, in the time that I was sequestered writing my opus, humans made several improvements upon Gutenberg’s press. Hot metal typesetting, the last fad I remember, has long since been superseded by computers.

Computers do it for you. That’s what I’m told about the typesetting of this booklet. The computer moves the letters around according to its mathematics, instead of whatever rudimentary maths exist in a human’s mind, which must be supplemented by abacuses and other toys. Apparently, my interns live much of their lives like this. They input data into the computer, and the computer returns with some idea of what to think.

I do suspect they overstate their case. For example, the computer does not feed or clothe them, and so they must live much of their lives outside of it. But most conversations circle back round to it. This is a human tendency their species seems helpless to escape. Once a new technology comes along, it becomes the synedoche for the entirety of reality. First the wheel, then the printing press. Now it is the computer, rather than the street car, basking in the sun. It just goes to show how bad they are at evaluating reality.

From what I have gleaned so far, the computer is a type of golem. Like all golems, it is an imperfect automaton, only able to operate in extremely direct fae-logic. The computer receives an order, and it carries it out heartlessly. If the order was to corrupt its own memory, it will be corrupted. If the order was to kill or maim, the computer hesitates no less than a gun, though — like any golem — it has a fine chance of killing its master in the process.

The interns’ tales of incorrectly coded grimoires and pseudo-intelligences run amok reminds me of nothing more than the golems I once knew. One was told to dig a well, but not to stop, and buried himself. By now, the bastard has melted in magma. Another drowned her village one water pail at a time, determined to fetch watch no matter how difficult it became. She, of course, dissolved in the resulting flood.

Humans love to build golems. If it were possible to create an artificial human, perhaps they could escape their fundamental problem — too few hands for too much work. In every era of agriculture, it has been necessary to enslave, dispossess, and oppress just to balance the books. Even now, for all their computers, my interns’ society cannot work out how to pay everyone for their work, without making paupers of most and princes of some.

But I cannot be certain, as I have yet to see a computer, or a computerized printer. (Idris adds it is “ink jet.”) The interns have a rational fear that my presence might destroy one, after one of their mobile phones caught fire in my hands. I would nevertheless visit those computers housed in the library, if not for a blood curse levied on me in 1954 for a late copy of Dead Souls. (Unfortunately, a librarian’s magic is rather strong, so I am powerless in the matter.)

Yet, paper persists. I have commanded the interns to create a print version of this newsletter they prattle on about, and I am quite pleased with the results. During my nighttime wanderings, I will take to distributing these. If you are holding these words now, know that I set them down for you to find.

And if you happen to see me doing it, be sure to smile. No one likes a gawker.

As for golems, and humanity’s charming hubris, and the renewed threat that a golem may destroy your village with BitCoin mining — I wouldn’t worry. Golems have a way of destroying themselves. Though, and I will speak vaguely to avoid censure, it never hurts to take the clay from the sculptor.

(This letter was originally written for Dead Horse Issue #1. You can buy your own copy on Ko-fi for $2.)

Ko-fi

Subscribe now

“His name is Atlas, and he is dying.”

They Colonized Mars is my debut science fiction/horror short story, a passion project that’s been taking off better than I expected it to, in all honesty -- it’s something very personal to me, exploring intersections of race, queerness, and disability, set against a backdrop of colonial violence; a world not made for everyone, which one nonetheless is forced to attempt assimilation into.

We follow our protagonist Atlas, a half-Martian, half-Human who works stacking crates in a warehouse on a colonized Mars, as he finds affection for the surveillance robot assigned to “supervise” him, recognizing their shared position under capitalistic exploitation. He decides to take it to a drag bar.

I draw a lot from my own experiences as a mixed Native American person, happening to also be transgender/two-spirit, and how white-Western gender roles conflict with my own cultural ideas of gender expression (the story opens with Atlas, standing over a sink, cutting his hair along with highly sensitive tendrils that would mark him as recognizably alien were they to grow long enough to be visible.) Living in the American South, I find solace and community in the local drag scene, an underground, very DIY space for gender-bending in dollar store sequins and drugstore perfume. There’s a sort of magical, transformative feeling to it that I aim to capture in my writing, contrasted against the bleakness of mundane evil in everyday life and intergenerational trauma. Mars was first colonized about 200 years before Atlas was born, but he still carries the weight of grief for this world’s ongoing destruction in the name of profit.

Whenever I talk about this project, I find myself trying to explain how all of these threads are connected, because they’re inseparable in my own life, but those who aren’t as familiar with these systems’ functions tend not to see it as easily -- or, people have a tendency to only see what personally affects them, without recognizing the larger structures of cis-patriarchy and imperialism... But that’s another essay unto itself.

The disability angle is woven through the way labor physically wears on the body, especially for those with genetic predispositions or affected by environmental racism; Atlas, as a Martian, is adapted to Mars’ lower gravity, which has been disrupted by artificial gravity generators, making the planet more hospitable to Humans while actively hostile to its original inhabitants. Atlas wears hydraulic joint braces, supporting his arms and legs, a more futuristic version of the braces and compression sleeves I have to wear to keep my own bones in place. When I started working on They Colonized Mars, I already needed to use a cane, but I didn’t have one yet, and this is reflected in Atlas’ character. His body feels heavy, painful under its own weight, while he continues forcing himself through it.

I draw inspiration from classic sci-fi, especially 1960s era, at the crossroads of the civil rights movement and space race. It’s a fascinating point in time for me, and the sociopolitical climate is heavily reflected in its science fiction; everyone was thinking about the future. This future was also 50 years ago now, and its ideas of progress have either stayed ahead of where we are now, or we’ve already surpassed them. In particular, I find a certain colonial undercurrent in space exploration -- mirroring ideas of exploring faraway lands, with “exotic” people -- that goes largely unacknowledged. What does it mean to boldly go where no man has gone before, when these worlds are already inhabited? This question is at the heart of my Martianverse series (spoiler alert, it will be a series; I’m already working on more stories set in the same world), and the idea of seeing this from the aliens’ perspective.

Additionally, I’m inspired by the surreal and absurd; think David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I also have a somewhat inexplicable fascination with the city of Chicago, which I’m not from, but I’ve visited twice -- I find it texturally interesting, the blend of shiny, “new” skyscrapers, juxtaposed with old brick buildings and rusty train tracks. This is where a lot of aesthetic choices for my worldbuilding come from, a plasticky-smooth futurism in contrast with the grit and sand. This reflects something in the themes I did very intentionally, that the world presented here isn’t flatly dystopian, but a reflection of our own present day. It would be easy to make everything plainly worse than it is now, but I see a future with a functional public transit system, which is still upheld by brutalizing Indigenous peoples and the working class.

Early on in development, circa 2021, my plan was to have Atlas be a sort of space hero figure, but as I started drafting an outline for how he would single-handedly overthrow the government and demolish capitalism and so on, I got stuck until I realized he just... couldn’t. Realistically, none of this works like that. I don’t want to be a doomer about it, it’s important that there is still joy to be found in this world, but as Atlas shifts into more of a would-be revolutionary, we find a more grounded look at life on Mars and a story that I -- personally -- find more compelling.

Research for They Colonized Mars brought me to some interesting places, like articles about what Martian sunsets look like through their yellowish atmosphere (it’s blue, by the way, a really striking visual against the orange rocks), and the Wikipedia page for “evisceration.” Without spoiling too much, I found myself reading up on factory farming, particularly techniques for animal slaughter on an industrial scale, which comes back around to Chicago in its infamous 20th century meatpacking district. I wouldn’t consider myself an especially squeamish person, but I have some very specific phobias, as well as a currently undiagnosed condition causing bouts of low blood pressure, which culminated in very nearly passing out, on the toilet, Elvis-style, around Christmas of 2024, a few months before I’d finish writing They Colonized Mars, as I was making sure I’d get some details accurate towards the end. I also learned there’s not one, but multiple, layers of membrane holding the organs in the abdominal cavity, something not often discussed but relevant to my interests.

Currently, my main big project I’m working on is a part 2 to They Colonized Mars, titled Extraterrestrial Nullius, a play on “terra nullius,” the Latin for “no man’s land.” I’ve been calling it a cyber-noir, playing with cyberpunk and film noir genre conventions, and exploring grief through murder mystery a la Twin Peaks. It will be considerably longer than They Colonized Mars, I’m roughly estimating around novel-length, and with this extra breathing room I’ll be able to dig into it all more thoroughly, a sort of post-mortem on the first story. Unfortunately, due to growing censorship issues, I’ve had to change a few scenes from my original vision, so it seems you get no bug sex and my time spent looking up anatomical diagrams of parasitoid wasp ovipositors is for naught under fascism. I could, of course, find a website that would take it, but not if I want to get paid. You see my dilemma.

Despite all of that, though, you can still find my work at tlirs.itch.io or tlirswriting on tumblr. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you there!

Read "They Colonized Mars"

Reblog on Tumblr

Follow tlirs

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

The last of his blood sustains him a long time. He gets to thinking maybe this is it. Even when the hunger comes back he doesn't acknowledge it for a few weeks, wraps that empty spot in velvet and tries to pass it off to me.

"Sure you did it," he says, eyeing me, our noses close. "You had kids, I'll bet, lots of 'em, wouldn't be able to keep the ladies off all this… y'know, port cities, islands? Barmaids and captains' wives, fuckin' — tavern wenches — Ha! was it tavern wenches back then? That's nice."

The flickering dark of an empty matinee. Though he won't kiss my mouth he has taken to climbing in my lap, hands braced against my cheeks, and tracing my features for hours with eyes and hands and sometimes lips. In the filmlight he studies me with the focus of a girl studying a treasured doll and moves me that way too— sit here, open mouth, tilt head back, blink. 

My features were not so distinct before, even that day in the church alley. He strokes my mustache, amazed at the vivid bristle, stares into my eyes and knows the color.

"Did you have a castle?" he asks. "Once you got rich on the whale oil, see, you had a castle — I'm making this up, mind, so as to keep my nerve — where you hired lawyers to come be your company and sent your daughters up to their beds — yes, daughters, you ain't a sons man — and drank them dry for weeks. You'd savor it." He sculpts the hollows of my eyes. "But you wouldn't sail off anywhere unless there was some real good lure. You'd settle. No excitement. That's where I'dcome in. I'd walk up through your big gates uninvited and challenge you to a game of cards. Then I'd play you under the table and you'd be huffy and want to kill me stone dead, right there. But you'd ask me to stay on account of my pretty face."

On the screen, a woman screams. He leans in and tastes my cheekbone, the wrinkles at the corner of my eye.

"And if I left you'd follow me, like you do now," he says. "And you'd try not to, 'cause of propriety, 'cause of conscience or 'cause you'd think I'm so damn annoying I ought not to live forever, but eventually you'd do it to me. Yeah, you would. You'd think about it all the time." He hums, then plants a swift kiss on my nose and tries to swing a leg off me. I grab his waist to keep him in place, and he stays, laughing. "But what would I be doing in Europe? Naw, that ain't how it happened."

He looks behind him. A gunfight flashing. He sticks his thumb in his mouth and chews it pensively.

"But you did do it," he says. "You musta did it too. To someone." He glances at me. "What was your… was there that little bar for you too?"

But before I could have given an answer at all, if I were so inclined, he waves the question out of the air and returns his attention to my face. My chin, my jaw, my teeth. Pricks his thumb on his canine and lets a little blood well from it. Then presses it to my lips, paints it slowly on my mouth and down my chin.

I watch his eyes. He sits back, smiling, and admires his handiwork until, though I try not to, I lick it off.

He laughs. Quick and wet, he swoops down and joins his open mouth to mine. I surge up to him, grab his shoulders and fix him to me — but as I start to bite he pulls away. I hold him but he struggles. "Naw, naw," he says, "take it as a gift." I let him go.

The movie ends, Nines's fingers drumming on mine.

It still takes him some time to realize what he's hungry for. He even tries to go back to the old way, again, always, the strippers and the travelling salesmen: “No, no, no,” he says each time, at the last moment, before the last pulse of the heart's blood, once with the victim already catatonic and draping himself against him. “I got a taste for fine dining now,” he says, dropping the bloody man, “shoo.”

Dreaming in the back of the night bus, there is an old white-bearded imam. A few stops in and a rabbi gets on, shuffles to his own seat, puts in a pair of bright orange earplugs, and also falls asleep.

Knucklehead Nines laughs and laughs. "Hey, ain't it the setup for a joke? Lover, guess the punchline."

But he makes no move. He goes quiet watching the old men's eyes twitch. Despite the shaking his cards never stop in his hands, the smooth, constant, liquid swish.

"Depending what you count as pigs' blood," he says pensively, "I could be a holy man."

He considers trying them. Wonders if it's holy blood he wants. He doesn't, though. He leaves the bus without talking to either, which is strange. Perhaps it's the first sign.

It takes a lot of bars, a lot of lonely nights, a lot of men and women left sleeping in motels. When he finally admits it to himself he doesn’t say it aloud, but I know. Because of how he tries to get away from me. How he dodges between subway cars, ducks into allies, loses himself in the crowds on the casino floors.

I find him on a street corner in the early morning, baring his teeth. “Ain’t no slop for this little piggy, now,” he snaps. “You disappointed? Wanna fatten me up, huh? You wanna bring me one? You got a fuckin’ thing for that, huh, Bluebeard?”

I shake my head.

He actually does get out of my sight. This is rare for him, now. I follow his smell to the roof of the building overlooking the train station. There he stands like a shadow, coat in the wind, sequins reflecting all the rainbows of city lights.

He glances back to me. His eyes gleam.

“I been around a long time." Slow. “A long time. Longer’n most, I’d suspect. Why do you think that is?”

He’s holding his hands out over the edge, over the tracks. One bare, in the other a hole-punched casino ace.

“How many people, to keep me around all this long, long time?” he asks. “How many of ‘em in me now? Gnawin’ at me, laughin’ at me. Oh, he’s a funny man. He is a funny little man.” 

He rolls his head back round to look forward. A train pulls in, sleek, modern, black metal.

“Yeah,” Knucklehead Nines says. “And what do I do with it? I made it. I live the life I want. This is the fuckin' American dream. I made that all myself. The streets of this country are paved in gold, you know, and I walk them, on, and on, and on, and on.” His mouth splits. “Hah. ‘Cause what else is a man supposed to do? I ain’t no sucker.”

He brings the card edge down his wrist like a strike of flint. Blood wells from the tear, iridescent black in the city night. Drops break off and fall down, down, scatter on the gravel beneath the rails. I do not step forward.

“Back where it belongs,” he says, watching it fall. “Iron and dirt.”

There is a moment, then, where Knucklehead Nines seriously considers throwing himself off of the building. I see his eyes widen, the thrill in them as he rocks on the precipice, delighting that the thought has finally reached him, after all these years wandering at the edge of his mind, bribing the guards and hopping trains. New, exciting.

Then he flicks the card into the wind and shrugs and turns away. “Ain’t far enough. Lot of bruises for a gesture, huh?” 

He jerks his chin to beckon me down the fire escape with him. I come.

“I can’t even die," he says conversationally, sinking hand over hand. "I’ll live forever. I don’t care who I eat. I been a cannibal all my life, this ain’t no different. What do I got to cry about? They got a statue of me going up in Vegas that’ll stand past when the pyramids fall.” He stops, turns out to the wind, hanging by one arm, and bellows, “YOU HEAR ME? I’M KNUCKLEHEAD NINES, AND I’M THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH!”

The trains bleat their answers far below.

It takes him a long time to find one. He has no idea where to start. Hungrier all the while, his skin fades, he won’t meet my eye. Now I’m helping him up stairs, buying his bus tickets. Knucklehead Ninces frequents cemeteries, museums. Spends a time circling the burlesque dancer in New Orleans, the veteran in Vicksburg. Charred rumor wafts toward him but each time he finds the fires cold, the bones long-buried and the spices spilled.They don’t frequent the casinos, any of them in the South but me, ‘cause they know he’s there. He has to give up the lights a while and hang around at used car dealerships, under bridges, park benches, draped in the bloody and tattered remains of his sequined suit. 

"I thought there was more," he mutters in the civil war memorial, the huge dome turning his throat to pipe organ. "I only ever did it to one. But she was… I didn't like what it did to her none. Must've been half a dozen she did, mostly singers she liked, opera singers, see, and then whoever they wanted. Real obvious, cursed-haunted shit. Say, for a while some man was gonna make a TV show. Or, no, musta been a book…"

But there're no opera singers outside the mutterings of old patrons in their beds, half-remembered stories, wisps on the wind. Even the older ones, he starts to suspect, are gone to ground, or gone. It worries him. Most of them are only dead to fire or flood, I know, but I don't tell him. 

"The dog, the dog," he says, his blue fingers tangling mine. "The bitch, we need her back. I liked her." Six weeks in those bloody basements. What, that dog with the scar, I heard she gone west, they tell us. I liked that beast, and her owner was a legend, they tell us. Immortal. Now there's a feisty one! Nines leans in kaleidoscopically but that last man has little more to say. "She bites," he explains. "I should hope so," says Nines.

West and west and the scent gets no stronger. He gets no thrill watching the dogs tear each other apart now. Doesn't jump, doesn't bet. His eyes still jutter around, flashing from side to side, face to face, but there's no smile now over the frenzy. His mouth hangs open and dark.

Then he looks up into the eye of a camera.

"What?" he asks the operator.

"They're streaming it," he tells him. "What do you mean, what, that's where the money comes from these days."

In front of them, a dog gets its throat torn out.

I never understood technology. To me even now the only source of light is flame. Nines is better, talked to people about sports and late night television, hailed cabs, played to the cameras for the crowds on the vegas strip. Still sometimes he'd mix himself up and ask about radio shows. There was a world and he had no interest in it. There bets were made alone, and he never bet alone. 

But he wins a favor off a young man outside the grocery in the rain, and he tells the man to take out the device in his pocket and ask it some questions. He does this again and again. 

When he goes up to people with this gamble in mind, it bears mentioning, he's seen. When he uses the drivers' license swindled off another man to get a library card, and plants himself at the old computer in his tattered sequins and rain-stained hat, his ringfingers make contact with the keys — he types one letter at a time. Doesn't fade so badly, now he's caught the scent.

On the screen a man begins to speak, and Nines presses his nose to it and breathes deep.

Alive and iron, it leads him to the cocktail party at the Florida winter nest of a rich man who sells the world the secret to wealth, through a trick of light and numbers. Of course his real secret is he cashed out before the Dust Bowl and then later bet on a bit apple, but he can't tell them that, no, he tells them it's because of genius.

The house is a mash of cubes and roman columns and overgrown because he can't keep a steady landscaper. Outside the garden wall Nines's skin flushes, breathing speeds, and he lifts himself to peer over the high fence through the autograph trees. “Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, you didn’t tell me what that smell does to you.”

He leaps the fence, swaggers up and offers a cigarette to the waiter leaning against the back door. The boy speaks only in Spanish, Nines only in English, but he keeps his eyes trained on the boy’s all that time, the embers glinting in his red tapetum. He’s understood.

After two minutes the boy slips out of his uniform, takes Nines’s flower pattern shirt, and goes off whistling into the dark hedges, bare-legged, barefoot.

Nines shrugs into the waiter's clothes, chewing the end of his cigarette. He stares into the service entrance, twitches running through his shoulders and brows. “This’s gonna be some work,” he says. “You wanna cut the bullshit and give me some of yours? Naw,” he refuses himself. “Naw, naw, fuck that, though.”

All that effort to get himself a disguise, and once he’s inside he beelines straight to the rich man. People drape around a blue-lit pool, sipping cocktails. Others talk on the balconies, or loom over screens on the couches inside. Nines catches shoulders in the crowd, half-knocks a few women into the water. 

The rich man is in the hot tub, his arms around two young blond women. Once in front of him Nines stops short and drops his platter of horderves into the water.

“What the hell –” the rich man barks.

“No Hhablo Ing-lls,” Nines thick-American drawls, and hauls him onto land by the arm.

All the time, the rich man fights, unable to comprehend what Nines is, that such a smaller body can overpower him with such little effort. They receive little more than a few uninterested glances as Nines drags him through the crowd, then up the stairs and into the master bedroom. 

Three women in domestic uniforms lay on the bed, brown-skinned, blue-lipped, still, but breathing. Nines scoffs in disgust.

He heaves the rich man to the floor, sets one boot on the center of his chest and holds him there. The realization finally dawns in his eyes.

“Please,” he says. “If there was a rule, I’m sorry I broke it. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell me anything. I don’t even know who he was. I’m so young. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Nines curls his lip. “You ain’t that young.”

“We’re of a kind, aren’t we?” the rich man begs. He wraps his pleading hands around Nines’s shoe. “Hey, man, look. I’ll follow you. I've been hiding for so long. I’ll do anything! Was it you? Were you him? I’ll do anything you want!”

He tries to kiss Nines’s ankle. Nines kicks his cheek hard enough it crunches.

“You don’t even know these ladies’ names, do you?” he demands, steps off and pitches toward the bed, pulling his hair. “Fuck, one of them could’ve been an artist! Fu-uck. Naw, he ain’t worth my time… he ain’t worth my first. I don’t want his shit in me, shit, naw, I might well throw it up…”

He turns back to the rich man, red-eyed. Sniffs. His throat bobs.

 “I gotta think on this,” he murmurs, as if the words come from another person.

He stands, snaps the rope from one worker’s ankles. He has it round the rich man’s neck before he can even think to fight. Nines yanks the rope and the rich man chokes, clutches at the noose, but his eyes go soft with relief.

Nines looks up into my eyes. Then he hauls the rich man out his own window into the wet mosquitoed night.

The rich man's name is Eddie.

Biting his nails on the bus to Tampa: “How old are you? Is it age that makes you stronger, or number of kills, or your, uh, sire?”

Crunching mosquitoes outside an airboat shack: “What’s your name? What’s the name of… that thing?”

“Okay, where are we going?” again and again. “How long are you gonna keep me?”

He puts on a false slang to disguise his age. But it spills from him, his life story, without any lie or disguise, maybe for the first time. Whatever he remembers, he says, one long, rolling confessional as we ride north. He talks about the YouTube channel, how he once tasted the vitamins he sells in another man's blood — "But that was an accident," he says, "he looked like a girl from behind." Millions of people bought his book so they could sell it to their own friends. He did work hard on it, he says. He believes everything he wrote in there, tells us for a good long time how he would've made his millions even now, if he was born in this century. 

Nines hates to listen, plugs his ears, only ever looks at Eddie out the corner of his eye. Yet his body tells another story. Like a flower to the sun, he leans, as Eddie talks. His nostrils flare and his skin grows warmer. 

If Eddie catches him with his fingers out of his ears, then he’ll look at him fully, pupils wide, almost hypnotized. Though it makes him sweat, once he really meets Nines’s eye Eddie can’t stop himself. He talks about the money he stole from his father. He talks about the girl he raped at a party almost a century ago at Yale. He has always felt guilt for that.

Almost like Nines is dragging the confessions up his throat like hooks, compulsive, constant. They disgust Nines and fill him, press on the edges of his teeth – horror, jealousy, lust. He has a creeping sense, too, that if Eddie were apt to say all this to any stranger he would not have lived as long as he has. Must be fear. “'Sides, how’s he remember all that?” Nines asks, picking his nails with a three of hearts. “Man, I don’t remember my own name.”

Then he stops, the card wedged halfway under a fleck of keratin. He looks at me, eyes wide, dead, horrified.

“I,” he breathes. “I…” His breath comes quick, sharp, like a running dog’s. “You’ll never get it. You’ll never get that out of me til I’m dead and fucking gone, I swear to you right now.”

Eddie’s throat is white where the rope roughs him. He never tries to take it off except once, and that time Nines seizes him by the back of the neck and throws him halfway through the wall of a bus stop.

At first, he doesn’t risk leaving Eddie. He can slip any bind and Nines knows I won’t watch him in his stead. Eventually he realizes Eddie won’t leave anyway, same as he won’t cut the rope round his neck. The thought doesn’t occur. He's waving at CCTV cameras, letting men take pictures standing next to him with their arms crossed on the street. They don't ask about the rope.

No, no more big Florida houses and cocktail parties for Eddie – he knows Nines would be there if he ran. 

So for a few days Nines takes to leaving him. Ties him to shower bars and bike racks. Walks the streets on his own, freer, lighter, goes to the pool bars where Eddie would stick out like a suit jacket among wifebeaters. Nines wets his fingers in whiskey, asks women to bet with him which side of his hand the drips will roll down. 

Once I let him leave me. Eddie cocks his head and nods at me, false-casual, toying with the cuff of his suit jacket. “So you, what’s your deal?” he asks. “Seems like you follow him around. Are you another one like me? Or some kind of thrall or something? Are you, uh… what I become?” 

It disturbs him how still I stand, how I don’t look at him while he speaks.

“I know you’re lovers," he says. "You can talk freely. I see how you touch each other. I don't care. It doesn't bother me.” He brushes off his jacket to show how much it doesn't bother him. 

When I say nothing, he coughs. “Okay. Where else do you go, then? When you’re not here?”

Scratches his rope.

“Alright, bro,” he says. “Can you get me some blood?”

Tiring. I am with Nines, then, in a park. Nighttime, the pale flowers blooming on the vines. Where he walks, the streetlights dim. He notices me, smirks; his steps take on a lilting rhythm, like a man in a musical. He sits at a bench and takes out his pack of cards, begins laying them out on his knee. 

"What you don't understand, Eddie — and this is what I'd say to him, mind, if I thought he ought to know…" He trails off. I don't recognize the game he's setting up. "This is ancient," he says, indicating the cards. "Roman Roulette… or Egyptian… I don't remember who invented it. One of them. Or the Aztecs. See, the secret is you have all these gods, and so does the other guy." Setting the cards down, he holds up both his hands with the thumb pinched to the fingers, puppets. The left talks along with him. "So you..." The right hand opens and seizes the left. "See?"

He folds the cards back into the deck and tucks it up his sleeve. He stands, turns to me, reaches out and dusts off my coat breast.

There are a few more walks in the park. But then one day Nines leaves Eddie and forgets where else he means to go. The waitresses won’t take his orders. Remembering those days before he killed his bastard scares the swagger out of him. He refuses to leave Eddie again, and hates him for it.

Tampa, Tallahassee, up to Atlanta. We coop up days since the rich man still burns in the sun. Knucklehead Nines paces the mold-streaked motel floors, casting glances at Eddie, whose cheeks too have turned ghoulish and sharp.

“I’m getting hungry, man,” Eddie says. “You're some kind of… monks. Reformists. I get it. I get it, I admire it, but look. That's not me. I get hangry. Okay? I can’t control myself. I've tried, I promise I have, but in the end it was better for everybody if I just —”

"I ain't trying to fix you, Eddie," Nines says. "I don’t want nobody else dyin’ on your account, you hear?"

"And I admire that," Eddie says. "That lifestlye…"

"Lifestyle?" Nines scoffs. "Look at us now. Before you, we were living the American dream."

“Please," Eddie''s on him. "Look, I know you must not get as hungry now. I know you're trying to help me. But you must remember. Just let me – that crackhead at the pool outside, see her? no one will miss –”

“I Gawd, this is really it,” Nines grabs Eddie by the shoulders and stares into his graying face. “Oh, I smell it coming like a coal train cross the desert, I tell you,” Nines says, fast and low, “I tell you, I got my neck out on the rail and I smell it coming like a cloud of black smoke. Shoo, like preacher’s blood.”

He turns his head, his eyes close, his nostrils flare. Then he slaps himself, reels back.

“P-please,” Eddie squeaks. “Please, just — just a drop, alright? Please. Please. Please – Sir? Sir? What about you, sir – Bluebeard?”

“Don’t you call him that,” Nines snaps. He leans back in to Eddie and Eddie cringes away, closing his eyes and hunching against the wall. “You ain’t worth what you already owe, alright?” Nines shovds a finger into his chest. “Listen to what I say to you, boy, and by God you might even wise up a bit, alright?”

“I don’t even know what you want from me!” Eddie says, and in a burst of strength manages to push him back.

Nines staggers and grins. “No?”

“You must know something!” A desperate note, louder than Eddie’s been in weeks. “There must be something, someone who knows about us, what we are. You – you must know what we are! You’ve been around so long –”

Nines seizes him by the jaw and slams him against the wall. “I know what you are,” he says, low and real close. “Eddie. You’re my dog. You want a muzzle, boy, that’ll shut you up? Beg me for it. I got no respect for your kind, bone-gnawing, devil boy, not a trace of man in you, not a speck of art.”

Eddie starts to say something. Nines slams him back again, nostrils flaring, teeth gleaming in the low light. 

“Go on and bite me,” he says. “Go on. Try.”

Long, long silence.

“Please,” Eddie whispers. “I’m so hungry. It’s like it’s eating me from inside. It’s filling my teeth. I – sir, I’m dying. I’m actually dying.”

Nines leans back. Nods slow. “Yuuuuup.”

He hawks and spits a gob of red on the floor at Eddie’s feet. As he swaggers off I watch Eddie’s drawn face twist and consider whether he’s hungry enough to lick Nines’s blood-spit off the floor. He is.

We move on to Jackson. Nines tries to teach Eddie blackjack. Doesn’t have the head for it. At a gas station advertising SLOTS $5 DAIQUIRIS he wanders the aisles, crinkling the Hostess wrappers, shaking the peanut bags, til the cashier asks he need something? He buys cheap vodka soda and gives it to Eddie in the slot room, who starts drinking it, dribbling it out, drinking more. It's something. The cashier watches through the rubber door. He leaves Eddie winning twenties and goes outside to the pumps. He takes one out and flutters the trigger, letting a little tricker of gasoline spatter the concrete.

The broker comes out with a styrofoam daiquiri in his hand, sipping, gagging, sipping, gagging. “You get the cashier?” Nines calls. Eddie shakes his head. Nines goes and takes the rope up again and pulls him down for a pat on the salt-and-pepper head. 

“Will you just tell me who you are?” Eddie asks. “Please?”

“Ha!” Nines spreads his hands to the corn fields, the cracked pavement, the SLOTS $5 DAIQUIRIS, the highway; before he can answer a tall pickup drives buy, shouts something indistinct thrkigh the open window, and Nines grins wide, wide, laughs like it’s carrying him up high to the crop duster above the fields and roars, “I’m Knucklehead Fuckin' Nines, the spirit of the South!" Whooping the phrase, kicking cans and crumpled soda bottles, he walks out into the middle of the street and whirls with the swerving cars as if in a dance.

The rich man looks at me, as if trying to catch a moment of solidarity between us as the audience to Knucklehead Nines. I meet his eye and smile. The daiquiri falls out of his hand, splatters red on the asphalt.

The next evening, he comes to Nines with an offer.

"Let's go west," he says, roped to a new radiator, pulling back the towel he'd draped over his head to hide from the daylight through the curtains. "There's a meetup there. I said I'd go."

No response.

"I haven't posted anything in weeks," Eddie tries. "People will start to miss me."

Nines curls his lip. "Nobody's missing you."

"You want the FBI on our tail?" He doesn't get it. "Besides, there'll be fans of a whole bunch of guys. Lot of young kids, alone, maybe their first time travelling. It'll be easy, even for you. Man, I swear I could eat an arena."

Nines scoffs. "I ain't following you."

"You ain't going anywhere, buddy!" Eddie bursts out. "We're in Mississippi. What are you doing?" He sits up, strains against the rope. "Fuck, man, let me get a car. Any car. I'm tired of busses. I'm tired of starving. I'm tired of trying to be better and I'm starting to think that you aren't so much of a saint as you pretend to be. Man, if you were a normal person, they'd never let you out in public. Look at you! They ought to put you on so many pills you forget your own name!" 

He swallows, sits back. Nines watches him from the bed, head tilted like an owl.

"I ain't interested in you," Nines says slowly. "It ain't just that you ain't cooked. I don't want you. I don't like you. There ain't nothing to you, Edward, what I want in me."

Eddie stares up at him miserably. "Then what are you keeping me for?"

Nines's face goes blank. His brows creep slowly up his forehead.

"Right," he says, bemused. "Right… You're a betting man of a kind, right, Eddie? Well, I'm a better stock broker than you ever were, simply 'cause I set my mind to it. I ain't no sucker. Why play for a bad pot?" Nines clicks his teeth and glances at me. There's a spark in his eyes. "You take us to that conference, Eddie. I know how to mind my investments."

Eddie's relief carries him through the next night. Gamy and worn, he makes it to the rental car facility. Throwing his silver card down on the desk, nearly leaving it behind: "I don't care how much it costs, man. Anything. I'll take anything."

This doesn't inspire the worker to trust Eddie with a car. Nines, savvy, lifts Eddie's phone from his pocket and shows the man a video of Eddie talking in his three-Tesla garage — and then he's amenable.

As we're leaving, Nines stops and looks back. "Hey," he tells the rental car salesman, tapping his desk with his right ringfinger stump. "You think I'm kinda funny-lookin'?"

The guy swallows. "Y-yeah."

"I'm Knucklehead Nines," says Knucklehead Nines. "This is Eddie, from YouTube. And we're going west to a convention to kill a whole lot of people."

He smiles, raps once on the desk, and walks away. The guy stares after him.

Eddie chases the sunset in a sleek gray sedan. Nines refuses shotgun but sprawls across the back, his head in my lap. The whole time, Eddie's talking — crypto, politics, about the sons he wanted and never had — and Nines has his ears covered. When his eyes close he almost looks asleep, his black hair mussed across my thigh.

"What's it for, Eddie?" Nines interrupts Eddie, just for the sake of interrupting. "This great big U. S. of A."

"For?" Eddie asks. "Like, for a person? Or the way a machine is for something?"

"No, no, no. Is it for the games? For money? For dog fights? For moving coal from one place to another? For killing whales? The people, Eddie, for the people… what are the people for?"

"For us?" Eddie chuckles. "Well, you know what they're for."

"That's still not my meaning." Nines frowns. "Or maybe it is."

"What do they favor, that's what you mean," Eddie says. "Hm. Well, really, all a man's in favor of is himself." He drums on the steering wheel. "They do some things out of kindness, they say, but really it's exchange. I give you this gift, so it'll come back around to me. They're — feudal, in a way. People like that. They want that. They want to give to someone who has so much more than them that the return of that gift is… inconsequential, rote. It's like — the farmer gives his lord ten percent of his acre's worth of potatoes, and in exchange the lord protects his life and family — that's not an equivalent exchange. But the peasant loves it. He seeks it out. Because he feels like he's the one who's decides that it happens."

Nines turns his face into my thigh. "Jesus fuck," he says, muffled.

During the days, Eddie pulls over and shuts himself in the trunk. He's not ungrateful, he assures us, but he's had his fill of hotels, if that's alright. With the sound of the door slamming over him, Nines shifts around and says, "How did that come from me?"

He gets up, as he gets up each dawn, and starts walking through the sun. He flinches, as he flinches every time. He finds the nearest gas station — five miles away, this time — and buys a pack of cards, and to the cashier he says, "I'm Knucklehead Nines, pool shark, gambler, the guy who bet on the losing dog. I'm headed west, with Eddie from YouTube, to a convention."

Glassy-eyed, they nod.

Once we reach the edge of the city, it still takes almost a full night to get to our destination. Long ago it would've taken a week, Nines stopping in every restaurant, tipping every dancer, knowing every bartender. Now he watches the signs roll by impassive, the barest crease between his brows.

At the convention center, projecting itself with the blank concrete authority of a Roman statehouse, nobody even recognizes Nines, but they recognize Eddie.

"Man, where have you been!" cry endless friends as they gravitate toward him, touching him, clapping his shoulders, tweaking his cap. "Let's take a photo. Let's talk. Have a drink! I never see you around anymore. Always at night, it's like you're a cryptid. What happened to your podcast? What's with the rope?"

Eddie smiles. His cheeks flush. The darkness softens beneath his eyes, the sharpness wanes; even his beard seems fuller. He answers the questions, takes the pictures, puts on the lanyard, starts to joke about the rope, waggling its end and winking.

Nines is his shadow. No one pays him any attention in his tattered suit and his figeting hands, save to glance at him and turn away, mouth pressed flat, searching idly for the security guards.

Eddie's found a group of men who shave their beards in the same way as him. "Guys, I want to do a panel," he says, half-drunk and not on beer. "Can I do a panel?"

"Yes, yes," they all say. They're unsure who has agreed, who has given up his months-planned spot. But the next night in the latest slot of the day, Eddie stands at the front of a small room with a microphone in his hand. There are two dozen people here enraptured. Half of them do not know him. But they have come. 

When he speaks it is a string of nonsense words: he says, "I've been with a guy called Knucklehead Nines. I've got something very exciting going on. Look at this rope. It's an awesome rope. At least, I think it's a good rope."

Women laugh. Men nod. Eddie waves the rope end around like a limp little snake. And then he glances at Knucklehead Nines, and Nines quietly shuts the conference room doors.

It startles Knucklehead Nines in a way it does not startle me. At the start he doesn't know how to be among the lights, the walls, the motion. He stands in the way of a spray of carotid blood, coughs and wrinkles his nose, ruined face and shirt. He retreats to the wall, dodging bodies and chairs. Blinking rapidly, he looks at his own hands, lets the card deck fall clumsily from his sleeve.

Shuffles.

Shuffles.

Shuffles.

For a moment, with the sound, the familiar feel, he understands it. For a moment he becomes the room, as he used to be the casinos, the bars, the laughter at two tables, the lights, the chances, the music, the human smell. It's enough to get him thinking again.

He's in the corner, his eyes two-stepping around the room, but not seeing the blood — he's looking at the windows, the doors. He's tasting the wind, crossing his fingers. "Come on. Come on," he says, "I got this bet going…"

But in time the movement stops and the lights go off and the thing he waited for has not come.

Eddie's glutted in the center of the room. Nines stares at him. His hand twitches forward, then back. "Still time," he murmurs.

He goes to Eddie, and Eddie looks up at him. The hunter's glass slowly fades from Eddie's eyes, and he rolls his head back and starts to laugh. 

"Look at this!" he says, flinging his arms out to the field of organs around him, this reeking temple. "This is what I meant!" He stares into Nines's pin-fixed eyes. "You get it," he says. "I know you do."

"Get up," Nines says.

Eddie's smile dims, only a little. As if on a string, he draws himself to his feet. He's taller, broader, reddened in the teeth and the flesh. He looks down on Nines with a light in his eyes as if he has only just realized he can look down on him, only just noticed the relation of their bodies. 

"This is my temple," Eddie says. "There is no guilt in it." 

His hand flashes out, seizes Nines by the chin. Forces his head side to side. 

"Look. Look," he says. "Have you ever done anything like this, Knucklehead Nines? Have you ever reached?" Nines sighs. Eddie shakes his head. "No. No, of course not. You're a small man, Knucklehead Nines. You're not a monk, you're just crazy." His fingers tighten on Nines's jaw, and he lifts, his muscles bulging, pounding, with all the life that has filled him. "You're so light," Eddie says, smiling wide, his lips bulging over his long, distended teeth. "You're not a vampire, you're a shade."

"Oh, Ed-ddie," Nines sighs, rolling his head back. "All that stuff I told you in the park, and you think we're vampires?"

Eddie's hand would've spasmed in confusion and his nails would've cut Nines, not enough to kill him, enough to bleed, but before it does I am there, I have the rope, and Eddie is choking backward and Nines falls heavily to his feet.

Knucklehead Nines looks at me. "A motel," he says, "should be. Fuck if I care which." He appends another pet name for me, one he has not used before: "Janus."

Eddie strains toward the sounds of people as we leave the bloodly little room but when we reach the building doors he's humbled. "But it's light out," he says. "Uh. Oh, please, it's light out." He laughs, high in his mouth. "Please, I didn't mean — I can do better, I didn't mean —"

Nines goes through the doors and I haul Eddie after him. He comes to the light howling and covered in blood; raises his hands to shield himself and cries and bares his fangs and all the while thinks he is dying, never realizes it is just the sun on skin. When I cast him into the roach-streaked motel room out of the sun he's missed for a hundred years, he weeps and tries to kiss my shoe. 

Nines has none of that. With disgusted little toe-taps he herds Eddie out of our way and drags me by the hand into the bathroom and closes the door.

"I'm sorry," Eddie bays, like an abandoned dog. "I'm sorry, I'll never do it again. I'm guilty, I feel the guilt now. You gotta believe me. I'll tie myself up. I'll cut off my fingers, I swear, just don't — don't —"

Nines shoves a towel under the door to muffle his words. Then he bends his knees and falls slowly forward, and rests his head against the moldy door, and closes his eyes.

“I’m stalling,” he says, so much quieter than he was not long ago, when all the world's dice were cast on the tips of his fingers. “Maybe I wasn't thinking at all back then. But I think I went back out in the sun not ‘cause I knew it wouldn’t hurt me no more but because I wanted to feel it try. Didn’t know before I tried. I took the warmth and the gift back and I didn’t care for it. I hate it, walking out there. I got used to the nights. I Gawd, I know I’m stalling.”

He looks up at me. Crow-dark eyes, thin, chapped lips.

“I don’t like feelin’ my back’s in a corner, you know, lover. I don’t like playing a stacked deck, for me or the dealer, you know? I ain’t no sucker.”

He sighs, presses his forehead into the door. Hits it. Then lays his palm flat against it.

“Fuck, I fucking hate this guy, and I like her,” he says. “You sure it can’t be anyone else? Someone I don't give two shits about? Naw. Never could be and won’t. Hell. She'll get something out of it that I won't, at least. For a minute. She doesn't have an ounce of him in her already; I do.” His mouth twitches and twists, tounge probing his aching teeth. "And if it doesn't work — well. Same difference in the end. All goes to the same place."

His face screws up. I lean down, I touch his cheek. My thumb sweeps away a bloody tear.

His dark hair, matted and uncovered. His face, streaked and gray. His jacket, ripped and stained and manged of its sequins. All these years, he has pulled me. Like watching a star implode.

Outside, in the main room, a yelp — a scuffle, an intake of breath. Then a wet half-silence. Nines lets it drag for a few moments, out of politeness, before he shrugs the threadbare jacket off his shoulders, hangs it on my hands, and pushes through the door.

I remain in the bathroom, standing near the blank mirror. I have a respect for such things and leave them private.

Still I hear her say: "At least I am no longer hungry."

"That's good to hear," he says, "I hope."

"If I am to live, I will play to win," she says. "And if not, then you will finally know."

"Know what?"

"How to lose."

The sound of Eddie's body falling limply to the floor. The sound of her standing, brushing herself off. Paws slamming, fast, on the dusty carpet — a strike, a thud, a bite.

The low, wet lap, lap, lap.

When I come out he's shuddering atop the body of the big black dog. Her huge black paws still twitch.His hands are buried in the fur of her neck, his spine jolts with every pull of blood. I like to see him this way, in these moments, but I turn aside.

Her breaths slow, slow, stop. A final huff. And she is still.

He breathes in deeply, catching her air in his nose. He breathes out. He braces his fists on his legs as his eyes unroll, and, slowly, he sits back. He stares down at her, the scant drops of blood on the carpet. His breathing returns to normal. His eyes unglaze. Flushed, veins pounding. I can hear it. My nostrils flare, half-remembering that same hot pump. He smells full, sweaty, virile – if virile were such a thing as we can be. 

He presses his thumbnails into his ringfinger stumps until they go white, trying to master himself. “You know, this is some bull-shit,” he says, his voice thick and strained. "It weren't nothing, what she was holding out on me. Careful as me, sadder, too, didn't know nothing. She scared me before, you believe that? Really did. Now it was easy." He closes his eyes. "She knew I'd be here with him, I made sure of that. I bet she would come anyway… can you believe I did that?"

His eyes flick open. He gets to his feet. He steps toward me, pupils flashing, anguished red. “Here I’ve been, spitting myself out for you," he says, jabbing a finger in my face. "I been turning over the fire, long as I’ve known you, muchlonger than that, and what do I get? What do I get? Huh, Ishmael, what?"

His hands fumble for the iridescent tie at his throat stained with a single ruby of blood, tears and flings it away, stumbles forward. “There I was thinking I was hunting you. Man, am I sucker? Am I a whale?” His voice spikes upward, breaking like a crow’s call: “Worse, is it a service? You gonna tell yourself you do it on our behalf? I won't rest at peace, man! I got too many, too much death on me to die! …I know you smell it on me."

His eyes fix on me halfway through unbuttoning his collar. His nostrils swell. For the first time he smells me.

"Gawd, what was she? Was it the men what worshipped her or the dogs? I see you got teeth now,” he says. "You got breath in you now I can feel on me from here. Cheat. Liar. Fuck, are you the reaperman?” He rips off his shirt and throws it to the ground. “And I done fell in love with you! God damn!”

I take one step toward him. All his strings snap at once. He thuds to his knees on the carpet, bloody, half-naked. I freeze. He falls toward me until his head rests against my shin, heavy and hard. 

Dark, crow-feather hair, spreading from a whorl at his scalp. He turns down and sinks sideways, presses his face into my trouser leg.

“It hasn't been so bad," he murmurs. I feel his lips moving through the fabric. "I lived the dream for a while."

He sighs, brushes his cheek down my shin.

"They liked me. I Gawd, they loved me. I met so many beautiful people. I felt it in my soul. I was the pulse — I had my fingers on it." He drags his cheek on me, catlike, feeling the scratch of the fabric on his face, the muscle. "I was singing. I was dancing round like a cat's cradle. I loved people from Carolina to the canyon. Lettin' them kiss my fingers, bite me til I bled. See, I always thought something was mine if I could get my blood all over it." He closes his eyes and turns his head. "I did love them. All of them. Now I only…"

One hand sculpts up my leg, probes the back of my knee. The other comes down to my boot, drags fingernails over the leather. “It’s that I ain’t got any more secrets to tell you," he says, a choked, tiny voice. "Not really. There ain’t nothing more to see. This is the life I lead, this is how I’d do it the rest of my days, if I could. Gawd, what a sad little thing.”

He hunches down, pulls up the leg of my trouser and kisses my ankle, deeply, open-mouthed, wetting all the course hairs on his tongue.

He pulls back and says nummbly, “You even got a taste now."

I reach down, touch his chin, just the barest brush of fingers, and bring him up to stand before me. I watch him, the bob of his throat; the fluttering carotid; the slide of blood from his head down his body, down his neck, his bare, skinny chest, between his ribs. His black, liquid eyes, a doe's.

I open my mouth.

Nines steps back instinctively, breathing in. I grab his waist and force him closer. It's a hard grip, bruising, and could be much harder, but he doesn't fight. Though every inch of him strains backward, he shuffles closer, closing his eyes, and I arc over him and sink my teeth into his neck.

It floods me.

"Fuck, that hurts," Nines says tremulously. "Fuck."

The heat of it. Pulsing, pushing — the gush, forcing itself into my mouth, down my throat, filling my belly, the warmth aching and bursting outward — I seize him by the small of the back, fall upon him, crush him to me. His hands come up to grip my convulsing shoulders, dig into my coat and deeper and into my bones, tight with agony.

"God damn you," he gasps. "God dammit, how many — how many others? How many like me? You must've had a dry spell, but — ah — was it all — fuck, but am I just a name to you? Do you even know my name, you even understood a word I said?"

His knees give out. His weight falls on my arms, and I sink with him, to the floor, looming over him and pressing him down, bending him backwards, just to be closer to the heat, the heart, that fills me — it strums me, deep in my chest. I groan.

"You better know my name," he hisses, holding me so tight my coat rips around his fingers. "It's a good fucking name. I'm famous. I'm a dog. I ain't just a body, you bastard, you fucking bastard, I ain't a demon, I ain't a mark. And I ain't. no. goddamned. sucker." He heaves a big breath. "I'm Knucklehead Nines, the spirit of the goddamned South."

He's gray, starting to spasm. His body heaves with mine, every muscle in my core locking, seizing, as I strain to pull it all from him. Sounds are forcdd out of me, pained, animal grunts. He cringes. "Hush…" 

With every pulse his grip on me grows weaker, his fingers slowly twitching out of my coat. Jerkily, he drags his hands up my back, my shoulders, the nape of my neck. As his shoulders hit the carpet they come to rest in my hair, tangling there, pulling, and then gentling. 

He tucks me to him. He strokes my hair. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

He shushes me. Shh-hh-hh, the pulsing, the swallowing, the breath. No language serves. And my own sounds join it, weave into that rhythm, so that it seems the sound comes from both of us. 

Then he is finally quiet. 

I pull back from him. His skin is ash, yet fuller somehow. The drawn, hungry look has drained from his face; softened, the hollows beneath his eyes and the juts of his throat. The body, no longer wasted but only the lean, the sun-kissed, underfed workman. The tongue stilled, unknown.

For a time I sit there looking down at him, warm with the flush of the take. All he has said, all he has forgot — it swirls, settles. I feel him in me. Awakening truths long-buried, as all true things tend to do.

I lower myself until my mouth is on his ear, and I whisper to him my name.

Then I push myself to my feet and lean over the corpse of Knucklehead Nines, and cough and spit a gob of blood onto him. This is not an insult. Knucklehead Nines's body was full of all the blood he ever drank; it fills me, and I taste every drop as it passes through his lips, every woman, every man, every artist, every dog. I pass a portion back to him. It is a gift.

Bu the time I leave him the smell is already blooming from his throat. His muscles go rigid and his bones begin to crack, caught up by their centuries of use. His body leaks all the fluids that are not blood. The droplets bead,fall and stain the carpet below him: water from the eyes, bile from the lips, and clear, sour lymph from the stubs of his ringfingers.

Subscribe

Share

He takes to scenery for a while, replaces his interest in the flesh. We leave the clubs and ride greyhounds round the lips of the Grand Canyon. He’ll let travellers convince him to play cards, but spend the whole game staring out the window. Wins anyway, if he wants to.

He points out the scraggly trees. “That’s the oldest thing you ever saw, maybe.” To the bare red cliffs. “I’d build a house there. Nicest place you ever saw.”

Some nights he follows lonely strangers off at the stops, eats in furtive shadows. Some nights he only watches them go. A woman in a green dress plays him gin rummy in the back row and asks him what happened to his fingers. “Work accident,” he says. “I got this crisp new deck of cards and I tried this trick here — see — and the edge of the two-diamonds just took ‘em right off.”

She laughs and marvels at the card cascade. “But this isn’t your work, is it?”

“Why, what else you think I do?”

A considering look. It goes on longer than he expects, and he squirms, didn’t expect her to take it serious.

“I think you’re an artist,” she decides.

“An artist!”

“It’s the way you look at the layers in the rock. You’re studying for a painting.”

“Am I, now? Maybe I am!” He laughs, delighted, and shuffles. “But you know, I came over to build a railroad.”

“Came over?”

He puts the cards to the side, zeroing in on a napkin sticking out of her purse. “You got a pen?”

He spends the rest of the ride sketching something on the napkin. He turns and twists it whenever I come near so I can’t see. When she gets off at her stop, he hands it to her, folded up. She kisses his cheek before she goes.

He returns to his seat and whistles through his teeth. “An artist!” he crows. “You hear that? I Gawd! I could be an artist. Hell, I’ve been an artist. I could be a poet, too. I’m whatever I want to be, I’m a poet. See? I get these phrases in my head. My name’s one of them. Ha! Knucklehead Nines, nobody called me that. Just couldn’t get it out of my ear one day Knucklehead Nines, Knulcklehead Nines. And I thought, what’s it take to be him, I’m him, I’m anything I put my mind to!” He giggles and slaps his knee. “So I stuck out my ring fingers and laid the tips on the rail and waited for a train to come.”

He catches his breath.

“The knucklehead part, that came natural,” he says. “I mean, what kinda knucklehead would pull that stunt?”

I sit next to him until the next stop, and when he slides out of his seat he flaps his hand stay down, stay down, looks at me side-eyed as he shrugs on his jacket. “I didn’t mean to make that no confessional,” he says. “You don’t need to get so excited.”

Knucklehead Nines doesn’t stop outside churches, synagogues, mosques, doesn’t flinch at crosses, doesn’t look at them funny or avoid them either, though some do. He says he’s from Alabama, won’t name a hometown. June, our bus breaks down near the California border, and Knucklehead Nines steps out onto the dawn gray street, and the crosswalks are painted rainbow, flags ringing on streetpoles. Two women walk furtively down the sidewalk to the mosque on the corner. There’s a cathedral on the other and a temple down the street. He follows at a distance, not covert.

He pauses at the side of the building, nose an inch from the wall, eyes into the blue mosaic, up in its face. He extends a hand, holds it flat out about an inch from the stone. Stands there very still. “I’ll know if it burns,” he says evenly. “So I can’t touch it, ‘cause if I touch it, I’ll know I can. And if it burns or not, hell, it’s worse knowing either or the other.”

The air itches, so close to a place like this. It hasn’t itched in so long, but it does now. I edge away stepwise til we’re a ridiculous twenty feet apart, me wavering and him standing with his hand raised parallel to the side of the building. He mumbles to himself under his breath, low and constant like a gut string. I hear, “What happened?” and other words I don’t catch.

Finally he turns, fixes his eyes on my face. He strides to me, takes my arm, pulls me rough into the space between the buildings; I let him. He pushes me against the wall with strength that would surprise if I did not know him for what he was, reaches up and presses hard down on my shoulders til my knees are bent and we’re at height. Pins my shoulder with one hand, grabs my jaw hard with the other. Forces his thumb between my lips and pries my jaws apart.

“There, there,” he says. He hooks two fingers behind my top teeth, strokes my soft palate, the backs of my canines. Coaxes my teeth to extension. The half-knuckle rests against my lip. “I ain’t never seen them before. Like pearls, milk teeth…”

I surge forward and crush my mouth to his, wide open, bloody. I sink my teeth into his cheek. He rips nine long gashes through the back of my coat. Rabid in the alley, loosing blood into the trash and stagnant water – I slam his face into the mosaic and I do not know if he burns.

Even with me inside him he rambles on like a child. “Man, what are you?” he asks, and it comes out sobbed. “What are you? Do you know me? Do you know me? O, Lord -“ and as he says the name his skin sears against me. I jolt. “O Lord. O Lord. O Lord - ”

The taste of him is more than I can bear. I find him again that night in the poolhouse.

“Thought I could use a change,” he says, leaning hawkeyed over the table. “Thought you wouldn’t go again, not so soon. Suppose I didn’t wow you. Hit to a man’s ego, I tell you what.”

The cue strikes. The balls scatter. The crowd whistles, and he asks, casual, “Where d’you go?”

My head tilts.

“Naw. Course.” His throat bobs.

His turn again. He leans over, tilts his head down. A few strands fall free from his oiled-back hairline, black strikes against his forehead.

“I ain’t never doing that again, just so’s you know.” A few slides of the cue between his fingers. He changes his angle. “I mean, I didn’t know you could. I think a while ago you couldn’t. I thought it was on account of how you don’t eat, but I ain’t seen you eat nothing, and now there’s enough substance to you I’m still walkin’ funny. Har-har. But it’s disturbing me and I ain’t doing it again. Just consider that what we in the business call a moment of duress.” He wets his lips. “But it was nice,” he says quietly. “Real nice, like.”

His body goes still. The other players round the table look at him strange. They know he talks to himself, one of the well-known quirks of Knucklehead Nines. But it’s not fun when he’s serious like this, not fun when his eyes stay fixed like missiles on the ball.

“I miss praying,” he says. “Nobody knows the prayers I used to say.”

The cue strikes like a gunshot.

Every gambler in Vegas knows him, gambler’s saint, golden calf, they blow his dice, touch his shoes, kiss his costume rings. Behind him in the streets follow the strange and the destitute, learning quickly that the one from whom he wins a few faded pennies or old silver teeth will see it back a thousandfold.

At a dive far from the main strip, he leans against the bar, passing a cocktail back and forth through his teeth in a swirly straw. “I’m anything I want to be,” he says. “I ain’t a sucker. See? I’m them hobos waiting outside. And I’m the neon in the puddles and I’m the stars in the sky.” He sweeps his hand lazily behind him, and the eyes of all the men and women clustered around the bar follow its costume-jeweled glint. “I’m Knucklehead Nines,” he says, extending a finger like a symphony conductor off-duty.

The Spirit of the South, they say, all and none.

He nods, satisfied. “But most of all,” glancing down through black lashes, tinking his nail on the rim of the glass, “I’m wanting to buy you a drink. You want a drink?”

I shake my head.

The swirly straw rolls along the rim of the cocktail glass as he bounces it toward my lips. “C’mon, don’t play coy now,” he says. Six diamonds stuck to the bottom of the glass. He takes it back, laughs, leans back and sleeves his deck with a suit-yourself shrug. Raising his voice, “Folks, I’m feeling generous. Who wants to kiss my rings?”

Then a familiar face pushes through the crowd, scruffier, puffier with days of drink, the dreamy haze in her eyes of the suddenly and catastrophically broke. But the same dress. And she’s smiling.

“The artist!” Nines crows, and his eyes light up with genuine joy. “How long’s it been? You still know me! Share a drink. Come tell me what you think I do now.”

Later that night in the alley behind the bar, he’s stripping off his ruined jacket, shirt, pants, undershirt, down to his naked skin, throwing the blood-soaked clothes into the puddle at his feet, where the green dress loses its color to the muck. The walls are dark and the clouds pissing on us like drunks.

“Man, fuck this mess,” he says, “I liked her, too. I was gonna teach her pinochle, you know, house rules, all special-kind. Man, three days I hadn’t had a drop, not a pang, and then I get the notion to her, her, why her? Sweet little dove-eyes lady.” He hurls his boxers down so hard red droplets splash a few feet up onto the wall. “I’m on a diet. I ain’t doing it no more. You don’t have to, I don’t have to.” Kicks off his crocodile-skin shoes next to the blonde’s glassy eyes. “I’ll be a monk. I’ll be fuckin’ keto paleo, vegan-style.”

He storms back toward the neon street. I offer my coat. He pushes it away.

For weeks, he keeps his word, and withers. His cheeks hollow and the whites of his eyes go tea-stained. His hands shake; he grabs his own forearms hard enough to break the skin, restraining himself from touching the dancers, the players, the lone men on the strip before sunrise.

“I feel great,” he says, shivering, wrapping himself tight in my coat. “I feel me. I feel more me than I felt in, hell, a long time, maybe ever. That’s it, it’s like a fuckin’ – pipe, you just put it down, you stop breathin’, you’re you, you’re just you without the pipe…”

He foregoes the tables. He spends many nights sitting, unblinking, in front of the slot machines. He pours money into them, oceans of money he has no reason to have, swirling away into the lights. Or sometimes he walks the aisles of the machines, squeezing past chairs in a labyrinth of spellbound people. He picks some at random, thin young ones with forty bucks to waste, sagging old men with debts to pay, fat women with throbbing backs hunched over the buttons – and he stands behind them, still, unblinking, watching them hemorrhage into the machines. He does this for hours.

Sometimes he steps forward, past them, and stands beside the machines. Their eyes go to him; in his sequined jacket, his hat, his sleek tie, he is the brighter lightshow. He taps the machine, or blows on a quarter, or kisses the finger they use to press the button, and the next spin spits five thousand dollars into their laps. If they play again, he stays. If not, he walks away. None of them speak to him. Their eyes slide off him and back to the spinning wheels. And it surprises him, makes his eyes wide and his tongue still when he finds himself unlooked at, but as the weeks go on it becomes easier and easier until he has to wave before their eyes or blow in their ears just to be asked his name.

One night he sits on his own at a machine but doesn’t play, just hunches up like a gargoyle and watches the digital display spin and beg and ruminates.

“I been remembering something,” he says, “something about me, now I’m not thinking about my meals so much.”

Minutes pass. He asks aloud, in a high voice imitating no one, “What is it, Nines?”

Looks at me. Looks back to the machine.

“Y’know, I’m anything I set my mind to,” he says, “so how’d I set my mind to being me, this? Who did it to me and did I tell them to?”

“Who, Nines?” he asks again, a note of anger in the mocking. He doesn’t look at me. The lights dance in the black of his eyes, perfect black, sucking black, black that holds anything and pulls anything. Hungry black.

Two hours pass, silent. For two hours, the machine tells him he’ll win if he spins again.

“Man, I don’t even speak English!” he bursts out, jumping to his feet and slapping the machine. It spits out a twenty; he rips it out, shoves it in his mouth, chews, and spits. “Fuck! Who’d I get this voice from? Whose body is this I put it in!” He storms off as he usually storms off, a quick and knifelike swagger, but takes a turn five steps into it and circles right back to where he started. “I got too many people inside me,” he says, finger jabbing in his chest. “I ain’t big enough. I think my first was a white man. Looked a little like you.”

He gets on a bus to Colorado. Furthest north I’ve seen him go. Beside a fire under an overpass, a toothless woman tells him, “You best settle your debts.”

“Me? I got the pot!” Knucklehead Nines says. “You wanna play me a hand and settle up yourself?”

She shakes her head. “No. Not to me. Best settle with him before he catches you out.”

He and cocks his thumb at me. “Who, him?”

“The Devil,” she says.

“Now, that’s what I’m starting to think!” he cackles. When we step on the next bus, the bridge left bloody behind us, the driver charges him for one ticket, but he shakes his head and hands over double. “Two,” he says, “one for me and one for the Devil.”

The driver waves him by, doesn’t hear.

Nines sits with his hands dug into his forearms. His feet hammer the floor. The buses are sacred to him, the traveler’s places, and so the miles pass in agony, as he bites his lip and shakes and doesn’t look at the boys sleeping in the row behind us, until in a sudden flurry he leaps up and wrenches the window open and leaps out into the night.

His heels hit the dirt and I’m already there. “Smooth,” he says, brushing off his shoulders. “I’m Knucklehead Nines. I don’t answer to no doors or speeds.

A beacon shines, a biker bar two miles down the road. He’s shuffling as he goes, nattering over the buzz of the desert night, insects and lightning and the distant cities. “Debts, it’s all debts,” he says. “Guy who loses a penny is a sucker. Guy who loses a million got balls. But, see, you earn a penny when you’re a penny in the hole, that’s the same as earning a million with a million in the hole. Same as. Side to side, the scale stays even. It’s the movement that matters, you catch it up, make the sideways work for you. That’s how you know you’re not a sucker.” He flips out a card and shows it to me with his eyes closed, six diamonds. “You wanna see a magic trick?”

We round the bend to the bar and the deck disappears up his sleeve. There’s music, out of tune, backs pressed to fronts, bandanas and gloves, spilt-whiskey dancing. It’s alive beneath the desert stars, and Knucklehead Nines’s mouth is open.

Inside he beelines for the pool table and mutters, “Just a round.”

I mingle with the light and the smoke while he white-knuckles his cue. They hear him. When he strikes a ball it rolls. “Him? That’s Knucklehead Nines,” says a hairy man at the bar, “biggest shark of the States.” Nines grins, looks around, disbelieving.

He whoops at the end of the shitty band’s set, rings chiming as he claps. He shoves two hundred-dollar bills in their can, then buys a round for the bar to an explosion of cheers. He’s patted, kissed, lifted briefly onto a tall man’s shoulder. He beams and crows, he’s king of the night. “I slept in a drain pipe last week!” he calls and they laugh and laugh.

By the end of the hour he’s stripped the old men around the pool table down to their silver teeth. They can’t manage to glare at him. At the bar, he orders another feast of whiskey for the house, then a few shots of his own. I’ve never seen him try to drink anything but fruity cocktails and he notices me noticing, rolls his eyes and says, “It’s thirsty work, bein’ me again. I’m thirsty.”

He throws his head back and holds a shot glass to his lips, but his mouth never opens. Eyes still closed he lowers it slowly back to the bar. His lashes flutter.

A bankrupt old man has mustered his resolve and come up behind him. The man shuffles and swallows and screws his mouth up while he waits but it doesn’t occur to him, he doesn’t even think, to speak unless spoken to. Nines passes him the shot glass and he walks away appeased, cupping it as if it’s liquid gold. Nines pulls a new glass to the space in front of him from his row of three. Swirls it, drags his skinny ring finger round the reddish rim in the light.

“They love me again,” he says. “I Gawd, I’m thirsty. Ishmael,” looking up at me, “d’you know what I’m thirsty for?”

Wide, dark eyes with the light of the bar sign in them like an ember in a coal. Warm dark. The quirk of his lip over his canine. I put my hand on the back of his chair.

“I learned how to play pool through the window,” he murmurs, his mouth barely moving. “Couldn’t hear a word they said, had to watch them, try to puzzle it out. Barman wore a silver ring with a picture of a sun on it. One night, the girl saw me, pointed me out, and he came out and hit me so hard the sun went through my cheek. That’s how I know to play pool.”

Like a snake, his hand strikes out and catches my wrist. He freezes there vicing me as if he wasn’t expecting to feel it, but he does — the coarse hair trailing up my arm, the flex of tendon and vein.

“Lover,” he says, “I ain’t thirsty.”

What comes next is not something one can watch. So I do not watch. Instead, I am the smoke, I am the light – I am the shattered tube of neon. The mold on the wall that drowns under the first spray of blood. The twang on the guitar when the singer claws for it as if it will do him any good or ever has. Most of all I am standing over the shoulder of Knucklehead Nines as he impales a man on a pool cue to keep him in place – and slashes another’s heel tendon with a broken bottle – and ties a woman to the wall with a fistful of electrical wires. And circles back to sip them, later.

“Please, I didn’t mean no harm,” gurgles the cued one, the last one, as Nines gnaws his open wrist. “I got a wife and kids. I don’t deserve — I don’t! She lied about it. I — I did it, but I didn’t think it’d come out this way — thought she’d learn something, learn to like it —”

“Funny, that’s what he said,” Nines says, unblinking, indicating the man on the ground.

“I got a kids,“ the man says.

“Yup, Hunter and Hannah,” Nines nods.

“Hunter? Yeah, him — I was going to teach him — if they’d just — I’d make amends, if you just give me another chance, Jesus, please —”

“Man, that’s what he said, too,” Nines says, swishing the blood in his mouth and making a face. “I Gawd, it’s always the same, same taste, same story. I haven’t eaten junk like this in a while. I been slacking off, focusing on my mind. Now, I tell you, it don’t go down easy.”

All of a sudden, he drops the man’s wrist and spits, slides off the pool table. He clicks his teeth, beckons me, dusts his bloody jacket, grabs my hand, and saunters toward the door.

“Wait,” calls the man. “Wait, please —”

“Don’t worry,” Nines says, splashing through a dark puddle. “You didn’t get any of mine, so you’ll just die.”

I let him pull me, kicking aside the stools and limbs.

His back is quaking like a fault line. His eyes are rod-straight ahead. “I oughta go,” he says, “That ain’t so bad. I’m sick of the desert and I’m feeling like a change of scene. They say Louisiana’s got houses for all kinds, they say in Mississippi there’s a slot machine at every gas station…” He’s not looking where he’s stepping, cracking and splashing underfoot, and he’s not seeing where he’s looking, because otherwise he wouldn’t be walking out into the sun.

He’s out in the middle of the empty road before the realization hits him, punching out of his chest with a little “H-uh.” He freezes, eyes wide, looks around.

The sky’s a blue screen, the heat wavering up off the road like oil in the distance. His fingers tighten on my hand.

“You coulda told me,” he says.

After that he rides back and forth around the Gulf, a trail of money and blood behind him. Still he cringes from the day, holes up in hotel rooms and bridge culverts, hunched up in the familiar shadow. Someone ought to be following him, he says, after a stunt like that, but nobody does.

“Crying shame, what this country’s come to,” he opines.

He leaves games halfway through, stands up and goes. Doesn’t talk to anyone besides his meals, and even then, half the time he leaves them unfinished. When people look at him he looks away, hides his fingers in his pockets – the substance is back, the magic gone.

“I’ve had enough of junk,” he explains. “A barrel of gas station wine ain’t the same as a thousand-dollar swig. I got a thousand dollars. I got a million. I got Midas fingers! I guess my taste’s caught up with me finally. I must’ve got refined without my noticing.”

He spends a lot of time thinking, sitting with his knees folded up to his chin and his finger-stubs tapping on his lips. For a while I’m with him, offering what warmth I can, and then I am less and less and I can’t quite stay.

Until one day there’s a young man smoking behind the train station, and as soon as Nines smells him his eyes go wide, wide.

“Here’s my special spice,” he says when he can speak again, licking the blood from his fingers. “Tastes like bourbon. It’s crisp! You and me, Bluebeard, we’ll be drinking molten gold from now on, just you wait. You want a taste?”

He proffers his last bloody finger, tilts his head so his neck is bare.

“Finely aged,” he says.

I shake my head.

Over the next few months he ferrets them out. There’s nothing outward to relate them, no special look or sign, no A positive or O, and they’re few and far between. He crisscrosses borders to find them, following the words, the glances, the acquaintances, and the half-remembered ties. He knows them, bloodhound nose. Wrinkles it up at anyone else.

“Some kinda first sin maybe,” he muses, “or a pheromone or maybe a curse or somethin’. Notes of bergamot. I don’t know,” but after long enough, enough dark-eyed men and skinny girls, he’s starting to suspect.

One he finds sleeping in an underpass. He’d just grab her and be done if not for the hint of movement under her arm. He crouches to watch it. A one-eyed kitten, squirming in her tattered scarf.

When she wakes he asks her about it. She says she found it down a drain, just can’t leave well enough alone. “He got nine lives?” he asks, and she shakes her head. “Only one left, probably. Or just half one. Used up all the rest by now.”

Nines grins and wiggles his fingers.

All that evening, he sits with her. He teaches her poker with the pierced cards up his sleeve. She tells him who she was, her gone mother, her brother who hasn’t been answering her calls. Where she came from. How she used to visit Gran but they won’t let her in the ward anymore.

“Gran-mother?”

“Great-great aunt or something,” she says. “I don’t know. One of those people you gotta keep around, ‘cause you’re really all they got and they’re the same.”

“Right,” he says. “Where is she?”

“Alabama.”

“Let me take you out of here. You got a place to stay?”

And she goes with us, sits in the Uber for hours toward Georgia. She says an old boyfriend lives in Atlanta with their son. Nines has money in his pocket that he keeps fingering, meaning, as he whispers in my ear, to buy her and the kitten a hotel room, a hospital stay, a rosary. “I mean it,” he says, starting to shake, “I don’t have to. I can do whatever I want.”

Five minutes past midnight the cab pulls over. The next he’s in the drainpipe under the two-lane highway, hunching over her as she wheezes through the blood.

“This time,” he says, tugging at his hair, “this time, it’ll be the last. I won’t even finish you off. I didn’t like you all that much, even. Not much in there at all. How’d you all get to be so boring? Lord!”

“You…” she says, “At first I thought… you were him… but you don’t look like him… you look like…my…”

“What him?” Nines sighs. “Don’t tell me. Men, I got enough of this already. He either left you or he took something.”

“He… left me… and he took…”

Nines throws up his hands.

To his turned head, the woman says, “But I… I asked him to… to do it…”

“Oh? Why?”

She coughs wet blood. “So it… it’d still be mine…”

He pauses. “Your son,” he says quietly, “you a lot like him?”

“What? He’s… yes.”

“Tsk.”

He knows — last week we were in Atlanta. It was quick and clean.

As he takes in the final few pulses of her heart, I lean in. He waves an arm at me, swatting blindly. “Hey, lover!” he hisses, pulling back with a spray and a shining chin, “back off, huh?”

Even after she’s done he stays there, slumped over her. His jacket’s stained but he doesn’t take it off. Breath like a hammer pounding his back, he rests his head in the hollow of her throat. The kitten’s curled on her sternum. He scratches its cooling ears.

“Back to Atlanta,” he says. “They got music and a building full of fish. We go back there, we won’t need no bottled gold.”

He takes so long to pry himself up he thinks he has to spend the day in the drain pipe, though of course he doesn’t. It’s a psychosomatic fear but I sit in it with him. He deals us hands of rummy, I don’t play so he plays himself. He chatters and jokes, tells me about the other drain pipes he’s been in, the last time he went to Alabama and what he thinks he’ll find there now, flying cars and air balloons going down in puffs of flame. The shadow lengthens and he goes back to the woman’s body where the little fish in the ditch water nibble at her ankles, and he takes two quarters from his pocket and puts them over her eyes, taking care to flip them both heads. He tries to do the same for the kitten, but the dimes won’t stay. The longer he looks at her the more his lips fall open, drawing the dusk over his tongue.

As soon as the sun’s down enough he’s walking, shuffling as he goes, nattering over the buzz of the cicadas and the leaves. “I feel good,” he says.

For weeks, he dances, dices, smiles, and doesn’t have a drop.

When the shaking starts again, he ignores it. When the dealers stop dealing to him, he moves to slots. When the slots stop taking his money, he sits in the back of a whitewashed room that smells of death and fumbles counters on a Bingo card. “Fuckin’ ridiculous,” he mutters. “Ain’t that hard. Ain’t that hard, picking up – whatever this is, fucking plastic, ain’t even poker chips.”

His number’s called. “Bingo,” he says. Louder, “Bingo. Bingo. Bingo.” Still they don’t hear him. Keep turning the crank, pulling balls out of the cage. He’s on his feet now. “Bingo.” The old woman in the seat next to him puts a counter on O. He sends his card and counters clattering to the floor. Swipes for hers, takes him three times til they scatter. She blinks a clouded eye and the aide kneels to gather them. “Fuckin’ BINGO,” Knucklehead Nines roars, and he nearly goes for her saggy neck right there, but he gags at the last second and stumbles from the room. In the hall he falls to the ground and crouches, wrenching at his hair.

“I know,” he says. “I know! Just one! After all I done, that’s nothing, that’s kitten food! One more and then — and then — Lord Almighty, what then?”

I wait, silent. Minutes tick.

“I wasn’t a slut, you know?” he snaps. “You’d think there wouldn’ve have been so many of ‘em!”

He shakes his head.

“What a fuckin’ choice,” he says. “Does everyone get to this, learn to walk in the sun? Is that why there’s so few I can see? Do they choose – choose not to, is this the line? Rather starve than — huh. And you too. I guess you made your choice. It’s not so bad if you’ve got the willpower, I guess. Fuckin’ admirable. Ethical-moral-lacto shit, that’s what makes you light as air.” He swallows. “But I don’t want to go where you go, see, when you’re gone. To me I think it’s hellfire. If I ain’t on earth, I’m in hellfire. I can’t remember but I musta sold my soul to the devil if I’ve lived this long outrunning him. I Gawd, I’ve lived a long time. A long fuckin’ time.”

He looks up suddenly, startled. I crouch over him, overshadow him, tuck him under my arm. My hand finds the crown of his skull, envelops the thick dark hair, pads of my fingers trailing the part. From there, slowly, I sculpt down to his neck, then over the curve of his spine, the knobbles of the vertebrae beneath his cheap sequin suit, the parabolas of ribs, around the emaciated side. His waist drowns in my hands.

He shakes. He stares. “You got so solid,” he murmurs. “Again. Did you really choose to… uh… Oh, no, I don’t like this one bit.”

He wavers. In the next moment, he’s on his feet and off down the hall, blinking hard.

“I know where she is,” he says, “I smell her on me. Me on her. It ain’t so bad. Just one, grand scheme-style. Just taking back something I lost, I need back. Don’t matter if it were a gift. Come on. Come on.”

We go to Alabama.

His last remaining grandchild lies on a plastic sheet, mouth open, breath wet, white skin bruised with age and needle. There are no less than three crosses balanced on the headboard of her medical bed. Knucklehead Nines stares at them a long time, most of the night.

Then, with dawn’s fingers probing the curtains, he goes to the IV bag and takes the plastic in tender hands. He bites it, first slow sips, then deeper, eyes closed, holding tight to the metal stand, until most of the fluid is gone. He moves to the tube, nicks it with one tooth, and the saline sprays from the bag in a neat arc and puddles on the floor. The machine screams once and he lays a hand on it and quiets it. Stares down at the open-mouthed thing on the bed. I step away from the wall and lock the door.

His hands shake. His eyes shake, his lungs. He sticks the tube in the side of his mouth like wheatgrass, half-chews on it while he thinks. Saline runs down his neck.

“Just a little blood,” he says. The voice is high, wheedling, like a child pleading with a parent. “Just a little. I got all the rest, so I can leave some of it, I can. It ain’t so bad, just taking as much as I gave, just as much as is mine. It ain’t even my name on the footboard. Some Winston or Whitman or whatever, huh? They drew a little cross… the pastor’s been here already. You smell that Bible on her? I don’t know what she confessed, if they do confession. I’ll tell you in a second.”

He stares at her for five minutes, dripping saline, stock-still.

“Just a drop, now,” he says, and seizes on her.

Her skin parts hard and gamy. Black eyes fly open, cateracts draining to the corners. Wasted muscles shock alive and yellow nails tear at Nines’s sequin jacket. It takes a violent strength to wrest that slow black blood from her jugular. His jaw works. His body heaves with it. The blood fills him and he is there, more there than ever he has been, his hands clenched on her sheets, his shoulders heaving. He darkens and strengthens to the roots of his hair. The bedframe cracks. “You,” the bastard cries, not knowing what she means – “You, you –” and then the word stops and the mummy mouth lets out a short, senseless scream, a dark and foul breath, and he takes it up in his chest, thrumming, moaning, until her heart is done and he rips himself away, leaving a torn white crater in her throat.

He stumbles back, panting, hiccuping, wiping bloody sweat from his scalp with the back of his hands. Whether it’s sobbing or moaning or laughter that comes from him, there’s no telling. “‘You,’” he coughs, the black blood on his teeth. “You think they told stories about me? Few months maybe I was a face at her grandmother’s window. I don’t recall!” He takes the IV stand in hand, clenches his four-and-a-half fingers and the metal crumples like foil. “Ain’t no more living blood of mine in all the world. Infanticide. Infanticide — oh, Lord, how long’d it take you?”

The room stinks. Her bowels vacate; the body leaks out all he could not take.

Suddenly the heavy, black eyes turn on me, the force of them enough to bruise ribs. “You. You. Get the fuck out. Get the fuck out of her place!”

He flings the IV stand at me. Clearly he still thinks it will go through me, so he gasps when I catch it and throw it aside. The fists of the nurses thud heavy on the door behind me. The sight of me standing there against that pounding shadow, taller, wider than ever he’s seen me, burns into Knucklehead Nines’s eye.

“All right,” he breathes, licking his death-wet lips. “We best get out of here, then, Bluebeard.”

Share

Share on Tumblr

This is chapter two of a three-chapter story. The final chapter will be posted on Halloween.

Subscribe now

Red walls, flashing colors, the clash of coins under cigar smoke. He’s flickering around like a camera bulb, at the pool table and at the slots and flashing his hand at poker, holding the cards in that odd way that burns in the minds of everyone to ever play him. His name’s in the mouths retreating to the edges, in the empty wallets the words he gives to everyone, Him? That’s Knucklehead Nines, biggest shark of the States, nine fingers four-and-a-half on each hand, told me he’s a navy man but he ain’t never been in the navy, told me he’s a genius but he ain’t never learned how to read. If he sits at your table, brother, just get up and walk away, ‘cause you already lost.

Knucklehead Nines. Only name he’ll ever give, maybe the only one he remembers.

He draws a crowd wherever he goes, dice or cards or magic tricks at the bar, flocks of women in blinding dresses waiting to blow on his dice but he always does it himself, a laugh and a loud voice crowing, “I’m Knucklehead Nines, spirit of the South, and I’m anything I set my mind to!”

Always halfway out the side of his mouth, like it isn’t really him talking. After hours and hours of this, he moves on to the next town, leaves not a trace but his name. He won’t keep the money, he’ll put it god-knows-where, and he’ll roll up to the next casino with nothing only to leave it a rich man again by the end of the night.

He’s young, not as young as he looks. He’s dressed up like a parrot but it doesn’t distract from his eyes, bright black eyes, blood threading the whites. No car, not anymore, must either take the bus or hitchhike, and he plays cards in the back with strangers to pass the time, and that’s the only time he’ll let anyone win. He’s alone in the world near-completely, never keeps anyone more than a night, never lets anyone follow him, not that he knows -- well, except the one night when through the crowd of sharp-dressed people round his table he tears his wild eyes from poker and points them straight at me.

“You been around a while, haven’t you? But you ain’t never played me a hand,” he says.

To my own surprise, I shake my head.

“You wanna blow on my dice?” He holds out his hand, shakes his head. “Naw, no you don’t. You wanna be my friend?”

Soft brown fingers curled around the sharp black dice, snake eyes in the palm of his hand. I shake my head back.

“Well, too bad, you, ‘cause I wanna be your friend.” Crooked smile, toss back of the dark, straight, magpie hair. “Ain’t you heard? I’m Knucklehead Nines, and I’m anything I set my mind to!” Showman’s wink. “And tonight, I want to be the man you fall in love with.”

He means to kill me.

I follow Knucklehead Nines around all night, table to table and hand to hand, hunger in my gut, and I wonder if he feels it too or if he’s too young yet -- if he doesn’t understand the animal to which time reduces power. Almost nice to watch him in what must be my final hours. Almost reminds me of something, but I can’t claw it up.

Then I’m gone. I don’t go, but I’m not there, not really. It happens often, more often than it doesn’t. Mist pushed away by the wind.

I blink back in in a new casino next to the same man. He looks up at me from the pool table, raises his eyebrows, and says, “I was wonderin’ where you went off to! Rude of you to go like that — I ain’t even made you fall in love with me yet.”

He doesn’t seem all that surprised by any of it. Does he understand what I am? What he’s so quickly turning into? Or does he just feel it — know the change as well as he knows the absence of his ringfinger tips.

I watch him play pool. When he leaves, I leave with him.

“I have an interesting philosophy on life and love,” Knucklehead says, scuffing his shoes against the streetlit concrete. “In that I think those’re the exact same thing. I love my life and I live my love. Ain’t never did nothing more or less than that.”

I walk beside him. I can’t remember my feet enough to walk with sound.

“I hope I ain’t been too forward with you. But I think I’m your cup of tea, huh? You been following me long enough. Maybe it’s ‘cause I wanted to be followed by you, and I just didn’t realize it yet.” He looks up. “Yeah, since I’m anything I want to be. I set my mind on being a card player not so long ago, and that’s who I am. Soon I’ll be someone else. Maybe I’ll be a woman next month, or a man, or a skinny dog — Whew, a dog, can you imagine! I bet I could if I set my mind to it, and you don’t wanna take my bets, trust me, my friend.” He lets out a short whistle of breath. “Shew. Most people’d say I’m talking nonsense, but you understand me, don’t you? Better’n anyone else.”

And so I go with Knucklehead Nines.

The back of a bus, the floor of another casino, a wet street at night. I never say a thing. I’m gone for hours, days, at a time, but I always find myself back at him. He’s happy to keep talking. The way he chatters, I wonder if he even stops when I’m gone, or if he spends all his time alone telling himself the same heroic stories with the same fairytale syntax, explaining the same card tricks to himself ad infinitum. I don’t mind. When he talks, I almost recall something. I almost smell the sea.

It’s roughly fifteen nights before he eats in front of me.

He pulls his body off the dumpster the stranger crushed him into, swiping a hand across his chin in habit though he does not bleed. He braces his hands on his cheeks and cracks his neck back into place, then laughs, nasal and open-mouthed, stumbles into a mockery of a fighting stance with his fists half-raised, fingers uneven. The other man is easily twice his size, bulky, bald, iridescent. He gasps under Knucklehead Nines’s gaze like a fish.

Knucklehead Nines spits. “Didn’t think it’d go my way, huh? What was it you called me? You want to call me that again, see if your luck runs better?”

The man cannot speak.

Knucklehead Nines opens his mouth wider than a mouth looks like it should open, extends his hungry teeth, leaps, and the man is unmade.

Fast, violent spurts, jerking limbs and eyes, but somehow quiet. All sound and motion, the screaming, the fluid, goes softly, easily, into the black at the back of Knucklehead Nines’s throat. Like ink stirred into water. All the sacrifices the man once made, the outcomes he influenced, the sacrifices he took, the name — Knucklehead Nines takes them with grace, lets them become his history, his legacy, his being, one long, fathomless river.

He licks the tears of life from his lips and looks to me, eyes red, pupils blown. “You want some of this, right?” Ragged breaths, glistening. “It’s what you followed me for, right? You’re dying, friend. I bet I can share.” He rubs his arms. “Come closer.”

I shake my head.

“Good answer.” Knucklehead Nines walks away, shrugging his sequin jacket up his shoulders. Too thin to warm him – all for show. He shivers. I smell the exhilaration fading from him. I smell the new blood pounding in his cheeks. “Damned distasteful,” he says. “I Gawd. I had a streak going. Going on a month, you know what—?”

I come to his side. He glances up at me, chitinous black eyes. Up — he hasn’t noted my height before. Hasn’t seen my substance. He steps a little back. Here, my fingers move, and I undo the buttons of my coat one-by-one, and I proffer it to him.

He quiets. He takes it.

I go away for a while. I come back, and when he sees me, he smiles. The slots lights flicker off his incisors, spit-shiny. On the night bus, he gives me back my coat. Tries to brush my hand, take my temperature, feel my pulse. Misses. “Is this navy? What navy? You could be a sailor, I see it, I can see you with your captain’s hat and a pipe between your lips, I can see you all over the world, big and bow-legged with the deck throwing you every which way. Nice big coat, waterproof, warm. You a whaler?” I am not used to being commented on. I button up the coat, look out the window. Itch in the sleeve, shake it free: into my hand falls the ace of hearts.

“You in love with me yet?” he asks.

Then he’s more often outside so he has an excuse to ask for my coat. Doesn’t seem to get the temperature aspect of it, asks in the heat of Arizona, on the L.A. strip. Beneath the neon, he does card tricks for money, pulls aces out of his hat. Always draws a crowd some layers deep, new pushing past old like sharks’ teeth. There’s always a moment, after he conjures their watches and rings out of his sleeve, everything he snatched in the second the cards had their eyes, when they stiffen, wondering if he’ll give any of it back. Wondering what kind of animal he’ll be. What they’ll do then. His eyes flash, and he returns it all. But that’s why he does it – the threat, the answering kick.

I wonder if he’ll pivot from gambling to street magic. He keeps at it for a while, but it’s not the same rush. On the streets, there’s always a moment when the crowd dissipates. Without a crowd, people skirt around him. Alone in the clubs he is king, alone on the streets he is — deluded. Belligerent. Nine-fingered, four-and-a-half on each hand — he talks to himself, talks to himself to me, talks to himself to the people who heckle in his direction, ask him if where he got his money, how’d he get that nice fancy sequin coat that drags at his heels behind him, who’d he swindle it off? These are dusk hours, dawn hours. They would comprehend him even less in the day.

Twilights find him blood-streaked, shaking, always shaking, soaked red down the front of his silk shirt. He never plans, never careful. Skips town soon as he’s done, wraps my coat around him on the bus and rocks, back-forth-forward, bending at the waist in almost a bow, and no one ever asks about the stains. Cries sometimes, streaking read down his cheeks, his jaw, trailing over the knot of his throat.

“Don’t you get hungry?” he asks. “I ain’t never seen you eat, not a bite. Do you live, man? You never indulge?” He grins around the blood-tracks, stretching them up in clownish new shapes. “I’ll take you round the bars, yeah, I’ll take you to the fanciest shitholes this side of Tennessee. Hell, I’ll take you somewhere real nice, how about that? Foie gras, escargot, we’ll eat with those little fancy forks and come away still hungry, that’s how it is with money. I’ll pay, I’ll hit jackpot. I’m anything I put my mind to. Lord!” Catches my flinch. “You don’t like that word? You don’t want to talk about food? I’ll talk about something else.”

Next he spends a few months betting on horses, finding his way to underground dog fights. Shadows, smoke, and sprays of blood. He watches skinny little scraps tear each other apart, keeps a running commentary, always bouncing to see over the crowd, picking at his teeth, pumping his fist and twitching his jaw in time with the lunges and bites. “That one’s me,” he says at the beginning of every fight, pointing to a dog. He always bets on the winning one, but only calls it himself half the time. Skin stretched over ribcages, pitbulls missing toes. He makes a fortune, bores, and goes back to the casinos. “Thought it would be more your speed,” he says, “but then I realized, hell, you don’t give two shits what we do.”

Lie. The street magic led him to this underground, and there to a thing that sometimes was a woman and sometimes a rottweiler. Always the loser, she was. The other dogs would leave her in a bloody heap unbreathing but she’d be back the next night, the prancing, glossy heel. Had it down so good she could stud her collar in gold. He’d started recognizing her by a bite scar badly dyed over on her shoulder and calling out to her each night, heckling at the side of the ring.

She never let him catch her out. Now his abrupt absence reels her. She appears to him in a back alley, always a back alley, and says, “You.”

“I, aye, me.”

“The fuck is that behind you?”

Black eyes flick to me over his sequined lapel. “Oh, don’t you mind him,” he says. “He’s like a pet or somethin’.”

“Return what’s mine.”

“Do what?” He makes a show of turning out his coat. “I ain’t got nothing but the shirt on my back!”

“My library,” she growls. “You followed me. I smelled you there.”

“What do I look like to you?” He splays his hands, aghast. “These dirty fingers ain’t never been within fifty feet of no library book!”

“Drop it,” she says, and lunges.

His burst-vessel eyes go comically wide. She’s as fast as a shadow and he makes no move to dodge. But before her teeth reach him she crashes to the ground, and she’s clawing at my boot, and I drive my heel down into her face over and over until she’s a dog and she crawls away, whining, bleeding bright and beaten, like she knows how to do.

Knucklehead Nines looks at my face, directly at my face, his red tapetum gleaming like the sunspots in the shitty neon light. “I Gawd,” he says. “I thought she was going to be kind to me, you know, I really did. I spent a long while thinking we all owed each other some kinda underdog love, serves me.”

He blinks, turns, faces the deep pothole puddle at the dumpster’s foot. Starts pulling things from the secret folds of his coat, clumping them down into the water so the surface shatters into a constellation of pink. I come closer. I see that they’re books.

“Thought I needed somebody to explain it,” he says. “Since I met you. That anybody could. Hell, I bet you could. But who’m I? I don’t need to know nothing. I know everything I need, and everything knows me. Ain’t no need for book learning. I teach at the school of life!” More books than could possibly have fit in his jacket; he dumps them out onto the ground, and his hands shake. “I bet you know every word these say. I bet somebody thought to teach you something, once. Hell. Everybody goes through a phase of wanting to know, I’ve heard it, everybody says. Maybe some of them actually do it. But I, I don’t need to know the answers. I need no explanation. I’m Knucklehead Nines, and I’m the spirit of the South. I’m anything I want to be. I ain’t no sucker!”

The final book splatters into the mud. The pages break from the fragile binding, thin as moths’ wings. The leather’s old, the ink cramped, the water staining slowly over the paragraphs pages, over the centuries of questions that holy men went blind in scribbling.

Knucklehead Nines delivers the pile a final, spindly kick and swaggers off into the night. “Man, I don’t even know how to read.”

After that it’s back to the clubs. Doesn’t talk about questions or dogs again. He tries a few times to touch me, and when his fingers meet air, reaches out to touch the dancers instead, strangers, lets them kiss his lucky finger stumps. Cultivates a fascination, for a while, for the form, the pull of sinew beneath beaded costume.

I find him one, two, many times crouched naked over bloody sheets in cheap motels, their sequin costumes tattered on the floor, and he looks up to me, dripping, says, “You know, I do feel a little judged, on occasion, lover.” He calls me lover, Ishmael, Annabel Lee. “Must take you a lot to master your appetite. I wonder if you’d want me reformed.”

I say nothing; I call him nothing. The truth is I have already seen him form and unform and form again.

They ask him what his day job is. He tells them he’s a whaler.

Share

Reblog on Tumblr

This is chapter one of a three-chapter story. I’ll be posting the installments on Fridays on DHP’s off-weeks throughout the month of October, with the final chapter posted on Halloween. It will only get weirder and gayer from here. Stay tuned.

Subscribe now

I’ve been shadowboxing Zeke in my mind since he posted Against the Torment Nexus a couple months ago. In it, he suggests that the “Torment Nexus” phenomenon applies not only to hard tech, like AI, but also to the social systems and environments of dystopias. Hal is a Torment Nexus, but so are The Hunger Games. I’d be all for that, except then he argues that sci-fi has “grown out of” dystopia. Narrativizing any subject matter inherently glamorizes it, so can the author of Don’t Create the Torment Nexus be surprised when Zuckerberg creates it? Can we be surprised at the multiple productions of Squid Game In Real Life?

Now, the obvious argument here is that it’s not an author’s fault if their story is misinterpreted, and that fear of misinterpretation should not determine what an author writes. However, can we take that stance while still believing in the value of representation? In the power of a story to shape reality?

Also… they’re pouring billions of dollars into making Squid Games in real life. When the point of dystopia is missed so often and so obviously, we have to reckon with that.

So – does the creation of Squids Games game shows and the terrible working conditions associated with them (1) (2) speak to a contradiction in Squid Game itself? Does the marketing surrounding the Hunger Games movies undermine the books’ points about exploitation and revolution? Is dystopian fiction, as it were, cooked?

I. Dystopian Fiction

Every story – be it an op-ed or a short story about a robot president – attempts to sculpt our model of truth: what is and what should be. That model then determines what we do in reality. Science fiction makes its arguments through metaphor, by hyperbolizing real life conditions into unbelievable spaces. It gives us a new angle to view truth; it tests our models in new and strange environments.

The dystopian Torment Nexus, then, is the central device of this heightened reality through which the dystopia models truth.

Take our infamous Game of Squids. The “Torment Nexus” here is a battle royale game where poor people kill each other for money. It’s a very simple model of class struggle in South Korea. The story’s main argument is that working people are pitted against each other for the gain and entertainment of wealthy capitalists. It literally beats you over the head with this point.

So how could anyone miss that point so severely as to manifest the Nexus in real life, exactly replicating the injustice that the show portrayed?

Some say this is a failure of the genre. The purpose of a system is what it does — Squid Game is a product, and its status as a for-profit “cultural phenomenon” results in exploitation for the sake of profit. Despite its anti-exploitation ethos as a work of art, we must regard profit as its primary purpose, and, therefore, exploitation.

So, as a dystopia, does Squid Game fail? Does the creation of the Torment Nexus represent a failure of the story Don’t Create the Torment Nexus?

Or… is there another way to look at it?

A similar thing can be said for a similarly-hamfisted story of worker alienation: Severance. I’ve personally been plagued by Lumon-themed Ziprecruiter ads on YouTube. The ads assume the voice of the show’s evil, murderous corporate giant, its Torment Incorporated, in order to incentivize you to apply to jobs. Like, hey. Hey. What are we doing, man?

Well… we’re doing exactly what Severance said we would do.

Severance makes the argument that corporations use propaganda and unreality to exploit workers. I would argue, then, that its points are not, in fact, undermined by the fact that the property has been digested into that very same kind of propaganda. Instead, it proves the thesis. In my opinion, the Lumon Ziprecruiter ad is Severance’s coup-de-grace. It proves that the show’s dark parody is, 100%, on its face, real and accurate to life. This is what’s happening. The actual product of Severance as a story is simply then an accurate model of reality.

Behind the scenes of the real life Squids Games, the reality described in the original show is manifestly true. Is that not, then, a testament to the original’s critique? Its dystopian metaphor is completely accurate.

If it wasn’t Squid Game spinoffs, it would be Hunger Games spinoffs. If it wasn’t Lumon Ziprecruiter ads, it would be the ten thousand other awful gimmick job site ads offering you the chance to beg to work for a company that will leech away your labor, your drive, and your time on Earth.

Both stories say, “This is how things are.” Do they fail for being right?

Leave a comment

II. Black Mirror or Some Shit

My first dystopia, and my favorite, is The Hunger Games. The Games are the work’s Torment Nexus, Katniss the hero readers yearn to be. It’s fun to imagine yourself in this Nexus. Take a UQuiz – what District are you from?1

The key to understanding why The Hunger Games is good is understanding its follower in the 2010s dystopia craze. Divergent has all of the same trappings as Hunger Games. It hits all of the same melodramatic beats: “begins and ends in a peaceful state, focuses on the perspective of an infantryman or grunt, its compelling characters are often found in ‘virtuous victims, scared, usually young, beleaguered, endangered, defined by suffering6, and emotional deaths made in service of the story’s goal: relatedly, the idea that a death during war is anything but ‘in vain.’” It invites the audience into a gamified, Hogwartshouse society. But, although it follows the same form of dystopia as The Hunger Games, Divergent, crucially, is bad.

Divergent’s Torment Nexus doesn’t really operate in service of a point. It’s a bad argument (distinct from a wrong one), a bad contribution to the discourse, and therefore a bad story. It’s maybe about eugenics? It’s maybe about authoritarianism, but not really? It’s mostly about feeling like The Hunger Games.

But it doesn’t. The thing is, although the first book in The Hunger Games is plausibly melodramatic and rompy, the rest of the series is explicitly concerned with breaking any illusions you as a reader might’ve had about this Nexus. It hammers home many, many times that the suffering and death of innocents is meaningless and avoidable, that the main character can keep nothing she gains, that she has almost no agency and exists as a tool of a violent system. As much as The Hunger Games invites you to put yourself into the adventure, Catching Fire and Mockingjay hammer home that you do not fucking want to be Katniss. This model is a horror. And if that wasn’t enough, the author comes back many years later with A Song of Songbirds and Snakes to beat American readers over the head with the fact that they are absolutely not from any of the Districts, but from the Capitol. It doesn’t follow the comforting arc of a melodrama. Taken as a whole, the series is as clear in its dystopian aims as it is possible to be, as pointed as a rapier.

We come to the movies. Again: whatever point the books made about blood spectacle, about capital and empire, about exploitation, the movies and marketing enacted without a shred of irony. Don’t think about your position as a resident of the imperial core watching children die for your profit on television – buy makeup. Buy Subway sandwich. Subway sandwich is your taste of revolution. Who are you rooting for, Gale or Peeta? Who are you betting on? What form of suffering do you want to playact?

Whatever The Hunger Games said the Capitol did, Americans did. We made ourselves up like them. We lived vicariously through blood sport, like them. We defanged every piece of political art, turned it into fashion and status, like them.

Ouroboros!

Ultimately, it’s the same story. Suzanne Collins presented a comprehensive critique. America responded by continuing to act out the system she was critiquing.

Maybe it’s ignorance. Maybe it’s willful misinterpretation. Maybe it’s a failure of the story. Or maybe… maybe The Hunger Games, Squid Game, and Severance simply held up a mirror. And maybe people were okay with what they saw.

The thing is that, once we expand the Torment Nexus beyond hard tech to social systems, we must acknowledge that every Torment Nexus story is written within the Torment Nexus, and then fed back into it. The fact that capital eats every story that points out the realities of capitalism isn’t a bug – it’s the whole point.

And so, as to the author’s liability: If I notice you’re holding a poison apple and tell you it’s poison, you’re going to die, and you say, I don’t care, and then you keep eating it and keep poisoning yourself and even start talking about how the fact that it’s poison makes you enjoy it more, is that my bad?

Alright, then it’s all futile. What’s the point of these stories? What’s the point of telling you the apple is poison? Well, it’s the same point there is in all fiction, the same point there was in protesting the Vietnam war. Even if we don’t fix the problem, even if our art doesn’t cause people to take up arms in the streets – and hey, who knows, maybe it will – there is value in saying, this is how it is. This is what we’re living in. Knowledge is the foundation of action. To plan for a better future, we must understand the present; in order to think about saving ourselves from the poison, we must first agree that it’s there.

Sometimes it’s better to stare the Torment Nexus in the face than pretend we’re not living in the kind of world that would build it.

III. The Right Hand of Light

We discussed the premise, the gimmick, and the melodrama of The Hunger Games. Now we need to discuss the end.

Mockingjay culminates with Katniss’s choice to end the cycle of violence and death despite the unimaginable losses she’s suffered. In the epilogue, it’s revealed that she has children, despite the fact that she’s spent the whole series insisting that she doesn’t want to bring children into the world she inhabits. But now, she has chosen to; for the first time, she has enough hope in the future to trust it with a new generation.

Her children play on what used to be a battlefield. The series ends on this image, something new rising from the ashes of the old order.

The word utopia is sourced from Thomas More’s 1516 work laying out an ideal society. Wikipedia – yes, I’m citing Wikipedia, let me cook – has only one joint article for utopian and dystopian fiction. It defines the two as counterparts:

Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author’s ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author’s ethos.

This definition vexes me. The world would be good if I thought it was good, and it would be bad if I thought it was bad. It seems so simplistic as to be ridiculous. Like –

– and yet I continue to return to it.

It’s not incompatible with all I’ve said about dystopia as metaphor. Both utopia and dystopia extrapolate upon a set of real conditions as a way to comment on those conditions. However, I think there’s a crucial difference here. “Here’s how things could be better” is more forward-facing than “here’s how things could get worse.” Dystopia is a warning, utopia a proposal.

My favorite piece of utopian fiction is Star Trek: The Original Series. Many people consider Deep Space Nine to have the most cutting-edge politics in the franchise. I disagree for quite a few reasons – not the least of which being that DS9 completely fails to stick the landing – but the most important is that, to me, TOS is far and away the most politically interesting installment in the series. In-universe, it envisions a future where humanity is governed by principles of unity and exploration, where all people are provided for, where life is valued. It asserts that racism, sexism, xenophobia, and capitalism will soon be things of the past. Many episodes take clumsily direct shots at political issues contemporary to the production of the show. It asks viewers to envision a better future and asks them further what they would do with one.

And the thing is – it fails! constantly! to meet modern or even contemporary standards of progressivism. It’s frequently misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, blindly pro-american. Yet the purpose of the show is not to express a view of what is – except in the sense of human nature – but a vision of what can be. It highlights the good of the contemporary moment and asks, what if we let these seeds grow?

TOS says, in the future, we can be better than this. Even TOS itself is not better than this. But it asks you to imagine that it can be.

Isn’t that an argument against Torment Nexuses, then, you ask? Isn’t this what sci-fi should be doing – envisioning a better world than the one we live in, challenging us to attain it?

But we haven’t gotten to the thing that makes TOS my favorite utopia. It’s one of those details that pops up randomly in the show, changes everything about the canon, and then barely gets mentioned again. It’s that between the 1960s and the Star Trek future, TOS places World War III. Humanity didn’t just Progress from the contemporary 1960s to the diverse space utopia. 1960s TOS looks forward instead to a horrific, bloody reckoning with fascism and eugenics.

Without this detail, the show would, to me, ring far more hollow. TOS isn’t just vapidly proselytizing about a better future. It may get much worse before we achieve utopia, it says. But we can make it through. And we can build something better.

Another piece of utopian fiction that I recently loved is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. There’s so much to be said about this book and I’m not going to say it all here. Still, I have to bring it up. The story revolves around two societies on two orbiting planets, one similar to modern-day America, the other founded by anarchist dissenters. The book is full of discussion not only of the practical concerns of anarchism and the friction of human nature within it, but of the pitfalls of capitalism, as seen from the outside. The utopia experiences all its growing pains in direct relation to the dystopia it left behind, literally orbiting it. Neither society can be fully understood without understanding the other. Each hangs in the other’s sky.

Late in the story, it’s revealed that humans – real life humans, not the sort-of-aliens we’ve been following (Hainish Cycle is weird) – destroyed ourselves and the Earth long ago. That’s the final piece, the final point of comparison: utopia, dystopia, and complete annihilation.

To quote another of Le Guin’s books: “Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.” Dystopian fiction and utopian fiction are not at odds. They ask the same question, compose two halves of the same answer. This is not a matter of opposing genres, but of extremes on one axis. Utopia only exists in the context of dystopia. The reverse is also true.

The unified genre can be called neither utopian nor dystopian fiction. We’re left with topos – stories of place, which fall on an axis between utopian and dystopian. Most lean one way or the other. But what do you get when a story tries to be both?

IV. Yuuup… Marxism

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is an early installment in the canon of YA dystopia from before YA was really a thing. Beginning in the year 2025 in a walled, middle class neighborhood in Los Angeles2, it follows Lauren Olamina, a teenager struggling to survive the collapse of late-stage capitalism.

After her neighborhood is destroyed, Lauren embarks on a perilous journey North, facing the widespread effects of climate change3, racist and sexist violence4, and the enforcement of “company towns,” made legal by a fascist president5, which operate in a system of indentured servitude that evokes Civil War-era slavery. In the course of her travels, Lauren develops her own system of thought, called Earthseed, and begins to gather people around her through a unified vision of individual and collective – conceiving of a new social order as she wanders through the ashes of the old one.

Jonathan Scott’s paper Octavia Butler and the Base for American Socialism is an extremely detailed analysis, and I highly recommend reading it. The main thrust is that, in Parable of the Sower, Butler expands upon the extant conditions of capitalism in order to highlight and analyze the problems she sees in the world… and then proposes a solution.

From the cited essay:

Allen reasoned that if the bourgeoisie was able to overthrow the feudal order “only because their mode of production had developed in the womb of the old order,” then “the basis of the necessary socialist relationship of production must be defined and developed within the womb of the capitalist order before the gravediggers of capitalism can become the builders of socialist society.” His question followed directly: “But precisely how is that relation of production to be defined?”

Butler takes a swing at defining it. Within the crumbling shell of the capitalist order, Lauren – and through her, Butler6 – preconceives a new form of society, free of hierarchy, and then systematically confronts the material problems of making it a reality, including gathering people, building support, and surviving the death throes of the old order.

In this way, Parable of the Sower’s narrative centers upon the exact point of transition from dystopia to utopia. It examines the problems of the real world, then proposes a new way forward; it asks the question, then starts building toward an answer.

In the narrative, though, these things happen simultaneously. There is no clean divide between Parable of the Sower’s dystopian and utopian modes. Instead, it’s a synthesis. It struggles with itself, constantly thrusting toward something greater.

On a broad level, I’d argue that all revolution stories, from Star Wars7 to Black Sails, occupy this position. They plant themselves on the inflection point between criticism of the real and realization of the ideal8.

V. Sidebar: But Where do the Zombies Fit Into This?

Well, you say, that model of topia is all well and good, but what about one of the major flavors of dystopia that Zeke discusses? None of this applies to zombie fiction, where, he says, “The entire framing of the genre encourages us to see others as heedless knaves, getting what they deserve, while preppers, the ultra-violent, and the Daryls finally get to inherit the Earth.” Egads! Where’s the preconceptive value in that? Zombie fiction holds up no mirror, cautions us against no worsening conditions.

Well… that’s because zombie stories aren’t really dystopian. They’re utopian.

Think about it. Zombie apocalypse narratives put forth a vision of a new society after the collapse of the current one. It’s most often an alpha-male-individualist society – but, look, I didn’t say utopian imaginings of the future had to be good. The writer of the ultraviolet zombie doomsday story is preconceiving in their own way. They posit that this, the kingdom of Neegans and The Governors ruling their castles with iron fists, is how humanity will arrange itself next. That this is the value system we will next subscribe to, this the model of strength.

Maybe the stories say vaguely that it’s bad for these men to be despots, but the way to beat them is still by outgunning them. In this world, might makes right, and you have free reign to gun down the faceless hoards scratching at your castle door as you see fit. Sure sounds like “a setting that agrees with the author’s ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers.”

Therefore, the dystopia itself has already happened. Modern medicine, bioweapons, scientific research, et cetera, whatever caused the outbreak – that’s the actual Torment Nexus. The zombies are only a faceless enemy. The inflection point, then, the actual breakdown of the dystopia, is the moment the first zombie is infected. The post-zombie world then gives the characters authority to arrange their world as they see fit, so long as they have the firepower to back themselves up. The Walking Dead is utopian fiction. It’s about the project of society-building.

There are, of course, actual dystopian zombie stories. In these, though, the dystopia does not lie in the actual existence of zombies, but rather in the hierarchies humans establish after the apocalypse occurs. For example, in The Last of Us, zombies are little more than an environmental threat, and the characters mainly struggle against authoritarian human organizations. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One does a similar thing, and also explicitly addresses the dehumanization of zombies as a bigoted fantasy by drawing a comparison to the real-life dehumanization of Black people.

M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts takes this concept to its limit. Here, the zombie apocalypse began years before the plot takes place, and a sort of authoritarian equilibrium was established in the aftermath. As in Zone One, this regime collapses. Then… something new.

See, The Girl with All the Gifts tackles the dehumanization of zombies head-on. In it, the children of zombies are sapient. They’re not human, but not dehumanizeable; they represent a new kind of people. The book concludes with its sole surviving human character accepting that the time of humans has ended, and deciding to pass humanity’s knowledge on to the zombie children. We end with the hope that a new society will rise from the ashes, a synthesis between humanity and the lifecycle of the mind-altering fungus.

Basically, The Girl With All the Gifts goes from dystopian (pre-apocalypse) to utopian in the traditional zombie story sense (post-apocalypse) to dystopian (establishment and collapse of military authoritarianism) to utopian again (conception of the new society). Like Parable of the Sower, The Girl with All the Gifts places itself at that transition point from dystopian to utopian fiction – shaking off the vestiges of the past, envisioning a new and transformed future.

VI. Return to the Torment Nexus

But let’s return to the questions at hand. What actually makes a dystopian story successful (not monetarily, but in merit)? How do we interpret the dystopian stories we have? Is Squid Game good?

For me, Squid Game’s success as a piece of fiction remains to be seen. Squid Game might start with a strong premise and robust dystopian ethos, but later seasons might devolve into a vapid adventure narrative without anything else to say. Alternatively, it could move through the collapse of its dystopia into a utopian vision9, or it could end completely without hope – even if all of the characters die and the Games continue on forever, grinding poor people into the rich’s meat, the point will be made.

And the real-life spinoffs will go on, and the merch will be sold, and people will die in poverty the world over for the aggrandizement of the imperial core. And the point will be made.

And the next killing game story will come along, and the next, and the next, and we’ll eat it up. The people who love to make Torment Nexuses will eat up the Torment Nexus stories and spit out shinier incarnations of the same old hells. And the point will be made.

Until maybe, one day, we stop.

What do stories like this really achieve? Probably not revolution. Proclaiming loudly in the town square that millions are dying for the profit of the few, that genocide is wrong, that ceaseless growth will kill the planet, probably also won’t get you a revolution. It’ll most likely get you fired.

But through the telling, through stories and arguments and protest, we establish that the Torment Nexus exists. We establish that this is the shape of things, and that such a shape is wrong, cruel in the abstract as it is in the real, hostile to human life. There is value in the truth. There is value in saying, “This is what’s happening to us. Look at it.”

Only then can we fully answer the questions of dystopia and utopia:

What is it now, and what can it be?

Subscribe now

While what I'm here to complain about today is recent, it also isn't exactly new. It has roots in older issues, and is part of what I've seen people call “I'm not touching you” racism, and general insensitivity around race in comedy and nerd culture.

The first problem is one I've seen others talk about: the sudden “joke” usage of slurs for robots… many of which derive from real slurs. Wire back is referentially anti-Latino. Bolt muncher is lesbophobic. Tinskin doesn't have a direct parallel that I know, but by focusing on “skin”, it intentionally gestures at race. Clanker seems to come from Star Wars, but may be popular as an excuse to use the “hard ER”. “Rust monkey” references multiple racial slurs. “Jamal3000” and “George Droid” are blatant references to black people- the latter being a murder victim who was killed by a cop. This on its own wouldn't inspire me to write an article. White people like slurs. Who knew. It's not like I'm a Trekkie that gets an eye twitch whenever someone says “Cardie” to be funny- a word implied to be mainly used by Federation soldiers against Cardassians, and constructed similarly to the real slur P*ki.

No, what irritated me- in combination with something else I'll get into- was watching Stanzi, a white woman, cheerfully role play being a racist 50s waitress in a sundown town. Just, you know. Targeting robots. That's totally kosher, right guys?

I've already had issues with Stanzi's comedy before. It doesn't surprise me that she participated in this trend (also notably joined in by Samuel Jacob playing a racist cop from the 50s… but for robots). In 2024, she also made jokes about the libel claiming Haitian immigrants were eating cats. Now, I've seen people say that she was mocking the libel. But all she did was repeat it. She didn't subvert anything. This libel was serious enough that people printed up KKK posters to terrorize and threaten people in the area, specifically implying violence towards Haitians. While these posters might have been fake, the psychological impact they have on people is real. Her “comedy” about “tinskins” has the same issue. It's not subverted. She filmed herself saying statements based on real world racism for a few minutes and then the video ends.

And if someone really wants to continue to argue the point with me, ask yourself this. If someone who wasn't Jewish said “this baby is lucky I'm not a Jew preparing for Passover”, would you be defending it? If I (someone who has faced antisemitism) said “well, that's really fucked up”, would you be trying to explain to me how it's fine, actually? Even though that libel has been used dozens of times to justify the murder of random Jewish people? Even though it's still repeated today by antisemites?

It's not that you can't make media showing racism that is clearly criticizing and subverting it. You can even use racially offensive or insensitive language to do so. I'm no great fan of Mel Brooks- but in high-school my English teacher attributed a quote to him, which understands something very important. It's not funny to watch a lynching. And, as that teacher continued, “It's only funny if the victim gets away.” (The exact quote has the same message, but was said far more racistly.1)

Now, some might undermine this by pointing out the same movie being referenced there actually uses the N word, full ER, as well as other racial slurs. I'd point out an important difference (though I still don't like the movie), which is that the townspeople are explicitly called morons and they are not the protagonist. In this way, Stanzi’s skit is less progressive than Blazing fucking Saddles, a movie that is still held up by whinging racists. Her waitress isn't portrayed as stupid (unless you want to argue a southern accent is a sign of intelligence, in which case I really can't help you) and doesn't get any comeuppance. She successfully threatens two people (standing in as a proxy for non-white people, and frankly probably specifically Black people) and runs them out of town. She doesn't even fail.

Of course, the point of “wireback” jokes isn't to parody racism or show its inane stupidity. It's to express a frustration with increased surveillance and the push of AI- by using racist language. The deep irony there is the people currently feeling the worst impact of AI and surveillance are Black and Indigenous peoples. In Tennessee, an entire Black neighborhood is being poisoned at a higher rate than what they'd already experienced from environmental racism, thanks to the building of a data center dedicated to AI. Surveillance is used to target and kill Palestinians- whether they are justified militants or young children. Stretching further, those suffering most under the current operation of our tech industries are the Congolese people, whose natural resources become fuel for child labor and armed conflict. As most of us in Western countries type on our phones, it is unlikely we are experiencing the true brunt of AI or “technofuedalism” or whatever other term you'd like to use.

The other side of this coin that really annoyed me was being really disappointed by a song.

Presumably because I'd been listening to the Dungeon Meshi AMV for “Burn the Witch” over and over, YouTube recommended me a fun looking little song called “All Paladins are Bastards”. And I will admit- I enjoyed listening to it. I enjoy fun little nerd songs. I really enjoy them when they sound good. The problem was I enjoyed it so much that I clicked on the channel and got a better look at the profile picture (grey scale, side view of a white guy). That immediately took me aback. See, this song wasn't just a fun little nerd song mocking the way palandins are portrayed in most DND type fantasy (which is a particularly racialized form of fantasy); it was a rap song evoking the idea of anti-Black racism and hood culture, down to the lyrics including the word “wizza”, short for wizard.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, I found the playlist of all the songs in this genre (labeled “Evil Wizard Rap”) and found a video featuring footage of the singer. Sure enough, he wasn't using a random photo to represent himself: this is, as best as I can tell, a white guy.

I will reiterate. I simply don't think it's kosher to use a made up word that intentionally sounds like a real racial slur, used in the same way as that slur. White rappers don't get to say the n-word, and I don't think they should be using sneaky substitutes for it either. But beyond that, finding out the singer was white (and listening to/reading the lyrics of other songs in this genre by this artist) added a context to the song that made it, conceptually, a worse piece of art.

The actual structure of the song was still as enjoyable as it had been; the vocals, instruments, and rhymes still were clever. But beyond the problem of using a made up slur, with the context of whiteness, the song simply doesn't work as well. The usage of anti-Black racism here isn't just vaguely gestured at, either- in another song from the playlist, “This World Ain't Built For Us” more bluntly draws on that imagery as the singer- a wizard- talks about difficulty being hired for legitimate, legal work, being tempted by dark forces, and being oppressed in other ways. It also adds “necro” to its list of fantasy racial ciphers. Being a wizard- a class which one learns to become, with inherently dangerous magical powers like fireball- is being equated with race in a much more deliberate way. This simply does not work, as presented, as a racial allegory. Equating Paladins with cops works because Paladins are usually lawful, portrayed in ways clearly based off of cops in several ways, and being a cop is a choice one makes- just like one chooses to be a Paladin. Similarly, one chooses to be a wizard. However, you don't choose to be Black.

I will admit, if this had been a Black artist, I would view it differently. For one thing, I'd assume they understood all of that and were just making an aesthetic choice for verisimilitude (as is their right). They can do that- rap is their house, they wanna wear shoes inside, they can. Guests, however, should know better and should be held to higher scrutiny. The reason I don't trust a white artist like that besides, again, them being a guest, is that white artists in fantasy in particular have a very bad track record of not understanding race. The idea of “why are these people oppressed? Well you see, they followed the Dark Lord/have scary powers and must be controlled/fought in this War” is very common in fantasy media, and very annoying. In the first iteration, some settings for DnD go so far as to explain the Drow's skin color as being a Curse of Ham situation because they worship Lolth.

Now, these justifications are based on real world racism- but they're propaganda. The real “reason” for racism is that it's economically beneficial. Despots, religion, claims of power and a need to control it, and war are post hoc justifications to obscure class relations and provide a moralistic reason to perpetuate economic systems. Fantasy media (again, often made by white people) tends to take this propaganda at face value. Very rarely have I seen a piece of fantasy media both include “ah, they followed the Dark Lord and fought in this war” and a deconstruction of that idea as propaganda. The closest is maybe Dungeon Meshi, which in having an orc and an elf argue about history does the comparatively progressive step of presenting racial conflict as a “both sides have a point” situation- at least conceding that orcs aren't oppressed for fantastical reasons, and making it out as a conflict about resources.

Something else I'd note is if this had been a Black musician, I would have assumed the use of “wizard” and not say, “orc” or “Drow” as a stand in for Blackness was a subtle reference to an actual piece of anti-Black racism. African religions have, for centuries, been characterized as sorcery and devil worship. This isn't unique to them; for example, the same accusations were leveled at Jews, which in Brazil led to some degree of allyship and identification among Black people and Jews who had fled to the safety of quilombos. Further, it's something that I personally deal with. Egyptians and, more specifically, Copts in various social situations have been associated with sorcery and magic. It's certainly not our main stereotype, but it comedy up often- whether it's lazy “pharaoh’s curse” jokes, people who only really know what Copts are because they study magical papyri or Gnosticism, the perception of Egyptians as magicians by Greeks and Jews in antiquity, or Muslim women in Cairo saying that Copts are best at “black magic” that uses demons and involves sexually immoral acts,2 magic comes up over and over. All of these instances range somewhere from “annoying” to “genuinely quite offensive” for me. If I was dictator of the world for a day, I'd make Pharaoh's curse jokes illegal due to how casually racist and irritating they are.

When flooding in Aswan happened several years ago, resulting in many scorpion stings as the creatures were driven to seek dry land, almost no one extended sympathy or shared fundraising. Instead it was just those damn jokes. Aswan, to anyone who knows more about Egypt than mummies, is well known for being a seat of Nubian culture- i.e. Black Egyptians, and notably one of our Indigenous groups. The one fundraiser I found and shared for victims was in fact, organized by Nubians. Nubians face discrimination in Egypt and were displaced en-masse from their ancestral land so the Aswan High Dam could be built. They still struggle to get compensated for their land and were never consulted in the first place about the building of the dam. No one knew that or gave a shit to learn.

It isn't just Copts that deal with this in Sahelo-Saharan Africa. In majority non-Black countries of the region,3 and in communities with significant Arab influence creating internal Black hierarchies, Black people are also stereotyped and associated with magic. This can be negative- Sudanese people view South Sudanese people as “sorcerers” and may associate this with violent and animalistic behavior. It can also be positive (though still sometimes fetishizing), with Black people in Tunisia having historically been viewed as good luck at celebrations (up to people making likenesses of Black people out of cardboard, wood, or stone and having it present as decoration if they could not invite a living Black person) and being seen as especially adept at spirit work.4 These are very relevant to adorcism and how it is practiced in Sahelo-Saharan Africa, and as someone who has studied adorcism as practiced regionally, I know just how incredibly unlikely it is a white person will know about this, much less address it with care.

The words “black magic” and “Dark Lord” invoked in these tropes- fantastical and real- also carry racial baggage. By using “dark/black” to mean evil, they associate those whose skin are those colors with evil. This is a very old problem. For example, some early midrashim about Ham's skin color describe his “darkness” coming about because he did something immoral5- though not always, with other midrash calling his dark skin a blessing. It also was not associated with the curse of slavery until many centuries later, after some Christians and Muslims had decided to combine the two.6 Unsurprisingly, both “black magic” and “Dark Lord” show up in “Evil Wizard Rap”. The Dark Lord is a spirit or god, portrayed as implicitly evil and in need of sacrifices. Rather than examining why pragmatic religions appeal to the marginalized (especially when they come from their ancestors in contrast to an imposed religion), or fighting back against the notion that African spirits and gods are demonic, this “Dark Lord” functionally is stand in for the draw of gangs and more or less religiously maps on to the Devil (More souls to feed the black shadow that's calling me/Wizard, I can give you what you want, quit stalling me). Like before, the music does not successfully commentate or satirize.

Putting bigotry into a fantastic setting does not, on its own, work as commentary. In the case of the former trend of jokes, the fantastical setting is simply a smokescreen for people to act racist. In the latter case of the music, its fantastic setting both acts as a smokescreen and evokes real world racist tropes that the musician was probably unaware of. As such the attempt at heightened reality fails. If you are aware of the ways in which Black religious traditions are demonized, “wizza” and “young necro” as references to Blackness aren't novel jokes. They aren't engaged thoughtfully enough to produce a decent commentary, either. It only reproduces.

Subscribe now

Consider devising a writing system for the below utterance from scratch:

/ʒə pø paz‿y.ti.li.ze yn ɔʁ.to.ɡʁaf stɑ̃.daʁ/

I'll give you some pointers. The ~ above the a in /stɑ̃.daʁ/ means the vowel is nasalized. When saying a nasalized "a", some of the air comes out of your nose, instead of it all coming out of your mouth. (This often sounds like you've sort of said n, but shied away at the last second.) The long ties‿between‿words are liaisons. In this language, when a word begins with a vowel, the previous word bleeds into it. Take for granted that /ʁ/ is r, /ʒ/ is j, and /ɔ/ is ou.

If by "phonetic" we mean "relatively close to IPA, where each phoneme has one grapheme," we might end up with something like this:

Je peu paz'ytilize yn ourtograf stɑ̃dar.

Even here, we've had to make certain concessions to the fact that we're writing in an alphabet, not the IPA. For example, the /y/ in /y.ti.li.ze/ and /yn/ aren't quite the same phonemic quality. But nevertheless, pretty satisfactory. Now, what happens if we make a few changes to the verb's conjugation and noun's number? (Pay special attention to the second and last word.)

/nu pu.vɔ̃ paz‿ytilize lɛ.z‿ɔʁ.to.ɡʁafs stɑ̃.daʁd/

Nu puvõun pas'ytilize lez'ourtografs stɑ̃dard.

The problems with our new spelling are coming into focus. If you didn't already know that peu and puvõun are conjugations of the same verb, it would be extremely difficult to figure that out. Even now, with the data you have, you probably can't divine the infinitive.

Moreover, we've drifted further and further away from a strictly phonetic spelling. We now have three different phonemes all represented by "e" — /ɛ/, /ə/, and /e/. If a phonetic alphabet is one where each grapheme is one sound, with no deviation, even slight deviations from IPA make it non-phonetic.

Now, here's a question. If the standard way of spelling the last word was "stɑ̃dar," and you needed to make it plural, what would you have to do? Simple: Remember that its plural form is -d. Each noun and adjective would have its own seemingly random plural form that you would need to memorize.1

By the way, here's the standard way of spelling these sentences:

Je peux pas utiliser une orthographe standard.

Nous pouvons pas utiliser les orthographes standards.

In the French orthography, standard is spelled with the final -d, even when it's not pronounced. When the noun it's modifying is plural, the writer adds an -s, for reasons traditional pedagogy usually describe as "agreement." What does agreement mean? It means that -d is actually pronounced. The -s is never pronounced, except to make a liaison. In spoken French, -d is the sound that marks that the word is plural. But this would be decidedly inelegant in written French, and so we tell the white lie that the -s makes an adjective plural.

Anglophone learners sometimes see this as the frustrating tendency of French to be non-phonetic. But French spelling is no less phonetic than English spelling. Both orthographies made different compromises in different places, to compensate for the fact that a purely phonetic script would be hard to read and hard to learn.

By retaining an older spelling, the orthography is able to show genealogical relationships between words much more readily than a purely phonetic script ever could. Linguists speak of "deep" and "shallow" orthographies: "shallow" orthographies are more phonetic and less etymological, and vice versa.

Among other benefits, a script which shows these relationships is easier to decipher. I bet you, as an English speaker, could puzzle out the meaning of orthographe standard much more easily than ourtograf stɑ̃dar or ɔʁ.to.ɡʁaf stɑ̃.daʁ, even though the latter spellings are more accurate renderings of what a French person actually says.

To a point, anyway. Even IPA has certain conventions in how it's transcribed, and in the case of English, the standard describes an outmoded style of speech. That's the problem with writing something entirely phonetically — phonetics change constantly, from generation to generation and from class to class. If we were to write in an entirely phonetic script, we would first need to decide whose pronunciations are correct and then decide to never change the way we speak. The problem is apparent.

Let's return for a moment to the verbs — je peux and nous pouvons. In the first year of French as a second language, learners memorize three different conjugation patterns (in addition to some irregular forms like être). The -x appended to peux serves no phonological purpose. In fact, it's a homophone with peu, i.e. a little bit. But the -x doesn't merely differentiate peux from peu: it also tells any reader with at least a bit of French learning under their belt that this is the first-person singular form of an -ir verb. All of these little innovations make a proper orthography easier to read.

To state the obvious, alphabets are more phonetic than other writing systems, like abjads and logograms, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to sound out. (The most obvious proof of this is the existence of the International Phonetic Alphabet.) All alphabets require special training in their usage, since each made different compromises between phonological accuracy and historical continuity.

Even though English and French have come to pronounce the words orthography and standard differently, we still spell them the same way. This facilitates more than "this meme transcends language" comments. It means that all Francophones can easily read each other's writing, and historical texts stretching back a thousand years. When working on my undergraduate thesis, I discovered — to my amazement — that Middle French was much easier for me to parse than Middle English. This, even though English is my first language, and my French was nothing to write home about. But that's because the English chroniclers wrote like this:

Now turners Edward ageyn to London his cite,

& wille wite certeyn, who schent has his mone.

Of clippers, of roungers, of suilk takes he questis.

Olde vsed tratitoures ilk at oþer hand kestis.

Peter of Langtoft (died c. 1307)

… and the French chroniclers, like this:

La dame qui pas n’avoit trop grand’joie, fors de ce qu’elle se trouvoit de-lez le roi son frère, s’étoit jà voulu agenouiller par trois ou par quatre fois au pied du roi son frère ; mais le roi ne lui souffroit, et la tenoit toujours par la main droite, et lui demandoit moult doucement de son état et de son affaire ; et la dame lui en répondoit très sagement.

Les Chroniques de Jehan Froissart (died 1405)

Froissart's French is legible, if not terribly pretty prose by today's standards. French Wikisource has a very nice e-Book of it in the original Middle French, replete with a 19th century glossary of words that had fallen out of common usage by then.2 In general, reading it reminds me of a joke I saw under a cover of the House of the Rising Sun in Middle French:

Luckily, humanity has gotten a lot better at speaking French.

In short, this discrepancy in legibility is because French has an older orthography, whereas English has a newer one. Perhaps it can also be said that French has changed less than English in the centuries since these texts were written. Though the above Froissart passage is basically legible, this is the modern English translation of Langtoft:

Now Edward turned again to his city, London,

and will be certain who has harmed his money.

Coin clippers and cheats, and of such dishonest people, he sought out,

and those of the traitorous bent, on the other hand, he banished.

Personally, I was entirely unable to decipher this passage. I could glean just enough to know was relevant to my thesis, and so spent a day and a half reading an e-Book about Middle English in one tab with an Early English dictionary in the other tab. (Being an Internet-age medievalist is beautiful.) After getting nowhere, I asked my thesis advisor to "help me finish it," and so she supplied 55% of the words and, um, the order they're in. This to say, a modern English speaker cannot read an English text from eight centuries ago without special linguistic training. If Langtoft had been using standard spellings (and if we'd kept those spellings), I might have been able to muddle through it.

But the truth is, these chronicles were outliers. The majority weren't written in the local language, but Latin, or at least a local-language-inflected Latin. Since Google Translate has a decent Latin option, these were significantly easier for me to skim than Langtoft. Even better for my purposes, many had been translated into modern English or French.

For a Western premodernist considering learning a language in order to access more sources, Latin has an impressive ROI. For millenia — up until the 19th century in the case of the Hapsburg domain3 — important documents were often written in Latin. Learning Old English opens up a pretty small cache of documents. But Latin's corpus is very broad, and its popularity as an L2 means many other learners — and therefore textbooks, teachers, and university programs — exist to guide curious scholars in the exploration of that literature.

Since all scripts require special training, why not require more training and create a standard literature in the process? A deep orthography helps with this, but using a classical language takes the logic even further. Most Arabic books are not written in the local dialect, but in MSA. This expands their theoretical readership not only from one country to many, but from this time period into the next.

Chinese has an incredibly deep orthography, with individual characters only sometimes containing a phonetic component. This it has in common with hieroglyphs and cuneiform — all logographic systems have at least some phonetic component. In the case of Chinese, though, that phonetic component was codified so long ago that it isn't always phonetic anymore. That's particularly true when the character isn't being used to write Chinese, but Vietnamese or Korean or Japanese.

Once an individual learns characters, however, it opens a new mode of trans-lingual communication. There's a famous story of shipwrecked Chinese sailors in Japan, who, finding themselves without a language in common, had to write characters in the sand.4 French orthography, descended directly from Latin in some cases, straddles a line between being a classical language useful for brushtalk, and a modern language whose sounds are always changing.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

1. The Button

Here’s a thought experiment1.

There is a button before you. If you press the button, you will instantly switch to the gender deemed “opposite” the one you were assigned at birth. You will fall within the broad biological norms of the “opposite” sex2. You will be socially accepted as a member of the opposite sex immediately, without any social consequences.

Do you press the button?

2. Variations On The Button

There is a button before you.

(i) If you press the button, a process begins. The process involves months or years of stressful, expensive medical procedures. The process involves a slow change in social status, during which many people you know will struggle to address you correctly, or will refuse to do so. You will be treated differently within your family, among your friends, at work, and on the street. People will make jokes about you. People will make laws about you. People you don’t know will make you into a bogeyman. The process will be slow and visible. You’ll struggle to find a place to pee. You get no benefit from this.

(ii) If you press the button, your body will become the sex opposite the one you were assigned at birth. People will continue to perceive you as the gender they currently do.

(iii) If you press the button, people will perceive you unquestioningly as the gender deemed opposite the one you were assigned at birth. Your body will not change.

(iv) If you press the button, you will instantly switch to the sex opposite the one you were assigned at birth. People will know that you pressed the button. Your family, friends, workplace, and perhaps even some people you meet on the street will know that you were once the sex you were assigned at birth, and will know that you chose to press a button to change that, and will treat you accordingly. Your family will know that you chose to change the person they knew. Some will mourn that person. Some will try to avenge them.

(v) If you press the button, your life is overwritten, or your consciousness switches to a parallel universe, such that you have always been the gender deemed “opposite” the one you were assigned at birth. You were raised as that gender, have always been treated as that gender, and lived in a body that falls within the biological norms of the other sex. No one will ever remember you being anything different, except for you.

(vi) The button is presented to you in utero. You can pick “male” or “female,” although there’s no guarantee you’ll get the exact results you imagined.

(vii) The button was presented to you in utero. Assume you picked one option out of two. Why did you do that?

(viii) If you press the button, your relationship to misogyny switches. Understand that misogyny has existed in the world of every iteration of the button I have proposed. You may gain or lose privilege. You may gain or lose the right to stand in sisterhood. You may gain or lose your pride. Really think about it. For some of us, a convincing case for pressing the original button is that being seen by others as a man is a real career advantage. In addition, the pressure of simply deciding whether to go through with the extremely dangerous processes of pregnancy and birth in order to have a child is immense, and removing it is a serious temptation. Press this button, and the threats, violence, pains, and shames leveled at women now become your burden to bear, or are lifted from you.

(ix) If you press the button, your gender changes. Nothing else happens except that you know you chose to press the button.

In which scenario might you do it? Is your answer different depending on the details?

Leave a comment

3. The Anti-Button

Someone pressed the button for you. You now fall within the broad biological norms of the sex “opposite” the one you were assigned at birth. You will be socially accepted as a member of that sex.

Transition exists as it does in the world now. Do you put in the effort required to change back?

4. Put This in Manual

If I surgically removed your genitals, would you feel unmanned or unwomaned?

Subscribe now

5. Disclaimer

If I could effortlessly give myself a dick I probably would. I think I would enjoy it more. I’m not sure why. Whether I would choose to effortlessly be perceived as a man, though, I’m not sure. In a world without misogyny, maybe my answers would be different. But I know “woman” to be a politically constructed entity, and I have lived my life within that group – defying, in small ways, the expectations forced upon that group. People assume I am nonbinary or a man far more than they assume the same of my other AFAB friends who want to be perceived as such. They start pronoun circles when they see me. I’m not sure if I should resent this. What, you think a cis woman can’t wear button-ups? God forbid she have short hair or ambition.

Maybe I’m just a woman to prove a point.

6. My Button Now

If I pressed a button right now that instantly erased all sexual dimorphism in humans and rendered us all androgynous, neither male nor female, would you still consider yourself a man or a woman?

If pressing that button also erased sex, sexual sex, dirty stuff, ie Fucking, made us all give birth by cutting off our limbs and growing new people out of them, I don’t know – would your answer change? How does the presence or absence of childbearing or of Fucking affect how you think about this problem? Being Fucked, getting Fucked, having the kids, raising the kids, getting the job… now everybody or nobody does any of it. It belongs to everybody. How’s your ego?

Would it be hard to live in a world that doesn’t tell you you’re naturally on top or underneath? Would you still be a man or a woman?

7. The World Without the Button

When I pose this question in real life, I receive a lot of surprising answers.

If a cis woman says she would love to press a button to have a penis, deeper voice, height, and other “male” characteristics, but would want to continue living as a feminine woman, is she transgender?

If a cis woman says she would press the button to avoid the pain of childbirth, be respected as men are respected, and lessen the threat of rape, is she transgender?

If a cis man says he would press the button if it had no medical or social consequences (other than misogyny), but not if it required the other significant social or physical sacrifices associated with being transgender in our world, is he transgender? Philosophically, I don’t know. I asked him, and he gave me a weird look and said, “Of course not.”

8. Conclusions

I think, if we lived in a world where the original iteration of the button existed, there would be a lot more transgender people than there are now.

But, then, what does that actually mean? If being transgender is an innate desire, or even simple willingness, to live as the gender “opposite” the one you were assigned, then many people who have not and never will transition in any way – are, indeed, explicitly unwilling to do so – Are transgender. People who choose to live within the precise binary gender role and bodily layout they were assigned. People who extract privilege from doing so. Some people who barely think about gender or sexuality in a political or interpersonal sense at all. I’m not talking about nonbinary people, alright, at least not those who would identify themselves as such. I’m talking about, like, firemen and teachers and Tiktok models.

Are such people in self-denial, unenlightened? If they aren’t, then are they cis?

And what about the people who do acknowledge to themselves some innate sense of being another gender, but do nothing to present themselves as such socially? Are they transgender?

If people constantly assume I’m nonbinary or a man, then am I transgender, regardless of what I say?

The reason I ask all of these questions is that there’s no clean answer. You may not have a clean answer even within yourself. Basic facts force us to acknowledge that gender is not biological, but it’s not fully social and separate from biology, either. We need to mature past the idea of a complete unity between sex and gender and the idea of a complete split. Neither model is completely true – the social is biological, the biological is social3.

Let’s sit with that discomfort for a minute, then. Let’s take it for what it is. Gender is a messy ideology. Transgender is a shifting word. As it should be – trans-gender, transverse, transcendent, revels in the ambiguity, the blurred distinctions, the discomfort, the questioning of an established paradigm. It doesn’t claim to have the answers.

So I leave you with a muddied definition of a word, and a single insight. Whatever transgender people are or are not, the line between them and the rest of us4 is not so stark at all.

Share

What is an organism?

Here’s a list of answers.

• An individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form.

• The material structure of an organism. (Using the word in its own definition. Helpful.)

• A system or organization consisting of interdependent parts, compared to a living being.

-Oxford Languages

• A complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole.

• An individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of parts or organs more or less separate in function but mutually dependent; a living being.

-Merriam-Webster

• A single living plant, animal, virus, etc. (Note the inclusion of “virus” here.)

-Cambridge Dictionary

• A single individual, or being, that cannot survive without its parts.

-Biology Dictionary

• An entity with life.

-Biology Online Dictionary

Yes, I know it’s bad form to start an essay off with a list of definitions, especially such a long list. Maybe one or two would be fine, but this? This is egregious.

Yet, in case you didn’t notice, not a single one of these sources provides a coherent definition of the word. None of them can actually, confidently draw a line separating all things that count as an organism from all things that do not.

Do we notice any patterns in the ideas on this list? Any contradictions? Do we notice boundaries, or a lack of boundaries, to what an organism can be? What does “with life” mean? What does “being” mean? What is an “individual” “with life”?

Oh dear… I thought we were talking about science, not philosophy.

In almost any discussion of biology or ecology, you’ll find the word organism taken for granted. We all know what it refers to. Although, based on the definitions above, it seems we’re not very able to codify it. It’s just, like… I dunno… it’s a thing.

So I’d like to talk about it. What, actually, is An, A Single, The organism?

For now, I’m picturing this guy I found on one of my canal surveys as The organism. For some reason, iNaturalist wouldn’t ID it.

I recently watched Mugsy Explains’s informative lichen video as part of my effort to refresh my biology knowledge after nine months of manual labor. And it kind of exploded my brain.

Lichens are made up of multiple species. They include a fungus, an algae or cyanobacteria, and sometimes yeast. The fungus relies on its photosynthesizing partner for food and in turn provides structure and anchorage. The fungus would not survive without its partner. The lichen would not exist without each component part.

Lichen on a post (in my post).

Mugsy Explains then says this: “It might not be too big of a stretch to say that ruminants, like deer and cows and sheep, are also, like a lichen, a compound organism, made of multiple species working together. Because if you take that cow and you kill all the bacteria inside its body, it won’t be able to digest food, and it’ll starve to death and die.”

Species classification, in the case of lichen, is complicated by the “compound” nature of the organism. A particular type of lichen can be made up of multiple “actual” species working in concert. It is classified based on the fungus, but if one of those other species changes, the ecological niche of the lichen may be entirely different.

Many animals are structured in the same way, with an animal of a “single” species actually incorporating many species of bacteria, fungus, et cetera that its system could not survive without. Therefore, a creature’s “species” is not only describing its place on an axis of evolutionary history but also, in a sense, the cluster of organisms that make up the one.

So, the question: Can you define such a thing as one organism? Is it an individual life form, a material structure, or a system of interdependent parts? Is it a structure of components largely determined by their function in the whole?

Our Merriam-Webster definition seems to fit the top-down notion of, for instance, a cow as a thing that functions through the work of multiple species, but if that’s so… What about the structures that incorporate the cow itself? The food web, the line from grass to cow to dinnertable, the worms that recycle the cow’s excrement and corpse to earth? Under the “system of parts” definition of organism, where does the organism Cow stop?

Let’s take it back. You could say, no, “compound organisms” don’t exist, that’s just symbiosis, which is a relationship between fundamentally separate things. The cow’s relationship to its microbiome is symbiotic. The actual organism Cow is genetically determined: a cow is made of cow cells.

However, I’d say a cow is basically a machine that turns grass into more cow. A cow without any other species in it could not process grass, could not live in the way a cow lives, and could not survive at all. If you separated every organism that is not a Genetic Cow Cell from a cow, what you would have left would not be a cow.

Even then, where’s the limit of the cow cell? Mitochondria were once free-living prokaryotes before being engulfed and incorporated into host cells. Would Pure Cow Cells then have to be taken apart to remove mitochondria and other components that have, over time, been incorporated into cow cells despite originally being separate organisms?

And if you managed to do that — get rid of everything that is not Pure Genetic Cow Essence — even a significant part of that DNA may be made up of ancient viruses that were incorporated into it over time, as in humans. Are those stretches of once-foreign DNA impermissible in Pure Cow?

So that’s not a valid route to define the limits of Cow. Cow is, instead, an organizational principle uniting the genetic material of cows and the many other things that make cows run.

But there must be a limit to Cow, even when our definition incorporates the cow’s microbiome. After all, not everything is cows, is it?

Pure Cow.

You could go in the taxonomic direction. A cow is a member of the species Bos taurus1. Things that are not cows are not part of that species.

Although… it’s difficult to define “species.” We can try to do it based on reproductive capacity – how able individuals are to produce viable offspring with each other. Most species are reproductively isolated, meaning that individuals are prevented from reproducing with each other due to morphological or genetic barriers. However, some hybrids are able to reproduce, and even hybrid speciation occurs, notably in plants. Many living humans have Neanderthal ancestors – and whether Neanderthals were a separate species or a subspecies is up for debate. The idea of reproductive isolation also straight up doesn’t apply to asexual species.

You could try to say instead that the dividing line lies instead in the traits a group expresses – species are different because of the different niches they fill and traits they express. However, populations within a single species can appear completely different depending on their environment and history. Dogs are all the same species, from Tibetan mastiffs to toy poodles – and, debatably, the same species as wolves. Convergent evolution, on the other hand, means that sometimes entirely unrelated species evolve to fill the same niche and end up looking and living in very similar ways.

The best working definition of species is the phylogenetic species concept, which is a kind of fusion of all of these ideas. It states that a species is a set of organisms descended from a common ancestor and possessing a set of defining traits.

So on a macro level, this is a working definition of Cow. You can say that at one point the cow’s evolutionary line was not cows, and then it became cows. So at one point long ago Cow had an ancestor that was not a cow. But where, then, is the specific divide where one generation of organisms was not cows, and the next was Pure Cow? After all, what did the First Cow breed with?

Speciation is not an instantaneous thing. That stark line doesn’t really exist. The shift into a new species is gradual, shaped by many changes and many environmental pressures over a long period of time. Populations change constantly. We can only really know that speciation happened in retrospect. The species Bos taurus is happening, but it’s less a static category and more a contemporary movement.

So there is no Pure Cow, and there is no solid line dividing things that are cows from things that are not cows. However, when some spotted beast is standing there mooing at you, you know it to be a cow. This single being is a cow. That one thing. That’s The Organism Cow, when you get down to brass tacks. Right?

Let’s leave cows behind for a moment.

A concept that blew my mind in undergrad and continues to blow my mind today is alternation of generations. This one’s difficult to wrap your head around, so I’ll try to clarify through the use of weird sexual analogies. Buckle up.

So humans, and many other animals, exist in a haploid (1 set of chromosomes in each cell) phase only as gametes (sex cells – sperm and egg). Those cells fuse and become a diploid (2 sets of chromosomes in each cell) zygote during sexual reproduction, which develops into an animal2.

In plants (and algae and fungi) that use the alternation of generations strategy, the haploid and diploid phases of the life cycle are basically... separate guys. They’re called a gametophyte (haploid plant) and sporophyte (diploid plant). You might expect the thing you know as the whole plant to be the diploid sporophyte, since it seems like it should be the more complete of the two forms. That does happen, but the haploid gametophyte may actually also be the dominant form of the plant.

For example, the leafy plant you would recognize as moss is the haploid gametophyte in a moss's life cycle. That gametophyte produces gametes (sperm or egg). When sperm from a male plant reaches the egg in a female plant, they combine to make a diploid sporophyte (meaning this thing now has chromosomes from both haploid parents).

Okay, follow this next part closely, because the plant’s about to perform a trick. The sporophyte then goes on to reproduce asexually, releasing haploid spores that then grow into haploid gametophytes.

See what it did there? It’s freaky. This is basically like if in order to reproduce, I – and since I'm diploid, I'd be the "sporophyte" in this equation – was very small, and then without ever having sex I birthed and dispersed a bunch of much bigger haploid men and women who looked entirely different from me, and then those guys went and had sex with other haploid people, and then they had kids, and those kids looked like me, and they were technically my kids.

A bunch of weirdo sex freaks.

In some plants, like mosses, the haploid gametophyte generation is dominant in the life cycle. Moss plants are either male or female. In others, the diploid sporophyte generation is dominant. For instance, in gymnosperms (such as pine trees, cycads, and ginkgo trees), the sporophyte is the tree and the gametophyte is produced in the cone. Single gymnosperm trees produce both male and female cones, but the gametophytes themselves are either male or female.

What’s crucial to note here is that these are not continuations of the same guy. It’s not like a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly. It’s a literal alternation of generations. A haploid gametophyte generation sexually reproduces in order to give rise to a diploid sporophyte generation, which then asexually reproduces to create gametophytes.

Some animals actually do a similar3 thing. These animals, including jellyfish and flatworms, also have a life cycle composed of two alternating generations. An asexual generation produces a generation of male and female sexual forms. However, they do not alternate haploid/diploid -- both are diploid, and the sexual generation produces haploid gametes (sperm/egg).

For jellyfish, sperm and eggs from male and female medusae – the recognizable free-swimming "jellyfish" – combine. Fertilized eggs develop into larvae, which then attach to a hard surface and become stationary polyps, sort of like coral (coral and jellyfish are related, both in phylum Cnidaria). The polyps reproduce asexually by "budding", where male and female medusae basically break off of the polyp and swim off into the ocean4.

Medusae.

I find this one easier to understand by actually seeing it happen, so here’s a video. I saw a better one once, but it seems to have been wiped off the face of the earth.

If you’ve seen the crazy "disintegrating worm" video, it's kind of a similar thing. Many marine worm life cycles involve "schizogamy," where the dominant form of the worm, which lives on the bottom of the sea, asexually creates a swimming sexual form -- sometimes through growing it as an appendage and then breaking it off -- which then swims up to the surface, reproduces, and dies.

This is basically like if, in order to reproduce, I cut my genitals off, they grew into a separate guy who could fly, that guy flew up into the sky and had sex with other flying guys and then died, and then I lived on to do that same thing another year. And that guy's children were technically my children.

Nature just does whatever.

We return to the question, again, of where one organism stops and another begins. A single complete life cycle of a jellyfish or a moss can involve different generations that reproduce in different ways. Is one jellyfish’s life counted as its time as the specific medusa in question, or does it begin with the moment sperm and egg fuse, at the beginning of the polyp phase? Remember, the polyp doesn’t just turn into one medusa — it ‘gives birth’ to multiple male and female medusae. Can we call the polyp and the jellyfish, which live separate lives, an individual, one organism? Can we call them multiple?

These are all temporal questions. The boundaries blur on what the jellyfish was and what the jellyfish will be. And then, again, maybe none of these phases are True Jellyfish; the jellyfish’s microbiome plays a crucial part in the production of a new generation as well.

We could put all that aside and decide that a single jellyfish is the thing encompassed by one jellyfish life cycle. There is a point, in this life cycle, where two jellyfish mate and produce a genetically distinct new jellyfish. The divide between one jellyfish and another is the distinction between them as reproductive units. One reproductive unit = one organism, right?

We could tackle this from the “genetically distinct” angle. For some asexual species, that distinction is not particularly clear. For example, female aphids can reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis for dozens of generations before any of them mate with a male. Is the “original” female aphid the “reproductive unit”, or does that include all of its clone descendants?5

No, no, no. This is getting silly now. One aphid is one aphid. Each aphid is an autonomous organism, even if they’re genetically identical, right?

I know a tree that might have something to say about that. Pando, a quaking aspen, is widely regarded to be the largest organism on Earth. It weighs approximately 6,000 tons, spans more than 13 acres, and may be as many as 16,000 years old. Pando is not a single ginormous tree in the way you might expect, though. Rather, it consists of tens of thousands of different stems, which appear to the naked eye to be separate trees. However, Pando is considered a single organism because all of these stems are genetically identical, originating from a single seed, and linked to each other through a massive root system.

Makes sense. I ask you this, now – why is Pando one organism, while a lineage of aphids includes many organisms? At what point does a clone become a separate organism from its progenitor?

Consider species that reproduce through budding, wherein a new organism simply grows on the body of its parent, then eventually breaks off. The offspring is a limb of the parent, and then is not. We could say that the moment of physical disconnection – be it birth or detachment – is what makes an individual.

Therefore, if we took one of Pando’s stems and a chunk of roots away and transplanted it somewhere else, it would no longer be Pando.

Therefore, if I cut off your hand and took it away and kept its tissue alive in a lab somehow, it would no longer be yours – would it?

If separation alone is what makes a single organism, then, as we saw with the bacteria-and-meat system Cow, few things are single organisms. Few trees are their own trees, connected as they are by vast networks of roots and mycorrhizae. If you say that the stem taken from Pando is a single tree solely because of its separation from its progenitor, then if that stem were planted in a different forest and integrated within the natural fungal network, it would logically become part of that organism, the forest organism.

So that got us nowhere. The question that naturally comes to mind next, in our quest to find a coherent definition of organism that reckons with clonal and compound life, is whether clone is a single reproductive unit. This is a bit of a toss-up. Maybe two female aphid clones could mate with two different males. Are their offspring half-siblings or distant cousins?

Yeah, things get complicated fast with clones. We’ll put them aside for now. Since we’re talking about reproduction, and thereby survival and mate choice, we’re talking about natural selection. Maybe a single organism is a single agent within the process of natural selection.

Let’s test this on honeybees.

Through a neat genetic trick, worker bees are more related to their sisters than to their offspring. That’s because male drones are produced asexually, and are haploid (only one set of chromosomes). Basically, if an egg is fertilized, it develops into a female, and if it’s unfertilized, it develops into a drone.

Now we get into something called kinship theory. Basically, evolutionary fitness isn’t exclusive to your own direct reproductive success. If, instead of directly reproducing, an organism enables other members of its family to survive – siblings, children of siblings, etc – it still ensures that whatever percentage of its genetics those relatives share is passed into the next generation. It has to do with the relatedness of individuals – I would pass 50% of my DNA to my child, share 50% of my DNA with my sibling, and, therefore, share 25% of my DNA with my grandchild and with my niece or nephew.

Since the drone only has one set of chromosomes to grow from and pass on, his sperm are all genetically identical to each other and to the egg that produced the drone. Therefore, that drone’s offspring will carry 100% of the drone’s DNA and 50% of his mate’s DNA, meaning that full sister bees share 75% of their genetic material.

This is why, instead of reproducing, most worker bees devote themselves to sustaining the hive while their mother, the queen, reproduces. Queens mate with drones from other colonies and use that genetic material to found their own colonies.

Therefore – and this is key – the reproductive unit of the honeybee is not the individual bee, but the hive. The exchange of genetic material takes place between two hives and not within hives. The hive itself can be considered, then, a superorganism. The worker bees are the corpus, the queen is the ovary, and the drones are sort of like overgrown gametes. Sorry, guys.

Individual selection pressures do still occur within the hive. On an individual level, males are highly interested in their own reproduction because 100% of their genetics are passed on to offspring. Some workers do try to have offspring of their own (which are often removed from the hive by other workers).

However, the same can be said of cells within the human body. They, too, communicate through chemical signals and movement. And what is cancer but a specific cell prioritizing its own reproduction over supporting the other cells with which it composes the whole?

Conversely, if a hive isn’t an organism, is a cow? Is a human? When you encounter a single bee on a flower, are you looking at an organism, or a limb of an organism? How would the bee answer that?

What is the bee? It’s either a bug or a hive. Right now, it’s the thing pollinating your garden.

What is the jellyfish? Well, it’s the thing that’s stinging you.

What is Cow? Cow is an ecosystem in an ecosystem. Cow is a period in time. Cow is all the things that make cows work and happen. Cow is the guy grazing in your pasture, whose grassy shit you just stepped in, ew, ew, this always happens, can’t you just watch your step for fucking once.

These are things at scale. The notion of one cow, one bee, one jellyfish, is defined by the instant and space in which you, a human, interact with that thing.

A complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole. An entity with life.

Natural selection is generally discussed as happening on the level of the individual, and evolution as happening on the level of populations (groups within a species). If we define an organism as the thing that natural selection acts upon, sure, a hive is an organism, a cow is an organism, the larva-polyp-medusa complex is an organism. But then… where do we stop?

Many organisms co-evolve with their symbiotic partners – pollinators with their plants, parasites with their hosts. Multi-species communities change in response to environmental circumstances and internal shifts. Organisms mold their biotic and abiotic surroundings as those surroundings mold them. We call both a living family of bees and the honeycomb maze they make “the hive.” If the hive is the organism, is the nest its house or its shell?

Where, even, does the biotic start and the abiotic end? There isn’t a firm consensus on whether viruses are alive. They’re basically packages of DNA or RNA. They do not perform metabolic functions. They’re lines of code that exist because they stick themselves in cells, and the code tells the cells to reproduce the code. Yet they evolve. They are biological. They’re often called organisms – in the most mechanical sense, as organizations of biological parts.

Natural selection is generally discussed as happening to an individual. Why? What, exactly, is an individual? We come back to the reproductive unit, whether that unit is an insect or a hive. An organism is still one thing experiencing that infamous biological imperative and making fit, strong babies. Ecosystems don’t reproduce, do they?

But ecosystems do reproduce. Didn’t we establish that a cow is an ecosystem? The component parts of the ecosystem shift and exchange and reproduce. Does not, then, the ecosystem do so itself?

A manmade ecosystem.

The thing to understand about evolution is that it is not conscious, it has no purpose, and it has no goal. Some people talk about the evolutionary principle as a stand-in for God, and Darwin as its prophet. But it carries no mandate. It has no ethic. Evolution is a process of change, and natural selection is the mechanism of that change. Natural selection is, in the very simplest of terms, the principle that the form in which life exists in an environment is the one that was best able to stick around.

The camouflaged insect does not know it is camouflaged. Nothing guided it to be so6. Random chance, then acted upon by environmental pressures, led to the traits that cause an orchid mantis to look exactly like an orchid, the flower of the Orphys genus to look and smell exactly like a female wasp.

Some random changes in the genetic code of a living thing mean that thing is less likely to die and more likely to reproduce, causing that code, and the form of life it creates, to persist. The organism itself is secondary – it’s the vessel, the interface through which the code persists in the world.

When the code mutates, recombines, and introduces random elements as a matter of course, the populations that result are more diverse, and therefore more likely to include some individuals equipped to weather changing circumstances7. That’s all natural selection is — the interaction between environmental circumstances and the constant reconfiguring of the base code of life. The life forms we have on hand are the result of this same statistical process playing out over billions of years.

And the genetic code doesn’t “want” to succeed in this process! It doesn’t “want” anything! It’s simply that the genetics that continue to exist are the ones that cause themselves to continue to exist. This is how kin selection works – there is no genetic imperative, because your genes don’t want you to reproduce any more than they want the orchid mantis to look like an orchid. An animal gains fitness by caring for its kin because those kin carry some portion of the genetic makeup that causes it to do so. The “point” isn’t making the best version of a creature. It’s just about what version is here.

We usually view evolution as a process that moves from the present into the future, or from the past to the now. I’m proposing we consider it, for the moment, the other way, present to past: look at what exists now, and understand natural selection as the millennia of specific dice rolls that led to this exact result.

So yes. Of course, obviously, natural selection acts on ecosystems, too. It’s the process by which any living thing has come to exist in its current form.

A cow is an ecosystem. An ecosystem is an ecosystem. Alright, alright, but where’s the “reproductive unit?” Where’s the boundary between ecosystems that makes it clear which one is evolving from which, which one is continuation of which? What is the individual? What is an organism?

The cow is the thing mooing at you. The jellyfish is the thing stinging you. The ecosystem is where you’re standing right now.

There’s a notion in science about the limitations of the human ability to perceive truth. Our observations of the reality of the universe are limited by our physical capacity to observe, as animals, with the animal senses we possess. In some cases, we can expand our scope through technology. In others, we are limited by the very forms by which we comprehend. We are only conscious within a single point in time. We only have certain senses. We can only process information from our surroundings through a human brain.

Therefore, raw reality, whatever that may be, is available to us only through the models that we can make of it in order to make it comprehensible. We can interface with and be parts of an objective truth, but we can’t know it, because every truth we’re able to know is only what a human organism can know, only a human truth.

An individual is an individual because you’re cognitively able to separate it as a single unit of something, on the scale you’re able to comprehend as a human, from the rest of the world. That’s it. That’s the organism. The thing with life. The governing principle at the head of the symphony of component parts: it’s only there because you recognize it.

Going into it, one tends to think that biological science involves clarifying definitions, determining rational causes, and drawing straight lines on a two-dimensional evolutionary tree. But, in fact, the neat lines and separations grow only hazier the closer you look at them. A species is a period of time. An organism is a pattern recognized. It becomes clearer and clearer that you, looking, making your little distinctions and defining words for your language-based consciousness to hear them, are the only thing making any of this real.

Of course, this recognition, this sorting, is natural and necessary to human survival. The human mind is, in the most mechanical of terms, an organ evolved for making distinctions, recognizing patterns, and creating models. Investing energy in those functions is how we as a species managed to persist. But these are also learned skills. You had to dedicate the first few months of your life entirely to learning how to use this complicated organ – learning to perceive, to recognize one thing as separate from another, to recognize yourself as separate from other things. Small differences in physiological processes can cause humans to alter or lack these concepts of separation in ways that seem bizarre to others – and of course these differences would seem bizarre, because they are entirely at odds with the way we (you, I) have rationally encoded the very organism of the world.

All this to say… maybe there is fruit in taking a moment to recognize the existence of the structures the human mind imposes. To try to see beyond them, beyond the sketched pattern of individual and environment, of self and other, of organism and organism.

Maybe then we’ll catch a glimpse of our place in the whole.

Subscribe now

Share

I have a Bachelor’s in biology. However, given that biological/environmental science envelops a vast body of knowledge, that in no way means I’m a qualified source. My only desire is to open up a discussion. If I get something wrong, or if you have information that would add to this discussion, I would be very much happy to hear it.

If you want some stories to help you marinate these ideas, I recommend Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy or Netflix’s Scavenger’s Reign. Also check out Ben Lockwood’s “Eeriecology” essay.