Bewildered

Figurine of a monk. Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland, Oregon.

I went to bed early on election night, after 30 uneasy minutes listening to Steve Kornacki’s brisk county-by-county trend analysis.

The following morning, I watched wrens futz around in the sunlit bushes outside my window for half an hour before getting out of bed. Movement came slowly. I crept through the tender stillness of the house suspended in a probability space of unknowing. MAGA was neither dead nor alive.

I sat down to journal before collapsing the state vector, aka checking the news. As I wrote I realized that in some ways it didn’t matter who won because at least half of America wants what TFG is selling. And then I looked at my phone.

What the fucking fuck?

In 2016, in an attempt to suppress feelings of apocalyptic terror, I set about figuring it out. What did I miss? What were MAGA folks thinking? What could help me empathize with their world view? I subscribed to several conservative magazines and news outlets, talked with folks who had voted Republican, and tried to find something solid enough to respond to, something to pinpoint in future conversations that would ensure this couldn't happen again. I never found that perfect leverage point, but by election time 2020 I didn’t need one. Folks who had voted for Trump were tired of his antics. It felt like maybe our lurch towards fascism (née nationalism) was a bizarre anomaly.

This time? None of that. We know so much more now—January 6th, 34 felony convictions, bathrooms as file storage for top secret information, and brazenly unhinged, violent rhetoric. And yet even more people said yes. This time I am not pouring through right-wing news sources and message boards trying to understand. I haven’t read a lick of the hot-takes that have flooded my inbox. I can’t think. There is no air for logic and reason to breathe. The tools I used to have—concepts, categories, and language, connected in networks of meaning through which I made sense of the world—no longer work.

This time I am not going to try and figure it out. Instead, I am going to stay bewildered. Because sometimes there is more clarity in bewilderment than there is in answers.

This fall I attended Making Sanctuary: Leadership and Change at the Edges of the Human, a five week seminar put on by the Aspen Institute with Báyò Akómoláfé as our poet-instigator-guide. Akómoláfé is someone whose lyrical provocations and fugitive explorations reveal new and uncertain terrains of being. Whose way with words and poetic invitations show us how we, too, can loosen our ontological borders and get a little weird.

The class was a revelation, an undoing of familiar ways of knowing into underworlds of more-than-human becomings. Our explorations eventually lead us to the Behemoth. Yes, that one. From Job 40:15-24.

For Akómoláfé, the Behemoth is an impervious system displaying a set of conditions “that absorb or deflect attempts at change, maintaining overall systemic patterns despite surface-level alterations.” Or what Aníbal Quijano calls the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP) an, “abstract mechanism, like the unconscious in psychoanalysis… the unconscious of Western civilization that… conceals coloniality, the logic of exploitation, multiple oppressions, and expropriation.” The Behemoth and the CMP are massive, beyond human comprehension. Timothy Morton uses the word hyperobject to talk about the “immense, structural forces all around us, and even inside us, that we cannot see with our eyes.” Reason, as a cartographic practice, cannot possibly map something so immense and invisible (not for lack of trying, tho).

For David Bohm, reason (as thought) itself is part of the problem. Thought is not simply an intellectual activity, but a process that includes feelings and the body, a process that passes between people creating a system in which every part is dependent on every other part. Thought imbricates us in an ecological field of thinking-feeling-sensing. The flaw in our thinking happens when we see something “wrong” with a part of the system and try to fix it using another part of the system. In an attempt to avoid uncomfortable feelings we seek ever more draconian forms of control. But this just adds more problems, creating what I like to call “the ouroboros of problem solving.” We lack the ability to stay with difficulty, to sit in our unpleasant feelings and resist the temporary relief of solutions.

Staying with the problem, or rather the trouble, is exactly what Donna Haraway urges us to do:

“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

Folks like Akómoláfé, Bohm, Morton, and Haraway are all thinking beyond what we’ve been given. Encountering their work flips the familiar on its head and troubles what once seemed so certain. In this space of unknowing we are invited to let go of control and turn towards what is here now—material networks of oddkin copresencing the world from moment to moment. Anything that distracts us from our senses, such as hope and despair, is useless.

“Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence.”

In the year 2000 Hopi Elders shared a prophecy, We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. I'm including it here in its entirity because it is impossible to excerpt without losing its exquisite context and meaning.

We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For

You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?

Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ’struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Let go of the shore, push off into the middle, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. Carried along by fast flowing currents, we cannot logic our way through turbulent waters, only move with them. Bewilderment isn’t a means of bypassing or turning away, it is a staying with, learning how to navigate and think in new ways, alert to what may emerge in the churn.

And what of the invitation to celebration and good times? When fascism is knocking at the door it can seem downright disrespectful to indulge in something akin joy. But I'd wager the elders have it exactly right. My dad, elder Mignolo, shared something similar with me earlier this year during a dinner in Buenos Aires:

“Recupero mi alegría sin perder mi indignación. El neoliberalismo quiere que nos muramos viejas y amargadas. Pero no le vamos a dar el gusto.”

“I recover my joy without losing my indignation. Neoliberalism wants us to die old and bitter. But we won't give it that satisfaction.”

Joy does not negate pain, anger, and all the other feels swirling around right now. But losing our joy disconnects us from each other, and from life. Pema Chödrön knows a thing or two about this, as she writes so eloquently in Living Beautifully:

“I realized then what it means to hold pain in my heart and simultaneously be deeply touched by the power and magic of the world. Life doesn't have to be one way or the other. We don't have to jump back and forth. We can live beautifully with whatever comes—heartache and joy, success and failure, instability and change.”

And so here I sit, bewildered and unmoored, staying with the trouble, shedding old logics, looking not for answers but for cracks, and attuning to increasingly strange ecologies of becoming.

I love you. Let’s all take good care of each other.