Page 13 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

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“Kin is an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common ‘flesh’...“

What happens when a tsunami or a big earthquake or a societal collapse hits the

coastal floodplains and those who can get their bodies out have to head for the hills?

How will we re-make the world? What will we eat? Who will be the keepers of the

stories? Who will be the keepers of the dead? How do we show up and take care of

each other, beyond the stories that we have been taught? It will take a myriad of stories

to answer these questions, and we need to answer them, again and again, to imagine

and re-imagine our wonderings, queries, tinkerings, what-ifs, into flesh and soil and

seed.

It is not only people who will need refuge, and indeed some people might have no

people. Not anymore. What if they find each other. What if they find the seeds. What if

they hold refuge for the dead, for each other, and for the living who will need to eat later

on. What if the story about what to do in case of disaster, what and who to prioritize, gets

queered, gets failed at, gets improvised outside of, gets added on to. What if they hide in

the hills and honor the dead by planting seeds into their crumbling soil. What if they find

each other and keep the breath of the world alive in a secret place. What if they hold

each other beyond horror, beyond bloodlines, beyond absurdity. What if they re-imagine,

together, what it is that needs to be saved.

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“Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the

earth-bound...compose and decompose, which are both dangerous and promising

practices...”

Dangerous and promising. Compose and decompose-- song to shit to soil. (All matter

merging into itself, one another. Microbes and worms breaking down? the myth that we