Page 14 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

ever weren’t kin, undoing the lie of a whole country acting as if we don’t, with the flip of a

leaf or a compost pile, just turn into one another’s bodies.

What does it mean to become kindred with the dead? To plant into them? To unfurl and

unravel and unassent to the story that exalts immortality, that promotes “failure to

become-with the dead and the extinct. “One of the things I do for a living is grow food,

and help others learn to grow food. Every act of feeding is also an act of dying. Every

moment of death is also a plate replete with food. Compost, insect, plant, microbe

Bodies becoming other bodies, matter mattering.

In our obsession with eternal life we tried to unbecome kin with the earth, to unbecome

kin with each other. Instead of merging and differentiating and merging again, as matter

tends to, we try to stay separate, forever, avoiding death.

And yet the dying, “... it has been beyond swallowing.” It is beyond swallowing. I have

lost beloveds and I am not grateful, I do not turn to death with rosy, easy eyes. So many

have had beloveds taken, whole generations, the unkinning of separation, how it tries to

unlink families, stories, whole histories waving in the wind.

Some of us, our ancestors, chose separation, domination, did this actively to people who

were not in fact trying to unbecome. These are the dominator stories unlinking,

unassembling us now, still. A planet with a fever. Bodies metasticizing something we

can’t always name but the sickness tries to.

But death becomes soil becomes seeds, seeds shared from hand to shattered hand,

Without kin beyond blood, beyond nation, beyond body, without kindred in death, we

create refugees, creatures, species, cultures with no place of refuge to recover, to thrive.

No death, no kin, no food. Kin begets refuge: places of holding over, of survival, of

keeping alive the children and the stories and the seeds.