The Protestor in Bed

We are always wondering: will the effects of one body upon another be beneficial, neutral, or violent?

—from Air Kissing

Bed Peace

Hello: dear reader, gentle reader. Are we gentle spirits?

I never get tired of writing that uses direct address. I wish poems used it more. It’s incantatory—Hello: dear reader. It acknowledges and reaffirms we exist together in a morphogenic field[1]. Here we are situated, prismatic triangles of the reader-writer-text electrobody. Even from a distance, we sit eyeline to eyeline, or pressed ear to ear. We transmit creaturely expansion. Or contractions, messes, and bellyaching. Harmonic extensions of organisms. Mutability. Our understanding broadens. When two entities come into contact, they leave each other changed.  

It feels weird to write right now. The starting place seems plain and normal: we need to unite and heal. We need to break up corrupt concentrations of power and protect each other as best we can. What else? My friend Harold says: sometimes you just need to put down your pen and be a person taking to the streets. 

I admire the vitality of that image. Not just because it suggests we can remake the world by living our everyday person-ness, but because it’s kinetic. I’ve gone to a few protests in the past year. I’ve marched as part of a group body and felt this body trying to blend its hopes and smooth its spikes. Like all bodies, it has many points of vulnerability.

Truly, though, I spend most of my time at home. And when I’m home I spend most of my time in my bed. This arrangement is not entirely by choice. I’ve had the auto-immune disease named Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis for most of my life. It took twenty years to get the diagnosis and the name—because, like most women seeking answers, I was told my symptoms were in my head. With this disease comes another condition that medicine calls chronic fatigue. There have been days where I can’t stay awake for more than a few hours. I’ve also spent a lot of time feeling not quite awake and not quite asleep. I’ve had to learn how to honor the limitations that come from being sick while, at the same time, not over-identifying with the idea of being sick.

The theory behind auto-immunity is disturbing. It states that your body is mistaking a part of itself as an invading foreign agent and sending antibodies to attack it. This idea can really mess with your head. It’s basically telling you that you’re trying to destroy yourself. It’s like your cellular planes are full of small lances and blades slashing away, scaling you down, inflaming your own ability to insult yourself. There are other theories too, like the more fashionable one that says your body is just trying to fight a secret Epstein-Barr infection. Even though this idea is probably a fad, it messes with your head less because at least here the enemy has been accurately tagged. I wouldn’t be surprised if medicine eventually decides that they’ve been completely wrong about the whole auto-immune construct from the start. As for my part, it would be good to dispense with the language of enemies and fighting altogether.

A lot of great art and protest gets transmitted from the bed, or from beds to beds. It’s easy to think of wan Proust’s chipped teacup, or John & Yoko’s intimate Bed-in (with the protest sign that says “Bed Peace”), or Kathleen Hannah recording the Julie Ruin album in her bedroom. I rarely ever write about my personal life, but I guess I should since I’m talking about beds. A couple weeks ago I went on my first dating-app date, after exiting the haze of a hazy relationship. Out of nowhere this man asked me if I wanted to continue our conversation naked in bed. His logic: it would be more fun to think out-loud together in bed than sitting across from each other at a table.  

The bed can try to provoke morphogenetic intimacies, but intimacy will always resist compulsory behavior. 

So I think about The Smiths singing about how we can share and merge our dreamfields: “send me the pillow/ the one that you dream on/ and I’ll send you mine.” My love for Morrissey leapt again when he released a song this year called “Spent the Day in Bed.” At the beginning of the video, Morrissey presents himself in passive mode, being pushed down a hallway in a wheelchair. He sings the song sitting in a small, uncomfortable padded chair. He hits the strings only Morrissey can: cracking open his emerald heart while also exhibiting high irony. “I spent the day in bed/ It’s a consolation / When all my dreams/ Are perfectly legal/ In sheets for which I paid.” The bed is a sanctuary for the ill, the mindful drop-out, the overworked and overtaxed, a place to rest our heads in protest, to heal. Don’t forget it also costs money.

We can also form powerful alliances from our beds, as we merge and expand our dreamfields. See the musician collander’s work from the album “grim bitch/sick shit.” About the artist: “that feeling when the medical industrial complex is yr ex.” The music has all of these bright disgorgements, but all slowed down. The music tracks how a body languishes and revivifies at different times of the day:  “All of these intestines/ and the qualities I show to you.” I also love to read the comments left on collander’s page. Here is one from Anna: “the sound of solidarity from one sick bed 2 another!! it’s queer crip femme beauty/ugliness; it enriches my spirit and gives me power.” In the morphogenetic field, we heal our organs together. We fortify our cells when someone else can’t. These are real intimacies.

If we know we’re one body, will this change the way we write to each other, and read each other?

Healing Agents

In addition to being a writer, I also study plant medicine (herbs and flower essences) and I’m currently in school to become a homeopath.

[I need to wind into an aside here: That homeopathy is under-used in this country, and is misrepresented by a media that props up the pharmaceutical industry, is shameful. There is so much I want to say about this issue, and I won’t dwell long. But first I’ll add this: homeopathic remedies work, and Trump’s FDA is currently working hard to ban them. A patient should always use the medicine they need, whether conventional or holistic. But if you want to throw me into despair, be one of those guys who prides himself on being rationalist, informed, discerning of reality itself—all while advocating for our crawling suicide-culture of zombie-food, suppression, and expensive side-effects (which is just a euphemism for replacing one illness with another). I don’t mean to talk about people in the loose categories of phlyotypes, but I’ve come across too many men who act like this, and I’ve tried too hard to breathe inside their emissions of podcasts and NPR. They’re disconnected from their senses, loyal to ideologies that don’t love them back, but treat holistic others like superstitious idiots. They advocate for a system that has attempted genocide on indigenous, folk, and women’s medicine, and that has stolen from and experimented on non-white bodies. They rarely recognize the flaws of a medicine that vivisects animals and uses the cis-male body as its baseline for measurement. They don’t acknowledge the success of certain medicines as political. Homeopathy thrives in countries where it has a government platform, like India, France, Switzerland, and South Africa. It was an indispensable medicine for first-wave feminists, who learned this medical art and science in their own homes, healing their communities out of their own bedrooms. Louisa May Alcott loved homeopathy. In Little Women, Nan becomes a homeopath. The AMA formed in part to topple homeopathy because it worked too well. And because of homeopathic treatment, my auto-immunity and chronic fatigue are finally healing. Hello reader: I apologize for the slide into rhetoric. I try to use rhetoric sparingly, since I find it a depressing mode of relating. In spite of my rant, my more gentle self knows that everyone acts the way they act for a reason, and sometimes we need to listen to these reasons.]

Because I study the healing arts, I think about how writing can heal, and how it might operate within the morphogenic, organismic dreamfield of reader-text-writer.

Homeopathy stems from the Hippocratic principle that like-cures-like. For example, let’s say you’re cooking and accidentally give your thumb a mild burn. If you run it under ice cold water, you’ll feel some temporary relief, but the pain will come back. Try running your thumb under hot water—the pain will get worse for a twinge, then it will disappear. In other words, we tend to see the symptom as a problem to be suppressed, and not as an expression of a body trying to right itself back to homeostasis. Homeopathy has its philosophical roots in vitalism: the right remedy will stimulate your body’s own self-healing mechanism, rather than imposing insufficient repair from without. 

It’s the hardest field I’ve ever studied. There are over 3,000 remedies, and growing, in the pharmacopeia. The idea is to find the one remedy that will match a patient’s constitutional picture. We try to get a comprehensive snapshot of the patient’s state: their symptom sensations and locations, circadian rhythms, food preferences, family history, trauma history, mental and emotional condition, personal philosophy, interests, philosophical beliefs, recurrent dreams, whether their bodies run hot or cold....  Remedies are made from highly diluted substances taken mostly from the plant, mineral, and animal worlds (for example, venoms and feathers). Each remedy is vast in its properties: a book in itself, because each living being is a book in itself. We try to match the totality of the patient’s symptoms to the totality of the remedy’s properties. When the right match is made, the patient gets better. In other words, we match one resonant, living morphogenic field to another, and self-healing happens. The word physician comes from the Greek physis (“nature”)—the role of the physician is to assist nature.

Technically, you could probably make a remedy from anything in existence, even seemingly “dead” matter, or something you probably wouldn’t notice—like those little Teflon sliders that people put under the legs of a chair. In a highly diluted state, a Teflon remedy would probably cure someone somewhere. 

To find the best remedy match for a patient, we also look closely at the poetics of their language. 

Yes, Re-matter

Look at matter close enough, and you’ll see there are no inanimate objects. Whenever two entities come into contact with each other, they are changed. We breath and digest all the molecules around us, and our molecules are breathed and digested. We’re globular and expansive: fields touching fields. There’s a reason your dog probably knows you’re coming home as soon as you get in the car.  When you’re mean on Facebook, you’ve affected the entire crystalline (silica) matrix that has to transmit and ingest it as data. My friend Michelle says, “I think the internet has weather patterns.” Of course it does. Silicone-based life forms are intelligent. Of course our words matter.

There is an influential and controversial homeopath named Rajan Sankaran who has cured his patients by listening closely to their language. (When I become a formal practitioner, I will not legally be allowed to use the word “cure” as part of my practice.)  When he listens to his patients, he’s able to detect, very skillfully, whether they will need a plant, mineral, or animal remedy. He listens to their “metaphors, idioms, similes, gestures, verbalized images, and described sensations.” For example, here’s a woman who needs a butterfly remedy for her headaches: “She was very expressive and described her headache as a tightness… after getting very tight, she feels as if her limbs are dissolving and there is a kind of blanket around her... then there is rocking. And then it opens and there is a light feeling of floating and flying…” The woman was describing her migraines using the idiosyncratic poetics of chrysalis and metamorphosis. She was given the butterfly remedy and the migraines stopped.

I also like to think that, somewhere inside this process of healing and re-attunement, the butterflies were helped in return—that a chord in the human animal group-body shifted, and the world tipped a little bit in favor of their thriving.

Whether we are a plant, mineral, or animal constitution is revealed in our syntax. You might notice that I use a lot of plant language. My own constitutional remedy is from the plant world (funnily enough, one of the language-qualities of this particular remedy is that the person will refer to their bed a lot). Remember the rant I had earlier, that I then apologized for? This behavior is typical of plant people and their hypersensitivities. If you had been reading a writer with an animal constitution, they probably wouldn’t have apologized. They might have flaunted their fur and feathers and dazzled in the primary colors of their fury. Their language may have been prescriptive. You may have cowered reading it. If you’re reading a blog post on this site by a poet who is talking at length about rhyme and meter and structure, then there’s a good chance they’re a mineral remedy. Poets who do the meticulous work of translation are also often minerals. A mineral writer will probably use straightforward logic—unlike mine which, you’ve probably noticed, is meandering, messy, and rhizomatic.

Sankaran identifies the syntax of our constitutional plant, animal, or mineral remedy as “the other song” that sings within our human song. 

You are a superorganism influencing other superorganisms, ones you’ve never brushed past in the flesh. Your mineral bones are 33% water. You have ten microbial cells for every one of your human cells. You’re repurposed star matter. And, somewhere in this earthly (and sometimes cosmic) morphogenic field, another creature sings through you, as part of you, writing with you. This is the creature that can cure you. For some of us, the same creature(s) may walk with us throughout our lifetimes. Sometimes these dynamics will change. Different poems, different books, different characters (if they’re in remedy states) will also have their own creaturely other songs. To me, it makes sense. All bodies share “all the things that make up this earth.” There are so many ways to find each other, help each other, and connect.

In my own work, I attempt to draw some of these interrelationships out into the open air. This is also one reason why I will scent the pages of a chapbook with a plant’s volatile compounds, or see if I can work with my friend Dan, a programming-poet, to get willing plants to write poems. Other creatures live with and inside and compel our human language. All over again, we are leaving each other changed.

 

Sense Biotics

If sickness goes beyond the human, then so do our political and institutional sicknesses.

There is a poisonous fungus called ergot, which could be partially responsible for the Salem witch trials. Ergot grows on rye and other staple cereal grains. If you eat it, you will hallucinate, jerk to and fro, twitch and spasm, fall into a well of delusions. It’s a poison and not a disease, so it will only affect those who eat it. Abigail Williams, and all the other Salem girls who were “ill with hysteria” showed telltale signs of ergot poisoning. A physician said their symptoms were the work of the devil.

To acknowledge the role of ergot in these executions is not to overlook other vital factors. But add a poisonous fungus to the intersection of colonialism, misogyny, the hysteria of patriarchy, suppression of herbal medicine, angry neighbors, legal disputes, and the enslavement of Tituba, and the atrocities escalate even more. Take the physician who didn’t use his senses. He failed to acknowledge the presence of the fungus as an actant and inflated his dangerous occult distortions. In refusing to acknowledge the active role of the natural world, he distorted the role of the supernatural world as well. These poisonous distortions then came back in the form of state and community violence.

It might be the plantbody in me, but I tend to wonder how our super-organismic selves affect our political present and how they can mobilize us in unexpected ways. 

I also think a lot about how plants and other creatures communicate. Plants talk to each other through scent and emotion. They are mysterious in that they seem to act as if they have sense organs when they don’t. Their neural networks are their roots. These neural networks join with (fungal) mycelia webs and together create the mycorrhizal networks that are growing for miles in the soil under your bed right now. They talk to each other, transfer nutrients and water back and forth, teach each other, do math, mark turf, gossip, and grow wise. If you think I’m anthropomorphizing, consider that these neural networks basically use the same neurotransmitters that we do, like gamma aminobutyric acid and glutamate. These neural networks also look like our own. They also look like the electromineral internet. To think the living world is intelligent is not insane; it’s coming back to our senses. To mechanomorphize the world, or to just see it as a stage set, is completely insane, a form of patriarchal hysteria. 

Stephen Harrod Buhner is an expert on plant and microbial intelligence. I’m going to wind in and out of paraphrasing and quoting him here, as he describes bacteria, who might have the most sophisticated language of all—

We’ve been really stupid if we think we know what bacteria are, especially as they are the oldest organisms, and the most essential for life, and they’re smarter than all of us. They are the biggest planetary superorganism, and they are experts at community organizing. For the most-part, antibiotics don’t biodegrade, so they’ll end up in the oceans and in the ground. Antibiotics are causing a massive microbial shift that hasn’t been seen in two-and-a-half million years. He writes, “Bacteria literally analyze the antibiotics that they encounter and generate responses to them. They actually remake their genome in order to alter their physical form. And this solution? It is passed on to their descendants.” 

Then he says:

[Bacteria] are communicating across bacterial species, genus, and family lines, something they were never known to do before the advent of commercial antibiotics. And the first thing they share? Well, it’s resistance information…They often experiment, combining resistance information from multiple sources in unique ways that increase resistance, generate new resistance pathways, or even stimulate resistance forms that are not yet necessary… they weave it into their own DNA… [Communities] are not competing with each other for resources, as standard evolutionary theory predicted, but rather promiscuously cooperating in the share of survival information… And they are not taking the presence of pharmaceutical pollution lightly; they are responding to the environmental disruptions caused by antibiotics socially as a group.

And finally, he mentions how, using a sophisticated language, they “take concerted action, influence human physiology, alter human thinking and work together to bioengineer the environment.” 

It’s no coincidence that our current human activities are using much the same language as our microorganismic makeup: resist, work together, and take concentrated action. Resist fixed boundaries, share resources, be promiscuous in the ways we help each other. Remake the world. Find creative ways to respond to systems that are anti-biotic (against life). To read another’s work is not casual, even though we treat it casually. Our language affects the shifting ride of who and what is allowed to exist. It provides new attunements for the reader-writer-text superbody. Reader, hello. I’m writing from my bed, and this is not casual.