I have been informed that this post is a bit too long for email…so if you’re reading this in email it may be cut off, if so, please read on the app or a browser?
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And here we are, back again… I was horribly sick, so last week was spent head emptied watching Hannah Montana at ten in the morning and alternating between being wrapped up in a duvet on the couch and on my bed. In a string of chaotic moments, my roommates cat went missing and then was found with the help of a kind flashlight wielding neighbour, a presentation at an anarchist bookfair needed more chairs than we could have thought, there was full moon <crushchaos> and <crushdisappointment>, and white pus forming at the back of my throat.
Lately my vibe has been:
Too hot to think, much less write
and then…
Too sick to think, much less write
But, out from under it I find myself here, in the middle of August, when things are changing, and when the heat and sweat is so close to unraveling into the scent of decay (though summer surely will cling tightly on). August when everything is sticky, and when I really feel my age.
thingschanging
thingschanging
thingschanging etc.
thingsending
thingsending
thingsending etc.
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But now, portals, portals, portals. {portals on the mind} have always felt exciting to me. They combine all the things that make life a delicious experience to be having: whimsy + mystery + dreamy.
More and more I’m remembering that they’ve always been there. As a kid, I would walk through strange doors, or odd openings, even two poles tightly placed together, and my dad would say through-this-you-are-entering-another-dimension. And there I was: in another dimension.
Why portals?
Portals are pathways to alternative dimensions, alternative timelines, possibilities that could-have-been-but-never-were, other worlds, other ways of being and on and on. They are the liminal space between here and elsewhere, here and something else, the conduit, the gateway, the entrance, the exit. Because the portal is a liminal space, void, inside it exists nothing and everything.
Basic facts about portals:
- Portals are everywhere
- Water is naturally a portal
- The breath is also a portal, perhaps, also, the most primary one
- However, anything can be a portal: it just requires intention + ritual
- Inside a portal, there is nothingness, void, but also [of course] infinite possibility
- Ritual helps you to generate a portal, and intention helps you to aim the portal
- There can be accidental portals
- Endings are in-themselves portals to elsewhere [this is where aiming comes in handy]
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On Endings…
It is no secret that the end of the world is central to a lot of my work. Not because I think the end will be this spectacular explosion in time and space, but exactly the opposite. {That the end is more amorphous, slower, subtler, boring, more mundane, than we can even perceive as necessarily violent}. Even though, here and now we are living at the end (capitalist ruins, steady decay, foreclosed possibilities) make no mistake, many end of the worlds have already occurred and been experienced by human and non-human beings alike. In fact, in the creation of this world, here, that drums the unified-progress rhythms of <Capitalism-Colonialism>, many worldmaking projects were violently corroded, cut off and severed. That loss cannot be overstated, and those multitudes of worlds and all that they could-have-been-but-never-were continue to haunt and press up against the boundaries of this one.
{The haunting} is another thread I want to tangle around this web, but for now I will just let this quote by Arundhati Roy linger, and I will return back to her later…
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“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
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This weekend my discussion group that I’ve been researching and reading with this whole summer {@endoftheworld.research} hosted a public discussion. We tangled our ideas with yarn around our chairs and around the circle we cast a web. All summer we have been asking “what is left of the self at the end of the world?”, and we come to this question from many different directions. In the middle of the circle, our group constructed an altar, with symbols that represented what we brought to the discussion group. I was the last to speak, for my offering, I offered the portal.
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The end of the world is a portal
This is something that I’ve been settling on in the past few weeks, inspired and brought about by collective discussions and my readings of Donna Haraway’s The Camille Stories and Arundhati Roy’s article “The Pandemic is a Portal”. At first, I thought, in aiming towards new world[s], here we needed to generate a portal and maintain it as we passed through this in-between space to other possibilities for living and dying on this planet, but lately, I’ve settled on something different.
There is no portal that’s needs to be generated: the end is already the portal, we don’t need to know how generate it, we need to know how to aim it.
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Written during the early days of the pandemic (April 2020, were we ever that young??), Arundhati Roy theorizes the pandemic as a portal space, one that can allow us to transverse to new worlds.
“Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
In my previous post on severance and rupture, I discussed an impossibility of a return back: as diaspora, an impossibility of a complete return back home, as a collective, an impossibility of a return to what could have been before <Colonization-Capitalism>, and Roy expresses something of the same. There is no return back to ‘normal’, and perhaps, normal never really existed—it was just a word that would fill in the blanks of precarity and loss and violence that was slow and nothing out of the ordinary. Portals disavow us of the comfort that there is some way back.
Yet, yet, portals do not wipe everything clean. They don’t break with the past, but rather have a more complex relationship to it. {remember, remember, portals are the liminal space where reality becomes broken down, they are void, and yet, nothing and everything are two sides of the same coin}
This is where the messy world of compost comes in…
…
Donna Haraway, in her book Staying with the Trouble, returns again and again to compost, not humanism, but compostism. This concept generates as much as it degenerates {from the latin “degenratus,” no longer of its kind} in compost, to which we will all return, we slip away from what kind we were, {self, human} into something far messier, liminal and incomplete. We have never been human, but we will always be compost.
Like compost the portal I’m theorizing exists in this in-between state. Both in an ending and a beginning, in living and dying and in what is birthed and transformed from decomposition. To enter into the nothingness the world as we know it must decompose. Compost does not dream of starting the world anew but rather in the decay and mess of troubled worlds it creates possibilities for transformation and alchemization. To generate possibilities for life in the degeneration of death. Compost itself is a portal.
“The communities of compost worked and played hard to understand how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that infuse every place and every corridor. Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them; they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and the living too” (From The Camille Stories).
Here, in {the portal that is the end}, there is no nothing without everything. Starting the world anew from ground 0 is as much of an illusion as the possibility of a return back to imagined wholeness, before the mess of damaged ecosystems and damaged worlds. Rather within {the portal that is the end}, we are asked to witness and take stock of all the timelines: all the possibilities that were disrupted, all the futures revolutionary movements imagined but never got to fulfill, all the ghosts, all the dreams for other worlds in the midst of impossible circumstances, all the pockets of freedom, all the loss, all the terror, all the mess. Within all of the muck, in the ruins and decay, we can aim the portal.
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Interlude: POV you’re googling symptoms early in the morning and realize that even the most horrid human experiences are somewhat beautiful
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& It matters who you are being
if the end is a portal to elsewhere…
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that is all,
-thai xx <3
georgeous, georgeous! 👏👏👏