and neither
letting go of either/or
Hi sweet humans,
It feels like a long time since I’ve sat down to write you a little note like this — how are you? how’s your heart? when did you cry last and what was it about?
I’m tempted to add: when did you laugh last? as a kind of buffer, an equilibrium-izer here, but I’m trying in this email to let go of that kind of back and forth yo-yoing we’ve been taught so well to do — in writing, in conversation, in our internal barometering. No tears without laughter or a reminder that joy exists, etc.
I’m trying to let go of the either/or masquerading as the both/and, not because laughter and joy don’t exist as much as tears and grief do. No no no, I want to say, like I did when I was a kiddo, not at all, as I might say as the adult I am now. The thing I want to let go of is the relationship constructed so carefully between them. A relationship built and maintained in and of a binary world that is, on the surface, obsessed with the either/or two-option categorization system, and underneath that, bludgeons us over the head and slips into the water the idea that one of these two options is better than the other. Wouldn’t you always choose joy over sadness? Wouldn’t you always choose ease over suffering? Good over bad? Right over wrong?
I don’t know! I want to not know! I want the intimacy of fucking around, the many many experiences of finding out.
I’m so tired of this kind of mental cage that hems in my thinking, my expression, that justifies so much fucking violence every single goddamn day, that is so at odds with what I sense when I walk by the creek, with the wildness of quantum physics (yes that is a link to a psychology today article, no I will not apologize, because Ricardo Levins Morales once said that if you can’t explain something at the level a second grader can understand, you yourself don’t actually understand it yet. And while I definitely don’t understand biocentrism yet, I get the same feeling reading about it as I do walking in the woods, where I have learned my most important lessons.)
I want to break up with the either, the both, the and, the or. Is bitter really the opposite of sweet? Joy the opposite of sadness? Do I really only get one, or only those two things, at a time?How do I know, except what I’ve been told, over and over again? I want to learn for myself, and I want to tell you about it and hear what you stumble into and out of.
I’ve talked about queerness here a couple of times, in part because uncloseting myself felt like learning that death wasn’t real (yeah, that’s the same article), or pretending in terror that it wasn’t for long enough that there was space for me to notice something else. Many somethings.
I want the neither. I want the both that isn’t and. I want the more beyond the both. And I want company.
I’ve been telling people this thing I read from alice sparkly kat earlier this year — real things keep going even when you don’t believe in them. Or maybe it was what stops existing when you stop believing in it? I want to stop believing in binaries, even the benign ones. I want binary thinking to be a tool I can turn to, barter away, forget on the shelf, not the two-way mirror I’m stuck between. (In checking whether two-way mirrors exist, I learned a delightful fact: two-way mirrors are also called one-way mirrors.)
I want us to remember that binaries are made up. Made up things still have power, of course (racism, empire, domination, fascism) — they’re still things we have to acknowledge. But I want to acknowledge and also stop believing in. And I want whatever third thing shows up when I do that. And the thing after that. So many things that we don’t even have to say and, because we understand that they’re all here, everything everywhere all at once.
I’m rereading this email and asking myself: am I just talking about polarization here? Binary culture relies on binaries being a natural, observable part of the world, the underlying foundation of everything. And magnets exist, after all. I don’t have a clear answer for myself, only muddy questions. Are what we (non-physicists) calling repel and attract in fact opposites? If they are, can they scale to encompass every single other thing in the world and the universe? Is there room, gaps, space in this oppositional relationship for other possibilities?
This kind of nonbinary, or queer, line of thinking means allowing myself to be a beginner, to not know, to ask questions, to be scoffed at, to be wrong — things I dread and delight in. Are dread and delight opposites? And if not, when they exist in me at the same time, and when something that isn’t both of these but is something else exists in me too, what is that? What is the word for that experience, or maybe: what are the experiences that exist beyond the terms of the binary, and how do we find them, and notice them, gather them up like leaves, or flowers, or rocks, immerse ourselves in them, and feel our resistance to that kind of immersion and the secret third thing— and then how on earth do we pull each other into and around and through them, too?
I’m sending you the feeling I got when I walked by a great blue heron today with a tiny silver fish wriggling in their beak — delight, awe, curiosity, an aching kind of want to feel their feathers under my fingers, to look directly into their eyes and into the eyes of the fish, too — as I sit here, on the hill between the creeks, under the oak tree, below the thunderstorm.
all my queerest, weirdest love,
Kali
If you loved this email you’ll really love my friend Rosie’s class on Nostalgia Medicine — on the surface it’s about reconnecting to the skills of childhood but above or below or also in the surface it’s about time travel, enchantment, curiosity, and sensing. (If you were puzzled by this email, me too, me too.)