I turn to face both of you. You have your mouth flung open in mock surprise. I look at Lali and she has her head cocked sideways with an “I told you to get out of bed” expression on her face. She rests her clean hand on her protruding belly and rubs it. We recently found out you are going to have a little sibling. A little brother. It will be four of us—you, Lali, me, and your brother, Kyah Jayden.
I know what to do: that moment speaks to me. I ask both of you to touch my shoulder. You both do—even as you ask, “Dada, what are you doing?” and Mama encourages you to do what I say. I touch the hushes one by one, each of them, stringed to each other by infinitesimally delicate strands of their hairs. They stop moving. I close my eyes, and whisper some words of gratitude for the journey now coming to an end, praying that the last hush will meet all four of us well. Bàbá said when the tenth hush is found, I will know how to pray, and what I should ask for—suggesting that my understanding of home might change along the way with the questions I would learn to ask.
Moments later, our bell rings. You run out to open the door, while your mum follows after you to stop you from opening it without seeking to know who comes. I stand up from the pot. The hushes are still immobile, perhaps frozen in fear from my touch. “Thank you for being a part of our village … you are us and we are you,” I whisper, then return inside as I hear Viji-ma’s distinct voice fill the house.
Stephen Hawking, a well-respected theoretical physicist and cosmologist, predicted that mankind would have to find a home in the stars within one hundred years if we are to survive.2 A new place to live. His prophecy was based on the observation that we have collectively destabilized the earth, making it potentially inhospitable in a few years. Last year, he had given us a thousand years to rethink our ways. To work out the puzzle of climate change and address overpopulation. But with asteroid strikes, the threat of thermonuclear war and raging epidemics, Hawking’s hope for some longevity had diminished drastically. Now with less than a mere hundred years, we would all have to come together, find another planet home, and—most importantly—find out how to get there.
If he had made these prophecies twenty years ago, he might not have found an audience willing to give him an ear. Today, however, is different. The race to space that pit the United States against Russia fifty years ago has been superseded by a race to colonize Mars. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States) hopes to pull it off in sixteen years (2033—when you’ll be twenty years old), while Mars One, a private initiative with a vision to establish the first permanent human settlement on Mars, has already selected one hundred potential colonist hopefuls to make the 225-million-kilometer crewed journey in 2024, nine years before NASA’s hoped-for departure for the red planet. Elon Musk’s SpaceX project, probably the most lauded, is planning for liftoff a mere five years from now—though timelines are continuously revised. Musk argues that we won’t live on earth forever, and that the only way to survive might be to become a spacefaring multiplanet species. Some are calling this the next great leap for mankind—recalling the moments Neil Armstrong set foot on earth’s moon, stamping its alien surface with our collective aspirations for place and new boundaries in a universe whose outer reaches seem to defy measurement.
Of course, there are cynical questions around these projected adventures into outer space. Who gets to go? Do we even have the technologies to sustain those who successfully make the trip? And if we do, why not apply those technologies to our current planet? Why rush off into the unknown blackness, the seemingly uncharted regions of myth and imagination, with the same exploitative technologies that are making our own planet uninhabitable?
All of these seem like valid questions to ask. They make the assumption, however, that this is a choice between staying and leaving.
I have to admit I have often imagined you reading these letters by an alien shore, kneeling before an ocean thicker and denser than any ocean on earth, underneath a sky lined with the secreted trails of giant whale-like creatures floating and humming beneath multiple moons. This might seem outlandish, but outer space is not as external or as distant as billions of dollars and millions of miles might suggest. We are entangled with those radical extraterrestrial others, with those endless miles, each mediating morsel of which is itself a destination of intersecting stardust, meeting in a trellised orchestra of music that plays unendingly in the formation and destruction of homes. Indeed, we are already a part of a cosmo-poietic unfurling of skin and form—our lives intra-acting with orbiting bodies, our individual destinies often tracked by the measured astrological positions of worlds we do not know, our telluric surfaces riddled with invading rocks small enough to never be noticed and large enough to make the headlines. In a sense, outer space is here, deep undercover, on the inside of things. And we are already where no man has gone before.
The space-faring imaginary also thrives on a single timeline—the same timeline that accommodates constructed memories of an innocent past and apprehension about an apocalyptic future, with mankind, well defined and distinct, moving along that line. We want to go to other worlds to survive, to thrive. We want to remain intact, to pick ourselves up and move from “here” to “there.” But that is not possible. To arrive at a new destination is to change the destination as well as ourselves. Arrival always changes the parameters, creating new ontologies of the journey that supposedly preceded it. The traveler doesn’t reach home eventually; home is not a place we inhabit, a fishbowl that can be emptied of its contents and refilled. To suppose so is to see new homes as voidal and empty, until we arrive. Home intra-acts with us. Stakes its claims on our skins, on our lungs, taxing our bodies, altering our conventions, challenging our breathing. Home is homey because of particular sympoietic practices that are not entirely within our control.3
In light of this touching of the outer and the inner, this dissolution of distance, this recognition of indeterminacy, this embrace of home and exile, perhaps the vital questions we might ask today do not simply concern just the math of how we get from here to there, but questions about the thick politics of what we are co-becoming. Questions about boundaries, and differences, and how we are already imprinted with the lives of many others. Calculations of an astonishingly different pedigree. Where love is not a bridge to be traversed in neat space modules, but a hyphen—projects of meeting and touching the other again and again, and thus meeting ourselves for the first time. In short, the sacred is here. The far is nearby. Space stations are everywhere around us, within us.
In the precarious other like Kutti, we meet a life at the middling edges of our city, and encounter questions about our space-making and sky-penetrating projects of home-building—along with our fears for property and what will be enough in an overpopulated world. In dust, and in the bated breaths of those made invisible by the colonial imperatives of sky-bound economies; and in Hope, whose dark and wild places are ruled out by petri dish cultures of sanity, we may be finding that new homes are produced by new ways of coming in touch. New geometries of touch.
I am a with-ness to these underground excursions to places where no one has gone before. To the shimmering, star-studded, milky boundaries of the other. You might not find any of these projects in the news, but they are there all right. With little or no funding, in humble and modest earth practices of partial recuperation, a subculture of adventurers is meeting the universe halfway, building space stations to travel to the spaces between. They are not “good” or “awakened” people; they are not holy or special. And I do not want to write about “them” for fear I might help create a separate class of people. But it is important to note that a particular kind of work is being done—one which might be understood as a response to the call of compost. The call to take seriously the generative implications of living with a world, instead of on it or in it.
Once, your mum and I took you to visit the Luray Caverns in Virginia in the United States—a rolling, geologic orchestra of drip-dropping water, fluid limestone
, perverse shapes, eroding layers, haunting pillars, frozen draperies, patient deposits, and magical sonorous chambers. I recall thinking to myself when we arrived inside: this is what it means to be inside a stone’s story. Lali said to me: “This is how nature ridicules art.” It was a very poignant thing to say, especially since we—a day earlier—had begun touching upon the ways life transcends story, and the way our overarching themes and plots divest the material world of its “telling-ness.”
The guides, shouting instructions at a teeming crowd of selfie-taking families, heedless youngsters, and screaming toddlers, kept reminding us that the caverns were discovered in 1878 by five local men, including Andrew J. Campbell (a local tinsmith) and his thirteen-year-old nephew Quint. They told us about the Washington Column, the wishing well (which was now filled prominently with dollar bills, rupees, and coins from indeterminable countries) that had raised over a million dollars for charities in Virginia, and the famous Stalacpipe Organ. The floors of the cavern had been tamed with tiles, and some of the naturally occurring pillars were fitted with soft yellow lights encased in concrete cups, making it easier for families to embark on the thirty-minute walk through the cavern—gaping at its ghostly stalactites and stalagmites, aahing and hah-ing and taking pictures with the formations.
It was a bit too touristy and modern for me. Somewhere within, I felt something crucial was missing. It was like walking through a museum where something alive had been put up for display; it was like walking into a community without seeking approval. A certain kind of awe was missing, a wordlessness that was hushed by stories of discovery. And time. And achievements. And charity. The creeping figures and lithic curtains and petrifying deposits were vibrant in ways that mocked ideas of origins and shape and form. When the ethereal sounds sifted through the formations, enveloping the “great cathedral” in music that could not be heard by ears alone, I felt the stone—this one stone that was the cavern—had its own yearnings that could not be honored by multiplying its age by millions of years, or giving one of its “parts” the name of a former president. I came to the edge of tongues. I gasped.
I feel, however, I learned a thing or two from the cavern, whose name cannot possibly be Luray. Each of the individual stalactites that were being generated, piercing toward the cave floor like a billion needles, might have looked “individual” to me—but they were anything but. In a sense, each formation, each proud pillar (and one particular formation that looked like a giant candle melting into a puddle of wax and adoration—I called it the “goddess of the cave”) was what the “cavern” was doing. A telluric involution.
I took this recognition as a gift, and placed my head under a falling drop of water to be “baptized” and blessed (something that everyone in our company later did) by the cavern, to be touched by a parliament of things. I appreciated how our claims to authorship, to ownership, to control, to moral coherence, to structure and instrumentality often get in the way of wilder wordlessness, a lithic silence more fluent than prose. The guides and their managers tried to make sense of a dead cavern by putting it in boxes that were understandable to them, hoping to electrify it with lightning bolts of discovery stories—but the stones were alive long before this. They didn’t “need” those labels as such—they were already enfolded with meaning and yearning and wonder and shadow.
I read the “writings” of the cavern and felt in a resounding way how meeting trouble, encountering irony, and noticing intra-ruptions are “invitations” to languages deeper than jots and tittles. Maybe when we gasp, and do not know what to do or say or write, it’s “because” we are silently aware that not all sentences are made of words. Maybe becoming imperceptible is learning to be still—for by being still, we might notice the grandeur that stillness and words are stitched into. Maybe my in/sincere attempts at self-effacing scrutiny, and my occasional theo-clinical quest for moral supremacy and professional exactitude, are what the “cavern is doing,” a queering of beingness too precious to last, too transient to not be forever. Maybe being in exile is part of what it means to come home, and being at home is a preparation for exile.
This dance of exile and home, outer and inner, future and past—this resituating of human bodies in a web of eco-political matterings we do not control gives birth to different notions of hope. When we speak of hope, the picture that comes to mind is that of a sparkling future—one with endless possibilities. Hope, however, is not all light and bliss. There are aspects to hope that are haunted, dark, and shadowy. In a sense, to entertain hope is not merely to give in to a linear unfolding of events; it is to allow oneself to be touched. It is to recognize that there are other possibilities—wild possibilities—and that these possibilities will not leave us intact. To meet hope open-faced is to surrender to a logic that is beyond our ken. It is to come to an arcana of many agencies. We never begin at the beginning. We always begin at a place already massaged by footfalls aplenty, by sighs embedded in loamy layers of earth, by nightly negotiations and strange rituals and spilled blood and muffled sounds and startling textures and painful interpellations and the budding promise of continuity. We begin at the edges in the middle. Hope is an affair of material middles.
Radical possibilities for transformation dwell in the unsure path … in the obstructed path—not the one cleared solely by human hands, bound to repeat the same oppressive timeline heading for the same apocalyptic Future, but the one where we acknowledge that we are not alone and never were, and attempt to meet the thing that stands in the way as an agent of change, not a mere dead object to be destroyed. I reckon that if we imagined that the between-space is just as charged with possibility as outer space, we might be more inclined to turn our attention to the fecund depths of our co-becoming with earthbound critters. What could turning our attention look like?
On a recent adventure to Brazil, I met with an exploratory group of people from around the world who were, just like me, asking questions about what it means to live with the planet and how taking seriously the idea of co-becoming allows for other practices of economy. I remember eating with others I hadn’t met. Eating slowly in community, sometimes raising my head to meet the eyes of another fellow explorer, and washing our dishes together. Then holding hands in a circle as we responded to playful chants issued by a local. I remember distinctly thinking there were other ways to be human my body had not yet known as I moved in sync with many others.
In Devon, where I had gone to teach a short course with your Manish-uncle—who co-founded an alternative university called Swaraj University in Rajasthan, where there are no fixed curricula, grades, or certificates, and where you’re likely to find khojis (or seekers who co-design their own learning journeys) sitting in circles dealing with grief, learning in intergenerational groups how to make a short film that highlights ecological issues, or embarking on a “bicycle yatra” trust adventure across the country with no money, phones, or food—we opened the “Shop of the Open Heart” on the last day of the course.
This “Shop of the Open Heart” … sounds elaborate, doesn’t it? Then you’ll be surprised to know it involved a single table, a decorating table cloth, and items we had invited our cohorts to bring to the “shop”—items that meant something to them, not things they wanted to give away. We had told them that if they felt a tug of pain as their hands slid over an option, then it was probably a good selection for the shop. We eventually arranged items we had gathered: books, boots, trinkets, pictures, and even the dried-out remains of a shark’s egg capsule (which had an uncanny resemblance to the first hush I ever touched). We then invited each cohort to walk round the table, simply surveying the items, without taking any away—listening to those that called out to them. Instead of positioning themselves as owners by identifying who had dropped what, we allowed the objects to “be themselves”—their own stories written by their own bodies. After a short space of time, we invited the cohorts back to the table. Each of them could now pick items—and afterward, the previous custodians of the items cou
ld tell a story about how the items came to be with them. This simple apparatus of gift-giving and sharing might seem innocent enough, but were you to witness it as I have done several times, you might know its true power: not only have people broken down in tears in sharing intimate stories or in receiving an item (which one could mindlessly purchase off a shelf in many instances), they have gone on to share those items received, passing it on to others as this practice of nonownership opened up other geometries of touch.
What feelings we have not felt, what concepts we have not conceived, what possibilities we do not account for are tied to radical new places where we practice being middling agents of a home that is wilder than our fences.
Apart from learning to grow our own food, your mum and I have also begun practicing our “Rainbow Wednesdays” with the Shop of the Open Heart. We are taking seriously the redescription of the world as an entangled and entangling place. A year ago, we co-initiated The Emergence Network, a curator collective and a commonwealth of earth-wide curated projects designed to examine the ways particular activisms and their frameworks of thinking reiterate the status quo, and to explore/experiment with the between-spaces of justice-to-come. I think of it as a way of remaking indigeneity after the “Fall.” And in a few weeks, your mum will be embarking on new unschooling adventures with the “Broken Compass,” which—like Swaraj University—is frontier work, at the borderlands of a system that brands kids as failures, and pretends to be “life itself.” None of these are “solutions” or meant to be universalized. They are our own efforts at re/turning to the dynamics of the local (as Helena Norberg-Hodge has often urged in her explorations of the eliding dynamics of the global corporate industry), of learning to see with new eyes, of working with our immediate contexts to reconfigure and decentralize our place in the world—which is why I say to you, my dear, wherever you are, on Earth or off it, where you are at the moment is the most sacred place you can be in. Life is not a ladder, whose topmost rung is more valuable than the ones before it; life is not a race to see who crosses the finish line first; life is not a circle with a discernible center or a proscribed circumference. The language of deficit drops you on a linear path, where you are never enough, where what you do doesn’t count in the larger scheme of things, where you feel guilt for not doing enough to save the planet, or where you do not always rise to your cherished shibboleths and values. Your job in this framework is to rack up achievements, faster than others, sooner than most. But what if life is a fractal with interlocking images, with parts reflecting the whole? What if life is a web, where past and present and future melt into a rapturous immediacy, glimpses of which we perceive in heightened moments? What if you don’t have to beat yourself into shape? What if there is no outside force to which you must measure yourself? What if your questions, your imbroglios, and tooth-chips are just as sacred as “having it all together”? What if you are in the most interesting place you can be in now? This home that is a dance with exile?
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 35