In the circle, we speak into a bucket and cough out our fears, and then a bundle of plants—nothing I recognize—is lit. I’ve been told smudging is more than just the touching of flame to dried plants and getting close to the smoke; it’s a piece of a cosmology, not teachable through a YouTube video. I don’t know where these plants lived. I don’t know who harvested them or whether those people gave anything to the land in return. I don’t know what I can do to reciprocate the healing the plants are offering tonight. All I can do is promise these plants that if I get well, I will try to figure it out.
I speak every fear into the bucket: That I am not safe. That I am too wounded to be anything but a burden. That the best of me has been taken, the rest of me left to grope for a calm that might never be anything but potential space for danger. That the spirits are indifferent to me or don’t exist at all. I speak until I’m through, then cough from the base of my body. I’m not healed, but I feel better.
It’s dark when I walk to my car. A white man approaches me, silent and high. When I pass him, he turns and follows. My ninth-grade writing teacher taught me that when I was afraid, I could make my aura grow so everyone would stay away. A psychic once told me my aura was dark. Like a mood ring on a corpse. I have nothing now but my big aura, my fistful of keys, and my throat that still knows how to scream because no man has succeeded in closing it. If I am going to die, I want to fight. I’ve been fighting the colonizers’ whispers that I’m not wanted here, not worthy of protection, nothing but a body to be pummeled and played with and threatened into submission. I have not died yet. My whole body is a fire, lit back when the world was complete, never extinguished by anybody.
I was born just before the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, or maybe a couple of decades after it, or maybe it hasn’t even dawned, and anyway, I didn’t know what that meant until I looked it up on Wikipedia. We crystal witches of the internet think what we’re about is not New Age, but it surrounds us like water surrounds a fish. I’m learning from Wikipedia that it’s exactly what we’re about, only we get our horoscopes as tweets and find our psychics on Yelp. We want the divine. We want to be healed and we want to fix. Most of all, we seek what we can’t locate in the vast universe of the internet: reassurance that it will be okay.
New Age eats the ancient, trying to digest old systems. It’s a collage of angels, magic numbers, incantations, and stolen beliefs. A collage is made not just of what’s there, but also of the absence of the material from which the pieces are cut. I got good at working gaps in essays, but not in life. Instead of fearing silence and disrupting stillness, I want to be ready to set down my cards, close the JPEG of my natal chart, and ask the quiet to tell me what this life should be.
I’m inclined to now list the things I know about the occult. This seems like the place to talk about witch picture books that introduced me to written words, episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch that wormed into my brain as backdrop to my homework, and haunted houses across the ghost-obsessed pocket of rural New Jersey where I spent my first eighteen years. I’ve been reading about witchcraft and spiritualism and Carl Jung and all kinds of mysteries, and I feel I should introduce a literature review here to show that I know the history of the dark arts, but I actually don’t. The purpose would only be to convince you I’m not stupid.
I couldn’t convince any of my boyfriends, so I doubt I could convince someone looking at me through the thick veil of this page. Anyway, I don’t care about Crowley or Salem, only about my own conjuring. I haven’t memorized the entries in the catalog of demons. I don’t even know the name of the one inside me.
Before I was born, I chose this body. I read that on the internet. My soul needed flesh and slipped into this case knowing my skin would feel like a body bag and my organs would refuse to handle what I fed them. I chose it knowing I would want to starve it and sun-singe it. I chose a pretty body, an elastic body that would swell and shrink, a little-boned body I would push to every edge because I knew I could get so close to snapping it. This would mean I chose the body knowing it would be raped. Did I? Does that mean I let it happen? I don’t like that. The internet says that before I was born, I made soul contracts with everyone who would bring me change. It sounds like another way to say I was asking for it. I don’t know what could’ve made my soul ask for violation.
Before I was incarnated, I chose my mother and the moment I would tear out of her, and so I chose my natal chart, a cosmic map. I chose every planet’s position in the heavens. One of the first things I learned about astrology was that my natal sun is in the eighth-house; my therapist had generated my natal chart, and she told me this house is about sex, death, and transformation. Mysteries, shared power, the depths, psychic knowing. The eighth-house sun breaks us and makes us mend. Maybe this is why I’ve sought, over and over, to dissolve myself into boys and men. This underworld sun lit me with the lumens that would transfix them, pull them toward my pretty face, and break us both.
I was a child with outsize wants for boys who weren’t ready to be wanted. I was a little girl afraid of the dark, depressed by the light. I wanted Halloween all the time. I wanted the pit of death buried inside life: when a woman on TV stripped off her clothes and dropped the straps of her bra, I thought, Okay, here it is, we’re gonna see her bones. When my teen body began to rupture physically, starting with a shoulder tear, I asked for the medical images of my insides. I was a teenager afflicted by night terrors: visible blue shapes by my bed, the feeling of being watched even under the covers. In my parents’ midcentury ranch house, I ran from ghosts I felt but never saw. Like most of my boyfriends have said, I’m stupid and I’ll believe anything, including that dead people are out to get me, or that my thoughts are so loud they’ll betray my silence if someone listens hard enough.
At first the thoughts I tried to guard were the ones that came to me in the back of Dad’s extended-cab pickup, riding through the forest into town: I’m ugly I’m awkward I’ll never be wanted I’m wrong I’m just not right I’m sad I could die in these woods and I’m with the only three people who would notice I’m gone. In the Age of Aquarius, it is said to be normal for us to hate ourselves and want out; I’ve read that this is why we need to raise the whole world’s vibrations with our meditation and orgasms. Maybe things would’ve been different if I’d believed I could effect any change in the world that drove boys to throw basketballs at my head and pin me between the high school theater stage wall and the thick velvet curtain, feeling for my soft parts and gaps. Maybe I wouldn’t have ended up under a college boy who showed me that my no was not enough, whose wall-hammering, shoulder-pressing hands had more power than my pulpy fear.
Nobody ever told me about intuition. They told me to count my drinks and plan my routes home but never that the sensation of gut muscles constricting tight as snakes around rodents was really the way my body screams when it knows something that hasn’t happened yet. I hid the rape pain in my hips, denying it for a year, until I took up fencing and the demands on my joints forced the pain to erupt into my flesh. I cried every day. I hid in the woods. I roamed campus at night like a ghost in a graveyard. I found a doctor who called it depression and then bipolar disorder but never fear of what happened and what might happen, never post-traumatic stress disorder, never the brain’s storage of the worst violence its flesh knows, never anything but unmendable defects.
I was told I’d be bipolar until death. Back made of bottles, pills for ribs. My medications would be with me forever: lithium to pull the mood poles together, antipsychotics for the brain screams, anticonvulsants to dull the effects of the antipsychotics, antidepressants to make me want to live. My body was slowly replaced by a new one: resurfaced, welt-speckled face; silvering hair; waterlogged cells bloating to pad bones. The kidneys were overtaxed, then the liver, too.
Because I had to drink. I smoked weed and swallowed Vicodin and Ativan. If I wasn’t drunk or high, I would pay too much attention to my smart body’s warnings. I once went to the ER bleeding
from the inside.
I have no choice but to live among men. I used toxins to try to kill the part of me that could tell me the truth about this world: that I am going to want to open myself to all of it, and that this is probably how I am going to die.
I may have learned from The Wizard of Oz that white magic is supposedly good and black magic wicked. When I googled for spells to get the things I wanted, I turned up warnings that playing with black magic was a bad idea. I figured I was safe: I never cut anybody to get their blood, dug up cadavers, or hexed my enemies.
The internet cannot agree on definitions for black and white magic, but there is some consensus around the notion that white magic is used for good, for healing, and for selfless purposes; it is a high-vibration activity, the white witches say, and it is natural. Plants and candles and things. Black magic, they say, is selfish, malicious, and chaotic; it’s for getting the bad things your heart wants; it is disruption. Blood, potions, sorcery. Of course, this is consumptive anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. Some white witches say spiritual practices with African and African diasporic origins are low vibrational, practiced by unhappy people. Others buy and sell candles depicting orishas they don’t even know.
White occultists’ fascination with caricatures of Indigeneity turns up in so many corners of New Age, metaphysical, and occult practice. It always has. In the late 1800s, white people asked long-haired Indian spirit maidens to visit séance tables and tell them how to live. In the 1940s, white people visiting a Manitoba residential school offered candy to starving Indigenous children to secure their participation in a study about whether they could, using Indian senses, read researchers’ minds.
I don’t know what a vibration is. I know that for thousands of years, my people have had an agreement with the salmon that they will allow us to eat them, and every year, in honor of this relationship, we take a fish from the river, kill it, cook it the way we always have, and eat the flesh. This is not magic, black or white: it’s tending and care.
I do use magic to get what my selfish heart wants: sometimes money, mostly love. If white magic brings light and black magic brings pain, I can see where my incantations fall. Love is exquisitely painful. I want it more than anything, and I will tear open the world to get it.
If there is nothing greater than sad flesh and what it touches, I need a magician to build an illusion to distract me from anguish. I was born to be sawed in half. Pulled apart in front of a crowd. Put back together. Plunged into a water tank, forced to free myself from a knotted rope. Disappeared into the divot in my mattress for days, reemerging in sunlight. Summoned from the other world. Before I was born, I chose to walk along the river that will take me to the underworld in this perishable body.
The underworld sun tells me to lodge a man’s body inside me, to be cleaved, to seek a love to consume us. I set my intention to build a cult of two. If I mean it when I ask to be broken by desire, the universe will break me.
The internet says I will not release my karma across lifetimes until I learn my lesson. I am ready for this to be my last life. I do not want to come back. I’m bound by a pattern, like a ghost that haunts until—what? Or a tarot card that keeps appearing until I understand. A transit of one planet to another that opens a wound every time it circles around. Over and over, another boyfriend hurts me and leaves me.
There is something I’m missing. Without it, I can’t exit the time loops teaching me through pain. Seeking out another man never works; instead, I’ll open my wounds and dig out what men left. When I pull the ten swords from my back, when I die to myself, when I am transformed—I think I will feel the snap of this riddle’s answer, and I’m close.
THE FIREMAN: I will tell you three things. If I tell them to you and they come true, then will you believe me?
DALE COOPER: Who’s that?
THE FIREMAN: Think of me as a friend.
DALE COOPER: Where do you come from?
THE FIREMAN: The question is, Where have you gone? The three things are:
(Twin Peaks)
ACT I.
ACE OF CUPS.
A hand emerges from a cloud, holding a chalice. Waters cascade from the cup into the pool full of lily pads below. A dove descends to place a Communion host in the cup.
THE DEVIL.
The horned, winged beast-man perches with harpy feet on a block in a black room, torch in his hand, pentagram on his head. A man and woman stand small and naked below, loose chains around their necks attached to the beast’s block. They have horns and tails, his made of fire, hers a berry, and he offers her his hand.
DEATH.
A skeleton in black armor rides a white horse among fallen people. Across a river and above a cliff, the sun rises or sets between towers.
A NARRATIVE HAS A BEGINNING, middle, and end. It could start with the protagonist in crisis. With a hook, maybe. A violent tool. It could start in the middle of the action or in a moment heavy with impending calamity. It should not start in a morning bed, waking from a dream. People only like dreams of their own.
A narrative could start with calm, the kind that can’t last. The reader needs to wonder what’s going to happen. It should start with someone wanting something so bad they’ll do anything, or, at least, they’ll do something. Maybe they know what they want. Maybe they don’t, or have the wrong idea.
There must be trouble. A protagonist in danger. She should be thrust by high stakes into her journey and shoved off by an inciting incident. A satisfying narrative takes its shape from story structures readers recognize in their bones. The writing should teach the reader how to read it. I don’t know what that means, but it’s true.
Fiction writers make plot; in nonfiction, writers make insights. We shape the recollected by how the remembering changes us. The mind wants to understand what’s done but not settled.
The past is boring because it’s over. There is another way. You can make up plot points in nonfiction, and you can do it without lying. You just have to make your life a book. I can’t recommend it. I was trapped, stuck in a hole. I was bored by what I wanted; I decided to follow my curiosity about what I desired. I’m best as a protagonist. I can make anything meaningful. Look at all these motifs I made for you, this rejection pain I transformed into epic heartbreak. See what a powerful witch I am?
Plot is a cause-and-effect sequence of arranged events in a created work. Narrative, same. I checked a craft book to confirm: the index said, “Plot. See Conflict.” I thought I was anti-plot until I realized my thinking is mostly building sequence and imposing consequence. I make narratives to make sense of what happened to me.
But then I began adding plot points. I like the real: essays about life. Realer still, I figured: life about essay. It’s cliché to explain that the word essay comes from the Middle French verb essaier, meaning “to try, to attempt.” Now I’ve gone and said it. But what about this: what about essaying not just to try to think through a thing, but to force life to become a string of plot points. To make calamity from calm.
Years ago, I built a book from looping failure cycles. In every essay, I turned over the same things, asking new angles for answers. But understanding was not enough to make me whole. The book did not end with resolution. This one has to. I think what follows would be called stand-alone essays. Fine. Or you could think of this as a dossier, the evidence of my attempts. If I don’t exit these time loops, these men echoing men, their cause, my effect, I’ll meet my tragic end. I’m saying a man might kill me if I keep choosing wrong. The protagonist’s stakes are what might be lost or gained when she takes a risk. I could write a book about what happened and what it all meant, attaching stakes to understanding it all. Or I could raise them. I could gain a life I can’t imagine if I find my way out.
LITTLE LIES
All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever
wanted, and
still do.
—Alice Notley
If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.
—Louise Erdrich, “The Strange People”1
I TEXT MY BROTHER, NATE, tell me again what you remember from the D.A.R.E. video. He doesn’t respond right away because he has a full life. He has a girlfriend and a puppy. He exercises and he goes to the beach. I just have this phone with a big screen to help me see my ex-boyfriend Carl’s Instagram better. His X-Files stills, Perpetua-filtered amps, impossible lips, deep shelf of frown over eyes that used to meet mine sometimes. I google alone:
D.A.R.E. video phil collins fleetwood mac
No.
Teen 80s drunk driving D.A.R.E. video in the air tonight phil collins little lies fleetwood mac
No.
The only good thing about the internet’s omniscience is that if I crack the search-term code, I’ll finally find this video the nuns and cops made us watch.
Google turns up PSAs in which young people enjoy life, get into cars, and die. “If you don’t stop your friend from drinking and driving, you’re as good as dead,” a God-voice says while a kid in a varsity jacket starts a car. With the sound of thunder and a bolt of lightning, the passengers turn into skeletons. Cut to a black screen: a fleshy hand and a skeleton hand reach for each other under the words
White Magic Page 2
