Maybe, then, there is no return to beginnings. No prelapsarian rendezvous. We must learn to live in the Fall, right here in the middle of things. Not “after” it, as if the Fall were done with, or “before” it, in the exhausting longing for Eden restored. If the Fall infected what was, what might have been, and what might yet be, then a gospel of the Fall is the thing to preach, not so? The absolute splinters into shards of the contingent—and here, this very middling ground—is the gold-powdered lacquer that embraces the fragments in a vast network of many becomings.
This middle—what with all its tensions and exclusions—is beautiful, dear. Do you already see that too? In the transgressions of the middle against its once noble walls, like an opening of Pandora’s box, we are left with a reimagination of “the” afterlife, and thus a reconsideration of the home-as-fixed-destination thesis. The afterlife is not devoid of life or an immaterial place of postbecoming that is “unaffected by empirical accidents of the physical realm [and] immune to the fluxes of becoming and destruction.”9. Neither is it a single place with boundaried walls, opulent pillars and beams. Like dust—as it is dust or a re/turning to dust—the afterlife is not invulnerable to the evanescence of the middle. It is not the apotheosis of the ordinary, and it is not a transfiguration into disembodiment. The afterlife is in the middle, substantiated by partial recuperations, and never not broken (such might become clear as we both sigh through these letters).
In a sense, we are already living with (and because of) the afterlife. As the world (itself partially made real by our performances) grates upon us, we shed our cutaneous cells and hair and pieces of ourselves, contributing these into a commonwealth of dust that includes other beings and their shedding. Edges bleed in traces of becoming, melding dying and living, beginning and ending, into an always pregnant middle. A thick middle. None can escape this “universal proliferation of dust”—this rebuke of Shiva the destroyer—whose medium is dust and whose art, Michael Marder reminds us, is to “pulverize composite beings, sparing neither you, nor me, nor anything around us.”10 He writes more:
Dust chronicles both the gradual break up of beings and how they get a second lease on life, the opportunity to lead a posthumous existence in a random combination of their remains. If there were a god of dust, the “god beyond God” Borges invokes, then it would most likely be Hindu Siva-the-Destroyer. Lest we be misled by his terrible attributes, Siva is not an external annihilating force; he is the temporal gist of finite beings, whose gradual or rapid manner of passing away is, at bottom, what they are. His actions uphold the living order, which needs change, dying away, and rejuvenation. And, last but not least, he destroys death or puts an end to the misconception that death is the end of existence, just as dust teaches us about the afterlife of its sources in the contingent communities they establish.
We are a constant falling-apart, a becoming-dust—and this applies not merely to surfaces, as if the boundary between surface and content, outside and inside, were that clear. We fade away in eddies of dust, and heaven itself—with all its gold and jasper and angels—will not refute the arguments of dust’s redemptive-destructive work. The rapture is taking place right this moment, as it always has—in the ongoing dis/appearing of the never-whole, in the purging of Eve’s children: God, world, and all. In seeking home, we are coming down to earth, and we will not arrive intact.
You are probably asking about my dad: what becomes of him, if he is not to be located in an immaculate place—at secure finish lines, where the saints go marching in? I figured, not without some difficulty, that it appeared he had changed address. He didn’t disappear into an existential black hole. No. I couldn’t trust that. That’s not the sense I got as each golden brick of heaven crumbled into dust, expelling its last occupants—and as I risked my first unsure steps into a cluttered world infused with the sacred. He was present in a way that queered presence itself, and—I realized—even closer than before: no longer awaiting his son at the end of time, arriving at my deathbed to whisk me into roiling prairies. He was right here in the middle, where I was—thus even closer. Maybe he was like that rusty and eminent ship I used to stop and stare at when we went to the Bar Beach in Lagos: neither tethered to safe havens nor cast away in roving emptiness. I knew this with every singeing memory of our time together. The effects of his haunting—experienced as a gnawing compulsion to make sense of the world—were no less loud than when heaven was supposedly the place I had to return to in order to find him. Perhaps his dust comingling with sky and soil flirted with the air around my ears, whispering my name. A mild haunting trace away.
Shouldn’t we then give dust her due? Pay more attention to it?
Look around you, love. Slowly. Do you notice this sunset? It’s the only one you’ll ever see. Tomorrow, you’ll see another one when you come to this edge—but then it will be another sunset, incalculably different from the ones you’ve already seen. Such is the miracle and wonder of the world. Everything moves, nothing stays or congeals long enough to ever be fixed into being. Everything is caught in the trance of becoming.
Do you feel the gravity of things? The way the ground feels beneath you? The tension in your chest as you pull in oxygen and dust, thereby disturbing the boundaries between the inside and the outside? Life and death? Feel the gentle drumming of your heart within, its music rippling through your entire body so that you—in almost imperceptible moves—are never not dancing. Never not flowing. You are moving, even though you sit still, here at the precipice.
Do not close your eyes, if you can manage it. I’d rather you meet the inchoate festival of colors and contours, the seemingly random stance of objects around you—their gritty materiality a scolding of our very old exile. Take in the muck and grime and beige dust. Priests of the middle. They have escaped our reckoning because of beginnings and longed-for endings. Comprising roving communities of remnants of human and animal hair, grains, pollen, pulverized stars, fibers, minerals, pollen, and dust mites—and lacking an essential identity or core integrity—dust unsettles foundations and neat borders, and yet gives birth to the world. The trickster surrendering to her own trick.
In Yoruba folklore, the higher God lowers a chain to the nether region, where Oduduwa, ancestor of all people, descends into what would later become the city of Yoruba people, Ilé-Ifè. The first settlement for earth’s citizens. Oduduwa comes down the chain hanging on the corner of the sky with a pouch around his neck, containing a rooster, some earth, and a palm kernel. He meets the tipsy waters, swaying this way and that. There is no place to rest his feet as he hangs by the chain from heaven. So he throws the earth into the water, and deploys the rooster, who scratches, flails and scatters the dust far and wide with its wings, making continents and huge land masses wherever the dust settles. Oduduwa plants the palm kernel, and makes his home on earth. But the dust never settles. It may be said that that ancient rooster, restless and eager, still disturbs the dust—and it is disturbed dust, always flowing, that makes us and makes the world over and over again.
We cannot account for ourselves, and the world by which our breathing is sustained, without paying homage to dust, to this graceful contingency that imbues all and resists wholeness and lastingness. This mysterious wafture without denouement. Perhaps a libation—the practice of ceremoniously pouring drink to the ground—is not so much about quenching the thirst of bloodthirsty gods or appeasing haunting ancestors, as it is about unsettling dust, summoning Shiva to intervene, if you will, and remembering that we all—hunter and hunted, sacred and mundane, master and slave, homeless and homed—are enchanted by our co–becoming-threadbare. In that ritual, we honor our fading, and yet pray for sustenance and well-being. Dust appeasing dust in preposterous palimpsests of becoming.
Dust gives us place, while reminding us that it isn’t ours to own forever. We cannot toss our proprietary claims at an ideal, at thought, at place, or at bodies, since the generativity of dust resists permanence and undercuts lasting presence. In my revised readin
g of the biblical story of creation, which hopefully will not long abide the chastising gaze of time, God curses man—but only apparently. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return.” It is at once an annulment of the project of eternity and wholeness—or a tongue-in-cheek invitation to us to learn alongside the many others how to live in the midst of the fade—as it is God’s own declaration of freedom from his shiny lamp, where he had not known the merest joys of finitude. It is his convocation keynote address, spoken to himself and to us as we collectively graduate from the eternal to the finite. Once immortal, we all will now have to learn limits. We will have to make do with hints of ideals, the dust trail of essences we will never catch up with. But this is a difficult lesson to learn, because it comes with the message that we are not unilaterally in control of our circumstances. We are not sovereign. “Dust … gives lie to the human presumption of power and control.”11
The real implication of all this talk about dust is that in consideration of the real, or of home, we can no longer march “straight to the things themselves, because that path would only bring us to the cul-de-sac of ideal and ideally dustless entities.”12 The world can only be spoken of incoherently, not because we don’t have all the details but because the details themselves show up only in traces, in residues, in hints of what might yet be or what might yet have been. Burrowing deeper will not bring us closer to the essence of things, or home at last; it will only generate a lot more dust.
Is it any wonder that those of us in the mechanical heart of modernity cannot tolerate dust’s presence? Does this tell us a bit why our cities—especially cities in the rapidly industrializing world—aspire to be dustless, shorn of any insurgent memories of our disappearing? Are Babel towers and phallic structures how we propose to escape the fact that we are dying (and being reborn in ongoing cycles of regeneration), along with everything else—and that no matter our ideological preferences, we all sympathize with this becoming-dust of things? Is there something here that coincides with our obsession with cleanliness?
These are the questions I learned to ask one hot Wednesday afternoon in Chennai.
In the room where, for most of the day, I am hunched behind a computer, in the unfortunate act of keeping myself relevant, I can still hear your cheerful voice in the hall, singing songs with no determinable lyrics. Lali is in the bathroom. I am busy, as I always seem to be, but I leave my chair and the seductive wink of the screen to see what you are up to. Through the crack of the room door now ajar, I watch you—as a sceptic taking a walk in the woods would watch a ring of elves dancing around a bonfire. As a prisoner might watch the moon gleaming through his bars. You are happily preparing a tea party for your sisters—“Mary,” “Sister,” “Fairygirl,” “Sophia,” “Ms. Miracle,” “Bumblebee,” “Fluffy,” and the naked plastic doll with blue threads for hair and one leg. Your little feet move nimbly and tiptoe past your guests. That morning your mother had twisted your curly hair into dreadlocks so that as you danced, swaying your hands and weaving your way through the audience of dolls before you, you looked like a shaman catering to her white visitors. Eventually, you bring out your small kettle and pour out pretend-tea into many tiny white plastic cups. And then you are silent for a while, crouched next to a queer assembly of plastic and cotton “sisters,” your attention stolen by Max and Ruby’s opening theme song on television.
A familiar guilt washes over me.
You had come to me many times prior to that moment, inviting me to play with you. I didn’t have the time or the patience. I had stuff to do. With a barely veiled frown, I succumbed to your demands on my time, and allowed you to pull me away from my chair, only to be stopped in my tracks when we got to the living room. The whole place was a filthy mess of spilled rice, littered alphabet bricks, and blotches of Plasticine stains on the floor—not to mention your tea set pieces flung across the room. The clutter was overwhelming. I’m easily triggered by clutter—especially the kind that defies easy interventions like the slide of a tall broomstick or the temporary inconvenience of squeezing oneself under the chair to pull out a stranded toy. Muttering under my breath, doing my best not to scream, I had reached for the broom and tidied the place up—firmly insisting that you put away your toys. You did so, crying that way you cry—talking at the same time, registering your protest with groanings that will not be uttered.
Now, standing at the door, watching you sit so still, nothing littering in sight … something feels a bit off. Dare I say it? Unnatural. Out of place. Isn’t it funny that order could feel out of place? For me, at this point in time, the painful regret of my previous reaction to your wild play, coupled with the forced orderliness of the room, troubles me. Are my little devils getting in your way, preventing you from knowing the tactility and virtues of your felt surroundings? I suppose so. My obsessions with keeping our small apartment spick-and-span—even to the point of ridding the thin places between the floor tiles of its revenant communities of harmless specks of dust, and getting irritated when our appliances are enveloped by a thin film of dust—remind me of the old existential anxieties that prefigured my reach for a disembodied home. For the sky. Like Icarus of old, seeking to escape his material imprisonment in Crete, my unease with clutter is a psychic riddle that leaks into the sociopolitical, telling a story of dislocation and separation.
Dislocation is what “Euro-American modernity” produces in abundance. An ironic observation—since the stamp and force of modernity is an assertion of humanity’s place in the world. The irony lies in the fact that in emphasizing permanence—that is, in striving to push back against the corroding and destabilizing effects of dust, and in striving to rise above the finiteness of matter, modernity escalates our being out-of-place.13 Specifically, modernity is about matter … or unease with matter—“nature,” so-called—and the consequent desire to tame her, rein her in, and put her in the family way.
In a sense, modernity offers the prospects of returning to heaven. The myth of modernity proposes a home (“a secularized eternity”14 as Frédérique Apffel-Marglin would say) in a world that is progressively conquered by scientific and technological advances: the more we come to know about how the world works, the likelier our chances for successfully colonizing it. The many modern practices of world-making (home-making) compel us to see ourselves as alone and uniquely imbued with the powers of agency, cognition, and conation. We are a noble race in a desert, surrounded by a pagan orgy of forms and bodies we are pitted against in a game of survival. It is us against the world. Us against dust.
As our fences grew (pretending to enclose within them a circle of anthropocentric agency, and distancing the wilds beyond them, where dragons and beasts and mindless weeds sprout like an uncontrollable plague), the promise of arriving at a universal, totalizing, and complete knowledge of the world keeps a steady pace—disturbed now and then by the interrupting sounds of the wilds. With science and its supposed abilities to mirror unvarnished truth, the war is supposedly being won. We are getting “better.” War and brute superstitions are being stamped out; we are gaining control over aspects of the world we would have thought beyond our control a few decades ago (there’s talk of men visiting Mars soon, propelled by engines that can achieve unfathomable speeds). Soon, we say, monoculture would replace nature, or eventually rise so far above it as to be called its master.
Of course, this imperialistic thesis of modernity made colonialism possible. And science, purportedly apolitical and neutral, was in cahoots with the economic and cultural agendas that led to the exploitation of black, brown, and even white bodies. On account of our “primitive ways” (or lack of proximity to the ultimate truths modernity was intent on categorizing), we—your father, my mother and father, their mothers and fathers, and those before them—were given a dishonorable place in nature. The Negro was three-fifths of a proper person, a white man. The Negro woman was probably not even accounted for—or was many decimal places behind in the scheme of things that her value did not register in the equ
ation. The home that modernity built was built on the bent backs of the inappropriate.
And yet, even with these painful histories, there is nothing inherently nefarious about modernity. Indeed, if we could give a fuller account of modernity (and no one can), and how it “came” to be, we might need to reawaken old anxieties produced by desires to preserve the ephemeral, to supplant the troubling contingency of things.15 We might have to listen to the old pre-agrarian European wanderer whose battle against the elements, whose quest to save his family of wanderers in the face of swift and punishing climactic changes, taught him to see himself as apart from the weather and instructed him in the art of cultivation—anything to enhance predictability.
In the quest to stand resolute against the sandstorm, to affirm our place in a bold stance of anthropocentricity, and ensure a home for posterity, we only accelerated and enhanced the felt disconnect between us and the world around us.
This concept of modernity will show up very often through these letters—not merely because your mother and I are embedded with others in this epoch, but because “it” is also a popular gathering place where stories about what we once had, homes we once built, futures we once thought given, cultures we once embraced, powers we once sustained, and liberties we once enjoyed are told and retold with nostalgic breaths.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 6
