obliquity

When the plane descends and there’s snow on the ground, the earth could be a populated moon.

Yesterday when I was looking at the waning moon out my window at home I asked, “why do you turn back?”

Of course that’s just me asking myself a question I’m projecting onto the moon. I know that everything is round and the sun has found another angle from which to brighten the moon. But from here it looks like the moons finds its place in the sun and then turns and goes back into the cold again. From here it looks like the moon found away to fully shine and then went back into hiding one truth at a time.

There is a Macushi story about why women don’t trust the moon. It’s a survivor story. An incest story. Somewhat triumphant but you don’t have to go here with me. It’s okay if you turn back now.

In the story a young girl finds a way to show everyone who is sneaking into her bed and harming her in the night. She keeps her hands in the soot and smears the violators face and in the morning everyone sees that it is her own brother that has been nightmaring her nights, and they send him out into space to become the moon, we can still see the smudges on his face.

Now I do trust the moon. And I can’t 100% trust the source of this story which survives in the records of a colonizing anthropologist. But I would love to know more about this story from a more reliable source, especially if any Macushi relatives or other Carib language speakers have heard this story in circle from elders. (And please support wonderful listeners like the makers of Pantani Blog who have recorded cosmic Macushi wisdom from Auntie Paulette in Macushi language.) I would love to know if this story is authentic because, can you imagine growing up in a community where child sexual abuse within families is not the hushed pervasive terror it is in our current dominant society? Can you imagine what it would be like to grow up in a community where evidence of survivor strategies and accountable community response was a conversation as big as the moon?

We have so much to learn about cycles. Cold is a cycle geologists are still trying to understand. Right now they are digging ice cores out of glaciers and the bottom of the ocean to try to determine how long ice ages last, or more pressingly, when the current interglacial period will end. And of course in the meantime industrial global warming is causing climate crisis and messing up everyone’s math.

Multiple factors impact the relative freeze of the planet: the movement of tectonic plates and the shifting of continents can impact how water flows and freezes and melts. But mostly the larger cycles of earth herself are what determine how cold, how long on the geological scale. Changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, (they call that eccentricity) how the earth wobbles on its axis (they call that precession) and shifts in the tilt of the earth on her axis. They call that obliquity. Recent research out of Melbourne, Australia suggests that obliquity has the most significant impact on ice age cycles.

Obliquity. Deviance from the horizontal or vertical, or the angle created by such a deviation.

I’m not an expert in geology or geometry so I know the word “obliquity” because of foundational Black feminist literary scholar Hortense Spillers and her essay “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers.” Spillers references Melville’s description of a lamp in Moby Dick to talk about deviance and straightness and the total disaster of patriarchy, specifically in literary representations of incestuous violence in literary work by Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison and others. The essay shows that patriarchy itself is sexual violence, (it just took Black writers to make it plain). And suggests that as Black americans aka survivors of white patriarchy taken to its enslaving extreme (but also inevitable) endpoint, we cannot reproduce patriarchy without destroying ourselves and each other. We have to create another relation. And another way of understanding relation itself.

This is why I will never stop reading Hortense Spillers (or recommending that YOU read her work!) because she takes us all the way there from A DEPICTION OF A LAMP that because of its tilted angle on board a ship sheds light on the “false, lying levels” of a room that was supposedly “infallibly straight.”

Obliquity. Our cosmic never straightness. How can we study the consequences of our angles, our deviation always from horizontal or vertical. Our tilting towards each other. Our way. My favorite abdominal muscles as a person tilted by scoliosis. My every movement an oblique meditation on tilt. A stretch. I want another relation.

I know. Sometimes it feels like I am giving you the cold shoulder, turning my (crooked) back on you, when I just need to reflect, take myself out of this projection for a moment and reckon with the impact of what I’ve done, what my mistakes have to teach me. Maybe this time I’ll let go of even more of the lie of my uprightness, but I don’t know yet what will melt and what will freeze. That’s the thing about the newness of a new relation, it’s like you or like earth, or like me, mostly unknown. But with our hands in the soot and across each others faces. With the lamp of our understanding swinging wildly in this crooked crooked room, what can you know?

That I’ll be back sometime, in some form. Still dirty. Still bright. That I’ll be shook and tilted, but I’ll be around. That I’ll be dreaming a new relation because I love you, even in the cold. Or when I barely recognize you in your sacred deviation. This is our axis aligned with change, this is our distance from the sun in a universe where uprightness never existed. This it the pull, the tilt, the spin, and I’ll be back.

P.S. Sky gazing writers join me daily in Stardust and Salt, a writing immersion.