I cheerfully refuse, for all the living

I didn’t read all of the books. But I kept a running list – three or four or five lists, running away from me; in the amazon cart, on my notes app, goodreads, twitter, my public library holds. I asked Jessica and Elaine, while we walked through Five Points, me panting up the hills, them not breaking a sweat. I asked Lauren, who had a dozen immediate ideas, none of which I accepted. I asked Jack, but he only reads books about music these days.¹

Sometimes I asked wrong. I asked twitter: “favorite cli-fi novels for a book club?” but all the answers were dystopian science fiction about surviving the natural disasters of climate change. I don’t want to scare people into conversion, though. What I really wanted wasn't climate fiction but eco-fiction; but eco-fiction that wasn’t preachy, wasn’t agenda-driven. I wanted a unicorn. I wanted a book in which the land or the animals were central, in which humans weren’t the only actors, in which place was a character and plants acted upon people. I wanted a book that would expand our imaginations in our real lives, the way A Wind in the Door permanently altered my sense of self when I was eleven, showing me that my cell was to me as I was to the galaxy, or the way that, later, Robin Sloan’s Sourdough made me see bacteria colonies in bread dough as protagonists equal to humans; equally dramatic, equally changeable, equally hungry and competitive, equally (perhaps) worth rooting for.² I wanted a book that would make us fall in love with the world as it is.

I read a half dozen books, started and abandoned a half dozen more. 

Parable of the Sower: Octavia Butler’s absolutely prescient classic, so prescient and formative that to read it for the first time now feels too late: its surprise has been neutered by reality, and its action is slog.

Once There Were Wolves: Two sisters settle in a remote cottage in the Scottish Highlands, one in recovery, one there to participate in a project re-wilding wolves. The process is complicated, though, and so are love lives and ethics. The scientist doesn’t always see what she needs to see. Is her twin sister real or a delusion? She gives birth alone in a snowy wood and nearly dies, but doesn’t.³ 

Into the Forest: Two sisters marooned in a house on the edge of a forest after some vague calamities befall the nearby town and all of society learn to homestead: to identify herbs and mushrooms, to can. Is this a prepper-tradwife novel? It begins to feel that way, at least until the sisters share an… intimate… night. And then decide to abandon the house and just move into the woods. Where one of them gives birth alone and nearly dies, but doesn’t.

Fall Back Down When I Die: More people are rewilding the wolves, this time in Montana! And life is still complicated, and people travel in packs like wolves, and that’s hard to overcome, you know? Politics. Gender. Guns. History. Poverty. A man is hiding out alone in the woods, and dies.

All the Living: So forget contemporary “issues” books. How about beautiful prose? How about the Kentucky land and livestock in the mid-twentieth century? How about poverty and trauma and those primary questions of all life: what does it mean to love, and can the distances between us ever really be bridged?

Stone Yard Devotional: Or get even more distant. A woman in Australia moves into a convent after half a life of ecological activism. She prays and cooks and cuts down on the convent’s single-use plastics, and tries to eradicate a plague of mice that descends. What matters, really? Activism? Prayer? Global? Local?

Orbital: Father still: outer space. Here, time loses meaning. The ship travels faster than the earth around the sun. Weather loses meaning. What is it to be human when untethered from the rhythms of days and seasons, separate from the connections to people and flora and fauna and all the rest?

Maybe I should just choose a book I’ve already read: Bewilderment by Richard Powers. It’s set here in Appalachia, where I live, and it captures both the grief of losing the creatures we love and the particularities of this place. A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. It’s short and propulsive, and all the biblical allusions are pretty fun for Christians to find, and the satire pokes persistently at my people (overeducated, white, drinking to numbness, self-satisfiedly liberal). But neither feels quite right.

I consolidate my lists into one master list, and instead of reading the rest of the books I start reordering it, grouping by title likenesses: Migrations, Late Migration, Flight Behavior, All the Birds in the Sky. The Dry, The Drowned World, The Deluge, Weather. How far the light reaches; How high we go in the dark. I wonder if the words of the titles could be made into a poem, if the titles themselves could give me what I was looking for if the books didn’t.

I have refused to commit to a book, as none of them seem perfect, and now it is time to announce the book club pick, and instead of choosing, I’m just shuffling words around trying to make them into a poem.

Why do I care so much about finding the right book? I want it to be a book Lauren will at least not hate – she’s co-leading the book club – and I want it to fit with the weekend’s theme of all creation waiting and witnessing as we abide together in the season of Advent – but mostly it’s like I’m hoping reading the right book could do some magical work for all of us, make us see the world differently, understand ourselves in it differently, live differently because of it.

Not so much so that we can “save” the world. I mean maybe these transformations I want for our little hearts could matter, ecologically – maybe. (Aren’t we too late? Aren’t our actions too little, given the corporations?). But part of me believes that if I can find a book that will help transform our imaginations so that we see the rest of the world better – not only see it, but attend to it in such a way that we love it – then we will want to change our lives, to care for the things we love, to sacrifice for them and have it not even feel like sacrifice. Even if that care is palliative rather than saving.

And if reading the right book could inspire changes in our habits and affections, whether or not those could “save the world,” they could save us. What I mean is that cultivating affection for the non-human world and a less anthropocentric perspective on life has changed my theology of salvation. As I’ve begun to understand my self as entangled and constructed and porous rather than discrete, concrete, individual, I’ve also begun to understand salvation differently. If we believe – as I do, sometimes, – in a bodily resurrection, and my body is home to and depends on all sort of other little creatures, organisms, bacterias, as well as leftover bits of the people who once dwelled in my body, then how can I imagine my own resurrection without imagining new life for them, too? If who I am is incomplete and unconstructable without the kind of laughter that only Lauren brings out of me, or my references only Jack can catch, or the glow of pride I get from my children, or the fury that only [redacted] induces – or the way ragweed makes me sneeze, or the trillion of microorganisms that have built a whole interdependent world of their own within me – then how can I be resurrected without them? If all creation is entangled and co-creating, then won’t our re-creation be entangled too? What I mean is: if anything is to be made new, won’t all things be made new?

“It seems necessary and impossible to rewrite the default grammar of agency,” Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Maybe that’s part of what I wish for– but that’s about verbs, about power. I’m interested in nouns. Is it necessary and impossible to rewrite the default grammar of being? So that we understand ourselves as always plural, as unavoidably interwoven, as continually being co-created?

Is it too much to ask for an adult novel that will do that for us? (for me?) 

Is it too much to expect that love matters?

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(just for fun, all the titles rearranged. I do like it ending the way it does, though)

Emergency and bewilderment.
When scattered all over the earth,
find a line made by walking into the forest.

Once there were wolves,
all the birds in the sky,
cherokee rose,
french dirt, hummingbird salamander how to catch a mole the sea and summer greenwood.

But storm – but trashlands,
cloud cuckoo land,
the wall the dry
weather
the deluge
troubled waters, crow lake, frozen river.
The drowned world, adrift, orbital.

All the birds in the sky,
how high we go in the dark–
how far the light reaches.
Luz at midnight. Night flyer. Light pirates.
Our flight behavior, late migrations; fall
back down when I die.

Refuge, maybe: seven steeples,
sunhouse, south pole station, prodigal summer.
Read refuge at the gate of all wonder: a children’s bible, exodus, the parable of the sower;
Read refuge in the stone diaries – a stone yard devotional – a psalm for the wild built–Read refuge in arboreality, a paper garden. Things that are.

What will I cheerfully refuse
for all the living? What ministry for the future?

The glad shout.

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Three Things:

• Speaking of Flannery (well, we were in the footnotes, anyway), I was surprised by how much I loved the recent film Wildcat. Maybe it helped that I went in with low expectations?

• This unreleased Adrienne Lenker song, and the way girls on TikTok are making beautiful little videos with it

• Hacks won for best comedy last night, and it’s one of my faves! (streaming on Max)

Are you registered to vote?

xo

1. Technically not true, as he’s currently re-reading Flannery O’Conner devotionally and read Prodigal Summer earlier this year.

2. Yes, this is my same old song: https://imagejournal.org/article/article-anthropocene/

3. Actually I liked this one, and several in this list.