Zhenevere Sophia Dao

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ON THE NATURE OF EARTH

In the soil of the flesh of the human body, in the rivers of the blood, in the storms of the psyche, in the pounding hooves of the heart, the human shares mysteries with the Earth. These mysteries are forms of Magic. Magic makes meaning, but inscrutably, irrationally. Magic is the natural action of the incalculable human heart. Earth’s magic takes forms: sacrifice; the Immensity of the Other; listening; above all, Sympathy. We belong to life ultimately only through Sympathy. When I say Belonging, I do not mean the comfort of familiarity. I mean nearly the opposite. I mean that the need to feel what is not ourselves is the very substance of ourselves. And this substance of ourselves, which is substantiated in the need to feel Others, is our relaxation on the Earth. This is the opposite of indifference, the opposite of bigotry. The Other is there before us—their body, their breath, their eyes. They are the encounter with what is real. We know them because we have become ourselves in the alarming attention of their eyes. And so we make Others in the alarming attention of our eyes. That is the history of human existence. There is of course another history—the history of non-existence; of ceasing to exist; of ending; the history of the human destroying the human; the history of the human destroying all living things. But Sympathy is the only viable history. All the other impulses are clots of fear that amount to suicide. Our suicide is plain now, at the end of human history. History is ending because the human is clotted with fear. But the least encounter with the Other gifts us existence again. Their body, their breath, their eyes—their pain, their wish, their prayers, their sadness, their wound, their abjection, their loneliness, their joy. Their life, we know, is our life. All of their being pours itself fourth through the porous shield of our expression. And because we are them, we cannot bear that we are not them. We want to make room in ourselves for their whole being. We try. But we cannot. We cannot wholly become the Other. The constituents of our lives are different. We cannot utterly mutualize all human circumstance within our single selves. And this knowledge is too painful to bear. But in order to bear it, we undergo a kind of magic: we transform. We expand past the limitations of our skin, past our thought, and past our mind. We create new sense, new thought, new mind. We include until we break, and then we reform again, like water expanding around a stone. The stone is our ego. The water is our being. The Other makes our being flow around the suicide of the stone.

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~Zhenevere Sophia Dao

Excerpt from SENSIBILITY