Art I've Thought About on Ketamine (Part II)

Welcome to Part II of my dissociative-fueled arts criticism series. To get up to speed on why I’m doing this awful drug in the first place, you can read Part I here.

Here’s a book of non-fiction, an album, and a fantasy novel. Enjoy!

CW: Drugs, Sexual Violence, Genocide

’s Who is Wellness For?

I left this book devout.

Despite these last years of intensive healing, embodiment practice, politicization, and…finding [gestures vaguely] God, I must admit I retained some unwillingness. It’s too easy to scoff at the things that could be holy but could be dismissed as woo. But Róisín’s dedication is infectious.

Part memoir, part deeply researched non-fiction text, part spiritual guide, Who is Wellness For? pulls apart “wellness” as it has been packaged by white supremacist capitalism, and presents an alternate version that both requires and makes possible the dismantling of intergenerational violence.

Róisín makes the case that there is no difference between healing mind, body, spirit, society, community, land—and to try to split some of these off is a violence that will doom the project. For example, divorcing and appropriating yoga, meditation, or…turmeric from their cultural, spiritual, and radical roots will not truly bring wellness. Similarly, workaholically toiling for justice without tending to the soul will not bring liberation.

The book is fearless. Róisín models spiritual, healing, creative, and political practices—often by excavating her history as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She invites me into her steadiness, her intrepid excavation, her relentless pursuit of integrity. She writes:

The book is a case for going there, for facing shadows, for entering the unknown, knowing that despite the terror of the process, the sense of self on the other side is more than worthwhile. This process requires the body, ancestry, political action, the divine, the earth, and loved ones.

In a recent newsletter, she wrote about the process of writing the book:

I offer this bit of writing as a gratitude. Thank you, Fariha, for reaching out to me from across the void.

Half Gringa’s Album Force to Reckon

Izzy Olive is a bestie and my birthday twin. She was the accomplice for my first-ever, fake-ID-enabled, ill-fated, tequila-fueled bar hop. She got naked for a play I directed. And she’s the frontwoman of the resplendent band Half Gringa.

Her album Force to Reckon has a title so good it makes me jealous. It sounds locationally and generationally precise: midwestern, millennial (Its Sufjan Stephens-ness helps with both). It sounds like flat plains, Chicago dives, floating in a great lake, taking the train downstate. Maybe it’s because she was born on precisely the same day as me, or the first track “1990”, but it feels like an ode to us heartbroken ‘90s kids, evoking the best of the feelings-y singer-songwriter music I grew up devouring. This midwestern alt-rock inspiration is woven alongside her Venezuelan-American roots. As she writes in her artist statement:

Her lyrics twist language surprisingly, ever enigmatic: “I don’t know your feelings by their first name”, “I made my guesses and I messed with Texas,” or “Nothing feels quite like almost touching.” They make me wish it was still 2007 when (with much angst but little context) I’d post lyrics to my Facebook. These words long to be tattooed in courier.

The ghostly vocals on “Silbadora”, the cosmic synthesizers on “Teggsas”, or the swell at the end of the last track “Forty” sound great in a K Hole. The greatest pleasure, though, is to watch an art friend grow up. She opens for big names now—The Flaming Lips, Iron and Wine. And she’s cooking up a next project, one she talks about with the kind of artistic fervor I know to be the real shit, the best feeling in the world, a harbinger of great works. She’s only just begun.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan

Ten-year-old Tenar has miles of pitch-black basement labyrinths all to herself; it is her domain. She is the high priestess of “The Nameless Ones,” reincarnated Dalai-Lama-like from the dozens of generations of priestesses before her. But to navigate the underground mazes, she has to have the directions memorized. They’ve been passed down from priestess to priestess across generations (right, left, right, right, right, left). Any mistake will leave her stranded in a dark dead end, with no one able to save her. Ketamine feels this way, as do nightmares, depression, and evil.

The Tombs of Atuan is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1970 anarcha-feminist fantasy novel (though she would not take on the latter label until later in her life). It is the second in the Earthsea series—the others of which I’ve found hard to get through, but I finished this one all in a gulp in the middle of the night; it stands on its own quite nicely.

Early in the book, Tenar’s supposed second-in-command, the steward of The Nameless Ones, tells her to sentence a pair of intruders to death, entombing them alive in the underground chambers. Tenar does so—it’s her duty as a priestess, right?—but she has nightmares for days as she imagines them dying buried alive.

The thesis of the book comes at the end when Tenar—aided by a wizard she also should have killed—chooses to leave the cult of the nameless ones, causing their temple to crumble. Standing on the plains (full of thistles and junipers, inspired by the eastern Oregon deserts) Tenar whirls in despair having lost everything she’s ever known, even if it was poisoning her spirit. Ged, the wizard, says The Nameless Ones, with their evil “should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped.”

I’m hearing more people use “evil” these days. Matter-of-factly, it’s the only apt adjective for genocide (among so many other sins). Nicholas Russel’s essay “Bringing Evil Back” makes a compelling case for its linguistic and theological usage. also used it stunningly in their piece of literary criticism “Against Forgiveness”: Author Alice Munro is, in fact, “evil” for letting her husband get away with raping her daughter. Evil, tragically, is not hyperbole.

Tenar gets wrapped up in a death cult as a young child, offered power if she enacts violence on outsiders. But her dominion is just a lonely subterranean maze, a mindfuck. As the buildings crumble behind her, she begins to feel the evil’s grip lose hold on her. Ged encourages her to notice, to remember evil, but to no longer anoint it.

In her metaphor, Le Guin also offers us an antidote: care for one another. As Sean Guynes writes in his lovely Reactor essay,

What might it feel like once these cruel cathedrals have fallen? Once we’ve loved and trusted and cared for one another so fiercely that we dare flee the cults that dupe us?

Sweet friends have sat with me while I take this frightening treatment, tucking my toes into blankets, writing the phrases I utter on notecards (“Le Guin,” “lesbian beach cave,” “the hole grabbing, holding me”), lovingly bullying me to eat just one more bird bite of a cracker when the nausea feels too bad. I feel like a baby; it’s so vulnerable. I can be cared for as I face an underworld. When I awake the next morning, my fibro-foggy brain is crisp, my pain softened—at least for a while. Is it worth it? Yes, because I was so loved along the way.