A Tale of Two Sounds 🌒
These men who are trying to eat us alive have babies, too. I wonder if they've ever quietly listened to the sound of a newborn eating.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
“You don’t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be,” said Grace Lee Boggs, the cross-racial activist from Detroit who was a luminary mentor to luminaries of mine.
A few weeks ago, I listed to a recent episode of Erica Heilman’s excellent podcast Rumble Strip. The episode is called “What Now Sounds Like,” and it’s an artfully woven curation of listeners’ recordings: the sounds of regular people trying to inhabit and make sense of this particular moment in American life, which feels so big and fast and strange—and, for many of us, so dark.
On January 27th, one moon ago, seven days after the Inauguration of our latest American “leader,” in the last breath of the year of the Wood Dragon, in the heart of the watershed of Nchi Wana, the Big River, here in the northwest corner of Turtle Island, enmeshed in webs and spirals of relationships seen and unseen, I gave birth to my little daughter by unplanned repeat cesarean.
It was not the birth we’d prayed and prayed and planned for. But it was beautiful in its own way. And in many ways, not all the ways, our recovery and postpartum period has been the woven golden time we hoped for. We are feeling very loved and very well supported and very, very grateful.
There’s a lot I could say about all of that. All in good time. For now—thank you.
For now, I’m (mostly) resting, grieving, celebrating, integrating, tuning into gratitude, and oh yes—breastfeeding, and staring at my baby. Thankfully, breastfeeding has been an easeful relationship for me and both of my babies.
But I did make the mistake of dipping back into the news a week or so after my daughter was born. When I was still too squishy, really, to take proper care of my boundaries.
Maybe I’m still too squishy. It’s been hard to shut that door again—hard to protect these precious postpartum days with my beautiful new one—the best of times—against the cortisol spike, the clench and vigilance I feel as I witness the men, the billionaire bullies who are currently running the show in this country—and yes, it’s a show, “great television,” a dark show designed to distract and exhaust us—delighting in predation, destruction and cruelty at an unbelievable scale.
Of all the gut punches that have made their way into my (still mostly protected) nest in these last few weeks, the worst (for me) was the White House’s “ASMR” video fetishizing the dehumanization of immigrants being deported.
In the video, shackles rattle on chained ankles, more chains clink as they’re piled and sorted, jet engines thrum, and black-gloved hands click manacles behind the backs of people whose faces we never see as they are pushed into the roaring plane.
By calling this video ASMR (“autonomous sensory meridian response,” a label for a certain kind of pleasure derived from certain patterns of auditory stimulii), the White House is saying that these sounds should trigger a pleasurable physical response: the sensation of “low-grade euphoria” or arousal that ASMR enthusiasts call “the tingles.”
I may still be too squishy to adequately describe the sinking horror, the sickness, I felt at this message, this framing, coming from this bully pulpit.
Elon Musk, the architect of much of the chaos and cruelty the Trump administration is dealing right now, amplified the video on the social media platform he owns, adding as commentary: “Haha wow [troll emoji] [gold medal emoji].”
When I told my partner about this, they said, shortly, “Yeah—they’re fucking sociopaths.”
Maybe so. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine how such glee in cruelty could come from a well-adjusted soul.
But I don’t think there are very many natural-born sociopaths. Mostly, I think, sociopathy arises out of antisocial operating conditions. And even natural born sociopaths, such as they are, couldn’t rise to positions of power without our systems enabling them. Conditions that reward cruelty will elevate cruelty. And here we are.
What is happening in this wounded world that creates and maintains these bullies as “leaders?”
While I have some ideas about the answers to that question, I take the prior—that we live in times of antisocial operating conditions—the worst of times—as a given, and I’m not really into diagnoses for diagnosis’ sake. I’m interested in change.
So how do we change the underlying substrate of a culture, its social operating conditions?
Well, at minimum, we try to behave differently—in this case, to behave in a prosocial way, and to reward and affirm prosocial behaviors. To paraphrase Grace Lee Boggs, if we want the times we live in to be different, if we want the world to change, who do we want to be?
Kinward Moves is my attempt, over and over, to meaningfully engage that question. Kinward is an adverb—a word that describes how we move in the world, how we act. This is my name for this body of work because my answer to this question, this who do I want to be for the world I want question, lies in behavior, in what we are actually doing, in the spheres of our own agency.
So what are we doing, over here in my cozy nest, while the world is burning?
Well, for one thing, we’re feeding the babies.
Right now, I’m listening to an old friend playing with our toddler in our greenhouse. He’s teaching her about the radishes and peas he planted. He’s really into teaching now that he has a baby sister. My friend drove over from Portland to give us a hand in our stretched-wide difficult beautiful post-op postpartum time. I can hear my partner playing with our baby in the other room. I’m clinking my spoon in and out of a bowl of split pea soup and pausing now to say thank you to the pig and the land and the farmers and the butchers, neighbors of mine, who made the ham hock possible.
Right now, I’m listening to the redwing blackbirds trilling in the aspens. They returned to our corner of the world about ten days ago. When my toddler was a baby, one of the first things he ever turned his head to listen for was the flock of redwings arriving at the feeder.
From the sound of it, my baby needs to eat again.
Across this lonely country, people whose lives have been suddenly upended by the chaotic actions of this administration are worrying about how they are going to feed their babies. In the most recent episode of “What Now Sounds Like,” Erica Heilman helps us hear a few of them.
Elon Musk just had a baby too, by the way. His baby needs to eat, like every baby. Someone, probably a woman, maybe that baby’s mother, is feeding that baby—who may have been named after a Spartan Nazi idol, yes, but who is definitely also an unblemished soul, “unstruck,” as every baby is, at the beginning. That baby is making little snuffling sucking sounds and swallowing something sweet and gazing up at someone. That baby trusts somebody.
Verbs! It’s not yes! a baby! or god! not another baby! In the good world, we feed the babies. For the fed babies, and so for us, it’s (also) the best of times.
The sounds of cruelty and bewilderment, the sounds of chains clinking, the sounds of people trying to make sense of what’s happening too quickly, of what we’ve already lost, of what to do, the sounds of blackbirds, the sounds of my little baby nuzzling and smacking her lips, are sounding all together at once in this world we share.
That’s not to erase or bypass any of it. It’s just to step back for a breath and try to see enough, feel broadly and deeply enough, to choose who I want to be in it.
I have to say, I can’t stop thinking about Elon’s baby. I’ve been wondering, in the surround of all these sounds, if any of these men—the men applauding the video of chains clinking, the men who made it, the people who are busily dismantling the governance and social systems and the economic and earth systems that sustain all of us and pocketing the change and poisoning the water—have ever sat quietly and listened to the sound of a newborn eating.
I wonder what happens inside them, what they imagine, what they long for, when and if they ever do that.
Nora Bateson, the daughter of philosopher Gregory Bateson (who coined the term “double bind”) and founder of the Warm Data Lab, has suggested that you could replace the grid-like logo of the UN’s sustainable development goals with the image of a mother breastfeeding. You’d lose nothing: a well-nourished world, the possibility of a future, is implicit in the image of a mother and child. And you’d gain the richness of the bond, gain all the stories of mothers. You’d see the human being before it all went off the rails, before the world began to feel so narrow and scarce, so lonesome.
You’d gain the boundless entangled nuance of what makes that most fundamental relationship possible. Of course, there are layers and layers of context around the woman with the baby—the network of relationships that must be in place for this primary relationship to be successful in this moment. The nest.
This is what makes us possible.
That’s “warm data,” in Bateson’s language. A rigorous attention to the relationships that make it possible for us to show up as who we want to be, that make it possible for our babies to eat breakfast, and their babies too.
For me, it’s the care and support of kin and friends; the security of a home we built and a garden we tend with greens unfolding as the spring days lengthen; the sunshine turning into vitamin D inside my body; the oxytocic depth of a snuggle with my family, now a foursome, in our bed; the sounds of blackbirds outside the window. All of this nested in my watershed, the circulatory system of Earth holding us: our watery sun-drenched planet with tiny new leaves and blackbirds.
Mars will probably never be a home for blackbirds—which might very possibly mean it can’t be a home for our babies either. I wonder if they ever listen to blackbirds, these men who want our babies to go to Mars.
There’s a question I’m trying to hone in on (not to answer!) in all of this. There’s something I’m trying to grasp, and hold lightly. Something about the simplicity of this baby, my baby, your babies, that man’s baby, being given, gifted, what a baby needs, right now. Despite everything. Because of other peoples’ bodies, because of care, because of earth.
“You don’t choose the times you live in. But you do choose who you want to be.”
Over and over and over, entangled.
Onward and Kinward. Be well, my loves. More soon.
"if we want the times we live in to be different, if we want the world to change, who do we want to be?" YES. That questions carries me, always.
Nora Bateson's story about once going into a mobile phone store and asking for a phone without slavery, and the research that ensued among staff and customers, has stuck with me for years. Very interesting and insightful person.
And: CONGRATULATIONS!