L asked me the other day if I think about death a lot while farming. Maybe they were talking about something more beautiful, the vital kind of decay that comes with any kind of seasonal work. But I thought about death like killing, killing things that were once alive.
My first season, sure, I thought a lot about all the vibrant weeds I was advised to pull. I remember the hesitation I felt around killing that marvelously iridescent japanese beetle, its writhing line-y legs. But it’s been a few years, and I would hope my thoughts have grown into something else since then.
Now, I’m uninterested in feeling bad for every stink bug I squish off a pepper plant. There’s no second-guessing when spraying the BT spray that kills caterpillars upon ingestion.
I know i knoww i am in every living thing and i knowww an insect’s life is no less important than a human’s. I know these bugs are parts of vast ecosystems I am comically oblivious towards.
But still! It’s different, i think! I think killing a stinkbug is different from killing another human! One isn’t inherently easier than the other, more immoral than the other, it’s just that they’re different. And even if I can’t describe the difference with precision yet, that difference feels important to me.
Maybe it’s in the way that most people will more quickly adapt to the circumstances that make killing a bug easier than killing a person. Maybe it’s because equating a genocide of humans to some kind of pest control is deeply insulting, especially when generations of money and energy are poured into those narrative-machines that turn people into creechies, i mean creatures - those narrative-machines so vital to any kind of colonial project. Maybe i’m just desensitized. If nothing else, I know I feel differently when bearing witness.
Basically, killing bugs isn’t all that bad, when you consider everything else, and i think i’m standing by that here.
But deeper down, i know… no one needs this many cabbages, and they don’t all need to look so pretty - why not let the bugs have some? Farming on any kind of too-big scale is an abomination anyway. and i guess i am still taking a precious life unjustly, i should atone or something. also, if i’m really present, it does always feel bad when you squish em.
i spent days in between the pepper plants trying to reconcile these thoughts. Around the same time, i was finishing up The Word for World is Forest and beginning to put together my thoughts for book club. i was searching incessantly for some kind of manifesto that cleared my conscience - le guin showing me hey look! here’s exactly how you should think about genocide and colonization!
Yeah maybe i shouldn’t do that. It’s a lil unfair to ursula. Instead of a neatly packaged answer, i was just met with a pretty familiar story of colonization. A predictable logic of razing, violent building of worlds atop untamable forests. and, of course, we don’t need to look to sci-fi to study all this.
What did stick, for me, was all the parts about the dreams. Athsheans and their glistening relationship to their subconscience. The certain ambiguity that arises when we really make space for both the world and our own dreams.
By the end of the novel, the Athsheans bear witness to and now possess the knowledge of murder. ‘There’s no use pretending’ that there’s some kind of turning back from this point in their collective history. This kind of absoluteness is rare to come across, no?
In Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, the citizens of Omelas are certain that their joy is directly, absolutely contingent on the suffering of that poor little child. Those who walk away walk into uncertainty - a place that may not exist - with the hope that things do not have to be like this. That their happiness does not have to depend on someone else’s suffering, and that the line connecting the two does not have to be so obvious. Are they in search for a world where suffering does not exist entirely? Or one where the two exist simply separately?
I have learned over and over and over again that my comfort comes at the cost of something, someone, else. I have learned that it is my responsibility to be aware of this, to do something about this. I have learned to take care of my questioning, critical eye. I have also learned that it might just be some unresolved guilt and shame… whatever it is…
It is something i’ve thought a lot about since living in Korea for the past few months. In the states, I already how to look for the worn down paths where the omelas kid sits at the end, the one who supposedly ‘pays’ for my comfort.
But here, i’m in unfamiliar territory. It’s led me to feeling obsessed with finding the kid in the room from where i stand. a desperate-tasting obsession with finding the path to that kid - the texture of the path, the way it sounds and looks and smells, the names and wars and policies that line it, the flow of money that built it. Am i not looking hard enough? is my looking annoying?
i made this video for a lil hw assignment about the looking. i thought it said something at least a little interesting but only after i finished did i realize how on-the-nose it is… just… all the walking and the footsteps and u know ‘walking away from Omelas’… it’s just a little too much for me lol i didn’t mean to but here it is:
anyway, i fell down an Omelas rabbit hole while making this and all the different ways people have responded to Le Guin’s famous story. Fuck those who walked away! They should’ve stayed back and pulled the kid out! or omg have u thought about the people who RETURNED to Omelas?? waaaow also this BTS music video referencing the story lmao
I really liked this one. A drop of blood in a bowl of milk.
It is easier to describe a utopia than the reality we actually share. The point isn’t that there is actually a small child locked up somewhere responsible for my comfort. The point is that I am comfortable and at the same time, there is also someone suffering - maybe a friend, maybe a stranger. Describing the world where the two exist at the same time - where the line between one’s suffering and another’s happiness is a bit more arbitrary, never fair of course - is the realest, hardest thing. It’s like describing water.
This became more about Omelas than The Word for World is Forest. sorry.
I’m not just killing this bug. I’m killing this bug at the same time as multiple genocides, as a broken ceasefire, as clownish feds with too many weapons and too much power take over chicago. It’s all the same world we have an obligation to hold. I know at the bottom of all my bug questions is just this deeper… fuzzier… older… angst...... this persistent... collective...selfish turmoil about what i need to do and where i need to walk towards. As difficult as it is, i hope it stays.
xx 🪲
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