lemonlights

The raw material of astrology is fate. Astrology is like any other craft – this particular craft applies itself to crafting fate. Yes, astrology can tell you when you’re going to die, as it can tell you how to live. But what can it teach you to tell? How can astrology be used as a storytelling device? When fate and time are approached as malleable and multiplicitous, rather than monolithic and fixed and singular, if they are internal as much as external forces, agencies as much as conditions, they become material like any other: a medium of communication, transmission, content, and form. There is the question of whether or not astrology is »real,« if it’s a »fact«. I’d propose that the more interesting question to ask is how we understand facts to be facts at all. How do we decide collectively that a system of meaning is real or not? And when we do, whom does it benefit? To what end? When the poet Morgan Parker was asked by The Believer magazine to discuss the state of the fact, Parker responded: »Facts are white.« In a talk with Arthur Jafa at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Saidiya Hartman stated that history is fiction with state power. I think of these statements often; they ring in my mind like a kind of bell.

EA  It’s historical. By nature we always mean landscapes. Language! The world is really the word; it’s the fact that it is. LR  Its isness. EA  It is and I love that. It distracted me from other forms of love. At the end of my life, I realize that the love of a person is a key to the world. Nothing matters more. To love a person in particular is the most difficult form of love, because it involves somebody else’s freedom. That is where misunderstandings come in; two people don’t have necessarily the same timing. You may love books and you may love paintings. They have their own technical difficulties, you fight with them, but you are the master of that fight.

You, my friend, are a dreamer nonetheless. But why dream? Maybe because that is what you are presenting them with when they ask your pronouns. You are gifting them with an unreality that might shake them from the terrors of waking life. You wish to, in your nonbinariness or your indifference or your refusal, hold imposed ascriptions in abeyance—in a move toward radical self-undetermination—so you can facilitate a different kind of encounter. Or, the abeyance, the gendered indeterminacy, interrogates the very grounds on which (gendered) relations occur, shifting the terrain toward alternative modes of relationality not predicated on “sirs” and “ma’ams” and “bros” and “ladies” and “gentlemen.” And that requires nothing but a wish and a desire for something else.

I use polyamory as a stepping stone to critique the imposition of compulsory monogamy and State-sanctioned one-on-one lifelong marriage by the settler colonial State. In Indigenous Studies and Indigenous communities we are always complaining about blood quantum and tribal citizenship rules, the colonial imposition of blood and racial ideology, and those kinds of exclusions, but going hand in hand with that was the imposition of monogamy and marriage, solo-marriage not plural marriage like my ancestors had—we were non-monogamist. The colonists divided up the collective Indigenous land-base into 160 acre allotments that they gave to the head of household, which was always a man, and he could get 80 acres for his wife and 40 acres for each child. So here you have this imposition of heteronormative settler sexuality and family structure onto the land.   All of this stuff came together so I don't understand how we can go after blood quantum and private property without going after monogamy and marriage. And so, many of us in Indigenous communities are so bought in, which leads to the next thing: that our sexuality has been made deviant. It has been made deviant the fact that our ancestors engaged in plural marriages, that they might had have same sex relations. If you look at the historical and anthropological record and our oral histories, Indigenous communities throughout the Americas had same-sex practices, had multiple genders, not this gender binary stuff that the colonizers imposed on us. And it was a site of tremendous violence, I mean they tortured and murdered people who engaged in same-sex practices. They made these practices illegal, they told us that we were sexually deviant and we have deeply absorbed this into our own psyche. It's not only the church that has done this, the state has told us this, and science has told us this. There are scientists at the turn of the Twentieth century assuming gender binaries, assuming heterosexuality as normal and good, and everything else is deviant. This is one of the things that non-critical polyamorists do, they just have some vague notion where they blame the church. Those polyamorists don’t understand monogamy and nonmonogamy within a structural analysis of racism and settler colonialism. It isn’t just the church, it's the state, science and the church all working together in a settler structure to impose these violent gender binaries and compulsory monogamy and marriage practices onto us. And so, my own polyamory is a way of living the life I want to live, but also critically examining on a daily basis—I guess I do auto-ethnography on myself—what people are pushing against when they are doing polyamory. I think a lot of polyamorists deep down have some of the same resistance that I have but they don't have the theoretical language, they don't have the politicization that I have to actually blame the settler State for this problem, because settler colonialism doesn't only harm Indigenous Peoples, it harms all of us, and it’s devastating the planet.

That was when I first noticed him. It was six weeks later that we first spoke. And maybe a year after that that I found out that the line wasn’t his. I saw it in a book he loaned me. I was flicking through it, not really reading. Looking for the marks of his pen in the margins, the notes he had made. There it was, underlined. The same phrase, word for word. But by then it didn’t matter. You can’t unnotice something.