Page 6 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Theater, Ritual and Biophilia” in this issue, patriarchy is the connection between

the two plays she presents: The Beekeeper, about victims of the Bosnian rape

camps, and Extreme Whether, about catastrophic climate change. Malpede’s
explicit aim in these plays is to create “an intensity of thought and feeling... that

allows expulsion from the collective mind of wearying numbness...” and thus “...a

vision, momentary, fragmentary, nevertheless real and embodied, of a dance of

life, a returned embrace...”In order to acknowledge the escalating danger and

darkness of this time we now offer you Aftermath: 11/9, a column that will appear
at the end of each issue. Aftermath will feature dreams, visions, nightmares or

communications with nonhuman beings that respond in some way to this era of

mounting crimes and obscenities against the earth and her most vulnerable

inhabitants--and ideally provide clarity and/or guidance. I very much agree with

Greenspan when she writes “our collective dreams carry the truth that is either

intentionally or unwittingly obfuscated by the White House and the media.” The
dreams in this issue, I believe, do exactly that.

A few words about “Making Kin,” a subject which feels more timely than ever.

The suburbs of Montreal where I live saw record flooding this past spring. We are

not often stricken by natural disasters here—at least not since the ice storm of
1999—so it was remarkable to see the footage of entire neighborhoods under

water. Even more remarkable, though, were the continual testimonies of

kindness in the papers – often on the part of those who had been hardest hit,

e.g.: “This one woman I had never met before just showed up at my door at night

and started bailing hundreds of buckets of water out of my basement... Even I

found myself helping other people out, and I’m usually selfish as hell.”
“Kindness,” of course, has its origin in “kin”—perhaps logically as well as

etymologically—and I’ve been noticing, especially on my travels, a sense of

kinship that is palpable in a way it was not before the November election. A mere

mention of the US president’s name leads to instant bonding with strangers on

the metro, with cab drivers, on airport buses.

Kathleen Moore, whose Great Tide Rising I rave about in my “After-word” in this

issue, identifies four categories of kinship, two of which are “the kinship of

interdependence” and “the kinship of a common fate.” The chances are very

good that increasingly in the coming years, many of us will be welcoming perfect

strangers into our circle of kin, either because we understand we need their help
(even if it is only to not feel so alone in a world that seems to be going mad)

and/or because we share the common fate of being dropped into a disaster zone.

This issue includes several accounts of human-human (and more specifically

woman-woman) kindness/kinship that is life-saving. As with so much else, in this

matter we are having to learn what indigenous cultures around the world have
never unlearned. The title of Lois Red Elk’s poem “Take Her Hands” is, Red Elk

explains, what “Sioux women say when someone is overwhelmed.” But of course