kerala

Of rabbit holes and cognitive dissonance

A note: I write to understand my world, our world. If my words are of comfort to you or help with your own navigation of life, please let me know. Liking a writer’s work is not banal - though everything about social media and online culture is ultimately banal — rather, it’s encouragement, it’s a way of saying, “yes, this” and “keep going.”

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I went down a rabbit hole the other night. The best kind of rabbit hole. One far away from Minnesota and the brutal sanding away of our rights. Away from the conversations about my mom’s morphine dosage, which quickly morphed all too into conversations about estates and donations.

"Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive at this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face– and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place." – Naomi Klein

I’m not even sure how I ended up there, Alice-like on a Tuesday night. I went looking for art — to try to jumpstart my heart. Douse it in the open veined visions of imaginations birthed from experiences far afield from my own. Less chronological. More mythological. Fewer rocks. More waves. Only by jumbling our sense of reality can we grow our heart to contain other experiences.

I landed in southern India. An art biennial in Kerala. I know the word K-E-R-A-A-L-A. But I couldn’t place it on map. Didn’t know of its left wing politics and watery canals. I found there a weaving school. A master of shadows and light. A painter of dreamlike landscape.

clockwise from top L: Thasara by Santha KV; Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Patterns of a Tactile Score; Tom Vattakuzhy, Lessons of Life; Nilima Sheikh, “Dying Dreaming"

It led me to a map and an imagined trek along the Arabian Sea - bucket list material. It brought me to perch on the line between liquid and solid.

This is where my mom was in those final days: right at the shoreline, sometimes under the water, moving into a space beyond what we can know with our shrinky-dink imaginations and linear patterns; sometimes right at the water surface, taking it in so that it bubbled through her lungs and garbled her speech and netted thoughts that were half of one place and half of another. In moments that were as normal as they were surprising, she she paddled to the surface, even crawled to shore to meet me in conversation.

I couldn’t name this undulation between lucidity and ambiguity. I couldn’t name it because, really, is this place lucid and another less so? What is lucid about our world? We are in a dream that headlines selfishness and power gone awry.

Since going down the rabbit hole to Kerala, I’ve been awed that it is there and Minneapolis is here. For even a fleeting moment, I think: “Yes this (reading headlines, paying bills) AND Kerala …” Today, it will be 90 degrees in Kerala, while it’s snowing in Minneapolis and feels like 11. I’m sure there are children hungry in both places. Artists poking holes in reality in both places. Mothers exhausted. Bureaucrats pushing papers. Cats roaming. Cars on their last gasp. Hikers pushing uphill. In both places.

Photo by John Locher/NYTimes. This breakdown of what’s happening in this photo is worth reading.

Here is part of my cognitive dissonance. This summer, I was collecting unemployment. Eating beans - so many beans. Not attending an event that was incredibly important to me because I couldn’t afford the trip. Now: I could buy a ticket and be in Kerala by week’s end. I could move to Mexico. Or open a hole in the top of my house and build a small luminous dome. This doesn’t compute. But the wanting is the same.

And what I want cannot be bought. I want: love. To have someone look at me with a peaceful, abiding love. A love that exhales. A love that does not possess but defends. A love that knows when to pause or take a step back and when to move forward. I want a love that says, Kerala - shall we? And as easily says, let’s just stay in. A love that makes room but shows up.

Somewhere in Kerala — perhaps they’ve been captured on a drone or CCTV — a person is sitting by the ocean, in a park, outside a home — feeling exactly the same thing. Thinking to themselves under the 90-degree sun, the humidity rolling off the Arabian Sea — “Here’s what I want: love.”

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I saw The Chronology of Water the other night. It is about our watery memories. The experience of a lifelong swimmer who is more at home in pools and lakes and oceans than in her own body. The fluids that run through us as blood and tears and ejaculate and spit. The horror and beauty that threads through families. The water that is death and birth. The way we remake ourselves out of the deepest caverns of pain into something strong and immensely beautiful.

Its makers — director Kirsten Stewart and memoirist Lydia Yuknavitch — deeply understand the contradictions in which we all are submerged, whether we admit to it or not. The author of the beautiful poem below echoes my experience: “…each time I have crawled the dark of my own belly to not see, the shape of the great light coming.” There’s a tomblike quality to the current moment — the weeks after my mother’s death, the deepest and coldest days of winter, the numbing bitterness of Minneapolis’ battle. And the light is not only coming but already here, even if it’s on the other side of the world beating down on the Malabar Coast.

The Cailleach to the Widow by Leanne O’Sullivan

The Universe said to me,

Old woman I have learned

a few good things,

that when one part dies

in me another comes

tearing through the darkness

like a star, sudden

and tender and painful

as hell. Each time

I have sat at the centre

of the world to see it,

each time I have crawled

the dark of my own belly

to not see, the shape

of the great light coming

and the dying one,

washed in such kindness

rising steadily towards it.