Transcript
[0:00] Hi, my name is Jasmyne, and you're listening to the audio version of Between Starshine and Clay.
[0:09] The title of this newsletter pays honor to the inimitable Lucille Clifton, so if you're hearing this, it means that you have subscribed to receive the newsletter or shown an interest in my creative practice. I thank you for the gift of your support and your attention.
[0:33] Today I'm reading from the essay I published on May 29, 2024, titled “The Wisdom of Wounds.} Before we get started, I want to let you know this recitation will briefly mention gun violence, suicide, terminal dementia, and other themes about death. Please do what is necessary to care for yourself.
[0:58] The Invocation is the first tenet of Earthseed from Octavia E. Butler's Parables series. It reads,
“All that you touch you Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.
God is Change.”.
[1:18] Continuing with the text of the newsletter:
“Last week I attended “Futurity as Praxis” at the Huntington Library where I spent two days sitting at the feet of brilliant scholars and singing the praises of Octavia E. Butler. As noted in recent dispatches, Octavia has been one of my most persistent creative inspirations for a decade. I am devoted to her work because it has held me through immeasurable change, and having dedicated time to celebrate the gifts and wisdom she left behind was more generative than I can quickly express here.
I’m curious how you processed grief about Octavia Butler’s death? I need help.
[2:04] During the conference's first panel, I had the opportunity to ask that question about grief. Recently, I have been re-reading Butler’s work for course research and have been stricken anew with a parasocial grief about how she was snatched from the world in her prime. So my question was thoroughly colored by my love for her writing and my own recent losses..
Rage and grief have been major themes in my life since 2020. During the height of COVID, I noticed that I was experiencing deep, unprocessed grief and rage about the dreams, lives, and potential for transformative change that we ceded to the pandemic. My somatic experiences of the compounded crises of a global public health emergency, structural and systemic violence, ecological collapse, and economic decay have been debilitating. To add to that, since last spring, four people in my life have died, making what already felt destabilizing more acute and disorienting. I lost a younger cousin to armed robbery; a colleague to suicide; a sorority sister went to sleep and never woke up, leaving behind a husband and two young children; and recently my maternal grandmother died of complications from frontotemporal dementia, or FTD.
[3:27] With Octavia Butler as the luminary, speculative fiction and mythological studies – stories – have held me through grief and rage heavier than I have ever known the last few years. For example, conjure and Southern Black American religious rituals through the lens of Yvonne Chireau gave me a framework to unpack my cousin’s murder. Becky Chambers’ “Monk and Robot” series helped me begin to transmute climate grief. Tibetan Vajrayana teachings about the Bardo lent me a relevant Buddhist concept to contemplate transformation and liminality rather than fixate on my late grandmother’s physical decline. And in invoking the wisdom of the High Priest of Change – High Priest, not High Priestess; that is intentional. Invoking the wisdom of the High Priest of Change, Lauren Olamina, helps me whenever sudden changes like death reveal themselves. God is Change. Shape God.
[4:27] In light of recent eclipses, astrologers have advised revisiting August 2017 to see what themes were present. That was a period of heartbreak, liminality, and rebirth for me that sliced a painful, necessary path and forced me to see the trickster face of God. Then March 2020 tore that scar open so that the past four years have been a gauntlet of sorrow and hard-won joy. From this I am learning that our wounds are what light the path to our wholeness. After all, gods demand blood. James Hillman teaches that all psychological suffering is necessary and has purpose. I want to believe that. I need to believe that. It feels true because every instance of suffering I have endured has forced me to transform. Change or die.
[5:23] On April 5, 2024 I decided to transform again, to choose the danger of the liminal. On April 6, 2024, after flirting with the threshold between life and death for over a week, my last grandparent died; she and I were ready to become something else. Still, four deaths in two years is burdensome. Even holding the belief that death is merely an unavoidable rite of passage for us all, the circumstances that precede it beg many questions, most of which I cannot hope to answer until it is my turn to pass through the veil. Maybe not even then.
Change is inevitable but transformation is an option. What does your suffering reveal to you about transformation?”
[6:12] That concludes “The Wisdom of Wounds.” Before we get out of here, there are a few important references to note. First, “Earthseed” refers to a religious community in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents that has inspired IRL praxis and intentional communities in which people empower themselves through adaptability. As stated in the previous recitation – and as I will state every time I get the opportunity to do so – Octavia is my greatest creative inspiration so know that I will cite her wisdom at every opportunity.
[6:51] The essay also includes Tarot references, and a riff on the line “Real gods require blood” from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Last, it also works with depth psychological principles from James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology. Links to all references are listed in the essay’s footnotes and image captions, so please visit jasmynegilbert.substack.com for more detailed information.
[7:18] Thank you for listening today. We’re less than 10 subscribers away from the goal of 100 by my birthday on Juneteenth, so please share this post with a loved one if you found it interesting or insightful (or you want to give me an early birthday present).
[7:36] If you have spare funds to support the public study and research practice of a Black, feminist scholar and cultural mythologist, please consider signing up for a paid subscription to “between starshine and clay” at only $8 a month. Funds from paid subscriptions support me to create a virtual immersion in myth, culture, and speculative fiction where participants will awaken their creative visions of liberation. As a token of my appreciation, all paid subscribers get a behind-the-scenes look at building the platform.
[8:13] Thank you for being here today. I look forward to being back in your inbox very soon.
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