on mercury and making worlds
“The growth of knowledge[...]is a very slow process. Far from being merely additive or cumulative, the growth of knowledge is a process of selective accumulation, displacement, deletion, rearrangement, and insistence[...]”
Edward Said, Orientalism
before i got into gardening, i thought all the work began and ended with spring. overtime, i’ve come to realize that early summer is where the work really begins. i live in the pacific northwest, so the rain can do most of the heavy lifting for the first few weeks of a seed developing. come summer, the rains aren’t as available, and as the seasons grow drier and hotter maintaining the crops takes more time and focus. it is very repetitive work. in a way the hard part is done–if you are fortunate, the seeds take. but there is something quite fulfilling about thinning crops, fertilizing, weeding, and just being present to the growth. all we can really do at that point is care.
that early summer time coincides with gemini season and can tell us a lot about the nature of mercury in our lives. gemini’s curiosity is seen as probing, sometimes bordering on invasive. there is a sense that because gemini is so curious, they can’t root anywhere. that they are constantly seeking. erratic in their quest for stimulation. i don’t deny that there is an intensity to gemini, but i see it more as an incredible capacity and desire to hold the world. the word curious has it’s roots the latin words cura meaning care, and curiosus meaning careful. we need to notice to care well. ask questions and receive the answers without judgment.
mercury is clearest in moments that make visible the fact that we are always engaged in a complex choreography. there’s a tendency to shy away from breakdowns in communication, but these breaks are an invitation to try something new. i think thats why mercury is often characterized as a being that can traverse both the underworld and our world. and why the messenger is often seen as the trickster. tricksters are beings that confuse binaries. i feel that energy most in the moments that i fail gender. there is a pause, then a scramble to figure out how to reroute the conversation. as i grow more comfortable in those breaks, i’ve come to realize that knowing what to say or do is often a balm. a way to soothe when life bites back. always knowing what to be obscures the precarity of late capitalism lifeways. normative gender offers us a chance to perform stability–a chance to play normal. to travel to new worlds requires a trickster spirit, but like mercury, that also comes with the baggage of being misunderstood.
in The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism, Sylvia Wynter opens by recontextualizing the renaissance, more specifically the secular studia humanitatis (study of humanities), as an act of heresy. she asserts that within the christian medieval world, “The rewriting of knowledge of the Studia was therefore a counter-writing to the order of knowledge of the clergy, the new knowledge in whose context a new template of Identity, that of Natural Man, was being brought into existence in the new narrative representations of Renaissance Europe.” of course time forces all ideas that were once revolutionary to appear banal, but like Wynter, i am curious about what comes after humanism. we are in need of new orders of knowledge, and the process of creating and enacting these new knowledges requires us to be heretics ourselves. this world we are trying to build won’t make sense to everyone. mercury understands what it is like to be misunderstood. there is a kind of vulnerability that comes with mercury.
i think a lot about the new world we have to build, and how daunting the task is. especially as we are bombarded with the reports about how little time we have. anyone can envision a perfect world. having a dream… that’s the easy part. forging a reality from those dreams requires the energy of a collective. making worlds is communal. we live in a world that pushes us to streamline everything in the pursuit of frictionless consumption and hyper efficiency. it’s really not a surprise that collectives are harder and harder to come by. like mercury, communities are created through friction, and creating and maintaining deep relationships with others are hardly efficient. friction is possibility, and those moments, while painful, open up into so much more. because things are awkward until they aren’t.
i don’t think we can talk about making things without talking about power, and how power determines the things we make and the ways we are allowed to make things. some words are not sanctioned. some words just don’t exist yet. some words are stolen and transformed to once again reinforce power.
to make anything, we have to court failure. we need to be open to the reality that most everything is temporary. including solutions. there will always be people left disappointed or unserved by something we created. the point of making things isn’t about achieving perfection. or coming up with the best solution. the point of making things is to create greater conditions of possibility for more and more people.
i struggle a lot with making things because to make something is to give up potential. to create is to be comfortable with missing out–being incomplete. i can neither be everything, nor do everything on my own. shutting the door to potential is terrifying under capitalism because everything is so individualized. living in the realm of endless potential allows me to hoard ideas—to feel as though i’m always ahead of the curve. a disruptor.
creation necessarily invites risk. as someone entangled in a world run by capitalist market logics, where risk is to be avoided at all cost, creating can feel existentially threatening. living in the so called united states doesn’t help, the stakes really are as high as life and death for many of us. birthing a new world is messy and hard.
creating a new world is a matter of insistence. it is the repetitive, often mundane act of willing something new into existence using the materials around us. it is tending to growing crops—weeding, fertilizing, and waiting.
the thing with mercury and making things is that mercury can be about symbols, but it can also be about the process of using those symbols to make and unmake the world and ourselves.