The Microbiology of Emotions
Tricksters are magician-teachers. Their job is to make fools out those who have grown stagnant and rigid so they may be shaken from their anaesthetized slumber. When patterns of fixity have crystalized in the body and mind, it is safe to assume a trickster is right around the corner, or rustling underground — placing potholes in the road to disturb the solidity of the everyday’s pavement. Such openings in the ground are the trickster’s attempt to play with the senses, teasing perception to slip out of its ordinary or mundane operating system, rupturing the belief that the world is indeed what it appears to be, or is as stable as it seems. Us two-leggeds seem to forget that trickster gods lurk in our psychotherapy clinics, yoga studios, coffee shops, and all other sites of production just as they hide in myths and legends.
When watching a magician, the audience very well knows something new is just beyond the horizon. You can sense it…something will soon appear so best to keep your eyes peeled. Anticipation fills the room, and everyone’s attention drifts to the yet-to-come. Scanning the background of experience for a sudden intrusion, deception, or a sleight of hand, the audience is rendered blind to the foreground which is currently being invaded by invisible actors and activisms. This shifty, wary gaze, is the eyes of modernity.
Modern society fixes itself upon the horizon, or the edge of experience where the present moment meets the future. Like a protruding phallic organ, the gaze reaches out to grab other moments in time to draw them closer. Modernity’s lens extends into time without time’s consent and its snapshot fixes time in space. These untrusting apertures who move by the force of fear are the same eyes of someone who has been wounded by the world. Wounded individuals have highly productive eyes. Frozen, incarcerated within the borders of the individual soma which is already a site of capitalist capture, moments and memories of emotions solidify in the matrix of the psyche.
The modification of the individual’s senses, the hyper-vigilance towards the next possible issue, and the perception of our reality are ordered around the yet-to-come. The vigilant eyes that scan for uncertainty are anticipating the next crash —Trauma is not simply where the meteor lands, it is the cultural assemblages that emerge post-impact. It is important to remember that culture is not an exclusively human phenomena. What bacterial communities rush to fill the void that is left behind after the initial shock?
There is an alchemy of emotions which exists on a very material and biological level, a level that is highly emergent in its earthliness, where there is no static state of being, only constant and dynamic becoming-with. Some trickster shit.
If we allocate emotions within possessive relationships, as in Luke “has” X feeling, then feeling becomes a property of the human. However, my having or doing or choosing is intertwined with Others having and doing and choosing me. I may eat, but by the powers of bacterial activisms in my gut, I am also always being eaten. If we (re)connect Luke back to leaves, to the grieving of a seed, to the migrations of clouds, the swirling of oceans, to geological movements, to architecture, we refuse to think of the self as an entity onto itself and we start to think of agency as a wider territoriality that reaches far beyond the isolated, dissociated individual and decontextualized trauma.
Who is to say that the swelling tides of queasy tension in my belly that accompany the missing of a loved one is not the die-off symptoms of gut bacteria that also loved and are enraged in loss? What if intergenerational trauma or epigenetic mutation is a biproduct of bacterial agencies that can pass on memory to their descendants? As Bayo Akomolafe describes, it is impossible to “tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade without naming the chemical inducements of sugar and the gut bacteria that fed on them” (2023, p.19). What does unethical farm labor do to the food, the soil, and the bacteria in the gut? This food and the bacteria that eats it sustain colonial means of production. Our soul’s wounding is thus not just interpersonal, intergenerational, or intrapsychic, it is paradigmatic.
The effort to gain control of the environment sends a message to the trickster to create more tension, which creates more cloudy perception, and pretty soon the human is completely disoriented and loses all clarity of time and space. “How long is this gonna last?” asks Caterpillar, who demands the discomfort of the present moment’s opacity come to a finality in which she can deem herself, “healed.” We cannot blame Caterpillar, though, she’s never changed form like this before. She thinks the chrysalis is a cage, that she is more alienated than ever. But in her withdrawal from the world she is not alone; the stowaway trickster travels with her.
Change and the pain it engenders or even craves intimacy with the world of Others, and it enlists other (kinds of) bodies. We cannot lose sight of our bodily entanglements, our belonging lives in our becoming-with-the-world. Mutual reciprocity and bodily co-regulation (which are the bedrock of feelings of safety) are not trapped in the sphere of the human. We must learn to dance with what Jack Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure”; an inability to remove cues of threat from our environment, an inability to “heal” to completion, to integrate, and to become whole, all of which continue to seek out other moments in time. The seeking out of time is precisely what freezes it.
We must learn to melt our anchors that have fish-hooked themselves in time, and soften our gaze that continuously reaches into the future as it is being anticipated. We do this with the fiery breath of compassionate feeling-with that brings one into intimate relationship with something that was once alien. Once unstuck, time is not even cyclical, it becomes sloshy. Picture the rings of a tree’s trunk that are the forest’s historian, marking yearly rainfall or drought. Allow your rings to melt and dissolve your unfinished business so all the temporally-bound nutrients may travel from roots to canopy.