“With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my litter mates who find a rich wallow in multi-species muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters.
I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking. My first familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, near where I live in North Central California.
Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something. This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes.
The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many. I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be: the Chthulucene.
I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler,” and tentare, meaning “to feel” and “to try”; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.”
Words from her daughter’s anthropology homework. Chthulucene. How apt. How dryly, how sardonically, and how evilly right.
(with Kora Vee)
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