Excuse my lack of words, my lack of sentences, my lack of written word…
Sometimes it is much needed in order for other voices to be heard.
This has been a reality check, a violent and destructive kind.
My brain has been eclipsed. She got hit by ten million dollar missiles. She got poisoned by religion’s stories and their event horizons. She sank in the bottom of a sea. She froze to death on the top of a mountain. She starved. She got showered by meteors and turned into molten lava. She burned, turned into ashes and dust… which is not important or significant at all, considering all the things happening in the world and our warming planet. I am rather insignificant so is my little brain, so are our little brains. Mind us, mind us not, but this is how the patriarchy gets us out. The recurring deaths and the loop of misfortune. If only, somehow deep imagination and wild creativity mattered and participated more in the making of the world. It seems power matters, rich matters, and also crowded and noisy can make themselves matter to a certain degree, in this human world. And they make sure neither them nor their eclipse can be ignored.
And there seems to be always an eclipse-like event, something that is so ready and so excited, something that is so entitled to obscure the light and the life of particularly wild beings, others, women who do not have much other than their imagination and creativity. Today is the birthday of my late cousin who passed away many years ago.1 She would have been forty eight today if she had been alive. Sometimes, I wonder how her life would have been and how mine would have turned out to be with her in it. She was the most vibrant being I knew back then and she was also perhaps the only (older) person other than my mother who believed in me, rooted for me and made me feel it… I loved and respected her, I still do, even though there was a lot of discord between our families. Sibel died three years after my mother, her aunt when she was thirty two years old. Her death marked all who knew her in its own way. I thought to myself then: Nothing truly nurturing, beautiful, radiant, creative survives here. This place organises itself to suck the life out of them. Happy Birthday, Sibel. My dead yet sometimes most alive human cousin relationship…
"The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
The written word tend to imprison my mind when the shapes tend to liberate her. Call it my forever-trouble with concretised stories and imaginations but when I am unwell, when I am troubled, shapes and images heal me. I cannot say the same for the words. Unless they are truly alive, truly wild and magical, they harm more. Rather odd for someone who has been trying to pen wild stories for fifteen years. Imagine why I could not.
I am drawing. Twenty Twenty Three started with colourful watercolour worms and earthquakes, ended with black ink worms and human-quakes. Worms are small and “insignificant.” They are more beneficial to their planet than many significant and big people. Worms live on zero euros. They do not earn. They do not spend. As worms, they get to have no budget. I am small and quite insignificant also. Yet I am a human, I do have a budget, no matter how small. It is about a couple of hundred Euros a month. Life has gotten very expensive and if I had not had a roof above my head I would be quite below the poverty threshold, right now I am dancing around it. I ask myself often, are some “tasks”, some responsibilities I try to shoulder way above my human, my place, my capacity, my means, my pay check…? Yes, they are.
I am drawing worms, I am swimming, I am repairing my brain and I am imagining to weave, evolve, re-invent new brains with worms. We all need a web of relationships, ecosystems and in some places they are harder to find. Worms are close to me. I have a tiny bit of soil in my balcony that is swarming with earthworms. Sometimes one crawls on my hand and I watch and feel. It is a beautiful sensation, a magical encounter. And apparently they know how to make brains.
Well, this is how the story goes… about six hundred million years ago, worms were inventing the first brains. So far, it seems they are the brain-inventors of our planet.
Once upon an imagination, worms were living in the waters of the Earth, wiggling, dreaming with liquid and creating the primal brains. Possibly in relationship to many other beings that we do not know or grasp yet… The imagination of marine worms, an hermaphrodite invertebrate, giving birth to the first brains is quite inspiring, mind-blowing on its own. Worms did not make baby worms inside them, they laid eggs to reproduce but they have made brains inside their bodies instead and they gave birth to the ancestors of our lovely brains. This first brain probably then consisted of a group of densely packed cells that received and processed very basic information about food and the environment which also deepened their relationship with their surroundings. Worm brains released hormones into the blood, integrated senses to the living experience, learned from sensory input, transformed it into motor input so they coordinated and oriented movements. The last ancestor we shared with worms roamed the seas around 700-600 million years ago. This is how we know the approximate timeframe. And we can still find these primal brains in modern worms, leeches and tardigrades.
“The worms 700 million years ago were acting in a way to bring forth the first brains. They didn’t know it. So in other words they were participating in the way in which the universe brings forth beauty and structure.” Brian Swimme
Now, brains are about 600-700 million years old. Brains have been on this planet for millions of years. Imagine processing an entire planet through diverse beings for that long… It is quite trippy. It is hard to wrap our minds around and we should not. Brain-making is an enchanted journey that we can track through many wild lineages. Now, our brains have about 80-100 billion neurons. Our Milky Way galaxy has about 100 million stars or much more. We as a species have become the brain, the head of our planet. What we do, affects not only ourselves but our entire planet and even beyond… We can choose to actively and consciously participate to the reinvention of our brains and make them become more planetary, or we may stay unchanged, burned, eclipsed, poisoned, starved… We are all tiny and insignificant. We are all full of wonders. Together we can participate in creating something we can all be proud of to leave as our human legacy… Like Brian Swimme passionately, puts how the worms did not know what they were doing and we may not know what we are doing… we may be unable to put it in written words but we can still participate.
© Gizem Gizegen, 2024 Istanbul, ☉ Capricorn ☽ Scorpio
P.S. I have just realised… when I put down the Sun and the Moon’s zodiacal locations, today does not only bear mark of Sibel’s (my late cousin) Capricorn Sun but also her Scorpio Moon. Perhaps when a dead has both sun and moon returns their story may strongly inspire you to write about (and with) them…
The biggest storyteller stone, the biggest circle you see, top middle was finished on her death anniversary last November.
Worms invented brain 🤯 words are not always necessary to participate ❤️🔥 thank you 🙏