Proxima Arcanum
The other night, I went to my first Proxima Arcanum at Current Space because literary wizard K.C. Mead-Brewer posted about reading there on Bluesky, which is a website I’ve described as “a psych ward for democrats and not-quite-leftist libs” because it is. At the risk of this post becoming a Mead-Brewer write-up, I’ll just say when she read her excerpt, I leaned over to my entomologist roommate and whispered, “That’s my favorite sci-fi writer,” which made him nod fervently, eyes wide.
This is not a Mead-Brewer write-up, but credit where credit’s due. I would not have gone to Proxima Arcanum without seeing that flyer on that miserable little website. I would not have walked to The House Handcrafted’s table. I was already wearing my “I <3 Hot Dads” t-shirt, which I’d forgotten to change out of, and which caused Amanda, of The House, to enter into a Very Baltimore conversation with me about how they feel spiritually aligned with my shirt, despite being queer.
I told Amanda plenty of no-men-allowed queer people could love Hot Dads. That lesbians in my life often express a desire, when they see the likes of, I don’t know, David Harbour with a gut, to place the bear or bear-adjacent fellow in a cardboard box and shake it really hard. Or, like, a terrarium. Sometimes love looks a lot like bug hunting. It doesn’t always mean you lay down with the specimen.
But I digress. While I was at Amanda’s table, I reached for a crate of handmade… things. Like notebooks, sketchbooks, but charged, somehow. They noticed me looking and smiled.
“Those are my grimoires,” they said. “They’re made of salvaged material. So, garbage. But I cleanse them each individually and charge them under the moonlight. They’re full of moon energy.”
I have a weird relationship with witchcraft. Who doesn’t? Over the past twenty years, I’ve seen things. Things you people wouldn’t believe. My hackles raise when I meet a twentysomething who identifies as a “high priestess,” yet has no elders to speak of (or to). There are tarot readers galore who spew bullshit and get paid for it, and there are mad psychics who never charge for their prophecies and live on the margins. The contingent of QTBIPOC (derogatory) I broke bread with in Ithaca and beyond had almost perfected the all-American art of snake oil salesmanship prior to Trump 2.0 and the attendant cull of all things “woke.” None of these people are bad people, by the way, nor do I wish them ill—quite the opposite—but many are human purveyors of vaporware and spam.
It’s really hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. You have to be intentional, lead with curiosity, and be kind. Take the “high priestess” I mentioned. Do I trust a word they say? Why or why not? What prejudices am I carrying that turn me against them, or make me more willing to engage with their wares? Are they selling ceremony (bad) or acting as a modern-day Apothecary (value neutral/good)? How much of my resentment is based in my own cultural loss? When I look at the grab-bag of religious and spiritual aesthetics people in my generation present, I am looking at my own exit wound at the exact same time. Where does my crabbiness end and my discernment begin?
Because Amanda scavenges their materials, their wares appealed to my current obsession: reducing waste. I do it anywhere I can. I deGoogle my friends Androids for them. I load ZorinOS, a GNOME-based operating system on my friends’ dying Intel Macs (laptops and desktops both) and salivate over peoples’ Windows when they start to go on the fritz. I have too many well-made, stylish clothes, so I give them to people in need. Lately, though, I’ve been feeling really… I don’t know, spiritually bereft? So, I looked at The House, and I shared some wealth.
IsEverybodyGoingCrazy_NothingButThieves.mp3
Before the pandemic, I followed an ethnically ambiguous cisgender woman on Instagram who talked about witchcraft in a way that resonated with me, kind of. She had the flippant, lived-in attitude I found myself cultivating, was trans inclusive, and tech-forward in the way I was back then. Get this: I fantasized about our impressive technological innovations being used for good. Like, plant the seed of the divine in the world wide web, post when the spirit moves you, code a program that can figure out if you have cancer before your doctor does kind of good.
I shelled out fourteen American dollars to this woman for a spellbook I’m sure I still have lying around somewhere, but partway through, something put me off. I’m really not sure what it was, I’m not paranoid enough for that level of pattern recognition, but these days, she finds herself on the business end of the Overly Online Leftists’ collective blunderbuss. Sometimes it’s for her carceral attitudes, or biological essentialism. Other times it’s because she’s gone the way of many flip, too-cool for school witches, slipped down the rabbit hole of the New Right. Whatever the case may be, I look back on her career with a sense of caution, not superiority.
I wonder if I could be that.
No, you say. Surely not. Maybe you’re a friend of mine I’ve stayed up late with who’s seen me at my most baffled, the overhead light burning into my tired eyes. Maybe we’ve never met, but you can just “tell” I’m Better Than That, I’m Smarter and More Intentional and whatever else you want to imagine we are.
Aye, there’s the rub.
We always think we’re better, stronger, smarter. It’s a big part of How We Got Here. There are people I love more than anything in the world—family—who will look me in the eyes and say the most demonstrably untrue, conspiracy theorist, frighteningly confident statement I’ve ever heard, and I have to smile and bite every political alliance I’ve ever forged, keep it all behind my tongue, because that’s my family. That’s my family, and maybe they know something I don’t. Maybe everyone knows something I don’t.
Then again, maybe we’re all pitching headlong into spiritual psychosis, both collectively and hyper-individually. Maybe the algorithm has already won, turned everyone into a cult unto themselves.
The big if
When I was a young girl, I’d lay in the fenced backyard behind our tooth-shaped house and listen to the angels blare their horns. Strange words entered my mind freely: I remember an insect whispered to me, “Baby Doc is dead,” one unseasonably warm October day, to which I said, “Who is that?” Only to get a copy of The Week a few days later explaining who he was, what he’d done, and yes, he was gone.
The whole world spoke to me like this. Riddles were for fairy tales. My spirits beat me over the head with their literalism. “If you don’t do your homework, you’ll be fine,” one said. “Your teacher is calling in sick tomorrow. But get to it. You can’t keep living like this.”
I wandered our unkempt garden a modern-day, socially awkward Cassandra, only my prophecies had little use-case outside of proving to me I wasn’t crazy enough to be crazy. If we hadn’t been colonized, maybe I’d have been cherished. But we were, so I wasn’t.
Looking back on my spooky childhood soothes my concerns about becoming a grifter. Those relationships, those stories, whether “true” or “false,” shaped me, and have no capitalist worth. I cannot profit off of the words of a beetle or the gentle chastisement of someone I can’t see. Neither, crucially, can you.
What do you remember?
As I write this, my boyfriend sits across the table working on his lesson plan for tomorrow. He’s a high school science teacher. Whatever he’s working on has to do with meteors. I’m in the middle of feeling sorry for myself, brow furrowed, thinking where to go from here, what to say, what to do, when he asks, “What, um, what are the stories of spiritual or, or cultural significance around meteors for the Ojibwe?”
I wrack my brain. The only thing that comes up when I trawl my memories for the meteor stories is an essay by Bezhigobinesikwe Elaine Fleming, a professor at Leech Lake Tribal College. Absolutely not what he’s asking after, but worth the read regardless. I tell him, “You know, ironically, you’re asking me this while I’m writing a blog post about my own cultural loss.”
I mean, if you really think about it, isn’t this whole archive just one long apocalyptic log by someone who’s losing touch with his culture? Ever since I started it, what moves me to post here is seldom triumph, but uncertainty. I’m so far from who I was twenty years ago, when my mother brought me along to Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College so I could keep learning Ojibwemowin after I’d aged out of Waadookodaading. Farther still from the baby who once spoke exclusively in the language to their auntie Donna. Yet I am the same person. The same body, stretched, warped, altered.
Lately, I’ve been saying to myself I need to pray more. I need to do better. I need to try harder. Do this, do that. Where does all the time go? I’m a full time college student and full time writer. I’ve lost my sense of ritual, of obligation, and the overculture encourages this. You owe no one nothing, our nation says. You are a god unto yourself.
Whenever I feel the urge to “be more spiritual,” whatever that means, I almost immediately tense up, because I feel watched. Part of this is my own fault: I am a Keahna and a Uran living in the shattered remnants of another tribe’s land. It gets lonely. But part of this is due to the fact that the internet is no longer a private, inside thing, but the very atmosphere we navigate. I could be being watched. I could be filming myself like so many other spiritual beings do. I could pimp out my culture and be lauded for it. All this (gesturing to my poverty, my unsuccessful attempts at getting in with the cool kids) could go away, if only I pick up that god damn camera and…
And what? Tell TikTok about my trauma? Sell my dreams?
As if.
Faith and—
Anne Lamott once said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
It is certainty that leads those among us to make wild declarations. To entrench themselves in absolutes, to imagine vaccines as demonic entities and women as succubi, to logic themselves into anything, to stand at the top of a hill and cast a thousand stones outward, scattershot. It stands to reason that my insecure acknowledgment of my own lack might be just what this moment needs. And this one. And this one.
Awhile ago, my younger sibling converted to Christianity. We were raised largely the same. In our culture, on our land. Christianity came to our people through disease, violence, child abuse, and murder. Despite its cruel origins, the many denominations it birthed in our hometown have taken up their own mantles of justice: environmental, tribal. Like a father who’s beaten his son to the point of death only to have a change of heart before the killing blow, if I wanna be edgy with it. Or, more realistically, like the descendants of a hungry god who find themselves sated and guilt-stricken. Who want to share all they’ve taken now they’re fed. My sibling’s church is not ignorant to this bloody inheritance. They admit their past and fight for a better future.
Here I’ll pause. Remember when I said Bluesky is like a psych ward? What I meant by that is that there are those among my peers who deal in absolutes. Who might read my explanation of the church and go, well, it was bad once, which means it’s bad forever. Never mind the church as a locus for community organizing. Never mind how many sermons have brought us both the left and the right as we know them. No, I imagine there are those in my company who bristle at the complexities. Who, in a permanently adolescent rage, demand purity of their narratives, whatever that looks like. Burn down every church, they say. Prayers don’t work. Praying isn’t enough. But the more I walk alongside my doubt, the less I fear the backlash of those who speak from an infected wound. These chronically online leftists are too hurt to meaningfully hurt me, so their echoes fade from memory by the end of this paragraph.
Lip service
I used to be one of those people who derided “thoughts and prayers” as inadequate. If you really cared, I’d say, you’d kill a billionaire or blow up a data center.
Then I actually started praying.
Have you ever thrown a punch and prayed it would land?
What about for someone? Have you ever prayed for someone?
Prayer doesn’t have to be lip service. If you do it enough, you start to notice things differently. You look at people and places differently. For me, prayer is both a precursor to action, a reminder of my place in this immense world, and an exercise in compassion for those I am encouraged to forget. My prayer often aligns with my sibling’s, and I’m grateful whenever I get to be around their faith, not least because it strengthens my own. To pray, in my experience, is to be an active participant in a broader story.
Witchcraft is prayer. It’s just prayer with extra steps.
More on this later. I have to go to Franklin Park to meet with a friend of mine, Grant Conversano. I’ll talk to you soon.
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