Almost Home: The 17-Year Swarm Cycle’s Orgiastic Frequencies
How South Park Offers Us the Fertility of Apocalypse
The dog in Clarice Lispector’s Almost True asks the reader: “Can I bark out a story that seems almost like make-believe and almost true? It’s only true in the world of someone who likes to invent things, like you and me.”
How can we collectively illuminate a call-and-response between imagination and recognition, anxiety and beauty: anxiety in the moment of recognizing the familiar within the unfamiliar (the other seen as grotesque); beauty in the moment of responsiveness to our undeniable connectedness (the fertility of uncanny congruencies). Lispector probes this psyche-somatic (dis)integrity. Like Lispector, I ask: what must I do “to become sufficiently self-estranged?” (Lispector cited in Hélène Cixous Coming to Writing:142). I, too. embrace anxiety as the offspring of the ever fertile uncanny.
As we compost binaries, we invite the uncanny to birth a collaboration with oneself, a collaboration that challenges the tyranny of modernity, subverting the violence of reductive, dualistic thinking that potentially leads to violent action.
Paralleling Kristeva’s definition of the abject as an uncanny disturbance of refusing binary codes (such as margin / center, complete / incomplete, composition / decomposition, ego / other, inside / outside, the familiar / unfamiliar), my photographs, written work, parenting, and economic-cultural navigation highlight queer ecologies-coalitionality-interconnectivity—the private as it seeps into the public. We are the fertile stranger—HA! Watch out cicada multipliers....
Surfacing from my three-month book/ eco-justice performance tour of 21 events in 14 cities, I land in an orgiastic forest of Western North Carolina—the cicadas’ voices sound comical in their deafening collective frequency.
I am staying in the cottage of the deeply compassionate death midwife Katherine Savage—supporting her as I witness Katherine’s struggle with the local evangelistic Christians' influence on Republican party politics.
As a reaction to her work with families whose loved ones are in the process of dying or who have died, the local Republican party leadership has documented in a dossier that they believe her to be the coven mother of a demonic death cult. This is reminiscent of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a Christian-supremacist movement whose agenda focuses on spiritual warfare and exorcism.
Rather than accepting our socialized fear of death and denial of its inevitability, Katherine guides the families she cares for to cherish and honor the process of dying and death by supporting them in the skills of vigiling with their loved one and providing a wake after death. Her passion and sense of peace with death becomes a threat to those who fear our inherent bodily and spiritual empowerment. Particularly during this Year of the Snake, this year of shedding and transformation, as Katherine’s ally, I share what I am learning about the infamous remarkably misunderstood Lilith. See Lilith Refuses the Anthropocene: What My Mother Taught Me, (Two Jews-one Biblical, one Sephardic, a Buddhist Monk, a New York Shaman, and a Quaker Abolitionist Hunchback “Little Person” walk into a bar…).
In reference to the sinister harassment she is attempting to deflect, Katherine writes:
“People with whom I've spoken to understand why my work has been labeled demonic suspect this is the local version of the intersection of white Christian nationalism and Project 2025. From conversations with local Christian ministers, I've learned that the evangelical concern comes not so much from fear of death, but from a belief that death doulas and midwives are interfering with God's sovereignty in determining when death comes. The truth is ignored to justify their agenda. Bringing more peace and comfort to people who are dying and their families is not witchcraft, but a way of offering mercy, justice, and kindness. It is my version of Jesus' commandment to love. Evangelicals fear that death doulas might promote or participate in rituals or beliefs that they consider to be outside mainstream Christian doctrine. Where you and I find others' ways of being human to evoke our curiosity, they view it as incompatibility that must be stamped out.”
Katherine is emphatic about nuance as she considers how evangelical Christians determine what they consider evil. She frames their fear of difference in a sense of love of multiplicity—welcoming the white-eyed cicada, not lacking, just a different way of “being cicada.”
Less than a month prior to my introduction to the violent operations of NAR, I find myself on Easter Sunday at the multicultural, New Life Fellowship in Elmhurst, Queens, New York. I am visiting Darian Stansbury, my friend and filmmaker. Darian’s film, “The History of Women,” features my son Zazu’s birth, our glorious two-in-one placenta-a Succenturiate lobe, and our long-term breastfeeding. Darian’s cinematic weaving still stuns me over a decade later.
Flanking the choir and extensive musicians on stage are stone wall carvings (that look like Aztec reliefs—perhaps Coyolxauhqui or Tlaltecuhtli's dismembered body)—topped by two large projection screens. Among the church rhythms is the chorus: “DEAD THINGS COME ALIVE!” “DEAD THINGS COME ALIVE!” As the parishioners extol the resurrection of their savior, I am taken by the synergy of their faith interwoven with why I am in NYC in the first place—part of my Living Ecological Ethics performance and book tour.
At first, I didn’t understand the corresponding videos that projected a bird’s eye view of the city scape and endless streams of highways and traffic during the closed caption “DEAD THINGS COME ALIVE!” chorus. I still don’t get the relationship from a Christian perspective, but from a supply-chain awareness orientation—“DEAD THINGS COME ALIVE!” so passionately repeated over and over by a swarm of devotees in conjunction with sweeping, replicated images of the wastes of industrial-civilization car culture, is absolutely perfect. The passion of their collective exaltation is riveting. Swaying with the others in our make-shift pews, I take notes and belt out what feels to me like a social permaculture call-to-action. Since so much of my life’s everything is how to embody supply-chain consciousness, how to individually and collectively reanimate what we consider dead: useless, waste; how to set up and maintain long-term infrastructures that support radical reclamation, reuse, repurposing (see S.O.U.L. (Shared Opportunity Used Local) Commons, the free store Wild and I began two years ago that supports mutual aid relationships and gift economies), I feel carried away by the potential of intersectional, communal revolution: eco-spirituality in full momentum.
At the same time, I find it mildly ironic that I am in this room among these devotees who welcome me, “welcome the stranger,” when as a child in Dripping Springs I was physically and emotionally violated as the Enemy of Christian Faith.
Children in my 4th grade class in rural Texas searched through my big curly hair looking for horns, assuming that as a Jesus-killer I am of Satan; the kids in the school cafeteria would go into vomit-mimicking hysterics because they saw my yaprakas and even bagels as dog biscuits, my colorful clothes and elaborate jewelry as Gypsy-like and gaudy—my voice, gestures, opinions were too big, completely out of place.
My Texas school mates encountered my Jewish otherness as danger and as a dreaded reflection of the abject.
My mother and I were clearly displaced, seen as foreigners—trespassing on U.S. territory. This was my first embodied understanding of the relationship between individual experience and greater whole, the vulnerability of my “ethnic” body and the vulnerability of my “natural” environment, the private and the public, microcosmic interactions reflecting macrocosmic interconnections. I quickly learned both the extraordinary danger and potential vitality of difference–the lived intersection between cultural diversity and biodiversity.
Within the realm of dying and rebirth, the fabric of shedding skins and even entire bodies, the rich, dark mulch of composting pain and habit, I also must share how the very children who in 4th grade had desperately fought me to the ground, by 5th grade had transformed—I shed my alleged diabolical horns, the kids learned that I was not only truly human, but one of their new best friends. They welcomed me into their circles where we belted out Joan Jett and the J Giels Band (although they asked my mother: “Does she dance like that because she’s Jewish?”).
I am reminded of so many Truth & Reconciliation gatherings that help overcome fear that divide-and-conquer ideologies breed. Rather than blaming and shaming, and rather than us versus them, we recognize how “we” are “them.” We are the stranger.
And we recognize death as life: Trickster interplays between life and death, the precipitous twists & turns continue as (Katherine reminds me) we witness abdomenless “cicadas” infected by the Cordyceps fungus. We hover with the almost, the simulacra, the both/ and of predator / preserver….
Through image making and vocalizing these paradoxical intimacies have been my life-passion work for over 45 years.
Please contact me if you would like to read my reflections on Avital Ronell’s (a dear friend) writings on friendship and disidentification through the lens of both Nietzsche and Derrida.
And now as my death-midwife friend struggles to protect herself physically and emotionally from NAR while maintaining her life-passion community integrity, “DEAD THINGS are COMing ALIVE!” all around us…
Thousands of waves of emptied bodies clutch the blossoming mountain laurel surrounding Katherine’s Celo Community home.
Perhaps referring to Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Katherine suggests we “stay in the non-dual OMMMM of the cicada emergence, with the long-term view of their primary life in the darkness.” Again, a call to Lilith.
She offers her perspective on cicada-emergence teachings: “For 17 years, they've been suckling on tree roots (not dead - just morphed), waiting for their turn in the sun…They all surface at once, across the same evening. A multitude emerging from the ground and heading up the trees to shed their exoskeleton.
Then once their wings had hardened to make flight possible, they began to mate and sing Ommmmmm….
They concluded their time here Solstice weekend. Their bodies still litter the ground alongside their exoskeletons—only recently shed…their bright orange has turned black. Alongside their death are their flight wings sparkling with the morning dew.
I'm training my community to do what I've been taught to do, so that they each have the power to give Death its rightful place in the cycle. Death can now feed future life with its generativity. With every death we tend, we are suckling on tree roots.”
Katherine then shares images of the cicadas' mass death.
We are inundated with the glorious formlessness of Life-Death-Life (song followed by sex, then more death, followed by more life) with no beginning, no end. Simultaneity saturates our senses. No distinction between life and death. Neti…Neti… (in Sanskrit, meaning Neither This, Nor That). The vibrational lure of the cicadas’ collective song exalts: “DEAD THINGS COME ALIVE!” We (the cicadas, Katherine’s death-life-voice vulnerability, my Sephardic heritage) embody the both/and. Given our histories of longing for home (implicit in the concept of Sefarad)—as immigrants adapting to new host nations—the Sephardic body represents home in flux. Kuándo una puerta sérra syen avren, “When one door closes, one hundred open.”
We represent la’am: (simultaneously yes and no in Hebrew and Arabic), the interplay among multiple ambiguities. Sephardic spiritual healing practices are vital examples of a seemingly outrageous, but in fact delicate balance of contradictions—cultivating life from death. As in Nature, there is no waste. Representing the both/and, the la’am, the Sephardic body, the Jewish body repudiates the tyranny of certainty through microcosmic-macrocosmic interplay. When asked his religion, Albert Einstein replied: “I am Mosaic.”
It is time for the 9th grade Quaker graduation with Zazu’s community. I walk through the forest pulsating with life in conversation with death. Overcome by the swarm of voice, desire, demand, I swoon.
Because Home remains too far away, mid-graduation celebrations, I shave my past-shoulder-length ringlets down to my skull. The first four times I did this, in my 20s, 30s, and 40s, shedding that luxurious, thick, heavy “female”-defining hair; chopping off thick curly braids and shaving my head to my scalp offered exposure as “liberation”—vulnerability as strength (I wrote my doctoral dissertation on reappropriating multiple manifestations of vulnerability). Here is one video of my second big shave: Hair Beach Eat and a variety of stills from several self-portrait and collaborative videos.
However, now in my almost-mid-50s, chopping off my heavy locks and shaving my head to my scalp—as a response to carnal-spiritual communal voice of the cicadas, the shedding of snake (in the spirit of Lilith), and part of my multipronged commitment to Embodying the Apocalypse—embodying what I urgently feel must be revealed—has been a surprisingly different exercise in exposure-as-futility, exposure-as-impotency, exposure-as-surrender (or resignation?). I feel too vulnerable. Suddenly, too naked. The swarming contradictions are too blunt.
Would Lispector witness this as one version of being “sufficiently self-estranged”?
When I have written about my past meanderings with cicadas and their cycles, I have encountered editors who correct my “faulty” time references, warning me of time travel as a potential source of confusion to my linear-adapted/ linear-habituated readers. However, relevancy warps linear time. Given my devotional compulsion to inhabiting nonlinear time, multiple colliding time zones of relationality, I will share with you some of my other cicada immersions—not necessarily in the time frame of every 17 years, but in the deep time implication of embodying that dizzying vibration of mutual voice—a radical symbiosis.
As George Clooney, starring (as well as writer and producer) in the Broadway production of Edward R. Murrow’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” on June 8, reminds the audience of Cassius (one of the conspirators who assassinated Cesar): “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…” Yes-a radical symbiosis. P.S. This production of Edward R. Murrow’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” was the first time in history a Broadway play was broadcast live on a television network—an international broadcast protest as well as the highest grossing play in Broadway history. See “Confusion as a State of Grace: Climate and Kinship in 2021- The Shame Sham ~’Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,’" my article that distinguishes between submitting to fraudulent, corporate guilt tactics that blame and shame the individual and acknowledging the power in collective-creative risk taking.
Westchester County. My first color photographs: Having grown up (mostly) in the mountains of Colorado, the first time I encounter cicadas is through the lens of my camera. As I shared in a previous Substack an excerpt from Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-Scene, in 1990 or ‘91 as a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College studying with Joel Sternfeld, I began photographing in the forests of Westchester County where I found tree trunks covered by cicada nymph exoskeletons. These silent bodies initially led me to my photography practice—"crawling" into and out of my models' mouths along with lush fruit and latex gloves...strangulating and soaring…
Cicada excerpt from Bloodlines, my Korea Stories, a letter I wrote to my Korean half-brother,
Dear Saan,
They say it is the hottest day in Seoul in 100 years: I don't think our skin knows what is coming and going—lying in bed listening to the different voices of the rain—sometimes fast—landed and disappeared (like the way I tend to use language—at least in the states. Here my communication patterns have been dramatically revamped—although me saying, "I don't drink coffee" is heard as "erotic coffee" because I realize that I don't leave any space between words when I speak) and sometimes heavy and slow and without urgency (like the way my dad lectures to his art history students). I have been hearing these rain voices all simultaneously—almost as though they are singing in rounds—palimpsests of sound. Seoul oozes the sound of heat. When it is not raining (drenching swelter quickly replaces the drenching monsoons), plump cicadas, the size of juicy heirloom tomatoes, create a new labyrinth of sound. Walking among the escalating vibrations of the cicadas' electric volume feels like I am violently being pulled through a wind tunnel. Their song exhilarates me. The other nocturnal beasts, besides the rampant South Korean consumers, are the howling cats. Middle-of-the-night material coveter, water and cat—wet and loud. If there are ten million people living in Seoul and each person is 70% water, then because of the outrageous humidity, we are excreting more moisture than the monsoons are producing. And the endless styles of pointy high heels and mini thigh highs don't stop—no matter how slippery-with-sweat every surface is. Evaporation refuses its innate chemical process. Cicada voice is now found on the Periodic Table.
Some highway scorching the US.
Covid-19 social-regulation controls are lifting. Wild, Zazu, Mac and I are traveling in our Love Bus (having left Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina—mid-plandemic—across the country to help friends evacuate from the fires devastating California and Oregon—Ecological Justice Border Crossings ~ Part 2 ~ When the Cure Becomes the Disease: Climate Crisis Inflammation). We are now heading North to visit my mom and stepfather. At a rest stop teeming with squirming, molting cicadas and their eerie precariously perched exoskeletons, Zazu (nine-years old at this time) is stunned to see a truck loaded with tires larger than our home. Out of the blue, he starts talking about advertising—as if he was confirming something to himself: "Advertising isn't true. If you have to sell something you have to advertise. If you have to advertise, you have to exaggerate. Whether you are selling mac & cheese or gargantuan tires." I respond: "Yeah, and we need to find out where exaggeration ends and truth begins..." Again, I hear the voice of Edward R. Murrow.
In the midst of megatires and cicada-seventeen-year cycle (or perhaps another time fold), Zazu's reflections on advertising demonstrate an ecoliterate mindset, body consciousness: the inspiration to draw unexpected connections as we make sense of our everyday lives. Zazu is unraveling how we deceive ourselves—rendering our obsessive consumption of everything from commercials and freeways to food, computers, and fast fashion clothing to appear to make sense, to appear natural, inevitable, and incontestable. He distinguishes between want and need (during this particular moment, at least). Although the transportation of megatires from state to state (in megavehicles that have replaced the railroad system—another relentlessly contradictory, ob-scene—both totally perverse and off stage— history) appears to be equally as 'real' as the cicadas and their exquisitely gently clinging exoskeletons, my son is learning to not only decipher the differences among what we regard as normal, he is evolving an ecoliterate wisdom that challenges how consumption-dehumanization is bound to accelerated suffering of all life. No longer deluded by technotopic “solutions,” we will collectively fulfill our humanity. Like the cicada’s shedding their former bodies and Katherine offering beauty and solace to families in flux, we will revel in as we reveal (echoing the Apocalypse) the conversation among birth, life, and death.
Or almost…
Newly shorn in my 50s, back in North Carolina at the end of my climate justice performance book tour: In my head, so it feels, I sense a Hell-born cry. Someone, something being scalped, flayed, methodically dismembered. Not shrill, but a deep-earth agony. Since my own brazen scalp faces the sky—the sun beating down directly on my head, my hair no longer there to protect me—the lament enters directly into me, becomes me. Out of the corner of my eye (my grandfather, Papoo, was one of seven out of nine siblings who fell to retinitis pigmentosa in which loss of peripheral vision slowly encroaches toward the center until total blindness takes over), I catch sight of those red protruding eyes,
its sticky feet remorselessly adhering to my shoulder skin (penetrating beyond the tentacles of my octopus tattoo). In contrast with the collective voice that had instantly lured me into its orgasmic sway, this cicada’s individual, isolated voice is sorrow full, dread full. How is it that their/ our individual voice is radically different from the collective? This question torments me day and night. Even writing these words, words of the illusion of separation feeding the reality of separation, I feel the urge to wail, to invoke my ancestral ululations, to exult as I dwell within flamenco, gypsy-Romani soul-spun anguish.
Instead, I write.
Both for my Fostering Collective Liberation and Socioenvironmental Justice: Co-Creation Across Contexts, ASLE Panel and individual presentation: Con-Spiration: The Joyous Imperative of Community, next month with the Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment we will continue our meanderings as we crabwalk (in the path of my brother-collaborator Bayo Akomolafé, also in awe of Cordyceps fungus) around home and homelessness, Homi Bhabha’s the beyond—reanimating the potential of interrelational vitality.
And perhaps through the whimsical frenzy of the cicada, our crabwalk, sidestepping can help us re-member South Park’s Kenny McCormick. Kenny, donning an orange parka that muffles his speech since it covers most of his face, dies gruesome, “comical” deaths each South Park episode and returns alive yet again the next episode.
For now, in the tradition of Claude Cahun—Surrealist, Anti-Nazi, Anti-Fascist, Queer, Cross-Disciplinary Artist, I continue to find exhilarating connections, writing and living about the Apocalypse as a collective commitment in so many surprising contexts! For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to read my “Apocalypse of the Familiar: Can Awareness Break the Spell?” in Communities Magazine, Communities #207, Summer 2025, for a limited time, the entire issue can be viewed or downloaded for free here.
From the editor: “The issue explores ways that communitarians are challenging and finding alternatives to thought patterns, lifeways, and habits of relating that keep us from realizing our cooperative potential and risk sleepwalking us off of metaphorical cliffs. Two reflections on Hurricane Helene unveil some of the storm’s many lessons; stories profile intentional communities that serve the wider world and act as agents of change as they question car culture, dwelling size and style, and ecophobia; authors examine how the dominant society impacts cooperative efforts, as well as groups’ power (sometimes embraced, sometimes not) to engage in solidarity work, racial equity work, and cultural reinvention; articles look at how to navigate polarization, channel fear usefully, and prepare effectively for a post-collapse economy. Friends, family, colleagues, and students also remember Laird Schaub, whose contributions to the Communities’ movement involved confronting many illusions and misconceptions head-on and empowering others to do the same. Please check out this new issue!”
As always, I’d love to hear from you: yoga@carajudea.com