By Anna Blaedel
(photo credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA.)
During this Pride month, I have been reading Tourmaline’s gorgeous new book, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. Tourmaline shares and celebrates Marsha’s life story, in all its “messy, infinite, beautiful glory.” It is a sacred offering.
Rumor has it, after Marsha threw the first brick at the 1969 Stonewall uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Factual or not, this image conjures something of Marsha’s spirit, and legacy. Rooting in the inseparability of fierceness and tenderness, defiance and joy, courage and care. It conjures, too, the spirit and legacy of Pride. Meeting brutality with ferocious love, and insistent beauty.
Poet Nikita Gill writes, “the rage you are feeling / comes from the same place / inside your heart as the love.” Poet Alok writes, “We fight for love because we know what it feels like to lose it.”
A beloved neighbor taught me a new word yesterday: brutiful. It made me weep, this honoring of the world’s brutality and beauty, both.
Last week, amidst the immense and escalating brutality we are witnessing, enduring, even complicit in – ICE raids, and armed, masked men kidnapping and disappearing beloveds. 30,000 pound bombs, dropped for bragging rights. Genocide excused, justified. The Supreme Court ban on life-giving care for trans folk. – a stunning blip of beauty emerged from a mountain in Cerro Pachón, Chile, at the edge of the Atacama Desert. The first photos from the Vera Rubin Observatory telescope.
Vera Rubin was one of the first astronomers to believe galaxies were rotating too fast to be held together by visible matter, or gravity, alone. They should fly apart. Rubin’s 1954 dissertation concluded that galaxies clump together, held by a large amount of something unseen – dark matter. Dark matter cannot be directly observed; we can only observe its influence. Dark matter, a mysterious substance that serves as cosmic connective tissue.
Vera Rubin initially denied, then granted only limited access, to an observatory to study; she was told her time must be limited, since they had no women’s restroom. She cut out a paper skirt and taped it to the stick figure image of a man on the bathroom door. Her ideas were considered controversial, and set aside for decades. Now, the Vera Rubin observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation, is facing a proposed congressional budget cut of 55%.
Kelly Hayes warns against what she calls “a politics of sacrifice,” in which state violence is normalized or justified. “This is actually how fascists win, when targeted groups are sacrificed, one at a time, and their violence is normalized, while so-called good people do nothing.” When we abandon each other – when trans folks, or Palestinians, or immigrants without legal documentation are abandoned, sacrificed.
“Why be a star when you can be a constellation?” asks Naomi Murakawa. “Alone, shooting stars quickly fade, but together, we persist.”
“May I love,” as Gabes Torres writes, “in ways that devastatingly disrupt organized state violence.”
The brutality of border walls and budget bills that further concentrate obscene wealth, leaving more and more of us without access to what we desperately need to survive. And, the love that disrupts state violence, the beauty that is the connective tissue that holds our collective life together. Like dark matter, often unseen, but its influence can be observed when we refuse to abandon each other, when we refuse to normalize the violence being waged.
“How free,” Tourmaline asks, in St. Marsha’s lineage and legacy, “are we going to let ourselves be?”
In this brutiful world, may we see how free we can be by how well we hold together, and persist in holding each other, in all our “messy, infinite, beautiful glory.” May we refuse to separate our love and our rage, or to sacrifice one for the other. May we “love in ways that devastatingly disrupt state violence.” May we live in ways that undermine brutality, and cultivate beauty. May we clump together – like galaxies – and refuse to sacrifice anyone at all.
anna blaedel
co-director
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students through sacred collective: a place of belonging for spiritual misfits, and has a PhD in theological and philosophical studies from Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.