Into and out of the underworld
Musings on death, decay and pleasure during Pride Month
“A little above the branch, a pair of pied woodpeckers are carving up a spot bare of bark. The animals rip the bark up and leave behind the traces of their lives in the wasting wood. The tiny larvae and little invertebrates that hide within it feed them.
“The tree is beginning to break down, to die off, and thereby to become a gift for other beings. It is beginning to be less itself as a sovereign individual that decides only for itself. And at the same time, it is beginning to become even more itself by becoming lively, a hub of activity, a gift that enriches others. The hawthorn is relinquishing itself and becoming a centre of many existences, a fervent font of the imagination that circles in the ice-cold air about this middle, which is gradually becoming ever more empty.”
–Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology
They shave their head as an act of gender expression. He traces the scars on his chest where dysphoric tissue once grew. She feels her muscles atrophying as estrogen replaces testosterone. We relinquish ourselves to become ourselves. We cut off families and friends. We shed past selves. We prune, we carve, we feed. We let one part die so that more may live.
Queerness and transness is dying in order to live. It is living in the face of death.
It’s pride month and I’m feeling feral.
With a wingspan of an inch and a habitat of just a single species of plant—that is increasingly threatened by development—the Palos Verdes blue is the world’s rarest butterfly. As larvae, they live in symbiotic relationships with ants, who protect them from predators in exchange for sugars and other nutrients. After dissolving into cocoons, they emerge weeks later as beautiful blue-winged butterflies. And live in that state for just five days.
There is also Pysche, the Greek goddess of the soul, often depicted with butterfly wings. The mortal daughter of a king and queen, she was so beautiful that no one asked her hand marriage, too content to simply worship her beauty. She was left on a spire where the wind carried her away and into a deep sleep. She awoke to music and a feast—and an invisible husband, Eros, daughter of Aphrodite and god of love and sex. Visited by her jealous sisters, she attempted to see her love at night with an oil lamp. It burned and awakened him and he fled. While her sisters, having learned about what happened to Pysche on the spire, went themselves and jumped, expecting the wind to carry them to feasts and husbands. Instead they fell to their deaths.
Psyche went to Aphrodite, begging for forgiveness. The goddess of love had her tortured then given a series of tasks to win back her favour. The first was sorting through grains and seeds. With the help of an ant and its colony, she completed the impossible task. Other animals, the elements and even gods offered their assistance with the rest of the trials, which included a trip to the underworld. When Eros was healed from his injuries, he found Pysche and, at an assembly of the gods, she was offered ambrosia, the drink of immortality, and became known as the goddess of the soul. And together, the personifications of love and the soul had a daughter—Hedone, goddess of pleasure.
“Every body is an existential drama turned into flesh and blood. it is a triumph over the forces of decay that constantly tug at it, a temporary victory of the erotic striving for unity and fullness over the ponderousness of matter. Every body is thus not merely a physique but always also a visible psyche: the significance of everything that has happened to it emanates outward from it.”
–Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology
Living authentically as oneself comes after trials. After death. It comes from connecting to nature—exterior nature and interior nature, which are in truth one and the same. It is emergence and emanance. It is the unity of love and soul. It is the foundation for pleasure, for happiness.
Even if it only lasts for five days.
Like the decaying tree, we eat and are eaten. We burst like flares. Like a fervent font of imagination announcing: This is possible. It’s no wonder those without imagination can only deal more death—it’s all they know. Queerness and transness is embodiment in a disembodied culture. It’s autonomy and happiness in spite of control and torment. It is the challenge: “If this is possible, what else?”
If the tree is useful even in decay, why do we discard nature so easily? How would we live without the fear of death? What is the point of a butterfly living for only a few days?
Ironically it’s the death-dealers who haven’t visited the underworld, who haven’t drank from the River Styx. Who see five days as pointless. But it’s all sacred. Every larvae, every grain, every day. Every tiny moment of pleasure. Every feast and flourish. And because it’s all temporary, we savour it. We must.
Sometimes it takes standing on a spire facing oblivion to find life. Sometimes we’re only formed by being cut and carved.
And I think that’s something to be proud of.
absolutely gorgeous.