Hard Pills

I have a new iteration on my concept of collecting soil samples from mass-institutionalization-era psychiatric asylums and hospitals in the country. It’s to take the soil from each location and fill pill capsules with it or press it into tablets. I don’t think I have to explain why that would be so meaningful, but I will.

First, medication changed psychiatry for better and for worse. Even the safest carry risks, and many folks aren’t on the safest ones. They’re on the ones pharmaceutical companies sell as the best and sometimes only treatment options.

Second, medication ushered in an era of biomedical treatment that often reduces those with mental-health diagnoses and lived experience to bodies in need of long-term pharmaceutical intervention at the exclusion of all other treatment modalities and without regard for life-limiting side effects, such as metabolic disorder, which exacerbates or may even be a root cause of mental-health issues.

Third, the medications my mother was given between the 1950s and early 1970s debilitated her. They weren’t much better than the earlier insulin shock therapy and electroshock therapy she received. This reason is especially personal for me, but of course my mother was just one of many who was harmed by these early treatments. She wasn’t the only one by any means. Her being a psychiatric nurse offered no protection against the treatment du jour, including pill, injection, and electrical current.

Fourth, some classes of medications are considered to be internal straitjackets that moved control of the patient from the external (chains, restraints, isolation) to the internal (blunting, sedation, lack of drive and motivation).

Fifth, our lands are chemical now, altered, as much a product of the Anthropocene as the medications themselves—and as much as we, as humans, are both products and victims of this human-shaped era. We can’t heal the land with a pill, and the land can’t serve as medicine in a desecrated state, one we brought it to by treating it as something to extract from, to inject into, to contaminate, and to abandon like we’ve abandoned so many people, especially those relegated to state lands where asylums were erected.

I say this as someone who takes a low dose of lithium carbonate daily. I’m not against medicine. I see its utility in the short-term during periods of crisis and in the long-term in some cases, like mine—but only as part of holistic treatments and the subjectification of those with lived experience.

I do think what we’ve done, especially since the late 1800s, to people with mental-health labels and lived experience, other forms of disabilities, and to those who challenged social norms—all folks who ended up in asylums and psychiatric hospitals—is a hard pill to swallow.

I can’t think of a better way than institutional soils displayed as contaminated medicine to say:

Give us back this land. (Cleanse this land.) Return us to this earth. (Cleanse this earth.) Heal us alongside this soil. (Cleanse this soil.) These bodies are the earth. (The earth is a body.) The earth doesn’t forget. (We haven’t forgotten.)

Vials

I may be wrong about this, but here are five sediment samples from two different sites near where I live.

From left to right, the first three are samples I collected years ago near the Toquerville mine. I believe they are: 1. volcanic basalt and alluvial gravel wash, 2. quaternary eolian quartz sand, and 3. mineralized sandstone tailings.

The last two samples on the right are what I collected yesterday. They appear to be Moenkopi that’s been chemically altered by runoff or chemical exposure and unoxidized Meonkopi unearthed during construction.

Images: Small glass vials of each sample with cork stoppers sitting in an Oliva cigar box. The colors include lavender, coral, burnt orange, tan, and maroon.

Sampling and Exploring

I rallied and got out of bed. What I mean is: I’m stubborn and internally driven even when externally constrained, in this case by a lung infection, so I got up and went out in search of Moenkopi samples even though I should have stayed in bed to rest and recover.

We did find two new colors of Moenkopi, neither of which is naturally occurring. One is maroon. The other is lavender. The maroon appears to be a function of the blasting required to build an adjacent highway, which swiftly exposed a buried Moenkopi bed that would otherwise have oxidized in the sun, turning it orange-red. The lavender appears to be the result of exposure to chemicals or runoff that’s bleached the Moenkopi. So human activity, including construction and contamination, have affected both of these areas.

The first three photos are of the Red Cliffs Recreation Area in Leeds, Utah, which is situated at the convergence of the Mojave Desert, Colorado Plateau, and Great Basin physiographic regions. The photos show a mix of plants found in each of these regions, with Navajo Sandstone cliffs in the background.

The last four photos are of what’s left of a historic pioneer home in the ghost town of Harrisburg, Utah.

Both Leeds and Harrisburg are about fifteen minutes from our home.

People ask me why I don’t apply for poetry residencies. This is why. I live in Greater Zion. This land is so beautiful, every day feels like a residency.

Images: Six photos as described in the paragraphs above.

Other Rhythms

I’m wearing colluvial sediment from the 90-million-year-old Iron Springs Formation in the wildlands behind my Utah home around my neck as an amulet. Yes, I’m still talking about soil and its components, in this case sandstone that is older than us and will outlive us. We need to start thinking in its rhythms rather than our own.

This is part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project. This sand protects me from the contaminated soils I grew up with, the ones that hold abuses, murders, exploitations, and a history of extractions, injections, disposals, and burials. I mean materials. I mean people. I mean culture itself.

This sand lets me look at that soil, a little at a time. My life is short. This suffering is long. It’s under our nails even if we can’t see it and has been in Oklahoma for nearly five hundred years.

Image: A silver globe memory locket filled with colluvial sediment from the Iron Springs Formation. The locket sits on a mesquite desk that’s out of focus in the background. Faint reflections are visible in the glass: points of light and a window that looks out on the laccolith near our home to the west.

The Collection

For my dif/Fused Ancestry project: soil samples from Oklahoma and Utah, flora samples, bones, stones, vases, pastels, hair, and other materials. Soon, this project will take over two bookcases and several large cabinets in the garage. The glass jar on the left with the silver lid is from the Upper Red Member of the Moenkopi Formation. I collected it near our home yesterday. It’s about 240 million years old and was deposited while Pangea was still intact.

Other(ed) Ancestors

As part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project, I also want to collect soil from every asylum in the United States built in the 1800s, which marks the Kirkbride Era of mass institutionalization of people living with mental-health issues, cognitive disabilities, and physical disabilities.

These sites aren’t my literal ancestors, but I feel connected to them in spirit for many reasons. This aspect of the project would also include collecting soil from the psychiatric hospital in my hometown where my mother worked as a psychiatric nurse and was treated as a psychiatric patient. That hospital opened in 1895 as Oklahoma Sanitarium, with the words “Norman Institute for the Violently Mentally Insane” welded to its front gates facing Main Street.

Dirt(y) Reads

These are four of the books about soil that I’m reading as part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project. I’ll share more books as I add them to my reading list. Shown: 1. The cover of Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong, by Claire Ratinon. 2. Dirt Church: Answering the Call to Rewild Spirit, by Charity Muse. 3. Soil & Spirit: Seeds of Purpose, Nature’s Insight & the Deep Work of Transformational Change, by Ian C. Williams. 4. Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life, by poet and farmer Scott Chaskey.

We Gather for This Soil

I got my great-grandfather’s soil today with my life partner and one of my very best friends, Jose Faus. We couldn’t get as close to the site as I would have liked, but we made due.

The collection process was more comical than profoundly emotional. It’s already becoming a memory I’ll cherish for that very reason. Between Jon and Jose, I know two of the best men in the world. Who else would let me drag them around Oklahoma like this to gather soil?

Images: 1. Jose and me together at the rental house. 2. The secondary marker for the battle where my great-grandfather was injured, pictured with a cat who came to greet us.

Jackfruit

I ate my father last night. Let me explain. I think this is true: During the Great Depression, some Oklahoma folks got all fancy and aspirational as a way of escaping the realities they faced, and one of the ways this took root was adopting aspects of French culture.

I believe this happened more broadly than in Oklahoma, but right now I’m in Oklahoma talking about Oklahoma and my people, who are from Oklahoma. Even if it’s not true, I can say with certainty that both sides of my family did the whole faux-French thing around that time. My mother was named after Mignon Laird, a silent film star from Cheyenne, Oklahoma. My father was named Jacque Dwayne, which he later changed to Jack Wayne.

The only problem is—and I have checked this on his birth certificate—my paternal grandparents did not know French, so they spelled their son’s name Jacque. That means he was named after the tropical fruit, the jackfruit, not given the actual French name, Jacques. How do you like them apples?

I’ve been meaning to have jackfruit ever since I learned about that naming snafu. Oklahoma heard me and provided, as it has so many times during this trip. Guess what was on the menu at Inheritance Juicery, where I read last night? Jackfruit enchiladas. I got them. I ate them. I thought about my father as fruit. Then I thought about this poem from my collection No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press). It’s kind of the times we’re living in and, I hope, live through and beyond.

Anyway, I have leftovers of my father. I think I’ll eat him again for brekkie. It’s a beautiful day. Hell, I love everybody.*

—

Sermon

If a man is in a fruit, then when the fruit is taken and blessed, it is redeemed.
— Rabbi Amnon

If a woman is in a lake, then when the lake
is drained and filled in, it is rescued from water.

If a generation of boys is in trees, then when the trees
are felled and milled, the forest is delivered from shade.

If a party of lost girls darkens the air, then when the air
swells with toxins and haze, the sky is liberated from breath.

If a grandfather is in the soil, then when the soil
is dry and bare, the ground is saved from production.

If a grandmother is in the body, then when the body
is scathed and broken down, it is released from its own ruin.

If a man is in an apple, then when the fruit is thieved
and cleaved it is redeemed from the curse of being a man.

—

* Yes, I am referencing James Tate’s “Goodtime Jesus,” which I think about all the damn time.

Contaminated

Many of the soils I collect for dif/Fused Ancestry will be contaminated in one way or another. That’s an environmental issue I need to incorporate into the project. The grounds at and around Central State Griffin Memorial, the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked as a nurse and was treated as a patient, contain asbestos, lead, and other contaminants.

The soils from Lake Texoma’s banks near the Buncombe Creek boat ramp contain contaminants such as petroleum hydrocarbons and physical impurities such as plastic and metal from fishing line and lures. The same goes for the soils along the highways I traveled with my father.

I have to be careful collecting these soils and working with them. I might get samples tested if I can afford it. I want to see which are the most contaminated and if there’s a correlation between environmental, political, social, and personal abuses. I’ve hypothesized that rich lands like those found in Oklahoma lead to abuses of the land, the culture, the people, and all living beings who live in and on those lands.

As Daniela Naomi Molnar said in her keynote speech at Tulsa LitFest, environmental, political, and social violence tend to occur in the same place. Where you find one, you find them all. It’s clear to me that the shift occurred when stewardship of the land was lost and ownership was imposed, when nature was commodified and a colonial mindset took hold, one that persists to this day. Places lost in this equation, especially the most fertile ones and, in the case of Oklahoma, those that are oil-bearing. But every living thing in those places lost, too—including our living soils.