image: Monica Sjöö Sheela na gig poster from Monica’s papers held at Feminist Archive South, Bristol.
Dear Monica
I am thinking of resistance, about what it means to resist, how its polarities can be held and threaded together, if at all. How the action of resistance is held in the body. The mind. In my body. Or your body. Our body.
re sist
re – again?
sist
exist to be
again to be (repair, restore, fix, mend, heal)
re - sist - er rediscover our sis terh ood
red is cover red thread
our sisters held together / hold forth (?) / in action
s
i
s
t
e
r
- hood / home / belonging
resister
What if to resist were to care, Monica?
Resistance > noun. The refusal to accept or comply with something.
> Origin Late Middle English: from French résistance, from late Latin resistensia, from the verb resister ‘hold back.’
To hold is to keep, to guard, to protect, to carry, to bear, shoulder, grip, grasp, clasp, embrace, enfold.
To hold in one’s arms. To hold in one’s hands!
To sustain, connect, resist.
To hold in mind, Monica.
Reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?
~ Donna Haraway
I am thinking of the time I followed the river in early summer as it curved and dipped out of sight, through the meadow and beyond the poplar and willow on its banks. I longed to reach the water, to feel its coolness on my burning skin in the unseasonably hot sun. Signs on the fencing warned me off PRIVATE LAND and my rage spurred me on. When I finally came to the bank a mile or two upriver, the bells of the water running over stones calmed me and I crouched down to watch the young brown trout swimming but not advancing against the current −
(there must be a word for it, that state of moving / not moving – could it be held?)
I wanted to stroke the back of the fish, as if it were my own child, as if somehow the trout needed soothing, embracing, as if the fish too, the animal kingdom, needed comfort.
Does the mind hold, Monica?
What is it to hold in mind? To share consciousness with something else; the holding can be physical, emotional. Do you think it could also be intellectual?
It may be human hubris to think that we can hold the world when we are such small life forms relative to the scale of the planet, Earth. But we are less than half ourselves, inhabited as we are by the lice, bugs, microbial colonies that make us what we are. We teem with, we embody so many species.
I am large. I contain multitudes.
~ Walt Whitman
And what of holding violence, care’s opposite?
Last Friday a sparrowhawk killed the white dove that flew above our garden each day in sweeping circles with a flock. At first I thought the clumps of white feathers on the grass were patches of frozen snow, until I saw the dove dead by the fence.
Its feet were curled and fleshy as human feet, an old man’s fingers, a new born baby’s toes - somewhere between pink and red, wrinkled and articulate, not yet stiff. I held it up to my sightline to inspect it – the feathers were improbably white in the truest sense of an ideal of whiteness – unsullied, spotless, untarnished, perfect, unreal, unblemished −
(see how many words begin with un-/absence, a prefix of opposites and negatives / lack relating to the absence of the bird from the sky. Dis-embodied heaven. The yearning of the air).
Each feather was an intricately crafted dart, each shaft stacked with barbs. The wings – perfect arcs protruding from the scapular – were archangel-like and substantial, powerful, built to fly.
The killing had been precise. The neck and head were stripped of flesh – almost a scalping, exposing a cranberry skull and just below the breast was a sticky red hole where the guts and organs had been plucked out. The dove was heavier than you might imagine (have you ever held one, Monica?), the weight of its thingness was striking, it’s holdingness was a thing, a body I held in my hands. The thingness embodied the heat and speed of violence and the cool slowness of care.
As I inspected the bird, the flock flew over again on their circuit, setting out from the dovecote in muscular flight over the houses, looping back to their homeplace.
The dead dove’s eyes were closed like a baby’s, lidded and soft, each one like the two halves of an acorn that would now never grow into trees. The bird looked so peaceful, the lids almost translucent in their delicacy. Angelic. I’ve said it again… why this instinctive leap to the divine when we hold nature in our minds, Monica? Nature - pre-divinity, pre-ritual, before words, before belief, the purest expression of life for life’s sake, the beating wings of blood and bone, made of the cells that are the tiny units of our lives, that believe nothing.
Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.
If I am less than half human, could it be that I am part dove?
Later the sparrowhawk returned and hopped around in the feathers to look for its prey, but by then I had disposed of the body.
How do we hold such violence? When birds are killed and ecosystems decimated, when livelihoods and home-places are destroyed, when all that’s left are the smuts of soot floating in a glass of water drawn from a borehole. Do we hold that too?
The relationship between resistance and violence was and remains one of the fundamental questions of the politics of resistance.
~ Howard Caygill
When birds lose their flock-mates, they make new ones and spend more time with their old flock-mates, building new social networks and strengthening existing relationships. A study of people’s interactions on Facebook found that humans did the same after the death of a loved one. The mycorrhizal connections of kinship care.
sister hood - - - kinship kindred redthread
Sister > noun. From *swesor, sister is one of the most persistent and unchanging root words, recognisable in almost every modern Indo-European language.
Sanskrit svasar
Arestan shanhar
Latin soror
Old Church Slavonic, Russian sestra
Lithuanian sesuo
Old Irish siur
Welsh chwaer
Rooted, entangled. We are living labyrinths, Monica. Branching kin, mycelium of resistance.
I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread.
~ Hélène Cixous
Imagine that you could pass through two doors at once. It’s inconceivable, yet fungi do it all the time. When faced with a forked path, fungal hyphae don’t have to choose one or the other. They can branch and take both routes.
~ Merlin Sheldrake
Sister is a root word
a route word roots mycelium
routes that bind us, hyphae, mycorrhiza, threads, stitch by slow stitch. A rip and its mending. A sticky red hole. Damage and repair. Imperfect, perfect mend.
image: repair poem, JLM Morton
What would it be to hold the variousness of our nature, our branching filaments, in the service of resistance? It is not enough to simply contain our multitudes – the dove and the sparrowhawk, the fish and the river. The tear and its mending. To resist the worst ravages of the hawk we must learn to control it. And hold it within.
Our minds, the minds of the nonhuman, the intricate ever shifting patterns of thought, millions of endless webs, endless changes in the pressure, the expanse. A tree doesn’t think like a snake or a stone, or an amoeba, or like us. The word ‘think’ begins to crumble and fracture under the weight of itself, under all of these different beings. One mind is never going to be enough…
~ Rebecca Tamas
Hold in mind. Our holdingness, our hyphae, our resistance is our resilience, our persistence our permanence. May we depend on and protect the intricate, heterogeneous networks that sustain us.
It may be true Monica that we will not always agree, but we see the ecology of resistance resting in our lived solidarity.
Does this hold?
So many of us!
So many of us!
… we shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
~ Sylvia Plath
This text first appeared in Performing Resistance: Letters to Monica Sjöö, a zine published by the Monica Sjöö curatorial collective to commemorate the 40th anniversary of ‘Embrace the Base’ a collective action at Greenham Common Peace Camp UK, 1982. Performing Resistance is currently available at the Modern Art Oxford gallery shop for the duration of the Monica Sjöö: Great Cosmic Mother exhibition (on now until 25 February 2024). You can also DM me for copies.
Artist, activist, writer and eco-feminist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005) was unwavering in her advocacy for gender justice, eco-feminism, matriarchy and social equities. This retrospective exhibition charts her life work and considers the relationship between art, spirituality and politics.
image: Monica Sjöö, Meeting the Ancestors at Avebury, 1993. Courtesy Monica Sjöö Estate and Alison Jacques, London. © Monica Sjöö Estate. Photo by Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
References
Donna Haraway, interview in Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: ‘The disorder of our era isn’t necessary’ |The Guardian (20 June, 2019)
Human cell quote from James Gallagher ‘More than half your body is not human’ BBC News, 10th April 2018 More than half your body is not human - BBC News
Howard Caygill from On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (London: Bloomsbury 2013)
Flockmates reference from Good Grief! Losing a friend brings wild birds closer together | University of Oxford 17th May 2017
Hélène Cixous The Book of Promethea (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993)
Merlin Sheldrake Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures (London: Bodley Head, 2020)
Rebecca Tamas ‘On Greenness’ in Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman (London: Makina Books, 2020)
Sylvia Plath ‘Mushrooms,’ The Colossus and Other Poems (London: Heinemann, 1960)