The Cicadas Are Coming
Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances. This may take the form of symbolically or literally re-enacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to occur again….
Repetition is a form of change.
—Brian Eno
I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Heavyweight about a woman named Elyse. Elyse is searching for her father, Billy, who disappeared without explanation when she was 21. Elyse wants to understand why Billy left, but more specifically, why he went on to have another child with a different woman they decided to name…Elyse.
You read that correctly.
The host eventually tracks him down in the Philippines, where Billy’s moved, and he agrees to talk to his daughter over the phone. He says his new wife just really loved the name Elyse, and yeah, maybe he should have pushed back against the idea, but it’s different over there. As if this will make her feel better, Billy tells Elyse they also chose to call their new German shepherd Charlie. Why? Because of the many delightful stories he’d told about OG Elyse’s favorite dog, whose name was…yes. Charlie.
Towards the end of the call, filled with promises from Billy of future explanations that will offer his daughter solace and make some actual sense, we hear the voice of a little girl crying out for him in the background, and then,
“I’m on the phone,” Billy dismissively says.
More potentially abandoned children, now grown — sons— from before either of the Elyses were born, are revealed by the show’s conclusion, and what’s clear, to put it in clinical diagnostic terms is that Billy is a fucking mess. The difference between when the episode starts and when it ends is that Elyse has tried her best to repair what is now clearly impossible to fix.
A couple of weeks ago, two different headlines in entirely unrelated publications screamed at me about things happening in America this year that have not occurred in a very long time. Specifically involving cicadas and the Supreme Court.
In the first case, I learned that two broods of that variously ticking and shrieking every one, thirteen, or in this case seventeen-year emerging creature (quite literally the loudest insect on Earth) will be arriving at the same time, which is extremely rare and which means when Spring comes (in 44 days but who’s counting), something in the neighborhood of a trillion cicadas will descend on the Southeast and Midwestern regions of these United States.
The second thing concerns what the brilliant and ceaselessly infuriated Elie Mystal wrote about in detail here: SCOTUS is poised to overturn the Chevron deference, which I will summarize as the Koch Brothers’ final fantasy made manifest—a complete kneecapping of the administrative state, once generally aspired toward in this country but which is now pejoratively termed and used as a cudgel by the Right. I’ll leave out the remarkably Oedipal mishegas Mystal mentions concerning Neil Gorsuch and his Mom, who you may or may not be aware was Reagan’s EPA head back in 1984 (shout out to the Eighties, and yes, I’m still recovering from Sunday’s heart-shattering Fast Car)
Anyway. The Chevron deference is a legal precedent that basically says federal agencies and their rule-making structure, which relies on experts, should be the final arbiters of any regulatory dispute enforced by those agencies versus unelected judges with no subject-specific knowledge, making the decisions instead. Overturning it is a power grab, Mystal asserts, at a level we haven’t seen in 221 years.
This is boring, and who gives a shit, you say. To which I reply ok, but:
221 is the precise number of years since the last time cicadas dropped two broods on us simultaneously! In 1803! Of all the years! Think how many different years were on the table here! So this is either a peculiar coincidence or a message from The Universe that we must pay close attention to.
I chose the latter because the idea that some higher intelligence is at work comforts me, but also?
It’s much more interesting.
I will save you a Google search for what other significant events occurred in 1803, though giving our tech overlords the impression that you are a high-minded history buff seeking deeper knowledge about the political past as opposed to a neurotic insomniac who asks the invisible blue light questions like is this vertical ridge on my thumbnail cancer or why does my watch say I’m asleep when I’m awake might not be ill-advised. Regardless, the main event you will be notified of in America’s history circa 1803 is that for 15 million dollars, we purchased 828,000 square miles of territory from the French:
You know it; you love it; you might even live on it: It’s The Louisiana Purchase, baby.
That is to say; in 1803, our government bought about a third of what is now this entire country for the current price of one house in the Hamptons and not even on the beach.
Parts of what we count as fifteen states were included in TLP, so yes, it was literally a big deal.
The thing is, though, when asking an algorithm anything, particularly anything about the past, it’s worth reminding oneself that the top results will be returned due to the majority of people doing most of the searching. And if the searcher is a member of that majority as I am and cares about what matters to people who aren’t as I do, it becomes incumbent upon you to cast the digital net intentionally further out. So I did.
What I discovered is that despite the following occurrences definitively taking place in and around Georgia during the year 1803, Google Results’ first few pages make zero mention of them when asked for important events in America during 1803.
In May of that year, after surviving the terroristic Middle Passage and upon landing in Savannah, seventy-five West Africans, specifically an ethnic group called the Igbo from what is now Nigeria, were sold for an average of $100 each to two white men. They were then loaded like cargo under the deck of a small ship intended to arrive on nearby St. Simons island off the Georgia coast, where they would be sold again to local plantation owners.
The oral traditions through which much of this history was passed have allowed for variations on its details and, therefore, an understanding that some of what happened next may have morphed into myth. But through records and contemporaneous accounts at the time, researchers have agreed on a basic fact: the Igbo mutinied. They overpowered the boat’s captain and crew, running the ship aground in a slip of water called Dunbar Creek. And then, instead of meeting the destiny that lay before them, where more white men with more money were waiting, they turned from the land and walked back into the water with shackles still around their necks. It’s been called the first freedom march. The ultimate resistance. Control of their own bodies’ fate.
Some legends say the Igbo walked on water that day in May. In other tellings, they flew. Past the barbarousness below, above the ocean’s thousands of miles, all the way home.
Three years and a month ago, we watched on live television as our Capitol was invaded and desecrated; we watched as people in positions of authority were terrorized for hours with no relief. We watched as people with no authority at all were left to clean up the maniac-motivated mess. When it was finally over, we thought, well, at least he’ll be held to account this time. And even after we heard him with our own ears in his own voice pressuring Georgia officials to effectively steal the votes of people who’d waited in lines outside for hours to cast them, we watched as he wasn’t held to account at all. We watched men who said they’d, at long last, had enough bow their heads and walk backward through the gold-plated door that swings open and shut on any semblance of morality there in the palm-sweet air of South Florida, genuflecting, grinning, flaccid faces toward all the cameras turned, standing right next to him.
Him.
The one who wouldn’t help when they were crouched in the gallery, grabbing at gas masks, making narrow escapes, shuttling through corridors amidst the marble facade in echoey halls. The one who was sitting there covered in clown make-up, watching the venomous brutality he’d fomented unfold, sitting there in his ridiculous red tie, demanding diet cokes, throwing ketchup at the walls, trailing toilet paper from his shoes, watching a gallows be erected to hang his own Vice President.
This past weekend, Joe Biden won the South Carolina Democratic Primary by 96 points. South Carolina is the same place where, in 1803, a new port opened for the increased arrival of enslaved people who were kidnapped from their homes.
Biden’s last job was second in command to our first Black President, and now he’s poised to confront the same guy he already beat by millions of votes before. The one who, rather than facing his own loss, his own failure, rather than reconciling his own grief, rather than making peace with the love his father couldn’t or wouldn’t give him, summoned a mob to feed his hole-filled heart instead.
***
Men like Elyse’s Dad and men like Donald Trump. Full of bluster and blame and excuses for what is fundamentally abhorrent. Peddling and believing their own myth. Freud was talking about men like them in his writings on repetition. Unconscious reenactment of trauma is compulsive, and the problem is it can look a lot like fate.
Brian Eno was talking about repetition of a different kind. About art and about practice. About evolution. He was talking about our species’ capacity to let go of what no longer functions or makes sense. Rote daily work in which a raw, flawed thing, over enough time and with enough purpose, becomes different. Better. More polished. Beautiful, even. It is a deliberate process that can start to feel a lot like faith.
I’m talking about America.
This monstrous, astonishing place. So much brute cruelty wrapped in all that early vision. So many promises of the future fixing so much. Maybe it will happen, still. Still, amidst the clamorous noise of Nature’s rising. The shrieking and clicking that arrives at night, one year, then again. And then again.
We scroll in the dark and search for answers; we wave our arms, hoping to ascend.
But a myth can’t know it’s a myth until it gets to the end.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
― Toni Morrison
This is so well done. Powerful and beautifully considered.
Your writing is superb, and I love your photos, too. I look forward to more.