It is why I have kept my Druidic moral code as simple as possible: If you’re doing some kind of large-scale harm to Gaia’s ecosystems, I’ll probably do something to stop you and make you regret doing it. The punishment will be swift and short term. You’ll have the chance to be kind to the earth afterward (or not) and be judged according to some other system (or not) when you die. You might even die in a fight over whose system of judgment is better—but of course that’s not something you can ever know, even in death, because you’ll only be judged according to one of the systems, if at all. I’ll be long out of your personal picture by that time, and your elements will return to Gaia, perhaps to be reused by some other spirit that needs a flesh cart to walk around in some distant day in the future.
Three lines of fire open up down my side, deep scratches from some clawed, hissing creature that slipped inside my guard. My response is to bat his head off his neck like a melon on a stump and draw power to heal. Wukong is right: They will indeed kill me if they can. I need to keep my headspaces firmly separate if I want to ponder questions of judgment in the midst of battle. Though I am not sure why I should—wasn’t I trying to shake off such thoughts moments ago?
I compartmentalize the battle in my Latin headspace—pugnā diabulōs!—and retreat to English to consider something new: Perhaps it is my comfortable assumptions about judgment I’m supposed to challenge? The Monkey King and these damned souls certainly have me thinking about it, and I’m at least clear-sighted enough to see I haven’t examined my assumptions thoroughly. I can spy room to grow here, even if it is not what Wukong intended.
I think my instinctive rejection of judgment comes from meeting too many people who say on the one hand that their chosen deity shall judge us all but then they judge me anyway, rather than leaving it up to the deity they profess to believe in and trust. That’s using religion to cudgel people into conformity, and it grinds my gears.
But Laksha recently pointed out to me that I had been judging her decisions in a similar way—not via religion, but via my cultural or even personal views of patriarchy. I do regret judging her, but I don’t regret my views. Which, I suppose, is how lots of folks feel about their faiths or deeply held beliefs. That allows me to understand, at least, how easy it can be to slip into a robe of righteousness and comfortably judge others, even if I don’t understand or agree with the viewpoints others are coming from.
I suppose what I’d really like to understand is our collective urge to focus on differences rather than similarities. I know our brains sort and categorize by default because that’s a survival mechanism—that mushroom’s good to eat, that one will kill you, that one will have you seeing wacky shit like mangoes and papayas complaining to pineapples that millennials are killing the fruit-juice industry. But despite this hardwiring, there has to be a way of thinking that will allow us to see nonlethal differences and celebrate them rather than point at them and judge them unworthy. For we seem to be ever running toward dystopias rather than the other way.
The Polish poet whose work I’m absorbing as a headspace, Wisława Szymborska, wrote about the loneliness of Utopia and how utterly bereft it is of actual people: As if all you can do here is leave / and plunge, never to return, in the depths. / Into unfathomable life.
It’s an apt metaphor. I often feel that I am swimming in a vast ocean, a lonely mackerel who’s lost her school and is trying to find her way back or else find some other bunch of fish that will let her swim along with them. Meanwhile, Utopia is above the surface somewhere and I have no clue. Is that what the Monkey King was talking about? A path to peace I’m incapable of seeing? How do I know…Wait.
“Wukong?” I say, looking around briefly to make sure he’s still close enough to hear me. He’s not far, but I repeat myself a bit louder in case he didn’t hear me in the din.
“Yes?”
“How do I know if I have good judgment?”
He barks out a few simian laughs. “Do you like bubble tea?”
That seems like an inconsequential detail, but perhaps even my judgment of that is suspect. Still, it’s a bit of a no-brainer, because it’s delicious. “Yes,” I tell him.
“And what do you think of this fellow coming our way down the mountain, tall and armored and wielding a sword that looks longer than you stretched out on the ground?”
He chucks his chin uphill, and I try to steal a glance up there while making sure none of the damned take advantage of my distraction. The figure he’s talking about is impossible to miss, the plates of golden armor gleaming and etched and tied on top of red leathers, his malevolence and power distorting the air around him like heat bouncing off asphalt in the summer.
“I think he looks dangerous.”
“Then I think your judgment is sound. That is Wuguan, the Fourth Yama King of Yingian.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a chance of us hugging this out?”
Wuguan utters a death-metal grunt that vibrates in my bones and raises his sword, his mad eyes locked firmly on me rather than on Wukong. His muscles bunch, and I can see he’s going to charge or—I don’t know, something aggressive.
“Wukong, none of my assumptions about this guy are comfortable right now. Does that make you happy?”
“Let’s talk afterward if you beat him,” the Monkey King says, and Wuguan roars, leaping into the air with his sword held high.
i’ve heard of the Amazon, o’ course, but it’s not something I can really comprehend, a vast river spanning a continent that’s the breadth of nine fecking Irelands or something like that. We have lots of bonny water on the Emerald Isle but not concentrated in a river that bloody wide or long. And it doesn’t hide alligators and piranhas and the like either, or huge great snakes that have somehow become euphemisms for a man’s mickey. I’ll tell ye what, lads: The day I see a mickey that can wrap itself around a full-grown man and squeeze him to death is the day I stop even trying to have sex.
The tree I use to shift in is right by the bank of the Amazon, near a city in Peru called Iquitos. I don’t realize it when I get there, but later I find out that ye can’t get to this city by car. Ye have to either fly in or float in on the river. Or shift in, like me, using a tethered tree. They have local transport in the city, roads and such, but the roads don’t cut through the forest otherwise. Still, it’s not a wee town. It’s half a million people, and it smells like they’ve been here for a while.
Siodhachan told me that most of this continent got colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese. Those were a couple of the big colonial powers, along with the British, French, and Dutch, who used gunpowder and disease to make the world such a European bollocks.
“The Irish,” he says to me during that history lesson, “were among the first to be colonized.”
I shan’t lie to ye, that sticks in me arse like a toothpick shoved in sideways. Can’t blame anyone who’s resentful of those colonial powers or the destructive swath they cut through the world. Whole peoples have been erased by them, others enslaved by them. But it goes further than the human cost, as far as the earth’s concerned. Gaia herself has paid a huge price for such arrogance.
Here in Peru, for example, the Incas had four hundred different kinds of potatoes, and the Spanish wiped almost all of them out. They brought a few kinds back to Europe, and that became a huge staple food for the Irish, which is why Siodhachan bothered to tell me about it, but the diversity was gone. There used to be a whole bunch of bananas too, if ye will pardon me pun, but now ye have just a few kinds left and some plantains. Siodhachan says he regrets not saving some of those in a seed bank or something like that, but he didn’t realize it was happening, because potatoes and bananas don’t have death screams. Extinctions are sad, lonesome exits by the last few specimens, often silent and always tragic. And they’re still happening.
Something around Iquitos is fed up with that. It’s decided humans are the problem, and much like Bavaria told me to take out the problematic kobolds, it’s taking out humans in this isolated city surrounded by the jungle.
Except it’s no single thing doing the damage. That’s the true problem here.