Where Solemna Will Go
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So, I’ve joined this lovely writing workshop here in Brooklyn. Besides meeting and doing writing prompts every week, the group is also doing a long-term collaboration with an equivalent group in Dublin, Ireland, that works like a long exqusite skeleton: one person will send a kernel, the next person on the other side of the pond will rewrite it and add one element, and so on. I just began a new thread of this project with a fragment about Solemna Navia, a character of mine who remains stubbornly fragmented and storyless; I thought this would be a perfect venue for her to grow into more minds than my own:
Solemna Navia was a plant. She had installed herself within warriors and made them farmers; she sought to use their Power to make a place for herself, at least a body for herself, beginning with food. The Toxic Event had taken the place of food, of plants; they all had trampled over their dinner on the way out the door. Her stomach felt the absence almost immediately, and now, years later, she wondered if the void would ever be filled. Perhaps once she had been a dedicated and careful anorexic, but now she began to mourn food, to miss it as the lover she had lived to hate. So she decided to begin to produce, to grow. She wanted to become life, and life is food, and love of food could teach love of the earth. Land in the city was disorganized, cut into unstable chunks of ex-lawn. So she hatched a plan to go south, find some land. She had found the Banks, an old tobacco farm, the soil depleted by decades of monoculture in service to addiction. Her warriors held her in their mind, planted her dream into the earth.
This is for the soil that once was never unclean.
Roots grow into leaves
May you be clean again.
Solemna Navia knew that the life of plants is in the dirt, that their intelligence comes from their roots. Though her field was irradiated and toxic, she coaxed from it lives purer than the food that had been eaten before the Event. Her crops were fertilized with the oils and plastics of decaying gadgets, once coveted motherboards whose silicon strove to kill the lives she strove for. A rebirth is a slow thing. Irrigation is a small canal. Clouds of ash are unforgivingly dark. Jai: jai Navia!