The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future.

I stopped caring about reason when we ascended and untethered ourselves from the grime and pulse of humanity, when we turned on ourselves and divided ourselves and proved what we had been all along: ravenous immoral consumers. Eaters of everything alive, as long as it sustained a story that gave us power over the struggling others.

I’ve been thinking about how our desires and fears manifest in our bodies, and how our bodies, carrying these stories, resist the narratives our culture places on top of us, starting the moment we are born. It’s our idiotic minds that overwrite everything. But the body has a point of view. It keeps its secrets. Makes its own stories. By any means necessary.