i get the eels now
on love in the time of cholera, sexual assault, and dreams of re-enchanting love
I wrote this in a single, urgent flow, following a dream and a series of symbols that arrived all at once. It’s meant to feel a little wild around the edges — that’s the state I was in. It weaves dream, memory, revelation, and story. Thank you for stepping into that atmosphere with me.
I get the eels now,
I understand what they mean.
Recently, I had a dream in which I was in the world of Avatar the Last Airbender and all these little Aangs were flying in all sorts of manners destroying a wooden structure near some mountainous areas. I was with the team and Aang was somehow also with us.
They prepare to leap in and Aang shouts to Katara and Sokka debating whether or not airbending or waterbending made the most sense to defeat these little Aangs when I stepped forward and said I would do an Agni Kai — a one on one battle to the death — for it.
The hut went quiet and the battling stopped.
I got ready and my outfit was sharp and Uncle Iroh gave me a long silver sword with a red dragon inscribed on it with lacquer.
I go down the rickety wooden stairs of the hut and I see Kit, my dear friend from Berlin. He is in a beautiful skirt and they were tying up their long luscious hair. In their elaborate warrior’s dress I felt that I was amongst a great hero. The legendary Kit!
There’s an important idiom “flip the cabbage” that concerns Kit: Once the Legendary Kit had cooked a magnificent meal. It was a warm meal of wontons, of soup, of steaming rice and of fried wonton rolls and we all sat in the room I had rented on Mohnickensteig 11. It was a cold September in Berlin and we had a warm picnic straight on the ground with pillows and candles and wonderful friendship old and new, near and far, but wholly queer and Asian and beautiful and kind and Vietnamese and Chinese and diasporic. There was also the very Asian thing where we were not eating the last piece on the plate which caused an awkward pull as I had not yet had a fried wonton roll and there was only one left but I was embarrassed to take it. In the shuffle I asked everyone if it was okay if I took it, and Kieuh said they wanted it too so I said let’s share. Then they said well, it seems like you didn’t have any so you can have it. Then embarrassed at the public discussion about the delicious wonton by Kit I reached my chopsticks and then Nhung said “actually can we share it?” So then I felt a bit disappointed as I was looking forward to the whole thing which might’ve been visible. I went ahead and cut the wonton in half and ate half of it, and while I was doing that Nhung flipped the cabbage on her plate and found another fried wonton underneath! We laughed and realized that sometimes in life we just have to flip the cabbage. This is the beginning of the phrase “flip the cabbage” as a way to illustrate that often we want what is in front of us in fear of not getting enough but really if we flipped the cabbage we’d realize that what we wanted is right on our plates the whole time.
Kit was holding a dagger that was short and golden. Solemnly I said, Kit, look, I know we’re about to fight, but let’s take a selfie before we do, you look fabulous sister. And we sidestep the heaviness of the moment a bit longer.
We prop up the phone on a small twig of a bush, and we pose in front, and I use the long silver sword and hold it above, and I ask Kit why they don’t they do the same, and they shake their head very slowly. They don’t want to pose with their dagger. I looked at its curling blade, curved like the body of a dragon made of trails of incense smoke. I nod. We push away the cruelty of our solemn hour even more. So we see ourselves on the small screen and pose and as I am looking I suddenly see two brown eels swimming in the bush as if it were in water and am stricken with a deep fear. I saw its slimy chin in the light. And in that moment as the phone started taking pictures, I realized we were not in the correct fight, that we should be fighting the eels, not each other.
But what do I mean by eels?
It’s been wracking my brain ever since this dream.
The only clue I have comes from the performance I was performing at silent green which is a crematorium-turned-beautiful-chapel-performance-art-space in. Diego, a storyteller from Berlin Spoken Word, came up to me after my performance to show me a picture and tell me a story.
My cousin was once attacked by a pair of moray eels in the ocean,
Woah.
And he almost drowned and was struggling and his friend swam over with a dagger of sorts and they stabbed them to death. He then melted the flesh of the eels and kept the bones and made this art piece with it:
IG @chrissweeneyart
My jaw dropped. Eels hunt in pairs?
Yeah, Diego said, eels always only hunt in pairs.
I was astounded, I hadn’t known this fact when I was writing my performance that I had just done, which inspired Diego to tell me this story as they held a glass of red wine. In the story two eels come and hunt my younger self and molest her then say “we just thought you were an easy target.” She proceeds to rip them apart with her teeth and pick their eyeballs out and they swim away and she maniacally laughs then sobs.
Unfortunately, that was a direct quote from someone who did actually sexually assault me exactly one month before that day at a friend’s wedding.
I had called upon the spirits of silent green at the end of my piece,
since it used to be a crematorium, in which upon gentle research as I’m writing this I found may include the spirits of Sigfried Ochs, the Guttman Banking brothers and Ida Siekmann who was the first to die trying to cross the Berlin wall because the firefighters didn’t pull the white sheet out on time to catch her…
… to help me heal these waters, this iced heart, this world, these wars, the disenchantment with all things beautiful.
Upon learning of my heartbroken state, a friend Devanshi recommended me Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I believe it is proof that true love prevails. It is a prophecy as much as it is a medicine for the poetic hearts who know that it is possible for a love to be so strong it elevates someone in this world into a complete god; a muse.
Which is to say, one person can become every doorway, every portal, every Al Hawd al-Kawthar of the palace or temple or river or lion in one’s heart. One person can inspire you to be the best and the worst of you. A true love can inspire you in spite of everything.
Florentino Ariza was sick with love. It was not cholera. It was love.
It was a love so intense he could not even understand that there is a world outside of this love. It was a love of constipation and of frailty and of funeral frocks.
They crossed eyes when she was 12 and he 16.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
please DO NOT read on if you don’t want to know the end of the book!
Only read the big words.
After years of patience and panic and of letter writing, of composing the crowned goddess on the violin waltz and playing it on a hill with the direction of the wind blowing the right way to her window, he and his true love fell in love through letters, years of letters. She agrees for his hand in marriage without ever spending any real time with him in person.
When they finally see each other, she says, out loud, “what we have is nothing but an illusion” and tells him to go and forget her.
And during this great turmoil of that great loss for Florentino, she goes and gets married to a rich boy doctor before he has the chance to ever be with her again.
He vows to dedicate the entirety of his life, to build a career worthy of her and build a house for her, to wait until her husband dies, to be with her.
The thing is in the end they did get together, but at a great cost and lost. When they were in their seventies after an entire lifetime. It became a love of enema and button sewing and old bones and sagging breasts, but still, love!
In the time it took for them to get to one another however, in his neglect of everything but Fermima and love, the parrots died, the alligators no longer snapped at butterflies, the monkeys did not screech and manatees were killed from a boat even after a captain had explicitly said Don’t do that! Don’t kill the manatees from the boats! The passenger still did shoot the manatee so the captain left the killer next to the slain mother on the island and didn’t take him back on the boat and kept the baby manatee instead to raise and eventually send to the zoo. He went to jail for it and came out saying he would do it all again.
Even worse… Florentino Ariza had blood in his hands because of his turmoil.
The thing about eels is that they live in the cracks of heartbreak.
He swore celibacy for Fermima Daza at age 15.
For love.
Then he got raped on a ship by a woman who impaled herself with his penis? Which is to say he was hunted by a woman.
Which is how he very slowly became more lustful and ready to distract himself from Fermima Daza with the love of the flesh…
But that drove him mad. For the forgetting was always only temporary. As he at first thought that maybe he could truly get over it. But he couldn’t. He was a voracious lover, his love inspiring all his other loves, but so intense that he ended up killing people because of his insatiable need and ended up becoming a rapist, and a molester and rapist of a child. As a seventy year old man he was with his grand-niece after grooming her for years and she killed herself when he stopped being with her to be with Fermima because in her heartbreak she went from best student to last and couldn’t handle the pressure on her own.
Of course, most of the time he was loving widows and having affairs with married women who chose him too. He became a very good hunter and lover. But still, it is undeniable that blood is on his hands.
He became two eels, leering, hunting and disgusting A love coming from the pain Of not being loved A love from our time This time we live in This twisted dark time of cholera
We cannot spend another century with such wrong ideas of love.
For the truth is Fermima Daza did not know if that was love with her husband of 50 years. She married because her father wanted her to have a ‘better life’ and because she was miserable after her father banished the woman who raised her because of finding out about her love letters with Florentino and she married because the rich boy was so persistent it was embarrassing and she didn’t know what else to do at a young age when everyone is saying you should marry and he was the most pursued boy in town.
She only married because she thought that’s what love should look like. She only rejected Florentino because of her pride.
Because though there were happy times, and it seemed to be the happiest marriage in the entire city, there was so much unhappiness and so many squabbles that after fifty years of marriage and taking care of everything after he died trying to catch a parrot who escaped onto a mango tree, she wasn’t ever quite sure if that ever was love.
It seems, then, after reading Marquez that the crisis of cholera, and the crisis of the river running dry and of the telegraph becoming the river company becoming soon taken over by the airplane, and the crisis of rapid development in a modern world and the crisis of the dying animals and the drying rivers and the dead forests is really, a crisis of love.
So now, it seems this quest for Love which I have embarked on is ever more important, and I see now it is a battle like every other noble cause: an effort to slay the eels. In this pursuit we must first finally admit that Love includes the possibilities of eels within even the purest and most steadfast loves. Because eels are the issue and not anyone who has done anything in any particularity.
The interbeing of it all is that every cliff of heartbreak is a dark shadow where eels could lurk and have lurked ever since the two moons began their great fight and one moon disappeared in angst and humans forgot love under the one moon who was always unsure if it is waiting or letting go of the true love that abandoned them to escape into the world of dust.
Eels live inside all of the cracks of broken hearts, hunting in a way that destroys the earth, and that’s why we must heal love carefully and with absolute seriousness.
What I mean is, in the end, when they finally consummate their love, in the overripe ages of 72 and 76, a manatee, a creature that was thought to be extinct, wailed a song on the riverbank to everyone’s shock and joy.