By Maura Krause
If there were people
Living in these tiny folds
Whose world would this be?
I often end up meditating while I walk my dog. This often takes the shape of noticing nature with an empty head, and then imagining myself surrounded by thousands of microverses, suspending my existence within an unseen dance of activity.
These berries seem sexual in their magenta wrinkliness, like they could be clusters of the hill’s clitorises. Or perhaps dozens of sexual energy sprites hang out in these, gathering their pink-tinged energy for spring, when they will burst out of slowly decaying berries and go help squirrels and beetles and herons copulate.
Wrinkly and so bright
If I were Victorian
I’d declare these lewd.
The other things I do while I meander around with my beastlet are think about sex and mentally compose haiku.
What I find so fascinating is that no matter how ridiculous and impossible my imaginings become, I am actually surrounded by microverses, life cycles that are completely incomprehensible to me. My flights of fancy and off-handed constructions of reality are far more accessible to you than the truth of that dead bug’s life could ever be to me. And that’s because I’m putting a human — albeit a Maura human — slant on things.
Which brings me to Star Wars. No, seriously. If I’m going to talk about the microverses I invent in my head to stand in for impenetrable realities, I can’t leave out the fictional universe that everyone is preoccupied with right now. Because the way that each of us loves Star Wars — or not — is a microverse of that commercially regulated universe, one that resides solely in its own brain. There are cosmetic similarities between how the Star Wars universe exists for me and for you, but any more than that? Who knows. Who are you?
Yeah, who are you? That matters. What are the rules and assumptions that shape YOUR microverse?
I cried four times during the new Star Wars. This is not the place for spoilers, so I won’t say exactly why, but. With that movie, the Star Wars franchise came a little closer to the microverse I’ve carried around inside me ever since I was nine. I was nine, and my mother, a deep and abiding Star Wars nerd, took me and my sister to the re-mastered original films in theatres. I think we saw The Empire Strikes Back at least six times. So perhaps it’s no wonder that in MY Star Wars microverse, female presenting individuals get to fly spaceships and use any weapon they want. Faces of color are just as common as white or alien faces. And — I could be the hero. Anyone who has seen The Forces Awakens must recognize the above elements of my microverse in the movie glittering across the world’s screens. That wasn’t so true, before.
Of course, while my microverse and those of many of my millennial Star Wars nerd friends are being acknowledged, those of white men’s rights activists were threatened. Shut down, even. I feel victorious thinking about this, and then I feel sad for these people, the ones who boycotted the new Star Wars due to “social justice pandering.” Even overlaid as they are with the fog of rage, these microverses must be very small, very uniform, very boring. No dance of activity composed of a million different parts. No clitoris berries. That seems… sad.
I’m sure my microverse — not Star Wars but ME, the star system of my blood and neurons and follicles — excludes others, sometimes. Perhaps often times. I know I defend my reality with subconscious fangs. But who am I minimizing, when those sharp teeth sprout? Whose existence do I glaze over? This question is so much more serious than knowing that squirrel sex is unknowable to me.
I didn’
t think you
Could exist coated in ice.
Just shows what I know.
This is what I’m trying to say, at the end of my meditations. We have to think about other worlds. We walk around, constantly shifting personal nebulas, and we all construct microverses for others using our own rules of physics. Our own biological framework. Don’t we? Or is it just me? Am I telling the story by my rules again? Or is your ‘verse vibrating in uncomfortable recognition right now?
I like imagining tiny people living in tiny apartments, hundreds to a fern. Three ferns nestled together — different towns? And maybe the center of town is in the curl at the tip of the fiddlehead, and there are dozens of little beings gossiping and trading and loving and fighting in there. When I was a kid I wrote a story about people living in a watermelon — the seeds were their homes and the flesh was their atmosphere. I’ve always made these things up.
But I would like to be sensitive to when I’m making something up about you. I want to resist telling you that your sky is periwinkle right before sunset, and that your rivers all flow to the sea. I want to try to make space for your microverse alongside mine, and even if language can’t truly describe your sun, I want you to tell me about it.
So…. wanna nestle?