The Case for Retching: On Empire, Elder Owls, and the sacred gag reflex

Like you, I’m sick. We’re sick to our stomachs. Sick to our souls.

We are relentlessly being asked to swallow things that our organism rejects:

the lies of the patriarchal genocide class, the rigged menu of a mafia duopoly, the impunity of sexual predators, sordid supremacies, the authority of war criminals, the promise that cosmetic reforms can cure foundational violence, the organized cruelty of systems of domination.

And we’re expected to accept it as normal. Be grateful. It’s the best we can do.

Name it capitalism, or patho-adolescent white incarceral modernity. I call it Empire for shorthand. A system that leaves our primary needs unmet keeps serving up its false feast of empty-calorie consumption, vapid spectacle, and manufactured enemies.

Our psyches—shaped by millennia of intricate weaving with the animate web of life and village rhythm—hunger for nourishment, shelter, care, connection, the pace of natural cycles, and meaningful participation in the living world.

Instead, we are force-fed a dead culture, a simultaneously death-phobic and death-dealing culture. Many of us were raised on this menu, taught to accept it as the only meal available. Not only accept it as the way things are, but often defend it and work for its continuance.

Our nervous systems are adaptable, yet not infinitely so. Something in us has long recognized there was something off about this meal.

The body begins to register its refusal. Symptoms accumulate.

So it makes a helluva lot of sense that we’re not well. Our distress can be an authentic, soulful, metabolic response to the real sickness. There is deep wisdom in our revulsion at an insane Overculture.

Ultimately, a necropolitics severed from cosmos, masquerading as civilization, cannot be digested.

Sometimes the stories and systems require composting—a theme I return to again and again. But sometimes, what cannot be integrated into the body requires a sacred gag reflex. The buffet of nutritionless bantha fodder of this bastardized mimic of intact culture requires a pure and simple reflexive regurgitation.

Anti-peristalsis as anti-colonial resistance.

A little instruction from Elder Owl in releasing what cannot be digested

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The Case for Retching

sometimes the body knows
before the mind

something poisonous entered
the owl cannot eat again
until the pellet is expelled

fur, bone
all that could not be digested

perhaps we too
have swallowed too much

too many spoiled spells
too many severances
too much empire

and so the body revolts
a sacred gag reflex

retching as refusal

vomit up
what was never nourishment

to make room for something living
to return

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Owls and some other birds often cast their indigestible pellets before eating again. Perhaps we will not be able to receive proper nourishment without expelling the indigestible pellet of this civilizational meta-Psychosis.

Soon our body either molts, bolts, or revolts, as a different poem, Spill, puts it.

May we move indigestible imperial material up and out of our spiritual digestive tracts.

Become Barbarian. Invoke the Retch Riot.