Nudge Somebody's Water Bottle a Little Closer
On ayahuasca trips, Martín Espada, connections we can't explain, and a bit of hope at midday
As the weekend was getting closer, I was wondering what I’d write for this new project here. I started out thinking about human connections – the little things we do to take care of each other during troubled times and the net effect of all those tiny kindnesses. On Friday, riding the bus in, I read this sorta hippy-dippy-witchy piece talking about, among other things, therapeutic ayahuasca trips. Apparently, for a while in the middle of the trip, users are hallucinating and puking a lot. It’s part of the purgative process, which honestly sounds pretty terrible to me, but then again I’m not trying to clear away any trauma. Since these sessions are often communal, that means there’s a few people sitting around kind of out of their heads, throwing up together.
But, the author explained, there’s this moment where you notice that somebody near you needs water, so you nudge their bottle a bit closer to them. You’re there, working through your serious shit, and you see somebody else dealing with their own serious shit, and the only think you can do is make it a little easier for them to rinse their mouth out. And at exactly that moment, the experience transforms, moves on to the next phase, the puking subsides, and the clarity starts pouring in.
That’s a pretty sweet metaphor. Nudge the water bottle for someone. It changes everything, even though it’s the tiniest thing. You can make the world a better place.
I spent the day thinking about that while I met with a couple students who were dealing with their own momentary bad trips (no vomiting, thankfully). Words like You’re amazing and It’s ok and That’s a crazy interesting idea – go with it! and I’m sure your family are fine and you’ll hear from them soon came out of my mouth a lot. I mean, they usually do. I’m an encourager. But the intention was really direct. I wanted to nudge the bottle. Walking down a street full of individual demons and wide-spread dissonance, with genocide raging and justifications for it sticking to everything like the stink after a house has burned down nearby, all I could do was nudge the bottle.
So I was already thinking about connections between people a bit when I got back on the bus to head home. I had picked up Martín Espada’s poetry collection Floaters from the library. I love his writing almost as much as I love the person he is in the world, the kind of guy who comes rolling huge jugs of water with him, y’know? No mere nudger, that one. I’ve met him enough times that I refer to him as “my friend Martín,” which I hope isn’t too much of an affectation. My wife and I saw him read in Lawrence, Kansas right after we got married. He started out by thanking the janitors for setting everything up, then talked about how some of the money paying for the event came from Coke, who was, at the time, murdering union organizers in Columbia, so he was donating a big chunk of his paycheck to the union and the families of the dead. A few years later, he agreed to come and do a poetry workshop for my high school students in the Bronx. A couple weeks beforehand, a load of free copies of his book Alabanza showed up so the students would have copies to read and get signed. He read, talked with students, and listened to their poetry. A few years later, when he and Lauren Marie Schmidt came to read at the University of Michigan, I picked them up from the airport. In a truly Detroit-ish moment, my ratty Oldsmobile was hooked up to a tow truck and about to leave us when we exited the terminal. Martín negotiated its release with a few words and bills. On the way back to the airport, we checked out the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Art and Martín paid for my ticket to see the special Diego and Frida Kahlo combo exhibition. A fantastic human being.
The new book is outstanding, totally deserving of its National Book Award. Largely inspired by Trump-era immigration policies and their underlying racist motivations, Floaters is packed with equal parts love and rage. Martín is always fierce in his commitment to immigrants, migrants, the poor, and the lonely. And he’s uncompromisingly vicious with injustice. So . . . y’know . . . Trump really gets hammered in the book.
In an early poem in the collection, “Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet,” Martín tells the story of Guillermo Rodriguez, a Mexican farmworker brutally attacked by Trump supporters. But Martín is never content just to criticize what is. He dreams of what can be, basing his hopes on what already exists. He condemns Trump to a Hell, not of devils, but of the real-life people who care for each other, despite the divisions demagogues exploit between us. He puts Trump into a Hell of solidarity and mutual aid:
For him, Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat
paving the road to JFK station sees Guillermo and dials 911;
Hell is a country where EMTs kneel to wrap a blanket around
the shivering shoulders of Guillermo and wipe his face clean;
Hell is a country where the nurse at the emergency room
hangs a morphine drip for Guillermo, so he can go back to sleep.
Two thousand miles away, someone leaves a trail of water bottles
in the desert for the border crossing of the next Guillermo.
It’s a step forward, even for Martín. One of my favorite poems of his, “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” encourages readers to create a world without deportation judges, extermination camps, or slave manacles by first imagining that such a world could exist. I love that. But this image of Trump’s already-existing Hell shows us the world that already exists, that we create together, day by day. The little water bottles we nudge – or leave along migrant trails in the Arizona deserts – for each other.
So I was all up in the idea of human connections. I had been all day. I thought of one of the students from that high school poetry workshop in the Bronx. A couple years back, she had written me an email, telling me about her joys and difficulties, about her two-year old son who she loved in that desperate way that good parents do, and about her writing. She was still writing and still had Martín’s book, which continued to inspire her.
I thought “I should email her. Hell, I should email her and Martín! It would be so interesting to try to get a conversation together.” I went home and had dinner and a couple drinks with my wife. I told her about it, said maybe I’d do that in the morning. That was around 10:30.
At 1:19 that night, my old student wrote me an email.
She was still thinking about writing, struggling with feelings that she was losing touch with her Puerto Rican identity in the day-to-day, and missing her dad. She had been checking out the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and sent me a couple pieces she had been working on.
Maybe on the cold digital page here, that doesn’t feel as magical as it did when I found her email in the morning. Of course, it was just a coincidence. I happened to think of her, then she decided, after years, to write me within a few hours.
But the thing is, everything is a coincidence. The Big Bang was a happy accident. That doesn’t change the fact that coincidences like these are absolute proof of the deep connection between all of us. In these little moments, we call out to each other, and sometimes we can hear it and we respond. I was going to write “not intentionally, of course” because that seems too instrumental, too mechanical. I can’t think about my brother hard enough till he gets a little nosebleed and calls me up to say knock it off. It makes me think about things like mindfulness, intention, and prayer, though.
And it makes me think, like everything does lately, of massacres and widespread acts of inhumanity. If we’re connected enough for an old student to respond to me thinking about her, 600 miles away, then we’re too connected to keep letting these killings happen. Still, I can’t stop them. And “thoughts and prayers” aren’t enough. But they’re another nudge of the water bottle while walking around talking about how things can be better and how we’re already creating the conditions for a more humane world, just by trying to be the humans we wish others might be. It’s going to take more than that – people in the streets, on strike, in uncomfortable places learning from each other – but, like Martín points out, we’re already living in the fascists’ potential Hell. We just have to come together with a bit of intention, turn up the heat.