Inca(r)n(t)ation

content/trigger warnings: graphic depictions of violence, suicide, and the physiological effects of medically transitioning, discussions of violence, abuse, a parent being violent towards and abusing their child, forced detransition, suicide, torture, imprisonment, psychosis, murder, settler colonialism, and death, written from the perspective of someone with a history of being violent and abusive

note: there is a glitch with the footnotes. if you click the return arrows that follow each footnote (they look like this: ↩︎), or if you click the numbers in brackets that indicate a footnote, it will take you to the very first set of footnotes instead of where you're trying to go. i apologize, i will fix this asap. in the meantime, please avoid clicking the return arrows (↩︎) that follow each footnote, as well as the numbers in brackets that indicate footnotes.

Secondary note: I fear that writing this and making it public will be, in some strange and/or indirect way, the catalyst for the creation of the harm I describe below, rather than its antidote. If this turns out to be the case, however, I cannot consider it (wholly?) my fault (and, of course, this work describes some kind of plan around how to mitigate/address that). Let us be done with blaming ourselves for the decision-making and actions of people who violently abuse us and/or co-opt/distort our work. They, and they alone, must be held responsible for the harm they choose to perpetrate. Of course, institutions, structures, and systems (e.g., racial capitalism, cisheterosexism, patriarchy, settler colonialism) play a role in this. But you cannot hold an institution, structure, or system accountable. You can only—and must—destroy it.

Final note: I have replaced the word "evil" in this piece with the word "harm," and I have replaced the word "righteous" with the word "just." I do this after re-reading a discussion of these words/concepts in "learning good consent," and I feel I am reading/understanding it for the first time. To speak in terms of evil and righteousness is, I think, part of the problem of pervasive violence and abuse, especially sexual violence and sexual abuse. I am disclaiming this here to make clear that, as with all that I write, this piece is also a living document that will grow and change as I grow and change.

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(I was wrong; now I know that art has a purpose, now I know what that purpose is.)

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Many people, throughout my life, tell me they think I am clairvoyant.

I laugh when they say this; I reply: "Hell, I wish." Underneath the laughter, there is fear because I know that they are right.

My first vision comes when I am nine years old, shortly after the first time I try to commit suicide (with a fucking butter knife; I suppose I have always been melodramatic). I am in the backseat of my parents' car and all I can see is a man in a jail cell, and then a courtroom, saying the words I am speaking as a child to my parents. He is pleading insanity and convincing those around him to be lenient with their punishment by using his visions of my life (quite literally co-opting my life/story) as proof that he is too sick to be judged. I speak and in my vision he speaks what I speak too, and at that age I assume this is an older me, past and future entangled. I also believe it possible that I, a nine-year-old, am a hallucination, and that the man from the future is hallucinating me. That I am not real: I am merely his vision.

My second vision comes when I am in eleventh grade (16 years old). I am asked for the first time to write a short story for class, and I tell the story of a 16-year-old girl who has visions of the future because of the violence and abuse she endures at the hands of her father. At the end of the story, she shares her most recent vision: her own murder. She decides, while taking the SAT (during which, according to her vision, her murder will occur), to kill herself before she can be killed, so determined is she to change her fate, and she stabs herself in the eye with a No. 2 pencil until the graphite finds its way into the depths of her brain.

My teacher leaves a note at the top: "Please see me." I see her and her concern and I assure her it is fiction. I suspect that it is not. I see the girl from the future as vividly as I saw the man from the future seven years prior, and I experience what she experiences just as vividly too. The story lingers in my mind for years after that, then just as quickly vanishes.

The third vision comes yesterday, and now I have had enough visions to understand, although a full day-and-a-half passes before I finally do. This third vision I experience completely firsthand: I have been kidnapped by an isolated sect of anarchists who torture me as punishment for doing Art, Strike! all wrong. The torture is endless; it involves, among other things, being confronted by those who I have hurt and facing how I hurt them. I try to escape too often, and the torture intensifies each time. I am allowed to wander around their compound freely, but I am a pariah: spat upon, ridiculed, kicked and beaten, often naked, always in pain.

The sect has something of a leader; no one calls her this, or even treats her like one, but you can tell that she is different. She exacts upon me the most brutal of the tortures; in fact, I am sure she is the one who designs it all. The place where I am being tortured is utopia, so everyone around me is full of life and love, except for her, who is always stoic. Even when she smiles, she is stoic. (I can, after I awaken from the vision, remember everyone's faces except hers, although I remember enough to know that it is different from mine. It is certainly not mine.)

Eventually, the torture culminates in brainwashing; they break my psyche down into bits and reassemble them as they see fit. Once more I am naked before them as they chant with just glee, with absolute hatred (what they chant I can barely process; this is how totally they have broken me).

My transformation is complete; they have purged the world of my harm.

This is the end of the vision: everyone chanting and cheerful I have been defeated. Except for the woman whose face I cannot fully see. She sits in a large armchair and simply stares. I think I see her smile. I do know her from somewhere. Then I wake up.

For some time (hours), I am terrified. This is the first vision of mine that I know is a vision; the others I always suspected were visions, but of this one I am certain. I am certain that this vision is my future. I am certain that there is something deeply wrong with Art, Strike! and that I am fated to be tortured for it. I am certain of this because I have already made mistakes and it has only been a week; I am certain because I am not allowed to make mistakes and yet nevertheless I have made them. Then those hours pass and I remain just as certain about all of this, but all at once my fear is gone. I accept my fate, even as I know I will struggle against it by ensuring there is not and never will be anything deeply wrong with Art, Strike!, even if I end up in the same place anyways.

What else could I possibly do?

I keep telling myself not to parse the vision further. I want to know why I am suddenly so certain it is a vision, why I am more sure than ever that I am clairvoyant; I have wanted my whole life to figure everything out, but this I think deserves more respect. Nevertheless, my mind races until I remember the other visions: the ones I suspected were visions, the ones which I know now were. And immediately I read the story they tell.

The main character in the short story is the man from the future's child, my grand-daughter; the man from the future is her father, my son. I cannot and will never have children so this is metaphorical. What I mean is I give birth to him, and he does the same for her.

How I give birth to him is this.

Art, Strike! has an endpoint and it is less than a year from now.^[1] I have baked the end of Art, Strike! into the beginning (like a good novel; like a good play) because the only way to guarantee something never even begins to move towards becoming an industrial complex is to end it before it can start. We will look back in a year's time and ask, "What was Art, Strike!?" and we will put extra emphasis on the word "was."

But fools believe in resurrection.

The man I give birth to is a man who I believe has yet to be born. His parents (right now, perhaps) are in the process of making the love that will spawn him. And he will grow and begin to have visions and they will be of me. You see, we are entangled. I do not know exactly why or how, but I have my theories. He will have visions of me and then find my work; he will uncover the history of Art, Strike! and the story of Erica Rivera and the similarities between his life and mine will lead him to think himself my metaphorical son and he will feel obligated to 1) transition and 2) resurrect Art, Strike!.

He will not, as I do, feel like he would rather be tortured for eternity than allow Art, Strike! to cause anyone harm. He will resurrect Art, Strike! and it will be at least half of the horsemen of the apocalypse. He will be jailed at some point for the violence he unleashes, perhaps for that which he unleashes on his child, the girl from the future.

I believed that my third vision was about me because the person being tortured is a man who is told he will never be allowed to transition in order to escape accountability, a man whose torturers forcibly detransition him, as part of their torture. [REDACTED].

But something nags at me as I examine this; one of the people he's harmed and forced to face in my vision says her grandfather unleashed violence upon her family members because of what the man did, because the man has brown hair and so do the family members her grandfather abuses and this is just how her grandfather's pain and violence manifest but that all of this is his fault.

And yet I do not have brown hair. (I suppose you could argue I have very, very dark brown hair, but the truth is that my hair is black.)

This single detail produces another, very brief, fourth and final vision: the man from the future imprisoned, being broken out, and for a moment believing himself free, until he realizes who his liberators are and how they have liberated him from his prison in order to hold him captive in their own.

And now I have the whole story.

There is a man who has likely not yet been born who will unleash terrible suffering upon the world. He will do this by resurrecting Art, Strike! many years, perhaps decades, after its endpoint. He will think himself good and just, although he will be a violent abuser, and he will justify his behavior by saying, "Well, Erica had a history of being violent and abusive."

I have a history of being violent and abusive. I am not still a violent abuser.^[1] I have the capacity to be violent and abusive, just as we all do. But the responsibility upon my shoulders is so heavy and so delicate that there is no room for mistakes, even as I make several in just my first week. These mistakes, I hope and believe, are not wholly irreversible, as my past mistakes always were. My mistakes are nevertheless always decisions I make, for which I must atone, and my recognition of them as mistakes, and my attempts to address their fallout, help ensure that I will not make a single mistake more, or else I will humbly sharpen the knives for those who wish to cut me into pieces.^[2]

But the man from the future will not understand this; he will read my words and understand only what he wants to.

All abuse is violent, but not all violence is abuse. The violence of self-defense is just; the violence of killing or maiming one's abuser is just; the violence of colonized against colonizer is just. Nevertheless, all violence has a price, a tax on the human soul. If there is room in utopia for people with a history of being violent, it is as accomplices to killers and maimers of abusers, as supporters of teachers of self-defense, as friends to those waging war on the people who refuse to relinquish power.^[1]

It is as designers of torture for those who dare to resurrect the dead.

The woman from the future is me. I cannot see her face because I cannot yet see my own; estrogen will soon course through my body and change everything about me. My testicles will be removed and after that my penis; my breasts will swell with sweetness, my hips and thighs with fat. The tone of my voice will soften; the touch of my fingers too. Eventually, I will look like her, the stoic woman who is somewhat of a leader although she would be the first to call for the abolition of such ideas. She will be the first to say that everyone around her leads her, that she long ago relinquished free will because although everyone deserves joy and care and pleasure, not everyone deserves free will, starting with those who have histories of denying free will to others.^[1] The woman from the future has a history of being violent and abusive but she has learned from that history and developed a particular set of skills, perhaps the kind that can lead to some kind of liberation, or at the very least, gesture at it. She has visions and they are mine. My vision requires me to endure from the perspective of the man in the future the torture she will exact upon him because this is the only way to ensure the torture she exacts is just.

The truth is that everyone is clairvoyant. Those who already know this know also that its source is trauma; trauma is the catalyst for clairvoyance. This is because clairvoyance is the same as hyperempathy; a better word for it may be hypersensitivity. Clairvoyants are sensitive to everything: the tiniest twitches, the most invisible winds. If you allow yourself to feel enough, you will have visions too.

The man from the future has brown hair and a daughter, who will be the first person he harms. I can tell you more about him because the visions described here are not the only ones I have had. I have had hundreds, maybe thousands, of visions, almost all of which are chronicled in the art and writing I have produced since childhood, almost none of which is published or public. Much of it has been destroyed, but lives on in my head.

If I need to find him, I can. If I need to find him, I will. If I need to make his nightmares real, then they will be the realest.

The truth is that visions are never certain. They may come to pass, or they may not, and that is largely up to us. The truth is that art has one function: not to chronicle visions, but to change them, if that is needed. To make real different futures.

This is a work of art, a piece of writing. In creating it, I hope to change the futures in my visions before they come to pass. After all is said and done with Art, Strike!, this is the part of my contribution to it that I will ensure persists for all eternity.

This is a warning.

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(I was right; Joan of Arc, as I have always suspected, did not do what she did simply because she thought it just; she did it, as well, because she feared beyond words the angels who delivered her visions.)^[1]

Beauty can be frightening, but it is nevertheless, still and always, beauty.