by Avis Barlow
Is utopia or dystopia a place or feeling? My first thoughts don’t allow room for any utopian sun to shine so I am going with what I know. “Dystopia,” the word that blinks a blood-orange red in my skull. It is the filter and the flashlight. It is an unrelenting ship inching in our direction while utopia is a mythic island far offshore.
“An imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.[1]”
Dystopia is a feeling in my belly that doesn’t go away unless someone rubs my back or head until I fall asleep. It lives in my skull above my left ear and announces itself with intermittent stabs that I press into to tamp down the pain while images of wrongdoing, harm, and exterminations initiated by those wielding fear or power flash across my closed eyes.
Sometimes it’s images of my life I replay – eyes wide open in fear – cowardly times spent trying to stay safe and braver times of standing up for my family and friends in courthouses, doctor’s offices, schools, on street corners, and in capital buildings. Places where rights and humanity and wisdom are stripped away by the callousness, the rule-following, and gaslighting of the fearful, gleeful, or unknowing.
Last fall, I was driving around Arizona and New Mexico, my first time not driving through these states to get somewhere else. This part of the country is foreign to me: deserts where I expect fields and mountains exposed instead of covered under canopies of pine or oak. In this place, the stone is showy with its layers of sandstone, basalt, quartz. I want to sit and listen to the earth on this trip. To the dirt, all that rock, the plants, birds, and the ancestors of this strange-to-me land.
As I admired my surroundings, I noticed whose stories were being told and whose weren’t. Cowboys, indigenous peoples, the enslaved, settlers, immigrants, refugees. And, how the plant and animal kingdoms were involved in scenes of loss, overtaking, manipulation, and opportunism. Layers on layers of history.
“It’s still like that here,” the elder volunteer at the Museum of Indigenous Peoples in Prescott, AZ said when we were talking about discrimination against the indigenous people of this area.
“Settler hatred is still alive,” she informed me sadly.
I asked, “Where can we go to make amends?”
She had never been asked that question before. Shaking her head, she suggested I contact the executive director during the week.
Instead, at each place we visited, I silently asked the earth, “How can we make amends?”
Sedona answered with visions of great healing and ancestral sadness set against the current-day realities of an $800+-a-night resort that “allowed” members of an indigenous tribe access to their sacred ceremonial land, for free, the tour guide cheerfully pointed out, whenever they requested.
In the Petrified Forest, I could see the long-gone but not-gone communities of people that used to live in this huge cordoned-off space now only accessible to those born to this piece of land for the price of admission.
In Truth or Consequences, formerly Geronimo Springs, New Mexico, all the mineral springs are privately owned. One of the resort spas offered idyllic mineral baths on the bank of the Rio Grande River, a few hundred miles from the stretch of river divided by razor wire intended to keep “illegals” out and cause harm to desperate people in dire circumstances.
“It’s still like that,” rings in my ears.
This desert trip started at an intentional community, an urban laboratory with ideals of connecting ecology, commerce, architecture, and community beside a mesa, in Arcosanti, AZ.
The late architect, Paolo Soleri, named both his design studio and the nonprofit organization he founded Cosanti – “cosa” and “anti,” meaning “against things” as a critique of our culture of consumerism and as an exploration of a utopian world built in balance with the environment. In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began construction of Arcosanti, a new way of living, in the Arizona desert as a testing ground for Solari’s urban planning concepts.
We stayed overnight at an apartment in Arcosanti. The design of light, space, and scale takes away your breath as do the ergonomic choices in a kitchen envisioned by someone who does not do much cooking. “The architecture of the future” is how the tour guide explains this place the next morning at the beginning of the tour I can’t join because of access barriers.
“So, the future is not available for folks with mobility impairments?” I ask for myself and others that can’t easily walk up and down the steep stairs outside the buildings to the different terraces, plazas, and apartments. Even navigation within the apartments is difficult. Stairs feature heavily in the intimate and expansive spaces. Arcosanti’s design elements ensure that disabled community members are excluded. The guide assured me that had ADA standards been in place, they would have followed them. They have considered how future builds could be more accessible, like putting in an elevator, but that would be an expensive retrofit for which there is no budget.
Soleri envisioned a place where thousands of able-bodied humans could live and work but Arcosanti has never been occupied by more than 100 people. Now that Soleri had passed, our guide felt optimistic that the board of directors for his nonprofit, the separate community board of directors, and the onsite community members could breathe new life, a better life, into this place. Soleri’s utopian vision feeds on the hope of this community to carry on.
Back 100 or more years and ahead 500.
A few days after returning from the desert trip, a transparent ethnic cleansing, under the guise of self defense, commenced in another desert halfway around the world. Joining the other genocides currently in progress.
“Surely they won’t do any of those other things,” we say each time they do heinous things to people dehumanized, terrorized, and then labeled terrorist. Annihilation incessantly executed in hospitals, schools, refugee camps, mosques, and where aid is distributed. Giddy with unleashed nihilism, the settlers appear to trounce out systems of life like giant two-year olds lacking an understanding of cause and effect. Is this what it felt like 76 years ago? Is it still like that here?
This spring, I cat sat in Amsterdam for a few weeks. It was my first trip to Europe. It was harder to get past the glorious tulips, aggressive bicyclists, and hardworking windmills to hear those older voices of the land in the Netherlands. I wonder if that is true throughout Europe or is it the colonizing remains of the Dutch East India Company that quiet those that have lost the battle of place here.
As I admired art and canals, the desert genocide continued as did the hateful rhetoric and acts against those not seen as United States citizens because of their religious beliefs, skin color, dress, and ways of being. This disconnection between place and people is an epic heartbreaker linking manifest destiny, slavery, and class with the ways in which we harm and take away community safety and belonging in this country. The old stories do not feel old. “It is still happening” flashes across my eyes as I press into my skull for relief. Underneath, “you are complicit” whispers across my aching heart.
A place of ideal perfection.[2]
This particular trip ended in the Catskill Mountains in New York. At a writer’s camp filled with talent, creativity, uplifting support, and a brilliant kindness that reassures you repeatedly that you, too, belong. Where we were asked to consider utopia, dystopia, and home. I felt enveloped and, months later, can still tap into the glow of hope and creative life ignited by time spent with these people in this place. If I think of them, my stomach calms and I notice that I have been holding my breath.
Recently, a stranger on a train, told me that some places are only meant to be theoretical. He was describing a workshop he was creating for elders to consider war and peace, now and then. He was going to place them in areas of conflict set up around a room so they could imagine the horrors and complexity of the current situation in these different parts of the world. So they could imagine being affected by the decisions and violence there.
Our conversation meandered like the river we watched as we crossed Montana. His words reminded me of this writing assignment and of the lure of a tangible, not theoretical, utopia.
After my trip to the Catskills, I can remember how a perfect place of community, creativity, and caring feels. It is a warmth in my gut that quiets that panicky blinking and stabbing pain just enough to find joy and have the capacity to see the wretched layers of dystopian reality still unfolding and try to do something about it.
[1] “Dystopia.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia. Accessed 1 Jun. 2024.
[2] “Utopia.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utopia. Accessed 8 Jun. 2024.
Avis Barlow delights in telling stories that privilege the warped and juicy moments of life. Their new chapbook, Corpus Memoria: Hair, is part of a larger work-in-progress that uses body parts to remember life stories that often don’t get heard: those of women, children, and queer folk. When not writing, Avis looks up things for fun, runs questionable fermentation experiments, and wanders the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
