Alchemical Scroll part 3: Iowa, a place to grow
or home: when the pollution on the inside is the same as the pollution on the outside
Originally, I included this permutation of the alchemical scroll in the (upcoming) post about my father as a child laborers in the 1940s, but that post is getting too long & taking too long (my apologies again). I think once that post is complete, you’ll see why they go together, though — farm labor, intergenerational traumas, disability ...
CN mention of suicide
For this permutation, another literal metaphor:
I wanted to represent how the ecosystem on the outside = my ecosystem on the inside.
It’s also a play on the old Iowa state tourism logo: Iowa a place to grow.
In this spinal cord drawing, ethanol gets pumped into my L1 vertebra, the pump itself drawn in iron oxide red and vermillion. As usual in this series, the materials are the message.
Vermillion:
Vermillion is made from cinnabar — a toxic pigment made of mercury sulfide. It is reactive, dangerous, and over time exposed to air, turns black.
To prove that the altered cinnabar was elemental, or 'metallic', mercury, lead author Karolien De Wael and her team placed the pigment on a platinum surface and dipped it in water that contained chloride ions. When the researchers cast laser light on the mineral, it turned black (see inset in picture below). By applying an electric voltage, the mercury ions were released from the pigment into the water. Moreover, the voltage required was precisely that required for metallic mercury to release ions, De Wael says. The results were published this week in Angewandte Chemie.
Without mercury, we would have no oxygen.
In the 18th century, Antoine Lavoisier heated mercury under a bell jar, watching as a red calx (what we now call oxide) formed on its surface, causing the mercury level to rise. When the stopped burning, he measured the decrease in air volume under the bell jar. Then, he removed the calx, burned it under the bell jar, and measured the increase in air volume: they almost matched. Mercury had eaten the air to create that calx.
But not all of the air, only one constituent of it: what Lavoisier called “eminently respirable” air. He became the first to say air was not itself an element, but rather, made up of elements.
Oxygen as we know it was born.
Iron Oxide Red:
Iron oxide is rust, a memorial of the Great Oxidation Event:
2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria learned to photosynthesize oxygen and poisoned the atmosphere to their advantage. They struck when methanogens were down: nickel-starved and weak, as Earth's crust cooled and volcanoes went extinct.
At first, iron — dissolved in the ocean — ate all of the oxygen, rusting and precipitating to the sea floor like tiny Titanics, down down down into the cold dark, burying it in the ocean bed, creating banded iron formations.
Air became fossils: a marker horizon for when bacteria breathed their own atmosphere into being.
When all the iron had rusted, oxygen had nowhere to go but up, up, up into the atmosphere. This is known as The Great Oxidation Event or The Great Oxygenation Event, depending on your point of view.
A mass extinction of anaerobes.
There is no fundamental difference between pollution and air, except who is breathing.
In 2018, an MRI to monitor my syringomyelia found a benign tumor at L1 in my spine, putting me at risk for a compression fracture.
The treatment: ethanol injection.
Growing up, my father worked at the local ethanol plant: ADM Corn sweeteners — producers of high-fructose corn syrup, too. Once, when I was five or six, he brought home a plastic squeeze bottle labeled “CornSweet.”
“Can you believe they can make sugar from corn?” he said. We drizzled the sticky liquid on our cereal, unaware it could be bad for us — it came from a vegetable, right? The sugar to save us from sugar.
Ethanol, the fuel to save us from global warming, so safe you can drink it (unless, like my father, you have a real ethanol problem):
We are stealing food from people to feed the cars. We watch them eat our food and think we are safe now. We have placated them, neutralized them, so they do not make us extinct with their exhalations.
Never mind ADM burns coal to process the corn to make your “clean” fuel — emitting mercury in the process — or that ethanol quickens climate change.
Or that to fertilize the corn to make the ethanol, we burn natural gas to break nitrogen-nitrogen bonds so that hydrogen can slide in like an interloper and father a new compound: ammonia, which we sprinkle like popcorn salt on the fields, so it can bind to the nitrogen in the atmosphere, extracting it to fertilize the soil.
All that nitrogen has nowhere to go but downstream, into the Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico, where it deoxygenates the water by feeding algae blooms that, in turn, feed bacteria, stealing oxygen from the water, transforming it into the primordial ocean once more.
Automobile pollution causes seizures, which is why I drew my brain in this sigil as a corn tassel: I am epileptic; I grew in this ecosystem. The tassel is made from iron oxide yellow mixed with bee pollen to represent plant fertility. When I was 13 or 14, I started detasseling corn to pay for my school clothes — detasseling being how Big Corn produces hybrids. I didn’t just live in this ecosystem: I altered its genetics, and it altered mine—seizures leaving epigenetic changes, some of which return GABA receptors to an earlier stage of development, rewinding me to primordial Karrie.
And my medications, all benzenoids, made of benzene, made of gasoline, the anti-knock agent of neurotypical dreams.
Once, at an art exhibit, a guest book asked, “What is home for you?” I wrote: when the pollution on the inside is the same as the pollution on the outside.
In 2019, my father broke his back — a compression fracture at L1 —and never recovered. His Alzheimer’s — maybe caused by cars, too — progressed rapidly, all his recent memories erased, only his childhood, primordial Clifford, before he was a father, remaining. A few months later, he was gone.
My benign tumor — on the same vertebra — started to feel like an omen. For me or for him?
My oldest brother worked at ADM, too, where an industrial accident left him requiring a fusion in his cervical spine — same location as my syrinx, drawn in this sigil with an ear of corn sprouting out of it, the fruits of all this pollution, all these sacrifices on the altar of Car World.
For the husk, I made an ink of viridian aka chromium oxide green: chromium being a finishing for the surface of cars and essential to the engine valves and piston rings. There is no fundamental difference in this ecosystem between growing corn and growing cars.
“Your brother was a woulda been, coulda been, shoulda been muscle car yahoo,” his high school friend told me. All the ladies loved to ride in his 1969 Pontiac GTO.
I killed my brother, in a way: Without the specter of fossil fuels creating disabled people like me, there would be no ethanol, no ADM, no life-changing injury, no prescription painkillers in his medicine cabinet, all made of benzene, made of gasoline, the anti-knock agents of suicidal dreams.
… and now I need ethanol injected into me — like a car — to save my spine, to save my mobility.
The same thing that makes us sick makes us well. I rob gasoline from the cars to stop my seizures. I rob corn from the cars to save my spine.
The pollution on the inside is the same as the pollution on the outside. This is home. Iowa, a place to grow.
I first read this in my email instead of in Substack itself. It's great to know that you can have conversations here!
wow! excellent piece of writing, Karrie.