When the current crises became global in scope, when the very ground underneath our feet and the skies meant to give us life turned on us, our desperation grew to cinematic proportions. We abandoned all previous fathers, who now seemed puny and impotent. Who was God, even, in the face of geocatastrophe? Dinosaurs never cared about a god.
When I think about how and when Jean de Men became the leader of CIEL—how we acquiesced—my compassion for our survival washes away rather quickly. I look in the mirror, and see who and what we have become. The only way we survived even this long is at the expense of what’s left of Earth’s resources. Including the humans we forsook, their eyes turned Skyward.
It makes me laugh before it makes me cry: he was a celebrity, de Men. Handsome and strong. A capable new father. We worshipped his mutable charisma. We worshipped the story of ourselves that he gave us: that we were bright and beautiful and with wealth. That we were the next chapter of human history. That we were an evolutionary step forward. We bought it and ate it like fine chocolate.
Body to body, then, I join Joan in rejecting the teachings of a pseudo messiah figure. I join Joan in rejecting messiahs altogether. The story born of her actual body will be burned into mine not to mythologize her or raise her above anyone or anything, but to radically resist that impulse. Not toward any higher truth other than we are matter, as dirt and water and trees and sky are matter, as animals were and stars and human bodies are matter. To claim our humanity as humanity only, an energy amidst all other energy and matter that emerges, lives, dies, and then changes form.
What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?
I will write it. I will tell the truth. Be the opposite of a disciple. Words and my body the site of resistance.
When I learn that Trinculo has asked to be burned at the stake, in the manner of Joan, I know two things. One, that they will hasten his execution for having the audacity to make this request, a fact that overcomes my entire body so quickly and violently that I drop to the floor, and two, that the image that has haunted me my entire ascended life will begin to come back to me in dreams.
I am, as it turns out, wrong about the latter. It comes to me not just in dreams, but also in waking life: while I work, when I eat, even when I sit in a chair and think of nothing. It obsessively replaces my present tense. Like a film stuck in my skull.
After Joan’s trial, it was decreed that, for maximum media impact, she would be executed using a method from antiquity. Specifically, a medieval burning. Several reasons were given: first, no trace of her corpse could be left behind. She must be reduced to ash and scattered into space. While some expressed concern that her ashes might be captured and used to lionize her—or, worse, to anoint a new terrorist leader—the larger concern was that any piece of her body that remained might be seized upon as something of a holy relic—and one tangible, material relic could be as dangerous as an entire belief system.
Furthermore, it was decided that an old-fashioned burning would have the ultimate dramatic effect, that no other form of execution could tap into a collective psychic desire to watch the object of one’s devotion in peril. Though there was, admittedly, much discussion about devising an electric chair execution, which some claimed would have an equivalent impact on the populace, but which was ultimately rejected because it required too elaborate a mise-en-scène. Drowning was a popular suggestion, but water was scarce, and suggestions of producing a CGI version were quickly dismissed, as even the best simulations of water always looked like antiseptic gel. Since the event was to be filmed and disseminated via media outlets all over the world, a fire death was likely to create the most dazzling visual display, and thus promised to draw the largest possible audience.
Finally, it was decided: a burning execution, a barbarity dredged up from the annals of history. It would serve to remind the remaining population on Earth that the very elements they had fought to claim and protect on that ball of dirt they called home could at any moment destroy them—whether through ecological cataclysm or through fire itself, the simplest and most elemental force in nature. As easily as it had evolved them, it could destroy.
For fire’s sake they burned her.
A scaffold was erected, in the manner of old. Joan was positioned upon the scaffold within a staged version of some bombed-out city, barren as a desert; she was not made privy to the location of her execution, only that it would happen at night.
High winds tricked dust into the air, making the stage appear to float on a cloud of dirt.
She looked up at the black and blue of the night sky. We looked down at her, without her consciousness of our gaze. Or perhaps with her full awareness: at one point, the cameras caught her looking up, and in doing so she seemed to acknowledge the ultimate power of our position and the utter futility of her own.
Then the drama began. To be clear, it took several rehearsals of the burning to achieve the desired result, the perfect shot. Even with a director of the highest pedigree.
Hands propelled her roughly toward the scaffold where the stake and faggots were waiting, and hoisted her upon it; it was built of plaster and was very high, so high that the executioner had some trouble in reaching her. Instead of a crown of thorns, a tall paper cap, like a mitre, was set upon her head, bearing the words heretic, apostate, eco-terrorist.
She requested a tree branch. She said she only wanted to see it.
Instead, a visual facsimile was supplied. Joan flew into a rage.
“You mean to execute me and you cannot supply a single branch from a tree? What are you, sadists? Neanderthals? I know you must have one. You must have saved something from your destruction—a trophy, a prize, like a serial killer would. You must have an entire museum devoted to your every act of devastation.”