armes molles
Léa Rivière (translated from french by Aubrey Birch)
august 2020

Geological lesbians: they are telling a story.
They tell it to themselves, one to another, wedged between the tree-shaded stones (the river a
little lower, you hear it rumble softly). Oaks, an ash tree, clusters of hazelnut trees, the granite is of
a lighter shade, mosses, quartz, lichens, cushions, water jugs, the light moves between the
leaves.
Some speak more, or for longer, some listen and say nothing (as though they were thinking harder
or imagining details in the space between the things, leaving the others to describe the invisible
forms deposited there – entrusted).
It is hard to know if they are inventing the story as they go along as though it might be some
vague and vaguely communal memory being evoked for the first time, or if they unfold it as
something that has not happened yet, but which they already know. Pragmatically, they tell the
story in exactly the same way (in all exact ways) that both of these possibilities are true at the
same time.

They say stories and the world are the same thing, or that stories is synonymous with relations
and this is the material of the world.

They say that to die is to facilitate encounters.

They have cocks, clits, hair on their breasts, breasts under the hair (they say that this is different,
they’re different stories), hairless breasts, breastless hairs, cut-off breasts, virtual breasts,
vanished breasts, breasts that flower, that emerge, that overflow, that struggle, that are hoped for,
that are invited, that are just passing through, breasts that come and go, breasts that are out of
the question.

They say that they are the humans of their dogs and the living of their dead.

They remember having guessed, or decided without quite knowing how, that traditions are a
crucial form of speculation and that science fiction is an indispensable archival power.

They have collectively replaced dead lines with circles of the dead: when it’s time, they make a
circle and they invite their dead for the storytelling — they’ve had enough of sharp edges.
With time they let acclimatisation replace transition with dramatic consequences.

Drama: what happens when you listen to rocks.

They say while laughing that the dramas of matter form their politics. Some of them call it
dramaterialism, others are sliding through the icy water that seethes between the rocks.

When one of them dies, it is the trees that look after everything. And they follow.

They say that gender is relational and community-based, not individual or identity-based.
They say that roles are to community what identities are to supremacy: its binding, its
infrastructure, that which makes it possible, that which it needs in order to be.

They say that supremacies are always projects, and that the way to effectively abandon a project
is to stop investing, more or less passively, in its prolongation (and to stop nourishing any fiction
claiming its disparition would leave a void needing to be filled). For this, they work to arouse in
themselves feelings of safety by the co-regulation of their nervous systems (between them and
with things without nerves). They call it ecology of trust.

They say that trust is the reverse of a war against a system. It is a compost to no longer need the
system that you believed you had to fight.

They say that to fight something is to make this thing a centre. So that fighting it first becomes a
habit. A habit that mutates into a need. They say that if fighting something becomes a need, you
end up needing the thing itself, making of it, in practice, a reason to be in the world.

They refuse to fight against what they want to get rid of.

So as not to be left defenceless, they craft supple, soft weapons.
And they fuck rocks.

They have replaced the sinews of war with the vagal system of aborted combat.

They sustain the difference between the absence of combat and the presence of a refusal to fight.
This is how stories matter, they say (the materiality of stories, their thickness, their place in the
stomach).

They have long since replaced gender identity with gender role and they don’t really speak of it
anymore.
They sometimes feel, lingering in their bodies and their forests, ancient fears when the expression
gender role is pronounced. They say that fear is the oxygen needed to burn the pyres.
They say that there are hundreds of genders and that roles are versatile.

They say that the role is a form of stabilisation, densification, an intermittent thickening of certain
relations. Whereas identity would be rather their negation — the project of making the world a
neutral plane with distinct things laid on top, assumed to subsequently interact in a vague
manner, cavalry in nature, colonisers in the jungle, soldiers in deep shit.

They say that they are composed of their relations, that their relations precede their existences.
They say it’s the reason they need the rocks all the time all the time all the time. That without the
trees, they forget what they are in the process of becoming.

They have replaced identity politics with a politics of stories.

They say that if the ministry of ecological transition still existed it would mostly be there to support
mastectomies, various implants and other seasonal pruning.

When the moon is in Gemini they tell jokes, and take care not to discuss too much the potential
differences between true and false.

Some find Hormone to be a pretty name.

Others suspect Homer to have been a mutation of Hormone. They say then that bodies are
odysseys whose messengers and their guests are telling the stories that they want to tell (or that
they are made capable of telling). Hormones as storytellers, they say.

When they say or it always means and (they continue to use or for the form that the mouth takes
when pronouncing or).

Most of them maintain that they have never been able to read beyond the first page of Monique

Wittig’s book Les Guérillères, that having hitched a ride on the circle that follows it, they make a u-
turn, returning over and over again.

They say that pronouns are cosmetic, that they wear their pronouns like they wear a skirt or a
beard or a scar.
They believe it important to make-up facts.

They say that any truth must be capable of demonstrating its own interest, in concert with the
alliances and stories it invokes, in order to be accepted as true.

They say that they always knew The Matrix is a lesbian film.

Their cocks have various, poetic forms. They have femme cocks, butch cocks, soft cocks, cocks
engorged with blood, silicon cocks in all colours, dicklits, clitdicks, pussy-cocks and cocks Who-
Must-Not-Be-Named, double cocks, triple-cocks, cocks at different levels of intensity. They make
good use of them.

Sometimes they fuck faggots who write fairy songs and fairy poems in gratitude for shared
knowledges. One time a faggot who was a bit of an anthropologist wrote a nuanced, sexy, and
generous article entitled Poetics of the Cock and Lesbogeologism: Undergrounds, Frictions,
Perspectives.
After a first read-through by an enthusiastic group, it was mutually decided to compost the
manuscript to grow vegetables instead of publishing it, and to let this chapter become an outlying
myth to be recounted when it’s hot.

They say that the process of consensus is opposed to that of concession, that a collective
decision is a sharp, ecological, and vibrant form of what was earlier understood as each individual
need (and not a rough, incomplete, or botched synthesis of the desires of each or the expression
of a hidden majority). They say that, as with justice and other forms of consent, collective
intimacies, or transformation of the milieu, to articulate a group’s needs is to give birth together to
an already-ancient creature, like the evolution of a pokemon.

They say that the story of the day hasn’t really begun, that they are in the middle of casting the
circle, that they are characterising the speculative territory.
They say that telling a story is like gardening. It’s the plants that take care of growing. Those who
tell stories or those who garden are only facilitators: they hold space, they invite, they listen, they
desire, they entice.

They say that everything they know the rivers taught them. They learn to learn from rivers every
day, by trusting them (by immersing their bodies, by being with them, by listening like them, in
their commotion).

They say that they are the river when they are in its bed: that to be part of a river is to be the river.
They call this a geological metonymy.

They say that the river is not just water, or rocks, or trees, or fish, insects, birds, but always only a
composition of all those things and still other bodies, a torrent of relations that are formed,
deformed, informed.
In the sense that they are part of it, some say that they are the river, even when they are far from it
(they end up with the same name), just as the trees that grow there are still the river, whether its
water narrows to an unattainable thread or their roots are submerged in its flood.

The knowledges of rivers are the difference between the stories of trees and the stories of stones.
Meaning, the space between them, their relations. They say that it’s complicated to say it with
words, that when you end up being a part of it, you know.
They say that they cannot speak of water without crying and that crying is what they can best say
of the water. That the knowledges of rivers are a form of epistemology of and by the running water
(that rivers redefine the very notion of knowledge — or its substance).

They have observed that amongst them, those that carry and birth babies are more likely boys
and butches. They imagine that if the word discipline was still in use, then that which permits one
to study this phenomenon would be called histoire-géographie.

They say that to heal is to conspire with and not against (that sometimes grammatical
redundancies are counter-spells) and that the opposite of the center is the milieu, not the outskirt.

They say that to heal is political and that to become politically organised without an intention of
multiple, collective healing or to embark on healing processes without articulating their political
implications are two examples of dangerous projects.

They say that they prefer risk to danger.

They say that names are legends (ancient stories) and that weapons are antennas, forms of
communication, air technologies.

They noticed that metaphors had become useless and unused, that all they are saying is
understandable in the literal sense.
They say that there is no trace of subjectivity in a person who listens.

Some of them, sometimes for several seasons, only speak to nettles.
Then it changes.

They say that narrations are invocations and that memories are prophecies.

They can speak for days about the way they touch stones and the way the stones touch them.

They say that the terms stone butch and dyke are forms of mineral divinations.

At some point, they share their ancestral geologies. They unfold the stories of soils and their
humans, the stories that gave birth to them. The ones they remember, the ones they've been told
a thousand times, the ones they wish they had been told, the ones they wished they’d never
heard. They describe, prolong, flesh out, shift and allow themselves to be shaped, appeased, still
moved by the lands-of-their-ancestors.

They tell the colors, textures, friabilities, how plants live there, grow there, what they transform
there, how the water, the fungi, the other animals negotiate forms of life and death, the
instabilities, the commons, the collective geomorphologies.

It is about lava, the earth's crust, colonization, displaced bodies, extraction, minerals, fault lines,
drought, rain, iron, resurgence, fertility, forests, ceremonies, architecture, lichens, agriculture,
caves, engravings, tombs, valleys, melting ice, mountain passes, fossils, seasons, harvests,
monsoons, sources, canals, oceans, plateaus, mud, fire, wars, tremors, seismicity, density,
crystallization, rate of cooling, sedimentation, infiltration.
Each story is always a mineral story in its composition.
They say that histories of soil are also stories of bodies and that stories of soil are also histories of
bodies.

They say that a person who listens is a world and that the world is a person who listens.

Geological lesbians: they are telling a story.
They say that the sowing is finished, that the seeds will need to be watered only if the morning
dew subsides.
They say that what grows is later often surprising.