Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

Annotations from "Helen of Nowhere" by Makenna Goodman

Often, she said, you’ll see the least altruistic people using sincerity to throw their weight around. Honesty and sincerity are great ways to avoid suspicion, she would always say.

But soon, the farmers couldn’t farm without the potions, because without the potions there were too many pests and no way to get rid of them, and without the potions the soil was useless, because the soil had become dependent, too. Farmers who had been making money then went into debt paying for the treated seeds and gallons and gallons of the inputs, boxes and boxes, whole vats of it, which had originally been sold as a miracle cure, but now were being sold as the solution to what was now seen as continual disease. The companies were making new potions to answer the problems that had been created by the old potions,

I ask you, professor, who was in charge of looking into theories and who was in charge of creating studies for how the chemicals had taken over the world and what could be done to save farming? The land grant universities is who, the ones the farmers had once relied on for soil analysis! The universities were going to solve the problem. But the problem was that the universities had replaced the soil scientists who knew the real benefits of soil with scientists from the chemical companies, and money was funneled into research and studies of yet more chemicals to fix the problems that had been started by the chemicals in the first place. The studies were skewed and quantitative analysis of the state of agriculture was skewed because it relied on the skewed data. Knowledge about soil and crops came from the thinkers at the land grant universities who were put in place by the chemical scientists who advised the companies to continue putting time and money into creating more inputs for the crops that now couldn’t survive without them.

It’s a joke. This country. The farmers got sick, and their kids got sick, and they had to take medicine that was made with chemicals, too, just like the livestock,

Inside every person is a landscape, Helen would say. Why look at your reflection in search of the truth?

All the mistakes we may have made, these are mistakes that come from looking too hard at our reflections. If we had no reflections, we’d see what was in front of us, we’d see many things at once, none of them ourselves.

Helen had money. You betcha. She used to say her life was like the inside of a golden egg, and that people with normal shells wanted nothing more than to be golden. And instead of thinking about their yolks or whites, they thought only of their shells and how they were missing some kind of decoration, whereas she had the decoration and wanted it to be normal, like theirs. Helen was a golden egg who wanted to be plain. And yet she knew she was just an egg like every other egg, who only cared about her shell.

Forget about “the end.” This is the beginning for you. I say you have a whole lifetime ahead of you. We don’t even know what’s out there. We’re both young, in the scheme of things. You’ve left the city and maybe you’ll never go back, but there’s a whole life outside of the city! I can sell a house and I can throw in some idealism, too, can’t I? Or are you a materialist?

I have a gift, the realtor said. But I was scared. I had learned to be frightened by my own desire. It’s a rare gift. Go on, I urged her, go on. I can speak about and validate subtleties of consciousness that are usually dismissed by the Western mind. It’s something I was not taught to do, but rather it came to me. And over the past several years I have been cultivating it and helping people come to terms with love.