[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 154, Issue 4
Joline Blais
jblais at maine.edu
Sun Oct 15 08:44:16 AEDT 2017
Dear empyre kin,
I’ll be coming on during week 4, but wanted to offer some response to imagining kin, which has been very important to me. I grew up in a small French-Canadian city in Maine—with some Indigenous culture/blood in my heritage. I had 72 first cousins—a tribe. Through the various traumas of industrial capital, I lost all of them. A few major ones through death, via paper mill pollution cancers, natural gas explosions, diabetes, and the straight jacket of Catholicism. But mostly through the dissolution of family, community, culture, language, and connection to place. My mother told me WII (GIs finding mates in foreign countries or other states) and college (GI bill sent soldiers to far away colleges where they me spouses and stayed) broke apart extended families in a single generation. The war that keeps on giving...
When I returned to Maine with my 2 & 4 year olds, I was on a quest to rebuild kinship. I told my kids frankly that we were losing our sanity because we were no longer communicating with the other beings on the earth, and that human knowledge by itself, without other species wisdom, was pretty stupid. They didn’t bat an eyelash. but went about making their own friendships in our yard, the nearby woods, and even with predators (the foxes that took their rabbit, saw it walk away in our car headlights one night). With foxes they told the mum they were pissed but understood she had kits to feed, and that one rabbit was all she could have—this was a verbal calling out in the dark night after night. And then they also decided to try a clearer language—both girl and boy began peeing around the perimeter of our yard.
So when I returned to the 4towering white pines that sheltered my childhood playgroup in our nearby forest, I took my 2 kids, and when I whacked the tree after a 26 yr absence, I got a resounding non-verbal message right up my arm which was very clearly “we’ve been expecting you” whichI knew immediately (they were old friends, after all) meant 1) they’d been waiting, 2)they knew I’d return, and 3) they also knew i’d return with more kin( the ” you" was plural now and they knew it). I told my kids this and they began to name the members of the tree family and told me what each liked best. So I told my friend gkisedtanamoogk, a Wampanoag (thanksgiving) Native American, and he said to me, “Well did you introduce your family?” (I was kinda hoping for something mystical or poetic, but he got practical about this kinship business straight off). I shrugged, recognizing my faux pas. He shook his head affectionately, “Well, how rude!” And we both laughed. So then I went back with proper manners and made formal introductions which my children loved—and they also introduced the trees. I have lots more of these kin stories, which I am now trying to collect. Perhaps when I return in week 4, I can tell how the wild blueberries Ian now working with called me home.
Invasives as kin: First, I think the controversy around “invasive” plants/animals, might be compared to the controversies around immigration—the natural world rarely objects to migration, immigration, contamination, etc. what we tend to see is adaptation. Of course human intervention here (see war example above) can be toxic and lethal—when humans move species too far, too quickly, there is little time for the usual adaptations…kinship making, negotiations...
Still, I heard recently that the only 3 indigenous fruits in the US are blueberries (more of this later as I describe my current wild blueberry project), concord grapes, and maybe raspberries(?) Most of us are not (fully) indigenous (yet). Can anyone else confirm this? How many of us species are refuges? Still. or again.
Weeds as kin: Many of you have probably heard that weeds are nature's bandages to wounded earth—they heal, and repair, then draw up deep nutrients, and they serve as critical local medicine: plantain, coltsfoot, nettles, brambles of all kinds, dandelion, comfrey. they help feed the bees and local pollinators. that add beauty, medicine, green, food. And also that the weeds that sprout near you are likely to be essential for your own health/balance, a counterbalance to dis-ease…japanese knotweed in the NE travels with lyme bearing ticks and has healing properties; my local sage pulled at the end of the year and left drying in a kitchen basket taught me to breath again when I had pneumonia, jewelweed appeared in my garden when my partner—who’s allergic to poison ivy had an episode…
Part of the Double Death Deborah Bird Rose describes, for me is the lure away from the earth, from the local, from the other beings that my work, culture, and school (later, when my kids were in middle & high school) perpetrate.
http://deborahbirdrose.com/144-2/
I have also felt this way about art practice, academia, theory. I have often felt that the most important knowledge/wisdom of our time lies in the whispers of what remain of the wild—including within us. This is the deep source for my current work with wild blueberries and their culture in downcast Maine—because big Ag has arrived and all of this wildness (including the wildness in the humans in this culture) is vulnerable to domestication. Maine Lobstermen and Blueberry farmers are a dying beed of independent humans whoo still live from the earth/sea. And I can’t think of how I can retain my own wildness without the million clone, incredibly biodiverse, wildly resilient blueberries.
Finally, my understanding of Wabanaki Longhouse (and the Haudenosaunee project) governance is the attempt to derive a model of governance where by kinship is the model. Working like CSS (yes Cascading style sheets) , the more local the rule, the more power/influence it has; the further away, the more “advisory” the governance. This puts “clan mothers” at the center of governance, as the innermost governing structure—the kinship between mother and child. Wow. And the haudenosaunee project was to try to articulate that model over a whole “international” intercultural confederation in time to defend themselves against the European threat.
In this conflict kinship (i.e. clan mother rule) lost out to the witch-hunting Europeans who had burned a whole generation of their own mothers. Time to grieve…we have still not recovered from this blow to kinship knowledge and experience. But this did pave the way for clear cuts, desertification, arctic drilling, fracking, and mountaintop removal.
So yes, kinship really feels like key here to re-weaving the Double Death that ushers in “the unmaking of country, unravelling the work of generation upon generation of living beings; cascades of death that curtail the future and unmake the living presence of the past.” Recently when conducting ceremony at a site of reversing falls, where there have been many native and non-native deaths, when I asked the white pines what we could do to reverse this, I got a back injury as first reply (forcing me inward to my own wild suffering), then when I returned the pain opened up a clear and simple channel: “Reconnect. Just reconnect to the earth and its beings. In every way you can. As quickly and deeply as you can. Everywhere. Every being.” We are the weeds now. And our medicine is simple: to reconnect especially where the earth is wounded. to breathe our own still living energy back. That is what I heard from my kin the eastern white pine. And so I now share it with you, my networked kin with your own families of wisdom to share.
I am deeply grateful for the stirring you have made possible, and the wisdom your own kinships bring to this conversation.
Joline
________________
Joline Blais
Associate Prof. New Media
IMRC Building
UMaine Orono
207 669-2431
Wild Difference, Wild Blueberry Project
> On Oct 9, 2017, at 1:32 PM, Elaine Gan <eganuc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear M and all,
>
> I inadvertently, but perhaps more interestingly, triggered something by saying "I don't want to grieve." As Margaretha and Lissette wisely point out, it wasn't really my main point, but maybe worth a few sentences now to clarify. Yes, grief (along with love and rage) is at the heart of my practice. But it is not my practice, not today, not yet. I don't want to keep burying the slaughtered, raped, maimed, run over, dispossessed. That's become a fulltime job in the Capitalocene and I don't want it. I'd like to work to change infrastructures and technologies that I/we have inherited, that are now doing more harm than good. One way is to make new things thinkable, to propose new imaginaries that might open up more livable socialities—within the terrible toxic dumps that industry has made. Randall posted that sustaining is not enough; I agree. We live in a dump and we can't stay here.
>
> The main point of my earlier post was critical practice, or agency. What becomes the work of art when we seek to recognize and enable multispecies worlding within industrialized, globalized dumps? No one planned for Echo Park lake to be a habitat for red-eared slider turtles. Nevertheless, here "we" are: non-native naturecultures, contingent beings of historical ruptures and long evolutionary lines. Entangled somehow, where lies agency?
>
> ...ahhh Columbus day,
> xxElaine
>
> On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 6:46 AM, margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com <mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Elaine, and all --
>
> Of course, who wants to grieve? But also, how can we make kin in the absence of grief? I can't help but think that if we don't grieve we are trapped in anxiety that keeps us away from the present and away from others. Otherwise I can't see a way out of "managing" but not "entangling"...
>
> I'm not talking about despair, or some over performative acting out, or even sadness. I don't want to make too much of it, but I do think grief is something else -- a kind of radical presence with the trouble, as Haraway puts it, and as Lissette echoes. I think of it as a way of being outside of time, of recognizing the past in the present.
>
> But yes to the work of art and a way of making with kin....
>
> The turtles are such a good way of locating this issue of the urge for a totalizing view of how to manage a population and predict its impacts, and also the desire to have indeterminate kin (is that a thing?) Sometimes it is easy for me to flow between these two ways of being, and other times I think they are very much at odds.
>
> -M
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> beforebefore.net <http://beforebefore.net/>
> guerrillagrafters.org <http://guerrillagrafters.org/>
> coastalreadinggroup.com <http://coastalreadinggroup.com/>
> --
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Elaine Gan <eganuc at gmail.com <mailto:eganuc at gmail.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks so much, Margaretha, for bringing us together around these great (and hard) themes. Everyone's posts this week has me thinking about many things—thank you!—but particularly the work of art in what Isabelle Stengers calls "catastrophic times." I don't want to grieve. No, not yet. I want to learn how to live again and again: we are still here and that recognition demands that we make kin, kin through which and with which "we" are being remade. Maybe that's what Margaretha calls "personhood"?— the ability to make kin and keep each other alive when a hurricane, earthquake, or plague of human exceptionalism obliterates "us."
>
> I'm interested in radicalities, work(s) of art, that aren't defined entirely by refusal against or critique of the Capitalocene, but by capacities to make kin. I learn this from Donna Haraway: making kin comes before, after, and in between the cracks and crap of capitalism and bourgeois liberalism. I'm looking for propositions for more-than-human worlding, for Haraway's Chthulucene, the "not yet finished, ongoing, abyssal and dreadful ones that are generative and destructive..." I don't want to grieve the road kill. I don't want to care for invasive species and toxic waste. I follow weeds, but I also fear them. I want to learn how we can bend our roads, design our cities and stomachs—so that they do not collide with migration routes of monarch butterflies, breeding grounds of giant catfish, life cycles of too many companions. If capitalism is a way of organizing things, as Jason Moore theorizes, then what is a way of making, making-with, kin? How might we map this double internality?
>
> I met a non-native yesterday, hanging out in Echo Park lake (one of the oldest and likely most haunted) in LA. I met several non-natives, in fact, but one that made me stop was a red-eared slider turtle who swam up to me, likely trained to equate people with easy food. These turtles are common, listed on many websites as "cute" little things that make "great household pets." Hundreds live in the lake; most likely, abandoned by owners who decided they just weren't so cute anymore. From what I could find online last night, this group of turtles has only been around since the lake's overhaul in 2012. Of course, my first question was: hey, what happened to the turtles that lived in the lake when it was drained completely for a two-year renovation? The next few questions were harder: are these turtles kin? Are they nature or culture in the Capitalocene or the Chthulucene? What is my/our responsibility to species that we've domesticated, displaced, mutated, and rendered disposable, when they've gone feral and survive outside of human control? Some become road kill. Some become new companions. But others are taking over, creating new indeterminacies (generative and destructive naturecultures). What then is the work of art in attending to these that are changing what it means to be human (and nonhuman)?
>
> xElaine
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 9:49 AM, Brian Karl <brianbkarl at gmail.com <mailto:brianbkarl at gmail.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I've been dipping in and out of Charles Foster's "Being a Beast" of
> late (sub-title: "Adventures Across the Species Divide"), in which he
> rather literally tries to embody a phenomenological experience closer
> to that of a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer and a swift by burrowing
> in and snuffling about closer to the earth for days and weeks at a
> time in the wild. He fully admits the absurdity as well as doomed
> enterprise of this, but meanwhile gets in a lot of philosophizing
> about human species' different relation to nature as well as lots of
> good sensorial thinking about different ways of relating to the
> complex and interactive physical world--what is framed and highlighted
> (or high-smelled or -heard) by different species' sensory organs and
> foraging needs...
>
> Responding to Margaretha's last inquiry:
>
> Well, my non-humans of late are pretty diverse: long, ongoing
> relationship continues with Bando, my mostly outdoors Siamese cat, who
> still sleeps with us humans most mornings after long nights
> tree-climbing and...who knows what adventuring.
>
> We have been together for going on six years, but it's changed and
> deepened in new ways since moving to the edge of a big open space
> trail last year where both he and I encounter different species every
> day--perhaps most spectacularly of late when he led me down the
> beginning of the trail one night a few weeks ago to discover the sound
> of rustling in some bushes to be caused by a pretty good-sized
> rattlesnake -- we got within five feet before my phone-light made out
> the coiled shape just as it began to hum and buzz at us...I think
> Bando got my intensely adverse response since he allowed me to scoop
> him up and carry him back down the trail right quick, where often he
> is a muscular wriggling objector...
>
> Bando's mouse-hunting season seemed to have mostly ended a few weeks
> back til last night we heard the tell-tale crunching of tiny bones
> through our bedroom window (he was bringing back inside several mouse
> bodies a week for quite a while there during late spring and summer,
> and he consumed them pretty much entire -- save usually for the guts
> -- munching them during the wee hours while we humans listen in the
> dark in exasperated, embarrassed, brutalized, just-woken agony (I've
> managed to save a couple that he brought in pre-kill, as well as a
> couple lizards that he also doesn't seem to want to kill and consume
> as quickly). We also have an occasional tussle around the catdoor, as
> a raccoon tries to get in, and that triggers the cat into action, and
> us into...a holding pattern of too-adrenalited helplessness at 2.am <http://2.am/>.
> or whenever...
>
> I've been learning to drive more slowly around the bends of our little
> canyon road so I have better chances of not hitting any of the many
> deer that stumble and nimble and amble around here. I startled a
> resting one into lumbering up from a kneel the other morning out in
> the yard -- little staghorn nubs on his just-past adolescent head
> maybe ten feet away. They usually come in small families, of course,
> but occasionally as solo ramblers.
>
> And speaking of solo ramblers, the local coyotes move around too much
> to get to know them as individuals, but, still, spotting them trotting
> along even country roads, varying from the size of a large fox to a
> large german shepherd (three different times in the last week)
> reminds that they must be constantly nearby, even when unseen (and of
> course occasionally we hear the group howls from up in the hills
> somewhere).
>
> The madrones' and eucalyptus' different peeling bark patterns
> (non-patterns?) never cease to fascinate, and I notice the big
> California Buckeye bulbs are coming out on the trees again (looking
> forward to the fat, long, aromatic blossom branches in the spring).
> Occasional chittering of squirrels and raucous jay or crow calls from
> a near distance. And more occasionally a solo owl hooing. Swells of
> crickets near and far we can count on every night -- the frogs have
> taken their mating calls somewhere else of late...
>
> More than enough from me, for now. Enjoy your trip to the farther
> northeast, Margaretha!
>
> B.
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 6:00 PM,
> <empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> wrote:
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> >
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> > 1. Re: Beginning Week 1: Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic
> > Systems and Entanglements (Randall Szott)
> > 2. short answer post :: all of -empyre-, what non-human
> > relationships are you cultivating? (margaretha haughwout)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2017 14:18:43 +0000 (UTC)
> > From: Randall Szott <placekraft at yahoo.com <mailto:placekraft at yahoo.com>>
> > To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> > Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Beginning Week 1: Radical Aesthetics,
> > EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements
> > Message-ID: <402365668.3318888.1507385923606 at mail.yahoo.com <mailto:402365668.3318888.1507385923606 at mail.yahoo.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > I want to thank William and Norie for their thoughts and my fellow conversants for theirs as well. William - I read the article you suggested and it does resonate for me in many ways. One thing I will point out though, is that "sustainability" is not enough. The model of "sustainable" has been increasingly displaced in agricultural circles by "regenerative." Given the amount of damage being done in various domains (including the linguistic - thank you!), we need to do more than sustain, we must regenerate (heal, repair, improve).
> >
> > ENTANGLEMENTS:
> >
> > A last thought for the last part of the week's title. I find entanglement a powerful descriptive metaphor in describing systemic relationships, much more so than network/connection/node metaphors. However, I want to throw another term into the mix, one of a slightly larger descriptive frame - ENLIVENMENT. This concept comes from a feeling percolating for years that I couldn't quite name, it hovered near readings on pantheism, ecopsychology, and Kathleen Dean Moore's "Holdfast" or ?David Abram's "Spell of the Sensuous" among others. Finally, I stumbled across ?Andreas Weber's "Enlivenment" and the feeling had finally manifest in words, words which then coalesced into a framework that has shifted my thinking/feeling substantially. The essay is full of magic incantations - worldmaking, householding, poetic objectivity, empirical subjectivity, and the call to shift from the values of the Enlightenment (which Weber describes as an ideology of death) to Enlivenment. Briefly, he c
> ha
> > racterizes it this way:
> >
> > "...a new stage of cultural evolution?that can safeguard our scientific (and democratic) ideals of common access to knowledge and the powers connected with it ? while at the same time validating personal?experience that is felt and subjective: the defining essence of embodied experience.?The Enlivenment that I envision includes other animate beings, which, after all, share?the same capacities for embodied experiences and ?worldmaking.?
> >
> > Enlivenment therefore is not just another naturalist account to describe?ourselves and our world that can then automatically dictate specific policies or?economic solutions...[it is]?a naturalism that is based on the idea of?nature as an unfolding process of ever-growing freedom and creativity paradoxically?linked to material and embodied processes. The biosphere is alive in the sense that it?does not only obey the rules of deterministic or stochastic interactions of particles,?molecules, atoms, fields and waves. The biosphere is also very much about producing?agency, expression, and meaning."
> >
> > Onward, then in enlivened entanglements with each other and our nonhuman poetic collaborators!
> >
> > -r
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2017 13:41:03 -0400
> > From: margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com <mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com>>
> > To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> > Subject: [-empyre-] short answer post :: all of -empyre-, what
> > non-human relationships are you cultivating?
> > Message-ID:
> > <CAP1-Q3YrMjQPOFDGzG4R4eFDG0rH8Ms_qrzcbaWA6q-ju=Ktmw at mail.gmail.com <mailto:Ktmw at mail.gmail.com>>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I'm driving across the northeast today, watching trees head into dormancy,
> > and thinking about the conversation that has begun this week. Lots to reply
> > to. I look forward to catching up fully this evening and tomorrow --
> >
> > In the meantime, a question for all of -empyre-::
> >
> > What relations are you cultivating with on-humans at the moment? I have
> > just moved, so my relationships are new and fragile:
> >
> > hawthorn tree at my studio
> > crabapples, apples behind my house
> > wild apples at colleagues house
> > mouse behind my oven
> > chamomile and brassicas in my greenhouse
> >
> > boneset in the trails
> > joe pye weed in the marshes
> >
> > to name a few
> >
> > --
> > beforebefore.net <http://beforebefore.net/>
> > guerrillagrafters.org <http://guerrillagrafters.org/>
> > coastalreadinggroup.com <http://coastalreadinggroup.com/>
> > --
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> > End of empyre Digest, Vol 154, Issue 4
> > **************************************
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