ˈtɛmp(ə)rərɪnəs On the Imperatives of Place C H A L L E N G E S # 2 John Kinsella · Russell West-Pavlov herausgegeben von Gabriele Alex, Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Dorothee Kimmich, Russell West-Pavlov Band 2 Challenges for the Humanities Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften John Kinsella Russell West-Pavlov Temporariness On the Imperatives of Place © 2018 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Internet: www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2568-4019 ISBN 978-3-8233-8174-7 Umschlagabbildung: Steel Matting, Wankheimer Täle © Russell West-Pavlov Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb. dnb.de abrufbar. 5 Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Matting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Residues of Hessian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Where is here? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Eco-futures Opening Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 At the End of August . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Flâneur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Writing a poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily , 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Approximate Proximity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Concretions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Utrecht caesura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Journaling an Activist Poetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 A Chronology of Poetic Activism I: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal ( June to October, 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Meshed landscapes of affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism II: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal ( June to October, 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Clinamen and the Kehre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 John: Response to Clinamen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism III: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal ( June to October, 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Framing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Subtexts of ‘Property’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal ( June to October, 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Trust Thoreau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 6 Contents Journaling an Actist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism V: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal ( June to October, 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 A Call to Non-Violent Resistance: Save Wildlife NOW! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Risk History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal ( June to October, 2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Extreme Weather Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Lessen the distance between the word and the thing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Waking Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Surprise or astonishment? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists . . . . . . . . . 154 Marks in the sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 The Distractions: Global Fascism is a Fact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Berlin Bunker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 On Filomena Coppola’s Earthly Tales Exhibition at Gallery 152, York, Western Australia (2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Fractal Merri Creek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Exploitation of Cocos (Keeling) Islands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place . . . 177 Wild Boars on the Panzerstraße . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 After the Mirage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Detachment Attachment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Monologues to Tracy II: June 5 th , 2017, Tübingen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Zlatna vrata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Monologues to Tracy III: June 6 th , 2017, Tübingen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Terraces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Monologues to Tracy IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Stories stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Monologues to Tracy V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Temporary episodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 Dialectical images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Temporariness and Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Neg-entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Monologues to Tracy VII . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Ordnance Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Contents 7 John on maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Hegel’s Pub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Two questions have never ceased to nag me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 Walking in June . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Monologues to Tracy IX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Running in the Black Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Monologues to Tracy X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Postscript (6.40pm) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 The act of writing in a new notebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 A shy sun orchid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Patmos as palimpsest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Bobcat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Sightings-failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 Anecdote as method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 Acknowledgements John: I wish to thank Curtin University, where I am Professor of Literature and Environment, for a Curtin Research Fellowship which has supported my participation in the writing of this book, and assisted me financially in the visits to Tübingen which have facilitated the dialogue between myself and Russell West-Pavlov. I also wish to thank the Curtin University School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry for a financial contribution to the publication. And much thanks to the ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’ project at Tübingen University for supporting my visits to Tübingen, and all those connected with the project. Special thanks to Tracy Ryan for her ongoing support, and also to our son Tim. Some of my pieces have appeared on the blog I share with Tracy Ryan, Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist and Feminist . And acknowledgement to the following occasions where sections of this book were given as papers: Australian Academy of the Humanities’ 48th Annual Symposium, Humanitarianism and Human Rights , the Perth Literary Youth Festival: Eco-Futures , and Sydney Ideas (at the University of Sydney). Also acknowledgement for first publication of some of my pieces to the journals: Angelaki , Cordite , Poetry Wales , Vallum Magazine and Rabbit . And special thanks to Andrée Gerland for the event we did together in Tübingen: Hälfte des Lebens at the Hölderlin-Gesellschaft in 2017. And many thanks to Alexandra Leonzini for her copy-edit (not easy working with such a conversational and free-ranging text! ), and also Sara Azarmi for replacing my lower-cases with capitals in the ‘Monologues’ for the bookversion of the manuscript. Permission to reproduce images of her artwork was given by Filomena Coppola; many thanks! Thanks to University of Queensland Press and The Estate of Michael Dransfield for permission to use an excerpt from ‘Geography’. Premission to use an excerpt from Kim Scott’s ‘Kaya’ was kindly granted by Fremantle Press. Picador Australia gave permission to reproduce my poems ‛Wagenburg’ and ‛Tübingen Peace Oak’. “Of Being Numerous” by George Oppen, from New Collected Poems, copyright © 1968 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishung Corp. Oh, and apologies to those who don’t subscribe to an ‘open’ conversational and divergent style: the rhizomes, roots, and trails through the textual scrub are an essential part of what this book is trying to be, and a result of what it is trying to resist. It is, to my mind, a living and activist text, and a text of dialogue, conversation and interaction—all conducted with due respect, I hope. 10 Acknowledgements Russ: I would like to thank Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Sara Azarmi, Alexandra Leonzini and Matthias Schmerold for assistance with the textual technology. Thanks also to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) which funded, within the framework of the Thematic Network Project ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’, several of John’s stays in Tübingen, thereby making the dialogue possible in its earliest stages, as well as assisting in the costs of the publication. A word of thanks is due also to Stephen Muecke, whose fictocritical writing has been a source of inspiration and a model since the day, shortly before my leaving the country behind, I discovered Reading the Country in the National Gallery of Victoria—and for friendship and advice dating from Stephen’s incumbency of the Hirschfeld-Mack Chair in Berlin in 2008-9. In a not dissimilar manner, the ‘episodic’ writing of my friend and colleague David Medalie has informed the structure of this book. Again, I’d like to acknowledge my debt of formal inspiration to his writing. Thanks are also due to Michael Titlestad for giving permission to reproduce extracts of an article on Medalie's work that originally appeared in English Studies in Africa 58: 1 ( June 2015). Permission to quote Michael Hamburger's translation of Hölderlin's “Patmos” (from Poems and Fragments , 2004) was kindly given by Carcanet Press. Angus and Robertson gave permission to quote from A. D. Hope’s poem ‛Australia’. Curtis Brown gave permission to quote from W.H. Auden’s poem ‛In memory of W. B. Yeats’. Thanks to Joshua, Iva and Niklas for getting on their bikes and helping with the concretions at the Neckarinsel, the Brechtbau and the Burgholz. And of course, thanks to Tatjana for lovingly sharing—indeed making possible—talks, walks, thoughts, and many other shared experienced that were, from the outset, ‘about time’. John and Russ: Both of us would like to thank Philip Mead for his steadfast friendship and mentorship over the years, and, in a sense, for getting the ball rolling. This dialogue, and this book, would never have happened without him. Thanks to Alexandra Leonzini, Joseph Steinberg and Anya Heise-von der Lippe for their assistance with the production of the text. We would like to thank the anonymous external reader for valuable feedback. And we would both like to thank Andrée Gerland for his friendship and humour, and for his sense of what poetry and the Global South are all about. Image credits Page 12: Steel Matting, Wankheimer Täle © Russell West-Pavlov Page 22: Cartridge, Wankheimer Täle © Russell West-Pavlov Acknowledgements 11 Page 30: Ant Concretion © John Kinsella Page 36: Ant Concretion © John Kinsella Page 40: Dozer Concretion © John Kinsella Page 50: Erdrutsch Sign, Schönbuch near Bebenhausen © Russell West-Pavlov Page 68: Herbst Concretion with Ripples, Neckar opposite Hölderlinturm, Tübingen, Text © John Kinsella, Image © Russell West-Pavlov Page 74: Ant Concretion © John Kinsella Page 76: Proximity poem © John Kinsella Page 86: Diagram © John Kinsella Page 94: Blaulach Ice, Tübingen © Russell West-Pavlov Page 106: Ruin, Wankheimer Täle © Russell West-Pavlov Page 114: Window and Shadow, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg © Russell West-Pavlov Page 166: Botanical Gardens © Filomena Coppola Page 170: Pebble © Filomena Coppola Page 178: Unexploded munitions sign, Wankheimer Täle © Russell West-Pavlov Page 184: Military Training Area sign, Wankheimer Täle © Russell West-Pavlov Page 186: Mirage F1, University of Pretoria © Russell West-Pavlov Page 200: Eucalyptus, Mirranatwa, Victoria Valley, Grampians/ Gariwerd © Russell West-Pavlov Page 202: Omiš and Cetina River © Russell West-Pavlov Page 208: Zlatna vrata, Split © Russell West-Pavlov Page 210: Zlatna vrata, Split © Russell West-Pavlov Page 214: Split main station © Russell West-Pavlov Page 218: Brechtbau Concretion, Text © John Kinsella, Image © Russell West-Pavlov Page 222: Terraces above Kaštel Gomilica © Russell West-Pavlov Page 224: Track above Kaštel Gomilica © Russell West-Pavlov Page 260: Mushroom rock © John Kinsella Page 300: Track near Landkutschers Kap © Russell West-Pavlov Page 304: Wagenburg, Französisches Viertel, Tübingen © Russell West-Pavlov Page 308: Hochsitz, Landkutschers Kap © John Kinsella Page 310: Anomalous Concretion, Text© John Kinsella, Image © Russell West-Pavlov Page 312: Hochsitz, Bläsiberg, Image © Russell West-Pavlov Page 316: Track near Burgholz © Russell West-Pavlov Page 318: Sun Orchid Concretion © John Kinsella Page 322: Mungart Concretion © John Kinsella Page 336: Classical column, Natursteinpark, Wankheimer Täle© RussellWest-Pavlov Page 342: Mungart Concretion © John Kinsella Matting 13 Matting It glints dully on the side of a branch of cobbled pathway that passes through a gap in a straggly hedge. It is a strip of metal sheeting—laterally ribbed, punched with an even array of holes, a long piece of mattly rusted steel not quite flush with the ground so that a sort of malaise emanates from its patently temporary presence. It’s a metre-long length of so-called Marston Matting, or Perforated Steel Planking (PSP), which has migrated down the hill from the erstwhile French military training areas around the Wankheimer Täler, to the residual hippy trailer park that we call the Wagenburg—a now more-or-less permanent settlement of construction-workers’ caravans converted into a sort of a commune-cum-trailer park. This sheet of Marston Matting is probably of American origin. The stuff was first manufactured during the Second World War for use in the Pacific campaign and the invasion of continental Europe. The prefabricated matting was intended to provide an easily assembled road or runway surface to stabilize muddy or marshy ground. The individual elements were perforated to reduce weight, given lateral corrugations to stiffen them, and were equipped with a hook-and-slot system on opposite edges to allow each sheet to be connected to its neighbours. The modular units were designed to provide an artificial ground more permanent that the shifting soil they covered. But by the same token, they could be transported easily, laid quickly, and if necessary, ripped up equally rapidly to be rebuilt elsewhere. Typically, the steel matting has always been geographically mobile, also being used in Germany, for instance, to strengthen the runways at Tempelhof and Tegel airports during the Berlin airlift. This is perhaps the ‘origin’, if one can use this term at all for such ephemeral building material, for the matting that I am photographing here. Marston matting has been frequently reused for more peaceful purposes than originally intended: as fencing material, as door strengthener, or in one of my favourite examples, as wine rack (you can slot a lot of bottle necks into a slab of Marston! ). Symptomatically, when I went back to the Wagenburg to take more photos of this material, I discovered that it was no longer where I had last seen it. It had migrated onwards on its trajectory of serial temporarinesses. The steel matting was produced with a high manganese content, so that it was resistant to corrosion, as the reasonably good state of the sheeting I found showed. This means that, paradoxically enough for a building material designed for the construction of temporary runways and road surfaces and frequently transported to new sites and re-used for diverse projects, it is itself endowed with a considerable degree of permanency. A recent clean-up of the now decommissioned military zone (one of a series that has progressively removed old munitions and military junk from up on the hills) dredged up quantities of this 14 Matting steel matting in pretty good nick. It is entirely plausible that the sheet that I photographed has an eighty-year history of repeated usage in various theatres of war or mock-war, from the Second World War through the Cold War, into the post-Cold-War era—a concatenation of epochs that has seen so many lowand high-tech conflicts around the globe. The steel matting, in its very material existence, or perhaps more appropriately, existences, is an embodiment of the dialectics of temporariness and permanence that is a core preoccupation of this book. This relic of numerous wars, non-wars or proxy-wars, lying about in a hippy commune on the edge of a South German university town, fascinates me. It seems emblematic of the relationship to place that John Kinsella and I explore in these pages. The sheet of matting lies on the ground, propped lightly against the base of a tree trunk, half in contact with the earth, half floating in the air around it—displaying its readiness to go elsewhere at the drop of a hat. The matting is a prosthetic analogy for the ground, porous like the soil and its latticework of crystalline particles, constructed of minerals drawn from the earth, of it but not of it. It is a modern technological hybrid, derived from but somehow alien from the ground. It is both related to the soil, yet oddly remote from that with which it so intimately snuggles. The matting creates around itself a palimpsestic, laminated configuration of elements—earth and air, perhaps also water and fire—which might be construed as a concrete metaphor for the very nature of the temporality of the earth and our modern relationship with it. Indeed, the iconic similarity between our title, tɛmp(ə)rərɪnəs (‘Temporariness’)—transcribed into International Phonetic Alphabet in a gesture towards the contingent singularity of the verbal speech act itself—and the perforated steel matting is not coincidental. If language, for Heidegger (1949: 24), was the house of being, we implicitly suggest in this way, that temporariness, in its material and linguistic forms, is the latticework of becoming. Coeval with the ground, the steel matting both connects and separates the earth and those who stand upon it. The matting migrates, like those who walk or work upon it. The metal sheeting exists in an uneasy semiotic relationship with its environment. Is both an icon of the surface of the ground and a metonymy of it, and in my recycling of it here, a metaphor for the complex relationship between temporariness and permanency that John and I explore in this book. It is also an artefact of war, which destroys many of the relationships that language depends upon and that it seeks to illuminate. So close to nature in its intended capacity of lying layered upon the earth, but so immensely indicative of what Sebald (2004) has called ‘a natural history of destruction’, this sheet of matting is an index of the annihilation of the earth of which John and I are constantly Matting 15 reminded—not unlike Sebald himself, who discovers on his walk through Norfolk and Suffolk ‘traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place’ (2002: 3). I am fascinated by this material—I say it again. It exerts a powerful attractive force upon me. Inert, passive, but at the same time absolutely interactive (any one sheet of Marston matting is designed to slot into others), it also interacts with me. Like a dumb interlocutor, its perforations so many mute interrogations, it coaxes me into speech when I encounter it. An unnatural prosthesis of nature, it behaves, indeed, like any other inhabitant of the natural environment, giving me, quite literally, ground to stand upon in my own capacity as a walker and wordsmith. To the extent that it is there and calls to me, speaks with me, it gives birth to me in this particular instant and instance of my own series of temporary moments of existence. The matting is a living entity—yes, living: it moves, it acts, it interacts, it signifies, indeed, it is also a site of feeling. It is an emblem of affect—that powerful attractive force that operates at the somatic, visceral level and connects entities, alive or half alive, human or nonhuman, to each other, in ways that cause them to change in the course of the encounter—if only then to disengage, transformed, ready to enter into a new transformative dialogue with a new interlocutor, and on and on, in an endless creative process of connections, deconnections, reconnections. The matting I have photographed is both a visual metaphor of the affect-ridden, affect-driven world we live in and an indexical manifestation of its ‘relational pull’ (Eckstein 2017) because I have been drawn to photograph it. Yet at the same time, it is also an index of the no-less powerful forces in our world that seek to exploit, divert, pervert and destroy the immense fabric of creative relationships that make up the cosmos: war, environmental destruction, the necropolitical annihilation of humans, animals, the forests and the earth itself. These forces also exert a powerful, sinister and unsettling fascination, meaning, if nothing else, that we can never claim we are not complicit in these ubiquitous processes of destruction (Sanders 2001)—even if that uneasy knowledge founds and fuels our dogged resistance to such forces. This play of positive and negative affects means that even our moral stances, our political engagements, are not permanent places to stand, but temporary site of resistance that in this ongoing war of manoeuver must constantly be reassessed and renewed. No theory, no manifesto, no work of art, is permanent or eternally sufficient. Each of them serves a purpose for a period of time and then, as circumstances change, must be replaced by another one that is more appropriate. That is why, in writing this book, John and I have implemented the genre of the collage of micro-essays. The book is made up of units that, not unlike the steel matting, can be combined and recombined at will with other units. We have chosen a particular sequence, but of course you can take the fabric of matting apart and put it back together in another sequence or collage as you wish. Indeed, in the process of writing, we have constantly tried out new permutations and combinations of the units making up this book, slotting them together in ever new configurations. Similarly to the sheets of steel matting, each of the textual units is porous. The perforations reduce the weight of the steel matting. Likewise, the essay has a certain lightness that eschews monumental and the exhaustive modes of academic writing—attributes highly valued in the Germanic academic system in which I work, where the essay, according to Adorno (1991: 3-4), is a subaltern and subversive genre. This lightness arises from the fact that the essay seeks to maintain an open structure that communicates with its environment. Iconoclastically, the essay refuses the customary distance between scholarly observer and the object of commentary. It thus threatens, however discretely, a tradition of ‘science’ (‘Wissenschaft’) that legitimizes its gravitas on the basis of objectivity, that is, non-involvement with its objects of study. It’s a good century since quantum theory recognized that no scientific experiment can take place without the necessary precondition of the ‘entanglement’ of, respectively, observer, scientific instrument and the natural phenomena under investigation (Barad 2007). Yet the essay still creates a stir by virtue of its mixing of the distanced mode of academic commentary and the participatory mode of creative connection—by virtue of its contamination of academia with art. In its very generic features, the essay is a hybrid genre, thereby advertising, performatively, the nature of its task. Adorno (1991: 14-15) identifies the essay as a genre that is inherently inimical to Descartes’ dictates about the functioning of analytical reasoning at the dawn of the modern—and beyond, right up to the present day. Analysis, for Descartes, divides the problem into a number of atomized elements that can then be addressed one by one. The principle of divide and rule in the world of polemical thought. Or the principle of the anatomy lesson, that violently takes the body apart in order to understand its workings. The essay, itself at first glance a fragment rather than a whole, does none of this, says Adorno. It addresses an issue in its entirety, in its complexity, without seeking to dissect it and thereby reduce its living, organic complexity. By the same token, it renounces any form of totality or exhaustiveness, contenting itself with the contingent, the provisional, the temporary—in other words, the only sort of encounter that can be had with a dynamic, actantial Other. In this book, our essays, themselves dynamic entities, enter into a dialogue with one another. Within that conversation, the essays, apparently stable in their black and white adhesion on the page, are in fact transformed by the man- 16 Matting ifold and shifting connections that the intelligent and alert reader, if she listens carefully to their subterranean or submarine murmur, will hear them making among themselves. Indeed, although we have orchestrated these pieces in a certain configuration, John and I have constantly been surprised by what the micro-essays get up to among themselves when our backs are turned. Accordingly, we have been reminded, time and again, of Thoreau’s (1908: 8) words: ‘We are made to exaggerate the importance of the work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! ’ We are aware that our own configuring work leaves ample space for the essays to work their own magic and weave their own connections without our help. But that is not all. The essays seek to engage in turn with their environment, to be open to the world. One might imagine the steel latticework as a material icon or a very objective correlative of the written text—its lateral corrugations mimicking the lines on the page and the perforations the chain-like sequences of the words themselves. Conceived of thus, it is striking that in this visual simile both lines and words are staged as absences: the lines are long open grooves and the words have literally been punched out on the production line. Both are open to the air. The steel matting provides a literal visual metaphor of what Eco (1989) called ‘the open work’. Literary poesis, and by extension, intellectual creation, does not result in an autotelic, autonomous work of art or a hermetically sealed work of scholarship. Rather, from the outset it is engaged in a constant dialogue, from the smallest unit of the letter or the phoneme, with its neighbours. The visual metaphor of the steel latticework, even though it portrays an artefact that is independent and may travel, suggests a notion of creation that eschews the paradigm of Saussurean difference. Rather, it imposes a notion of interrelationship as the driving force and the underlying precondition of artistic creation and inquiring thought. Each of these essays seeks to communicate with its neighbours and could not exist alone. Each one entertains a myriad of vital connections to the earth, to the forest, to animals, to other walkers, to the wind and the clouds. To that extent, this collage of essays stands, in the manner of a complex synecdoche, for a worldliness that we believe is the only viable mode of being for the humanities if they are to survive as part of the educational institutions of the future. This book is a plank—modular, open-ended, dialogical, contingent—in a programme for a temporal (as opposed to spiritual) humanities that has yet to be invented, but we believe to be our only chance for saying something of relevance in the era of multiple global crises that forms our dangerous Now. RWP Matting 17 Atomic Swans, Neckar River, Germany River rising out of Black Forest is the river you walked past and will walk past again, again, Neckar rising and falling all the way to the Rhine at industrial Mannheim, flowing with swan families keeping zones, maintaining half lives in the dip of seasonal sheddings and re-applications, wingspread to hold warmth, to harbour the cores of their legacies, codes we stumble around, taking photos. And then, downriver from Tübingen, on a train to Stuttgart, later approaching Kirchheim, across the waters, hook of the river, swans familiar but different, chain of being, or reaction against corruption of fundamentals. Across there, summer family, Schwäne, Gemeinschaftskernkraftwerk, GK N2 with its hybrid cooling tower suppressed volcano eruptive as the Börse Frankfurt doesn’t want to be, steady steady goes the hebephrenic—broody reactor in its oven nest reminds you of Frost’s ‘American’ ovenbird, but this can’t be enclosed in a sonnet reactor vessel, can’t be shielded against its wild prosody when life goes on and on all around, cheap land for wealthier thanusual families who don’t maintain anxious states, who let the becquerels wash over them in health denial. The big flood of extra warm water in 2004, the heating river with happy expanding fish, the Simpsons laugh-off at mutating presence, those drones out of Stuttgart, the ongoing states of warfare. Wonder if the mines in Western Australia on stolen land stealing spirits and unbalancing will feed its last years, the swans’ white labours in the wastes, 18 Matting the ‘historic hiking path’, the respect a Mayor has for tradition and rites of way, trek on to Heidelberg escorted through the plant by ‘guard and German shepherd’. Matrix of traversal. Swan spectres. Wondering how people could live within a few hundred metres of the plant, of Unit 2 itself, how? Benign as ‘Wouldn’t know anyway’, and ‘Better dying first than lingering longer being further away’. Quid pro quo choice exchange not likely to rouse as much interest as Boris Becker’s financial solvency or Bernard Tomic’s ‘un-Australian’ statement of fact: ‘little bit bored’, shattering a sponsor’s illusions of a too busy to notice enculturation. Radiation gets places, works its way in, speaks its mind. And white swans mute and full of voice, the songs of culture pledge benefits of plant, and company’s people-skills, localising instillation. Benefits. Privileges. Of ‘German Engineering’. Safe as houses. But what do flight and song and Hölderlin have to do with violence of matter, of a split in the forest’s fabric, the potatoes bulging in the fields right up to the ramparts, tours through a ‘sterile’ environment: clean is unseen. So who’s to watch CNN on atomic television, or atomic rail past steam rising or the quiet hum of plant transpiration? These networks of empowerment, these liberations of carbon futures, carbon credit slaughterhouse? Incongruous change of tone, shiftback phonemes, almost passive observation recollection data collation—stay safe within the poem. All these voices that make schematics, make policy for energy to cloak the wor(l)d, to screensave and dilate our spectres. Late day travelling past, even in summer light with the risk of a shower, your swans show the way, Matting 19 cygnets trailing, blazing a generational pathway; for no Reactor Birds are alone for long, and even diminishing, register strong—what does it mean outside the ancient sources, the languages that have gone into making up the grid? And to cap it off, waste from elsewhere arrived on a barge, a ghost-train passes on the other side, on the far bank, shielding you? Or—later, later—on the intercity express from Mannheim to Frankfurt, the ball in play, everything in motion, the Rhine enabling Biblis plant, the Rhine in role of co-dependent , the Rhine regurgitating loops leaks breaks quad cooling tower symmetry to placate Unit A and Unit B pressurised water reactors, gloriously twinned with Balakovo’s pride, ovens warming to swan silhouettes, a Lotte Reiniger manic design Ordnung, the Neckar warm water merged with the Rhine warm water fed as wedding party bliss! O, but stymied with decommission, that slow trek towards non-existence as if it never was, wish-fulfilment a trace in cabbage fields. But good ol’ GKN2 back up the tributary will stay hot under its collar! True, true... Neckarwestheim is not on the railway but from across the river you join its pseudo symbiosis with plant, with the history of atomic birds: Höckerschwan, Graureiher, Bussard, Kohlmeise, Gartenbaumläufer, and with lists keening through glass you absorb becquerels to add to your stockpile, weaponised psyche to expand human consciousness, ingenuity of refusal and acceptance gathering as the train slows at Kirchheim, Neckar still rising out of the Black Forest far back, as you always travel facing forward if given a choice. These zero-sum gains in which spectral swans are winners averting glances, GPS propositions. JK 20 Matting Residues of Hessian 21 Residues of Hessian The residues of the military trying to keep a firm footing on ground they’ve disturbed, disrupted, brutalised, are a reminder and an affirmation of their failure to hold what they’ve appropriated, no matter how ‘resilient’ their technology. The ‘essential’ nature of manganese for not only anti-rust qualities, but also its qualities of shock reduction on steel, made it a deeply desired commodity in World War II, and the desire lines lead to the ‘neutrality’ of Sweden (Swedish ships carried and protected German ore shipments during the war) and, say, the Artillery Mountains in Arizona. Manganese mines, like all mines, are places of great natural and cultural disturbance. The exploitation—new waves of colonisation—of African ‘resources’, including manganese, developed multifold during World War II. All intermediaries between the earth and our feet, between the earth and objects of human design—the ‘conductive superhighways’ of the false anthropology—create a buffer that can only be permeable. A common sight in rural areas around the world is the degraded macadam that has been defeated by ‘weeds’ and tree saplings, breaking through, remaking habitat. The reclamation of steel matting of many wars and false wars, a reclaiming into the domestic porousness of forest not as monopolised capitalist-military resource, but as a place of nature in which humans are also nature, is a pragmatic dissolution of the vicariousness of conflict and violence, of the sundering of earth to conductivity. All wars are won or lost depending on lines of supply and communication. The matting allows vehicles to move where they couldn’t move of their own volition, or where they would be impaired in the usual movement. Tracked vehicles incorporate their own ‘matting’, of course, but even these sometimes require the extra ‘footing’ matting provides. And now the matting that fitted together so readily and efficiently is moving as if compelled by itself, and not by the military. A life, maybe, outside conflict—an absorbing of the less destructible into the forest, into the dwelling of ‘hippies’, into the liminal spaces of the forest-edge dwellers. In the personal essay we are often ‘reminded of ’ and draw analogies because we wish to frame the run of words and yet make it porous enough for ‘us’ to dip out and re-enter at will. This matting is necessary for the act of reading to ‘walk’ over the textual roadway laid down to enable the journey we think we require when beginning a text and imagining its possible ends. And in this spirit, yet another ploy, I am reminded of living in ‘the shack’ in the cow paddocks on the edge of the creek deep in the southwest of Australia, a few kms outside Bridgetown, with marri forest edging nearby, and a giant colonial walnut in the vicinity of the shack. And mud. In winter, it rains heavily and gets muddy. And in the same way turbulence is on the increase due to climate change, and aviation thinkers are trying to out-think the conundrum of flying Residues of Hessian 23 through what is increasingly difficult to fly through, their machines contributing strongly to the cause of the effect, so too the erratic weather patterns over the southwest produce erratic dries and wets, and the earth underfoot behaves in unpredictable ways. But when I/ we lived there, it was muddy in ‘winter’ and we laid hessian sacks on the ground outside the front porch (an unlockable ‘front door’, and no back door at all), to relieve the abjection and to make passage to the vegetable garden more practical, and to the toilet which consisted of a steel drum of high manganese content with a wooden seat above it so you’d hover over a pit of excrement, to be covered in lime after heavy usage. The sacks had been used for ASW wheat, which wasn’t grown in any quantity around there, but was grown to the northwest of the district in vast amounts over vast areas—areas I was more familiar with. The sacks had been acquired elsewhere and brought in, though we had no car and only walked places or hitchhiked. I cannot recall how we got the sacks there, so the designed usage was consigned to the temporary, and a pragmatic reinvention of use put into action. But more planned than one might think. I’d seen the sacks used for this up around farms throughout my childhood. The sacks were a little resistant to mud, but not particularly—the fibre grew sodden. Eventually the mud soaked through, to join deposits from our feet, to fuse. Walking the forest around the Wankheimer Täle with Russell, I was fascinated by the residues of an old stone road he showed me. We took many photos of the stones, our own feet, the dry mud around them. I didn’t find it abject, but my feet were well shod. The stones were fixed, and had likely been so for hundreds of years, but they were intrusions likely of the place into the place, a looping intervention but also continuity. Walking, we might wonder a-priori and know they must appear where the track becomes difficult, where it descends from field to forest. These objects with human defintion calling up experience. A complex array of presence and habitat. A challenge to the temporary, in the way all ‘time’ is inevitable and terminal and will demand its end (and, for that matter, all time is present in the moment, the singularity—ends and beginnings are relative terms). But this is really a rhetorical ploy, because in the spatial maze there are only dead ends (which become a propaganda of ‘beginnings’), and not a ‘solution’ encompasses reaching an emanating, enlightening ‘centre’ (which merely tells you that you have been on a journey). And the journey is as continuous as time which is contained within the singularity of the moment—a drawn point containing many if not all points. Thus our compulsion to make narratives of journeys, of a walk from a to b. It is a story of all time and no time, of a very specific (if meandering) route, and all space (the infinite numbers of points between points).The matting is a paradox. The matting will always move, and, indeed, it was designed to do just that. But it also moves against its design purpose, and in doing so mocks the violence and industry 24 Where is here? that prompted its creation. Conservative ‘red pill/ blue pill’ Matrix binaries are served by the matting—we can seek knowledge and its consequences, or remain blissfully ignorant. But bliss and knowledge are so intimately connected that the binary is rendered absurd before it is made. The matting is not a binary, or even part of a binary, but a recognition that even the most violent human constructs are subject to the ‘inevitable temporality’ of ‘nature’, that the materials of its making are the material it is deployed to control. An absurdity. A theatre of self-loathing. The discursive essay has to break down into ramblings and let the mud through while retaining its trajectory, its ability to move through and over rough terrain, contrive its narratives of self-preservation. Or as the rhetorical ‘or does it? ’ transports us rhizomically and atmospherically over the same land without damage. Termites scaffold their food externally and internally—and they feed the earth as they eat a tree’s deadwood. The tunnels in a termite mound, the tunnels of digested material through the dead centre of the log, are the matting created and possessed without war being enacted. The termites’ is an essay as form without violence. JK Where is here? Where is here, where is there? Where is home, where is away? John has just written a poem about signing the petition against the accident-ridden French nuclear power plant at Fessenheim—just across the border, on the other side of the Rhine, only 100 km from here. Where is here, where is there, when the reactor flushes its contaminated cooling water back into the Rhine and its tributary the Neckar, and the winds can carry any particles that the plant may emit across the black forest to our adopted Swabian home further east? So much anxiety about belonging, about refugees, about keeping foreigners out—the basis of the shocking right-wing surge in the 2016 state elections—and so little anxiety about a more potent ‘foreign’ threat, one that comes from over the French border. It’s that threat that ought to be causing us a deeper anxiety. Although even that ‘foreign threat’ is no less dangerous, so Tracy tells me, than the domestic radioactive leaks from our ‘own’ Neckarwestheim and Neckarsulm plants further up our own oh-so-idyllic Neckar. While we are on the subject of belonging and ‘here’: Neckarwestheim is twenty kilometres up the Neckar from Marbach-am-Neckar, where the German National Literary Archives are housed. The great treasures of German literature—manuscripts, letters, rare first editions, all the textual paraphernalia accrued since the elevation of Luther and Goethe and Schiller to icons of na- Eco-futures Opening Speech 25 tional tradition—are irrigated by the radioactive waste that threatens to put an end to all traditions, not merely those textual ones that are enshrined upon the Schillerhöhe looking over a bend in the Romantic Neckar. Fluid half-life against the river-like flow of a literary legacy (albeit one tarnished by the book-burnings), that I could experience live, tangibly, when I visited with Amadou from Dakar, to investigate Sebald’s scribblings from the Fens. It’s time to recalibrate our notions of where we belong: perhaps, as Vivieros de Castro (2014) would have it, our home is a shared human continuum of humans and nonhumans, all experiencing themselves as intending persons, and thus as sites of intention and ethical action, but seeing various natural worlds around themselves. We and jaguars all have a taste for beer, but what we take for beer (IPA, Hefeweizen, or blood) is a matter of species-specific taste, a question of what is prey for each predator. Today, that common ‘humanity’ of human persons and non-human persons is underscored all the more so by a grotesque inversion. If we are predators one and all, beer-drinkers alike (in best German tradition), we are all, none the less, also ‘prey’: we are prey to that predator technology unleashed upon the world by human persons unaware of their place in a continuum of personhood and determined to dehumanize their own putatively singular humanity. Here and there is neither here nor there—what counts, it would seem, is our common personhood across a spectrum of species and across a spectrum of places—whose differences, so important to childish nationalisms, are of no regard whatsoever to the monster radioactive ‘person’ preying upon us all. RWP Eco-futures Opening Speech In all we do, whoever we are, wherever we consider ourselves as coming from, we should be aware of the impact we have as individuals, and collectively, on the natural environment. We should be critiquing our very presence. That is not to say that we shouldn’t ‘be’, not at all, but that we should be aware of being— its contingent privileges, and costs . And every word we use in discussing our presence should be scrutinised. For example, the word ‘cost’ itself. What does it mean in this context? Are we reducing habitation and ecology to a system of profit and loss, of wealth accumulation? Obviously not, but we don’t have to be poets to know that words carry weight beyond our intentions. Yet as poets, we can always neologise— where a word is lacking, create one! 26 Eco-futures Opening Speech For me, when I talk of environment, I am usually talking of what most would call ‘the natural environment’. This might suggest an environment untrammelled by humans, or it might also mean an environment in which humans co-exist with other life-forms in a more ‘harmonious’ way. The problems of ‘harmonious’ aside—for ‘harmonious’ will only, in the end, ever refer to the human condition, not the non-human—I will say that I mean ‘natural’ and ‘human-made’, forms of environment, in the same way that ‘landscape’ is actually about human impact on the natural environment. We also need to consider the ‘human-made’—the ‘built environment’—in all discussions of environment and ecology, because ecology is necessarily anthropomorphic, and should be critiqued and understood as such. From the garden through to the house, the village through to the city, from the park through to the forest, environmental language is built out of comparatives, slippages, gains and losses. Environment is also about immediacy, about the conditions under which the human—and, for me, as vegan and (an? ) animal rights activist, the animal —subject is present. It’s a complex notion for what is often the simplest descriptive reference to nature and place. So, as I will be talking about ‘environment’ and activism—which is an infinitely complex variable in itself—I do so with the understanding that its many meanings can easily shift in and out of focus as I move through this text, this speech. And given that we are dealing with ‘eco’ and ‘future’ in this festival, this discussion, we are confronted by a question of ecological environment specifically, and what is likely to remain the same (little) or change (a lot) as we go forward through the years. We all know ‘oikos’ is house—in fact, a whole discourse has developed around that transition from the ancient Greek into the ecology of modernity. I’ve always found the word in its biological usage, the relationship of the organic to the inorganic physical world, a colonialist appropriation. The state of ‘our house’ or ‘the house’, depending on the grammatical article you select, is both an objective and subjective condition. We wish to keep our house well, we wish to keep the house well; we wish to wreck our house, we wish to wreck the house. There are choices of action and choices of possession in this. And dispossession . Surely we need to ask whose house it actually is, and whether or not it has been ‘stolen’. Further, as we feed on technology, we should ask whose house is being robbed to give us our consumer comforts. Because you can be sure human houses are being robbed, as well as animal and plant houses. Consumerism is theft. To my mind, many of us in Australia are calling it our house when it’s actually someone else’s house. We are on Aboriginal land. Fact. Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe we can all co-exist, and I am deeply committed to an open-door Eco-futures Opening Speech 27 policy regarding immigration and refugees (in fact, Open Door is the name of the poetry book I am writing at the moment). But in the case of the exploitation of the house for wealth-accumulation, there has to be compensation, or better, the house shouldn’t be wrecked at all. Co-existence is possible and desirable, but it should come under conditions respectful to traditional owners and custodians. And I say this as one who doesn’t believe in ‘property’ or ‘private ownership’. But what of the environments and their ‘houses’ that can and should exist outside the human? Well, there are many of these, and some actually exist inside the human! They are ecologies of bacteria and viruses that thrive in the human body, their environment, their house. Some of these bacteria we consider ‘good’ and allow to thrive in, say, our gut, but many are destructive to the human organism and we try to eliminate them. Survival. And there are some non-human living environments that experience human presence as that kind of contradiction: sometimes useful and necessary, most often not. Survival. The relationships are complex. Some talk of ‘balance’ in these things. Others talk about accumulated cultural knowledge as a means of pragmatic and generative co-existence. Language grows to accommodate. As a writer, and a poet in particular, I think I have to be aware of all these houses, environments, ecologies. Even when I am ranting against a particular destruction, I need to do so in an informed way; consider all the possible interpretations; critique the words I am using. Nothing in language, for me, is random, though language seems to resist this confidence and introduces elements of the random I can’t track or control, and thank goodness for that. Language is not just a tool—a tool of control, yet also empowerment—but also, for me, a living entity with a strength outside human subjectivity. Language is of animal and plant, of rock and vacuum, as much as human. It is elemental. Language is part of all ecologies, all environments, and is many houses at once. When I write poetry against invasiveness, I do so knowing language will be critiquing me as much as I it, and that it will likely work as a weed, a garden escapee, and invade the very ecologies I am seeking to protect. For that’s the difference between, say, the invasiveness of colonial usurpers introducing the fox into Australia for the purposes of hunting-entertainment, and the fox escaping their ‘jurisdiction’ and going ‘feral’ and colonising the Australian landmass in the process. Two forms of colonialism: one is an act of choice for self-benefit (the introduction of the fox) and the other a case of survival (the fox expanding its range). Now, like the cat, the fox has devastated the natural environment, and is shot, poisoned, and displayed as trophy throughout the country. A large part of this killing is pleasure-based. I know of many hunters who thrill-kill foxes, and if they didn’t get that thrill they’d be spending their time getting wasted. Actually, 28 Eco-futures Opening Speech many are wasted while shooting, but I mean even more wasted. It’s a sick joke. The pleasures of control are part of the colonial experience, and in the ongoing colonial state of being that is ‘Australia’, this fits as a kind of environmentalism, a warped form of ecologism. To kill off the foxes and cats is part of an ecological future for native bushland, and yet it’s also the signifier of colonial presence, cruelty, and hypocrisy. As farmers and miners and land-developers clear thousands of hectares across Australia every single day for their various self-interests and ‘needs’, they remove native habitat. As I have said before about foxes and cats, goats and camels, pigs and other introduced animals, they become the scapegoats. But more relevantly, the environment becomes an excuse for a form of ‘leisurist’ colonialism that undercuts even the settler myths of difficulty, struggle, and loss that have real groundings, but are manipulated by profiteers for the purposes of propaganda. For me, the future is now . Platitudes about ‘planning for the future’ seem like obfuscations of obligation to the ecologies of now. Such ways of thinking and speaking come from decades of ‘comfort’ in thinking and talking about impending environmental catastrophe. Awareness of the biospheric catastrophe caused by humans and confronting humans—and I am not talking about catastrophising thinking here, but actual catastrophic human behaviour—has grown exponentially since the 1950s, producing such major works of ecological awareness as Rachel Carson’s 1962 volume Silent Spring with its powerful critique of the impact of pesticides on environments (Carson 2000). Works such as Carson’s are of the present as much as the future, the damage being done that destroys the now as much as what’s to come. But still we always operate as if we have time to heed the warnings, to act in environmental as well as human interests, often as if they are separate needs. They are not. But even back then, warnings of disaster were generative: change now and there is hope. It is different now. We are in the endgame, and I don’t say this to cause distress, but to say that if the future isn’t understood as being now , we will have acquiesced to the powers of greed and dispossession, of self-interest and oppression, and embraced electronic gadgets and consumerism, surfing the last waves of natural habitat and biospheric health out into the dead zone. This is not a speculative fiction; it is the reality we have narrativised into a movie of our shared existence, with identity melded into socially policed categories that can be ‘liked’ or ‘not’. This is the context out of which I write, we all write. I think linear time—the idea of forward ‘progress’—is a con. As human knowledge is focalised through ‘looking out’ and ‘away’ from planet earth, and anyone who challenges this ‘expansiveness’ is considered to be opposing the very essence of the human spirit, so the knowledges of the here and now are ignored and potentially lost. Eco-futures Opening Speech 29 Governments serve this version of ‘progress’ because its serves them—the people who constitute government are serving the state, which can only be oppressive, and themselves, much the same as the hierarchy of private corporations. They will make decisions on our behalf—rights we have often handed over to them—that serve a ‘common interest’ that even at its best can never take into consideration even the nuances of a single word such as ‘ecology’, or ‘environment’, never mind the realities of loss. And one must always be conscious, as a writer, that governments and corporations will readily co-opt (and fund! ) creative texts to further their own ends, even when those ends are far from the intention of the writer. There is what we might term a ‘grey market’ in text—say, lines from a poem used to further a capitalist and/ or ecologically destructive purpose outside the poem’s intended meaning. We see this a lot with right-wing political parties and figures using musicians’ work to promote their cause/ s: note how many composers and bands contested the Trump campaign’s abuse and misuse of their songs/ music! Now, I am against ‘ownership’ of text per se, but as an activist I also feel we need to be vigilant regarding how our texts operate in the world—always thinking of them in terms of cultural respect and how to avoid culturally appropriative behaviours. We do not have the right to access culturally and personally sensitive textualities. And, importantly, we need to be aware of how texts might be misused . We need to use language in such a way that it is able to deny, actually to deconstruct right-wing, anti-environmental, conservative agendas. I believe this is possible and worth thinking about. I try to do this with my poems, to create a flexible language that is giving room to grow, to critique itself under any conditions. Poetry is a means of not only acting as witness and bringing attention to ecological damage, but also implementing change by allowing people spaces that are private and public at once—the poem is a space of conversation, of shared language, but with each reader or hearer taking away a particular personally inflected version. ‘Call and response’ has long had a role in traditional poetries; I also see it as an essential part of the contemporary activist poet’s range of practice. I write an observation of damage being done to old-growth trees along the York-Quairading Road (now destroyed) and you hopefully will respond with your own words of challenge—not to support the damage, but contesting my words in terms of finding more effective ways of halting the damage. A poem is out there, hoping for a poem-reply to come back. It’s a form of communication, of course, but more than that, it’s a way of building a linguistic campaign that can find hands and feet and embodiment to implement change physically (non-violently). Eco-futures Opening Speech 31 These exchanges draw us out of our houses into the broader ecological house of the world—they focus us around the trees that need saving, they help focus us to protest GM crops, to refuse participation in military adventurism. A poem read in front of a bulldozer/ clearing equipment can stop a bulldozer. I have done this across thirty-five years. Not only have I read poems at the recent Beeliar protests, but I read them in the same bushland behind Murdoch back in the early 80s (when I literally stopped a bulldozer with a poem). I have read poems in London during the Occupy protests, against the Iraq war in the United States in the early 2000s, against logging in the southwest on various occasions over the decades, and in many other adversarial circumstances. Poetry is not only where I articulate my witnessings, but actually how I amplify my protests beyond my self. I am a vegan anarchist pacifist—a self-definition of fact some people find annoying—but I feel it necessary to declare this so people understand (if not appreciate) that there’s a thought-out position, a coherence to what I am trying to do. All words have variable meanings, and so do all actions. We need to think coherently about how we are activists. To do a single activist action because one has a rush of adrenaline is not going to help the present (or the future). But to think it out carefully, ‘craft’ (a word I have problems with—another story! ) our actions like we do a poem or a story, can be long-term generative. It helps to be aware of all the possible contradictory readings our actions might engender—such awareness can help make our actions and poems potent tools for long-term and permanent positive change. And change is now . We are in an endgame, which still actually means—to use a disturbing gaming metaphor—that we have not lost. I do not think in terms of winning—winning is what crushes others—but rather of not losing to the forces of consumerist, military, state and corporate oppression. Is that a stalemate? Maybe, but only because the damage to the world’s house has been so extensive now—peak destruction has been reached. What we ‘save’ won’t be the same as what has been lost—there will sadly be less ‘old-growth’, but there can be expansive new growth . Stop the damage now, and what has been damaged, where possible, let’s replant. This is what’s happening at Beeliar. The Roe 8 horror seems to be at an end— the malice behind it thwarted by vast, collective action—but now the replanting. The house needs to breathe something other than diesel and asbestos fibres, the birds need to return even though it will take decades to ‘repair’. For a few years now, I have been writing poems based on the mythological Irish figure, Sweeney, who was cursed, sent mad and turned into a bird after killing a psalmist of the Bishop Ronan (who had been offended by Sweeney prior to this killing and had already cursed him). Sweeney, so altered, sees the world 32 At the End of August differently—or struggles to. In his ‘mad’ bird form he is a visionary, and in my ‘version’ struggles towards social and ecological awareness. And Sweeney has been there through the Beeliar and many other protests for me. He’s a strange colonising (as the Irish were colonised and have been colonisers) and decolonising figure at once—he’s not one thing or the other, but he is . He sees . He knows his own stupidities and weaknesses, and he sees corruption clearly. Every word that comes out of his ‘madness’ (madness is clarity in so many ways! ) is measured and often found wanting. He slips across time—the past is his future. He is aware of how he inadvertently appropriates culture and desperately works to prevent this happening. He acknowledges cultural difference; he deeply respects the elders. And this is his final Beeliar moment, maybe: Having Given Up the Ghost, Sweeney Flies in With Seedlings to Help Stitch the Wound A traumatic wound—gashed open to the bone. But the Emperor and his Jester are up the creek without a paddle, wading against their own effluent. A traumatic wound—gashed open to the bone. The spell feeding on the workers like dermonecrosis is broken, and they disperse into healthier skin. A traumatic wound—gashed open to the bone. Having given up the ghost, Sweeney flies in with seedlings of native vegetation to help stitch the wound. A traumatic wound—gashed open to the bone. In the sand the bushland had grown from, Sweeney knows country is still alive and consults with the Elders. A traumatic wound—gashed open to the bone. It can be healed. Its essence is spilling out like a balm. The red-tailed cockatoos are thinking of the decades ahead. JK At the End of August Promptly on the very last day of August, the weather tips. After days of uninterrupted sun and heat, a late-evening thunderstorm announces the onset of rain. The next morning, drizzle, punctuated by stronger showers, sets in. Mist At the End of August 33 nestles in the valleys, and the tip of the Kandel is shrouded in cloud. Sheets of persistent rain, not heavy but opaque nonetheless, blur the steep outlines of the ridges. This is the seasonal shift towards autumn, we say to ourselves—forgetting how utterly changeable and erratic the weather has become: the ‘temps’, ‘tiempo’ is nothing less than temporary in its abrupt shifts from one day to the next (the ten days of sun that preceded this change has been a welcome exception to the months of moodiness before). Now, forgetting all that, we slip back into the age-old habit of reading off the seasons like a chain of rosary beads. The shift has been announced for weeks, we intone, by the first splashes of gold and russet on isolated trees in the forest. Indeed, the oak that guards the turn in the road at the bottom end of our little valley, just opposite the tavern ‘Zum Grünen Baum’ where the Griesbach flows into the Wilde Gutach, has in fact increasingly stridently played the variations on a full range of autumn colours since we arrived ten days ago. This version of the temporality of the seasons—temporary in a sense that is anything but temporary, viewed within the large scheme of things—is itself an avatar of the timelessness of the mountain now hidden by low cloud and the grey panes of rain, now revealed through a gap in the drifting mists. At the beginning of his magisterial Stone , Cohen (2005: 3) suggests that the sheer timelessness of the mountain ‘is something more than an allegory for Edenic nature, a figure in a human story of balanced inhabitance and expansive earthly interconnections. ... Climb a mountain to seek a vista and its native prospect will give you ontological vertigo. To think like a mountain requires a leap from ephemeral stabilities, from the diminutive boundedness of merely human tales.’ Yet we are slowly beginning to appreciate the temporalities of such entities as mountains, from the wrong end, as it were, as we see the glaciers melt. A narrative of the nefarious effects of human activity upon the global environment now includes the thawing of these immense ice reservoirs as global warming proceeds apace. For millions of rural inhabitants in India, for instance, the thawing of the Himalayan glaciers, which function as immense water-storage receptacles and water-supply regulators, means more erratic patterns of water availability, with catastrophic consequences as droughts alternate with floods (Ghosh 2016: 89-90). (And those issues do not even approach the threat emanating from the Artic ice cap as it melts in ever accelerating cycles of feedback that see the thaw reaching into the coastal shelf seabed, realeasing methane plumes into the atmosphere—or even methane flares that signal the onset of an even more aggressive rise in global warming rates [Wadhams 2017]). But as we come at this problem of cosmic proportions from another angle, we may discover an ongoing mode of natural agency that continues unabated. For the native Americans of the Alaskan and Canadian circumpolar North, ‘gla- 34 At the End of August ciers take action and respond to their surroundings. They are sensitive to smells and they listen. They make moral judgements and they punish infractions. ... Glaciers also enter accounts left by early North Atlantic visitors who wrote with a different idiom and brought distinctive environmental visions to their interpretations’ (Cruikshank 2005: 3). What happens when we shift from the environmentally aware but still precariously anthropocentric North Atlantic frame of reference to the posthuman frame of reference that envisages glaciers as actors, almost as slow as mountains but not quite, and today gradually limbering up for an accelerated and bad-tempered mode of actantial intervention in the globally warming world? The seasons change according to their customary, age-old rhythm, do they not? And the Kandel stands, sometimes visible, sometimes shrouded in cloud—but what if the Kandel were burning, and slowly melting away in a wilful exercise of its own hitherto dormant agency? At this point we might have to reassess our entire framing of our own agency in the fraught political area of global environmental politics—and of global politics tout court , because there is nothing, in fact, that escapes the gambit of the politics of global warming. Perhaps, in rethinking the time of ‘temps’ and ‘tiempo’, we might also rethink the relationships between temporality, temporariness and our own actantial contributions to a threatened world. For, if we are to rethink politics in a world where glaciers are ‘both animate (endowed with life) and animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit’ (Cruikshank 2005: 3) we need to rethink our notions of agency. This ‘animated’ and ‘animist’ approach to the world does not merely attribute agency to entities habitually thought of an inert or passive (the agency of the glacier as merely an immensely slow manifestation of the downward pull of gravity), but rather, sees all entities in the world as co-actants: endowed with devolved agency by their neighbouring actants with whom they exist in an ineluctable meshwork of interaction. Life, or ‘the living’, Simondon (1964: 260) claims, ‘lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (qtd in Deleuze 1990: 103). It does so in a constant encounter, at the edge, with Others who thereby endow it with their life. Animist agency in this reading is not ‘internal’ to the hitherto inert or lifeless object, but, true to the etymology, like a wind, blows through each entity, transversally, animating them from outside (Ingold 2011: 29). Animist agency is not a stable attribute of an entity, but rather, a temporary, tempestuously ‘windy’, fluctuating derivative. Agency can never exist without a hyphen, and it can never exist except in a provisional and contingent temporal mode. Agency is never a given, but must be constantly renegotiated with the co-agents that co-determine what agency might be, and where it might lead. Agency, then, by definition, is related to the new. It does not imply the reproduction of self by the imposition of will in an intentional vector beyond ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ 35 and in front of oneself, as Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) phenomelogical spatiality implies. This merely translates into the colonial vector of conquest celebrated by Carter’s Road to Botany Bay (1987) in the colonial act of travelling-as-naming. Rather, this mode of agency implies the production of the new at every turn, because every instance of agency involves an engagement with an other. Such engagements cannot be predicted in advance. Their temporal mode is that of the contingent, the exploratory, the tentative—even if they are an engagement with the actantial temporality of a mountain. Thinking agency anew, as the new, in the light of animist interactions, may be a surprising and unexpected key to political renewal. Slavoj Žižek (2016: 108) laments the utter untimeliness of democratic politics today, citing the hopeless fate of democratic governments from Greece to Venezuela as examples of a politics that is completely against the flow of history. Such opposition to history, he suggests, is in fact a freedom from the shackles of history, a freedom to act, and to produce the new out of the sheer dynamics of desperation. Mark Terkessidis (2017) similarly demands a complete renewal of the politics of migration, given the utter lack of future perspectives or vision displayed by the political class as they react to the ineluctable refugee crises that characterize our times. Only the work of imagination, he suggests, will produce new options under these circumstances. For such a ‘new’ to emerge, we must embrace a version of co-agency that welcomes all actants into the coalition of the democratic, nonhuman as well as human. The times of shared democratic agency may sometimes be tempestive, seasonal, but we must not mistake them for some putatively true temporality of the agency of mountains. Stolid and unmoving as they may seem, the agency of mountains may also be tempestuous and unpredictable—within a timeand speed-frame to which we are only just beginning to accustom ourselves. RWP ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ All is in each of us, and we all deserve this acknowledgement, but as the sun shines across the planet it takes us collectively as well as individually. And human-induced climate changes alter the conditions under which the earth receives the sun’s bounty, shifting the range of sustainability through which life was nurtured. Subjectivity and damage to the biosphere are as intimately linked as the inevitable vast movements of people are to human conflict. Cause and effect are the poles we struggle between and deny, remaking our own images to convey ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ 37 to a world we hope is eager to see who we are, the very essence of our being. Modernity of the now is tied deeply to the way we materialise the soul through consumerism, making our interiority visible, and it seems consciously or unconsciously, to many, a price worth paying. A price. Worth paying. Breaking it up, the absurdity increases as syntax is designed to retain a status quo of reason, to ensure information is conveyed in an absorbable, comparative, and recognisable way, however different we are as individuals, or cultural collectives. But when language is broken free of its patterns, it bothers and disrupts, and the accepted forms of social media do all they can to pull these disruptions back into line. While we resist as poets, reworking language into new possibilities, we also subscribe to a status quo that has contracted the world to the self, to materialistic gain, leisure and pleasure. In what follows I proffer specific instances of ecological protest, and a more general shared action against consumerism that I believe can dislodge the ruling elites that disempower citizens. As an anarchist vegan pacifist (and all these qualifications of each ethical and political ‘component’ are necessary), I believe that ‘citizenship’ denotes the rights to inclusive participation (through consensus) of all bodies in a community, should an individual wish to participate. I believe in small communities that self-govern outside configurations of centralised power, and that make decisions for a social good, with each other’s welfare as well as that of the self kept in mind in all such decision-making. The brutality of Theresa May’s ‘to be a citizen of the world is to be a citizen of nowhere’ is emphasized when expressed within such a belief system (or dynamic), as the ‘nowhere’ is very much the small non-flag-waving community. Through what I term ‘international regionalism’—respecting regional integrity while fostering international lines of communication in order to prevent conflict and promote understanding between different communities around the world— citizens embrace cultural diversity, pluralism of life choices, and tolerance of difference. In other words, as citizens of small communities outside centralised power constructs, we are also citizens of the international, of the world. That citizenship is open, non-prescriptive, flexible in definition, and tolerant. We are citizens only insofar as we are individuals with obligations to other individuals, and these citizens (flagless, nationless) are part of all other small communities, as much as part of the one we make decisions in. The ‘social media revolution’ has created faux and facsimile communities that can activate but ultimately detract from a cause because of the costs at which they come. The centralised, controlling power in this context is the corporate machine behind software, and even if ‘open’ software, certainly behind the manufacture of the hardware. But social media is about social policing while fitting a consumer model of em- 38 ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ powering the companies who own the softwares. Twitter benefits greatly from Trump’s threats of nuclear annhilation via its service—it’s ‘pure’ apocalyptic business. I search for liberty from these constraints, and to decrease the ironies of any protest activity through this. Where I am going with this is into the heart of protest and how protest actions are communicated and engendered—now largely via Facebook, Tweets, and other social media via ‘devices’. We are witnessing the destruction of rare bushland and wetlands at Beeliar in Perth, Western Australia, and are part of a multitudinous voicing of opposition to abuse of the biosphere and locality, abuse committed by a Western Australian government hellbent on proving power by enforcing a toll highway that is seen by many, including town planners, as a ‘white elephant’. In witnessing this, I have seen desperation and trauma lead individuals and groups to deploying all non-violent methods available to them in an effort to stop the bulldozers. There have been legal actions, chants, yelling, the holding of protest signs, the massing of protesters to block machinery, individuals locking-on to equipment, tree-climbing and tree-sitting, poetry and music and art being employed as protest tools, and innumerable articles and essays and radio interviews pointing out the destructive wrongs of the government’s actions. In response to all this, we have seen hundreds of police deployed, and often quite aggressive retaliations to these protests. In many cases, the state has crushed and traumatised the protesters, over-riding all, and evoking signs and realities of a police state in which the constabulary become an extension of government policy. Nonetheless, this ‘Roe 8’ protest is much documented and is ongoing. The damage inflicted by the government and its ‘partners’/ contractors from ‘private industry’ has been extreme, with obvious trauma to the land itself and equally obvious trauma to the people who care about that land (in many ways, it is akin to the psychological trauma inflicted by war—and yes, it is that brutal, and we need to understand this if we are to appreciate the serious consequences of such acts of environmental devastation). The destruction of habitat, the wiping-out of endangered animal and bird species, of rare flora, and the abuse of Noongar boodja [Country], are an extension of the state’s remorseless attack on habitat and belonging throughout Western Australia, and there are numerous examples of this across the whole of Australia. I need not point out that the sun shines in a disturbed way on such abuses around the world as it works its way remorselessly ‘round’, witness to these serial and parallel desecrations. Yet the very subjectivity that allows us personally to release and make collective bonds inside and outside personal cultural norms in order to resist such abuse, is compromised by the social media that have become pivotal in these ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ 39 resistances. As with the computer I type this on (a very old one I struggle to maintain, resisting the ‘outmoded’), the devices we use to communicate our actions, to draw the soul into the materiality of resistance, come at a cost that equates to what we are protecting. The rare earths that go into making a phone come from somewhere, and the destruction in mining them is massive. The power used. The psychologies of indifference behind the industries that manufacture hardware and software. I don’t need to list the causes and effects; they are well documented. Nothing seems to be able to stop the juggernaut. In the same way that tyrants thrive in the late-capitalist Petri dish, so does the technology that has become synonymous with exploitation and resistance at once. It is a universal that opens lines—often angry and disrupted lines—across cultural difference, and allows access not only to ‘information’, but to the very essence of a constructed, publicised self. In this, cultural identity is diluted and fused with consumerism. Ideology is now consumerism, and inflections of control (from the self-proclaiming ‘free’ societies to dictator pariah states) are managed through access to devices/ gadgets and the ‘freedom’ to use them. To stop an oppressive government in a ‘free society’, stop consuming. Trump and May and Turnbull et al. ultimately succeed because we purchase. Even Stalin aimed for five-year plans that would (theoretically and eventually) resolve consumerist urges, and this is at the basis of all population buying-offs. I ask my fellow protesters—would you agree to not having phones (ever), in exchange for the wetlands? Some would genuinely answer yes, and mostly we can tell who they are because they make their difference from ‘society’ clear in many ways. Others would say yes on principle, but most would feel compelled by ‘necessity’ if nothing else, to decline. This is an argument not of convenience but of syntax—if we don’t disrupt and change the way information flows, we will consume right to the core of the planet and the sun won’t be able to help us. We are dealing with notions of alternative facts and alternative truths at present, but control of media has always meant that—you don’t think Goebbels was for the free-flowing supply of ‘facts’, or that Stalin wanted the truth out on radio and in newspapers at all costs? Of course not. But now we delude ourselves into thinking ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, which have been handed to us via the military through the internet, via the exploitation of Global South communities, via the mass destruction of habitat, have meant that we ourselves control our own access to information. And thus ‘armed’ with that information we become powerful ‘selves,’ and through this apparent empowerment can make choices of connectivity (the old collectivity ) to increase our group RAM? This is, disturbingly, a rerouting of the syntax of the self and the group into a new conservative prosody, into a compliance to ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ 41 company and state. We have given our liberties away, and paid to do so at the shop counter (increasingly online). I laugh sadly as I see the increased sales of George Orwell’s 1984 —written by one who spied on and sold out the left—in the context of the horrors of language being altered to brainwash, when every Tweeter (say no more, man in the high tower! ), and every Instagrammer plays language (textually or visually) many times a day in order to bend the semiotics of appearances , to contribute to the brainwashing (so often while denying doing so), to increase their own stake in the temporariness. It’s about increasing one’s space within time. We wear sunscreen to protect ourselves against a sun we have exposed ourselves to in ways John Donne never envisaged—and he was progressive ! —and we filter our corporeal selves to reimagine what we understand as the essence of who we want to be—our identity— through filters. In some ways, I am disturbed by the conservatism that could be read in this identification of the self as the route to destruction, but I reassure my radical self that it’s nothing to do with the essence of who we all are, as this ‘essence’ surely doesn’t wish to hide behind hypocrisies that will wipe all life from this planet sooner than we allow ourselves to think. In each of us is all place, all people, all selves: each of us has to act for the other whether we can see or hear them over phones. Just know we are out there, know in your relationship to sun, in language. Disrupt the lines of communication, don’t rejig them and contribute to the paradigm of consumerist denial. The Bulldozer Poem Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they tear the earth’s skin—from earth they came. Bulldozers are made by people who also want new mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families. Bulldozers are observers of phenomena—decisions are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions. They will hear our pleas and struggle against their masters. Bulldozers slice & dice, bulldozers tenderise, bulldozers reshape the sandpit, make grrrriiing noises, kids’ motorskills. Bulldozers slice the snake in half so it chases its own tail, 42 ‘In that the world’s contracted thus’ writing in front of its face. Bulldozers are vigorous percussionists, sounding the snap and boom of hollows caving in, feathers of the cockatoos a whisper in the roar. Bulldozers deny the existence of Aether, though they know deep down in their pistons, deep in their levers, that all is spheres and heavens and voices of ancestors worry at their peace. Bulldozers recognise final causes, and embrace outcomes that put them out of work. There’s always more scrub to delete, surely... Surely? O continuous tracked tractor, O S and U blades, each to his orders, his skillset. Communal as D9 Dozers (whose buckets uplift to asteroids waiting to be quarried). O bulldozer! Your history! O those Holt tractors working the paddocks, O the first slow tanks crushing the battlefield. The interconnectedness of Being. Philosopher! O your Makers—Cummings and Caterpillar—O great Cat we grew up in their thrall whether we knew it or not—playing sports where the woodlands grew, where you rode in after the great trees had been removed. You innovate and flatten. We must know your worldliness—working with companies to make a world of endless horizons. It’s a team effort, excoriating an eco-system. Not even you can tackle an old-growth tall tree alone. But we know your power, your pedigree, your sheer bloody mindedness. Sorry, forgive us, we should keep this civil, O dozer! In you is a cosmology—we have yelled the names of bandicoots and possums, of kangaroos and echidnas, of honeyeaters and the day-sleeping tawny frogmouth you kill in its silence. And now we stand before you, supplicant and yet resistant, asking you to hear us over your war-cry, over your work ethic being played for all it’s worth. Hear us, hear me — don’t laugh at our bathos, take us seriously, forgive Flâneur 43 our inarticulateness, our scrabbling for words as you crush us, the world as we know it, the hands that fed you, that made you. Listen not to those officials who have taken advantage of their position, who have turned their offices to hate the world and smile, kissing the tiny hands of babies that you can barely hear as your engines roar with power. But you don’t see the exquisite colour of the world, bulldozer— green is your irritant. We understand, bulldozer, we do— it is fear that compels you, rippling through eternity, embracing the inorganics of modernity. JK Flâneur Here I am sitting in a café in Lygon Street. A temporary presence. Flâneur. Non-participant observer. Watching from the outside. As I survey the locals streaming past, I let my mind go back at leisure to the past. Sitting here with Dan (who soon afterwards left for France, permanently, as it turned out), chatting in pretentious student French in the absence of any genuine Francophones with whom to converse. But was I not even then also a temporary presence? Waiting impatiently for the moment to expatriate myself as my interlocutor was also on the verge of doing? Are we not always temporary presences? Above all as a white person in Australia! How can we ever claim to be anything but passing visitors with our two hundred years of temporary residence against seventy-thousand-plus of deep cohabitation with the land? Paul Carter (1996: 2) has a piece where he describes settlers as ‘gliding’ over or floating ‘off the ground’ in their weatherboard or brick-veneer houses on the fabled suburban block. This sense of distance manifested itself in my childhood and youth as a frequent sense of emptiness: on weekends, the sense of being a thousand miles from any human habitation, even though the sound of a lawnmower could be heard next door; or later, the experience of stepping out into a broad Carlton street, lined with brick terrace houses, shimmering in the summer heat, to see not a soul in sight; or the stillness of the rain-soddened bush and its expanses of khaki-olive eucalyptus canopy that earlier settlers had once described as eerie (and that I as a youth only learnt to love at the moment of departure): all forms of distance that translated the settler’s ignorance of the vibrant life of the land all around—or, in an even more 44 Flâneur extreme instance of dislocation, as a symptom of the disruption and destruction that the white invaders had wreaked (and continue to wreak) upon the land and its original inhabitants, leaving a gaping wound where once there had been a dense fabric of reciprocal communication and interdependence. Now, as I sit here in Lygon Street, already remote from my own earlier sense of remoteness, I imagine my temporariness here in Australia against the background of an existence in Germany which has become pretty much permanent— and which I rather suspect will not result in any further expatriations. But what is a presence? Is it also not a series of temporarinesses? A series of fragmented presents? As one intensity gives way to another, one basin of attraction is broken open by another pole of intense magnetization—a task, an idea, a momentary thought? What would be a permanent presence? Nothing more than the act of smoothing over these shifts from one present to another. A forgetting of the discontinuities that make up the pulses of life. But these discontinuities themselves weave back together in a fabric of disparate threads. A year and a bit later. Here in the Black Forest, I constantly find myself being reminded, at the level of sensory or spatial memory, of the period when I worked on the North Devon coast in 1983. The overgrown roads with their steep sides brimming with luscious vegetation, the small streams cascading headlong down narrow valleys, and the lack of a view until one emerges where they open out at the valley floor … all this recalls the sunken lanes and the abrupt valley mouths of the coastal area between Lynmouth and Martinhoe where I worked for a spring, a summer and a winter. Time, says Gail Jones (2007: 182) is ‘recursion, fold, things revisiting’—as, I feel in this part of the Black Forest, is place. Yet it doesn’t shift in loops or circles, it moves in spirals. Thus I am not the same person as then. There I was in search of a quintessential imagined English countryside that I never quite found—though I did occasionally glimpse it, always from afar, through the gates of some manorial estate or from between the trees of a coppice on that week-long walk through the Cotswolds from Cheltenham via Charlbury to Oxford. And I found other facets of it on the similar tramp that I made through the Lake District (including, almost emblematically, walking off the wrong side of Helvellyn in a thick fog, so that a knife-back ridge that was not Striding Edge took me down into a totally different valley from the one my itinerary had led me to expect). Today, some of the questions that drove me out onto those scree slopes or down those country tracks have been laid to rest. But the anxious circling around one central interrogation—how to be in the world, when one is always too early, too late, at odds with it, out of place, precariously on the edge—has not abated: the spiralling continues. The walks along these tracks in the forest still teach me something. But the forest itself shifts and changes and reforms around 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I 45 me as I walk, rather like Tupia’s maps of the South Seas that showed the stars and islands always from the point of view of the navigator sailing with their help (Di Piazza and Pearthree 2007). The path that leads into the forest continues to beckon. But you never step into the same wood twice. RWP 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I 18/ 9/ 2015 Rosewood, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland Difficult and full fortnight of work coming up before I have to travel solo to London on bus, ferry and train. Went to Kinsale yesterday—a cold town that is dragged down (for all its boutique holiday sell) into its early seventeenth-century historical vacuum. Its ‘Englishness’ riles against its Irish suffering of the time (and after). It seems anathema to me. Its old court building museum has closed, the tide was out, and the star fort (Charles Fort) was austere, brutal and only ‘lit up’ by the non-comprehending selfying of teenagers poured out of and then crammed back into tourist buses. One could see how the Spanish Fleet (pre the 1670s fort) was pincered into the harbour by English guns. The fort was like a pacifist black hole of military-historical fetishism (of unresolvable ironies). I stood watching a cormorant working the water. We travelled back via Ballinspittle and Timoleague alongside Courtmacherry Bay (and inlet) towards and through Clonakilty then home via Skib. We had travelled from home via Bandon and Dunmanway. Was fascinated to see nine swans feeding in a line that clearly moved higher up the flats as the tide was coming in fast. There’s a poem about space I need to think about. Today I was caught in a waking dream of driving the road from Calingiri to Wongan Hills at the height of summer—I could taste the dust and the stubble in the burning air and the blue sky seared me through the windscreen. It is cold here today and the rooks strop their beaks, remorseless in their calling, calling. On Friday a massive wedding—four-hundred people. The village is still coming down from its high. It was a son of our landlady—she has been excited about it for weeks now (and no doubt longer! ). And between Skib and Bally as we were returning yesterday we passed Kilcoe Church and there was a line of hundreds of people in pairs (cars parked everywhere) filing in and out of the building. A funeral? It also marked me, and I will long remember it as an overwhelming and humbling impression/ vision amidst the rough roads and furze. 46 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I 24/ 10/ 2015 Saturday Rosewood Good day. Went to Kenmare and Sneem via Bantry. Visited the Lady Well and the stone circle in Kenmare. Travelled to Sneem on the Ring of Kerry. Good walks. Kenmare saturated in Halloween stuff. Witches on the street. Grim reapers at corners. A woman with (what looked like) Celtic crosses tattooed on her face photographing her kids and their father by a pumpkin coach drawn by skeletons and driven by a witch. The year turning and leaves on the streets. At the Lady Well, horse chestnuts and horse chestnut tree leaves forming an abject but revivifying mulch. Showers then sunlight and mountain/ bay/ river cold. On the path alongside the stone circle which I will not (we will not) step inside (respect): a used condom. A weird paralleling of fertility and constrained fertility where the Catholic world edges against the old ways and can’t reclaim—so many stones and tombs were used as sites of prayer when the English crushed freedom of worship and tried to mate syncretistic Catholicism to their own imprint. The collapsing belief matrix via the resistance of localism and adaptation (multi-dimensional spatial conquest modelling). Returning home via the Caha Pass, sun on mountains, on the bulging lens of Barley Lake and the rivulets of quicksilver down sandstone walls, was electric and contradictory (in image perception). Dangerously mesmerising. Reading a biography of Derrida. I want to work this tiger-snake poem out—I have been writing it for thirty years. John almost stepping on one at Jam Tree Gully, another coming out from beneath Stephen’s and Dzu’s house the other day, another seen by Mum and John on the road to Geraldton. Plethora! And up there is the furthest point of the tiger-snake’s range (but range is shifting in so many ways for so many species—we are often among ‘28’ parrots and Port Lincoln parrots at Jam Tree Gully... Ringneck parrots both, but ‘28s’ are not generally considered to be located that far north). But Stephen emailed to say shearers have been seeing a lot of tiger-snakes up around Geraldton this season of awakening and activity. They are reaching up and out and inwards! They are changing their spatiality, their definitions of the local, of what is permeable. Snakes that favour moisture and swampy areas are reaching inland towards the meagre offerings of farm dams, soaks and the seepages of interiority. 25/ 10/ 2015 Rosewood Cold day. Thinking over long-term plans to do an Argonautica . Lots of thoughts on it over the last four years. Thinking now that I might have a ‘vehicle’ for it— the journey from Schull to London and back. I will rough out the first version during the trip—develop over following journeys there and back with Tracy and 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I 47 Tim before Christmas and when we return overland and by sea from Germany/ Holland around Easter. Have been adding to the new sequence of Graphologies—Graphology Rune series—bit by bit over the last month. It just grows at its own rate. 31/ 10/ 2015 Rosewood 5.50pm Soon the Halloween invasiveness begins. I dread it—no peace at all. This annual ritual of confrontation with the horrors, demons and impositions of history. History should never be ‘sent back’ but confronted and conversed with to make a better future, but I find Halloween a grotesque re-envisioning of famine, colonisation and loss of control over one’s own destiny. I understand why it is, and appreciate its cyclical respatialising and attempt to ‘manage’ the horror, the heritage of loss and brutality, but its very desperation creates a contradicting consumerism I find disturbing. In a famine place there has to be a constant negotiation with a possibility that can never again become an actuality, but the commercial and sometimes prurient underpinnings seem to undo the confrontational and regenerative nature of the occasion. An activism is possible at the time of year when the ‘veil’ between the world of the living and the world of the dead is thin, but it needs to be inflected with an awareness of the ongoing exploitation and suppression of the natural world outside the human, or at least where the human/ non-human interface is degrading and collapsing. • Went to the Skellig Ring on the Iveragh on Thursday. From the top of Mt Geokaun we looked out to the Skelligs so recently invaded and desecrated by the Star Wars movie Viking simulacrums. The monks in their beehive cells would have seen the Devil and no doubt called on God to assist them in their spiritual and physical crisis. It’s an unholy and capitalist act of consuming and destructiveness to have used the place of the old monks in such a way—and a destruction of a vital bird habitat. Rock pipits, gannets etc. From up on Valentia Island’s mountain we also saw the lighthouse being dashed by heavy swell, the powdered spray off the cliffs, the old slate quarry... A meadow pipit dashed across the water-riven steep road as we left the place where some of the first creatures to crawl out of the planet’s amniotic waters left their mark in the sandstone. • Not been able to write as I want to write for days. Anxiety. Have to go to London tomorrow via cab to Cork City, bus to Rosslare, ferry to Fishguard, train to London—a 24-hour journey. It’s the most eco-sound way to travel (and get there on time) but seriously exhausting and enervating. • 48 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I Thinking of some poems—maybe Graphologies—come out of Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Pad’. I used to use these devices a lot as a child and have done some experiments with them re creating temporary poems (whose erasure is never true—palimpsests are left on the surface beneath the ‘erased’ plastic sheet). This fascinates me. Art as permanence is capitalist fetishism and anti-environment to my mind. Things need to dissolve and return, though with such a device it’s just a simulacrum of this vulnerability of text and art that actually participates in the production of extraneous items of entertainment, and damages the planet further. A poem that works as a conceptualisation of the ‘mystic writing pad’, that performs the same tasks of text framed and text erased is more of interest and activist relevance. I want to start working more with the mechanisms of ‘memory’. Freud in 1924 writes in ‘A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ (1961: 227), ‘The sheet is filled with writing, there is no room on it for any more notes, and I find myself obliged to bring another sheet into use, that has not been written on. Moreover, the advantage of this procedure, the fact that it provides a “permanent trace,” may lose its value for me if after a time the note ceases to interest me and I no longer want to “retain it in my memory”.’ I will not give this text the pleasure of the future of data, of the screen, of personal computing. Too many lies and exploitations of ‘nature’ and people in that (those mines, those mines... Those previous metals... The destruction of entire eco-systems so we can have depth behind our screens, can call up memory as data, can hypertext our way into alternative truths, alternative geographies and ecologies...). 14/ 11/ 2015 Rosewood Been inside all day due to weather. We are all in shock and traumatised by the horrendous attacks in Paris last night. How to talk and think and write about it? Our only avenues of coping. Will get outside tomorrow whatever the weather—need the air and the release. 23/ 11/ 2015 Rosewood Tracy and Tim are downstairs reading Jane Eyre aloud. They are about halfway through. We will see a National Theatre production of Jane Eyre in London (the slow journey to Cambridge/ London and back) on the 28 th of December. • Wet day. Forgot to mention yesterday’s superb sunset. We watched it from behind Mt Gabriel as it orange-lit and conflated the edges of the hills and mountains. It burnished the eastern side of Barnancleeve Gap an amber-orange. Unforgettable. • 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts I 49 Did a very wet walk up Ardmanagh and along the mountain loop. A small dog barked at me from behind a ditch and as I walked—ignoring it so as not to draw it out onto the roads—I heard the tell-tale pitter-patter of a following dog. I looked around and it stood and pricked up its ears and tilted its head and gave me that ‘you’re who I am befriending’ look other walkers are likely familiar with. I knew then it would persist in following me. A Beagle-Jack Russell cross. Following me slightly to the left, about two or three metres astern. I turned and told it to go home and stop following lest it get hit by a car. But its pursuit was committed as we continued between the hedgerows, negotiating puddles and the steaming macadam. For a moment I thought it had turned back or diverted through a gate into a field, but it was soon back at my heels. Eventually I passed a house where a miniature dog trotted down and growled at my new companion, setting off an exchange that quickly made me redundant. The dogs seemed to know each other. I am guessing it went safely home, each of us with a new sense of mapping, a different way of setting our co-ordinates as we experience place. It’s easy to become one’s own set of reference points in understanding a locale one is walking through—all else out there mediated through one’s experience of passing through, of noting and recording. The solitary walker is never actually solitary, though it’s easy to forget this. • Yesterday morning Tracy drew my attention to a chiffchaff in the (bare) bushes outside the kitchen window. Very exciting—tiny ball-shaped bird (like an Australian weebill in size). They are rare here at this time of year though some do winter on the southern coast of Ireland, especially in Cork. 25/ 11/ 2015 Rosewood Fine, clear day. A good day in a difficult, compromised and grim world. As the conflicts between religions, sects, nations, and individuals grips the planet, it is hard to find purpose in the quotidian. But ‘nature’ deserves reverence and I hope I can always remember that the ‘outside human’ is a vital and resistant massiveness, outside the thanatos that has us all in its thrall. I so enjoyed Tracy’s company as we visited the heights on the west side above Barleycove Beach—the causeway still closed due to storm damage and the beach itself difficult to access. And then we went to Bantry to pick up some stuff from the health-food shop. The whole region was blown through with a glorious light and the locals were full of it. Something reached into most people here and Tim came home from school full of the joy of the day. This is a resistance to the dismal death-wish that has stifled human creativity in so many places (a death-wish that often has complex and co-determinate origins, but also one exploited by power-players in the jigsaw puzzle on inequality, Writing a poem 51 privilege and control). I refuse to be crushed by their negativity but I will never pretend it is not there. The activism of poetry is manifold—I believe in direct pacifist applications to create possibilities for positive change, but I also increasingly believe in the (poet’s) efficacy of practice and existence in that the process of making and experiencing poems is essentially generative and life-affirming, whatever the ‘intention’ of the poet. Even those poems that claim or affirm negative or oppressive aspects read beyond their limitations (e.g. pro-war poems) through the belief that the act (of poetry) can be ‘potent’ and restorative—that something exists beyond the material or even the notion of spiritual reward. The collating of words/ sound/ sight is the ‘6 th ’ estate—the generative composition. I am saying (also) that the desire to express beliefs (whatever they are) in figurative language likely indicates at least a subliminal ‘hope’ (vestigial that it might be! ) that oppression is the antithesis of the poetic act. Even if we consider manifestations of State-driven poetry such as patriotic verse, or that registering a noblesse oblige piety, or even, say, poetry celebrating ‘the hunt’, there’s probably an intrinsic quality to the act of writing poetry that reveals other, often contradictory to the ‘message’, desires regarding how we might (de)read (as in Illich’s ‘de-schooling’)—that the act of poetry goes beyond the intention and subverts the (conservative) propaganda of the ‘poem itself ’. That is, the poem itself generates new meanings that allow the writers and readers, the speakers and listeners, to move outside the limited scope of their original desire and purpose (and patterning). Poetry can free the poet and the listener/ reader from the prejudices that inscribe acts of writing and hearing/ reading. Poetry, in a sense, drives itself against thanatos, against the death cult of language. JK Writing a poem A poem is a way of framing a relationship to reality. It articulates something that connects a writing entity to the world. To the extent that it articulates, it gives verbal expression to a position between other entities or spaces. It is a relational act. It is transformative. In articulating the way in which I am connected to other entities, I render explicit a relationship, or even a set of relationships, which having been allowed to advance out of a previous state of latency, now take effect in new and unexpected ways. They in turn inflect my own ongoing practices, one of them being the act of articulating myself and my place in the environment via poetic enunciation. The poem has an existential, ontological value which is condensed and clarified in ways they are not as starkly clear in 52 Writing a poem other literary genres. One might call it a statement, but this flattens the poem down to a linguistic thesis, whereas it is a way of bodying forth a relation in order to position oneself actively, perhaps even thereby repositioning oneself, within that relationship. It is a way of situating oneself deliberately and consciously within ‘the Open’ (Rilke 1978: 71)—a necessary and transformative act because we are usually situated, by default, within a grid of losses and gains which rules our ordinary reality according to the regulations of economics. A poem is a deliberate decision to eschew the monumental, the monographic, the ‘Bestandsaufnahme’, the ‘state of the art’, the monolithic summary of knowledge. Rather, it might be understood as an attempt to articulate or a moment of being, even to bring it into being via the incantatory work of language. The poem is not an effort to capture a moment of being (seizure of course indexing a mode of possession), nor to lay it bare (which in turn assumes the pre-existent nature of the fleeting, temporary moment, and the reflective nature of language). Both of these fallacies, however, point heuristically towards the real work of language. Language is a threshold, a blurred contact zone where the agency of the poet, and that of language itself intermingle. It may transpire that it’s not so much the work on language, as the work of language (and thus only derivatively the work in language) which reveals the creativity of the moment. It would be the logic of language itself that would be a mode of participating in a much larger process of unfolding creativity—in which the point would be to be in language so as to get the subject out of the way. In the words of the British poet Charles Tomlinson (1985: vii), poetic language would be a realm ‘where space represented possibility and where self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality’. The theory of relativity, among other things, suggested that the observer was not a neutral, objective factor outside the experimental process itself, but rather, that the presence of an observer abolished the very idea of objectivity. The presence of the observational or measuring device could be seen to alter the gravitational fields, be it ever so slightly, within the experimental environment, in such a way as to become a participant in the process. The experimental relationship thus had to be recoded as one that could no longer be understood as pertaining between a neutral subject that recorded or measured the effects of experimental actions, and an inert, purely reactive object—but rather, as the intervention of a subject into a fields of participating subjects (as Stengers [1997] would point out much later in her work on the co-agency of experimental actors). The observer participates and influences what was hitherto assumed to be a separate realm of scientific experimentation. Writing a poem 53 Might one be able to say the same for art, and more specifically for poetry? Could the act of perception that is the work of art, an apparently neutral recording of a world, or the notation of a state of mind or recollection of emotion be also seen in a similar light? Might the work of art, in its putative autonomy and its aesthetic difference, be a mode of engagement? Might the work of art—quite apart from any notion of political intervention or polemical sloganeering designed to change attitudes—not always already be a perception that would simultaneously constitute an action? If the work of art, at the very most minimal level, arises in the flurry of the creative remodelling of an elemental aesthetic material—paint, language, wood, clay, metal, stone, earth, air, canvas, paper—that also shifts material relations with the world around it, could one not suggest the same with regard to the less tangible shift in perception that goes hand in hand with that recalibration of material forces? Would the poem, as a zone of altered perception, not exert an influence through the very fact of a transformation of our ways of seeing the world or its ways of seeing us? To understand the world differently might then exert a tangible transformation of material relations—a reorganization of neural pathways and increased neural traffic, consuming cerebral energy and transmitting it to the environment, a tiny alteration in body temperature, a minute shift in the gravitational field of the poet or the reader, and a corresponding response in the subjects-objects close to that textual actor, a reply from the persons or things (or thing-persons) nearby. To write or read a poem would be a way of taking effect on the world, however minimal and however imperceptible. About suffering he was never wrong, the old master, but the same cannot be said for his dictum on poetic agency: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ (Auden 1973: 82). Everything makes something happen, and poetry is no exception. In the face of the enormity of global warming and the continental and oceanic degradation of the environment, we are all urged to recycle our plastic packaging, compost our potato peelings, switch off lights and ride a bike. Yet who tells us to write or read a line of poetry every day? Might that not be as significant a mode of intervention into our environment, shifting ever so slightly the destructive relations of a world at war with itself ? Why pooh-pooh poetry because its interventions are at such a small scale? Perhaps these minimal environmental actions through the discrete potency of the poetic image may reconnect us to the places through which we move in participatory speech acts that can restore our sense of wonder, ‘renew our shared sensory experiences in a world that is as interconnected as it is divided’, as García Canclini (2012: xii) writes? Imraan Coovadia’s fictional Cape Town minibus taxi poems ‘which invariably made me see a new fact about the world or maybe some old thing anew’ (2014: 27), or the creators of Poetry in the Un- 54 Writing a poem derground, or a graffiti artist with a spray can—all of them are perhaps the work of interventionist activists in the ecology of spatial relations, in the alchemy of the way we are, whether we will or not, in the world. RWP Threshold Failure Our behaviour no doubt affected by oil fumes from a leaky system, a decentralisation of heating that makes détournement with our bodies, all thresholds fail. Fumes permeate and will break through concrete in time, the oil sitting and working its way down and out. Fossils emerging from fuel to hunt you down. They are still hungry. Outside, wind blows hard off the Atlantic. Our families came from here to escape starvation. Mass graves everywhere, whole towns reduced to memories, like the wolves of Mount Gabriel. All angels, wolves and humans and formless spirits we stop at thresholds—what will happen now the thresholds have fallen? Outside on the green, wet ground, gathered in the gridwork of hedges, members of the crow family crisscross and divvy-up territory. On the wooden crossbeams of the fence a dozen jackdaws, swinging in and out of hedges, greenspace and gables. In trees losing leaves, maybe two-dozen rooks, maybe establishing a new rookery in the face of jackdaw business. And ravens on the chimneys call down and sound ‘spooky’, distantly incarcerated voices we could draw analogies and paradigms from. A deathly laugh like a carnival ghost-ride. Collapsing thresholds. And crows from home in memory. They rule the dry and dusty places, 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II 55 the zones of most intense fire risk. When flames come, they fly slower than they could, dragging thresholds of sparks across the tinder. I am dizzy and less focussed than I should be. The fumes are weirdly strongest in the vestibule. Through the front door into the chamber. False threshold. For another door to negotiate before passing into the house proper. The fumes follow but are already inside to greet you. You can see crow species through open windows which want the fumes out, you can hear their crosstalk. JK 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II 21/ 2/ 2016 Tübingen, Germany In Bautzen today a scene of horrendous tragedy and implication—the burning of a building meant to be used to house refugees while thirty people stood around goading and cheering, with youths trying to prevent/ hinder the fire brigade from extinguishing the blaze. The fire was deliberately lit. • Went to the Hölderlin Tower today with Tracy and Tim. Was last there in the late 90s. Very moving, always. Distressing (terrible) to see great plane trees cut down along the river’s edge. Everywhere the felling of trees? A blight? Opportunism? The mass cull of trees around Tübingen is ongoing. These are trees authorities say are ‘in their downward cycle’, being 200 years old. Maybe, but many others around the area are young trees suffering the same fate. Hölderlin would have seen these trees in their early days—through his window, as Zimmer talked with him. And as for that late, great ‘prose poem’ (as transcribed from memory by the author of the novel Phaeton ), the lovely blue... The spires (of the churches) reaching into the ‘lovely blue’, these plane trees (the lines of the poem still living across the river on the island) are spires, and their loss—should they also be eventually taken—is a loss for birds and insects and other creatures (including humans) and for the trees themselves. Their spirituality is the fact of their right to existence. Apparently, some years ago, two women placed votive candles inside the hollow of a great plane tree on the island for Valentine’s Day and set the tree alight—it took eighty minutes for the fire brigade to extinguish 56 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II and the tree’s interior turned into a chimney, wasting the canopy with flames. With the sickening rise (again) of neo-Nazism in Germany, feeding on the hate generated by the humanity of offering homes and a life for refugees, the association with all burning with the indelible stains of the past is impossible to ignore. From Valentine’s Day to Bautzen. The links are there. Not tenuous, but disturbingly present. We cannot walk the streets without graffiti of hate (often overlaid with graffiti of welcome), and other burnings have taken place in surrounding villages. In the tower I was taken by the remarkable letter with three palimpsests of poem drafts 1 . Astonishing. And a magnificent coal tit in full song on the limb of a weeping willow in bud, over-reaching the river. And the trunk—massive—of a plane tree on its side on the island, with kids climbing over it. Innocence and experience are in need of revising, as is the neo-Romantic sublime that underpins so much Westernised ‘ecopoetry’. Only intense conservation and respect for environmental intactness—environment beyond the human (all humans)— and highlighting the intensity and worth of ALL life will bring a repair to the biosphere and all of us—adults, children... Animals—within it. As the white cat arched itself and waited at the door of Zimmer’s house to be let in. On this warmer winter’s day with blue breaking through the clouds even thirteen-yearold Tim leapt about. 27/ 02/ 2016 Tübingen Went for a good walk with Tracy and Tim around the Österberg this afternoon. The grassed banks and copses of forest as we walked east, then turned back down to the Neckar where downriver of the hydroelectric bridge/ plant was a flotilla of about thirty swans, with new arrivals skiing in at regular intervals. Many songbirds in riparian vegetation: great tits, coal tits, blackbirds... Deeply moved to see the Denkmal to the memory of the Jews who were murdered or driven into exile by the Nazis and their sympathisers. It is located where the old synagogue had been—burnt down by the Nazis. The memorial is on the Gartenstrasse at the Synagogenplatz. It is one of the most affecting places I have ever come across. It is horrific to know that the university here (and of which I am part at present) was built on the ‘foundations’ of the expulsion of Jews in the late fifteenth century (the founding of the university coincides with this disgraceful act). The monument is made from rusted steel and includes the names of those who escaped and those killed. It also includes information about the synagogue and the acts of the Nazis. I will write a poem. This is why I write. 1 In time, I started work on an essay with Andree Gerland on Hölderlin’s great ‘Half-life’ poem and close consideration of this manuscript (which Andree gifted me in replica). 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II 57 Poetry can only be experience or witness. Witnessing is ongoing. Witnessing of the moment is the means by which we might try and stop a horrific event. But witnessing continues—when we stop witnessing, the horror begins again, or regains momentum. What shocked us further was that it took until 2000 for this monument to be erected. An apartment building has been built on the site! Language needs to be reclaimed and reconstituted to note and record and converse with the horrors of the past. Poems are not objects but living memorials. They are always active. We need to be vigilant in our texts—wary of the bigotries absorbing discourse as they are now (again) in Germany and elsewhere over Syrian refugees and (the irrational fear of) Islam. Even the ‘picturesque’ village of Bebenhausen (I am trying to unpick that ‘picturesque’ notion in a new series of Graphologies)—with its monastic underpinnings (and antlers over doorways tapping into the hunting heritage and the active hunting blood-rites stuff of the contemporary ‘outdoors’ hunter person of modern Germany’s aching forests)—even Bebenhausen was a major ‘retreat’ for Nazis after the war. Somewhere picturesque and ‘authentically German’ for them to retire to. Donald Trump and Citizen Kane. Boosterism. Trump’s ‘democracy’ is the world’s dictatorship. We eat his/ their shit! 28/ 02/ 2016 We walked up to the Spitzberg this afternoon—hazy, glary light and cold, a prelude to the snowstorms predicted for tomorrow. Walking along the paths of the south-east corner of the forest, we passed a frozen pond that has been de-silted and de-shaded (euphemism for trees removed) as part of a preservation programme for the Kammmolch —the great crested newt. This creature is on the red list. A group of off-their-faces late teens wandered into the forest and past the pond, seemingly oblivious to all around them. The forest as their refuge. Collective aloneness. One of them seemed to be suffering drug psychosis, but was left alone in the moss and fallen trees to work it out. I would like to hope some of them were trying to connect with the forest, but they appeared to be indifferent to it. I always hope for the best. It is a place of great plant diversity— beech, oak, conifers, many plants we won’t see till spring (when we will walk here a lot! ), hundreds of insect species, bird diversity, wild pigs, and hopefully bats. A walk east along the heights takes you to the Schloss, walking past the ‘Bismarck tower’—cold block of concrete. Views all round of the Neckar and Ammer valleys, of the small towns surrounding Tübingen and Tübingen itself. Small farmlets on the south-side terraced hill where there were vineyards during the nineteenth century. 58 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II 29/ 2/ 2016 Just been listening to Tennessee Williams reading his early poetry—CD in the back of Roessel’s and Moschovakis’s edited Collected Poems (2007). The reading of ‘The Summer Belvedere’ and ‘Little Horse’ were particularly moving and slant. I admire his off-angle ways of seeing and his joy in language and sound. There is almost epic movement in ‘Belvedere’ without the poem leaving the immediate environs. War, damage and immediacy—little losses against the large, the private madnesses. Little snow overnight—a dusting—but not the 15cm they predicted. Weather predictions here are invariably wrong. Thinking more and more about memorials and memory places. Old hospital looms large & ground holds the left-overs of bodies donated to science or the Nazi-era sterilisations. I send my poems to a friend in Tel Aviv for feedback. There’s support but language slippage means anti is anti anti. Sun is through now & the old hospital with its peaks looms large, grandiose, controlling its body. Rest in peace. Rise up. Reclaim. We are making our own ‘desire lines’. We are creating grooves we might get stuck in. We vary our path slightly or add new lines. Extensions. Augmentations. Radical diversions. Large cats walk lower ledges of apartment buildings. Each day the spray-painted tags multiply. The message is the name. The name is the word. So many were here. So many mark their paths. Flag desire, its lines, its wish-fulfilment, emptiness. Listen to steps on cobbles, the soft ground open 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II 59 by the river. Sound of bicycles in the tunnel, wet tyres drying with motion. The tic-tac-toe of this town, like and unlike. Our walking. In my new Blake-Dante work, both Blake and Dante have become whispers, echoes, marginalia to the concerns of here and now. As all else was echoes to their heres and nows. Not templates but residues I work through and around. As Tim maps Iting (his many-years-old-now imaginary world) in increasing detail and with greater and great complexity, so I unmap and remap my engagement with literature, music and art that have scaffolded my own work. I am not completely undoing but I am replacing, working in and around, and going elsewhere. There is no ekphrasis. Tim’s self-immersion in world music has also been an epiphany for me. Nepalese, South Seas, many African countries, Japanese and Chinese music—he has a capacious appetite for breadth and difference and I learn from him regarding musical notation and the textures and tones of specific instruments. We are up to page 166 in our nightly reading of Finnegans Wake . 3/ 3/ 2016 Tübingen Have started reading and (re)considering the work of Pierre Nora (1989) on history and memorial sites. Considering Klee’s, ‘Art does not reflect the visible; it renders visible’ as footnoted in Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991: 125n), we might contest and rejoinder: Art is a concept of the visible, its truths are interior and invisible. It is the invisible I track as I walk and collate all I see, experience, learn. I do not wish to make these things visible as such, but rather suggest that they might be thought of as visible. That is, I want to be aware, but NOT appropriate. I want to observe but not fetishise in the consuming/ possessing sense of the word. Others might have good reason to absorb or comment in that way, but I don’t, personally. Further, to ‘possess’ can be temporary, to own is to desire the exclusive use (or the rights over usage) until ‘it’ is either sold, given, inherited, lost or stolen. Talking of the Bauhaus, ‘as artists associated in order to advance the total project of a total art’, Lefebvre notes (as consequences) three points: ‘1. A new consciousness of space 2. “The façade” [he notes: ‘Fascism, however, placed an increased emphasis on façades...] 3. “Global Space”.’ (ibid: 125) Regarding the latter, he says, ‘Global Space established itself in the abstract as a void waiting to be filled, as a medium waiting to be colonised. How this could be done was a problem solved only later by the social practice of capitalism: eventually, however, this space would come to be filled by commercial images, signs and objects. This development would in turn result in the advent of the pseudo-concept of the environment (which begs the question: the environment of whom or what? ).’ (ibid: 125) 60 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts II My response, taking into consideration the vagaries of translation-loss and recontextualising to my own ecology of poetics (maybe the only ‘eco’ that poetry can ‘possess’! ): Space does not need to be filled—all space is already filled, or filling and emptying or in a state of ‘about to be filled’. Not just symbolic ‘dark matter’, but an eternally active spatiality, a flux of movement and exchange in which privilege is local and immediate but never permanent. I step and my steps leave a mark—I step again and the mark gets deeper but doesn’t erase the first step. But it is at once physically and conceptually eroded and its initial presence needs be restated (in poetry, in art, in music) to ensure respect for its initial presence, for knowledge of its intrinsic worth. In the same way, the poem text lost and present, or word-of-mouth, suffers entropy and is remade—it is flux. How can we respect indigenous space and open that space to people in need of a place? How can we entertain and respect multiple arguments for presence? How can we all be and not take away from each other? Space does not need to be filled: it is not a vacuum to be fed. It is a presence. But a presence that can tolerate mutual ‘occupation’. Environment as the presence of all matter—living and ‘enlivening’ as it exists without the consequences of colonisation (theft). It is through the active notion of occupying space because it is ‘there to be occupied’ that invasive mentality gains traction—the poem should resist this as much as we should in our living actions. Instead of ‘left’ and ‘right’, maybe we should think in terms of how people wish to ‘control’ or ‘respect’ this ecology of space. Liberty of space or control of space . Lefebvre is wrong in his deployment and understanding of constructs of (natural) environment. When he absurdly writes, ‘Pollution has always existed...’ (ibid: 326) he seems to treat it more as metaphor than reality. There is nothing ordinary about waste. Understanding the waste we produce—from the house, the town, the city, or a camp, or a tent or in the open—is pivotal to understanding the weight of being human, of a consciousness of occupying space to the exclusion of other living entities. Pollution as metaphor is the convenience of being able to pollute in reality and to pollute reality. This is the kind of crap that has allowed anti-green Marxists to (re)negotiate human space and biosphere as ALL, to negate intactness of ‘environment’. They are the colonisers who work hand-in-hand with the capitalist destroyers. [...] 20/ 3/ 2016 Tübingen Walked through forest to the Wurmlinger chapel in its island hill with Tracy and Tim. A nice 16km round trip—not far, but a good walk. Enjoyed ourselves greatly. Thinking of chapel-in-the-forest poems—Uhland’s poem is on the outside wall. His poem of burial and song and life and loss. And I think of Michael Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily , 2015 61 Dransfield’s poem ‘Geography’ and those exquisite lines which have imprinted me since I was a teenager: in the forest, in unexplored valleys of the sky, are chapels of pure vision. there even the desolation of space cannot sorrow you or imprison. i dream of the lucidity of the vacuum, orders of saints consisting of parts of a rainbow, identities of wild things JK Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily, 2015 On Receiving From England a Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers. Pale Ghosts! of fragrant things that grew among The woods and valleys of my native land, Phantoms of flowers I played with long ago: Here are the scented violets I sought In their cool nooks of verdure, and the bells That fringed the mountain crag with loveliest blue; Here are the flushing clusters of the May, The dainty primrose on its slender stem; And the forget-me-not—all faint and pale As those dim memories of home that haunt The exile’s wistful heart in banishment. I look around and see A thousand gayer tints; the wilderness Is bright with gorgeous rainbow colouring Of flowers that have no dear familiar names. I see them closing ere the dews of night Have touched their waxen leaflets: close they fold Their tender blossoms through the darkened hours, And will not open, though the fractious winds Should wrestle with their roots and strain their stems. They waken not until the softer airs, Breathed from the rosy lips of early morn, Come whispering, “lo! the lordly sun is nigh.” 62 Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily, 2015 But in my hand these frail memorials Lie closely pressed; a slight electric link, By which thought over-passes time and space, To other hands that plucked them: other hands That never more to any touch of mine Shall thrill responsive. Blessed be those hands With prosperous labours, fruitful through long years, Of all life’s truest, tenderest charities. E. Western Australia, 15th September, 1868. ‘I look around and see’. There’s a wilful effort in this, a forcing of the self beyond the casual formulaic, the poetic gesture to keep the poem flowing. A narrative device, sure, but also an acceptance of a different embodiment in place. That in the poem, and in the poet, many stories of belonging and exclusion crisscross, and try to coalesce. In the neatness of the poem, we might be led to believe that prosody’s ultimate purpose is to package these contradictions. Certainly the poet wants to write ‘verse’, but it’s only to contain the rough edges and disruptions of writing in a space that challenges and contradicts colonial manners, the imposition of the ‘civilised’ on day-to-day life. What makes this poem different is where and when it was written. And why. Just over thirty years after this poem was written, we read ‘Willy Willy: The Boulder Bard’ in his ‘Ode to Westralia’, noting of Western Australia (pre Federation): Land of Forests, fleas and flies, Blighted hopes and blighted eyes, Art thou hell in earth’s disguise, Westralia? Art thou some volcanic blast By volcanoes spurned, outcast? Art unfinished—made the last Westralia? Wert thou once the chosen land Where Adam broke God’s one command? That He in wrath changed thee to sand, Westralia! Land of politicians silly, Home of wind and willy-willy, Land of blanket, tent and billy, Westralia. Home of brokers, bummers, clerks, Nest of sharpers, mining sharks, Dried up lakes and desert parks, Westralia! Land of humpies, brothels, inns, Old bag huts and empty tins, Land of blackest, grievous sins Westralia. The sense of Western Australia (massive as it is), being the ‘end of the earth’, and in this something perversely to be celebrated, was a dominant tone in verse written out of the colony. In terms of the brutalities settlers committed on the indigenous peoples of the region, most of the newspaper verse found in early colonial papers is overtly racist, often hate-filled. Moral defence as attack? But one did find a register of guilt even if it was rendered in the ‘noble savage’ sense with touches of ‘local colour’ (this is an American term, not an Australian one regarding context and period, but the irony serves the bereftness of the situation). The poet ‘Acaster’ in ‘O’er a Native’s Grave’ (1871), writes, contesting the given bigotries of the colonial press and community: Poor child of earth—The rising sun, That tips the hills with mellow ray, No more shal’t rouse thee from thy sleep, Or cheer thee on thy lonely way. No more with spear, and weapons rude, Shal’t thou roam thro’ the woodland dell, No more midst festive scenes shall sing The wildsome songs you loved so well. So, considering the poem I have chosen by the early ‘settler’ poet of Western Australia, Elizabeth Deborah Brockman, we might think of where it came from. It may not be as overtly original as much other European poetry of the period, but it was extremely unusual to come out of the ‘bush’ of Western Australia at Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily , 2015 63 64 Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily, 2015 the time. Written at Seabrook, the property on which Brockman lived with her husband and children near the colony’s earliest inland town of York, it encapsulates the sense of loss and disconnection ‘settlers’ often felt in their ‘strange’ new place. Brockman migrated with her parents to the Swan River Colony from Edinburgh where she had been born in 1833. She was seven years old. Living on a property known as Glen Avon (which I often pass, travelling from Jam Tree Gully to the town of Northam), by the Avon River, she led a bookish life and became one of the earliest and certainly most accomplished settler poets, publishing as ‘E.’ in the local church magazine. I have written a lot about Brockman, investigating colonial subtexts in her writing (there is only a small book of poems published after her death in 1914), women’s right in the colony, religious obsession and security, depression, and most importantly, I think, the fact that Brockman lived on land that had been stolen from the Noongah people, the traditional owners and custodians of country. These subtexts are obscured in the poems, but through reading letters, journal entries (by other parties), prose commentaries in the Church of England magazine, and other snippets discovered in historical archives, one gets the typical picture of both a predictable exploitation of indigenous people and religious patronising. But I also argue there is something more than a sense of superiority and possibly guilt eating away at the edges of the sense of belonging and alienation in her poetry; that in those local flowers that have ‘no dear familiar names’, there is an acknowledgement that access is something that has to be granted, that it can’t just be taken. The flowers from ‘home’, the Old Country, she receives in the mail, sent by ship and taking six months to reach her, are the dried residue of an old life, a life of her childhood, of a country that is no longer hers. They act as symbols of the absent present, triggers of memory, signatures of her own history (and that of her colonial family) and of those left behind in the Old Country. They are dead but look (fragilely) alive, they are almost living memorials, or maybe simulacra of themselves, and her ‘othered’ self. They are signs of what she might have been. As Pierre Nora (1989: 8) observes, ‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.’ But the poet is also an alien in this stolen land, and for all her effort to become one, to become the place she now lives in, she can’t entirely. She is isolated by distance and by unbelonging. She is permanently temporary, and when she loses family to death or returning to England (or Scotland), the loss is doubled in spiritual and conceptual ways. The cost of this to her is immense, and to those who have been dispossessed, and though discovering this poem as a young person was an epiphany to me, especially having spent so much of my life in the region out of which she wrote, it also represents the crisis of writing poetry as a non-indigenous person in the place I know as ‘home’. Brockman says: I look around and see A thousand gayer tints; the wilderness Is bright with gorgeous rainbow colouring This wilderness is her angst and her security. In the alienation is her poetry, but also her desire for conformity. She is both recognising her non-belonging and trying to counter it. Those ‘gayer tints’ include wildflowers and trees, from donkey orchids to the blossom of York gums and wandoos, which I know so well. Many years ago I wrote an essay on Brockman that begins: The case of the Western Australian poet, Elizabeth Deborah Brockman, who wrote the bulk of her poetry in the 1860s, is unique. A poet of depth, grace, subtlety and controlled anger [now I’d see this as melancholy, and not a barely visible ‘anger’], her work carries a spiritual content akin to Emily Dickinson’s [now I also see this differently—the struggle to be what one is not, determination to subscribe to the manners of the Church and contingent social interactions, the struggle with depression and frequent physical isolation in a more seemingly hebephrenic way in the poems while rebelling against it; Brockman’s torments are all below the surface of her poems], and a formal approach and language-resonance that might remind the modern reader of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. These tonal signifiers are fused with an appreciation of the local, and a ‘transcendent’ sense of spatiality, linguistic and geographic hybridity, and ‘nature’. Despite being isolated in bush rural areas in the years after the founding of the Swan River Colony (1829), Brockman kept up with modern literature through regular consignments of books from the “old country”. There is no doubt she was familiar with the work of Barrett Browning (whose Poems were published in 1844 and were fantastically popular)... And as background: In the colony, poetry—much of it doggerel, though with the occasional gem—featured in the various newspapers that came with the ‘settlement’ of what is now known as Western Australia. Papers such as the Swan River Guardian (1836-1838), Inquirer (Perth, 1840-1901) Herald (Fremantle, 1867-1889), and Sun (Kalgoorlie, 1898-1929) were vehicles for the development of a State and regional literary consciousness. It wasn’t until 1873 that the first book of original verse by a Western Australian poet was published, Henry Clay’s Two and Two . It’s this connection, in what is formulaic in her verse (the ‘dew’), and the oddness of its circumstances of production, that interests me still. In the last stanza of the poem, Brockman talks of the delicate dried flowers as being ‘frail memo- Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily , 2015 65 66 Selecting a Poem for Poetry Daily, 2015 rials’, an echo of the markers of death of the colonists in their often-isolated graves, and the memory of markers in the Old Country. What is built is tenuous. More: the markers of memorialising are not visible to the casual observer, as they involve the deaths of those whose land is stolen, and the lost graves of those who died in ‘exploring’ and colonising. No word in this poem can be read within the conventions of English-language verse; every word, as ‘pat’ as it seems, comes with a contextual kick. Those who are in the Old Country are as the dead, as she is dead to them. The stolen land is haunted by misdeeds and her loss of connection is a haunting, too. She doesn’t overtly say this, but all colonial poetry, especially that written in such profound social and cultural isolation, tends towards such complexity. The electric link is more Frankenstein than a polite shudder of a genteel religious lady. Her religion is a buffer and buffers can dissolve so easily. The last few lines of affirmation and well-wishing are reassurance, not a polite homily. When her family collected her work after her death, the small book came with an interesting preface. I quote a couple of extracts here: Elizabeth Deborah Brockman, the authoress of this small book of verse, has just reached the close of her long and beautiful life. She passed away at her residence at Cannington in her 82nd year. She was the eldest daughter of Lieutenant Frederick William Slade, and was born in Edinburgh in 1833. When she was in her seventh year, her parents hearing much of the new settlement in Western Australia, caught the spirit of adventure and decided to join the small band of colonists there, and to find a new home for their young children in the land of the Southern Cross. and: It was during these years that she wrote her poems. Some time in the early sixties, she met and formed here a great friendship with the late Archdeacon Brown and his wife. The latter was a daughter of the Rev. A. Mitchell, and the former was at that time Rector of the Parish of York, and editor of the Church Magazine. It was in accordance with his wish, and under his encouragement, that she allowed her verses to be published in his magazine under the nom de plume of “E.” Some years later, an uncle of hers in Edinburgh, perchancing to see the Church Magazine, was much struck with the beauty of the poems, and, collecting them, re-published them in pamphlet form for family circulation. Mrs. Brockman was of a cheerful and buoyant disposition, but at this time of her life, grief for the loss of her much loved relations, and the many trials and difficulties inseparable from the rearing of a young family—in those days of early colonial settlement—had for a time greatly injured her health, which for some years was very precarious. Her poems were the children of heartache and solitude, and a deep note Approximate Proximity 67 of sorrow runs through most of them, but her strong religious convictions and the firm faith in God which upheld her through all the trials of her life, is the key note of every one. This might not be one of the greatest poems in the language, and it does fit a template of similar poems written out of the colonies with a longing for the absent family and the markers of the Old World, but it is different because of where it comes from and when it was written in that place. Context is everything, sure, but it’s even more than everything here. It’s a counter to the rules she lived by, the patterns of behaviour she chose to observe and uphold. No glittering poet’s-fame for her: just a connection with her own alienation reconfigured into an expression of the loss she certainly felt but also helped create. In some ways, this is a tragic poem of chronic depression, the crisis of the colonial subject and the subjectivity of being a ‘poetess’, and of searching for consolation where no consolation was or could be morally available. It is a poem, to my mind, of what I’d call temporariness and schism in belonging. What is ‘lost’ is permanently lost. Old memorials are the false memorials over the killing fields of the colonised land. JK Approximate Proximity Skyping the other day with John in Cork—an approximation of proximity, that taught me a thing or two. Proximity drives creativity—that’s why we both miss the back-and-forth of discussion, each interrupting the other, both of us constantly veering away from the topic in a productive clinamen. Proximity is not just the exchange of ideas, it’s an exchange of energy that generates ideas in a way that is more than just intellect. In a slow recognition of this, there’s a growing impetus in literary critical studies of the importance of what is called affect—collective, interpersonal, bodily-based emotion—in the work of creative thought. This tells us that ideas are a material process, that thinking uses up energy and emits energy, and that other thinking beings are energized by that energy, in turn pumping out energy-ideas… For much of human epistemic history, knowledge was carnal. To know was to pay close attention to the world, with ‘close’ being the operative word. Words were part of the ‘prose of the world’, and to imitate in art was somehow to enter into a contagious contact with the object imitated (Taussig 1993). Then came the Enlightenment, sundering nature and culture, things and humans, and replacing intimacy with distance as the guarantor of true knowledge. Cut free of their Approximate Proximity 69 moorings in the natural world, humans received a mandate to know that world in ways that were closely related to an instrumental exploitation of everything that was non-human (and quite a lot that was human but could conveniently be deemed sub-human if expediency deemed necessary). Language ceased to be a way of communing with the world, and became instead, a means of categorizing and describing it, with communication reserved for humans among themselves. The results of this history of instrumental reason are now becoming unmistakeably clear to us as the climate spirals out of control and threatens to take its revenge not only on the wider and wider swathes of the earth’s population living in poverty and precarity, but also large numbers of those at the top of the socio-economic ladder. Unsurprisingly then, the double functions of language in modern literary studies, those of description and derision, documentation and critique, both predicated on distance between the writing self and the object of writerly discourse, are slowly being overhauled today by something that looks like a resurgent aesthetics of proximity. Omniscient narration or anti-ideological demystification are losing ground to, if not totally displaced by, emergent paradigms of literary creation that depend upon proximity and the sort of contagious effect that goes under the name of ‘affect’. Much of this thinking has come from our colleagues in the Global South, where creative art, whether it be dance, theatre, or performance poetry, has never ceased to work in a mode of proximity, even as it has invested the more distanced medial forms of the published book or other manifestations of the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Literary aesthetics in Africa has a respectable political pedigree under the aegis of what our Cape Town colleague Harry Garuba (2003: 276) calls the ‘referential imperative’; but it has an even longer history of working according to the dicates of what, in opposition to critical realism, he terms ‘animist realism’ (ibid: 267, 274, 284). This is a form of literary creation that is implied in a ‘continual re-enchantment of the world’ (ibid: 265). Examples of this ‘animist realism’ can be seen in Ghanian dramatist Joe de Graft’s call, in theatrical performance, for a form of aesthetic practice that would spurn ‘verisimilitude’ and manifest, rather, ‘the non-linguistic behaviour and attributes’ of fictional characters, ‘their bodies. ... And the appetites that drive them’, but also ‘their environment and what it is charged with—its dynamic’ (de Graft 1974: 37-8). Sam Durrant notes that this form of proximate, worldly literary creation, in which words and objects and multi-species actors are intimately entangled with one another does not merely represent life in the postcolony, but ‘invests’ in that life via a mode of ‘enchantment’ that makes of the literary text a ‘transformational rite’ (2018, forthcoming). This ‘post-representational’ mode of writing (Thrift 2008) activates literary creation in ways that unleash its powers via the medium of affect—an 70 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III im-mediate mode of taking-effect that works within spaces of proximity and tactile contact rather than the cerebral and haughty distance of critique. But isn’t this all a bit far-fetched? This is all very well for our colleagues in Cape Town, but aren’t West-of-Ireland Cork and Protestant-Reformation Tübingen both anchored firmly in the Global North, the hemisphere of technological progress and stern rationality? After all, for god’s sake, it’s skype that is connecting us at this distance! But both of these places have their own distinct genius loci—that’s what leads John there, and holds me here, in any case—and persons like sites have their own interlinked spirit of place, the creativity that emerges when their paths cross and their orbits overlap. That skype session led to this piece. Indeed, many other chats, viva voce and otherwise proximate, some sitting in the office that overlooks the Österberg, others walking through the forests around Tübingen, others via the mode of written dialogue and the secret magic of words, have led to this book. The proof of proximity is in the producing. RWP 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III 24/ 5/ 2016 Rosewood, Schull Two walks today! Getting active again. First walk—Colla Road loop. Second walk—highlands loop with Tracy who came along to study the plants of the hedgerows (which she is writing about). She managed to identify every species she examined. I took particular delight (as did she) in the flowering hawthorn trees (apparently, even indifferent local farmers avoid ploughing too close to hawthorn trees in order not to disturb their roots and consequently The Others). • During the first walk I considered how to rethink the post-World War II ‘rethinking’. How to think around Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, how to think beyond the ‘tree’, outside The One, and also how to recognise and respect Adorno’s observations regarding art and Auschwitz. If we extend the living ‘tree’ metaphor and metonym we might look more to a contribution of the graft and the leaf ’s vascular system and its temporariness re life and its vulnerability to damage and occupation by ‘parasites’. The assault on the lifespan of a leaf by totalitarianism and other ideological forces, as well as by the cadre units of control, is a disturbing poetics of human abuse of fellow humans and life in general. 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III 71 I have deep concerns over D & G’s stand on ‘these’ things. However, François Dosse (2013) in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives , approaches some of the complexities in this way: Philosophy must not encounter historical tragedy and remain unarmed. On the contrary, it must affirm its function. ‘Of course, there is no reason to believe that we can no longer think after Auschwitz, and that we are all responsible for Nazism.’ (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 106) But the shame of being human, which Primo Levi expressed blindingly well, remains. We are not necessarily responsible individually, but Nazism sullies us all. ‘There is indeed catastrophe but it consists in the society of brothers and friends having undergone such an ordeal that brothers and friends can no longer look at one another or at themselves without feeling a sense of ‘weariness’, perhaps ‘mistrust’’. After Auschwitz, we can no longer claim the candor of the Greeks. (Dosse 2013: 520) However, I think we all do have responsibility regarding Nazism if we have knowledge or had knowledge of the ‘western world’ or were part of (or are ) ‘The West’ and haven’t acted to the contrary, but also I think that if we do not refute such a metaphysics and philosophy in general in the light of this (self) knowledge, we are game-playing with horror and catastrophe. So much of the dialogue centres on the personal desires and egoism of the players—their loves, the affronts they receive or perceive, the enforcement of their belief system/ s. D & G resisted ‘stratification’ of systems and yet they deployed their ‘war machines’ to renegotiate the spatial terms of engagement on a very pragmatic level (micro and macro). In other words, in their post-Nietzschean world, they indulged themselves. Collaboration as indulgence is undesirable to me and a desiring stratagem for them—all openings and enveloping, all enterings and releases. It’s a form of drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. It’s desire for the ‘attractive brunette’ and the enjoyment of recognition, even if one puts a humble face to Badiou and his Maoist’s intrusion into your seminar. On the first page of his conclusion, Dosse (2013: 519) writes: Between 1969 and 1992, the year of Guattari’s death, two authors with very different backgrounds, personalities, and sensibilities collaborated on an exceptional oeuvre. During this long period, a “disjunctive synthesis,” or collaborative arrangement of enunciation—a term they defined in a portentous way in their first article, published in 1970, on Klossowski—functioned well. It was an improbable marriage of the orchid and the wasp. ‘Collaboration’ can mean any interaction we care to configure—positive or negative or both, or something else entirely (indefinable in affect). I have worked 72 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III with poets who have ‘uncollaborated’—removed material (of theirs) from the collaboration to use in other contexts (fine, I am okay with that)—‘cannibalise’ as Tom Raworth called his excision of material from a collaborative text in the mid 90s. I have encountered collaborators who deny the agency or existence of the other collaborating party, or have/ show a loss of faith in the collective outcome/ work. Other collaborations have dwindled and gone silent after having great energy and zest, though I find these often eventually ‘reboot’ and have new life and fresh direction; others remain incipient or work on a ‘small scale’ (a few fragments maybe) never to go further, and for the moment to be what it was. So collaboration becomes a personal anchoring against winds of creative change, slippage in personal interactions, and the drives of text itself. Having collaborated with many different practitioners, I ultimately collaborate with the idea of ‘art’ as a generative means of facilitating conversation and making an extra(mural) creativity. My friendships often form in the nexus and matrix of collaboration. I—we—find ourselves as we exist in relation to each other, the text, and versions of ‘the world’ (abstract, conceptual, empirical). The third party rises without prejudice, we hope. How activist can these interactions be? —different intentions pull against the desire for personal (specific) outcomes. It/ they so often eludes the pragmatic. The activist notions of the collaborative break down and we are left holding fragments of our intention(s). • As I was walking the Colla loop, I was thinking about my childhood fascination with things military (the very fascination that led me to pacifism)... And I’ve decided to write a sequence of poems entitled ‘War Games’ that deal with this (extending from ‘Army Surplus’—a recent poem). I will start with the notion of the ‘fort’—its implications in life and language • International regionalism is a manifestation of ‘artistic’ collaboration. Polysituatedness is subliminal collaboration through psycho-geographic co-ordinates. • These walks aren’t overlays but grafts (see note 1 below) onto pre-existing notions of place and pre-determined understandings (come from observation and participation) of place. I do not add ‘palimpsests’ to the walk from other walks. But I obviously walk informed by my experiences of the same walk, other walks, my general knowledge of walking, and things a priori . Rather, I call this ‘grafting’—I graft all I am onto the walk as it happens, and also afterwards. This grafting makes a narrative thread that is both linear and Möbius. Continuous and infinite. Adding and flowing. It does not build ‘up’ but ‘along’. The points on 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III 73 the loop are approaching the infinite even if they cannot be infinite (ecological damage prevents this). I count syllables as I walk. I memorise and memorialise with the markers of my tread. • Watched a wren in the hedge near Town Park today—lively! • Note 1: A graft over the top of, say, exposed flesh—a skin graft—is not a palimpsest but a removal and addition to create continuation. To fuse with what is (left) there to become one with and not just a patch or a cover(ing). Evening walk up to the top of Ardmanagh and back. Examining the ‘skin’ of a foxglove flower I thought of the organicism of graft, of the restoration and repair and recovery of graft, and the growth and repair of the poem. I also thought about the materials to make the graft—where they come from, the effect on the source, the damage and cost of graft: of phonemes and morphemes, of syntax and utterances. The ‘all’ the poem takes in its growth, its becoming the leaf (of the book, on the tree—metonym and metaphor). From 25/ 5/ 2015 Schull Unlike Deleuze, I do not believe in a unity to which all ‘subdivisions’ are subsumed... • Graft (and leaf) is the interrupted unity, the introduction of the duality that suggests (genetics, observed experience) a certain fruition, but always contains an anarchic possibility—the graft that doesn’t take or that is poorly done or gets affected by other biological or empirical (environmental) forces. A certain contingent certainty = graft = poem. JK Carraiglea Self-Caters The eternal letting of the house that cannot be sold—‘gut’ pool in the rocks as inviting to humans as otters—and the sell is of fish and dolphins. The south-west coastal experience. Visit and self-cater for a few days, then go. Write in the guest book. Join the fray of encounter. Read research articles 2015/ 16 Journal Extracts III 75 on radionuclide contamination from Chernobyl affecting Northern Ireland. And what of the Republic— hesitant on the border, violence smuggled in its colonial pocket? But walking Colla Road as a daily exposure to a vast water narrowed to channel and dead red sandstone, that Spanish Galleon weighted with my ancestral ghosts, I risk yelling into the anemones gaping just under the tide— I am weighed down with contamination, and my body will serve no otters as substitute— the fish fed on sailors’ corpses then on the ill-satisfying spirits, fish latched onto by the sleek fast otters, and this Otter looking up at my walking high above where I was so temporary— a couple of weeks that ate into our psyche—spitting pitiful bones of my connection out into that vastness with its atomic wrecks, its lies of purity. So far north, monitoring of the border shows residues this long after— after no otter will ever recognise. JK Concretions 77 Concretions In one of John’s recent actions, he has placed his poems in the natural environment, underling in the most literal way possible the proximity of a poetry of the environment to the environment. Poetry is embedded in the natural world of which it speaks. It does not describe, in a stance that is metaphoric in nature; rather, it is contiguous with, associated with, indeed causally linked to the world, in a relationship that is fundamentally metonymic. He explains his practice in the book Polysituatedness (Kinsella 2016b: 49), whose title perhaps suggests that not only the poet, but also the poems, are situated in the world: Over the last nine or so years I have been accumulating poems that exist as expressions in landscape—accepting that landscape is a mediated term in itself and relates to human presence and intervention with varying levels of impact. Whether printed paper placed among rocks and scrub, or lines written in charcoal on a concrete path between York gums, or words scratched into a firebreak, none of the creations had more than a temporary presence in the environment outside being captured in photographs. Such a project is striking and innovative, if not downright weird. Yet we ought to assume that what John is doing here is actually closer to the norm of poetic creation than a deviation from it. This is not some bizarre lunge off the beaten track, into sandthorn or spinifex scrub, that will end in a bog. It’s not a typical piece of artistic self-advertisement that seeks to épater les bourgeois . It’s not an ostentatious activation of the famous Brechtian V-Effekt (alienation effect) so as to ward off the danger of being assimilated to the familiar, naturalized and coopted by mainstream cultural practices. No, on the contrary, John’s practice is simply a way of illustrating, in a rather over-literal manner, as if instructing a somewhat obstreperous child, the fact that poems are always already part of the world, and not inhabitants of an aesthetic desert island in some far corner of the globe. John’s poems on/ in the landscape do this in two ways, lodged on the intertwined axes of spatiality and temporality, of synchrony and diachrony. First, space. The poems are concretely part of the environment: literally so. One poem is scratched in or on a strip of concrete laid out across the leafand twig-strewn dirt. It’s so fundamentally indicative of his aesthetic practice that it is reproduced in colour on the cover of his book. This is a ‘concretion’ of poetic practice that shows it up as a material, and not simply an intellectual or ‘merely’ ‘aesthetic’ practice. Poetry is inherently part of a real place, a real environment, a real situation, despite its manifest difference from the environment. It’s here that the difference of the aesthetic cuts in: it’s because the typewritten sheet of 78 Concretions paper is a wee bit out of place among the gravel and eucalyptus leaves that we notice it; yet it’s because it’s among the gravel and eucalyptus leaves that we realize it has something to say about them. Second, time. The poems are ephemeral. They attach briefly to a place, then blow away, rot, crumble or dissolve. The aim is not to create artefacts, but to participate in a creative, transformative process that may also be identical with decay and disintegration. These poems must always be repeated anew. The poems are acts in a place, but like the place, they are part of transformative procedures and processes. Language, one with its material base (paper) and nestling metonymically among its context, participates in the dynamism of place and of the elements that work upon it: rain, wind, sun. As Thoreau (1908: 8) says, ‘All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle that is taking place every instant.’ The task of art is to mark its inevitable participation in that process of change, and to accelerate, accentuate and steer that change in potentially creative directions to the extent that it can. Poetry as a human undertaking is both limited, but by virtue of its limitation, connected to that which delimits (and thus de-limits) its capabilities. When Stephen Muecke (2016: 40) asks, ‘The question is: Are the humans running the country, or vice versa? ’, in a sense, both answers are true: it’s a collective business where humans and poetry are both engaged upon the business of bringing in the new. One of John’s landscape poems includes the simple couplet: Emerge Emerge (Kinsella 2016b: 55 [photo 6]) This sums up the creative impetus of this poetry within the landscape, where the fabric of time is manifest as the emergence of the new from the rubble of the old: dead leaves, desiccated twigs, blown dust, even drought cracks in the earth. Sites of emergence that, as that couplet suggests, are meeting points between at least (and almost always more than) two actants, out of whose interaction transformation arises. Something emerges at the faultlines where actants are drawn to each other. A place is generated by these interactions, and offers the rendez-vous for the next interaction, changing its contours, which are made up by the actants themselves, at each turn. That is why this book is written in the form of the fragment: the fragment in textual form is the chronotope of an intersection of actants at a tipping point as a structure transforms, however minimally. Soon the next moment will come, and with it, the next prise-de-position in a place, a configuration, a network, a community, or a transformation (all of these being synonyms, or at the very least, cognates, of each other). Onwards, then, to the next intersection! RWP ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ 79 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ When the government of Western Australia uses its shock troops—the police, of course, but also the Main Roads and their private contractors—against the people and the environment, they are not swayed from their purpose by protest, even where that protest succeeds to some extent. They are working through military solutions to their problems of opposition, and ‘outflank’ those who are concerned with the destruction of natural habitat. If one front is under pressure, open up another. While a large amount of protest energy has rightfully been focussed on the Beeliar atrocity, the government has been determinedly destroying native vegetation and habitat as well elsewhere. The extreme and gratuitous removal of trees along the York-Quairading Road is one example, but such acts on an even larger scale have been happening along the Great Eastern Highway between Southern Cross and Kalgoorlie for many months. And recently we’ve been seeing the wholesale removal of tall marri trees (in wondrous bloom at the moment) from along the Toodyay Road north of Gidgegannup (especially at intersections), and also the removal of vegetation alongside and between the double lanes of the dual carriageway of the Great Eastern Highway in the Eastern Hills between Glen Forrest and Mundaring. The trees are/ will be gone for good. While the ‘upgrades’ are being implemented for ‘safety’, it’s obvious to many that all opportunities are taken to destroy as much vegetation as possible in the process. We see the same with ‘fencing’ on private land—the fencers often destroy vegetation on the ‘long paddock’ side of the fence with impunity, and there’s a recent case locally of bush from a nature reserve being cleared in the process of fencing private land. These actions slip ‘under the radar’, which is why we need to entirely rethink the way protest is used to resist these destructions. Global fascism has almost completely absorbed deforestation of the planet into its pattern of abuses. As global politics lurches further to the right, the right concomitantly define their existence through an attack at least twofold. Not only do they attack people who show compassion towards their natural environment, compassion towards cultural and spiritual difference, compassion towards those who see things in ways different from their own (if this sounds like a paradox, it is! ), but they attack especially through ‘developing’ the planet such that all life and all topography are a ‘resource’ that must be put into action to prevent a shift in values away from self-affirming materialism. It’s as if ‘nature’ is a threat to the consumer-unit of self, family, and chosen social group. Nation itself becomes an extension of this philosophy of confirming that one exists—existence defined through usage, through consuming. 80 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ It strikes me that what I term ‘temporariness’ is evidenced in more than one way here. Not only through human verification of place through presence—even if only ‘passing through’ or having a non-permanent interaction with a social geography—but also in the impact that humans have who claim place as their permanent homes (whether they have negotiated those rights with, say, indigenous custodians or not). They have an impact on natural environment by reversing, or maybe more accurately unbalancing, the equation: the removal of ‘ancient’ trees to make those trees ‘temporary’, and to make those people who control that place (through the police, the Main Roads, the machinery of government, the party etc.) the legitimate ‘permanent’ presence. So, the ancient becomes the temporary, and the state replaces this with itself as the ‘permanent’, validating its presence by creating a sense of precedence (a concept of terra nullius has served Australian governments here). ‘Temporariness’ becomes the natural world that isn’t sanctioned by the post-Enlightenment greed of personal subjectivity expressed in controlled social groups (controlled by force of arms and force of social pressure). I wish to extend this argument in a number of directions. First, I reference an email discussion I had with an old and very dear friend over the last few days—a fine poet and a man of great moral fibre—who refused to believe that I could completely be the anarchist (pacifist) I am. Here’s my reply: I won’t contribute to a system I see as corrupt, bigoted and oppressive. The ‘majority rules’ is just not fair or just. What’s more, an individual cannot represent the concerns of many individuals. It’s deep-seated with me. I haven’t voted for over twenty years and refuse to. They even make voting compulsory—state control. Obviously, I infinitely prefer a ‘Green’ to a ‘One Nation’ (candidate), but I ultimately see the system as wrong and won’t play their game. I make my input in other ways. I feel every person has direct responsibility and it’s because of the state in its various manifestations that we’re seeing the rise of global fascism. I am committed to a fair and just world in which social responsibility is shared and the environment is respected not just as an extension of human values but in its own right. Same with ‘animal rights’. And same with the rights to spiritual belief. I also believe in the rights of cultural difference and cultural co-existence, and oppose all forms of bigotry. But I feel I can better express this as a writer and speaker and in how I live and conduct my life (to the best of my ability), than by participating in the machinery of government, which is largely, if not always, hypocritical. Obviously one intersects and crosses over with government constantly, and one has to ‘work’ with those contexts—it’s what I term ‘umbrella anarchism’—but in the ways we can (while managing to feed our families), it strikes me that all non-violent resistance is a positive and generative thing/ position. ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ 81 P.S. I should add that I am constantly speaking out and being active against the ‘one nations’ of the world. One doesn’t have to do the party thing to resist the overtly evil (and they are). I do so every day of my life and have done since I was twenty (many a sign of the Australian Nationalists Movement was removed by me from Perth streets in the 80s etc. etc. etc.). I include this here because it’s a statement of ‘permanence’ and temporariness. I have lived in Western Australia (mainly in rural areas) for much of my life, along with lengthy stints in other countries, and still consider myself ‘temporary’, because I live on stolen Noongar country. I do, however, have an insight via a form of ‘permanence’ due to family association, early childhood experience, and a deep commitment to the land itself. But I mention this only in the context of acknowledging Indigenous permanence and ongoing custodianship. Aside from the fact that I recognise no government anywhere, I do recognise totemic relationships with place and knowledges of country that extend across millennia of observing said country and the impact (and sharing) humans have had on that place. My temporariness, like that of all non-indigenes, can be enriched and crossreferenced with this ‘permanence’, and through this be enriched and expanded without occupying/ territorialising (even more) indigenous space. On these grounds alone, I could never lend my (even) tacit approval to government through voting for it (in any manifestation): government claims permanence when it is temporary, and in doing so deletes totemic permanence . Second: a tangent. All presence in place is measured more accurately or more relevantly through tangents. I have recently been laying out the groundwork (non-invasive and non-colonising of natural habitat, I hope—every word we use has an implication... What structures am I building here and what do they occlude or delete? ) for a collaborative work with a fellow poet, referencing John Donne’s work. In doing so, I consulted an old Penguin edition we have at Jam Tree Gully (one of four or five Donne collections here), and was surprised and pleased to find it was a copy Tracy had bought as a gift for me back in 1994 when we were ‘on the bones of our arses’. I was still an alcoholic and addict then, and we were hugely in debt due to the chaos of my life. Tracy had found this copy in a university second-hand bookshop, and it’s a minor miracle we still have it—I tended to sell or hock everything back then to get the next bottle of sherry or whatever. The contradictions with my politics played a major part in my being eventually able to stop, and move on. 82 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ Anyway, this edition is annotated in my scrawling hand in patches here and there. I find myself reading marginal comments around the poem ‘The Harbinger to the Progress’ (‘The Second Anniversary’) or ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’. Here are the comments: ‘May Yagan colonise the soul—‘thief, murderer’ [as called by the ‘Settlers’ of the Swan River Colony], [is actually] honourer and representative of HIS PEOPLE. This comment probably connects to ‘(a third)’ which I have encircled in the first line of the Donne poem: Two souls move here, and mine (a third) must move Paces of admiration and of love; On the next page I have written: ‘I never liked Dante’s Paradise—maybe I am a victim of what I assume of others’. This hermeticism is followed by the comment: ‘Oh, the repraise. The dynamics of—of—Natural Born Killers.’ This comment is next to the final couplet of the poem: Those acts, those songs shall still content them best Which praise those awful powers that make them blessed. Which brings me to my theme and the tangential interconnectedness of things. The permanence of the Donne text and the temporariness of my hand-written comments in a volume breaking at the spine, a residue of terrible days (for us), with the pages even stained and bearing a strand of rollie tobacco twenty-three years later (I haven’t smoked for twenty-two years), the linking of a pure afterlife (and getting there, one might add, ‘lightning moves but slow’), ironically to the adulterated (and, of course, ‘passionate’) materiality of the here and now, to highlight the tactile pleasures of living life, of letting death be death, is the engine in many ways behind the very Western subjectivity. A state-sanctioned subjectivity that has led to such materialistic greed, to such a ‘selfie’ socialising of the self—policing of the individual by socially connected individuals (who have long since consigned individuality to digital groupthink). The ironies of Donne cascade through the centuries to become the greed of a science not of knowledge but of self-gain (often camouflaged in a patriotic/ nationalistic false collectivity). The reference to Oliver Stone’s exploitative movie (of violent imagery to stimulate viewers as they witness manifestations of the anti-social, whatever role the corporate state has had in creating the conditions for such an extremely violent ‘response’) Natural Born Killers , which Tracy and I had seen at the cinema at the time, is more than a pop-cultural reference of degradation and (violent) breakdown of modern Western (consumer American) subjectivity; it is a parallel to the prosodic devices being deployed in Donne’s personal conquest of the soul. ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ 83 This harbinger brings me back to the government and Main Roads and private companies extending their destructions into the realm of the soul, into a model of well-being of progress to tame a world to one end and one end only: praise of a God who gives and takes and who expects us to use ‘his’ world to his ends, which are an extension of their right-wing politics. The religious right is strongly present in Australia as much as America (even if this is denied) and strongly indicated through racism and bigotry; but more than that, there’s a colonially inherited God-model of nation that, even if Godless for some now, is about forces outside the quotidian directing and determining what is right. If you doubt this, check the demographics of right-wing parties in Australia, and their connections to and origins in mergings of individual, God and state. As the NSW school curriculum (HSC) switches back to a world of imperialism by concentrating on texts through which its implementers might hope the crimes of the contemporary are reduced to allegory and tangential metaphorical allusion, we find ‘The Bard’, whose universal meanings (no denying those) are read by conservatives for gesture rather than the complexity of historical/ linguistic context (try instead, as a counter-example and for a more nuanced approach, reading John Kerrigan on Shakespeare)—in other words, deeply political texts are sold as vaguely human and universal (they actually were pinpointed)... We also find Jane Austen. Her privilege was backgrounded by slavery (despite her implicit objections to slavery in Mansfield Park and Emma, her family’s wealth and social privilege were deeply implicated in the profits from slavery— see ‘Austen and Antigua’ ( Considering Jane Austen 2018) for a rudimentary, somewhat unwittingly empire-centric, and wishful outline of the issues: it is important to note that many existing slaves weren’t emancipated until 1834! ). She created texts that critique women’s economic dependence on social and economic structures that thrive through enslaving women within the society and an empire that grew through slavery elsewhere (that strand of tobacco? sugar plantations...). This is a Jane Austen who nonetheless uses irony in doses absorbable by a (very) slowly changing middle (and upper) class, creating entertainments that again universalise messages about the oppression of women and also the sass, wit and genius of individual women... Entertainments that can be now used to reflect themes that are political-lite, but not offensive to the conservatives of now... And finally, Charles Dickens, whose undoings of British oppressions of the poor are far enough removed from the now to allow analogy that is toothless (the poor of other social orbits are distanced more and more... The corrections that a Dickens brings to British oppressions serves the purveyors of progress 84 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ with a white neo-liberal royalist Westminsterism) in terms of the horrors of now. Among these champions of British letters (sold as ‘English’ literature): very little of colonialism as evil, very little of environmental destruction, very little of the rights of different spiritual approaches to life (in essence), and very little about governments’ ability to destroy all life on the planet. Which brings us back to the trees lost on Great Eastern Highway and the stretched resources of protest and the military metaphor of many fronts at once. Going back to the Donne—Penguin English Poets edition (ed. A. J. Smith) —I find a quote in Tracy’s hand on the half-title. Her gift to me. These lines from ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’: Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. And I remember now, through the haze: it was a gift when I was taking myself away to Cocos, away from the scene I was feeding myself to, that was eating me... Away to find another way through, and a way back to Tracy (which is obviously what happened in the end! ). Donne’s metaphors of the tactile (of exploration and science and guild craft), so apt for the modern, also incorporate (I use this word carefully) the failure of the modern. Knowledge misused, knowledge extending the many empires of human ingenuity, their oppressions. Even poetry written in (in some ways) radical exception to a crushing status quo (religious in Donne’s case—state oppression of Catholics), ends up feeding the apparatus of the state once it manages to meet the ‘needs’ of the consumer through creating a verisimilitude of paradise on earth. A treeless paradise populated with humans and electronic devices. And even then, only the right devices, and most frighteningly in the age of the Far Right as centre, the right humans. Around the time of giving me this book, Tracy was continuing to write her novel Vamp (1997) a reversioning of the gothic in the now of the early 90s, a gothic in Fremantle, Western Australia... And those lines from Donne (‘like gold to aery thinnesse beat’) title Vamp ’s first chapter, and take us into a world of a feminism constrained by a machine that still only paid lip service, and still does. Tracy’s novel proffers a violent reaction, yet shows it is no solution. The gothic is constantly reinvented and can easily become a tool of cautionary entertainment that in the end lapses entirely into entertainment—I shudder to think how the ironies and parodies of Austen’s Northanger Abbey will be zombified (oh, Utrecht caesura 85 the money to be made from genre-jamming—mash-ups—to feed the zeitgeist of the zombie era! ) for a generation of new Australian voters under the NSW HSC reading regime! (Teachers, resist! Use it in conjunction with contemporary texts that challenge the problems of how and why we read! It’s only useful if shown as having parallels to texts that parody the literary conventions of the now—and the neo-liberals are churning out films and novels that do just this... Nicole Kidman, with her placation of right-wing America while selling herself as a ‘serious’ actor, is one of its figureheads). Tracy’s Vamp I think, is all about how and why we read genre text, and the ends to which their ironies can serve the state, no matter how risqué they seem. When it came out, Vamp messed with all these conventions and was genuinely radical. It never aimed to please nor to make its criticism polite or popular. So, as Tracy, Tim and I travel the roads of the wheatbelt or head down to Perth, our (old now) mode of transport contributing to the problem, we observe the militarism of elected governments, the corruption that comes through their being sanctioned by an electorate that signs off on responsibility. All of us: stop driving now, get out, confront the workers who have been duped into this damage, and try and discuss it with them. Offer alternative ways of making a living, work together to provide it. Step outside centralised government and the system that makes you think you have a choice (or that your vote will prevent the more evil ‘representatives’ getting into power), and work together for other modes of living, sharing, and supporting the biosphere. It’s possible, if enough of us click, if enough of us try. Small groups. Then those small groups interacting with other small groups. Living networks of communication to increase tolerance and understanding and to make the local relevant. Know your locality, gain knowledge of neighbouring and distant localities. Let temporariness and permanence peacefully commune and the permanence of Indigenous communities be respected and privileged. JK Utrecht caesura Arriving in Utrecht for an international conference on literary studies, I come up the escalator from the train into the large ticket-hall-cum-plaza. There, I buy myself a city map, before entering a large mall complex that should take me directly to the city centre. Once inside the mall, however, I lose my bearings and wander for a good three-quarters of an hour. I pass all manner of shops, some familiar global chains (C&A, New York City, Burger King, the usual suspects), some unfamiliar, presumably local businesses. As so often in the Netherlands, Utrecht caesura 87 there is a sense of being in a slightly grubby hydroponic hothouse. I first stroll and then, slightly desperate, hurry through one hall into the next, via escalators and T-junctions and skylighted atria, with occasional panorama windows onto artfully landscaped Grachten, but fail to find anywhere an exit to the city centre. Finally I stumble upon a sort of air-lock that releases me onto a square full of vegetable vendors’ stalls, and soon after that, I arrive at one of the main Grachten that leads me to the building where registration takes place. Several days later, on the way back to catch my departing train, I discover, from outside, a much simpler route into the mall, but by then the adventure has left an enduring impression upon my mood. My getting lost in the mall makes me feel as if I’ve strayed into Postmodernism 101 with Jameson’s (1991: 39-44) infamous diatribe against the Westin Bonaventura hotel atrium as set text. Indeed, the the experience seems to anticipate and then epitomize the entire conference that I am attending. Laudably, the conference organisers, the board of a big American literary studies association, have ruled that every panel should include PhD students alongside established academics. The PhD students’ papers are really excellent: accomplished, polished and highly sophisticated. They are theoretically astute performances garnered with intricate textual readings. But I have the impression that these displays of intellectual mastery are largely self-referential, their aficionados moving effortlessly through a forest of theory, weaving their own highly self-conscious tendrils of text, context and concept. Essentially exercises in literary sophistry, they are—implicitly of course—almost exclusively addressed to the older academics seated in the audiences who may be future search committee members or tenure evaluators. Of course these students are bound to work in this manner—we’ve all been down that track. Less forgivable, I feel, are my peers, whose work displays the maturity of years of research experience, but nonetheless appears to be equally deliberately aimed at reproducing consecrated knowledge within a closed bubble of academic discourse. Worst of all are the keynotes by the star academics. With the exception of the Africanists, who appear to still have an acute sense of the precarity of life beyond the academic halls and malls of Euro-America, these globetrotters seem to be caught in a glittering cul de sac where their paradigm-shifting ideas turn upon themselves in ever more intricate and tighter circles like cats chasing their own tails. This extraordinarily intelligent, subtle and nuanced intellectual work seems to be entirely calibrated to the fashions and fads of academic discourse rather than the rapid transformations and multiple crises of the world we live in—about which hardly a word is said in the panels I attend. The double curse of academia—the pressure to be clever (consecrated, in the US-system, by ivy league tenure and University Press publication) and the pres- 88 Utrecht caesura sure to gain external research funding (in Europe and in Australia)—seem to vitiate two fundamental ethical imperatives for intellectual work: the imperative to address pressing contemporary issues, and the imperative to address a contemporary audience—as co-actants—that is wider than that of fellow academics. I am haunted by the sense of having got caught in a hall of mirrors. Where in the world am I, or more accurately, where in the world is the world? Here the temporary seems to have completely erased the contemporary. Theoretical paradigm chases theoretical paradigm at ever more dizzying pace, and my own panel on ‘animism’ may appear at first glance to be no exception. And yet the global now is so close at hand. I sit in various cafés on the Grachten between panels watching the population of Utrecht stroll by. The Netherlands’ very visible Global-South heritage is evident in the faces that pass me, signalling substantial African and Pacific-rim legacies in this north-western European bastion of liberal asylum. Yet the Dutch model of multiethnic coexistence seems to have lost momentum as rightwing populists proclaim in louder and louder voices their strident heckling (Münkler and Münkler 2016: 281). The Dutch liberal majority has just recently pulled itself together however, and without any great display of enthusiasm, gathered around the VVD headed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte so as to prevent Geert Wilders’ right-wing PVV from gaining power. And equally threatening are the recent terrorists attacks at nearby Brussels airport, and a recent bomb scare at Amsterdam’s Schipol. They remind one that although the Netherlands has remained largely unscathed in the contemporary war between state-sponsored big-power terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, this may merely be a temporary calm. As I sit on the Oude Gracht with a local beer, my resolve hardens to mark this sense of the exhaustion of temporary academic mores by setting, mentally at least, a sort of a caesura. I must engineer an emergency exit from the maze and craze of article-writing and funding quests—for what we are confronted with outside the pleasure garden is indeed an emergency. As Benjamin (1999: 248-9) reminds us, ‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.’ Remembering Benjamin, I tell myself, without knowing quite how to go about it, that I need to emerge from the funhouse and provoke my own emergency at least. I must turn my face towards the ‘con-temporary’ (Ganguly 2016), with its very present threat of a re-emergent fascism worldwide. The search for an answer to this urgently sensed imperative to turn towards the ‘con-temporary’ has resulted, in part, in this book: personal, political, embodying an ongoing search for a direct link Utrecht caesura 89 between the two that is the nexus of writing, thinking, inhabiting place, and engaging with others in an effort to effect positive change. Trivial and ‘minor’ these efforts may be, ‘[yet] that future horizon frames in this narrative an understanding of how the future emerges, changed, out of such catastrophes’ as ours today, and how ‘the most intimate, even minimal, acts ... [r]emake the terms for collective survival’ (Lloyd 2008: 37). I channel all my frustration and fury into my own paper, which I give on the afternoon I’m due to fly out from Schipol. I abandon my original written text and speak directly to my fellow university teachers, from over-worked instructors to lecterned professors, habituées of the classroom one and all, gathered around the same large table as me. I speak about our everyday task of teaching, ‘that most practical aspect of our trade’, as Spivak (2012: 255) calls it. Teaching, and especially the teaching of future teachers, which makes up the bulk of literary studies scholars’ work in the German academic system at least, feels to me like a genuine site where the literary humanities touch the real (Schalkwyk 2004). I argue for an animism in the classroom—a sense of co-agency infusing every aspect of the teaching environment, including the apparently inanimate actors in the pedagogical project—books, blackboard, biros, desks, chairs, the classroom itself—as a configuration of co-actants out of whose intermeshed work knowledge production is generated. You never step into the same classroom twice: Carol Oomera Edwards’s Australian Indigenous sense of the classroom as Country (i.e. as an animate landscape where identifiable features of the terrain are the ancestors watching over and giving life to the environment) means that every entry into the classroom invokes a respectful pedagogy of place: ‘Hello, only us mob coming, OK if we camp here again? ... Hello, my name is Tommy. OK if I spend a year with you here? ’ (Carol Oomera Edwards, qtd in Muecke 2004: 69). The classroom is a temporary space because it is peopled with beings constantly interacting with each other and thus implicated in constantly recalibrated relationships in which persons (human and nonhuman alike; Vivieros de Castro 2014) ceaselessly make each other anew. This ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2011: 63-94) has no outer limits. Teaching and learning is a constantly transforming interaction with others on an infinite tapestry that spreads out beyond the four walls of the classroom to connect up with the world. Several months after my brief sojourn in Utrecht, the sense of a caesura persists—or at least, the feeling, that I have traversed what Heidegger once called a Kehre : a bend in the track that takes one in a quite different direction, although the road is the same and, because other countervailing hairpin bends may follow, the general orientation remains despite the zigzag progress of the route. Much of what I have done for the past two decades seems to have reached its 90 Journaling an Activist Poetics use-by-date. The discipline of literary studies into which I was inducted—at the twilight of new criticism and in the heady heyday of deconstruction and new historicism—has made me what I am, but I have a sense that it has lost the impetus to make me (or more to the point, us) what I (or we) may become. What now? From fleeting engagement to fleeting engagement with texts and text-makers, from one fragmentary site of word-making to another—onwards step by step in a process of ongoing poeisis in the world with whichever partners, co-writers, colleagues near and far, students, activists, books, languages, places, that may be at hand. RWP Journaling an Activist Poetics I have been keeping a journal since I was fifteen. Most of my early journals are long gone, but some remain from when I was nineteen and twenty. The journal was quite different from a diary, which I also kept—mainly to record what had to be done rather than what was to be done. As I became more directly ‘activist’ in my late teens, attending protest rallies against nuclear energy, against the logging of old-growth forests, and in support of indigenous land rights, elements of my thinking about the nature of protest, and where it did or didn’t segue with writing poetry, started to appear. As the years went by and activism became the major focus of my interaction with ‘public space’, and poetry increasingly became a means for me to express what inevitably led to the lock-up in the ‘outside’ world, the focus in my journals shifted to writing about how best to create an activist poetics, how to create a dialogue between the poetic act and the activist moment. This is not to say that the journals became purely places of discussing modes of protest; rather, they are a space for the consideration of what a poem might focus on so as to extend my desire to articulate my distress at the degradation of human rights and the ‘natural’ environment. I look back over a life of writing poetry—I started as a child—and sadly find a ‘tracking’ of environmental destruction and climate change. However, this is not a case of the poems necessarily ‘saying’ something is wrong, but of it being implied in what the poem is observing. My journals, and my poetry, are often inscriptions of the world around me in any given place or time. So, I will record the presence of different birds, insects, mammals and so on. I will discuss plant types and what phase of their cycle they are in, and so on. It’s in these records that I track the truest activism I can offer: a witnessing, and a recording. A Chronology of Poetic Activism 91 What follows is a series (albeit syncopated) of journal entries written between June and October 2016, from recent journals that utilise much the same kind of patterning as my journals have over the decades. You will hear the observations of place and a lot of conjecturing over the nature of place and space; you will get opinion on various texts I am reading, you will have the tendentious and the overtly subjective, and you’ll get information on environmental and social issues I feel strongly about, and am trying to respond to in activist ways. But this is not merely a set of disparate journal entries. I want to say that I always write with two formal agendas—one is for each day to be contained in itself, but second, for each day to connect to the discourse of other days. In other words, the journals have their own diegesis, their own narrative arc and their own dialogics with that (or those) narrative/ s. At times, the journal becomes a poem sketchbook; at others, interludes in essay-making, but all in all, they are an expression of my angst at failing to halt the destruction I see happening around me daily. But the journal entries never give in—there is always hope of positive outcomes. It is this movement between the private space of the journal and the public space of (pacifist) action that drives the journals, that underpins my compulsion across almost forty years to keep a writing and activist journal that is consistent (basically consistent—there have been long gaps at times for all sorts of reasons). JK A Chronology of Poetic Activism I: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016) 26/ 6/ 2016 Home. A home. The home? Wrote (typed on the manual typewriter) a poem on arrival and another today (regarding ‘proximity’). Now thinking about polysituatedness and U Sam Oeur and Cambodia’s ‘itinerant poet(s)’. The itinerant moving within a ‘fixed range’—either (and/ or) geographically, conceptually, changing, uncertain and paradoxically fixed, definable, cumulative. The poet hopes to cross these ‘terminological’ reference points. Poetry is outside semantics, syntax, and calibration. Thus form is always in play and flux—always ‘open’—though constantly reaching for points to affix to, depart from, enter. Form can be liberating, can define a freedom and itinerancy of poetic gesture. 92 A Chronology of Poetic Activism A repulsive health-destroying, invasive NBN tower has been erected on a very nearby hill during our absence. Proximity of a destructive force/ essence. How government controls and destroys environment (people, flora and fauna) while claiming necessity, beneficence and altruism. It is a crime. 24/ 7/ 2016 Was in Northam this afternoon which was relatively quiet after the over-excitement surrounding the Russian ‘adventurer’/ balloonist arriving back from his circumnavigation of the globe. Crossing the suspension bridge over the Avon with Tim, I was almost bowled over by a couple of teenagers running without looking up, fixated on their smartphones, their blank-faced parents (I would guess) behind them. I noticed them tapping their phones extra hard as if trying to create a visceral relationship with the machine, when I realised they were playing an augmented reality game, probably that full-blown capitalist product/ business placement vehicle that inculcates violence into a membrane between place and screen, Pokémon Go. Place is replaced by a simulacrum of unliving life. Setting is ‘real’, and the ghostings are decoration. The violence is real. Then having succeeded, the kids waved their devices at ducks and waders as if they were enemies too. In-situ, a production of belonging, as ‘blind’ participation, as being in place and not conscious of it outside the capitalist constraints of the product itself, outside the leisure centre. The diminishing habitat of ibises and spoonbills, swans and black-winged stilts, as they vanish them (habitats and birds) from where they actually are, now only in focus on the screen in its fluidic ‘settings’—that is, they do not exist for the players outside the screen ‘setting’. Location as shifting movie-frames. The ‘parents’ seemed pleased their offspring who ‘looked as if ’ they hadn’t been outside their bedrooms for years were ‘exercising’. Outdoors — making the outdoors like drone warfare. That oddly conflicted and often contradictory movie director, Oliver Stone, has said (see AFP, 22 nd July, 2016), regarding Pokémon Go, that it is ‘a new level of invasion’ and ‘It’s what they call totalitarianism...’ and ‘They’re data-mining every person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what it is you like, and above all, your behaviour! ’ 4/ 8/ 2016 The new olive tree saplings have been knocked about by the frosts over the last couple of weeks. Worked to resurrect them today. Have been typing poems as I listen to Mahler symphonies—an interactive text-sound process I’ve long employed. The text segues and deflects, merges and diverges from the music. A process that opens the matrix of form—breaking A Chronology of Poetic Activism 93 into the line-length and stanza compartments and overall shape of the poem-onthe-page, the structural properties of the symphonic movements crosstalk and feed—Mahler’s idiosyncrasies liberate the text. Associations and juxtapositions form and then decay to reform and alter. I find it an exciting process. These poems will join the additions to the Isolation/ Openness (‘Open Door’) manuscript of Jam Tree Gully-based poems I was writing before we left for Ireland last year. Just starting to think now how I will structure the book as a whole—though, basically, it will follow the chronological order of composition because I think in terms of the overall book shape as I write the poems. This is, the poems write themselves into the other poems of the existing manuscript, and thus into the conceptual scaffolding of the book. The ‘Homes’ of isolation(ism) and open(ness) are constraints through the poems, wherever and whenever the individual poems digress. Each poem is ‘complete’ in itself, an up-close patch of the larger abstract canvas of poly(situated) place. I also have to start work on putting the Spiralling manuscript (2017d) together for the Newton Institute. 8/ 8/ 2016 Was my vegan 30 th anniversary last week! Thinking over vegan issues, I was looking over Val Plumwood’s writing on ‘vegan ontology’ and found it disturbing. Too much of the school of self-justification for her own non-vegan ways. I find the accusation of vegan dualism—of the vegan outside ecology and welcoming animals into the privilege of human subjectivity—offensive. Her every moment (as with all of us) was a human moment with all the privileges of that moment. The duality she critiqued was actually her own duality (deflected). It is a specious and speciesist argument that is essentially middle-class eco-self-comforting, self-justifying and a form of fetishisation of the so-called ‘hunter-gatherer’ (no one fits such a label! ), from which she appropriates and transfigures to fit her own needs. A vegan can be a most effective and empathetic ecologist. And I say this as a respector of much of Plumwood’s ecological commitment outside her failure to understand ethical veganism. Don't get me wrong, I believe Plumwood is at the generative core of resistance to ecological damage in Australia, and her commitment was real and her legacy is a strong one, but on this issue I feel she needs challenging. Did an interview with a couple of vegan animal rights activists from Utah this morning. I feel I was too placatory by way of compensating for their own apologies of/ for violence to ‘stop’ violence—a position I can never agree with. Cold front over last night—wind and rain. Listening to Oppen read—fantastic (especially the early poems). Also to Glass Symphonies 1 & 2—too much razzmatazz without enough irony. 9/ 8/ 2016 Census Day I refuse! They are not getting hold of my personal details. I will write poems instead. 26/ 8/ 2016 Bold Hill Reserve Elegy Rain lashing car at Reabold Hill. Front starting its coastal passover, wind in tuarts. Car—horror device— driven carefully, had earlier swerved within its safe arc, slowing to avoid two Carnaby’s cockatoos coming down the Scarp before Red Hill toxic waste dump. coming down to tune with drop in air pressure. Down from a marri tree the birds in front of the car, struggling to realign, so imbued with empathy. But there’s nowhere to go when they’ve passed, and another drops into the swerve, death-crunch on windscreen, deflected in its shower of feathers, its show in the rear-view mirror thudding silent to the asphalt and ridden over by the car following. These cars, and their drivers. And the bird being so ‘rare’, this twist in the tail, this character in a narrative of denial, the ravaged coastal plain below. Where we are now. JK A Chronology of Poetic Activism 95 96 Meshed landscapes of affect Meshed landscapes of affect How to describe the precise ‘structures of feeling’, as Raymond Williams (1977: 128-35) would have rather abstractly said, upon returning to the pays natal ? How to make sense of this odd and simultaneously disturbing and comforting configuration of textures of place, selfhood, affect, that meet and mesh as one returns (almost but not quite) to the land of one’s birth? Perhaps this, often, is what John Kinsella’s poems seek to do, as they weave a tapestry of literary allusions, places names and people connected to a certain place and time: Cambridge, Gambier Ohio, the Wheatbelt, Jam Tree Gully, Tübingen’s Österberg… A record of complex tissues of ephemeral embeddings in a place, separate from but intertwined with other places and their respective temporalities. Australia, ‘home’ for both of us, and yet no longer home (or perhaps from the outset never quite ‘home’), poses an irreducible conundrum: we are A. D. Hope’s ‘second-hand Europeans pullulat[ing]/ Timidly on the edge of alien shores’ (Hope 1966: 13), even after a couple of centuries of more or less violent occupation. We embody the temporariness of white European civilization on the continent in the face of Indigenous life, which has proved far more resilient, even in the face of genocide. Precisely at such a moment as this, however, this drive to describe asserts itself particularly strongly, as a way of articulating a moment of uneasy, conflicted articulation: several places, several times, several persons, several bundles of affect… (and this is already a seductive simplification). Pasts and presents, different sounds and smells, the texture of the air and the soil. The sense of a number of different fabrics of affect sliding, catching, intermeshing and unmeshing with each other, their strands already entangled in extraordinarily complex nets in the place they are ordinarily associated with, and now rubbing up against, snagging on, or grabbing like Velcro tabs against another. The kids instinctively try to articulate the same sensations: ‘Somehow Dad, I like it better here than South Africa: there’s no barbed wire, the fences are so low…’ But description is the wrong word for the writing of affect. And articulation barely does the job either. The agency of writing: I have to tell my students again and again that they should not wait for the ideas to come, or for them to become fully formed, before ‘transcribing’ them; rather, I intone, they should begin writing as soon as they have a response to make to other words. Out of that response to the text, and out of that engagement with the language, and with the materiality of ideas emerging, comes the new idea itself. It’s a collaboration with the text, with the language, and with ideas, that gives birth to the new. ‘A life collab’, John has just written to me about this common experiment in co-writing. ‘Life (as) collaboration’ I write back to him. Exactly. Not only writing. Everything is, Meshed landscapes of affect 97 in fact. Meshworking as a verb (thanks again to Tim Ingold [2011: 165-75] for reminding me of this), that encompasses the work that place does upon us, and the work that we do in responding to place, even as it supports us, furnishes the ground under our feet and the air we breathe. For me at the moment (of and in writing), there’s a sense of the Australian summer warmth, the faint smell of eucalyptus down in the regrown bush that borders Merri Creek and pushes back the not quite inner-city 1900s weatherboard cottages and 1920s California bungalows along the bluestone-guttered streets of Northcote, the melodious warbling of the happy magpies in the grey early morning and the bellbirds down at the afternoon creek, even as the distant roar of city-bound traffic and the rumble of trams is still to be heard on St George’s road ; there’s the residual sense of a gradually receding winter freeze in Tübingen, with the last-minute stress of a marathon effort to cope with a death in the family, defiantly celebrate children’s birthdays, get a book manuscript off to the publisher… Indeed, engraved upon my mind are the recent images of the frozen Blaulach, with a crystalline canopy of wafer-thin ice, all diamantine fingers, spun across the ripples of the water still flowing beneath. The ice is caught between as it reaches across the water, balances, hesitates, and then withdraws again as the sun catches it. Below, the pebbles on the bottom of the stream cause the eddies and minute waves that lap at the underside of the ice-wafer. Thoreau (1908: 85) writes: ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it: but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.’ Several temporarinesses overlaid upon each other, intermeshing: ice, the flowing water, the loose pebbles in the stream-bed; Northcote, Tübingen, more distant Kaštela, and even more distant Jam Tree Gully. Quantum gravity theory suggests, at two extremely polarized economies of scale, that time is merely a contingent local manifestation. At the mezzo-level of human experience, it would appear that, for the time being, time is there to stay. But we now know that, like Newtonian physics, its range of validity is fairly limited, rather like that of humanity itself—which, as we are gradually realizing, is a brief blip on the history of the universe. At the minute scale of the mega-nano, it would appear that there are so many temporal processes of productivity taking place that it is impossible to speak of a single, linear, unidirectional flow of temporality. At the immense level of the history of the universe, time appears to be equally illusory. If time is supposedly locked into the entropic process of energy exchange and loss, calibrating entropy in its apparently unlinear parabola towards a zero point, this idea loses all meaning once we take in the universe. For the universe is not, as has long been assumed, an infinitely expanding space that 98 A Chronology of Poetic Activism II thus obeys the laws of entropy. Rather, its volume would appear to be regulated by a sinuously oscillating movement between implosion and explosion. Rather than a ‘Big Bang’, it’s a ‘Big Bounce’ that forms the spatiotemporal contours of the universe. Entropy is only one part of an elastic, systolic-diastolic cosmic heart-beat. In the long view of things, energy is not lost, but returns again at some later stage to an infinitely compressed point in a cosmic intake of breath before being released anew (Rovelli 2016). The ‘Open’ is a space that is undulating and elastic, but it is not fenced. It has folds and ripples, it expands and contracts, but it has no borders or limitations. It does not have demarcations, but rather phasal transitions. There is no sense of (self)-possession, no sense of loss, merely an economics of exchange which brings about transformations. There is no sense of death as the final border, the site of ultimate loss, which is echoed in all other smaller border crossings or moments of loss, but rather, merely crossings into other states. The structure of feeling that belongs to each place and connects me to it, flipping over into a sense of sadness at times, also flows into other places, connecting me to them too, as waves and ripples might connect. ‘The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things’, continues Thoreau (1908: 85). Affect is a meshwork(ing) that knits those cleavings back together again… RWP Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism II: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016) 30/ 8/ 2016 There are a couple of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems I like in particular, though the conceit of the second poem is somewhat inadequate to my mind. The poems are: ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’ (2008: 15) (reminds me of weather on the Mizen), and ‘I am like a slip of comet’ (2008: 39). In some ways, I prefer these poems to the late, ‘great’ sprung rhythm overdrive(n) poems. ‘Binsey Poplars’ remains the GMH poem I admire the most. It’s somewhat ironic that ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’ should remind me of the Mizen, given Hopkins’s relationship with Ireland and his unreconstructed Englishness and his sense of personal isolation when living in Dublin: To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life Among strangers. and A Chronology of Poetic Activism II 99 I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third Remove. Not but in all removes I can Kind love both give and get. (2008: 151) [from ‘To Seem the Stranger’—one of the so-called ‘Sonnets of Desolation’] I obviously reject his notion of ‘enemy’ (said in context of teaching at University College in Dublin—supporting the ‘enemies’ of England... The double-irony of his Catholic position in this), but I do understand the ‘stranger’ aspect—but for me, it’s a stranger in almost everything outside Tracy, Tim, and very immediate family. What GMH found in the Church I do not have and I do not want. But GMH’s isolation is only truly mediated through God in nature, which I understand. And there—in nature —my isolation is also mediated. Though as an alienating subject of a Western construction, of colonial extraction, my isolation has resonances always disclaimed and caveated. Strangely, thinking over narratives—stories—with little or ‘no’ plot , I wonder about GMH’s ‘desolation sonnet’ (this collective notion does not work for me, but I use it as a point of reference), ‘Patience, hard thing’ (Hopkins 2008: 170)— the retreat, the call for patience to work of desolation. In the Selected Poetry we find this note: Spiritual Exercises VIII : ‘Let him who is in desolation strive(s? ) to remain in patience, which is the virtue contrary to the troubles which harass him; and let him think that he will shortly be consoled, making diligent efforts against desolation...’ (ibid: 239) Patience in the poem becomes embodiment of trauma and tension (‘hard thing’) though aspired to as spiritually worthy. This tension is drama and is plot. And that is the plot that interests me in making stories. Further, the contradiction in seeking the quality (of patience) produces a negative tension that can be cataclysmic as ignoring its necessity. This paradox is of destruction and resolution at once. The irony of the human condition and the crises of free will. ‘Patience who asks/ Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks’ (ibid: 170). There is generative patience and destructive (pursuit of) patience? ! Discussing the sonnet with Tracy, she points out its note of masochism. Yes, patience costs—it brings damage, but Hopkins sees this as a worthy thing. God (2 nd stanza) having infinite patience absorbs all this. I have the opposite view regarding the acceptance of (personal or otherwise) suffering. Suffering is never generative. Does the second stanza over-ride the first? Yes, it’s an argument. But does this stop it being a paradox? And does the sonnet form show the 2 nd part overcoming the 1 st ? Maybe he only hints at the paradox? He’s certainly struggling with it—between ‘another’ self, and the doctrinal self. 100 A Chronology of Poetic Activism II Patience and its struggles: Good in God, failed and fallible in humans? This can become plot as much as ‘events’ leading to shifts in perception. Story isn’t simply plot. Read four GMH poems to Tim tonight—‘The Windhover’, ‘Pied Beauty’, ‘Hurrahing Spring’, and ‘God’s Grandeur’. What interests me in these poems is the mode of address—as if, poetically, God needs to be overwhelming enough to focalise nature. If GMH didn’t believe in God, he would have had to invent it. Pantheism? I also understand this need, and I guess these poems are prayers/ declarations in which the intensity and richness of belief must be marked by the density and intensity of the language itself. The mode of address is tied to the act of working, to the act of making the poems, the labour of language making in the poem. In the same way, GMH excoriates himself to make himself worthy, so must he lash himself linguistically to create the transcendent yoked with the visceral language of worship. In my poem-exchange with Kwame (Dawes) I wrote (tonight) a poem ‘about’ this issue of address (number 31 of our ‘New Beginning’ collaboration). 1/ 9/ 2016 First day of so-called ‘Spring’. Artifice or not, the birds are truly out and active today. Tim has been recording all bird sightings in his bird journal (which he keeps assiduously). But most amazing is Tim’s call to us this morning that there was a pair of quail outside his window. Surely not! I called back (Tracy and I had yet to emerge)—maybe bronzewings? No, Dad, they are quail! And they were! A pair of glorious painted button quail foraging outside the front of the house—a nesting pair. John/ Guru is over tomorrow to do some mowing, so we are asking him to avoid the house tier, and the next tier down the hill to avoid disturbing or accidentally destroying their nest. Of course, it will be tough for them because there are a number of feral cats that roam around here—legacy of people bringing cats into bush as pets and then abandoning them. Should never happen. The appearance of the quail has come as a real boost to all of us in quite complex and difficult times. The environment around the district is under assault and the violence of the world is with us every day, even out here. It is very difficult to contemplate and ‘absorb’ the horrors of race hatred going on in Australia as a whole, but specifically in Kalgoorlie at the moment. Racist vigilantes. The killing of a fourteen-year-old boy. Incitement to murder on Facebook, the despicable freedom-denying company. Social media have been NO liberation of humanity; they have been a mob-rule focalisation of bigotry and hurt. Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘The Lottery’ writ massive. • A Chronology of Poetic Activism II 101 Grace Paley’s stories continue to amaze me. • Read Tim some W.H. Auden last night, including his wonderful ‘Words’. • Listening to Crass and J. S. Bach at present. • Dominion Less The bush on the block is not mere buffer but integral to itself. Quail do not mow or keep firebreaks ‘intact’, but we let them be as much as possible while watching intensely when we can, thinking we don’t intrude. Stubble or painted—species gameplan notarised, difference encouraged. Validating our selves. • Might read Tim some of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson tonight. 4/ 9/ 2016 Went with Tracy and Tim to the York show yesterday. One understands more about the district’s doings via the ‘agricultural show’ than almost any other way. It pleased us to see how much more ethnically diverse the ‘crowd’ has become. The wheatbelt demographic is slowly changing, at least in the towns closer to Perth. • Warmer day. Nuptial day! Ants are flying and bees are swarming. Spent afternoon outside sorting stuff around the block. Poem-mapped in my head the far southwest corner. Tim wandered around and recorded bird presence. Did a couple of Hölderlin roughs of versions/ ‘afters’ when I got back inside. JK 102 Clinamen and the Kehre Clinamen and the Kehre Heidegger (1972) has a wonderful title, Holzwege , which, deriving from the expression ‘auf dem Holzweg zu sein’, means something like ‘off the beaten track(s)’, or ‘paths to knowhere’. Heidegger gives it a new, more positive inflection, rehabilitating the apparent intellectual dead-end as a possible route of conceptual discovery, ‘paths into’ and perhaps ‘through a thicket’. When I first read Heidegger’s (1993: 213-66) Letter on Humanism and discovered his clearings ( Lichtung ) and hairpin bends ( Kehre ) on mountain tracks, I was staying in the Rhön, a hilly, wooded, region that, only a decade before, had backed onto the iron curtain—the wire-mesh fence protected by a mowed and mined deathstrip, with its regularly spaced concrete watch-towers, that cut a swathe across Europe from the Baltic to the Balkans, condemning its inland littoral to infrastructural neglect in anticipation of an imagined scorched-earth scenario to come. The region had been forgotten by Bonn, and thus offered barely inhabited stretches of secluded forest and wild pasture. As I tramped along tracks bordered by snow-laden pines, Heidegger’s place-imbued metaphors took on a reality endowed by the twists of the track and the brief openings among the trees blackening in the dusk; and under the leaden sky that released flurries of snow-flakes, my footsteps muffled by a carpet of pine-needles and snow abruptly unfolded for me Heidegger’s sense of Sein as the cradle of beings. I felt, tangibly, step by step, that I was crossing the clearing that allows its invisible preconditions, the forest, to become visible. Heidegger’s magical incantations allowed me to sense language as the house of being. On those deserted Rhön hillsides, words and the landscape merged and emerged into a new reality for me. Lucretius (1951: 66-8) has an intriguing idea of material reality being made of showers of atoms falling through space. Sometimes they divert from their downward paths, drawn off course by the attractive force of other atoms. Their clinamen or ‘swerve’ causes them to choose a Heideggerian ‘Holzweg’, to ‘go off the beaten track’ so as to join up with other atoms in unpredictable but creative ways. Michel Serres (1977) describes their paths as laminated trajectories that they abandon for more irregular tracks, causing one laminate to collide or fuse with another, producing something new and wonderful. Swerves are the reason that newness comes into the world. The clinamen is the means by which mobility produces creativity. A poem is perhaps the most condensed human manifestation of the clinamen that one can imagine. It is a concatenation of ‘veerings’ (Royle 2011). As Eliot (1969: 175) once wrote, ‘Words strain, ... Slip, slide, ... Will not stay in place, | Will not stay still.’ Eliot was alluding to Modernism’s sense of the crisis-ridden Clinamen and the Kehre 103 failure of literary language, but his Four Quartets , from which those lines were taken, already envisaged a more redemptive notion of magical magnetism. A poem is a construct of words that swerve off their orderly course to link up with other words with whom they are not supposed to associate—as does Eliot’s ‘Will not stand still’, loosed from its cognate ‘will not stay in place’ less by the scission of the line-break than by the attraction towards words that are not a mere paraphrase of its self. Rhymes, assonances and alliterations, chains of metaphors, associative metonymies, all work to make the word unruly, mobile, sociable, promiscuous, and finally creative. All these ‘tropes’, modes of ‘turning’ if we go back to the Greek, are ‘turnings away’, ‘détournements’ or diversions, which are by the same token a ‘turning towards’ that produces new meanings. Poetry depends upon an erroneous use of language which in the French meaning of ‘errer’ is a wandering that produces strange and unexpected meetings. This is a creative process in which complexity emerges out of an assemblage of elements which are interacting with each other rather than merely fulfilling preordained functions (the latter may be an idealist imagination that fails to recognize that the clinamen is the norm, not the exception). To that extent, the poem perfectly epitomizes the swerving of matter that is happening, always, everywhere—no more and no less than every other material or semi-material entity in the universe. A poem does much less than we might think, ‘makes nothing happen’ (Auden 1973: 82), looking at it from the point of our human, individual, self-obsessed agency—and much more than we realize, once we see it as one vibrating intersection on a humming cosmic matrix of swerves, collisions and copulations. A poem is an exploration of the mobility of matter in which the ‘swerve’ is the producer of the new. We are used to thinking of literary texts as reflections of social reality, as critical meditations upon social discourse, perhaps even as interventions into collective modes of perception, though I always wonder how many people really are transformed by a poem, and how much of collective reality is thus changed. These notions of poetic agency are perhaps hyperbolic exaggerations of the epistemic agency of words because they misrecognize the more fundamental materialist agency at work in them. Here, then, I am making a claim for the genuinely material action of a poem. A poem is an artefact made of visual-semantic material. Misreading this material, we customarily dismiss it as merely aesthetic or merely mental (until, of course, we read it aloud). Yet as a dynamic construction of material marks on a material surface with carefully assigned places in an elaborately configured structure whose spatial design is unmistakeable, indeed part of its very poem-ness, it suggests an order that it will subsequently infringe. The poem is a work of swerving that undoes the very emplacements of which it is made, 104 Clinamen and the Kehre producing encounters that cannot be predicted, although some of them may be pre-inscribed in the fairly obvious form of rhymes or metres, for example. Much else that happens in the poem cannot be foretold, but emerges only in the act of reading and re-reading. A swerve is a material event, and not merely a mental image. The encounter between reader and poem needs to be understood also as an instantiation of clinamen . The poem is not merely a model of the working of the clinamen , it is in fact a performance of this phenomenon, for the event of reading itself may be an example of the swerve, as text, reader and the place of reading come into contact and then interact with one another. Opening the book of poetry, addressing myself to the poem, allowing myself to be addressed by it, I suddenly find myself careering towards it, drawn off course, pulled into the ambit of its magic. For the purposes of teaching, the idea of the clinamen is vital. It allows us to think about the way in which the text becomes a part of the real—a part of a real that is creative and productive (not merely replicative, or critical). It explains why close reading is important. To open a volume of poetry and engage with a poem is an act of entanglement with a complex entity in a way that is mutually transformative, both of the poem’s structures, which need to be activated in the moment of the reading, and of the reader heror himself. In my reading of Heidegger, with his metaphors of clearing and turn, the latter a figure of the clinamen par excellence, an about-turn which leads us abruptly towards the clearing, whose emptiness allows us to perceive the forest as forest, his words met the landscape I was walking in. Swerving from the page to meet the spaces of the Rhön, they transformed each other, and myself. Words swerve from their native meaning towards a foreign place where they learn a new language, transforming the travelling subject who reads them. They leave their ‘pays natal’ for a trajectory that lands them in a ‘Wahlheimat’ (an adopted native country, something that becomes permanently temporary or temporarily permanent). The swerve is never pure. The clinamen happens within the nomadic subject, engendering a polysituated-ness, an overlapping temporariness and ambivalence at the heart of the word itself. But it doesn’t happen only there—because the subject itself is part of a swerving landscape, a world of geographically embodied twists and turns. When then I read in Kim Scott’s and Hazel Brown’s (2005) co-authored work Kayang and Me of natural features large and small, from rocky bluffs in the middle of the wheatbelt to boulders on the side of the road in suburban Albany, that are metamorphosed Dreaming ancestors, and indeed can find them in all their medial banality in Google Maps streetview (at 35°01'08.3"S, 117°53'08.2"E to be absolutely precise), then I notice another swerve taking form. Kim writes: John: Response to Clinamen 105 I grew up in Albany . . . and almost every day went past a huge stone known as Dog Rock. It’s the shape of a dog’s head—or seal’s—and its collar of black and white paint and the curve of the road to detour around it shows what a traffic hazard it is. (2005: 217), That boulder on the side of the road, that cars have to swerve to avoid, also draws me in an affirmative swerve towards it. It is not merely a willing suspension of disbelief when I recognize, yes, it is the ancestral dog. That dog draws me, via Kim Scott’s writing, out of my here-and-now Euro-rationalism towards a South in which the landscape is populated, in my mind and in those of many others, by cosmic beings and their force. But the swerve starts here, in my polysituatedness: our own little patch of forest nestling around the Wankheimer Täle is not just a patch of forest. Like Kim Scott’s Nyoongar land, it has its ancestors and its ghosts: I too avoid the ruins in one of the nearby valley where, in spring of 1945, the Wehrmacht is said to have shot hundreds of its own supposed deserters… That is a repeated swerve away, one I told John about on our walk that way, but where does that swerve lead me? That remains to be seen—and said. Protest is also affirmation. Even more radically, as Lucretius (1951: 89) said, death is not an end: it is merely a clearing, a turn, a swerve, where…? RWP John: Response to Clinamen What I am interested in is the free will and the failure of Epicurean self-determination (of atoms? ) from and in a collective in terms of capitalist-military projections, and in centralised expressions of power. Free will that operates outside the collective good inevitably damages the liberty of the individual as much as the group because the aspirations of the individual work through referents of/ to ‘others.’ Only through a dispersal of collectives can the ‘swerve’ be given full range without sideswiping all other existence in its desiring, its want of self expression and reward. In this context, I ask the question: can one’s experience of a place be mediated through ‘comparison’ with translations of experience in another’s place? Our polysituatedness extends to received experience, but how does the vicarious knowledge we gain through hearing of the experience of others find correlatives in our own experience? How can it coalesce (and be expressed) as a generative part of our identities without being another colonial act? Is a-priori knowledge of place a colonial residue (in part/ s, at least)? John: Response to Clinamen 107 Well, decolonisation is an aspirational arts ploy of the collective more than it is a reality so long as we enjoy the fruits of the capitalist colonial programme. Only through complete rejection of the material product of such timelines whilst keeping those timelines firmly in mind (forgetting is akin to acceptance, which is horrific), can our sense of co-determined existences become a generative dynamic. The ‘swerve’ of atoms is the ability to make a choice, and yet the articulation of such a choice (based on a scientific orthodoxy if we believe Lucretius who believed he had created a scientific ‘proof ’ to accompany the conceptual) is reliant on the scaffolding and torture devices of the empire and its inheritors. That should never be forgotten. So, how do we travel with the clinamen in a way that doesn’t carry the baggage of our co-ordinates of being (as long as there’s been an ‘archive’ we’ve been imprinted by the machine of location, ownership, the state), of our imprints of manufacture, of fetishisation of product? How does our labour yield liberty without costing others through our comparisons that bring us an understanding of who we are and who we’re not in our given place/ s? How does even the small collective unit avoid mechanisms of control that deprive liberty? Ritual and law in all societies are constraints—but some of those constraints prevent damage to individuals, to the environment around the community. Are these desirable? Or do we always need to be swerving away from agreements we make for just living because conditions change, and because aspirations are unique as well as shared? To give pain is wrong, but is it always right to desire pleasure? Clearly not. Pleasure is the subjective that drives Western aspiration, and is the basis of the colonial urge. Polysituatedness is a set of awarenesses, but it necessitates responses. Often we have to give up the pleasures of awareness in order to respect others, to respect the biosphere. The clinamen as free will is ‘choice’ offered in what, in the damaged and damaging humanity, can only be an ‘absolute scarcity’ when capitalism sells us over and over and thrives on ‘relative scarcity’. Place cascades, and place is not exclusive—and human decolonisation does not mean the same for animals, forests, bushland. The use and abuse of human cultural integrities is sucking the last profits from the big land grabs, it is the clinamen of the individualist collective grab of capital, and becomes more than a symbol for the annihilation scenarious capitalism profits from, even to death. That we might all be annihilated as we sleep, as we watch a sunset, as we walk the dusty paths, the banks of a river, speak to a loved one, is the leverage that consumerism needs : acquire while you can, for who knows what follows. It’s the basic equation of greed, and no great revelation, but it is the pincer in which those of us who aspire to a decolonised world are held, and we serve the colonising drive by speaking out against and still utilising the tools of the colonial. 108 John: Response to Clinamen The clinamen is actually complete rejection, and letting our polysituated selves coalesce in a collective of all-place as site of recovery is a memorial to our own invasiveness. Aponia and ataraxia are desirable , and are a just outcome for all of us, but the atoms have been split by design and the god-particle is the ultimate expression of a colonialism that can’t even be ended by just restitution and recognition of geographic colonial wrongs. Postcolonial discoursing is a spatiality of colonial capitalism—it appeases and yet is insidious in its ultimate designs. Aponia and ataraxia grow for some at the expense of others. To not experience pain and loss is (falsely) attained by privileging the self (and often family, even community) at the expense of others. At the expense. At the expense. At the expense. Atomic theory. Graphology Soulaplexus 26 on Russell’s clinamen moment As if the hand isn’t in this, this reaching the limits of language, the word ‘hubris’ trailing behind as if separate from the action. What’s left to write of this being here event? Seriously? At least in terms of what I’ve written, which is nothing. Know that in the documentation of images, the compilation of interstices and intrusions: sheet of paper with typography on ant city’s surface expression, flowers confronted with accrued blossom from earlier appearances, the damaging inertness of the communication tower. Too linear by half, and those choices of swerve a friend offers from Germany, as if we’ll pull the split atoms back together, restore something lost, hoping for a better collective of spirit, across the divides, the bridges. Graphology Soulaplexus 27: aponia Stuck—still—at the edges of language, communication means stuff all. Positive or negative feedback is no organ response A Chronology of Poetic Activism III 109 to stress, to damage, but that holy-mouthed utterance of distress and bewilderment at pain. This is not how it was intended to be, as a kneeling act, a prostate act, a wish asking for nothing. And it’s what I want, too— no pain for anybody, no pain but—still—a responsiveness to inflictions intending harm on anatomy, its glossaries. JK Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism III: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016) 5/ 9/ 2016 White-winged trillers nesting in the mistletoe just outside the south-east end of the house. [NOTE: as the nest was finished we realised it was a thornbill multi-chambered nest, which I have come to call ‘the mansion in the sky’.] • Walked around the block with Tim—he wanted to name all the places in his own way (as I’ve ‘named’ them prior). We talked about the politics of naming, of erasure. He is going to draw his own map. Cuffs covered in capeweed flower pollen. Brown falcon, bobtail, red-capped robin pair, and many other birds and insects. The place is buzzing. Sunny day. 12/ 9/ 2016 Went from JTG to Roleystone then on to Jarrahdale and then on to Point Peron and back again via Mundaring yesterday. A long ‘expedition’ that focussed on Jarrahdale (where Tracy lived twenty-five years ago), and Point Peron (so Tim could do some research on coastal erosion for a homeschool project he is doing). Tracy walked around Jarrahdale and took photos and mental notes re her new novel for Transit Lounge—she has some textual expansions to sort and felt it would be good to re-engage with the (much-changed) place! It was also 110 A Chronology of Poetic Activism III a ‘journey’ for me by way of subtext, because my paternal grandfather—the ‘Old Original’ state forester, Claude Kinsella—spent some of his early working years in a cottage in Jarrahdale. We often went to Jarrahdale as small children with my father (and then often on to Gleneagle where he grew up in the forest). We also visited the Serpentine Pipehead Dam and had our lunch—first time I’ve been back since writing a poem for Nicholas [my eldest son from a relationship of my youth] twenty-seven years ago, and this time with my teenage son, Tim, and my wife of twenty-two years, Tracy. The same (but larger! ) red camellias were doing the same thing they’d been doing all those years ago (‘undressing’), broadcasting their ironies in some of the last vestiges of ‘native’ forest. As Tracy kept remarking during the journey [because of Tim’s history theme this year]—‘continuity’ and ‘change’. Late last night I wrote a ‘companion poem’ to that earlier poem on visiting the pipehead (published in Eschatologies as part of the ‘Dams’ sequence)—it was painful in so many ways. Nicholas—whom I haven’t seen for decades—went on to become a dam engineer! All those earlier visits to the dams in the Darling Range? Tim saw a scarlet robin and was ecstatic. Here is the (revised) poem: At the Serpentine Pipehead Twenty-Seven Years Later The camellias are still there and rampant red absurdly bloody in the eye of the catchment—red as parrot red, red as the wattles of red wattle birds, catching your eye as you sail in along the road to rest. Frogs can still be heard in the reeds, and the dam wall looks barely the worse for wear. Your teenager is with you now, and the small boy who first crossed the wall with you is twenty-eight and a dam engineer in the north of Queensland. You never see him. His LinkedIn page says that he is qualified in ‘dam upgrade and remedial works, structural design of appurtenant structures, failure impact assessment, drainage design, hydraulic design of spillways and conveyance structures, hydrologic analyses, risk assessment, dam inspections...’ He and I and his mother visited the dams around Perth many many times when he was a small child. He marvelled. A Chronology of Poetic Activism III 111 I wrote poems about dams. And then we parted ways. And with my now wife of twenty-two-plus years, I also visit catchments, and our son grows ecstatic spotting a scarlet robin on a lichen-coated boulder. He walks the dam wall with us, and says he does not much like dams, but loves the plants and animals of the area. He has never met his half-brother. I look out across the hectares of water, out past the boiling pipehead, up into the claws of dieback that close in on this mostly ecstatic grove. And I know the chemical treatment plant still mediates water and flesh flashing red warnings, that new technologies work unseen in crevice and flow, and that festoons of freesias rise all innocent but gloating even out of soil cradles in granites—an ultimate triumph of the New Presence. Phone signals don’t quite reach into the valley, but they will eventually, dragging humours into memory and history and ancestry. • Point Peron was under assault from Pokémon Go players. Hundreds of players trampling the fragile limestone formations and scrub into submission. Clearly, this was the first time many of them had ‘encountered’ the ‘natural world’ in even such a mediated way. It’s argued that augmented reality games help (the unfit) engage with exercise and the ‘outside’ world. Well, watching this absolute abuse of the ‘natural world’ take place, I feel that they are a symptom of technological fetishisation at the expense of all else, sadly giving up their autonomy to a faux freedom that actually extracts and deletes their rights—the ultimate capitalist control mechanism, the terrorism of the corporate and its state stooges that leads to a destructive disconnection between cause and effect, between players and environment. Habitus is the device and the screen—the occupation of an invaded real by a virtual dwellingness. Only one other family (that we encountered during our visit) were not playing Pokémon Go! Tim spotted dozens of birds and recorded them all in his (hand-written) notebook. Cockburn Sound is always disturbing—the naval base on Garden Island across the causeway, the smoking stacks of industry. I looked across to the place where I worked in my early twenties—CSBP (as a wagon-cleaner using 112 A Chronology of Poetic Activism III a sledgehammer to break up superphosphate that set as concrete), the mineral sands loading wharfs. Grotesque—but formative in understanding from the inside. That’s part of how an active poetics forms. So many conflicting thoughts, and yet, as the limestone crumbles and the mushroom rocks out from the Point collapse, the sea keeps speaking. I wrote a love poem for Tracy. A couple of decades ago I wrote ‘Tenebrae’ for her in the same place. Developers are trying to take the last vestiges of ‘nature’ on Point Peron for housing and a marina. The state is trying to overturn an agreement that after a certain period the place will revert to a federal nature reserve. They just deny it, like they do with the Roe 8 highway extension through the Beeliar Wetlands. The department for environment has become a rubber stamp—it should be called the department for development. Obscene. Point Peron for Tracy The cliffs eroded, delicate, ready to give way—and they have, and have again. We missed so many collapses—nuanced and brutal, human-induced and at the hands of a lashing ocean. But we’re here now, and the static of recreation has nothing to do with our standing back from acts of weather, of coiling water, ‘mushroom rocks’ on their thinning stalks, the paradoxes of limestone—spiritual building-blocks reshaped as we look on, at this very moment, and in those moments past, still to be made. A Chronology of Poetic Activism III 113 16/ 9/ 2016 This from Murray Bookchin (2005: 185): Terms like repression, renunciation, and discipline, used in their psychological sense, have all too often been euphemisms for oppression, exploitation, and powerlessness. And they have been shrewdly linked to “historic purposes” that have never served the ends of “civilisation”, whatever the may be, but simply the aggrandizement and power of elites and ruling classes. To a large extent, the theoretical corpus of Marx and Freud blur and conceal the extent to which such attempts to manipulate the self are actually extensions of class interests into selfhood. But it is now becoming patently clear that these interests are forging an apathetic, guilt-ridden, will-less psyche that serves not to foster social development but to subvert it. The mastery of human by human, both internally and externally, has actually begun to erode selfhood itself. By rendering personality increasingly inorganic, it has been pulverizing the very self that presumably lends itself to repression and discipline. In terms of contemporary selfhood, there is simply very little left to shape or form. Civilization is “advancing” not so much on the back of humanity but, eerily enough, without it. As with much Bookchin, there are things I agree with and things I strongly disagree with. Issues of ‘civilisation’ aside, and my problem with his use of ‘guilt-ridden’ aside... I will say that the hierarchy he denotes is the ‘eros[ion] of selfhood’. The irony extends (post-Bookchin) to the social media and device fetishism of the here and now—as the ‘self ’ asserts ‘itself ’ more and more, ‘selfhood’ is diminished. The ‘selfie’ is NOT selfhood. Facebook is NOT selfhood; nor is it community. It’s a conversation of ‘selves’, and these selves do not operate on or through consensus but by the most emphatic deployment of ‘self ’. The emphatic avatar can be louder than most self-excoriating ‘authentic’ ‘real’ persons. Is there a ‘real’? Even persons seem to require scare-quotes around their (possessive) ‘real’. Reality is slippage, and that is what is celebrated and it’s why the new ‘secret police’ [The Dead Kennedys’ ‘suede-denim secret police, they’ve come for your uncool niece’] is/ are so-called web communities—because the emphatics have the day. This is a bullying scenario that morphs in accordance with the consumer fetishism of what the self—per/ via the group—‘should’ be. This is the triumph of capitalist ‘individualism’ in which all individuals can become (D & G distracted)—collectively, and hidden by the screen-police. • It is a time of ‘couples’ at JTG—nesting quail, brown honey-eaters, grey shrike thrushes, ‘28’ parrots, yellow-rumped thornbills, weebills, and magpies—all nesting just outside the window, or down in Bird Gully, or in the general vicinity of the valley. The trees and sky between branches are bristling with their activity. Feral cats are alert to it. Framing 115 The roos are still ‘absent’—though I saw some fresh droppings on the driveway the other day. One or two about, maybe, but the large mobs have gone. Murdered? The boutique butcher in town (who sells to weekend visitors from the city), is advertising ‘freshly killed’ rootail. One doesn’t have to think hard to work it out. But mostly, it’s thrill-killers who shoot up roadsigns and animals with equal glee. My old laptop is so ‘out of date’ now that even with a ‘retro’ browser (‘Ten- FoxFour’), it’s becoming almost impossible to function. This is a good thing. I detest and refuse the techno-fetishisation—especially of the Apple company (evil overlords of smiley-face capitalism)—who changed their processor shortly after this model and consequently made all earlier computers and software obsolete (Tracy did an issue called ‘Obsolete’ for Cordite poetry journal), redundant, dysfunctional. I do everything I can to keep the machine going—I have tried over the years to avoid computer usage as a resistance to techno-fetishisation, but all my work in terms of publishing processes relies on it—that is, those I work for ‘require’ it. This is no excuse, and as I did for a couple of years last decade, I aim to go off it again for good. Being off-grid isn’t just collecting your own water and harnessing your own energy (or avoiding it altogether) and growing food, but entirely abjuring computers and all they stand for. So, in the interim, I will not join the ‘upgrading’ cycle of waste and exploitation, and will make do. JK Framing Once when I was living in the inner-city Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, I retrieved from a rubbish container in front of a building site in Choriner Straße an old window-frame. I removed the last shards of shattered glass and painted it in bright orange paint, taking care not to spoil the wonderful brass Art nouveau window-handle. The cheeky window-frame hung, always slightly askew, on the walls of several flats in Berlin (Choriner, Chodowiecki-, and Leichhardtstraße), and then in Pretoria (Brooks and Mackenzie Streets), before it had to be discarded in the Dunkirk-like evacuation of our temporary South African bridgehead. I smashed the window-frame into a pile of bright orange splinters so as to be able to lever out the Art Nouveau window-handle. The orphaned handle then returned to Tübingen amongst our very reduced collection of goods and chattles. All that is left of that empty window frame now, I think with a touch of melancholy, is the catch that allowed one to open and close it within its own framing emptiness. But narrative compensates: that, I think, is a story worth telling. 116 Framing The stories that I recount in this book often frame the more philosophical meditation that nestles within their diegetic folds. Framing, Lotman (1977: 212- 17, 229-31) once suggested, is that necessary condition for marking out a narrative, or any other work of art, as fiction, as game, that is, as fundamentally different from the real despite the maintenance of its contours. But my image of folds implies a more ambivalent function for the frame. Frames may also occupy the threshold position of the paratext (Genette 1997), which is somehow both part of the text and not part of it. Here the frame is not merely a marker of the fictionality of the text, its other-worldliness, but also an index of its worldliness. The frame does not merely call attention to the playful fictiveness of the storyworld, it also anchors the story in the real world. Following that logic of ambivalence, the frame would be a fold, an undulation where fiction and world segue into each other in a moment of curious uncertainty. And in so many of my anecdotes, the frame is indeed part of the world: a stroll along a track, a landscape, an encounter with a tree, an animal, a natural feature, a twenty-foot shipping container being driven away down a street shadowed by jacarandas flowering in a cascade of purple. My framing anecdotes serve to place unfamiliar ideas, fictions of a world of constantly renegotiated co-agency, within the world of thresholds, traversals, transgressions, of walks and not just of words. Elisabeth Wehling’s (2016) theory of ‘political framing’ opens with a cognitive theory of the way in which language is connected, in the brain’s circuitry, to the real actions that words connote no less than their conceptual referents (ibid: 20-30). The book then proceeds, on the basis of that neurocognitive structure, to illustrate the manner in which turns of phrase carry the limitations of the real world with them as ‘semantic frames’ even when they are used in a metaphorical sense. The ‘pratico-inert’ (Sartre 1960) of semantic frames thus resists purely conceptual attempts to refute their ideological content. The right-wing catchphrase ‘the boat is full’ (i.e. the nation cannot tolerate more immigration) cannot be refuted by pro-immigration lobbyists’ counter-assertion that there is still room in the boat—for a boat by definition is cramped, possibly leaky, exposed to wind and waves, and apt to capsize when overloaded (Wehling 2016: 168-71). Wehling suggests that if we wish to transform political rhetoric, we must search for new metaphors that imply, in their very sematic structure, the positive attributes we wish to stress. There is an odd mismatch, however, in Wehling’s initial parading of neurocognitive technology—the activation of motor sections of the brain in conjunction with the more narrowly semantic operation, say, of a particular verb—and the analogical concrete baggage carried by the vehicle of metaphor alongside its poetic tenor. The concrete vehicle of metaphor—boats are exiguous in capacity and precarious as a mode of transport—works more to generate conceptual Framing 117 ballast weighing down metaphor’s negotiation of stormy rhetorical seas, than to provide a motor force to drive it onwards. Wehling’s notion of conceptual baggage restricts and burdens metaphor, whereas her initial notion of an active substrate in the cognitive circuitry of language implies that the notion of the boat would activate a range of actantial impulses, from paddling or rowing or setting a sail or hauling on hawsers, to keeping one’s balance and keeping a lookout. Her neurocognitive theory opens up metaphor to the world, via neuronal circuitry and muscular response, whereas her purely cognitive linguistics closes down access to the material world. How might one be able to bridge the gap that appears between the two parts of Wehling’s argumentation? In other words, how could one reconnect the transformative power of concepts and the transformative power of actions? How might language once again offer a frame through which one could enter the world? —a window-handle upon which access to material reality would hinge? The question is crucial to the legitimacy of the humanities as they seek to survive. The humanities find themselves pushed to the wall in institutions that stress national research priorities, the inculcation of professional skills, and reduce all scholarship to financial and economic values—amidst a world of multiple, cumulative and accelerating crises. Under these draconian conditions, the only possible legitimization of the humanities that will afford them institutional purchase is that they foreground an education in the creative work of the imagination. And that work must be real work—hard yakker, as they say where John and I come from. The work of the imagination does not mean a flight into the realms of fantasy, but quite the opposite. Imagination is that capacity to generate novel solutions for a world gridlocked in a global pattern of self-destruction. For the humanities to take on such a role—exploratory, creative, imaginative, innovative—in any convincing way, the link between imaginative concepts and imaginative pragmatic strategies must be made absolutely clear to students, colleagues, managements and funders, whether private or state-based, alike. Up until now, by and large the humanities have been content to produce novelty within the limited purview of scholarly work. Their addressees have been fellow scholars rather than the world outside the university. This is of course a vital aspect of scholarly work, but it is no longer adequate, either in terms of the polemics of university funding or in terms of the ethics of academic addressivity and responsibility. This is why we need a new version of framing, one that sets to work at the cusp of imagination and reality, and puts down the foundations of the building site of creative futurity in the here and the now. Framing reality in new and innovative ways so as to facilitate new strategies and policies is the task of the humanities. The frame is always empty, but it is always embedded in a window 118 Framing embrasure, however tenuous that may be, and however wide its opening arc may be. There is no frame without a here and a now that it frames. The here is the concrete site where solutions must be implemented, and the now is the contemporaneity of the global crises that renders such solutions so acutely necessary. For this to happen, ideas should remain close to the ground—as in the indigenous knowledge that Sudesh Mishra (2017) witnesses coming to the fore again in a South Pacific where global warming is wreaking havoc on island communities, or in the Somaliland minister of development’s suggestion that her pastoralist population, deprived of their traditional livelihood by the current climate change-induced droughts, should turn to the sea, whose resources to date have not been exploited, and become a fishing people: Shukri Haji Ismail says, ‘I believe in going forward always ... We have to look to the sea. ... It will take a long time. Everything will change’ (Ehrenreich 2017: 28). The process of the production of the new has its own specific temporality. A first step might simply be to shift the general framework of perceptibility, to move those ‘horizons of expectation’ that allow certain objects or entities to come into view. Thus one of our South African colleagues, Carrol Clarkson (2014: 3), focuses upon the intellectual as a window-frame-handler in a ‘context in which certain works, acts, or encounters, by creating a new field of sensory perception, have the potential to bring about shifts in the way a community delineates itself in what it perceives to be significant, or even noticeable at all’. Notwithstanding my initial evocation of a first step, learning to see the world anew is not a precondition for acting in new ways—no learning takes place like that. Rather, the temporality of transformation is one that links seeing and acting in an ongoing process of reciprocal transformation where each exploratory step forwards creates novel connections that in turn generate new novelties and facilitate subsequent exploratory encounters. Rather than reducing the world to a text, as a hackneyed version of Derrida’s famous dictum had it, we would have to raise all thinking to the status of acting—and ideas to the status of actants, where every encounter has the power to unleash the new in a giddying process of temporary but generative couplings, decouplings and recouplings amidst the real. There may be a moment where you have to take a hammer to the window frame, retaining nothing but the handle. RWP Subtexts of ‘Property’ 119 Subtexts of ‘Property’ I have been thinking about temporariness and a rejection of property, which as an anarchist I subscribe to. The valent aspects of possession in the Western capitalist model lead to an accumulation of goods that creates power through a hierarchy of haves and have nots, or have mores and have lesses. Bookchin’s argument for usufruct (out of ‘organic’ societies) as being less hierarchical than communal property models which, as they break into smaller groups, move towards something akin to private ownership, is problematical in that it doesn’t deal with calibrations of difference to ‘need’ of possession of tool, ‘land’, or idea. [Bookchin—‘the practice of usufruct, the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact that they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used’ (2005: 116)—‘Communal property, once property itself has become a category of consciousness, already marks the first steps towards private property—just as reciprocity, once it too becomes a category of consciousness, marks the first step towards exchange. Proudhon’s celebration of ‘mutual aid’ and contractual federalism, like Marx’s celebration of communal property and planned production, mark no appreciable advance over the primal principle of usufruct. Both thinkers were captive to the notion of interest, to the rational satisfaction of egotism’ (2005: 117).] My issue is with the notion of temporary belonging, because even temporary belonging signs possession, which I reject because it sets up a system of priorities that can’t be ‘sustained’. Belonging is a choice of place of the self, even more than the self over place. It’s an exchange (more of this at the end of this ‘subtext’), of course, but place itself is a priority in such an exchange, and as such undoes individual profit or sole benefit, or place is too easily disrespected and damaged, and consequently (all) humans suffer, too. ‘I have more need than you’, can be real, or subjective, in terms of use of materials, and in many ways property is reinforced in the qualification of one need surmounting another. It seems to me, that if usufruct is a form of temporary possession of materials (and ideas, for that matter) according to need, communal property is also an arrangement of temporariness that necessarily overlaps—one doesn’t exclude the other, and Bookchin’s polarising is an act of semantic convenience. No society has operated in the cut and dried way he says, and it’s a primitivising of complex social groups to suggest that ‘organic’ or ‘traditional’ societies function only one way across all the time of their existences. I am often challenged regarding how I can deny possession and seek to rectify the dispossession of usurped peoples, how I can claim to respect a traditional 120 Subtexts of ‘Property’ ownership (which I always qualify with the additional ‘traditional custodians’), as opposed to a (post)colonial ownership, equating the latter with a process of theft. Well, ‘traditional’ societies can be radical in so many ways, and the combination of communal ‘property’ (including a spiritual relationship to country) and usufruct (which is what I’d argue for in anarchist communities—a communal usufruct) functions as a consciousness of responsibility towards place and its material and conceptual being, as well as allowing for a means of conversation and exchange that doesn’t create a hierarchy of ownership (which is an ongoing act of exclusion), privilege or default ‘grounds’ for disagreement over priority. Only the fetishised object is value-added into exclusive use—general use of the materials of place (tree, soil, air, water etc.) are more generic if the land is respected, and ‘resources’ are not forced into a choice of the finite. So, temporariness is the X co-ordinate of possession to the Y co-ordinate of ‘need’ and usefulness outside excluding of others (use, participation, but also right to respect non-use—to speak against use as being, say, ecologically damaging). Sharing is an easy word, but that also is underwritten by an ownership of materials by the group—and I reject this ownership by group or individual, as need and use are not the same, and sharing suggests use and need are equal variables. Temporariness is desirable in terms of interacting with material (and conceptual) need as it offsets permanence, and offsets qualifications and hierarchies of need. Use of materials in the world is on a continuum, and never cumulative—to accrue possessions is to accrue power, as the William Glass based system of equality (1817) on the island of Tristan da Cuhna emphasises in its ongoing engagement with public-communal land and limitations of possession of farming and other goods’ (including, disturbingly to my vegan mind, animals); though being part of a British Overseas Territory it still operates under the guise of the (residues of) British Empire. So, place is temporary in its vulnerability, in it being a construct (like landscape ) of human desiring of presence and control (even if passed through with the negotiations of passage and presence that entails—markers and signs are always left), and in its constant material change, but it’s also temporary in its screen presence within the human imagination and pragmatics of projection of desire onto that place. The ‘use’ humans make of place varies according to the notion of properties that form the nature of seeing, of the screen. So, if this projection is non-owned, non-possessed or possessing, not embodied as ‘property’, but is informed by communal usufruct, this temporary place (and emplacing ) is respected, even protected from damage by being allowed to flow and move in its change without massive interventions by (the permanent implications of) greed and abuse. Exchange of ideas and concepts generates A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV 121 understanding, tolerance, and additional data to inform preservation and conservation of environment in place, so with reciprocity of ideas. On the other hand, exchange and reciprocity of materials creates ‘goods’ and leads to property and inequality. The temporary of ideas and the temporary of possession are not conveniently interchangeable but have to be understood in different and variable ways that carry consequences as well as undoing hierarchies of property/ ownership. That is the challenge that temporariness must ‘process’ (outside production)—change brings change that might not be foreseen, and could enforce the damage rather than alleviate it. Property is theft á la Proudhon, true, but theft arises from property. Usufruct privileges the possessor’s need over another’s need—how does one want in need? We might explore the slippage between the notions to breakdown hierarchies of possession. JK Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016) 16/ 9/ 2016 Floreat Beach, 6pm Down in the city for Tim’s Goethe Society German class with which, along with sport on Wednesday afternoons, we supplement his homeschooling. Sun low. Tracy and I sitting and writing in our journals. We all went to Reabold Hill nature reserve as has been our Friday habit in recent times. A goshawk flew low in front of us and a drone traumatised the sky. Goshawk and Drone Out of banksia and tuart out of the highest point on the Swan coastal plain out of persistence and survival—words that crop up with intoning and emphasis out of marginal existence and ontologies behind every single one of us— is its blood and it operates with few associates, lines set far back, but trust more than ever on its shoulders and then the drone—it does not deserve analogies images anomalous readings descriptors—it’s just a fact of new robotics, of surveillance 122 A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV lust, of every niche pried open, every trapdoor lifted, every goshawk’s flight— those few flights—severed, cutting sky into slivers, buzzing nest and roost. And eyes at the far side of the mirror mesmerised: the allure of false totemics, of gratuitous gain. 17/ 9/ 2016 Just back from a long ‘nature walk’ around the block with Tim. Have to be careful because of the high wild oats and though it’s a relatively cold start to spring, snakes will still be out and about. Tim followed in my wake as I made a path through the wild oats. Speaking of reptiles, we came across a freshly dug burrow which judging from the pattern of dirt dispersal and the long slender scats around the entry is a Gould’s monitor’s—a bungarra’s—burrow. Very exciting—we will keep an eye on it over the coming weeks but in as unobtrusive a way as possible. One of the greatest delights of the walk was the discovery of fresh kangaroo droppings and trails. After their ‘vanishing’ over the last couple of months, we feared that they had been wiped out. They were obviously ‘culled’ by hunters, but they have been sheltering at JTG and rebirthing. I taught Tim not to walk in the convenient trails left by roos through the grass, so as to avoid kangaroo ticks. We came across sheltered areas where the grass was flattened, which indicates roo resting-places. Brown honey-eaters were wildly active. Tim is doing a ‘bird of the week’ project and has written some superb bird poems. We will publish some of these in a Shed Under the Mountain publication for Christmas. • The sell-out by the conservative Federal Government of the universities to industry makes me sick to the very pit of my stomach. It is the annihilation of ideas and knowledge to serve the military-industrial engine of abuse and profit. It is a sell-out I cannot be part of. It is greed, nationalism, and a fear of anything ‘subversive’. All academics have a responsibility to allow knowledge to grow without interference, and without it being used for exploitation of people or environment. • Black-headed monitors are arboreal—soon (as it warms) we’ll inevitably hear them in the roof-space as we usually do each summer. Though with the temperatures rising, it becomes an inferno under the corrugated iron. We also see them outside on the walls of the house. And on the granites—another favourite place. A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV 123 • Just picked up a book from the JTG shelves that I’ve never actually opened before—was sent unsolicited a few years back by Otis Books (thanks, guys! ). It’s entitled Common Place: The American Motel by Bruce Bégout, translated from an Editions Allia edition ( Lieu commun. Le motel américan ). This is a 2010 translation by Colin Keaveney. Another French space/ place work with a disturbed proselytising (sorry! ) obsession with American ‘noir’ and the production of (servitude) ‘space’. I have read only half-a-dozen pages so far but this sticks out like a sore thumb—the Augé non-space seems a given. I refute it. The urban critique from within an urbanity can only ever be self-constraining. I am in the proofs of my Polysituatedness book so it’s probably too late to ref, but we’ll see. But it’s nothing to do with what I’ve been considering, so it’s probably best left for another work. It is full of gross generalisations such as this: If the city-dweller, for example, spends less and less time in his workplace and his home because he is constantly on the road, in the underground stations, railways stations, airports, with only his rolling luggage and laptop for company, it is almost natural that he should attach no particular value to the various places he passes through. Everything, for him, exists in the same realm, that of the road map, the airline itinerary, res extensa ; as written character and movement; in terms of its length, width and height. (Bégout 2010: 59) It gets even worse after this. The cancelling of ‘self ’ because of movement is an (ungenerative) cliché of the travelling salesman (or merchant of ‘knowledge’). Many of us have travelled under work stress, away from loved ones, and suffered, but it’s an abuse of place to divest even temporary presence of agency and this responsibility. I try to embody (and whatever way, and respectfully—which in itself is an array of codes place/ cultural specific that need to be ‘learned’) every place I have ever been/ visited—no matter how ‘the same’ or how degrading through repetition, or however miserable I was. Places like the ‘motel room’ are cleaned and maintained by people, and it is part of their lives as much as the traveller’s (‘wayfarer’s’) or more so! This is typically easy ‘philosophy’ in which the experience of one’s academic travels (or travails), are packaged as observation of a sociological reality (which they are, but whose? ! ). And lest we think it is actually anti-consumerist or anti-fetishisist of pleasure, think again. Read on: In the absence of the permanence and reference that once made them genuine topoi , sedentary places (office/ house) can no longer elicit from people who only inhabit them sporadically a lasting emotional investment, which would transform space into an extension of the Self . As if freed from earthly ties and the obligation to reside anywhere, people direct their scattered and fluctuating affections towards objects, which 124 A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV are themselves mobile (cars, mobile phones, computers etc.). They find satisfaction in the celebration of passing things. (ibid: 58) I interrupt here to say the ‘things’ argument could only come from an ultimately (in real terms) largely unselfcritical consumer—an eater of the ‘same’ and the taboo. Whatever comes up for grabs. One who has the choice to consume where and what ‘s/ he’ wants. Many don’t have the choice, but target audience is everything here. Continuing: Property has lost its flavour, for people no longer have time to enjoy it. (ibid: 58) I interrupt—or intervene—again. This is not a faux-Menippean construct (which I would delight in if it were! I often think it’s the only way a novel can work... But this is theory, alas... The ‘faux’ signals my belief that the ‘Menippean’ notion in itself is worthy of satirising and is too often an easy and evasive reading of a text). Under the irony, a love of the enjoyment of property and a deep (even if subliminal) love of goods, ownership, and ‘enjoying’ in space and time (as if controlled like contrast, volume and hold on a television) of reflectiveness enriching the possession of worldly goods and the world itself ? The text continues: With all their constant travelling, their home is transformed into just another hotel room, no more no less. Moreover, if it does not always fulfil the same function as the motel room, it often comes to resemble one. (ibid: 58) I say that this reductive view of the ‘species’—the data—not only removes all agency from the ‘individual’ but denies the agency of place itself to impress what it is (birds sounds, the people, trees, fibres of carpet that might be toxic...) on the individual whether they are ‘temporary’ or not. And the ‘lost’ home is still a place of return and has a cumulative (acquired) identity for that individual, which changes the co-ordinates of the familiar, of coming and going. And to finish the quote from Bruce Bégout: For the time spent in impersonal accommodation has become so brief that the contemporary nomad no longer has the luxury of settling down once and for all. Of greater importance to him is what he can take away with him, what is mobile and portable. (ibid: 58) There’s a point here—under the offensive 1950s Disneylandesque anthropologising of the nomad male of American capitalism—the what ‘he’ can take away with him. As Tracy notes, so many people see place in terms of what they can consume (and I don’t just mean ripping off the soaps and shampoos from motel rooms) and purchase—the souvenir, but more than that, the authenticated marker of experience, of having been present. I fear that Bégout doesn’t sense A Chronology of Poetic Activism IV 125 the quiddity of this, just the sociology—the act. He also ‘defines’ property, and this is just a different form of property as theft. Proudhon—‘Property is theft! ’ What Bégout fails to factor in adequately is that at this point (and likely always) is the colonial arc of his commentary, and the seguing of property with space and time and all that it excludes in its privileging. It is a construct of empowerment, however temporary our engagement with it—as soon as we claim rights of dwelling (e.g. the right to the room we have paid for, for the duration of our contract of occupation). 19/ 9/ 2016 Nest Repairs Mid-deluge I went out onto the verandah to see the nesting honeyeater was okay. Rain reflected darkness back at me. A sleepless night. This morning, the front passed over, I see the honeyeater in her battered nest, holding on. And now, the male works about her, attempting to repair the damage, to help her restore the balance in the geranium. • I read: Australian jets help kill Syrian soldiers—they’ve been killing people for a long time. I read: Turnbull is going to the UN to tell world leaders how to ‘control’ refugees—the sanctity of Australia’s ‘border protection’ policies. I read: of walls between USA and Mexico, of walls of Christian enculturation in Australia against Muslims, of ‘voter backlash’. Of a protest in Berlin against Merkel’s pro-refugee policies. Of walls around asylum seekers in Calais. I read: The breakdown of empathy. The profit in alienation. The protectorates of greed. JK 126 Trust Thoreau Trust Thoreau In one of his most famous passages from Walden , Thoreau (1908: 8) confides, ‘I think we may safely trust a great deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.’ Care exists in a limited quantity. The 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ (for Europe; for the refugees it has been going on for a lot longer) and its aftermath showed that. The rarefaction of care is a basic precept necessary for the understanding of our limited place in a generous universe. There is only so much care. This may appear a heresy to those of us used to thinking in terms of unlimited generosity and care for others, but in actual fact, as we all know, this is the simple truth. But rather than making this a lament, Thoreau turns it into a strength. Care exists as a limited quantum, but it can be distributed. When we bestow it elsewhere, we can relinquish it for ourselves. Or, to put this around the other way, to the extent that we bestow it elsewhere, we realize that the relationships thereby created in turn care for us. Thus it is that Thoreau (ibid: 8) imagines we may step back from a stranglehold of self-love that makes us ‘thoroughly ... [c]ompelled to live, reverencing our life, denying the possibility of change’. The less we reverence our own reified and ring-fenced life, the more we can reverence that of others, indeed, life itself, which in turn supports us. Thoreau imagines an equilibrium between self and other that can fluidly shift its respective weighting, but remains reciprocally entangled. Care is limited, but the limitation is in a constant situation of dialogue which ends up supplementing lack on one side by plenitude on the other. This explains, furthermore, how an ethos of self-abandonment and acceptance of the supporting fabric of the universe (which knows, at the end of the day, no ultimate loss of entropy, in which death is merely a manifestation of a phase-transition to another state, and thus no ultimate cause for mourning), is also compatible with an ethics of politicized engagement against exploitation, discrimination, destruction and necropolitics. The quanta of care that can be relinquished from the self because one is borne up by constant processes of vibrant transformation even in the moment of suffering, is transferred to a care bestowed upon others, which cannot but be political and contestatory. This apparently bizarre equation answers a vital question: How can it be that I can accept with equanimity my own ageing, my own death, because it is part of the great flow of being, while I can, indeed must protest at the suffering of death of others, and even more so of nature itself, under a globally unjust and exploitative order? Thoreau (ibid: 8) answers the question almost immediately: ‘Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.’ Nature is as well adapted to our relinquishment of care for ourselves as to our care for others. These two forms of carelessness and care are not antithetical to one another, nor Trust Thoreau 127 are they ethically contradictory. They are inherently linked by their reciprocal entanglement within a generous economics of the quanta of care. And their intrinsic linkage to one another determines the form that that care takes. Addressing the attention to self that Thoreau thinks we might do well to relinquish, he notes (ibid: 8), ‘The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or what if we had been taken sick? ’ The same light tread regarding our efforts for ourselves can also be applied to our efforts on behalf of others: we are beholden to protest on the part or offer our support to those caught in the nets of global injustice; but because the quanta of care is not unlimited, we can safely accept that what we can do is only what we can do, no more and no less, and that we are not ultimately responsible for more than that. This does not amount to quietism or resignation. Rather, and far more importantly, it is tantamount to a realistic appraisal of the basic parameters of life itself. And these are always dynamic. Once again, Thoreau’s equation of care steps into play, but here in another, less explicit form. The limitations of our action are balanced out by the fact that we are not the only actors working for transformation. Where our efforts on behalf of life stop, life’s work on behalf of life—in other words, life’s ceaseless dynamic of self-renewal, of increasing complexity, of dazzling self-transformation—takes up the slack. Thoreau (ibid: 8) adds: ‘How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert ... Reverencing our life, denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle that is taking place every instant.’ Everything we do, as politically engaged subjects, to defend life from the encroachments of necropolitics (not of death! ), to defend diversity against the strictures of authoritarian single-party rule of all sorts, is always already part of a larger project: that of life itself. Our work in favour of the transformation of society does not happen in isolation, the weight of responsibility does not lie upon our own shoulders, because, once again, we are borne along by nature, that is, life in its dynamic entirety, as a process of constant transformation. Thus the rarity of our own work, its limitedness within the larger scheme of things, rejoins a notion of temporariness. Nothing stays the same for very long, everything flows. This is no cause for lament, once again, for this is the mark of life. Indeed, that is precisely the reason why we do not need to hold on to our life, mistakenly ‘reverencing’ it; rather, it is the temporariness of life that constitutes the true ‘miracle that is taking place every instant’ (ibid: 8). Every scenario in which we find ourselves involved as politically engaged subjects is 128 A Chronology of Poetic Activism V a freeze-fame, a still, in a process constantly in flow. The temporariness of any situation is the flipside of the dynamism of life, just as the rarefaction of our care is the flipside of the generosity of life itself. RWP Journaling an Actist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism V: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016) 22/ 9/ 2016 Pollution, habitat destruction, and general damage done are so often secondary to futile ‘debates’ over (the fact of human-induced) climate change. The deniers use their objections to the science as a (literal! ) smokescreen to the despoiling of the natural world. Just in terms of the human, never mind all other living things, as Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring (2000), back in 1962, in the chapter ‘Elixirs of Death: ’ For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. (Carson 2000: 31) ‘Animate’ and ‘inanimate’—this is the slippage, the error zone, the place of ambiguity that makes the poem (necessary) as activist extension, intervention and an activist moment in and out of itself. In the poem, the paradox—the recognition of toxicity and the generative creative acts that gives rise to the writing (of the opposition to that toxicity and its cause/ s). The loss of the poem to aesthetics is likely—in our own minds, in the minds of (some) readers. The declarative activist moment in the poem (the ‘didactics’) will render the poem less as ‘art’ and less likely to be absorbed, considered, or to act as a trigger for self and communal reflectiveness. The more the art is tied to the material, emotional and spiritual needs of community—as a tool for mnemonic memorialising, for retaining a status quo (in whatever form)—the more it will persist. But if it confronts the sureties of that community, or the ‘needs’ (pleasure or pragmatic necessities), the more it is likely to be rejected or forgotten. To my mind, the non-polluting ‘disposable’ (or ‘recyclable’) poem, the poem that vanishes maybe leaving just a non-toxic but still conscience-troubling residue, might be useful. A poem about toxicity that calls the reader a hypocrite, that tells them that their own lives are wrong, that they are part of the problem, is less likely to be as effective as the A Chronology of Poetic Activism V 129 poem that attributes blame to some great oppressive other. I find this disturbing and most often prefer to ‘shock’ a reader into awareness. The fact, it seems to me, is that we ARE the oppressive other (poet and reader). All of us. We need to read in this light. Writing is an act of reading, of accepting our own culpability. An article on the state of sea ice in the (Brisbane) Courier today expresses glee that ‘climate scientists’ might have leapt too soon regarding pack ice dispersal. Reading the article, we see climate issues but they are deflected by the writer and vested interests quoted within the article. This is, of course, a usual rightwing media ploy, but it is factually erroneous in itself and part of the language of dissembling. A poem is given permission to dissemble under the auspices of ‘art’, under the ‘mystical’ (Brennan) or ambiguity of the contemporary poetics theorist (I also believe in the value of ambiguity), but the poem can embrace these qualities and still have a declaration of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ without coming across as ‘offputting moralising’. Ethical is not proselytising. It rests in the registers and slippages of language itself (i.e. language isn’t stable and adapts to needs and conditions and is moving in many—sometimes contradictory—directions at once). No language is adequate to the ‘purpose’ of poetry—poetry actually happens in many ways well beyond the reach of language—it needs constantly to bend and alter language, ‘make it new’ as has been observed, but also ‘near’, to gain a proximity to events, issues, dwelling, presence, movement, and being, in order to keep activist and ethical but not proselytising. This is not a contradiction in terms. It’s possible and it’s the key. 4/ 10/ 2016 Coming home from York (picking Tim up from Mum’s), a white-necked (‘Pacific’) heron managed (as I slowed down) to curve away, to avoid being hit. It was an exquisite piece of flying as its avionics functioned at optimal level. I was also grateful and humbled. Starting to warm a little after the coldest (and longest) winter in my lifetime— breaking many ‘records’. The shift in climate sends tremors and disruptions in all directions, even if the ultimate trend in temperatures is upwards. A summer at Jam Tree Gully is almost untenable and fire is always just around the corner. In many ways my ‘life’ is what I leave out of my journals. However, ‘life’ per se—human interaction with the world (for good or bad)—the world for me being ‘nature’—is what I do record from one minuscule point (of view). There’s a ‘confession’ underpinning it all, but only insofar as culpability. Mea culpa. Who I am is almost irrelevant (but not quite! who I am is a measure of culpability and a point of calibration—I have that responsibility as a keeper of a journal, I think), and the challenge with which Rousseau finishes his Confessions is also 130 A Chronology of Poetic Activism V irrelevant outside a belief and confirmation that the veracity of these journals of witness is who I am and all I am. Rousseau writes: For my part, I publicly and fearlessly declare that anyone, even if he has not read my writings, who will examine my nature, my character, my morals, my likings, my pleasures, and my habits with his own eyes and can still believe me a dishonourable man, is a man who deserves to be stifled. (London, Penguin, 1953; 33 rd impression, p. 606) That’s typically aggressive and demanding, but still. My own pleasures are contingent on the health of the biosphere, my pain is the pain of degradation inflicted by people on each other and the ‘environment’, and all I am is the recognition that I am not the only one, that I am only unique in as far as I share existence with many other unique entities. That is community, and I believe passionately in community where I do not believe in the state or corporate embodiments. • I write the above because I’ve been thinking over the nature of an activist journal. What is ‘confession’, what is observed ‘fact’, what is subjective comment etc? This is not a diary—I tend not to note what I plan to do in the future, to record all I have done with my days, but it is an intense if selective record of interaction with a myriad of ecologies. From the inside looking out, and the outside looking in. But witness entails risk and participation and is always vicarious—the wrong we see and record is also a defence against the wrong. To record acts as a talisman, as emblem of hope—a warding-off. Superstition and pragmatic ‘loyal’ documentation—a record of events and minutiae that inform a ‘case’ in natural law. I witness the damage being done and in doing so, hope it serves as testimony that might be ‘quoted’, ‘cited’, used to prevent said damage continuing. There is always motive and purpose in journal keeping, always a process. Whether it’s a personal catharsis, or the hope of ensuring something is recorded, and has a ‘worth’ beyond its time, or a desire for some kind of ‘acknowledgement’—I see such approaches as acts of vanity, of a curatorial or decorative approach to issues that deserve more serious scrutiny. The paradox of the journal-keeper writing the self and distancing/ challenging ‘the self ’. A journal, to my mind, must be participatory and active, with a constant act of writing (in it) and transcription (out of it)—it becomes a dynamic part of a series of overlapping dialogues (held simultaneous in different spatialities). In this light, we find details in ‘historic’ journals (and diaries) that seem prescient of future ‘plagues’ and ‘disasters’—the wrench between personal subjectivity, fear, self-preservation, a record of the ‘world’ as one sees and perceives it as if it makes the evidence fit the desired order and manner of presentation—the page becoming the witness stand, the judge’s bench, and the jury’s box, all in one, as if conceptually and virtually (on the written page) overcoming hierarchies A Chronology of Poetic Activism V 131 of justice. In this context I think over the sadness and ‘isolation’ (willed and emotionally self-protecting in terms of one’s responsibilities) of this entry in Samuel Pepys’s diary of June 17, 1665: It stroke me very deep this afternoon going with a Hackny-coach from my Lord Treasurer’s down Holborne—the coachman (found to drive easily and easily, at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand; and told me that he was suddenly stroke very sick and almost blind, he could not see. So I light and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself, lest he should have been stroke with the plague—being at that end of the town that I took him up. But God have mercy upon us all. Lawson, I hear, is worse then yesterday—the King went to see him to-day, most kindly. It seems his wound is not very bad, but he hath a fever—a thrush, and a Hickup, all three together; which are, it seems, very bad symptoms. (Pepys 2003: 498) 5/ 10/ 2016 The aporia of the journal? The journal of activist witness tells what is seen. It also tells how we/ I might interpret what is seen. What is witnessed is selective. However, the recording, the writing comes out of what impels, what is essential. Graphology Endgame: Aporia I am clear in what needs to be said about what is happening around us— us is implicated as much as clarity in the brown honey-eaters trying to nest again where the cat destroyed their last nest, their fledglings. What role this house plays in their protection. There is no order of things. Rhetoric is not reality. At the beginning of Part IV of Panegyric 1 , Guy Debord (2004: 37-8) writes: I have known the world quite well, then, its history and geography, its landscapes and those who populated them, their various practices and, particularly, what sovereignty is, how many kinds there are, how one acquires it, how one keeps it, how one loses it. I have no need to travel very far, but I have considered things with a certain thoroughness, according each the full measure of months or years it seemed to merit. The greater part of time I lived in Paris; specifically, within the triangle defined by the intersections of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue Roger-Collard, Rue Saint-Martin and Rue 132 A Chronology of Poetic Activism V Greneta, and Rue du Bac and Rue de Commailles. Indeed, I spent my days and nights in this limited space and the narrow border zone that is its immediate extension—most often on its eastern side, more rarely on its north-western side. Debord says he has ‘no need to travel very far’ and this concentration of space in which a broader awareness of the world is ‘propagated’ is interesting (if only culturally concerned with itself). Does the world come to ‘him’ or is it a mediated world of quarantine and partial porousness, a perforated worldliness in which the omnipresent Paris filters what is undesirable to its self-image, even in a revolutionary sense, and even if of concern and ‘interest to him personally (Algeria, the ‘68 uprising etc.)? At Jam Tree Gully (our home place) the revolutionary is about both intactness of environment, and its ability to self-propagate, plus interventionist plantings and conservations, and a ‘radical’ configuring of ‘un-property’ and de-surveillance (despite satellites, planes and drones) in the context of earlier (and still present in essential ways) lines of movement and connection and dwelling of Ballardong Noongar people. In some sense, JTG becomes more internationally regional because of the need to recall, reinstate and revise present divisions of land, whereas Paris is a historic, sovereign, colonially exporting fait accompli (though, beneath, in actuality, it is a colonised space as well). • Fog in the morning but it had lifted by about 9am. Quite warm now (12.35pm)— getting to 25degC today. John (Guru) is here mowing. He and I were just looking at a tear-drop swarm of European bees in a youngish jam tree. He said that the reason they are less likely to sting is because they have bloated themselves with honey before leaving the hive and they are weighed down—their bodies doing extra work surrounding their queen on their way to a new dwelling hollow. Tim notes there are a pair of nesting red-capped robins and that the bronzewings have returned. • Reading back through the facsimiles of Kurt Cobain’s journals, there’s a note on the cover of ‘the spiral notebook’ that reads: ‘If you read You’ll judge’ (2002: 11), and as a ‘pre-page’ to the collection is this note on spiral-bound paper extracted from one of the journals: ‘Don’t read my diary when I’m gone/ Ok, I am going to work now, when you/ wake up this morning, please read my/ diary. Look through my things, and figure me out.’ Herein is the private space public address apparent in so many journals. A place of privacy and an inner-most sanctum, but the awareness, the declaration even, of a prospective externalised audience. JK A Call to Non-Violent Resistance: Save Wildlife NOW! 133 A Call to Non-Violent Resistance: Save Wildlife NOW! Too many of us know something is wrong, think it, even say it, but simply do nothing. I am afraid the placebo of social media campaigns is as much an expression of hubris and vanity as it is a positive act of engagement with vital issues that require change or prevention. It’s simply not enough, and it ‘costs’. The most positive example of the social media campaign for positive change is the online petition, and this has been used to great effect in Britain for all sorts of local and regional issues (though I don’t think they’d have any chance to halt the horror of racism and bigotry that has been ‘unleashed’ there in recent weeks). But that, too, is reliant on officials and politicians feeling they have enough to gain from following it up, or, say, once introduced to parliament, that there’s the will to implement change on the various levels of bureaucracy. Government is inevitably self-serving and inevitably compelled by its (bottom) fiscal line. Compromise will always be made. The so-called will of the people, which is usually measured by ‘numbers’ rather than consensus or even a default understanding or consideration of the needs of ‘minorities’, is a variable which officials and the so-called representatives of the people manipulate, and with which they play with at will. As a pacifist, I believe in non-violent direct action. I believe that each of us must act in accordance with our consciences, and also in accordance with non-vengeful, non-violent natural justice. Further, I believe that individual action has to be enacted through community on a small scale, and that those communities are rarely quantifiable or definable. A community does not have to be those who surround us who might hold, say, racist or violent views. Sometimes we have to step outside geography to make communal decisions and implement communal action. Community might be those who are concerned, for example, about the health of the biosphere. They might hold many different views on many different things, but there’s general consensus on that primary and vital issue. And thus I bring this horrific issue to readers’ attention: Western Australia’s government could have the power to approve activities that could make a threatened species extinct, under biodiversity laws now before state parliament. The provision has been dubbed “the God clause” by scientists and conservationists, who say giving the environment minister discretion to effectively authorise the extinction of a species contradicts the very purpose of biodiversity legislation. 134 A Call to Non-Violent Resistance: Save Wildlife NOW! This ‘God clause’, a coinage by Western Australian scientists in the context of legislation being debated in the Western Australian parliament, seeks to give the government and the minister for the environment the power essentially to exploit an ecology that might see the extinction of an endangered animal. (Wahlquist 2016) As is pointed out by those opposing this on the level of policy, to give rights for clearing land where an endangered species lives kills the creatures, regardless. Further, the qualification of which species should be able to live, and which will (through the actions of companies or individuals) perish, is not only speciesist, but literally an act akin to genocide in human terms. That humans destroy on a massive scale is obvious; that humans feel remorse is evident yet paradoxical; but that humans would wish to legalise and legitimise their death-acts is so criminal it should be looked at as a form of war-crime. If one believes, as I do, that all creatures deserve the right to exist, this is one of the basest pieces of legislation ever placed in front of a governing body. So what do we do? Social-media our angst and forget about it until the next piece of propaganda comes through from the Taylor Swift camp to keep us all distracted? No, we write more than a few lines; we write our lives into our opposition. We change our interactions with the state on every level so the state can no longer act in our names. We point out that even majorities can be tyrannies, and that no one can represent animals, and that even the most dedicated pro-animal campaigner will waver at the edges due to the pressures ‘of life’. It has to be individual collective action. Let’s not allow this one to happen. As we watch more and more land-clearing of less and less native vegetation; as we all sit back stunned and let it happen, participating in the crime with our every consumer act on the planet, let’s pause, slow down at least one consumer ‘necessity’; let’s not leave it purely to advocate groups of ‘scientists’ or ‘prominent people’ or volunteer or paid members of environmental advocacy groups, but rather make our own decisions, communicate in real ways where we speak to people—not to avatars and numbers of followers. Speak individually, converse, dialogue, exchange. This legislation is symptomatic of a greed so great, of an exploitation in what they are turning into an endgame, of a mass extinction made by the cronies of developers, miners, agricultural interests, and anyone who thinks they can make a buck to buy themselves better material goods, that it is much more than a local concern. It’s the hand that signs the paper. Its synecdoche reaches every part of the planet. It is the ultimate form of terror. JK Risk History 135 Risk History In the summer of 1987 I took a train from Lille in the North of France, where I was working in a live-in community with disabled people, to Luleå in the north of Sweden, to visit a former colleague from my time in North Devon. The long train journey from Flanders to the Artic Circle was interrupted by a break at Cologne because the train for Stockholm didn’t leave till midnight. So I spent a few hours wandering about the old town in Cologne, little suspecting that I would visit several times subsequently and even live there a decade later—but that’s another story. (In later years, I would sometime excavate long dormant memories of parts of Cologne I had once visited, but could only long afterwards, in a dream-like déjà vu experience, situate on a mental map that had not yet existed at the initial encounter). At some point in my wanderings around the ancient city centre I met a group of activists demonstrating against imminent construction works that were threatening an archaeological dig at the very heart of the old town. Cologne has long been and in fact continues to be a ‘zone’ of intensive archaeological excavations. The ongoing work of urban reconstruction since the almost complete razing of the city during the air-raids of the Second World War is constantly bringing the past back to light. In the course of the past few decades the diggings have revealed more and more material from the successive layers of history going back down through the city’s modern, medieval, Carolingian/ Frankish and Roman periods (Grosche 2015). I can no longer reconstruct which of the many archaeological sites around the city centre may have been the centre of controversy in the mid 1980s. Wherever it may have been, it was memorialized for me by a protest poster that I took home as a souvenir. The poster featured a spidery outline of the site, probably a reproduction of an old cadastral map, and carried the inscription “Risiko Geschichte”—“risk history”. I had no German in those days, and so some months later, when I was back in Australia, a visiting Swiss friend had to explain the meaning(s) of the inscription to me. The absence of an inflected article or of a preposition between the two words opens up a polysemic Pandora’s box of possible interpretations. The two words may be taken as an adjectivized noun, which in German would usually form a compound: ‘risk-history’ (‘Risikogeschichte’). Would this be a history of risk (once merely the stamping ground of insurance assessors and actuaries, now a central theme in the social sciences [Beck 1992] and increasingly, climate change studies) or a particular sort of history of ideas focussed upon the social construction of risk? Or might it even be history itself, in its increasingly entropic course down the centuries of the Anthropocene and/ or the Capitalocene, 136 Risk History as a trajectory of progressively growing risk levels culminating in apparently inevitable (human) self-destruction? To the best of my knowledge, this branch of historiographical theory does not exist, but I am strongly tempted to establish it. Or might the two words be construed, alternatively, as the skeletal remains of something that could be construed as ‘the risk of history’ (‘[das] Risiko der Gesichichte’), that is, history as a risky undertaking or as a risk factor. Here the idea would be that historical investigations risk turning up new knowledge that may overturn comfortable assumptions, indeed that may even prove subversive to the hegemonic social order. Whence the resistance of historicism to ‘presentist’ readings that, from hermeneutics onwards, have defined history as versions of past that serve the purposes of the present. Such history cannot be kept at a safe distance, packaged for populist or nationalist abuse but otherwise conveniently sealed up and hermetically closed off (Attwood 1996: xviii-xx). Thus it reminds us unpleasantly of our elided connections to the pogroms, genocides, enslavements and evictions that underpin our present-day existence. (Does this sound exaggerated? In mid-2016,the German Bundestag passed a motion officially declaring Turkey’s Armenian genocide the first European genocide of the century [Bundestag 2016a]. Less attention was garnered by the fact that the first global genocide of the century was in fact perpetrated by the colonial military forces of German South-West Africa, now Namibia, when the Herero people, defeated after a failed uprising against the colonizers, were deliberately driven out into the desert to die en masse in 1908 [Sarkin 2011]. Shortly before the Armenian-genocide motion, the Bundestag overturned a motion proposed by the ‘Linke’, the unpopular successor to the former official GDR ruling party, to make an official apology to Namibia on this issue [Bundestag 2016b]. (A parallel motion tabled by other parties at the same time but couched in more moderate language was also later rejected by the Bundestag [Bundestag 2017]). As African refugees die by the thousands making the Mediterranean crossing, more or less directly condemned to death as a result of EU border-regimes [Trilling 2017] and German-driven disincentive measures such as the dismantling of Italy’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ sea-rescue operation [Bade 2016: 101-4], the connections between the willed deaths of Africans a century ago and those of today appears to be one we would rather not examine too closely. Such connections, with risks of transhistorical resonances and confrontation that they entail, are usually too dangerous for the state and the polity to contemplate, as Benjamin [1999: 247] recognized long ago: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly Risk History 137 appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. ... In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is about to overpower it. The risk of history, and the danger that lies beyond it, is real, and that is why it is relevant and often susceptible of repression.) Or, finally, the two words ‘risk’ ( Risiko ) and ‘history’ ( Geschichte ) might be read, less plausibly in terms of German grammatical logic, but no less seriously for that, as ‘the risk to/ for history’. This risk would be that posed to historical knowledge by activities such as building construction and the pursuit of capital accumulation—evinced presumably in just that prioritization of urban development over historical preservation against which the activists were protesting. Such risks were amply illustrated when shoddy construction work on a new underground line in 2009 caused the City Municipal Historical Archives to collapse into the tunnel site, causing two deaths and the loss of a quarter of the archival collection, with 30 years estimated for the reconstruction of the damaged archival material. (If all of life is an archive of its own coming to being out of the legacy—and often the remains—of prior lives, then the Anthropocene itself might be seen as a gigantic process of capital accumulation as a ‘risk to/ for history’ of life on earth—certainly to many species, perhaps even the human, if not of the planet itself.) Paradoxically, however, the subterranean collapse also revealed a Roman burial urn lying seven meters underground. The loss of one type of historical (archival) material bizarrely laid bare another sort of historical artefact (cremational residues), thus compounding several of the varieties of historical risk that are compressed into the asyndetonic term of ‘risk history’. Koselleck (1979: 10) has spoken of ‘overlaid’ historical periods, Mbembe (2001: 14) talks about an ‘entanglement’ of historical times, and Hook (2014: 204) imagines a ‘folding of time’. Such entanglement is literally present in the contradictory possibilities that meet at the vanishing point between ‘Risiko’ and ‘Geschichte’. But that meeting may be more of a clash than a friendly exchange. All of these spatial terms give us a sense of the geological or textilic patterning of temporalities, but they don’t really convey the explosive force of the frictions caused by the overlayering and interfolding of dangerously similar moments in history. It’s Benjamin alone, perhaps, who has really articulates that dangersous clash of historical laminates. On the long train trip north from Cologne through Germany and Denmark, across the Baltic at Rødby Havn, and through the endless Swedish landscape of pine forests and lakes over which the sun refused to set, I was reading Louis Marin’s (1974) semiotic study of the biblical narrative of the empty grave. It’s 138 A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI the stone rolled to one side and absence of the body, he says, that opens up a space in which the Christian narrative, with its extraordinary (and often gruesome) historical consequences, can be generated. Ditto for the absence of the inflected conjunction in the term ‘Risiko Geschichte’ on the poster that I carried with me all the way to the Artic Circle, then back to Flanders, and later pinned on the wall of a shared terrace house in inner-city Carlton—all sites of risk histories, where historiography and its dangers were and still are being deflected by various ideologies of historicist immunity. Such immunity turns the present into a monument on a par with the reified, ossified versions of the past it likes to promulgate. The missing pronoun, with its plethora of shadowy, potential connectors hovering in that empty space between the words, stands, in my retrospective imagination, for the banished past, but also for the myriad ways that past may be re-evoked, brought back into the present, by the work of story-telling and the establishment of affective links that reconfigure temporalities as they intertwine various dangerous timescapes (Angerer, Bösel and Ott, eds 2014). The gap is ingenuous. What may come to be in that interstitial space does not bear thinking about, say the custodians of the present peace—but maybe, for precisely that reason, it might be worth giving it some long hard thought. RWP Journaling an Activist Poetics—A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI: Jam Tree Gully extracts from An Activist Journal (June to October, 2016) 6/ 10/ 2016 I have just written to the CEO of Goomalling Shire regarding the intention to clear old-growth wandoos and salmon gums (well over a hundred years old with nesting hollows) from along the edge of the Wongamine Nature Reserve on the Nunile-Bejoording Road. Another local government outrage, indifference, insensitivity and maliciousness as an extension of the state’s and federal government’s machinery of environmental destruction as policy. Further, the bauxite miners are back and staking new claims through the Avon Valley, aiming to delete jarrah and marri forest to create open-cut mines. As the Toodyay Herald reports (October 2016, article by Brian Dale from the Avon Hills Mining Awareness Group): ‘It seems not a month goes by without the announcement of a new mining tenement in the Avon region.’ The bauxite miners are trying new angles on new zones in their effort to consume the remaining forest to make more window frames, planes, bits of cars, etc. This latest abomination even includes the Inkpen Nature Reserve. All voices A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI 139 of opposition—feet on the ground, literary, artistic, traditional owners (so often neglected and ignored in these conversations), social and cultural disobedience need to be focussed on preventing this cascading colonisation. I wrote to the CEO of Goomalling Shire this evening: Dear Clem Kerp, CEO, Goomalling I would like to add my voice to the deep concern being expressed over the removal of old-growth trees on the Bejoording Road in Nunile. I (and my family) know these trees very well, and they are essential to the health of the ecosystem in the region. There are few enough of such trees left, and the removal of these will have a long-term detrimental effect on bird-life and the environment in general. I beg you to change your plans for the road before it’s too late. I am willing to assist in any way I can for this conservation aim. Thanks. Sincerely, John Kinsella 11/ 10/ 2016 No reply from the Shire of Goomalling re my letter. Will head out to the old-growth trees at Nunile later today and see what the situation is. Take photographs (or Tracy will). First stage of protest is the letter, second takes place in situ . Problem with trying to campaign for this is that it’s relatively ‘isolated’, and ‘lone’ action can leave one vulnerable to violence with little chance of success. When my brother and I were protesting old-growth karri logging in the southwest thirty-years ago, we were actually hunted down and shot at and took refuge overnight in the forest. The Toodyay Naturalists’ Club are very angry about the situation and I will make contact/ liaise with them if I can. Community is necessary in such actions. Can poems work this late in the piece? I will try. • I have written to the Toodyay Naturalists’ Club. All avenues with this one! • HORROR! ! ! DISGUST! ! ! ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMINALS! ! ! The Shire of Goomalling have already chopped down those old-growth trees. We went to look at them this afternoon to work out an approach to help save them and the Shire had done the filthy deed. Tracy has taken dozens of photographs to document it. There’s almost nothing like these trees left in the area now. And as we lamented, a pink-and-grey galah appeared out of the hollow of one of the remaining trees in the ‘background’, looking down at us and the wreckage of its habitat. There is actually a vast space on the east side of the road that could have been used by the shire in their road widening, but no, they went for the 140 A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI trees where over the years Carnaby cockatoos have nested. This MUST stand as a test case against such butchery. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! ! ! • Letter to the Shire of Goomalling: I am shocked and horrified to see the trees have already been chopped down. This is an outrage. This should not have been allowed to happen! I will be speaking loud and wide about this disgrace. It is an ecological crime. John Kinsella • Swapping emails with The Toodyay Naturalists people. Sounds like something very malicious and calculated was behind this clearing of old-growth trees. The Naturalists’ Club is outraged and also want it to become a ‘test-case’ to prevent it ever happening again. It turns out that the area cleared wasn’t even part of Goomalling Shire, but actually part of Toodyay Shire. And today the WA Government has said Roe 8 will go ahead through the vital Beeliar Wetlands despite a High Court challenge looking likely. Country is being eaten, eaten, eaten! More: The Shire’s media release about the clearing (Feb, 2016) did not go to the people concerned about such issues and, what’s more, was released by Goomalling and not Toodyay (shire) where this ecological crime has been committed. And as for their ‘advisor’s’ comments that the Carnaby nesting hollow wasn’t in use, how ridiculous—Carnaby’s cockatoos return to hollows at intervals over many years. These old-growth wandoos and old-growth salmon gums are increasingly rare with the wholesale clearing of the wheatbelt (Goomalling only has 4.6 percent of its natural vegetation left according to the Naturalists’ Club in the Toodyay Herald , October, 2016). Cleared cleared cleared! That’s the only use poetic repetition should be put to—to illustrate grief, anger and to imprint itself on conscience. ‘Approval’ The neighbouring shire clears old-growth trees—wandoo salmon gums. Poaching. The fall of nesting hollows is to unleash voids that cannot be filled. A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI 141 Living stumps remain after the chainsawing is done— slices of trunks, limbs laid out, distended like a reconstituted human skeleton. Those living stumps will be uprooted very soon— erased. ‘Approval’. Yellow crosses still mark their bases—a yellow that burns the psyche. Form is of no use unless it reconstitutes the flesh. What use are the ‘rules’ of prosody in the face of such horror? What can poetry do? Language must break out of the constraints and restraints of the poem. Not become a set of shire minutes. I have sent this poem to Kwame as part ‘45.’ of our collaboration: it’s a space in which I can work out activist approaches, as he also deals with the hells of hatred, the murdering of black men and women by the police forces of the United States. 45. Another environmental outrage here, Kwame. A neighbouring shire has manipulated a boundary and cleared old-growth trees from the edge of a nature reserve. I had been going into campaign mode to try and stop them. We went out to visit these old wandoos and salmon gums—vital nesting trees as it takes over a century of growth and work by fire and termites, fungi and storms, by all the natural acts of existence, for suitable hollows to form in limbs and trunks, places 142 A Chronology of Poetic Activism VI where cockatoos and parrots can lay eggs, rear their chicks. Fewer and fewer of such trees are left, as the land is ravaged by farmers and developers and miners greedy for every foothold, we must ensure that on the edges and in the niches, these habitats persist. But to go out and see the massacre unleashed—the horror of butchered trees’ corpses, and a lone pink-and-grey galah looking on from a remaining nesting hollow in a nearby tree: it imprints deep. Even the sunset is bereft. But I’ve no room for metaphor— it feels tainted, it feels like insult to injury, to death. • Over the years I have noticed that some activists can be disturbingly territorial about their ‘causes’ and campaigns. They wish to advocate in their ways, and through their controls. One offers to help and it’s ignored; or, say, when I was trying to save bushland and watercourses near Walwalinj in York when the shire wanted to create an ‘equine precinct’, a well-known environmental advocacy group showed no interest despite my repeatedly writing to them—they were focussed on their own campaign (necessary, but that doesn’t alter the need to be connected in these things). We will possibly have different views on how to approach issues and the best way to resolve them or advocate, but we need to communicate and, where possible, work together without hierarchies. • Astonishingly, just to finish the day, a far right ‘One Nation’ senator said in his maiden speech to parliament today that the nation belongs to ‘Anglo-Celts’, and that it is—wait for it—‘being colonised’ (by non-Anglo-Celts? ) and that his sort (the ‘real’ people of Australia? ) are ‘being swamped’. He wants the ABC replaced with the ‘Patriotic Broadcasting Corporation’. It would seem like a sick joke but it’s true. Australia IS on the verge of falling into full-blown, literal fascism. JK Extreme Weather Conditions 143 Extreme Weather Conditions ‘Extreme weather conditions’—we hear that a lot. This summer has been psychotic. From 45 degrees centigrade (a few weeks ago) to 17 degrees centigrade (yesterday); from a dry that eviscerates to deluges that have broken all records. As things have been progressing, it’s become clear that our concerns are mild compared to many people's. This is a major set of weather events that is having catastrophic consequences in some places, and the Avon’s flooding is severe—whole towns are being cut off. This blog entry reflects only some recent experiences. Last Monday and Tuesday we received 160 mm of rain, and I spent Tuesday morning digging ditches and channels to release water gathered behind the house, trapped on its cascading ‘got to go somewhere’ run down the hillside. Gutters couldn’t cope, the ground destabilised, and old-growth trees tilted. And then last night we received another dose of 75 mm, and woke to a tree down on the shade-cloth frame and the house roof. I had lain awake through much of the night and heard an almighty crash, and at first light looked out to the east because I suspected we might lose one of the trees out that way, but it was still standing. Then Tim noticed one of the magnificent old-growth York gums down, one that grows on the tier above the house, just below the red shed’s level. Only two days ago I had caught a glimpse of a sleeping tawny frogmouth in the fork of its upper branches—numerous ring-necked parrots and galahs roosted in those branches, and it was part of the territorial stations of magpies and many other birds. Song-birds thrived in its blooms and around its lower branches. But the tree that had likely made the crashing sound that alarmed me, was a younger tree, nonetheless quite tall, which had been uprooted and collapsed. I thought we’d have to call the State Emergency Service, but decided to deal with it myself, given there was no hole in the roof, and given the pressure all services are under with flooding throughout the southwest, and given that we couldn’t expect assistance from our reliable friend John (‘Guru’), my mother’s partner, because they are literally flooded-in over near York, and their block is experiencing torrents. Anyway, I spent an age working out the best way of dealing with the tree, sans a chainsaw (which I refuse to possess or use), and avoiding further damage to the roof. I managed, using a bow saw, to cut the lower trunk partially, so it hinged down, lessening the load on frame, roof and trunk, and then once that load had been more evenly distributed, cut through and slide it from the roof. 144 Extreme Weather Conditions I did the same with the next branch, and with some help from Tracy, we managed to ease the thick limbs down and away. Then I cut segments of the trunk down bit by bit. It was slow and dangerous work with the ground very unstable but it was done. I had then to saw up the tree and remove it because over the next couple of weeks the fire risk will inevitably rise to ‘severe’ or even ‘catastrophic’ again, and we just can’t have swathes of eucalyptus leaves and branches piled up, drying close to the house. As we deal with these bizarre weather patterns, tropical lows coming down fast from the north and cold fronts coming in west, I think of the fools in Parliament in Canberra taking lumps of coal in to make points about energy production. We have handed our rights to self-determination and the rights of the biosphere over to fools. They live in their air-conditioned bubbles (in their mansions, in their offices, in the parliament, on their tractors) and can’t make simple links between cause and effect. And here in Western Australia, the Western Australian government, private industry, and Main Roads, destroy every bit of vegetation they can lay their hands on. Cause and effect. Climate models. They want to live their lives now , without care for the future, and extract all they can. It’s brutal, selfish, and malignant. So the reports are coming in: areas of Northam Shire are under evacuation orders as the Avon River rapidly rises. York is expecting a 4-metre peak and Toodyay similar. Walls of water moving fast and not to be toyed with. Strangely, dealing with limbs of the old-growth tree pressing on other trees, and sawing away with the bow saw to relieve the pressure on those other trees already stressed with the softened ground, I noticed, in all the dirt thrown up around the torn and broken roots of the tree, clods of dry soil emerged from deep beneath its centre. I felt a weird anti-abjection that with all the mud and sogginess around actually made me viscerally sick, so incongruous was it. Nearby was a puffball that had burst and set like concrete in the heat, and then being soaked in the deluge, had developed a black, mouldy patina. It was otherworldly, alien, and upset expectations of observation. The entire landscape seems to have been given an injection of ghost , and the water still rushes out of the rocky soils of the hills, and gathers and flows down ‘Bird Gully’ to the valley below, to the valley where ancient flooded-gums had been burnt to their cores when someone’s burning-off got out of control some years ago. The dead trees parody their living selves sucking up no water, and the pobblebonks are always hidden mad in mid-summer with calling to the weirdness, the haunting. It’s like that, walking the bloody firebreaks, a skein of green coming up in the paddocks. Extreme Weather Conditions 145 And so I write a poem, because it’s how I process disparate information, make sense of disjunctions between how I see something and how I experience it. These trees we struggle for, watch daily as life evolves and revolves around them. I think of the wounds being inflicted along roadside, in paddocks, at the Beeliar wetlands, in nature reserves when someone wanting to fence makes more room for themselves, breaching the private and public, neo-colonists, and the broken, disrupted surfaces washing away under the deluge, and when the heat comes back fast and soon, blowing away as dust. Everywhere around the district are new fences, and all the vegetation the fencers find an excuse to dismiss from life. And not far, those secretive ‘smallscale’ bauxite mines on private land, sending the essence of ecologies away to smelters. And few know, and few listen, so many struggles happening everywhere at once. And so I write a poem, one of my new ‘Graphology Endgame’ series. Number 25, they are gathering. The lines are showing me a way I don’t wish to take, but am compelled to: For all our preparations— fixing gutters, making channels, ensuring flows are as clear as possible, the next instalment of The Flood comes and puts us in our place by dislodging expectations—and then a tree on dwelling, our habits shaken, and a bow-saw violining the limbs, the trunk—that cutting we push back against in every other way, always. Wetted soil, dry at the core, to replant between extreme weather conditions. And tend. And let be. JK 146 Lessen the distance between the word and the thing Lessen the distance between the word and the thing John sends me a blog which documents the ‘extreme weather conditions’ currently plaguing the inhabitants of the Western Australian wheat belt: heat waves, fires, then torrential rain and flooding (Kinsella 2017a). Downpipes overflow, the soil no longer holds the rain, slopes begin to drift: ‘Gutters couldn’t cope, the ground destabilised, and old-growth trees tilted.’ Trees topple in the ‘unstable ground’ and others are ‘already stressed with the softened ground’. John traces the cause and effect cycles as one instance of natural destruction triggers another: ‘the water still rushes out of the rocky soils of the hills, and gathers and flows down “Bird Gully” to the valley below, to the valley where ancient flooded-gums had been burnt to their cores when someone’s burning-off got out of control some years ago. The dead trees parody their living selves sucking up no water.’ John focuses on the fences, those ultimate signs of settler hegemony over a primitive, ostensibly unfenced wilderness: these lines across the landscape that claim to order its unruly undulations but in fact break up the natural systems of cosmic equilibrium: I think of the wounds being inflicted along roadside, in paddocks, at the Beeliar wetlands, in nature reserves when someone wanting to fence makes more room for themselves, breaching the private and public, neo-colonists, and the broken, disrupted surfaces washing away under the deluge ... Everywhere around the district are new fences, and all the vegetation the fencers find an excuse to dismiss from life. The fences instantiate the parcelling up of common land (that is, land that belongs to the cosmic commons, with all the rights and obligations and boundaries and limits that this implies) into private property—but by the same token, the imposition of private possessiveness upon the public space of the cosmos and the environmental commons. Paradoxically, fences split the world up into commodified, reified segments, but in the same way—‘Cause and effect,’ repeats John—they erode the laminated checks and balanced of the land’s fabric, open the floodgates to self-perpetuating cycles of destruction. Faced with these apparently uncontrollable spirals of destruction, the poet-smallholder can do little except saw up the fallen trees, and, when this task is completed, sit down with pen and paper: ‘And so I write a poem, because it’s how I process disparate information, make sense of disjunctions between how I see something and how I experience it.’ The poem, it would seem, is a way of restoring connections even as the world appears to be increasing the disjunctions. Some of these connections just need to be made visible: the spiralling cause-and-effect of knock-on environmental vandalism, for instance. Lessen the distance between the word and the thing 147 Other disjunctions, like the paring of the toppled tree, turn out to be salutary. Even registering these unsettling conjunctions and disjunctions highlights others, when John pays tribute to ‘These trees we struggle for, watch daily as life evolves and revolves around them.’ Like the poet, the trees observe the natural world, no less ‘stressed’ than their human companion by the changes in the soil and the atmosphere. Even the languages of poetic lyricism appear to be caught up in these turbulences: ‘And so I write a poem, one of my new ‘Graphology Endgame’ series. Number 25, they are gathering. The lines are showing me a way I don’t wish to take, but am compelled to.’ Is this community between poet, trees and poetic lines, all of whom seem to be endowed with a common, if unruly agency, mere metaphor? Are these connections, and the identities they appear to endow in a reciprocal process, mere imaginings on the part of a layabout artist who ought to be out there getting his hands dirty? Or, in more sophisticated terms, are words words and the world the world, and never the twain may meet? —so that it is vain and ridiculous to suggest in so many words that things may be alive? Lest we capitulate to the Antipodean actionism that tells the artist to get out and get a bloody job, let us remember that much of the frentic settler activity that John talks about here (when it doubt, chop it out) has directly contributed to the severing of natural networks: cutting firebreaks, setting up fences. The idea of words as isolated tokens, and the notion of their putatively reified, rarefied disconnection from the world are merely a further symptom of this tendency to fence off the world into fifty-acre blocks. Let us turn things around. Just as the ghastly cycles of tree-felling, erosion and flash-floods show us, despite and indeed because of our best efforts to slice away the connective tissue, that everything is connected after all—so too, the poet’s words may lay bare the connections between language, plants, animals and humans, that we have been fencing off from each other for centuries since the Enlightenment’s slash-and-burn campaign against ‘the prose of the world’. The poet’s words do not ‘invent’ anthropomorphizations so much as ‘reveal’ the shared and distributed agencies that we no longer know how to perceive. This is a two-way process. Lessening the distance between the word and the thing, between the text and the world, means rediscovering the materiality and agency of texts as we discover the co-agency of things. Writing now appears not merely as means of ‘self-fashioning’ or of self-expression, but of discovering a larger self whose creativity is performatively instantiated through the text as an assemblage (self, ideas, body, paper, ink, computer, language, rhetorical devices, intertexts...) and which gives selves-expressions (not self-expression! ) to that larger community—indeed, instantiates its ongoing living-together. This is not mere metaphor, but constitutes real material processes of multifarious 148 Waking Thoughts types, many of them invisible, which in our separation of body and mind, self and world, word and thing, we have successfully elided for so many centuries. Once we have begun to see these linkages, we may be able to turn the text around and point it back towards the world it has, in fact, never left behind. In this way, we will best be able to reply to the current multifaceted crises that grow from day to day—ecological, geopolitical, financial, demographic—by placing our writing about writing, our talking about writing, and our teaching about writing in intricate networks with everything else we do in response to the spiralling, cascading deluges of events. There are no separations between writing and reading and more obviously political interventions, whether they be sawing down fallen trees or supporting a visa or asylum application at the local immigration office. RWP Waking Thoughts Warning: this contains spoilers—those takings of your moments. A permanent change to your ability to encounter the act. The act of waking, of talking, of opening ‘the day’. But sleep doesn’t come in the way others tell you it comes from them. You privilege no closure as they define it. But you wake. And you talk. I have called the loss of data in the realm of the internet, ‘net death’. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but a fact. Digital data has its own temporariness—a claim for longevity challenged by entropy, and the same forces that made it—the military—capable of undoing it in nanoseconds. The EMP of the thermonuclear is the monumental act of death—it is death of data to make death of people. Data and people become fused in their fates. This is permanence, not temporariness. Temporariness is not the disposable, the usable, the wasteable, but a permanence of contact, the moment echoing outside temporal constraints. The parallel intersects without our being able to pinpoint where and why. The ephemeral news article, the latest craze (fidget spinners, yo-yos), and casual talk that makes community that is forgotten and lost. No, these are markers of the permanence of the temporary. The net is monumental because it is death, because it is digital invasiveness, not liberty, our fates fused to what sucks the biosphere dry. The net is not metaphor—it’s literal and all calumnies and all ‘facts’ and all throwaway comments are truths and have implications on their own and collectively. Cascading colonialism. What do we do with the novelist who consults community about the ethics of writing their story and then ignores the very protocols they themselves Waking Thoughts 149 acknowledge? Discourse shifts. The discussion is there, and the liberty of text allows us to say. And yet we are writing in the penumbra of our own guilt, still wanting the benefits. Media consoles and crushes us, and yet, that becomes ‘yesterday’s news’. And yet the net gives us all that is obsolete, it is presented if we want to find. It is available. Tracy did that issue of Cordite journal on ‘obsolescence’—she was particularly concerned with the exploitations of ‘builtin obsolescence’. The fusing of political success and computer-based being as either corporate beneficiary or user of the mediums of ‘communication’, is as ephemeral as the laptop that can no longer play with other laptops—‘dated technology’ ( love the slippage: the net is a pun—language doesn’t degrade, it just substitutes itself for itself). This is not temporariness outside the points of contact in the lives of those making the plays, is not temporariness outside the (often massive) communities affected by this. What is left? What can we claim as the efficacious in the temporary in opposing the monumental, the all-consuming, the edifice. I recall (just read, just read yesterday, just read after collecting wood) Jean Rhys’s early story ‘A Spiritualist’ and the large slab of ‘white marble’, the headstone that was never placed on the Commandant’s mistress’s grave, sitting in the middle of the dead woman’s flat. It wasn’t there before. It is now. A monument of the phantasm. A phantasm in which the mistress is a loyal servant. This monumental misunderstanding by the chauvinist of the loss, the suffering, the life he has fed on. Many of us might think Lou Reed’s ‘Statue of bigotry’. The ‘Dirty Boulevard’. Many of us won’t. I wake, Tracy wakes, we talk of her watching Kate Bush’s song ‘Violin’ (‘out of the realm of the orchestra’). And I think of Benjamin and Baudelaire and the internet of The Arcades Project , the failure of the archive in the face of absolute tyranny. All-encompassing. Parallel lines crossing. The paradox we accept as we continue with lives so filled with the knowing of ‘what happened’. What can we do about it? We can quote a fragment (that’s the word, that’s the word, surely? ) in the Belknap Harvard edition translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin: ‘Fashion determines, in each case, the acceptable limit of empathy’ (Benjamin 2002: 361). I originally read ‘of ephemerality’. Desired it so. Wish-fulfillment. I refuse to call it a misreading. Fashion, the exploiter of nature. ‘The poet’s libido’ we also find, locate. The internet’s libido? The thermonuclear device’s libido? The electromagnetic pulse’s productivity, its commercial applications. As the hermit state is no less a commercial construct for the party as the US for its share holders? These hierarchies and their communication vestments. Closed off, open—the idea of what is had or not. Vestments. So Benjamin’s hands are beautiful here too. Temporarily enacting ‘the dream’. 150 Surprise or astonishment? Badiou (2006: 126) says, ‘The Greeks did not invent the poem.’ That might be enough? It is obviously true, we could inculcate it into a quotes or sayings page on the web. We could. A search would reveal a truth. We might or might no disconnect it from the next lines, in translation: ‘Rather, they interrupted the poem with the matheme.’ The period is the definer of the saying, the point, its pithiness. It is part of the short paragraph’s hesitations. It is not the fluidity of The Wake , which I am thinking of always. I have associates who think of it always. I have now watched Kate Bush’s Christmas Special ‘Violins’. A violin with bat wings. The bridge? Permanence/ temporariness? Not monumentalism? JK Surprise or astonishment? Several days ago, we experienced a storm, the likes of which I have never seen before. What looked like a bog-standard thunderstorm was brewing, so we made for home. After a preliminary spattering of large raindrops on the windscreen, we were taken by surprise by what developed, within the space of several minutes, into something resembling a hurricane. Solid sheets of rain blew across the road, the side of the car was pummelled by their weight, and visibility suddenly dropped to about twenty metres. We saw boughs ripped from trees, and elsewhere, as we discovered shortly afterwards, corrugated iron rooves were whipped away by the wind and whirled into the main trunk road nearby. Then, as abruptly as it had come, the hurricane was gone. We were left perplexed and bewildered, almost wondering whether we had imagined what we had seen. Erratic weather patterns have become the norm. But meteorological events of this degree of unexpectedness took our breath away. (In subsequent months, successive walks in the forest increased my sense of bewilderment. If the storm had been vicious yet strangely brief, so too the havoc wreaked in the forest appeared to be equally random. In numerous places we would find massive trees snapped off close to the roots, as if felled by a squall of extreme force—while all around the rest of the stand appeared to have been spared. There was not even an immediate contextual explanation for this selective violence. It was not necessarily the unprotected trees on the edge of a clearing, or those standing in some sort of a wind tunnel, that had found themselves at the mercy of the storm. The remarkably temporary onslaught seemed to go hand in hand with utter spatial contingency.) We live in a world in which, at least in the Global North, we assume permanency to be the norm. Proust (1999: 15) wondered: ‘Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles Surprise or astonishment? 151 et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles.’ [‘Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed upon them by our certainty that they are what we take them to be and not something else, by the immobility of our thought when it regards them.’] The idea of immobility is deeply rooted in Enlightenment thought and pervades every nook and cranny of our modern mentality. Lee Smolin (2000: 52-3) goes back to the origins of Enlightenment science to explain the genesis of this notion of permanency as the bedrock of everyday experience. ‘In the Newtonian mode of description’, he notes, ‘one would describe what it [a particular elementary particle, say a proton] is at a particular moment of time: where it is located in space, what its mass and electric charge are, and so forth. ... Time is nowhere in this description; it is indeed, an optional part of the Newtonian world. Once one has adequately described how something is, one then “turns on” time and describes how it changes.’ In contrast to this, quantum theory has forced us to acknowledge that not permanency, but rather temporariness is the basal reality of the material world. ‘Motion and change are primary. Nothing is , except in a very approximate and temporary sense. How something is, or what its state is, is an illusion. ... If we want to think fundamentally, we must not lose sight of the fact that “is” is an illusion. ... We must learn a new vocabulary in which process is more important than, and prior to, stasis’ (ibid: 53). In a sense, as Smolin notes, time is not an added extra, a supplementary ingredient to be injected into solid-state reality; rather, time is in reality from the beginning, infusing it with dynamism from the outset, contaminating its solidity and rendering it mobile in its very be-ing. Reality is temporal, and thus temporary: ‘From this new point of view, the universe consists of a large number of events . An event may be thought of as the smallest part of a process, the smallest unit of change. But do not think of the event as a change happening to an otherwise static object. It is just a change, no more than that’ (ibid: 53). We are surrounded by objects in flow, entities that are made up not of minute particles, but of events. Indeed, we ourselves are gatherings of events. Getting our collective head around this idea, to put it in colloquial language, is no easy task. It involves changing almost half a millennium of thought patterns. But it may be one of the most important tasks that the critical humanities have to take on over the coming decades. Allowing the realization of basal cosmic flow to pervade our mental universe and our existential habitus is a necessary precondition for changing the course of global history, or at least changing our place within that course of history. Foucault (2006: 530), working according to the principle of ‘philosophy with a hammer’ that he borrowed from Nietzsche, pioneered a notion of history that favoured ruptures and epistemic breaks rather than continuities. Foucault’s phi- 152 Surprise or astonishment? losophy of history was caught in an agonistic conflict with nineteenth-century historicism, whence his predilection for spatial metaphors of scission and caesura (Foucault 1989: 183-95). Foucault’s project was a salutary exercise in leaving behind Enlightenment convictions of stability, stasis and solidity. His friend Deleuze (1992), however, came up with a more flexible notion of discontinuity, one better suited to the nature of physical reality: the fold. With its figures of waves, undulations, and loops, Deleuze’s notion gives a much better conceptual approximation of the fluid dynamics of cosmic creativity. It gives a glimpse of the materiality of change and transformation, and of the temporariness that underpins the apparent thereness of the sea, clouds, or a hilly landscape. And it conveys a tangible sense of the affects that might possibly accompany the realization of the basal processuality of the world. Tim Ingold (2011: 74) makes an interesting distinction between surprise, the affect that occurs when predictions fail to materialize, and astonishment, the affect that expects the new, and never ceases to be amazed at the way the new emerges, which of course, is new every time: ‘Astonishment’, he writes, ‘is the other side of the coin to the very openness to the world that I have shown to be fundamental to the animic way of being. It is the sense of wonder that comes from riding on the crest of the world’s continued birth.’ Surprise is connected to the assumption that one can predict the future upon the basis of past experiences. The drive to prediction reposes upon the conviction that events can be summarized or coagulated into something that is permanent, and that can be projected into the future just as it has been solidified in the past. When this structure fails, what emerges is surprise, an affect generated by the disruption of the permanent in its future manifestation: ‘Scientists are surprised when their predictions turn out to be wrong. ... Surprise, however, exists only for those who have forgotten how to be astonished at the birth of the world, who have grown ... accustomed to control and predictability’ (Ingold 2011: 75). However, if we assume that the lessons of the past teach us not permanency but rather process, or the ubiquity of the temporary as the very face of be-ing, then a different affect may become evident: ‘those who are truly open to the world, though perpetually astonished, are never surprised ... rather than waiting for the unexpected to occur, and being caught out in consequence, it allows them at every moment to respond to the flux of the world with care, judgement and sensitivity’ (Ingold 2011: 75). ‘Astonishment’ is a vital affect, because it allows us to be at ease in a world that is, fundamentally, even in its most unconflicted state, full of novelty, caught in constant processes of change and emergent complexity. Expressing such an affect in the late nineteenth century, Thoreau wrote, ‘All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant’ (1908: 8). How much more necessary it is, then, to Surprise or astonishment? 153 be able to live in a state of astonishment, rather than surprise, in these times of ours, increasingly turbulent as they are, and where turbulence must become a concept we can work and live with rather than reduce or control (Carter 2015). If the fundamental processuality of the world is coeval with the underlying creativity of the cosmos, this is not, however, something that global capitalism has failed to recognize. Just as capitalism coopts the creativity of human actors and captures its dynamic for profit (Gilbert 2014), so too it coopts the processuality, the temporality and the temporariness of modern life (Massumi 2015b), accelerating them ever more in the race for ever shrinking profits (Rosa 2015). Global capitalism sees mobility and temporariness as resources, and global autocracy sees mobility and temporariness as weapons. Together, they exploit the fundamental dynamic of the cosmos, transferring it into the exploitable mobility of goods and of skills or labour (increasingly, the difference between the two becomes blurred), or the weapon of ‘expulsions’ (Sassen 2014) and of ‘preemptive strikes’ or ‘anticipative threat-creation’ (Massumi 2015a). The response of the Right to the refugee phenomenon, in Germany, for instance, is to reassert the primacy of belonging, homeland, ‘Heimat’ (Schüle 2017) and immobility, expressed in a rampant politics of border defence (Palmer 2017) and viral muralism (Dolphin 2006; West-Pavlov 2010a; ‘Grenzsicherung…’ 2017). We may oppose ever shorter employment contracts (which now for instance may even concern 40% of the relatively well-off German labour force [Behnen 2017]), ever shorter temporary asylum permits, and the deliberately fuelled rise of precarity. But the opposite does not hold: we should not fall back upon immobility in the face of expulsions, or mass movement of populations, but should embrace the fundamental dynamism of the entire cosmos, seeking for pragmatic ways of compassionately accepting and moulding human mobility. The basal processuality of material reality thus contains the potential to offer an ethical template at scales ranging from interpersonal relationships to geopolitical negotiations. What is the role, in that ethical mandate, of the intellectual work of teaching and writing? One answer comes from an unexpected quarter. In a surprising— perhaps even astonishing—twist of rhetoric, the scientist Smolin abruptly proposes the eruption of the narrative arts within his field of quantum theory. Summarizing the primacy of mobility and temporariness in the material universe, he says, ‘there are not really two categories of things in the world: objects and processes. There are only relatively fast processes and relatively slow processes.’ So far, so good. However, then comes the astonishing moment: that of narrative: ‘And whether it is a short story or a long story, the only kind of explanation of a process that is truly adequate is a story’ (Smolin 2000: 52). Joyce’s looping ‘riverrun’ (1975: 3, 628), which inaugurates ‘swerves’ and ‘bends’, that is, waves 154 The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists of recursively productive linguistic novelty (‘recirculation’), transpires to be the truest mode of participation in the processuality of the universe. Narrative is not a representation of the mobility of the universe—because it cannot re-present the ‘is-ness’, the ‘present-ness’ of something where those stable states do not exist. Rather, narrative participates in the temporainess of processes. Narrrative narrativizes to the extent that it temporizes. And perhaps it does that to the extent that narrative ‘uncertainty,’ the ‘unexpected’, is precisely the diegetic element that makes narrative ‘go’ (Currie 2015; Nowotny 2016). There is no story without a border-crossing into the realm of the unknown and astonishing (Lotman 1977: 233, 237). John’s narratives in this book epitomize Smolin’s sense that story-telling is the only way to take the measure of—no, better, to affectively assimilate oneself to change. His anecdotes of walking are anecdotes of a forward movement through the undulations and unevenesses of place, in which every fold of the ground or twist of the forest path may reveal, in its physical manifestation of the foldedness of reality, a wave of newness in the world: a tree budding, a vole poking its head out of a river-bank burrow… Even the old bears the signs of the new: the deep ruts in the cobbled surface of the old Reutlingen road that winds up past the prehistoric hill-fort are signs of change, of the constant remoulding and modulations of that putatively most permanent of foundations, stones and the ground we stand upon. RWP The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists Window Shopping at the Taxidermist’s The permeable glass—sieve-like—drains the liquid light, a fluid more precious than formaldehyde, the smell of life … A grimace or a grin stretches like a trap, and as a backdrop a deer dispenses with its claim to needing a heart, it’s only there from the neck up, though its eyes are sharp, senses finely tuned, nervousness held in check through a familiarity born of sharing a display case with a pack of wolves. The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists 155 The window shoppers hunt amongst the grime of the city’s unglamorous side, their prey the glimmering skin, the combed and shining— here they show their skill, knowing where to bag the finest trophy. I wrote the above poem in 1992 and it was published in my 1993 volume, Full Fathom Five . I am pretty sure I wrote it at the base of the Darling Scarp, though it’s actually ‘about’ a piece of taxidermy seen elsewhere, maybe in the northern hemisphere when I was twenty (though I am pretty sure it was triggered by seeing some taxidermy in a window in Northbridge, Perth). It is a poem-critique of a capitalist disrespect and abuse of the dead, and also, though only by implication as it is superficially ‘genderless’, of a patriarchy of trophyism. Living in central Ohio in the early to mid 2000s, an excursion out into the region would take us past taxidermists’ shops—not rare in hunting territories. Some of the taxidermists prided themselves on ‘artistic flair’, ‘respect for nature’, and ability to deliver a ‘quality product’. If I recall correctly, at least one of these taxidermy businesses was run by a husband-and-wife team. Or am I wilfully misremembering? I don’t think so. Taxidermy has haunted me since seeing, as a child, ‘specimens’ in the Perth Museum—what others might take as a point of inspiration, the seeding of a vocation, I took as disturbance. But though back then I was not a vegan, and not an animal rights activist, and in fact did hunt and fish, I found the ‘re-enactment’ side of the displays—the animating of the dead to give humans a sense of authenticity, to provide entertainment and ‘education’ in elements of the world that cannot be shown—hypocritical and dishonest. To illustrate , to capture (again) the animals in a (faux) performative moment in their ‘native habitat’, was to mock their living, individual lives. To make the dead ‘live’, to make the temporariness of their lives (however ended or taken from them), quasi-‘permanent’, to arrest their being in such a manner, was grotesque to me. Their eyeballs seem particularly wrong. And in each case, little adornments of ‘place’—a branch, a rock, a snake rising in the corner on real sand. It truly bothered me. What brought this all back, suddenly, was seeing another article (Webb 2017) (one was run last year on that year’s instalment of the same taxidermy exhibition) on what we might term ‘new-wave taxidermy’. And though this is an interpolation, written after what follows, I would bring to mind Carol J. Adams’s question in The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (2000), ‘Where does vegetarianism end and feminism begin, or feminism end and vegetarianism begin? ’ And consider her observation a few lines later: ‘Our 156 The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists meals either embody or negate feminist principles by the food choices they enact’ (Adams 2000: 178). So new-wave taxidermists are wishing to get away from the word ‘taxidermy’? This is ‘art’! So they’re trying to get away from the ‘stuffy’ version of weird men in back rooms playing with animal corpses? So they’re trying to get away from the idea of dead animal ‘mounted’ as ‘trophy’? Instead, we have a ‘gender’-angled promotion (as extension of arts-capitalism, not as an act of liberty and liberation) in which some women (especially younger women, it seems) are territorialising the realms of the dead. A reconvening of the underworld in which Persephone reclaims the space of body articulate in the domain of Hades. There’s an absurdity in this configuring, but the subtexts of the gender issues around the new-wave taxidermy, as conveyed by promotions and ‘teachers’ wishing to ‘modernise’ practice, are playing into these tropes. Don’t worry: all of this will suit those ‘stuffy’ male taxidermists and death fetishists very well indeed. Their kingdom grows through the process. We read that we’ve gone (in Australia) from one woman over a decade ago (officially? ) playing with dead animal corpses, to over fifty in the here and now. And now , it’s nurturing nature morte —bringing life to dead nature. The women are placing the animals in ‘natural settings’; they are bringing life to what is dead. A new fertility—a reclaiming of the birth of death. This, of course, is withering gendering discourse. It is setting women up as clichés and prisoners of the incubator, with a femininity (anxiety) so powerful it can re-animate the dead (as Dr Frankenstein succeeded in doing, but failed, as his creator Mary Shelley knew he must; or horror struggling with right-wingism in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction). This is a torturously constrained semantic display. We read that to not understand this is because of our ignorance, because we don’t know how to read this new presentation of the living dead. We (male or female or non-binary) apparently need to be taught. We need to be educated in the aesthetics of displaying death, the rewriting of ethics through playing the ethics of gender (in)equality. The gender of the stuffed (! ) animals becomes a variable in the display. Of the beauty of the fox (so hated in Australia) in its ‘natural’ environment (what, the Australian paddock, the Australian national park, or the vague ancestral memory of English fields? ). Such gendering of death-plays is destructive and demeaning, though probably not more than a non-gendered death display, but it’s not liberating in any way for humans or animals alike, and shouldn’t be claimed as such, outside the machinery of chromosome counts. The abuse of dead animals to make nature ‘art’ is an abuse of the animal as subaltern—written into it is not only a politics of indifference and insensitivity, The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists 157 but a demeaning of women as process. Okay, if people are going to be exploiters of animal corpses—removing all sanctity and spirituality in death from their rights and rites, then they shouldn’t pretend it’s to do with redressing the grotesque and omnipresent social and personal wrongs of gender inequality and gender abuse. These are facts. Women have no ‘equal’ status in any real terms, and need to constantly push in every context to redress this. Taxidermy is not an effective medium for this— in many ways, it’s the endgame of patriarchy. And if it is to become a medium to dismantle patriarchy, then it needs to be textual and abstracted, and not literal: that is, no real corpses used in the process! To use death as a metaphor of rights, especially within the faux fertilities of reanimation and ‘art’ (and ‘design’), is a furphy, an advertising ploy, and capitalism’s happy incorporation of women into its consuming maw in yet another profit-orientated context. I am reminded of an artwork I saw at this year’s student art exhibition at the Western Australian Art Gallery—a commentary on different aspects of gun culture, from a form of critique of gun violence to a personal romanticising (attempting to be the opposite) of a ‘farm girl’ holding her rifle, owning her own destiny. The contradictory message of this artwork wasn’t generative or liberating (which contradiction can so often be), but entirely compliant with the patriarchy, entirely compliant with one of the many versions of self-empowerment and self-confidence that gun manufacturers sell to the world (I should say that there were some superb artworks against abuse and degradation of animals in the exhibition— across ‘genders’). There is no ownership of destiny with weapons—no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ version. Guns kill. There is nothing outside this. Maybe the student sees this? If so, she needs to develop her critique—maybe she will, and in doing so offer new ways of critiquing the existence of guns in all contexts. Guns will always be weapons, and only weapons. Guns are patriarchy whatever gender we identify with. And taxidermy is what the faux-animating of dead animals is. How and why people collect the dead is also a question. The fox shot by a farmer/ hunter and brought lovingly ‘back to life’ by the artiste? Gender is part of all we do, and has implications in all we enact, but some gender resistances and affirmations bring positive change, and sadly some don’t. In his 1996 preface to Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments (1996: xii), the translator Michael Hamburger—a very ‘direct’ translator of the poet’s German—said, regarding the act of translation and possible doubts about his method, that ‘freedom to re-interpret, recast and even omit has never been my way. I had probably been needled by Robert Lowell’s description of my kind of translator as “taxidermists”.’ 158 The Nature/ Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists The unwitting and grotesque irony of ‘needling’ aside (always amazes me how even experienced poets who are constantly dealing with the polysemous might miss a slippage if their own politico-ethics don’t allow for a broader expanse of contexts and interpretations), Hamburger’s distress is with the fact of not only bringing a living poem into a death, but that the poem is killed by such ‘directness’ in the first place. He, of course, felt it was not the case, but likely is offering the poem a life in a different habitat that is equivalent to the one it possesses in its originating language. Lowell’s use of ‘taxidermy’ is actually an example of an artistic view of taxidermy as a false art of ‘life’—one only ever moribund, bound in its origins of death. The ‘artistic’ acts of taxidermy as aesthetic enactments of the dead, making the dead perform for the living human audience, are of this category error. What Lowell wanted were ‘translations’ that, above all else, lived in the language in which they were being remade (a fine example of this is Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal ). Ironically, for all their literalness, Hamburger’s Hölderlins largely achieve this quality. But Hamburger’s final riposte to Lowell comes at the beginning of the last paragraph of his preface: ‘Gaps in Hölderlin’s fragmentary later poems have not been filled in with taxidermic stuffing’ (1996: xv). Does this defensiveness actually suggest that Hamburger well knew what his ‘needling’ represented in the discourse, and was using it to brutal effect? In the making of metaphors, language can grow, but its growth doesn’t mean that cause and effect vanish for other uses of the word. Hamburger’s first use of Lowell’s reference is, of course, scare-quoted; his second isn’t. He has grown into his task of re-animating the supposed corpses of the English-language versions of Hölderlin’s poems. The dead poet, the dead era, the prophetic poet, the ‘modern’ audience as receptors, the leap across languages and a multitude of cultural variants, and the alienation of mortality, and the intimacy of dealing with the dead, all coalesce. In these usages, a form of rivalry and trophyism is afoot. Taxidermy is about control, oppression, and hierarchy in its figurative as well as literal manifestations. And in the living world of media and textuality, as I was going to leave this piece at this point, another news item comes in—scientists-taxidermists at the Queensland Museum putting their ‘skills’ on show (‘hands on’) for the public during a science fair (Moss 2017). Here we have the false claims of necessity and environmentalism—the notion that the dead are brought to life in their interaction with an audience (note the classic journos’ promotional ploy: ‘taxidermy comes to life’—that headline ‘joke’ at the expense of the dead). The museum’s colonial and imperialist urge cannot change—a museum that makes use of the dead is denying the rights (and rites) of passing from the cor- Marks in the sand 159 poreal to non-corporeal. A collection; a zoo of the dead. And note that ‘most’ corpses are brought in as roadkill or from some other apparently morally benign source. Most . Historically, naturalists have filled the museums of the world with captured specimens, killed to inform not only scientists but their customers, their audience, and ultimately their paymasters. Taxidermy is an act around which a language of euphemism, deception, dissembling, and gallows humour attempts to dilute ethics. Death is never entertainment! (Though, in the case of say, Jack White, entertainers can clearly be enthusiastic taxidermists—Meg White dabbled with less enthusiasm; so maybe taxidermists feel they can be enthusiastic entertainers). And ‘science’ does not require this, no matter how it’s sold. JK Marks in the sand La Chaise-Dieu, The Chair of God—a largish village in the Massif Central, at the back of Bourke as one might say elsewhere, a really long way from anywhere else up in the high country between Clermont-Ferrand and St Etienne to the east of the Auvergne. Smack in the middle of the hilltop hamlet, a huge and rather unadorned Gothic abbey church, as big as a cathedral, towering over the diminutive village square. Today it is inhabited by a very small monastic community, half a dozen refractory believers persisting in a life of cloistered medieval piety. I am there with a group of disabled people on a summer holiday excursion from the north of France—indeed, from the French enclave around Lille in Flanders, that is actually a part of Belgium if one follows the natural line of the border rather than the large detour it takes deep into the Flemish hinterland. From the flat landscape of Picardy with its lines of poplars crossing the fields of chicory, the only ‘mountains’ the slagheaps of the now defunct coalmines rising on the horizon, and the distinct Flemish architecture, whether the Renaissance old town of Lille or the grimy rows of workers’ houses in the outlying villages where the French-Flemish patois (Chtimi, or more correctly Picard) is still spoken—from the far north, it’s a distinct geographical change to the southern-central hills and pine forests of the Auvergne volcanic plateau. The monks in the huge abbey church are an anomalous recrudescence of a form of holiness that was more or less banished from Europe with the Reformation and the Enlightenment. This handful of stubborn pietists are simultaneously self-effacing, sacrificing a life ‘in the world’ for the daily cycle of prayer and virtual poverty, and self-advertising—their demeanour is defiantly, even arrogantly ostentatious as they stride around the village in their grey habits, 160 Marks in the sand exuding the discreet superiority of total self-renunciation. There is a taint of fanaticism when they announce to me that my wan Anglicanism precludes me from taking communion, as this would be a blasphemy against the Host. The monks have come back, no matter that it is only to this high-country backwater. Their return is commensurate with the crouching bulk of the abbey church somehow stranded in a tiny village in the remote uplands. It’s difficult to tell whether they represent a fad, a brief mode-retro revival of something long gone, or whether they are more genuinely an outer fold in a rippling, undulating, pleated tradition of belief, sometimes hidden, sometimes visible, that maintains its continuity amidst the tidal patterns of confessional history, indeed, across the millennia of the three religions of the book. The abbey cathedral in La Chaise-Dieu was founded around 1000, and the monks are still here—or at least, are here again, having installed themselves there in the mid-1980s, shortly before the moment when our group of disabled people spends a summer fortnight there. What scales of time does one need to take account of these ebbs and flows of belief and the holy life? In a discussion of Islamic State, Owen Bennett-Jones (2016: 18) notes that ‘the violent jihadist ideologues have the advantage of thinking decades or even a century ahead. Islamic State may be on the back foot for now, but in the long term the establishment of the caliphate, whatever its immediate fate, has shown that reversing some of the losses experienced when the Ottoman Empire collapsed is a real possibility.’ The modern monks of the Community of St John and the Kalashnikov-brandishing combatants of IS may seem odd bedfellows, but they share a sense of eschatological time that is largely forgotten in our day and age, but that, perhaps, as the Anthropocene spells the possible end of civilization as we have known it, raises interesting conceptual perspectives for these out-of-joint times. Every morning I wake up several hours before the disabled men with whom I share a room. In my early-morning freedom, I alternate between going running on the thickly wooded slopes below the hilltop village, and, starved of reading-time, cramming in two uninterrupted hours with a book before the bustle of breakfast begins. I set myself a schedule that will allow me, in two-hour slots of approximately fifty pages, to reach the end of Foucault’s (1966) magisterial classic Les Mots et les choses (in English, The Order of Things , 2002 [1970]) by the close of the month-long excursion. (I buy Foucault’s tome shortly before our departure in a small bookshop in the Rue de Valmy behind the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille.) It is as our fortnight in the shadow of the huge abbey cathedral draws to a close that I finally arrive at the concluding passage: Marks in the sand 161 One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. ... In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words ... Only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear ... A change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (Foucault 2002 [1970]: 422) It has taken a good half a century for Foucault’s ominous warnings to begin to seem much more than Quartier Latin rhetoric, but now, as the full extent of planetary ecological destruction becomes evident in the wake of accelerating climate change, and global terrorism of all colours reveals the extent to which humanism has always been a façade for a basso continuo of cruelty (to nature, to animals, to persons), his announcement of the demise of the ‘human’ appears to contain more than a grain of truth. The erasure of the figure in the sand really does seem a plausible narrative now, as the Caribbean hurricanes crank up their ferocity and range, the parched Sahel squeezes the life from the millions of inhabitants on its double lateral fringes (what Weizman and Sheikh [2015] call ‘the conflict shoreline’), and the nuclear powers hurl abuse at each other from either sides of the Pacific and threaten destruction of apocalyptic dimensions. Looking at the somewhat battered Gallimard/ NRF copy of Foucault that I read at La Chaise-Dieu thirty years ago (before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, before 9/ 11, before Abu Ghraib, before the crash of 2008, before the great migrations of 2015), I wonder whether Foucault would have recognized the academic discipline of ‘post-humanism’ that has emerged at the nexus of hybrid cyborg technology, climate change, the death of the subject, and somewhat further down the philosophical track, the ‘new materialist’ or ‘new vitalist’ turns. Perhaps he would not have been surprised, nor much minded not having been consulted. If, in The Order of Things , Foucault gives a prognosis for the demise and the contingency of the ‘human’, he is nothing if not consistent with regard to his own place within these developments. Somewhere in an interview, 162 The Distractions: Global Fascism is a Fact Foucault scornfully rejects his interlocutor’s demand for personal information, pooh-poohing biographism: ‘I know nothing of myself. I don’t even know the date of my death’ [‘Je ne sais rien de moi. Je ne sais même pas la date de ma mort’] (qtd in Auzias 1986: 11). As it turns out, he is right: his death has well and truly come and gone before I even think of opening The Order of Things . RWP The Distractions: Global Fascism is a Fact In attempting to dilute the impact of the crypto-fascists of the now on community (the Australian Broadcasting Commission moves further and further right with each government incision), those who would label the nationalistic and bigoted agendas of right-wing groups around the world as ‘lukewarm’ versions (if versions at all) of earlier fascisms are actually mediating grounds for fascist behaviours. Further, to say ‘fascism’ is really only a term of ‘abuse’ when used regarding the now is to smokescreen the issues: as if it’s a tit-for-tat. I’m afraid that it’s real, and has very specific co-ordinates rooted in an admiration for aspects of historical fascism and the essential fulcrums of racism and notions of national superiority and exclusiveness. Origins and histories of terms are paths to understanding their meaning, but the real-time applications of terms matter inherently. The politics of race and religious hate, the attempts of imperialist and ‘post’-imperialist nations and their supporters to separate immigration to ‘their shores’ from their own invasive activities (past and present) that led to such movements and displacements in the first place, are part of the resurfacing of fascism as much more than just a term of ‘abuse’ by those opposed to rhetoric and actions of the right-wing politicians and their ‘parties’. There is a rising global fascism in which race and religious hatred become an international commodity in the wall-building of the ‘local’, and a language-in-common in creating an exclusive economy of shared values; denying this strongly suggests a sympathy with at least some of the likely outcomes of exclusion. I have come across this again and again with Brexit—nominally leftwing individuals with sympathies for Little Englands as a cultural normative which gradually reifies within their selective application of left values (rights of their workers, their environment, their socialism). To say the signs of fascism might only be evidenced in religious and immigration issues but be less evidenced in other aspects of daily (governmental and social) life of, say, Europe, is a gross dereliction of observation: for those who The Distractions: Global Fascism is a Fact 163 aren’t of the right, or who aren’t sympathetic to the right, or who aren’t benefiting from policies of the right while feigning left-wingism, it is appallingly obvious that European ‘democracies’ are using the military and the police to enforce their belief systems. One doesn’t get to vote to dissolve militaristic nation states to be replaced by community consensus! The French nuclear power network, the tyranny of nuclear weapons, the trashing of the environment, are also expressions of militarised nationalisms, and when linked with anti-immigration and a bigoted religious programme (even in so-called secular states), it is the machinery of fascism we are dealing with, whoever is in power. And when the far-right gets hold of this machinery, the consequences are obvious. No fascism? So the support of Farage and Le Pen and Trump and Putin by overt neo-Nazi groups is incidental? Of Hanson in Australia (who admires Putin’s leadership ‘strength')? Incidental? No—fascism didn’t vanish after the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler and their acolytes; rather it took on different forms, different forms that allow the apologists of the Western state and its fascist underpinnings to thrive, to dominate, to control. We might not have reached a 1939 scenario quite yet, but we are in the early 1930s again and moving inexorably again towards Global Fascism on an horrific and disastrous scale. When we see the bigotries of Australia’s One Nation party becoming part of regular political discourse—the signs promoting candidates (alongside their leader Pauline Hanson), well-known for their far-right views, a common sight at the moment on rural and suburban roadsides, one becomes aware that we ARE in the grip of a fascism that is normative now, that has shifted the discussion to excuse itself as speaking for the people as a whole. And it’s when the people as a whole shift further and further right because this is seen as ‘the way things are’, and their ‘intellectuals’, ‘scholars’, ‘writers’, and media commentators (and others), try to change the language of the discourse to make the fascism of Hitler seem a ridiculous comparison, that we have real problems. The comparisons on many ‘finer points’ and a few blunt points are there to be made. Recognising this, rather than denying it and playing pseudo-historical games with terminologies, is part of a process of preventing the worst. Fascism changes according to the times, but in the end, it is time and all it contains that the fascists seek to control. They reach back right into the DNA—they have been present long before official origins, and operate outside a historian’s conservative (because you are, you are! ) conceptual containment policies. JK 164 Berlin Bunker Berlin Bunker It’s a gateway, says Jens. On one side there’s Schöneberg—upper-middle class, very nice indeed, yuppy professionals. On the other side there’s Kreuzberg, lots of immigrants, mainly Turkish. The bunker is a squat mass, a great lowering cube four storeys high. Its façade is without windows, but there are regularly spaced embrasures for the ventilation slots. The rough-cast poured-concrete walls bulge at ground level where an angular glacis slopes out around the massive steels doors set at twenty-metre intervals from each other. If there is anything that embodies permanency, defies the temporary, it’s the bunker. The bunkers survived the bombs, but they have made an even greater mockery of the wrecker’s ball for what will soon be a century. Built over the bunker, but separated from it by an interval of a few metres, and also spanning the Pallasstraße, which takes you from chic Schöneberg into grubby Kreuzberg, there is a long-strung out block of high-rise flats. It’s called the Palace, says Jens—the Palass, in German—written like the street. He chuckles. From the housing project, whose peeling paint and forest of satellite receivers belies its plush denomination, you can almost touch some of the newly renovated Wilhelmina mansions right next door. The block is famous in Berlin for forming a whole quarter, originally conceived as an instance of 1970s social planning, then decaying into a 1980s slum for poor immigrant families and drug-dealers, only to be cleaned-up in the 1990s and its infrastructure, shops and youth clubs, given a new lease of life. The gridlike façade of perfectly identical balconies bristles with satellite dishes—probably to receive TV programmes direct from Turkey. If it weren’t for the satellite dishes, says Jens, it would look almost like a Le Corbusier block. The bunker, a relic from the nightly air-raids of the Second World War, is not a gateway. It seems appropriate that it is slightly to one side, a monolith too massive to be demolished, a monument to the Berliners who hurried into its dungeon-like depths at the sound of the air-raid sirens night after night for almost half a decade. Its own history is grim. Such bunkers were constructed by imported slave labour from all over occupied Europe. If the difference between an empire and a colonial system is that the latter transforms the economic structures of the subject territories, while the former does not, the Third Reich went some way to becoming a colonizing power, siphoning off labour, food, and raw materials from all over its fiefdoms stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. By the end of the war, the Todt Organization had ten million slave labourers working in munitions factories, repairing bomb damage to the cities—and building enor- Berlin Bunker 165 mous reinforced concrete monoliths all around Europe: submarine pens, flak towers, the Atlantic Wall on the French littoral (Virilio 1994), a gigantic submarine works with its own dry dock, Bunker ‘Valentin’, on the River Weser near Bremen (Buggeln 2016). That bunker was not a gateway, despite the watergate through which the completed submarines waterbirthed from the Leviathan. More an Orphic entrance to the underworld. Literally so for those who died of starvation or drowned in the poured concrete while working on the ‘Valentin’ site. Or those who were killed, in the shadow of this particular Berlin bunker, by an allied bomb’s direct hit on their makeshift barracks next to the building-site. The Palace is a gateway, says Jens. Over the bunker, and above the busy traffic passing beneath along Pallasstraße, with a foot on each side of the street, the flats are strung in a long aerial span, dividing Berlin’s own Occident and Orient. The bunker, as it were, guards the gateway like an oversized porter’s lodge, not unlike another gateway not far from here built on the same geographical axis. A couple of kilometres directly north of here stands the Brandenburg Gate, which also faces East and West. During the Cold War the Berlin Wall, graffiti on one side and death strip on the other, skirted it by a few metres. Another monument to a frozen historical era that, it transpired, was remarkably temporary. After the fall of the Wall, the concrete slabs, perforated by the ‘Wall-woodpeckers’’ hammers, once again became the gateway between East and West—two halves of Germany which, though joined politically, remain quite distinct, divided by prejudices, mutual suspicion and resentment. Jens, who grew up in the erstwhile GDR, is one of the younger generations who appears to negotiate these invisible divisions with aplomb, switching between East Berlin and university-educated idiolects at will. In a sense, these gateways belong to him too. In a larger context, though, Berlin has once again become a gateway to the West, taking on anew its time honoured role of ‘transit city’—the door to Western Europe for its Eastern neighbours (Rada 2002). Today you hear as much Russian and Polish in the Berlin U-Bahn as Turkish. But despite their apparent lack of connection, the bunker and the Palace do have a common history apart from the mere coincidence—the few metres the building regulations stipulate as minimum distance between their respective concrete surfaces—that makes them share the same site. The slave labourers were repatriated in 1945. A decade later, as the American-funded economic miracle of post-war West Germany got under way, immigrant labour was once again needed—and the same concept served as a template for its organization. Young expendable labour was imported, to be repatriated once it was no longer serviceable, on the assumption that the long-term costs (those of work-related medical conditions in the main) would be footed by the home country (Ha 2004). On Filomena Coppola's Earthly Tales Exhibition, Western Australia (2017) 167 Those couple of metres separating the roof of the bunker and the underside of the Palace measure the temporal interval that separated Todt-construction and Marshall-reconstruction—made manifest in two generations of poured concrete in varying tones of grey. Between the permanent and the permanent there is something that one might term the temporary—a vibrant fissure, aperture, lieu de passage. The space of the Gastarbeiter—to which my own family has a particularly intimate connection—a place of swerving away-from-and-towards. Of multiple passages, through lieux de passage, from the terraced zemljište via terraces of poured concrete, wooden form and steel reinforcing rods, to Schrebergarten and back. Where is the temporary, where is the permanent, in all this? The mouldering concrete of the bunker, or the toppled walls of the olive terraces that barely registered the Yugoslav navy shelling from Split Channel in 1991? RWP (with thanks also to Stephen Muecke) On Filomena Coppola’s Earthly Tales Exhibition at Gallery 152, York, Western Australia (2017) This is an exhibition of the tactile—you’ll want to touch, but you can’t, and that tension will generate insight upon insight in a cascading run of sensations. For these works are about sensations, as much as they are about displacement, disconnection, but also invitation and entry points. There are three series of work here; each of the threads is in conversation, in this superb open space where light and bareness coalesce. The natural elements are displaced, as the Murray Cod you will see drawn on ancient petrified redgum sanded and polished to a sheen, and the orchids you see in their aching leaves and stalks and blossoms are a long way from home. Yet such separations create empathy, for the fish is trying not only to find its way home, to understand its own issues of belonging, but also to tell us something about our own conditions of belonging and isolation. In a sense, the threads interweaving in this distant space are about empathy and hope. And as a silhouette of the ‘Fish Out of Water—Murray Cod’ series there is an earlier work, and some understanding of the drives of this work is useful in approaching ‘Murray Cod.’ Filomena Coppola has said: Fish out of Water—Murray Cod is a development from an intervention project that began at summer solstice, 2013 and continued through summer solstice 2014. I have been painting a lone sardine on a river pebble—the sardine is a reference to the waters near Sardegna and the Port of Napoli—the port where my parents began their journey to Australia. I then released a pebble at each of the eight sabbats. These represent the 168 On Filomena Coppola's Earthly Tales Exhibition, Western Australia (2017) earth changes of the summer and winter solstice, the equinoxes and the four cross quarters of Lammas, Samhain, Imbolc and Beltane. Often associated with pagan festivals, I am acknowledging this history as well as connecting with the earth changes throughout the year; the seasons, light and my own connection to place. If you’re interested in the dynamics of this fascinating project, there’s a downloadable pdf available via Filomena’s website. And though these sardines are in evidence in the framed works here (which constitute one of the three main narratives in the exhibition), crossing Australia on their long, almost timeless journey, carrying stories across the world’s oceans and acting as shamans and healers on behalf of the earth itself, while also functioning as cultural intermediary and creating a hybrid presence and new stories as they progress, the real focus of the ‘Fish Out of Water’ installations here is the ‘Murray Cod’ of which the artist notes: This work Fish out of Water—Murray Cod is a continuation of this project. Working with petrified red gum, which is between 5000-9000 years old and sourced from the Murray River, I made nine organic forms—grinding and sanding the wood into forms that are beautiful to hold. The petrified red gum carries within it stories of the Murray River, this continent, its cultural history, and the floods, droughts, fires that have affected this landscape. I feel that each organic form vibrates with the history that it carries. On each, I have painted a Murray Cod—a fish out of water—a comment on this changing continent, its climate, culture and demographic. I then travelled the length of the Murray River and selected nine locations beginning at Cudgewa Creek and ending where the river runs to the ocean at Goolwa [Artist’s statement—website]. And we can see that journey here, and we can connect with its cyclical movement, and share the journeys. This vital predatory fish of the Murray-Darling system—one that nurtures and protects its eggs—is under threat in its own home. It is looking for a way back to its stories, its narrative of being. And, in addition to this, we can all question our own understandings of cultural presence and relativism, and the responsibility we all have to respect the different stories of belonging, and the different stories of journeying. I appreciate and admire the respect shown to Indigenous knowledge and presence, and the power of that belonging. The other thread of this exhibition, the ‘Wallflower’ series, is in part about sexuality and female subjectivity, and this doesn’t necessarily mean it requires the male, though the male may be there, hovering around the edges. It’s about identity more than sexuality, and as sensual it is, it’s for the ‘female’ to decide, to make choices. On Filomena Coppola's Earthly Tales Exhibition, Western Australia (2017) 169 In many ways, these flowers are speaking to women, though not exclusively— these are not to be left sitting on the sidelines neglected, waiting to be asked to dance, they are far too active in their apparent quietude for that. These are suggestions of female bodies—but there’s the furred implication of male presence as well, but maybe that’s not essential here. What’s challenging in all this is that these ‘parts’ are closer than many would like to think—they fur together, they grow together, they are part of the living organism, of the essence of life itself. There’s nothing prurient in this—it’s threatening, sure, but life is about risk and we need to understand our discomforts as much as our pleasures. So, enticing and disturbing, maybe, at once? They are also outside sexuality, as they are outside the plant, the botanical. They are vegetable becoming animal and vice versa; they are the interweaving of all life into the moment of observation and experience. And the desire to touch. First thing I did when approaching the remarkable ‘Wallflower—Meow, make me purr’, was reach out to touch, then remind myself, No, that’s not permitted, not part of the rules of encounter. Step back, respect the intactness of the image before you, and all it represents. Not only did I want to stroke the fur as one might a partner’s hair, or an animal’s fur, but to stroke it against the grain, the wrong way. Because there’s something disturbing going on in these drawings, something that makes the pastels hyper-real beyond illustration, and something almost carnivorous. Not as dentata, or as invasiveness, but as a dangerous kind of welcome. Talking with Filomena, she mentioned the animal belly seam in the fur, and I agreed, I had encountered that in the work as well—something liminal, a line that is vulnerable and yet assertive. The irony of the docile image of the wallpaper background, the polite and muted domestic, is that within the walls of rooms the secrets are held, the risks taken in love and life, and shared encounters made. There is something threatening and rebellious in all this; with its undertones of the anarchist designer William Morris, one is also reminded of where the decorative meets craft. And also something investigative, as we find with the sardine swimming through the neat, small frames of botany, zoology, and rainfall data on the Australian map in the three confrontations with data and subjectivity—what facts we have, what we know, and yet the ‘touch’, the qualities of life itself are often missed. As the sardine ‘swims’ on the dry dead eucalypt leaves in these montages, it lifts details into the sensorium, into the realm of environmental investigation, consequence, and we hope, healing. But we are ahead of ourselves here, because we need to find the Murray Cod trying to re-enter the river, a river that has suffered horrendously from environmental degradation, that is a barometer for the consequences of colonialism. Yet On Filomena Coppola's Earthly Tales Exhibition, Western Australia (2017) 171 it’s also a river of ongoing beauty and strength, and that’s to be embraced; the presence of people has been part of its being for tens of thousands of years, and the new migrants to Australia of the last two hundred or so years, or, indeed, of the last decades, can be part of its repair and its spirit if they listen, learn and sense. I see the ‘Fish Out of Water’ Series as very much about healing, about return, about belonging. The merging of textures in the ‘pebbles’—the wooden stones, if you like—carrying the fish as they ‘bed down’ in different locations on or near the river, or by the sea shore, absorb the qualities of those locations, and return to their homes with the knowledge of their experiences. This is an ongoing conversation, in which learning is essential—Filomena Coppola has gifted us a role in this narrative, and that is to find the fish, to witness, to return them to their homes, and in doing so share in this illumination. For me, touch—the tactile—is a vital component of understanding. I was lucky enough to have the artist hand me one of the stones—the Barmah stone—to hold, to nurture in my palm. It’s a disconcerting and reassuring experience at once—a sense of breaking a taboo, of being where you shouldn’t, and yet entirely ‘natural’. Now, viewers can’t touch these objects, but they will want to, and that’s the point. On their wooden platforms with photos of sites where the fish out of water will try to find its way back, they tempt us to pick them up and put them in place. I asked a couple of people which fish they connected with, and three said the image of the reeds, as the fish was soon going to work its way through the reeds back into water. Another said, ‘All of them’—a collective experience of return and belonging. In all of this, the hybrid, the identity made up of many experiences and backgrounds and even origins, is part of the understanding, part of the beauty and the trauma. No easy solutions are offered in this, and neither, I think, can art do that. Art is about ambiguity as much as resolution. Mentally, away from the space of the exhibition, my mind keeps returning the installation of/ from/ out of Bonegilla, and its relatively recent history as a migrant camp of many Nissen huts, and the transitions from one life into another. All lives are part of presence, and the fish returning to water is a complex journey, and involves many stories; these are fixed and unfixed, and have a massive breadth. So, respect and welcome and difficulty and reconciliation and hope and desire and questioning and conservation and learning. And touch. Filomena Coppola said to me as we were looking at the image of the fish on its ‘pebble’ near rock-pools that will probably dry out, leaving it more stranded than ever in an alienating landscape, but we hope, we hope against the odds, that she intends, ‘Layers of different cultures in landscapes...’, and this is surely the case. 172 Fractal Merri Creek So, I declare this beautifully uncomfortable exhibition open—it is seductive and disturbing in so many different ways, and it is generative, and searches for a healing and a healthy future. And may you embrace its talismanic seeing-stones—touching them with your mind’s eye, but not your fingers! JK Fractal Merri Creek The creative process of writing—what does it have to do with belonging and not belonging. How does it intersect with place? Is it a mode of separation, of seeking to cross a gap, to fill the absence with a sign that always pushes its referent away towards the horizon? Is writing itself perhaps inevitably, fatally, a mode of not belonging, of permanent exile? Here I am, back in Germany, gazing out across the snow-covered rooves of the French quarter, towards the grey profiles of the leafless larches and the grey-green pines. Is the memory of Merri Creek that now assails me, the recollection of river gums and casuarinas, of magpies warbling and bell birds calling, not simply a genre of elegiac longing for a natural plenitude that is both temporally and spatially remote? Yet I might well have asked the same question as I scribbled down my notes (now I am back in the earlier palimpsestic substrata of this multi-layed, multi-located and multitemporal meditation) in the back garden in Northcote, already a kilometre and half an hour removed from my morning running route. At what moment was I truly there, as I jogged between the trees in the early morning air with the rumble of suburban traffic somewhere in the distance? Or, for that matter, where was ‘there’, if I was in it? Merri Creek, with its carefully replanted areas of wild native grasses, its fenced-in scrub, its landscaped ‘bush’ which is hardly a decade or two old, is already remote from ‘itself ’, remote from the supposedly ‘authentic’ and ‘intact’ environment it represents for gentrified urbanites’ complacent leisure. The recaptured bushland of Merri Creek (for a couple of decades now, local community groups have been regreening the environment, culminating in the recent regeneration of the platypus population! ) is like a sign whose referent is permanently deferred as we go back in time from the first days of expanding suburban sprawl (weatherboard cottages and Californian bungalows) to the moment of the first government land sales in 1839 and perhaps the signing of Batman’s treaty in 1835, and before that to millennia of Wurundjeri custodianship of the land. Even that land was not ‘pristine’, but underwent thousands of years of native re-working according to the ecological economy of clearingand management-by-fire (Gammage 2011; Pyne 1998). Fractal Merri Creek 173 But this way of thinking of the ‘ersatz’ bush, a sort of natural fetish which stands in for an absence, constitutes the natural environment as an always already lacking, never able to ‘recover’—or ‘re-cover’ a natural lacunae. But the environment doesn’t work like that. It does recover from catastrophes, astoundingly so (whoever would have thought that the Alaskan ocean could itself clean up the Exxon Valdez mess? ) even if the current economy of global degradation may be irreversible. The ecology of fire assumed that loss and destruction was part of an economy of plenitude. And perhaps nature is more versatile, creative, inventive, and wily than we give it credit—always making the best out of a bad job. Nature doesn’t seem to subscribe to doom and gloom scenarios, but appears to create and go on creating regardless, taking every moment as a new beginning (Tsing 2015). As I zoom out again then, spatially and temporally, from my mini-paradise of the Merri Creek path, I look at it differently, seeing it not as a fake covering over the scabby surface of once poor working-class, now rich yuppie inner-suburbia, but rather, as an exemplar of an irrepressible exuberance in the natural world. Time to re-envision that strip of urban bushland as something that will always exceed those neat fences lining the bike trail. And it’s time to zoom further. (Fractal zooming, in fact, is the route to the discovery of complexity—which is plenitude and creativity, irrepressible. Zooming at one level takes us back to another, and vice versa. The fractal focus moves in and out, replacing a single hierarchy. There is no place of origin, each structure refers us to a complexity within itself, which in turn refers us to another complexity within itself … or without… and the levels don’t buttress each other, they generate each other…) As I scribble my notes in the Northcote back garden, and even more distantly (back up a level in the spatiotemporal palimpsest here), rememorize them at my Tübingen workplace, that natural world is not a lack, and not distant. Already the sun is coming out over the snow-covered rooves of the former French army barracks, and the green is glistening on the slopes of the Wankheimer Täle, beckoning my self into that continuum of forest that crosses Tübingen, indeed the whole of Baden-Württemberg, from north-east to south-west, pointing, like these words themselves with their own ecology of creative self-invention, however restrained, even further south, and further still… RWP 174 Exploitation of Cocos (Keeling) Islands Exploitation of Cocos (Keeling) Islands I lived on West Island, one of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean back in the mid-90s. I wrote a long sequence of poems on the islands (collected in Lightning Tree [2004], with some of those poems included in my recent Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 [2016a], and also a novel, Post-colonial [2009]). I have maintained an interest in the islands and follow any news relating to them. I was thus astonished and appalled to see the Premier of Western Australia’s latest statement (Weber 2017) of cultural insensitivity, ignorance, and grotesque exploitation. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands have a fraught colonial history, and the Cocos-Malay people who live on Home Island have a cultural life that extends back to the first half of the nineteenth century (and obviously beyond that to their places of heritage). They were horrendously exploited by white colonial overlords (starting with Alexander Hare and his harem slaves, and his conflict with the Scotsman John Clunies-Ross and his family who arrived in 1827), right through to the late 1970s. As indentured labourers who were paid in tokens (‘Cocos Rupee’) only usable at the islands’ store, the Cocos-Malay people have the right to self-determination even if they opted to go with Australian citizenship during the 1983 referendum on self-determination. In 1978, John George Clunies-Ross (whose family ruled the islands across two centuries) sold the islands to Australia—forced to do so by the Australian government due to the overtly colonial exploitation model under which the islands were being ruled, though the islands had technically been under Australian administrations since 1955. Yes, sold. That West Island is an extension of Australia is arguable in some ways (though I’d refute this as well); it is certainly not a playground for the Colin-Barnett leisurists. Barnett’s insensitive implication that Bali exists as a tropical paradise for ‘Westerners’ (specifically the Western Australian versions) to play out their fantasies is obscene. Western tourism’s impact on Balinese cultural and day-today life has been immense and very often negative. All the economic-rationalist arguments in the world won’t offset the abuse that is the tourist reconfiguring of ‘Kuta Beach’, that is the mockery of spirituality on the island. Home Islanders of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are of Sunni Islamic faith, and they have been so since long before they were ‘purchased’ by Australia. The religious bigotry that has embroiled Australia in the hatefest that has led to so many Muslims being targeted by right-wing ‘patriots’ is shown for its absurdity Exploitation of Cocos (Keeling) Islands 175 in the fact of the Cocos Islands having been Muslim (and to some extent animist) since long before there was even a Commonwealth of Australia. In fact, Cocos-Malay culture is complex and diverse, and people of many different geographical and ethnic origins came together as ‘Cocos-Malays’, and though the people only number in the hundreds (on the islands; many other Coco-Malays have emigrated elsewhere in Australia and Malaysia), a Cocos-Malay language has essentially become its own language, and aspects of island culture belong only to those islands. I don’t doubt that some Cocos-Malays, and probably quite a few non-Cocos Malays running businesses on West Island, would welcome this message of development, but I personally know many Cocos-Malays who wouldn’t. There’s a difference between having interested visitors and making a massive exploitative assault on culture and rights that comes with isolated places being turned into the playgrounds of holidaymakers looking for pleasure, leisure, and a beach party. Sensitivity and respect are the key in this. My novel Post-colonial was actually an attempt to articulate an independence movement under difficult economic conditions. It follows a character who has gone to the islands to experience oral cultural histories, while wrestling with his own demons of addiction and disillusionment with Western life. I send my best to those people on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands who need to know that some people on the ‘mainland’ actually do care that their cultural identities and ‘ways of life’ are respected. Here is my poem to Mr Colin Barnett and other would-be exploiters: Graphology Endgame 15: Cocos Islands Party Plan ‘Just think about it—our own tropical paradise. An alternative to Bali.’ Colin Barnett, Premier of Western Australia The Premier of Western Australia wants to ( re )turn the Cocos Islands ( in )to a colonial playground. Sensitivity swirls about his corporate state of excitement. Like a cyclone. Shattering coral, threatening homes with breezy annihilation. Those small risings of land made so slowly— particle by particle—way out 176 Exploitation of Cocos (Keeling) Island in the Indian Ocean, carrying a legacy he will never translate, hearing only English. This threat to the spirits that simmer in the lagoon, drift through coconut palms, scuttle over the sand dunes of South Island. The Big White is sailing back in with the tide. The Big House is rising again. Small sailing craft are becoming quaint . Ghosts indentured. Drinkers at The Club on West Island are charging their glasses. Prospects of a fire sale? Can he possibly know that Hari Raya doesn’t imbibe his eternal beach-party movie, his piss-up for patriots with palm-heart daiquiris? JK High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place 177 High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place It is the air of atrocity. An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. George Oppen (from Of Being Numerous [1968: 22]) When I was a boy, actually through to the age of sixteen, I was obsessed with explosives and rocketry. Looking back from this point in my life, as a pacifist of thirty-plus years, I am bemused as to why the physics of explosions so fascinated me then. It was ‘technical’ and not ‘political’, though I was also in those days interested in things ‘military’, especially in terms of technology, equipment, ordnance and their relationship to strategy and tactics. The Australian military could have made good use of me if I had not had a pacifist epiphany (eventually). And when I read of Al Weimorts, the civilian engineer working for the US Air Force Research Laboratory who designed the GBU-43/ B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb used yesterday on a Taliban cave network in Afghanistan, a horror of disconnection falls on me in so many ways. Obviously, the sheer brutality of this largest non-nuclear explosive device ever deployed as an act of war is horror enough in itself. This device, that has a one-kilometre-plus blast radius, and that will inevitably cause non-targeted casualties (though in the aftermath this has been denied), is the inheritor of the Vietnam forest-clearing 15000-pound bombs, ‘daisy cutters’, used by the US airforce, and then the bunker-busting bombs used by the US in the first Iraq (Gulf) War. The glibly nicknamed MOAB (I won’t even begin to untangle the Biblical subtexts), was designed for use in the last Iraq war but not ‘called upon’. Al Weimorts, who died of a brain tumour in 2005, and was even celebrated in a New York Times obituary, was also the designer of cluster bombs used in Vietnam. On his hands is the blood of those killed by his death devices. He was a ‘righteous’ murderer, in the same way the designer Kalashnikov was (even with his near-the-end epiphany), or, for that matter, Leonardo da Vinci. Many of us are personally implicated in this in subtle and obvious ways—and that is for each of us to consider and work out. Personally, as a child and early teenager, the fascination I had for ‘explosions’ (more than their ‘application’) was intense, and was only moved on from when I underwent an ethical and High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place 179 political shift at seventeen, developing an awareness that my politics of action were tied to the place/ s I was in; that ‘explosions’ were a contradiction of place, that all I loved and respected was undone not only physically but also conceptually by my experiments. When I exploded a ‘device’ to observe for effect, or set off a rocket to see what kind of altitude it could achieve, I was indifferent to the effect it had on the immediate ecology. The same kind of view of place as a performative stage for individual desire is what allowed me in those days to shoot things and fetishise weapons (all of which I long ago renounced and still renounce). Now I see that when those kinds of seeings are directed through work and patriotism into the Al-Weimorts-take on the world (that man with his children and grandchildren, well-dressed even at work, neatly groomed in the pics), the gap between being in a place and destroying that place is wider than death. Weimorts witnessed the one previous explosion of a prototype of the weapon in 2003 at a site in the US (we see a forest in the background which we imagine was vaporised), so he physically felt and saw what it did to place. A place set aside for the testing of weapons, a place that had lost cultural and ecological variables to ‘necessity’, a replacement of ontology of existence with temporariness (the site pre-explosion) and a new presence of emptiness (post-explosion). The explosion caused by that prototype resulted in a mushroom cloud that could be seen 32 kilometres away. Now, many years after Weimorts’s death, the Trump administration has used Afghanistan as a site of demonstration to impose its new global order. The American command in Afghanistan is denying that the use of this weapon is connected with Trump administration posturing, saying it was purely an internal ‘on-the-ground’ military decision made because the terrain and target were ‘tough’—but only the deluded would accept this bit of propaganda as fact. This was an act to show the world that the US is ‘permanent’ (at least the pro-Trump parts of it! ) while the rest of us are ‘temporary’. The US military used ‘daisy cutter’ bombs (at least one) early in the capitalist war in Afghanistan to vaporise entire deployments of Taliban, so a country was already made temporary before the new permanence of mass destruction. The non-nuclear is sold as a step down from total annihilation, but it’s also the calling-card of the total destruction that will come. The simulacrum of a nuclear weapon without the ‘fallout’. Just deletion and cascading effects on habitat (of humans, birds, animals, micro-organisms, those scarce plants in ‘desert’, and inhospitable—how can we even use this word? —place/ s). The desire to go nuclear, to merge the theory of general relativity, the escapism of wormholes, and the mediated ethics of Einstein (representative of human aspiration and ‘genius’), into a digestible paradox of being, of being under 180 High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place conditions of capitalist-state ‘liberties’. The ultimate home defence is to attack before they get to the door. In the same way the Geneva Convention underpins warfare by defining degrees of abuse, in the same way the RSPCA underwrites the slaughter industry as long as it operates within their definitions of non-cruelty, so the MOAB is the atomic bomb when you’re not having (or allowed to have) an atom bomb. It is a lot less ‘powerful’ than an atomic weapon, but it makes a big impression and causes big damage. Also, as a thermobaric weapon, the MOAB (it offends to use the acronym— they wish us to use it... This is the problem with all namings) sucks oxygen from the area around the detonation to feed the reaction, and in doing so evacuates space/ place of even that marker of life. Through the caves and tunnels in the mountains it was targeted at, it deletes in manifest ways. There is more than a symbolic act in this. The ultimate message: all living things, all places, are temporary before the might of US imperialism. Weimorts is the enabler of this imperialism, rewarded with the signs of the empire. Further, it’s not just a deletion of people (potentially on a massive scale), but also the deletion of the markers of culture and even the topography, geology and ecology of the place. This particular weapon is not a deep-penetration weapon, but is said to have ‘low to medium’ level below-ground impact with an absolute deletion of what’s on the surface in the blast range. Yet it does affect what’s below (thus its use against a broader cave system), so its implications are those of terraforming—rescaping the planet for eventual colonisation. There is no gap between the cultural weapons of radical religious bomb-makers and the Al Weimorts of the United States. Both look to ‘defend’ by ‘attacking’—conserving and extending their belief systems in the process—and also to remove the markers of the previous culturality and topography. It’s worth noting that the Russian military brags of having a ‘conventional’ bomb at least four times more ‘powerful’ than the MOAB, and the Americans themselves have a ‘bunker-buster’ that has a higher ‘conventional’ explosive yield. And so to the the ultimate deployment of ‘nukes’. Nukes —that word that has almost become affectionate euphemism in a gaming age, as a kind of reflex action regarding power and inadequacy... Trump thinks of these endgames in the same way... Because they are so real, they are made unreal... A taunt in the playground in which the taunters, the victims, and the playground, are all temporalities... Slippages in time-space that have everything to do with going to sleep and nothing to do with waking. The temporary itself is forced through a wormhole of temporal fantasising—vast time-scales are drawn upon, the halflife of plutonium bandied about like military budgets. We live in this grotesque High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place 181 unreality where place is localised or internationalised by causational connection, and shared responsibility is somehow lost. It was with disturbed interest that I read of an ‘end-state’ in military-political thinking today (I wrote this article on ‘Good Friday’ but am revising on the Saturday)—its glibness is horrifying (and I think likely also to the academic who deployed it) and in writing my Graphology Endgame poems it sadly has to come into play as a static in the background, or a different form of fallout. This from the ABC news website regarding the use of the MOAB, quoting Professor John Blaxland (of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University): ‘“This is telegraphing to the opponents of the Government in Kabul that the United States … is now upping the ante, and is prepared to kill many people to achieve its political end-state,” he said. That end-state, said Professor Blaxland, is for the Taliban to cave and for the US to be able to reduce its presence in Afghanistan’ (Viney 2017). So we have pursuits of end-state while playing humanity to an end-game. Grotesque. As a young person obsessed with ordnance, an obsession I no longer have, I went through a variety of decision-making processes every time I made an explosion. My interest was specifically in the rapid uptake of oxygen in a reaction (the MOAB exploits this to the fullest) and the colours an ignition produced. I was less interested in the stress placed on the container in which the ignition took place, though I almost died (along with two others) when a 3mm steel pipe went off ahead of time and sent shrapnel three feet underground, the explosion being heard 5kms away. That was my epiphany—because of coming close to losing life and causing the loss of life, but also because (a) the ‘controlled’ event did not behave as I’d expected (b) the ecology around the event changed so decisively that I finally understood that such events have long-lasting effects on topography and on culturality. They permanently change what we (especially as kids) might consider as temporary and continually available to change (our little ‘improvements’! ) or a change can happen because it was ‘nothing much to worry about’ to begin with—that is, the change can have repercussions. And such events do change surroundings—they damage flora and fauna, of course, but also a place’s psychology. They make it ‘feel’ vulnerable. They place it (and I choose the word carefully) on tenterhooks . What I was doing (in the name of ‘science’! ) was wrong, and I turned against it, which given I was also deeply interested in things military back then, was surely a healthy thing. And as my politics and ethics evolved, my repugnance at such terraforming, such cultural impressings, has led me to metaphors as redemptive acts of place ecology. Having said that, I think creative thinkers can hide behind the figurative while still being fully implicated in the damage being done. Metaphors can be 182 High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place violent as well as healing; but more than that, they can create a reality in which the performance of a screen-place, in which the creator’s morality is played off against the (bad) morality of the non-creative materialist. We surely have to be wary of this. I am looking at a photo in the public domain, presumably supplied by the US airforce to the world at large, with the caption: ‘Al Weimorts (right), the creator of the GBU-43/ B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, and Joseph Fellenz, lead model maker, look over the prototype before it was painted and tested.’ Rather than paste the photo in, I’ll tell you what I see. (‘Brown bear brown bear, what do you see? ’, that classic of American literature my son grew up with, that prepares ways of seeing that loop our selves into a material reality, a linguistic and visual presence in place.) I see two men and the ‘homemade’ bomb before it becomes the industrial weapon (apparently, to this point, only fourteen have been manufactured); they look serious and yet ‘mature’. The ‘model-maker’—such a ‘play’ title—and the designer, both exhibiting confidence and gravitas, there’s a most serious production. And yet almost casual, too—we can whip this up in the back shed because that’s US know-how and culturisation. This place of making can replace all places. And more than that is not worth noting. It is what it is—from someone who played weapons inspector in Iraq, a seeker for weapons of mass destruction, a weapon of mass destruction ‘half in love with easeful death’. The weapon looks solid, well constructed, permanent. Its moment of destruction is an eternal marker of human endeavour—the post-it note on place, dropped from high altitude (‘air supremacy’) from the back of a cargo plane (an MC-130) and ‘guided in’ with GPS, from here to there. The ironies implode in direct proportion to the explosion. Oh, and the men touching the unpainted weapon: lovingly, cautiously, and confidently. All of this, in the theatre of the photograph. And never forget the early days of the war: Halliburton, Bush, gas. Lest we forget. These horrific doings in the unravelling of the narrative of human presence on the planet—its unravelling by the few who have the power, also of all our narratives in our inability to prevent them, and in some cases, complicity—are a denial of the essence of place in the human condition. By disarranging place, we deny place. Such massive violence against life and presence, against the markers of belonging, is showing our temporariness while claiming an imperial permanence in which power and enslavement to death are projected through time and space. All our stories of implication are relevant to attempts to reassert Eros over Thanatos, to reconfigure the spatial and temporal variables of our shared existence. We need to analyse the play, the actions, the events, and the narratives of our own lives from earliest memory and see how they have participated in or diverged from the deathstory of global and local militarism. High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place 183 On occasions, I have turned to Maurice Blanchot’s (1995) The Writing of the Disaster for ‘pithy’ summations of horror. But it too often fails me. Regarding Eros and Thanatos he says, and I can see this, ‘There is not the death drive; the throes of death are thefts from unity, lost multitudes.’ (1995: 46) But as part of his essay, Blanchot also cites Mallarmé: ‘ There is no explosion except a book .’ (ibid: 7). This is under a separate ‘bullet’ and sits alone: it is a critique, of course, of its own absurdity, but it is also given reflective space. It is true, and yet absurd. Under the MOAB blast, in the caves of the violent and sadistic and deathcultish enemy, there are gestures of the human. Snuffed collectively. And insects and birds move above. And creatures we ignore. Snuffed. The English teacher, Mallarmé, has to shake our foundations linguistically to make such a declaration simultaneously float, and attach. All our personal stories validating our presence, the presence of our families, our people. As entwined (or not) in place, the land/ s. And yet, the MOAB is still made and many people are proud of its making. It’s what you’d expect. The schools that made the engineer. The jobs. The belief systems. Family (liking it or not). Community. Circumstance. Notions of enemies. The fallout is devastating. We register the explosion on a seismograph. And yet, there is no spike in measurements of radioactive fallout. That almost ‘largest’ non-nuclear device. But then Blanchot follows with his next—or his publisher’s next—bullet point: ‘The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. What this does not mean is that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual’ (1995: 7). Yes, because all writing has been vaporised. Even those who in their caves see literature as corruption, even their hands for writing and typing have been vaporised. The page is gone. No new pages replace. Does the translator of Blanchot, does Blanchot himself know what ‘beyond the pale’ does in this context? Probably. And if so, what of beyond writing beyond fragments beyond disaster? The disaster has been deleted. This post-disaster acceptance. These acts we perform after hearing the news, as we all do. These copyings and rewritings of our own narratives. Just a few ‘paragraphs’ before he mentions the Bishop Faustus, Saint Augustine in his Confessions writes: ‘Clearly the wicked do not know that you are everywhere. But you are not bound within the limits of any place. You alone are always present, even to those who set themselves apart from you’ (1961: 92). I treat this in a secular light on Good Friday, the most sacred Christian time. I copy this onto this ‘page’ in the long hemispheric of a secular patriotism that allows such barbarity as the MOAB to even exist. Make no mistake that such massive deployments of violence require spiritual sanction: even the most brutal High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place 185 states will make use of any ‘permission’ and validation they can acquire. The wicked do know ‘God’ is everywhere, and that God is unbound by the limits of place. And the same for the temporal. But this idea that place is a human limitation over-ridden or over-come or incorporated by God is a very earthly desire: the desire to be larger, and controlling of place. And what better way to do that than delete place. To replace ‘place’ with the constructs of military-capitalism, fill in the holes with the machinery of ‘liberty’. The metaphors of othered history that we pick over for evidence of material and non-material existence are the permissions we collect for our actions, collectively and individually. We could all stand up and refuse! If that happened, the war machine would stop, and the God so many want to believe in would be respected in all place(s), not in acts of hubristic and horrific deletion. Graphology Endgame 63 We wish to extract from what we can’t see? Oxygen from surroundings to facilitate an explosion spirit from emptiness to fill those voids A love—no, no, a need — for gravity wheedling us out. Or a question of limits, statutes, gasping for aspirations. Workshops of erasure. JK Wild Boars on the Panzerstraße 187 Wild Boars on the Panzerstraße Not at dawn or at dusk, but in full daylight, one late Sunday morning, I see a column of wild boars hurry across the long concrete compass-needle of the Panzerstraße as it stretches before me on its east-west axis. After that, I keep my eyes open with a vague sense of threat—it is the beginning of spring, who knows whether these animals may be in an aggressive mood. They, plainly, have no fear, however, of the other threats perhaps still lurking in the forest—old cartridges, detonators, mortar shells and whatnot that the most recent purges may have missed. The Panzerstraße is a remarkable piece of military engineering that has survived the end of the Cold War and the signing of the ‘two plus four’ peace treaty in 1990. It does a graceful concrete curve through a swathe of forest that was once littered with gutted tank hulls and unexploded munitions. A lot of my ideas come to me there. Like the trajectory of the peloton of wild boars, perpendicular to the concrete-slab road, it seems that the forest injects its own impulses of green thought into the forward meanderings of my musings as I jog along the long avenue between the mass of its pines, larches, oaks and beeches. It’s hardly virgin bush, but it has crowded back in on the cleared groove the military engineers cut through the sylvan density. That new growth encapsulates the forest’s capacity to persist as historical epochs come and go. Indeed, the Panzerstraße does a big loop that reminds one of Joyce’s (1975: 3, 628) epic ‘riverrun’ and its ‘recirculation’. From the French Quarter (the Französisches Viertel), it snakes past the Wagenburg, up the steep slope of the Schindhau, along one side of the narrow valley cut by the Blaulach stream, ending in a turning circle for the military vehicles on the bottom slopes of the hill called Landkutscher’s Kap. After that, the Panzerstraße peters out, joining up with a narrower gravel track, which in turn runs back down the hill on the other side of the valley. As the track winds down the steep escarpment towards the back of the French Quarter, it becomes a narrow path paved with typical early-modern or perhaps even medieval or pre-medieval cobble stones—flat stones buried like coins balancing side-on, with only the longside sticking out of the earth, perpendicular to the track. That track takes you a long way back before the Cold War, maybe as far as the prehistoric Burgholz hillfort near its bottom end, where a battle was fought sometime about 1100, though archaeological finds in the area suggest a history that may go back to 500 BCE (Goessler 1944/ 1948; Sydow 1974: 3). The Panzerstraße, despite its name, emblematizes the way the environment has taken back the space that was taken from it, has re-co-opted the concrete ribbon of road for its own purposes, re-colonized it so to speak. The French army’s rather rough-cast concrete slabs (military engineering, what can you expect? ) float on the ground, as if on a sea of dirt, not unlike a pontoon bridge 188 Wild Boars on the Panzerstraße on the undulating earth, or a raft of interlocked steel matting planks, supported, and finally shifted to one side in their original purpose, by the tangential swell of the forest’s own enduring life. With their insouciance towards the remnants of the Cold War, of which the Panzerstrasse itself is the most obvious relic, a long thread-like monument to the temporarily frozen East-West stand-off that polarized not only Europe but the world for half a century, the mob of wild boars are locals, indifferent to the ebb and flow of global politics. Their trajectory, cutting across the arrow-like East- West vector of this stretch of the Panzerstraße, pointing as it does to the remote trace of the erstwhile Iron Curtain that stretched from the Baltic to the Balkans, asserts another view of history. The boars tell how a military installation can revert in the passage of time to an outdoor recreational area used everyday by cyclists, walkers and joggers like myself, not to mention the other inhabitants of the forest. The boars remind me of the way so many roads around Europe have regained a civilian usage. Was the Panzerstraße, with its half-metre-thick slabs of concrete, perhaps also one of the many makeshift landing strips invented by the Cold War strategists? They were preparing for an all-out assault and scorched-earth policy that necessitated the establishment of fall-back satellite bases for the airforces on both sides of the wall. The Lüsse grass glider airfield near Kuhlowitz, outside Berlin, where we once had a family holiday with the long-winged craft circling almost soundlessly over our heads, was just such a satellite for the Soviet airbase near Jüterbog, almost indistinguishable from the fields around it. All over the country, stretches of motorway could be converted into makeshift runways at the drop of a hat. South of Münster near Karthaus, for instance, the hardstandings are still visible today, converted into parking lots for tired drivers. Such fall-back runways were intended for a generation of specially designed aircraft such as the Franco-British Sepecat Jaguar or the French Dassault Mirage F1, whose stork-leg undercarriages allowed them to operate from short, rough airstrips. Thinking of the way such temporary airstrips were at loggerheads with the larger drift of history, and the way the short-take-off-and-landing fighters’ lifespan was so short, puts me in mind of the Mirage F1 displayed on the campus of the University of Pretoria, not far from my former office in the Humanities building. The aircraft is propped upon on a pillar in take-off stance. It has just left the ground, its undercarriage extended like a pair of raptor’s claws, its nosecone jutting aggressively upward and away towards some already-sighted prey. One might imagine it just leaving a bush airstrip in the North-West to fly sorties against Cuban MiGs or bombard SWAPO positions. Such was the requirement that motivated the South African Air Force to purchase and deploy Mirage F1s in the final decade of hugely militarized apartheid power. The F1 replaced the Wild Boars on the Panzerstraße 189 older Mirage III, supersonic but unwieldy, and was better adapted for short landings on forward bush airstrips that became tactically important in the socalled ‘border wars’ of the 1980s. The South African Air Force roundel on the F1 fuselage explains what these anti-liberation wars were all about: its pentagonal icon imitates the form of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, a Vauban-style fortress built by the 17 th -century Dutch settlers to ward off attacks by raiders from the Hottentot Holland Mountains. The white settler siege mentality persisted several centuries later. The ‘border wars’ were more or less clandestine conflicts with the socialist ‘swart gevaar’ (‘black threat’) emanating from the neighbouring countries of Angola and Mozambique and the subjugated protectorate of Namibia. The apartheid rulers understood the creeping danger of black Marxist uprisings whose success might spur on South Africa’s own dispossessed black majority to an effective revolt against the white elite. They assessed the situation correctly. The South African defeat at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, when a coalition of Angolans and Cubans routed a superior South African military force, triggered the independence of Namibia and, subsequently gave hefty impetus to the dismantling of apartheid, leading to the release of Mandela in 1990 and the first free elections in 1994. After the end of apartheid and the establishment of black majority rule, the South African Air Force donated several decommissioned and partly dismantled Mirage jetfighters to three South African universities, Stellenbosch, Wits (in Johannesburg) and Pretoria, in recognition of their contributions to military engineering research. Wits and Stellenbosch discreetly put their Mirages away in secluded storehouses, well out of sight of the public. The Pretoria Mirage languished on a parking lot on a remote corner of the campus for some time. After this Interregnum, it was restored to visibility like a giant Airfix model in front of the SciEnza, or schools’ science education centre, on a sturdy concrete plinth, symbolizing a sanitized post-apartheid technological state. The jet can now be admired by anyone who cares to go for a stroll around the expansive campus under the shade of the purpled-flowered jacarandas. The Pretoria Mirage celebrates the cooperation between the university’s engineering faculties and the oversized South African military establishment. Yet if the Mirage is a metonymy for the bygone age of a white anti-third-world-communist coalition in the Global South, its presence is not entirely irrelevant to the contemporary moment. It bespeaks notions of progress in the name of southern African capitalism with the support of the nationalist state—a tradition that continues under the new dispensation minus global sanctions, plus a better coordinated imbrication of government, industry and multinational capital, with the unseen poor masses it is parasitical upon still as black as before. 190 Wild Boars on the Panzerstraße As a historical and geographical metonymy of these moments, the Tukkies Mirage is a curious artefact. A truly museal object, it signals the pastness of the past: the end of officially legislated white supremacy, the close of a period of white racist military incursions against black-majority democratic struggle, both inside South Africa and outside its northern borders. The Mirage acknowledges the temporariness (the historical mirage? ) of a racist regime that persisted for less than fifty years (as if that was not long enough). At the same time, however, it also symbolizes a latent ongoing presence of white economic hegemony (easily preserved in 1990 as a bargaining chip in return for the ceding of political power) and the concomitant attitudes, now discreetly aired only in private and around the poolside braai (barbecue) except for a few maverick white fascist clubs. The ambivalent mixture of temporariness of a minority rule on the Southern African continent and the permanency of its de facto neocolonialist grip on the hard core of economic power in South Africa is revealing. After a moment of hesitation, the predominantly white management of an erstwhile segregated Afrikaner university decided the time was ripe to signal their ongoing presence, if anything reinforced by the retreat of open apartheid-era conflict—but equally ossified in a political configuration where the accumulated rage of the disappointed hopes of liberation will inevitably turn against them. The Mirage is a true instance of Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Benjamin 2002: 462). This piece of military aeronautical junk, frozen in a stance of spurious dynamism, displays ‘a configuration pregnant with tensions’ (Benjamin 1999: 254). The aircraft’s petrified permanency ‘gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad’ (ibid: 254). The Mirage works, contrary to the intentions of its creators and curators, to ‘blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history’ (ibid: 254), thereby betraying its own lifeless suspension in a cul-de-sac of history. Significantly, there is no one in the cockpit of the Mirage, and its engine has been removed, making it a mere shell simulating a form of industrial-military potency emptied of significance. No white pilot grips the control column, and the economic thrust behind the penile trajectory of white male Afrikaner exploitation is flagging as productivity slows. Why is it, however, that the ‘#RhodesMustFall’ movement that has toppled so many colonial monuments in South Africa since its emergence in tandem with the ‘#FeesMustFall’ movement, has failed to target the Pretoria Mirage? My suspicion is that the jet fighter is able to elide its own curious amalgam of colonial ephemerality and stubbornly residual post-colonial white hegemony. It conceals these contradictory elements under a façade of putative technological neutrality that imputes the absence of ideology in the realm of technological progress. Significantly, the University of Pretoria, always closely connected to the South African military-industrial complex via the prominence of its engineering fac- After the Mirage 191 ulties, has remained as close to government after the end of apartheid as before its demise. Post-apartheid governments regard development purely in terms of instrumental reason. This has led them to replicate the same civilizational logic underpinning apartheid in their efforts to palliate the structural effects of Afrikaner social engineering. The Pretoria Mirage, with its sleek missile-like form, instantiates this sort of linear (non-complex) thinking (contrast, for instance, in the South African context, Cilliers 1998, 2016). Its position in front of the children’s and schools’ science centre is a metonymy for the place of rationalist, utilitarian education within the South African polity. This version of education is endowed with a façade of neutrality that barely disguises the massive inequities that continue to dog what is effectively still a racially stratified education system. In other words, this is progress, cleansed of all its allegiances to race and class, clothed in the garb of benevolent technology, and allied with an instrumentalist ‘skills’-based education. That pedagogical apparatus skilfully hides its ongoing involvement with social privilege, economic power, and the global military machine as it grinds up the bones of its victims—the bugbears of the stalled decolonization of South Africa’s flawed and failing democracy. The Mirage F1 on the campus, crouching rather like a giant metal grasshopper next to the SciEnza children’s museum, is a relic like the Panzerstraße itself where its European compatriots might have landed—and where now the mountain bikes reach Mach 0.1 as they speed down the hill towards the French Quarter. Yet, like the Cold War walls that are being re-erected all over Europe in the reaction to a new ‘swart gevaar’, an invasion of refugees from Africa and the Middle East, the pastness of the Panzerstraße’s past may be just as ephemeral as its apparent temporariness. But the wild boars take little notice of these ebbs and flows of human history, bold as they are, jauntily crossing the concrete road in the broad light of day. Following a scent perpendicular to the vector of the militarized road, they perhaps know more than they let on. Maybe it’s them we ought to be listening to. RWP After the Mirage From a pacifist perspective, one concentrates on the extension of techno-military aspirations in the residue of white-sublimated academia, and the ongoing prospect of western/ ised technology via arms sales masquerading as expression of self-determining choice-making/ agency. I have been involved in a distressing disagreement with an ex-colleague over my participation in a peace reading in Cambridge for the Stop The War Coa- 192 After the Mirage lition because she sees the coaltion as in some way acceding to Assad and the Russians through condemning western brutalities but not adequately condemning the Russians. Of course, though it might (might! ) be true of a few people, it is not true of a peace movement that is against all use of military intervention or activity/ brutality. It becomes an overdetermined argument in the sense that people speaking for total peace on such platforms are speaking to an audience they hope will hear and act. It doesn’t mean subscription to the network of individuated takes that make any movement. Thus your mirage analysis embodies the apartheid military hubris but also the residues which clearly still operate in the discourse of might and ‘sleekness’. The irony of defeat is almost stared down with the potential of the take off to victory. Horrifying. JK ‘Statue Haters’—Past & Present So, the right-wing newspaper columnist calls out the ‘statue haters’—those who sign off on The Age of Exploration. These statues are as innocent as history. For him, they are factual whereas the Stolen Generations are a construction. O, the legacies of the printer’s hellbox. Contraindicative, we see the fusing of ‘refugees and terrorism’, we hear the denial of compensation for the brutalities of Manus Island. The Columnist—point blank— prefers statues over refugees, over Aboriginal peoples’ rights to their own country. But the statues have aged with the climate— changing, that is. Transforming. Assimilating? His readers might deny that also. The script of the navigator—observe what is useful to your patrons. Sink all rivals’ boats. And statues. Keep the sea-lanes open Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen 193 to The Crown, your protector—don’t sail over the edge of the world, but brave it out. The statues aren’t white, not usually, which is a flaw in the choice of materials— in the casting. ‘Statue haters’ should paint over statues with white paint only, white as pigeon shit—bring out their essence, the truth. John Kinsella, ‘Statue Hater’ Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen Just back from a long walk up to the back of the Schloss, down into the town, up to the Osterberg and along the bottom of those green slopes till the sign to turn towards Bebenhausen (on the pedestrian/ cycling track) then up to the road to Bebenhausen and back here via university and botanical garden. Being places with you is special and ‘normalises’ them for me—I have realised this more than ever today. I have learnt that my spatiality is informed by familiarity of connection which I take with me, but particularly comes into focus when I am with you (and Tim). So my temporariness, my polysituatedness is actually calibrated by the knowledge of you and who you are. I am more than me and all I am, I am also (like it or not), the part of you you make available (your stories, the experiences that you share etc.), and the part I also vicariously experience. Now, I don’t doubt this is the same for all families, but it’s also a definition of empathy (even ‘love’), and makes one see slant to one’s unified self-take on the world. As ego-driven as it sounds, it actually defuses the self. I write this as I drink a cup of organic fair trade green tea, absorbing co-ordinates (and traumas) of different lives into my body. Graft, usage, theft even, and appreciation. The costs of survival. The repeated incidents of mass violence perpetrated in Britain bring home the vagaries of place, our temporariness, the ‘stains’ of our bodies’ content left and washed away after such violations. We are to always be conscious of this, as so many have through history for so many reasons—but in the end, it’s the violent hatred of the earthiness of place-presence and the desire for fantastical alternatives, that drive the killing. And that can be from militarist governments wanting to increase their territory and control 194 Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen to make a heaven on earth for themselves at the expense of others, as much as it can by (raging) hormonally disturbed young male ‘jihadists’. The temporal and spatial qualities of presence collide with the chemical misinformation of their bodies. Being summer here, the signs are so very different from when we were here for those first three months, and yet like when I was here for a week or so twenty years ago. But the comparisons I make with trees fully-leaved, the Neckar with its peddlos and gondolas (believe it or not—northern parody Viking gondolas! The Germanic wish-fulfilment authenticity crisis... Reminding me that I saw ‘Hitler’ chalked onto the pavement near the REWE), the Ammer flowing down fast and dirty from the hills after last night’s blasting rain, the Steinlach with a stoat (burrow) just above the high water line (really flowing full and fast), and a sequoia in the botanical garden smouldering red at sunset with the odd nudist catching what they can of an old god! What is place in this cross-hatching of movements, in this desire for certain parts of time to stand still? The old town square is bubbling oldness —and others adapt by making a postmodernity of their past. For me, the twin fountains and the symbol of the white rose outside the university’s main building is the hope and where history needs to place itself as a resistance to the horror of Nazism. An ambulance going past so loudly that Wendy and John will have been woken—we are right over the street, of course. But back to my point, the comparisons I make with any temporary ‘belonging’ I have here, are to do with winter and bareness and people retreating into the warmth (while I walk around outside in a shirt in the cold, and you and Tim go to school early with all others on the bus in darkness and snow and on black ice... Wary wary! ). All people living here make those comparisons, but they wait for the warmth, usually, whereas because I am lacking you, I yearn for the bareness and cold which I equate with your warmth of presence at ‘our time’ here together—but a living bareness and cold, of trees resting and not defeated. We saw them awakening, even if out of kilter because of the damaged ‘seasons’, but nonetheless, the blue tits around the awakening foliage was special, and the woodpecker working around the Ammer, and the buzzards working all seasons, finding the thermals! Speaking of buzzards, I saw one being chased low by ravens near the English Dept. And I saw with Mum and John a bunch of jackdaws ‘conniving’ on the island (lush and green and almost an illusion of primeval forest—reminds me of the French poet I heard the other night in Rotterdam, the forest absorbing and igniting the self, almost eaten out with the desires of the forest’s energy... What I—and Nicholas Birns who just got married—would call ‘foliage’... Enveloped by Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen 195 foliage... By the leaf... The leaf poem Rupert Loydell needs for his mini-anthology... Unlike the oil-volatile green of Australian eucalypts)... But place is actually less temporary for all of us than we imagine, even passing through or staying a short time or revisiting. In the ‘head shop’ window there is a glass smoking implement shaped like an AK-47, in the wild green grasses at the base of the Osterberg two boys were trying to shoot an arrow from a home-made crossbow, saying in English with strong German accents, ‘fire fire... Shoot it shoot it... Go on, do it...’ in imitation of Hollywood films. The occupation after the war... And the French tinge of Hollywoodisation of the ever resistant French-language... The weaponisation of language, speech. The violent commonality. And for Germans to speak American English, is common. And it is a language of conflict. I am reminded of that display in the British Museum of sculptures made up out of old AK-47s from African conflict zones—I was telling someone in Rotterdam about the disturbance of accepting them as art, especially at the remove of the British Museum, a colonial centre if ever there was one. The artist has one intent, of course, the museum has intents it maybe doesn’t completely understand. And we the global audience filing through its doors, do the work... And nothing? Or is it part of a peace conversation of shifting the trauma of one place into another... Spreading, presenting, diluting, or all? This connects with my disturbance regarding my reading a couple of days ago at the Gallery Joey Ramone in Rotterdam. I met the artist whose work was being exhibited, and we had a heated discussion (I did not get heated, just remained persistently consistent, I’d like to think) about violent interventions when confronted with violence. I said never violence—that I would put myself between an attacker and their victim and accept the consequences, that I might also try to (as non-violently as possible) restrain them (we know about that! ), but I would never willingly inflict violence on them (the conversation connected with punishment and indirectly vengeance, I think, though he did not say this). He claimed he couldn’t say that he wouldn’t meet violence with violence because he ‘did not know’—that pacifism was ‘too black and white’ for him. I said that it’s nothing of the sort—that it is complex and strained and also straight forward. It is all at once. The place of this conversation was all important because it was a representation of Middle East conflict—one image was of people throwing someone out of a window and filming it on smartphones... The image of this taking of images was taken from above... Horrific... And there were panels of these images getting darker and darker till the image was blacked out... Metaphor for how easily we forget. Another image showed a ‘white man’ with a child on his chest, playing, and next to it a man from maybe Iraq or Syria with a dying child (heavily wounded) on his chest... I need not explain. It destroyed my sanity, as was intended. 196 Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen Clearly anti-violence, and I supported the stance, but I was bothered by a slippage between not-of-the-place artist and the place content/ context. We are all part of it now, as conflict extends (it has imperially-speaking long been connected, but the violence has ‘spilled’ out of ‘its’ zone now...) so maybe that’s enough, but maybe not. I did my peace reading in front of images of two destroyed buildings... Cathedrals? Coptic? I don’t know. The artist is known for his support and advocacy for LGBQT rights, which is excellent, but there was still a slippage between cause and effect that bothered me... The shroud-veils with Arabic-like ‘text’ hanging from the roof ? I am not sure... And that’s art, and uncertainty is ambiguity, the core to activist art actions... But, the complex model of place it necessitates seemed almost lacking to me. The need for care in such presentations in galleries and all they stand for, even a radical one (or actually bourgeois radical! Which it can’t but be! The woman who runs the gallery was good and tuned in, but she is of her condition... Possessor of a place of profit...), is paramount. Maybe a notion of (dis)placement of the potential brutality of the temporary was missing? Or maybe because I am not even temporary in my passing through but rather an ‘event’, I can’t see what others local might see... Which doesn’t mean what they’re seeing is necessarily just. We must ask these questions? There is such a stark difference between summer and winter behaviours here—same with any stark contrasts in climate, of course, but more than that, it’s a determination to make a difference. As if two people at least in the cycle of a year must live in the same skin. You see this in Cambridge, but it seems even starker here in southern Germany—part of the cult of body and exercise and purity of an outdoors that is assailed with pollutants people want to pretend aren’t there. Travelling in the trains from Rotterdam, you see reactors and factory after factory, miles of stacks, especially around Mannheim. Dante-esque forests of smoke stacks. You’d think in this country of all countries the notion of burning and sending it high enough to imagine that the taint, the guilt, the reality of pollution , will flow elsewhere, is ludicrous. The temporariness of both damage and consequence. Acid rain. I first heard about it back in the 70s when I was at high school regarding the Black Forest. I started to worry then that all my chemistry etc. was part of that. And it was. And then there was the x-ray anlysis equipment I used from ages fifteen to seventeen (in the lab outside Geraldton)—no doubt the cause of my thyroid issues. It was Siemens equipment. It might as well have been Krupp—weaponisation? No, Siemens is enough of a military entity in itself! Literally weapon guidance system makers—I might add that it was called a ‘2011 top military friendly company’ and now, as I campaign against the nuclear industry, a consequence of IT is that I can only survive with treatment with radioactive iodine. They Monologues to Tracy I: June 4th, 2017, Tübingen 197 have me lock stock and thyroid. Thyroid goes with me, but is place-specific in its damage—I am sure of when and how. But with equipment made in Germany, using radioactive isotopes to calibrate no doubt from Australian mines (would have been the three-mine policy back then), and other places of the word. A polysituated ‘illness’/ condition? It’s certainly possible. Though I am not really happy with this flat, one of the things I do enjoy, admire, and deeply respect, is the collection of Jewish literature and books, and books related to Germany and Jewishness, that critique Nazism and bigotry. This is part of my ability to connect, as it was in the apartment (literally four buildings away! ) we stayed in last year. It gives me hope and makes me feel secure as an act of affirmation and resistance. For me, it’s a metaphor for life and also for an ongoing reclaiming of presence , and difference, and continuity of a right to belief. Maybe, really, I am talking of a polysituatedness of spirituality which segues with a people’s sense of belonging. The ‘migrant’ (and generations that follow—and actually all people as they migrated from the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation in Africa over the many millennia) should be able to belong to multiple places without it threatening the presence of others. All of it belongs. All of it is part of human temporariness. All of it is as permanent as it is temporary, surely? Don’t you think? As the floorboards of the flat above me creak the presence of someone I haven’t seen yet, and at most will probably greet in passing on the stairs, tell me so much about who they are, as my steps (and Wendy’s and John's) tell the people below us who I am (we are). These palimpsests of belonging, of course, as has been much discussed (if not in this specific context! ), but more than that, these complex geometries of co-existence and uniqueness. I like the shapes, the maths of connection and unseeing—if we appreciated the patterns that are there no matter what, we might seek to damage these relationships less? I am trying to resolve my temporariness into purpose and something pragmatic. Tim takes language from here (and you... and you from Karl... and the tree-graph of connection stretches...), and we have the birds and their songs and our comparative and overlapping experiences... So this monologue is part of that picture-building. I hear birds I can no longer match ‘visuals’/ bodies with. Will I achieve doing so again? —I guess so. I hope so. Application! Enthusiasm— survival. What I have found myself doing already is noting every person I pass, every oddity in facades and buildings and layout of place I see. A few extra lights (not on) on a balcony, a woman walking past who pays special interest to me tucking in my t-shirt, a man folding up his paraglider chute and joking with another man about... I assume... the lack of breeze. Language is more than understanding syntax and its intonation, and I understood all the complexities of their 198 Detachment Attachment conversation as I walked past, bringing in my own issues with paraglider pilots damaging the bush of Walwalinj right where you sleep now! You sleep—and I, awake, am in your sleep... Not intrusively, but a sense of shared being. We all want that to some degree, don’t we? These heightened senses, as if I can be more than temporary, or less than temporary. In Cambridge—really our other home with Schull... outside the Wheatbelt... the co-ordinates are so familiar—I ‘slot in’ (the familiar patterns, but it also is strangely family with me, and us, and me through us), even if the bigoted Brexit mentality is detectable in ways that might surprise some of the strong-minded anti-Brexiteers. But not so with our friends, steadfast in their ‘permission’ for us to belong there as ever, part of a Fens poetics, if a belated part! But it’s different here, and maybe I think that difference is more revealing, because here it’s more overt and more of a deadly subterfuge—‘Hitler’ can still be chalked on the pavement and stay visible for hours, at least a hundred or more people walking over it. It’s a brutal reality and there’s no hiding from the horror of its reality. Though I noticed it’s gone today... Sadly, probably washed away by the heavy rain rather than by a human hand... But still, rain is an agency of ‘nature’ and rain which is local and regional and broader. Not mysticism but recognition! It answers climate here, and there. It speaks and is silent across zones. It wiped Hitler from the lexicon. JK Detachment Attachment I grew up in an extremely Anglophile family in Australia, in a bookish environment where tourist magazines such as In Britain , pre-war sepia photo volumes of the British landscape, and a single Ordnance Survey map in the characteristic early 1970s dark pink cover formed an English imaginary—one that was always an elsewhere in relation to an Australian reality that for the most part, I desired to escape. The British reality when, after finishing school, I found it, was quite different to my multiply composed imaginary, and somewhat of a shock—that of a dream withering in the harsh grey light of a rainy Devon winter. Yet alongside that English imaginary, there was secondary Central European imaginary, moulded by British right-wing political novels such as Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia and Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds . Sometimes these imaginaries collided in strange ways. Durrell’s British spy, acting as a liaison officer for the exiled Monarchists in Tito’s Yugoslavia, camps in a river valley and reads passages from Thoreau’s Walden as he slips off to sleep with the sounds of the rapids in his ear (Durrell 1957: 106)—a literary-environmental experience as Detachment Attachment 199 wildly decontextualized for the protagonist as it was for me. (Although years later, on a car trip up the Cetina valley from the cleft-like estuary-mouth at Omiš on the Adriatic, was I not travelling into a real that must have resembled Durrell’s imaginary? ) Yet such deterritorializations are powerful, and trigger new territorializations, always and everywhere, following the dynamic of life itself. Durrell’s text was the reason why, at a flea market under the huge ironbarks in Sassafrass in the Dandenong Ranges behind Melbourne, sometime in the 1970s, I seized upon Thoreau’s Walden , in a gold-embossed Everyman edition from 1908—the one I am still quoting from—as well as the the orange Penguin edition of Buchan’s House of the Four Winds . And when during my high school years, I went camping with my father in the Gellibrand valley near Barramunga in the Otway Ranges, I had the temerity to claim that this valley, here and now , with its river boulders and she-oaks, was the perfect replica of that imagined valley in Serbia. How many unfinished novels did I try to write as a child that invariably featured a castle perched on a rocky crag above a narrow pass, only to discover the reality of these images when I later took the intercity train connection from Munich over the Alps to Klagenfurt? The year after I left school, I found myself doing toll-booth-duty duty on a stretch of private road near Lee Bay on the North Devon coast, on a tight bend of the road on a narrow and densely wooded valley that dropped precipitously from the bare plateau of Exmoor down to the rocky enclaves of the coast. I was reading Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund in the Penguin translation (the one with Caspar David Friedrich’s Abbey under the Oaks on the cover). That book inducted me into German neo-Romanticist imaginary of the Deutscher Wald, the German forest (Schama 1995: 75-134), which meshed uneasily with the steeply dropping woods of wind-dwarfed oaks surrounding me. Nature was always an other and an elsewhere, promising something that it held in reserve, beckoning like Conrad’s West African Coast (again, it has been, for decades, the Penguin English Classics edition of Heart of Darkness , with the riverboat veiled in an impressionist haze on the cover, that has been beckoning to me)—or like Bonnefoy’s (1972: 9) ‘other’ road: J’ai souvent éprouvé un sentiment d’inquiétude, à des carrefours. Il me semble dans ces moments qu’en ce lieu ou presque: là, à deux pas sur la voie que je n’ai pas prise, c’est là que s’ouvrait un pays d’essence plus haute, où j’aurais pu aller vivre et que j’ai désormais perdu. I have often experienced a feeling of anxiety, at crossroads. At such moments it seems to me that here , or close by, a couple of steps away on the path I didn’t take and which is already receding—that just over there a more elevated kind of country would open up, where I might have gone to live and which I’ve already lost. (Bonnefoy 2012: 25) Detachment Attachment 201 Yet almost in the same breath, Bonnefoy continues: J’aime la terre, et il m’arrive même de croire que la ligne pure des cimes, la majesté des arbres, la vivacité du mouvement de l’eau au fond d’un ravin, la grâce de la façade d’une église, puisq’elles sont si intenses, en ces régions, à des heures, ne peuvent qu’avoir été voulues, et pour notre bien. Cette harmonie a un sens, ces paysages et ces espèces sont, figés encore, enchantés peut-être,une parole, il ne s’agit que de regarder et d’écouter avec force pour que l’absolu se déclare, au bout de nos errements. Ici, dans cette promesse, est donc le lieu. (Bonnefoy 1972: 10) I love the earth, and what I see delights me, and sometimes I even believe that the unbroken line of peaks, the majesty of the trees, the liveliness of water moving through the bottom of a ravine, the graceful façade of a church—because in some places and in some hours they are so intense—must have been intended for our benefit. This harmony has a meaning, these landscapes, and these objects, while they are still fixed, or possibly enchanted, are almost like a language, as if the absolute would declare itself, if we could only look and listen intently, at the end of our wanderings. And here it is, within this promise, that the place is found. (Bonnefoy 2012: 25-6) Listening to him, my mood too changes, and I think back to other senses of place. The Western Victorian Grampians/ Gariwerd, a series of mountainous ripples surging up out of the flat volcanic plains stretching from Melton to Mount Gambier, already contained a sort of immanent plenitude that I sensed as a child as we returned every year to the same colonial-style farmhouse near Mirranatwa in the Victoria Valley. The huge eucalyptus down by the front gate onto the main Dunkeld-Mirranatwa road, about which I have written elsewhere (West-Pavlov 2011: 18-19), and which, to the best of my knowledge is still standing, is an Indigenous sacred tree. The grandfather of the then owners of the property, graziers who’d been in the valley for generations, could remember Indigenous people coming there regularly when he was a boy (which, I guess, might have been in the first or second decade of the twentieth century). There are a number of sacred sites in the Grampians/ Gariwerd region, most prominent among them several rock art sites. More hidden, however, are sites such as the one on the farm property we visited every year, trees that might perhaps have been guardian figures on a node of dreaming tracks. But my sense of the singularity of this tree—a sense echoed by Bonnefoy (1972: 106; Bonnefoy 2012: 103) in his felt connection to a single tree on the hill opposite the cemetery where his grandparents were buried—may quite possibly have arisen, though I am not entirely sure, from the moment of caesura that came with my expatriation, from the outset a search for otherness. Only later did my sense of restlessness in the bush, among the diverse community of eu- Detachment Attachment 203 calyptus varieties and other inhabitants of the native forest, disperse—by which time, however, I had left the Australian continent … permanently, it would now seem, as I realize with indescribable sadness. Later, the German landscape with its diverse forest of pine, larch, firs, oak, linden, and beeches would offer a here and a now that, ultimately, has become my framing natural vista, visible through the window even as I write, looking up to gaze out towards the tops of Landkutscher Kap. But this tale is not one of a gradual discovery of an European natural landscape tradition that I would come to make my own. Rather, it is an ongoing engagement, often via a work in language, with a constant overlaying of multiple real and imagined places, here and there, in which for me the imaginary has always already released the power to be sensitive to the real’s own creative dynamic. This perhaps explains, then, the curious mixture of re-found belonging, almost intoxication, and simultaneous rejection, quasi-visceral, that I experienced the last time I was in Melbourne, walking through the Royal Botantical Gardens. Under those gigantic Moreton Bay Figs, with their immense trunks, several metres in girth, constructed of many bole-like strands, I remembered the profound sense of distinctive place and connection to place that I felt as a child, always combined with the urgent desire to leave. And, paradoxically, the same sensations accompany me as I go through the long drawn-out process of German naturalization: a surge of identification with the place that, seven or eight years ago, I felt I had to escape, taking me and my family to South Africa for a relatively brief but utterly transformative sojourn on the Gauteng highveld. Have I not always been wanting to expatriate myself ? Since birth, almost, feeling myself a foreign body even in the family? —even in my own body? At the heart of attachment, always, detachment. Detachment, here, means a deterritorialization that destabilizes one intensity and basis of attraction as it spills over into or opens up to another intensity or basin of attraction. Detachment in the sense explored by AbdouMaliq Simone (2018): a moving away from self that is in tune with the dynamic transformations of place itself. I become detached from the place of attachment because that place itself is no longer the same. The place itself is moving on, and in consequence I too must move if, paradoxically, I am to remain attached to its placidness, that is, its own mobility within placedness. RWP 204 Monologues to Tracy II: June 5th, 2017, Tübingen Monologues to Tracy II: June 5 th , 2017, Tübingen I will be less exuberant this time, though it’s hard, because I am just back from a walk up to the forest of Spitzberg. About half as far as I walked last night... It is magnificent in the evening light, in full green with a weird vegetal darkness oozing out onto the walkways. I didn’t go far in but did a circuit to keep the walk ‘brief ’—I went to the Kammmolch pond, invoked and intoned the crested newt, then broke away to the right on the path that circuits back around a lovely chunk of forest absolutely bristling with blackbirds and the sounds of creatures rustling through the leaf litter. Rather than point de repère , it was more point de relais —as if I were being reinvigorated with passing through the various stations of connection—seasonally different but with me abstracting and extrapolating as I went. I was in conversation with you and Tim! Most interesting bit was around the Tübingen side of the circuit—that other pond which I don’t doubt is home to Kammmolch was bristling with yellow irises (yellow flag), their yellow parrot beaks half-snapping and half wilting in the demi-light. There’s a poem there I need to find. I didn’t feel temporary at all in that moment—I felt fused and connected which goes against all codes of rights and belonging. The green sap of Dylan Thomas driving the fuse of my desire to be organic, of the biosphere. Though it could (and no doubt will) be destroyed directly or indirectly by people in time, the moment is indissoluble. All time present. The singularity which is, of course, a-priori as well. I felt an affirmation of the multiverse, without any ‘religious’ weight. Pantheism? Probably. Which brings to mind an interesting conversation I had at lunch at Churchill with a favourite of mine at the college, the great astronomer (ex director of the Greenwich observatory), Prof Alec Boksenberg... He was telling me that he traces his desire to be a scientist back to the age of one-and-a-half, when in his cot he watched a pull-down blind flapping in the wind against the window and changing the length of shadow as it did so. A point de repère , but also a point de relais as he goes back in time searching both for an origin of vocation but also a ‘grounding’ to a personal cosmology. What’s really interesting is that he sees individual achievement as secondary to that of the ‘community of science’, and believes that when discovery of knowledge is used by the individual to further themselves, it leads to greed and destruction. We overlap in views of rapacity, and it was extremely exciting for me. I said I’d write him a poem about all this. At the moment, the headspace is hard to find! It’s to do with angles, shadows, sunlight, blinds, yellow irises, forests, verdure, and crested newts, I’m sure. Metaphor is wish-fulfilment in an over-determined world, it’s also the wresting of time and place into a ‘pretty pill’, but it doesn’t have to be the ‘poison in a Monologues to Tracy II: June 5th, 2017, Tübingen 205 pretty pill’ of [the anarchist collective band] Crass. Not necessarily, even if they inevitably reveal at truth! So, Andy Warhol has been with me on this journey in a vicarious and unfulfilling way. Point is, because of his automated leisure at the expense of capitalism and as an extension of capitalism, he always falls away as a meaningful critique of a condition he was so interior to—the wallpaper to the blatant reality of an advertised ontology. He always fails me when I need him most. First up was the college dining room when talking with Tim Cribb and Alec, and Tim mentioned that the guy who owns the ‘Marilyns’ and ‘loans’ them to the college, might want them back one day (unsurprisingly, I guess). I said, I think it at least undoes some of the capitalism of fame (ego collapse? ) by allowing them to be semi-public. Fully public even better still! And then when I went to read at the gallery Joey Ramone I had intended to read a raft of Warhol poems, but only read ‘Warhol at Wheatlands’ as a ‘peace’ poem (anti-gun violence and the implicated violences of celebrity), and didn’t read my Warhol Sonnets. Anyway, after the reading, the artist with whom I had that heated discussion I mentioned earlier, said to me with some astonishment: ‘It was Andy Warhol who led me to (politicised! ) art. I was originally a screen printer, inspired by Warhol’, and he pointed out that those veil-scarves were screenprints. And I replied that Warhol had led me to many things in art and writing—the absurdity of celebrity and capitalist leisurism and an existential ennui of his ‘autobiography’ The Philosphy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (2007) distended my mind when I was eighteen, which now I find laughable as it’s entirely empty of content, which is not enough! I bought that book from the Trinity Arcade Bookshop in 1983 at the same time I placed five copies of The Frozen Sea in the shop for sale (what became of them? ). Anyway, it’s weird how the greed and flatness and ‘acceptances’ of the factory man can have spurred on such anti-capitalist art after exposure and absorption. Like seeing that exhibition with Ken and Kristen in New York—seeing Warhol displayed in New York actually defused some of the mystique for me... It was as if... Well, as if... What else could he have done in the Big Apple. It expected it, it fed it ... Shoe adverts have to be written and have to be placed and have to be art or the city’s supposed (not true) raison d'être would fold in on itself. Of course, New York is none of what it’s supposed to be and is in fact innumerable overlapping communities that generate a sense of cohabitation against the rapacity that rules over them from Wall Street. Wall Street is the(ir) lie they live against—the charging (actually, rampaging) bull confronted by the ‘fearless’ girl racket of suings and artistic integrity as different companies vie for a bigger slice of the fiscal and emotional-artistic pie is a travesty of art. I suppose Sonic Youth spent decades trying to undo it all whilst also being ‘exposed’ to the bluster and carnage of arts colliding with corporate 206 Monologues to Tracy II: June 5th, 2017, Tübingen culture—at least they refuted the violence and capitalist aggression and understood integrity and that New York was an outpost, always, of co-existence. Mum and John have, of course, noticed the extensive graffiti in Tübingen. As I pointed out, almost none is political, but rather youth-gang territorial. It’s tagging. Is that a politics? Only insofar as consumer goods acquired in the face of the fat-of-the-land capitalist citizens that surround those with less is. Maybe it’s more political than we think (and how do we position generational defiance - a ‘fuck you’ in the face of ‘clean surfaces’? ). Is this real temporariness? —the expectation that the wealthy will remove the dog piss marker and replace it with their brazen empty surfaces of gilt satisfaction, their canvases waiting to be painted when they chose to illustrate their lives. Actually, probably... However, as I have written in the On the Outskirts (2017c) poems, the spray paint is extremely eco-damaging and these ‘political’ acts of (often) testosterone become extensions of an unwillingness to think of cause and effect. It can be thought of, but isn’t. Why? I told Mum and John of the old guy I saw (and still see) who pushes a bike around on Sundays scrubbing the tags off with solvents, especially off the older buildings. The chemical industry—a marker of knowledge (historic scientists) and industry in Germany. But here’s a weird thing... Today, I saw another use for graffiti. A little girl was with her mum and her mum was teaching her to read by spelling out a large piece of graffiti. The child was enticed by the large oddly shaped letters, so outside her experience (I’d guess) of the formulaic in early reading books. I heard as I walked past, the child picking up words and spelling lightning fast and literally jumping with excitement at the linguistic-meaning synthesis. Her Alec the Astronomer’s blind and shadow moment as a writer? The mark of her place which will be whitewashed off within a few days. The temporary being indelible for her? Of course, it wasn’t offensive graffiti, but actually (for once) something left-wing and affirming—pro refugee, I think... And the child might have been a refugee child (I can’t know this, but the dynamic with parent suggested so). The parent wasn’t mocking, but seemed excited the child was interested in the words? A welcome mat/ palette of sorts? I read a novel by Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin , about a couple who resisted the Nazis after their son was killed fighting in France—the husband wrote anti-Nazi slogans and comments on postcards and they both delivered them (primarily him) to buildings (staircases, window-ledges etc.) around Berlin until tracked down by the Gestapo. It was based on a ‘true story’, but the novel is (and I find this disturbing) a noir-ish detective story (obviously inverted and anti the ‘detective’, but still! ) and a montage of conflicting behaviours during the Nazi period... And maybe also an effort to explain how it happened. It has too many villains and demi-villains and the good are too few for it to work to my mind, when the most evil of all was the silent (in fear maybe in Fallada’s versioning) Monologues to Tracy II: June 5th, 2017, Tübingen 207 masses. In Fallada’s account, there is something of an excuse for the general population, whilst condemning the allowing it to happen as well. I read that Thomas Mann said any literature written and published in Germany during National Socialism’s reign should be consigned to the rubbish bin. Alone in Berlin was written after the war, and Fallada (an addict) did time in mental institutions etc., but he ‘struggled’ in and out of favour of Goebbels and the Nazis, and his resistance (an addict is an addict is an addict) is of a bizarre kind. I do not trust the work, though I can also see its importance. But those who really resisted are beyond fiction. For me, maybe only poetry can just (only just ) do something resistant and non-compliant, and even then because I don’t feel there are genres, something that at least destabilises text—not through mere disruption of syntax and grammatical conventions, but politically questioning the sources of its own production, the writer itself (more more and more). Even this is too optimistic, I know. I see the signs around this city showing the impact, coercion, supplication, welcoming, and collaboration with Nazism culminating in 1933. I realise that denazification has to be more than reminders, it has to be translated into behaviour, to unfamiliar experience, to constantly becoming other, to placing one’s self into a subaltern position with graciousness and respect. I find it very grounding to get the bird news from home—and that includes from Wendy’s and John's place under Walwlinj. The heron nesting in those great flooded gums the neighbour tried to burn out so he could land his paraglider—‘clear line of sight’ and its costs. The kestrels nesting. The mimicry of birds sounds as affirmation of presence. I have been making a special point of memorising bird song to check against recordings of bird songs to help with identification because, weirdly, the verdant foliage is making it harder for me to spot the birds here at this time of year—they hide. Now, this is as it should be, but I have to adapt my ‘sightings’ to fit their world. I like that! Though blackbirds and blue tits are omnipresent... Singing and darting between bushes and low trees. One thing that is fascinating re our last stay here, is the state of people’s small holdings—the veggies moving along, flowers out, them ‘camping’ over the long weekend in their strips of garden. Religion is so sublimated here, and ‘Pentecost’ has a weird seriousness that is to do with state vs religion in a way I can conceptually comprehend, but can’t (multi! )culturally unpick. Do I need to? Well, knowledge is liberty, and shared knowledge is shared liberty, so yes, I do. But gaining ‘access’ without being intrusive (on different angles, different points of view) is difficult—in a sense, one has to ‘let it come to you’, if you know what I mean. They don’t put wreaths in birch trees around here. It’s spruce, beech and pine here ... What does that mean re: the holy spirit coming down to Christ’s followers? I like to think it’s an illumination of the forests through enriching the shadows... The shadows show big growth, no choking, and such rich ecologies are created. But ironically for the crested newt, the Zlatna vrata 209 open spaces around the ponds (between the trees and ponds) are part of their survival—so the forest has its more open areas and its dense knotted areas where things other than humans can find habitat. Last night I heard the one chime of 1am, the two chimes of 2am, the three chimes then the four chimes before, as light crept in, I fell to sleep. You know the ringing of the bells here—it’s ingrained the spatial-temporal co-ordinates of presence, and certainly belonging. At least of the Old Town... How far do the chimes carry into the suburbs? And do the suburbs get crossing (countering waves? ) of faint echoes/ pulses of different chimes from different towers across the region. Mum was telling me that a tower in Lausanne has the distinction of being able to chime 2 seconds before all other swiss clocks! I can’t find details of it, but in searching came across this weird temporal-spatial certainty (definitely not an anomaly, though I wish), in the Wikipedia entrance on Swiss railway clocks. The ongoing battle by Apple for control of time, space, and all product. As I type this enslaved to a machine I despise. The corporate monsterism of the jobbing poet. JK Zlatna vrata For almost a century now, Grgur Ninski, Saint Gregory, Bishop of Nin, has stood outside the wall of the Roman palace precinct of the Dalmatian harbour city of Split. His four-metre bronze effigy gazes across the forecourt towards the median gate in the wall of Diocletian’s Palace, hopefully less oblivious than it might appear to the bevy of believers who rub his polished toe to invoke good fortune. On this visit, his view of the northern Golden Gate, the Zlatna vrata of today, the Porta aurea of the Roman palace that subsequently grew into the old town of Spilt, is barred by a printed tarpaulin. What the advertising lingo calls a ‘wallscape’ (the term is peculiarly appropriate here) hides renovation work on the third-century CE façade (Travirka 2005: 79-93). Its function is presumably to give tourists a sense of what otherwise they would be missing out on: the most elaborate of the four city gates, through which travellers from the even older city of Salona once entered the palace. The gate itself is flanked by two niches, and topped by three more alcoves, once bordered by columns and still intact arches. All this is now hidden by the scaffolding and chipboard hoardings—and by the printed tarpaulin. What is most striking, however, is the ‘wallscape’ itself, a gigantic facsimile of a drypoint etching from the Scotsman Robert Adam’s lavish volume Rvins of Zlatna vrata 211 the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (1764). In the idiom of Gothic ruins, here is the wall of today cast back into an etched sepia tone of an idealized classical past. Adam’s plate XII, ‘View of the Porta Aurea’, an engraving by Paolo Santini, has been enlarged to exactly match the dimensions of the Northern Wall. The image portrays the wall in its eighteenth-century condition, somewhat more intact than today, but already ruined enough to appeal to antiquarian sensibilities almost exactly contemporary with Edward Gibbon’s massive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). (Adam himself was elected to the Society of Antiquaries in 1761.) Lest the unwary tourist be too completely deceived by the ‘reality effect’ of the direct superimposition of the literal ‘wallscape’, advertising tags in the lower corners signal that ‘Splitska Banka’ is sponsoring the project, and that ‘Metropolis Media’ has created the outdoor publicity artefact (Metropolis, the second largest outdoor advertising concern in Croatia, is bought out shortly after this tarpaulin is erected, by its Croatian competitor Europlakat, itself a subsidiary of the Austrian Gewista and the global player JCDecaux [Europlakat 2017]). I am fascinated by the way in which the municipal authorities have chosen to drape an eighteenth-century antiquarian engraving across the real wall itself. It is as if, under the corrosive influence of scaffolding, chipboard cladding and sandblasting equipment, the wall is no longer old enough to serve its heritage-tourism purpose. It needs an extra patina of age, an antiquarian supplement, to return it to its pristine state of ‘original’ ruination. It has become too ‘con-temporary’. Its preterity has been eroded by the restoration work. What better solution to this dilemma, while it is being restored to its true pastness, than to have recourse to an eighteenth-century image of the Roman past? The ‘wallscape’ restores the ‘original’, the eighteenth-century ruins. This combination is patently oxymoronic, as Adam (1764: 23) revealed when he credited himself with being the ‘first’ to record the walls in a reasonably but not excessively intact state: ‘I knew, from the accounts of former travellers, that the remains of this palace, though tolerably intire, had never been observed with any accuracy, or drawne with any taste.’ Its authenticity (only the original is really authentic) depended, strangely enough, on it not being the original (the ruins sketch the contours of the original, but also its loss). Whence the possibility of being the first (the original witness) to record something long since gone. For the original was not original, and never could be. Even in the late 1700s the city had been inhabited for close on a millennium and a half, constantly transformed and retooled for the purposes of its respective urban citizens. Adam (1764: 3) knew this all to well, as he rather disdainfully acknowledged when noting that within the Palace precinct, ‘houses are built upon old foundations, and modern works are so intermingled with the ancient, as to be scarcely distinguishable.’ 212 Zlatna vrata an increasingly large segment of Dalmatia’s income (every year the narrow streets of the old city are more crowded, the cafés more sophisticated). The tourist is a temporary visitor, and Split itself, despite—or perhaps because of—the inroads of overseas real estate investment, a lieu de passage. How appropriate, then, that it is Robert Adam, a Scotsman on a grand tour (1754-8) to pillage Europe for templates of classical architecture that will make him an architectural leader in the British classical revival, who is chosen to provide an icon of the Zlatna vrata. His profitable five weeks in Split in July and August 1757 [Graham 2009: 146-8] are recuperated by the city via the non-less profitable ‘return’ of the image. The gaze of the eighteenth-century foreigner is recycled to present the contemporary visitor with a commodified past. Just as Adam had to travel to import a remote past to his own British moment, so too, it seems, the contemporary Croatian tourist economy must delve into an offshore archive to constitute its reified heritage brand for a clientele of temporary visitors. What muddies this commodified difference, however, is precisely, the sort of differ a nce, that is, uncontrolled deferral, that Derrida found everywhere in the world of signs, discourses and ideologies. There is a process of deferral-backwards when we look at the image’s own harking-back to ever more distant pasts; there is a deferral-forwards when we note the manner in which the image has been, indeed is being, recycled again and again. My commentary here, which takes up my earlier writing on and photography of this artefact (West-Pavlov 2010a: 188-9) would be the n th link in a chain that might include Adam in Croatia 1757-8 → Engraving 1764 → Facsimile of 2001 (Navarra, Burns and Cantone 2001: 212) → Tarpaulin screen print in Split 2004 → my earlier commentary 2010 → this commentary 2017. If the image seeks to immobilize the past in a frozen antiquity, its own historicity is one of constant recycling—a sequence of ‘afterlives’ (Benjamin 1999: 71-2) which begins to look very much like those of the architectural edifice it iconizes. In Benjamin’s mode of reading, what is ‘actualized in the dialectical image, along with the thing itself, are its origin and its decline’ (Benjamin 2002: 917), a notion of the artefact that is entirely commensurate with the antiquarian sensibility and its need for ruination to mark the past and the weight of tradition it thereby confers. By contrast, the ‘wallscape’ says something rather different to that sense of gently entropic historicity. It advertises not so much the contact of two temporal modes as their ‘entanglement’: ‘multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another’ (Mbembe 2001: 14). The tough fabric texture of the ‘wallscape’ concretely embodies this intertwining of incommensurable strands of temporality, in which the moment is both eternalized and relativized. Or perhaps even Monologues to Tracy III: June 6th, 2017, Tübingen 213 better, the ‘wallscape’ bodies forth the ‘foldedness of time’ (Hook 2014: 204), made manifest in the undulating pleats and ripples in its fabric (Deleuze 1992). Leaving the main station just outside the old city for the twenty-minute train ride around Split Bay, past the ruins of the ancient city of Salona (now the northern suburb of Solin), back to Kaštel Gomilica. There is a sense, as the bellowing diesel locomotive rocks a single carriage along the track, that everything changes, but increasingly in the service of a gaudy, frenetic consumer race that few people here can actually afford. A roadside advertising billboard for the Tommy supermarket chain declares: ‘To mi treba: Tommy’ (‘That’s just what I need! ’). Perhaps the irony that has crept into my makeshift translation explains why Emezeta and Konsum are always empty—and the range of expensive overseas products pitched at Euro prices they sell shrinks from year to year. But Kozjak looming on the right, with its cliffs and screes, transforms at another tempo, not unlike the sea on the left—despite the recent jelly-fish plague brought on by the rising water temperature of the Adriatic. RWP Monologues to Tracy III: June 6 th , 2017, Tübingen Been a wild evening—I am glad I headed back to the flat early because I hadn’t realised there was an orange-red weather alert on. We’ve had high winds, thunder, and lashing rain. Large tree pot-plants are over in the street below. Trees bending into the Schloss, and hanging signs swinging a hundred and eighty degrees—quite eerie, actually! I started the Ferrante novel My Brilliant Friend , and as I feared, I am finding it lush while pretending to be taut, over-written when pretending to be minimalist etc. The personalised saga and the ‘richness’ of setting as it intertwines with character, is sick-inducing. It strikes me as entertainment for those who want sensual responses filled in for them—I don’t. I will persist for a few chapters more, but it reminds me of the set-piece reclusive novelist with the big story to tell and operating by shade the numbers techniques which are sold as original. It’s like a pastiche of ‘great European novels’ of the early twentieth century inflected with threads of modernist technique (very little of that—mainly straight down the line story-telling dripping with ‘characters’ and ‘setting’). It’s everything about place I feel is a lie—an obscuring of consequence and damage through the over-portraitising of people-in-their-settings. ‘Local colour’ let loose—you can so see it appealing to an American audience with its myths of Italy and the old country! It’s ‘fraudulent’ to my mind. But I will give it more time. Oh, and it’s limp though sold as fiery and tough. Monologues to Tracy III: June 6th, 2017, Tübingen 215 I found the office strange to encounter—a familiar space that has had many people pass through. They will lose the office soon, so I am one of its last occupants in terms of the Global South programme. I heard the ‘ratchet’ bird (great tit) as mentioned, and I am still disturbed by my typing in ‘birds of Germany great tit’ last time I was here and getting a page full of German ‘love’ websites. A celebration of the bounty of nature! And the strange reorientation with the river system—that the Ammer thins to that width is odd, driving the water through as if from a larger gauge pipe to a smaller, increasing the pressure. What we didn’t see last time, was the lush envelopment of grass making a tunnel over the water. So it’s the same, but very different, as you’d expect. But it’s not just the cyclical thing of seasons, as I mentioned prior, but a tangent to the intensity one applies in wishing to re-engage. It’s like eating familiar vegan food from the REWE supermarket, and wanting it to be in the same place, and to eat it the same way, to affirm a presence. All of it wrapped up together, along with Hölderlin, a big reason for my being here, and certainly connecting with (dis)‘place’. Nature and Classical Greece and isolation and desire to be part of something and resisting the collective culture all at once. A poet has to do these things—step outside the cultural spaces though it is so often painful. Really, ‘temporary’ is an inadequate term (or expression). I mean, when I talk with Andrée I am enriched in the specifics of Baden-Württemberg—a knowledge of presence that is offered up to help me fill out the sketchy image of (the) place I have. He is generous. The first thing he told me because he knew how pleased (excited, thrilled) I’d be, and as an expression of how pleased he is himself, is that the university has stopped animal experimentation. I don’t doubt it exists in subtle undeclared ways (I don’t know this specifically, but experience tells me so), but on an overt and public level, it’s gone. This is a great moment in the campaign against such cruelty and though I only wrote poems about it (and sent them everywhere I could think off), and though I have nothing to do with the process that led to its abandonment, I feel part of the presence of such a decision, part of the complex jigsaw of ethics that is of here and everywhere else. It’s just an affirmation of life presence, and of the least temporary side of the human condition—the side that doesn’t attempt to make all other life more temporary, less enduring than it. So I am thinking that rather than ‘temporariness’, one should flip it on its head, and to recognise all presences as permanent, as essential parts of the place, but without prioritising these presences of pre-existing (and especially ‘established’ long-term presences). The passing through is essentially forever. It is a multiversal presence that transcends maps, transcends co-ordinates, transcends records and images (photos, say) of that place. It is not the sign of the place, it is the place itself perpetual—the moment is forever in that place, spreading through time, and eternal in the moment, the singularity. And our contemporary ‘original’ hidden behind the ‘image’ continues to be inhabited. When the tarpaulin is taken away, a lattice-work brick parapet once again becomes visible; behind it, a roof-top terrace, where washing can sometimes be seen drying, is spiked with television aerials; the antique alcoves are flanked by kitchen windows let into the pre-medieval walls. The ‘wallscape’ is a ‘simulacrum’, a derivative that does not refer back to an original, but rather, to an infinitely receding series of derivatives (Baudrillard 1994). This is use-value, not exchange-value. Split is a living city, never ceasing to recycle itself for the current moment. The tarpaulin thus seeks to emphasize the antiquity of the city which in actual fact has always already been in a process of continuing transformation. The ‘wallscape’ does this by virtue of two countervailing operations: it puts the clock back to an earlier moment (that of Adam’s engraving) which was in turn putting the clock back to an imagined earlier epoch (the Roman period) which the Scotsman could only access by going to ‘the past [a]s a foreign country’, a place where history as monument was still at least in part intact—as it had to be: only by being a ruin could the artefact display its pastness in the present. What we are offered, doubly, are snapshots which do not so much freeze the present as re-territorialize the past in the present. They are, as it were, time capsules that seize a moment from the past and transport it more or less intact (though ruined) into the present, while signalling the fraught nature of the entire configuration: the wall and its icon thus constitute what Benjamin (2002: 463) calls a ‘dialectical image’, an ‘image ... [w]herein what has been comes together with the now to form a constellation’. Curiously, however, the entire assemblage, while signalling its ‘iconic’ correspondence to the façade, is by the same token quite up-front about what it is doing: the simulacrum-façade is separated from real façade by an interval, the space of the workmen’s scaffolding, catwalks and ladders. The tarpaulin does not adhere completely to the real façade of brick and mortar, thus advertising its difference from the real thing, a difference within which its exchange-value lies. Here, however, the assemblage is considerably less revolutionary than Benjamin’s dialectic of the image might suggest. The past must be significantly different from the present, otherwise its commodity-value would be lost. Yet this difference goes hand in hand with reification, the erasure of the past as process of production. All that is wished for is an image unburdened by signs of its own history of emergence so as the better to circulate in the global now. The marginal references to local-global bank (Splitska Banka 2017) and to local-global advertising index this embeddedness in the world of image-capital. According to the relentless logic of reification, this insertion in the flows of capital is obfuscated by the short-lived nature of the commodity, condemned to an ever-shrinking shelf-life as the pace of commodity turn-around accelerates constantly. The addressee of the ‘wallscape’ is patently the tourist who provides Monologues to Tracy III: June 6th, 2017, Tübingen 217 I am reminded of Baudrillard because on the door of ‘our’ old (and my ‘now’... our ‘always’! ) office, is a sign for a conference looking in some way/ s at Baudrillard and the simulacrum. This is true: ‘The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory— precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory’ (Baudrillard 1994: 1). In that poem of mine, ‘Figures in a Landscape’, this is almost what I am suggesting, that survey is the tool for creating notions of property. Of course, ‘massacre’ is the horrific ‘key’ in that poem—and the imperialism of survey and ‘territory’ is what is being critiqued. But Baudrillard is also wrong—as it’s not ‘no longer’ but always has been, because the tools he uses to discuss and analyse the sign are the tools of western imperialism, the residues of the Crusades. Territory is beyond the space of traversal for survival or even encounter, it is the space of control, of occupying not only the reality of human presence, but the ‘natural world’ in all its variations. It is total. As with so much theorising of the sign v. reality, the agency of animals (and plants) is not part of the agenda, and where it is, it’s to illustrate difference (the other) with humans. Andrée bringing to mind the letter of Hölderlin’s about the necessity of going to France to encounter the other seems essential to me. And we can extend that into the ‘animal’ and ‘plant’ worlds—territory is a construction of belonging fused with control, and of course modernity is going to make its simulacra its realities because the killing zone that is ‘real’ reality is unbearable to contemplate, and such contemplations interfere with profit-making. Anyway! The birds, especially the ubiquitous (and why not! ) blackbirds are in full song post-storm and the onset of darkness. It’s glorious—blackbirds speaking to other blackbirds they have never ‘known’, far away. Out the front of this building is a magnificent ranging climbing red rose. It reminds me of folds of many satellite dishes speaking and receiving communiques from all the other roses of the world in their various states of opening and closing, freshness or decline. The one I mentioned in an earlier email as ‘rising’ outside the flat at Churchill, was a pink climbing rose and it had much wider petals, but still seemed to be searching the skies for messages. DNA is a myth of control—as if it’s all in one specific place, and distance and space is mere replication of the same code. DNA is a reaching out as well—its changes are communal, and not of the interference of genetic modifiers who think messing with chromosomes breaks the tyranny of creation and increases human liberty. DNA is a communal code as much as a personal ID—it is the rose speaking out and receiving. Speaking of speaking out, you mentioned the political graffiti one sees here further out from the centre and sometimes in the centre, especially regarding refugee rights. Yes, that’s true—and though I disagree with the paints used, I certainly agree with the method of in-yer-face non-violent communication. This Monologues to Tracy III: June 6th, 2017, Tübingen 219 is no mere culture jamming, but an essential cry, a plea (out) of necessity. That does happen here, but most of what you see is ego-tagging that is essentially consumerist, capitalist, and right-wing; though, as I said in my last email, one can easily critique this and see a kind of class struggle taking place as well—aspiration is not (necessarily) having! And a struggle for at least more permanence than walking past the flash houses would seem to allow. And that’s why I think we need to think about being spectrum-wide permanent—omnipresent rather than temporary—and our ‘real’ presence being qualified by where the majority of our time is spent. I think of R. in prison—his presence there is temporary, but it marks him for life. The skill set he acquires there is complex and about a lack of freedom that nonetheless is forced belonging—a simulacra of community or the core of community (along with visitors, guards, letters, parole hearings). Thinking about these issues of place and belonging from ‘inside’ a prison, is a very different thing. Even the police lock-up, which I knew so well in my younger years, gives a sense of a shared perpetuating unbelonging—not the non-space but the super-invested only space in which anxiety of permanence terrifies one. Does this make sense? ‘Place’ studies are the convenience of the consumer (be they capitalist or from a consumerist single-party state embracing capitalism), and as such are simulacra in the Baudrillardian sense of it (though I doubt much self-accusation took place there, in this context at least! ). In writing letters to R. in prison (were you able to take a look and post? I guess that makes you vicariously part of it, which I also need), and receiving his replies, I am not sharing his time, but I am trying to alleviate and mediate it. I am trying to release him a little from (that) place, and make that place seem different from what it really is. What am I doing? Contributing to a delusion of place, a loss of liberty that is supposedly a consequence of wrong doing? His was not a violent crime, and yet the state (working through private companies profiting from this space and its constraints—in the case of Western Australia, a company that killed an old man in the back of a van in the desert through letting him dehydrate to death—a racist act of hate) apportions space to correct him, to be mediated in a way that it is devoid of ‘free’ ecology. R. was in Bunbury prison. Now, in Woorooloo Prison Farm where prisoners have/ encounter ‘nature’, but only as it is imprisoned for human benefit—animals butchered, prisoners farming etc.; labour to control nature as illustration of their own subservience to the state. Do you remember that young people’s prison in Mohican State Park in Ohio? The razor wire around buildings set in one of the few forest reserves around—to be in nature and not in nature. Torment of faux-place, or the ‘real’ place of control, as, indeed, Mohican is controlled in itself by the authorities. Mum was telling me about one of their hotel people or cab drivers who was a hunter and bragged about hunting the 220 Terraces last brown bears in Croatia (I think). All place was this hunter’s to make impermanent—he would make temporary. But his crimes are indelible. This flat is a strange confrontation with simulacra. Because it is almost a shrine to the owner’s mother and her extensive Middle-East and North African travels, there’s a sense of time stopped but also the flowing of the sands. There are also many books on Judaism and a number of menorahs and other religious ‘objects’ which function as memory, no doubt belief, and also a confrontation with the horrific past of this town and this country. I find their presence affirming. And though it’s not a comfortable flat and is ‘cluttered’ and more like being in a personal museum, it is also a major statement about faith and belief and permanence that can’t be deleted. I celebrate this, and admire its strength. There are other complexities with the ‘old’ being displayed as a challenge to the ‘new’, but in a way this place is also an act of postmodernity, a desire for the ‘defunct’ object to have validity in sharing space. So though I am not one for lots of ‘bits and pieces’ around, I think there’s something going on here that shows a tension between the ‘commercial act’/ necessity of renting out (she lives off the income, which is by no means vast! ) and wishing not to have to rent it out. And because she can’t be in two places at once (she has a home outside town), this is a way of keeping it active, and the memory of her mother active in the real world. Strangers are made familiar, and the travels come to her memory? Tomorrow I will try to get some work done in the Global South office, tackling the reversal of the z and the y on the keyboard as act of connection (but enjoying the keys with built-in umlauts! ). I might go up the castle to the museum sometime, but that will depend on work. Mum and John are hoping for some sunshine as their connecting and temporary ‘belonging’ is strongly mediated through photographs, mainly through recreating presence later, much later, and to share with others. That’s permanent, in its way, too. JK Terraces The terraces on the mountain below the crags, bluffs and scree slopes of Kozjak are being opened up again. For more than half a century, the terraces were neglected and fell into disuse. A process of economic transformation that converted peasant farmers into proletarian workers (for instance at the sprawling Adriachem facility, now in ruins, down by the water) allowed the scrub to cover the terraces to such an extent that in most places it is almost impossible to make out their stepped contours. Terraces 221 Now, however, here and there the stone retaining walls are being repaired and rebuilt, the brambles are being cut away and the scrub rooted out, the olive trees and vines are being replanted in orderly rows. There are even some people who have built bungalows on the higher slopes among what was until recently a tangle of bushes and dwarf oaks. The zig-zag gravel track that winds its way up the mountain towards the fire-brigade lookout is being progressively concreted or tarmacked so that residents can drive up to the higher slopes in their Lada 4x4s or their rusty first-generation Golfs. Where once there was gravel with the backbone of granite showing through at intervals, there is now bitumen and gutters to channel off the rain. The narrow vertical tracks, deep grooves in the hillside snaking down between stone walls, carved in bygone ages, perpendicular to the terraces for the grape-laden mules, are being cleared and their reticulations marked out again against the mountain’s profile. Every year when we return, there is more and more evidence of activity on the mountain. The wilderness is being transformed back into an intensely humanized landscape. Its state of wildness was just a temporary pause in a human-natural interaction that must go back centuries. But the new forms of habitation are perhaps different. I cannot quite imagine, as I gaze up towards the rearing bluff of the Kozjak range, that there will be a genuine return to the slower and more intimate forms of communication that must have underpinned manual labour and transport with beasts of burden I am not sure exactly what motivates this return to the mountain. Is it economic necessity that pinches harder than ever since the crisis of 2007-08, so that more and more people fall back upon an informal semi-rural economy, buttressed by barter, to supplement their meagre livelihoods (you help me with my olive picking, and I pay you in the wine from the terrace below)? Or are these hobby farmers from the city, recycling the fruits of rising tourist prosperity that is now spiking steeply as various geopolitical crises close off previously popular tourist regions such as Tunisia or Turkey? Does reclaiming the steep terraces betray some sort of nostalgic yearning for ‘the land’, manifest in the reoccupation of family block—the zemljište —as the city of Split grows, and Kaštela, once a series of more or less rural villages, now a separate municipality, becomes a long lateral suburb running up the coast towards the airport? I am particularly wary of any appeals to the earth in this part of Dalmatia, where militant and militarized nationalist sentiments run strong and deep. Thousands demonstrated in Split 2005 when Zagreb handed ‘war heroes’ to the Hague, and jubilated at their acquittal in 2012. (Until quite recently it was possible to buy ‘war hero’ (Heroj Rat) t-shirts on the market in Split; once, exploring a mountain track on another bluff further down the coast towards Omiš, we came upon a secluded weekender cabin festooned with portraits of ‘heroes’ of the war of independence). Terraces 223 On the very lowest slopes of the mountain, at the family house and in the garden, the same process, in miniature but at accelerated tempo, is taking place. An absence of several months has allowed the garden to grow wild, grass and weeds choking the spaces between the olive trees and growing out of the chinks in the concrete retaining walls. Annoyingly messy, but above all, dangerous: the snakes have moved in, and not all the varieties to be found here are harmless. One of the boys panicked the other day, when during a walk up the track we discovered half a snake lying between the wheel ruts. Yet again the nagging question: Is this really wild? or merely neglected? —as the accumulated rubbish from the workmen, beer bottles and plastic bags from Getro and Konzum, would seem to suggest. Last year I sat down on the bottom terrace in the garden reading Harry Potter to the kids. I discovered that the olive trees, in whose splatter-dappled shade we’d put some deck-chairs, generate their own micro-climate. Even though the sun was shining through, the temperature was distinctly cooler than elsewhere. It was as if, through millennia of entanglement with their human co-habitants and co-actants, the olive trees have developed a benevolent relationship with those that frequent and cultivate them. (German has a specific word for a landscape that has been crafted by a long dialogue between humans and natural actors: a Kulturlandschaft , a cultural landscape, or a landscape-culture). None of that this year, however, in the hectic regime of cleaning-up as we wait for a steel bin to be delivered by the council to cart it all away. What is being rehearsed here are struggles to assert ownership and control, into which I find myself being dragged, unwillingly. A regimentation of people, their time, of vegetation and of the space of the garden, symbolized in the walls built to keep out the encroaching neighbours as the olive grove next door becomes the site for a new house. Even here, the invading suburbs, a creeping urban machinery that devours more and more of the erstwhile village spaces and outlying landscape (evident most brutally in the quarry that has chewed an entire lower slope off the steep glacis of the mountain behind Solin) makes itself manifest. Yet has the process of acculturation on the mountain not always also been one of encroachment? Even the mountain slopes, since time immemorial, have been captured by the villagers, as one sees when one looks up the mountain and detects the re-emergent outline of the high olive terraces. And even before that, the coastal territory that belonged to the Venetian empire was a process of co-optation. The Venetian bridgehead was secured by the seven 1500s castles on the coast that form the core of the seven ancient villages of Kaštela. Their purpose was to protect the produce harvested on the fertile coastal strip north of Split against marauding pirates from the Adriatic, and from raiders from the Terraces 225 Ottoman-dominated hinterland once known as ‘Turkish Croatia’ (today’s Bosnia, or ‘from behind the mountain’, as the locals say). The long annexation of the land was a gradual process. Once upon a time, there was a dialogue with the earth, emerging out of the back-breaking clearing of the hillside, the transport of rocks to the retaining terrace walls, or to the longitudinal walls on each side of the steep mule tracks. Nothing idyllic about that dialogue—but it happened, out of the sheer givenness of material interaction. The walls emerged slowly, and in recent decades they subsided back into the mountain slopes whence they had once come, sometimes to be rebuilt or laid bare again in the current process of land reclamation. These are processes that cannot be captured by a Benjaminian ‘dialectic in stillstand’ (2002: 462)—the spark of an electric contact as two epochal moments collide and discharge their historical mega-voltage, or the Conradian flashes of lightning that reveal the barbarism at the heart of modernity. Such highly-charged instants instantiate a different form of temporariness, or temporarity, that lays bare, via the flashbulb of the instant, the clash of conflicting drifts of human history. Such temporal rarity as imagined by Benjamin or Conrad comes in the form of a reduction to the instant, a cross-section brutally sliced from the flow of time, perhaps a little like the chunk taken out of the side of the mountain behind Solin. Such notions have little purchase on this slower, gentler work on the slopes of Kozjak. What we see in the stone walls are longer, more fluctuating ebbs and flows of an intertwined human-natural history. Here I feel myself more drawn to Braudel’s (1977) notion of the longue durée , forged precisely with such Mediterranean-Adriatic culturescapes and their ancient interaction of sea, land and humans in mind. Yet I find myself caught up in this place in another imperceptible process of acculturation. It’s one that I have barely noticed and that takes me by surprise this year. One evening, as we sit on the terrace looking out at the blinking lights of the little fishing boats moving silently across Split Bay between our mountainside and the wooded slopes of Marjan peninsula, it strikes me. The extended family is chatting loudly (shouting, my reserved Anglo relatives would say) in Croatian. I feel as if I understand everything, though I can only pick up scraps of the conversation here and there. Over the years I have become so familiar with the sound of the language, although my competency is miserable, that it is has become for me a micro-climate, a language-ecology (Mühlhäusler 1996) like the warm evening air: the melodic intonations and rising-falling stresses (the hallmark of Croatian in contrast to other Slavic languages) have become an intuitively-sensed second skin. Who, here, has co-opted whom? Has the language, a habitat (Leitner and Malcom, eds 2007), captured me, encroached upon me like the wild grasses and scrub of the high terraces? Or have I become aware, here, 226 Monologues to Tracy IV of a phenomenon akin to that of the urbs that once spread out from Diocletian’s palace (itself a hybrid of monument and living space) and now sprawl casually all the way up the coast of Split Bay to the medieval walls of Trogir…? RWP Monologues to Tracy IV I was just looking out from the kitchen door, across the balcony up to the neighbouring roof and found myself being carefully studied by a great tit on the guttering! I have had an intense day of engaging with animals and birds around the place. Rooks are always watching and studying, and of course I had my major encounter or rather observation of the vole! Vole! Vole! Vole! When I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’d seen a stoat hole above the high waterline in the bank of the fast-flowing (my stock epithet for it—narrow but fast flowing) Ammer river, it turns out it was and is in fact a vole hole. And it’s because I walked that way to study the entrance closer from above on the path next to the road, that I chanced upon the grazing vole, its short tail trailing like a waterweed in the river. I had actually noticed a patch of grass that looked as if it had been mowed near the hole, and was pondering how (and why) on earth it had been done. And then I saw the vole systematically chomping and nibbling at a section of grass next to it, literally mowing a neat rectangle. It looked like a compacted beaver! The European water vole is often called a water rat though looks absolutely nothing like a rat, nor behaves like one. Not that there’s anything wrong with water rats! Strangely, as I watched it nibbling, and then lowering its lower half into the really rapid water, then venturing for a new succulent-looking section of growth, people walked past and took absolutely no notice! Voles are no longer a common sight anywhere, so such apparent indifference was quite disturbing. Anyway, I headed back to the flat, got the camera, and thought, I bet it’s still there when I get back, though likely further down the river. And it was—on the far side of the hole. I took some photos (quick low-res snaps—lack of available memory! ) before the vole actually dipped into the water, thrust upstream, and then up out of the water and into its hole. I will look out for it everyday! It’s been another on again off again day in terms of rain, though in the later evening it is now clear. Before dinner (wonderfully prepared by Mum and John), I went for a walk up along the railway line (where all that graffiti is and the small holdings) up to where that strange beer garden mini castle is below the Steinberg (crossing the railway line and the Ammer), and back. We all walked there a couple of times, and I often walked that way with Tim. It wasn’t the Monologues to Tracy IV 227 same without him/ you. But interestingly, the fields were sown with summer corn which was well-established. I found it fascinating to observe the stronger patches in the field where more water and more nutrients meant more rapid and richer growth. I heard a lot of birds but didn’t see many, though town is entirely alive with sparrows and blackbirds. I did see a black bird that looked very much like a chough, but I don’t think one gets them here. Not sure what it was. Walking back to Mum and John and my dinner, it struck me that what alters the temporary is family—if your family is somewhere , you feel somewhere . That’s why when we were here together I felt part of the place, even if the place didn’t have any need or response to ‘me’. It makes migration as an intense engagement with new place understandable, especially the desire to bring family out and recreate belonging. I had a weird shared vicarious moment on the way back, having passed the REWE—a cat sauntered onto the road, paused, licked its paws, stopped traffic, ignored the horns, ignored the bikes, sauntered a bit more, no rush... Annoyed people ended up laughing and so did I, and a really tough young woman looked at me and the cat and we laughed together as we passed each other. Temporariness or a moment of engagement that undoes all possible differences? Not Schroedinger’s cat question with its life-death perversity, but an action to prevent death (cars stopping) and letting the cat have one over the ‘superior’ humans. It was collective subjugation to cat without threat. It was the collective engagement with cat moment! One of the things I’ve found myself doing in an effort to define my relationship with this place is to look for faces I might recognise from last time—shopkeepers, people in the street etc. Obviously down at the university that’s more likely, but I have half-remembered some in shops and today in precisely the same spot I saw her last time (I told you about it), I saw that extremely overdressed woman who strides along looking very different from the rest of the town. She probably lives or works near where I saw her both times, but she is so distinguishable she becomes like a mobile marker of presence. How we map a place using no more than terrain, even demographics, is not only colonial and controlling but just limited. Games like The Sims try to capture some of the depth of presence, but only make the human, never mind the (rest of) the natural world, more distant and shallow in the process. I have been thinking a lot about the falseness of maps, and the Mercator projection of Africa and all it means in the ongoing subjugation of freedoms in the lust for resources. A map in the Schloss Museum exhibit of the moment—an exhibit tracking human ‘development’, showing the Middle East/ Europe as centre is to be ‘expected’, of course... We see what we see where we see it from—reminded me again of the distraction of the map. 228 Monologues to Tracy IV I just read an appalling story in The Guardian newspaper (Murphy 2017) in which Marcia Langton defends the mining industry and one of the very worst mines to be on the planet. The intricacies of this colonial project are mutating— the Indian billionaire who counters ‘white’ colonialist histories with the industrial might of India (built on class exploitation) but actually connects with its own internal colonialism as well, a colonialism in which Langford seeks autonomy for her people through employment but actually cedes control to miners and enacts a new kind of colonialism of the biosphere, making classically minimising and conflating comments on ‘green groups’ (‘cashed up’) as if they’re all the same (something anyone who has experienced such systemic bigotry must know is the first step to a destruction of rights) with some kind of ‘white’ imperialist eco-project to create their own Gardens of Eden while leaving others in ‘hell’. The absurdity of this angers me intensely—it’s why Charmaine’s efforts to say to her people that the miner’s sympathies (if they have any) are short-term and will leave nothing but damaged damaged Barna (in terms of, say, Yamaji land) is so important. I don’t think I have ever been so distressed. I am sure the corporates Langton is supporting (whether she knows it or not, and I am sure she does! I wouldn’t patronise her to suggest otherwise—it’s her gambit, and she is a committed advocate for Aboriginal people with much acuity: I do not question her commitment to her people), will divert some of their vast profits into ‘community’ at some levels—maybe even creating some kind of ‘cultural fund’, but if she thinks these Captains of Industry can be utilised to further the rights of her people, then she surely ignores the base ruthlessness of the greed—physical and post-cultural—these miners feed on. Their ‘concern’ for Aboriginal rights and well-being extends no further than what they can steal and profit from, what they can take away and ‘return’ in diminished ways. Langton is a major figure in her community, and a model to many Aboriginal people, but she is wrong in supporting those who will destroy all of us to benefit their own lives, their own short-term vision of the planet. [I wish to add by way of interpolation here, that after sending the above paragraphs to Aboriginal activist, critical thinker, poet, and commentator, Evelyn Araluen, I received a lengthy and highly reasoned response, part of which reads: ‘I think it’s really important to stress that as far as I’m aware Marcia has never stated that she personally supports Adani. In an essay for the Saturday Paper she writes: “I have been reported in the media as supporting the Carmichael mine proposed by Adani in central Queensland. This is not correct. What I objected to is what I see as the challenge our native title rights posed by opponents of the McGlade amendments. Put simply, they were demanding that thousands of Aboriginal traditional owners who had successfully negotiated and registered ILUAs in the past 20 years sacrifice their native title rights and their agreements Monologues to Tracy IV 229 so that Burragubba and his small group could continue to litigate against their own native title group and the three others who had settled terms with Adani” [Langton 2017]. So, she’s more concerned about the legal precedent in this particular instance, and is arguing for the upholding of Indigenous Land Use Agreements even when they’re divisive and bad for the community.’ Evelyn says much more, but strongly suggests I read Alexis Wright’s new book Tracker (2017), a biography of Uncle ‛Tracker’ Tilmouth. I haven’t acquired a copy of the book yet, but will, of course, and comment on the text when I have read it. I do not feel as if I can reproduce all of Evelyn’s email (and what is included above is included with permission), but I will offer my response here: first off, i want to thank you for your incredibly generous, sophisticated, nuanced and deeply informed response. i can barely express how much i appreciate it. this deserves a long and thought-out reply, and that will come in some form or other over coming weeks. what i need to do is decide whether to pull the section from the book, or to nuance it. unfortunately i won’t be able to read tracker before this book goes to proofs (in a week) because i can't get hold of a copy till the 17th (it would only give me a day or so to read and process and rewrite). however, i will read it and will respond in the best possible way. the piece i extracted is from a series of ‘monologues’ written to tracy while i was in germany last time, thus the informal tone—though the book itself is multifaceted and ‘complex’ in its array. but i can see that while my ‘opinions’ regarding the issue are reasonably ‘sound’, the response to an article in the context of a broader campaigning (i am absolutely of the belief that ALL mining companies are morally devoid and that capitalism in all its forms is wrong—my views on this are formed in the field as well as in the head), is inadequate. i can remove the reference to m. langton and the article and make the more general point, which i stand by, or i can completely delete. if i keep the general point, it is opinion not commentary—a different thing, of course. what i do know, is that it can’t stand as is. one of the problems with m. langton's using the mining lecture as a platform is that it can only feed the mining industry, and even in its subtle legal argument—a real case scenario—about loss of rights through ceding them to environmental outcomes, the mining industry is highly adept at using precedent and even tangential support as leverage in manipulating government, via parliament, which makes law. law is ephemeral in most western culturising because it serves capital and the embodiments of the state. in arguing against the state for rights of Aboriginal people, all advocates run the risk of increasing the power of the state and its appendages more. for me, it's a case of dismantling the state entirely in a non-violent way, of ceding empowerment (as opposed to power) to peoples with continuous connection (and also disrupted connection), to let law exist in the local, as only connected to land, to biosphere, can it be just. NP and ML have stepped outside that to become interlocutors with the state, and that, for me, is where the breakdown 230 Monologues to Tracy IV of outcome begins. they are in positions to advocate total resistance from having been ‘inside’—there is a point of interaction where a break is necessary to undo the state’s very blunt and unsubtle aims. p.s. of course, i have no doubts environmental groups can manipulate, abuse and sidestep rights. i, too, have seen many such things. but working with the miners is literally joining the force of destruction—no benefit can come it in any real sense. all groups that concentrate power outside community do exploit—it’s how they maintain control. as an anarchist (vegan pacifist), i deny the power of organisations and believe in responsibility of a social self. i guess i am what you might call a socialist anarchist—believe in no machinery of state, and no governance of protest outside community respect. protest is the thing in itself compelled by necessity, not by mood, ‘likes’ or zeitgeist. it is because it has to be. so i usually operate at a tangent to such organisations, and have been left in the lock-up by such groups as an ‘agitator’ on more than one occasion. but i am totally committed to ending capitalism, to returning ALL australian land to aboriginal peoples, and to stopping environmental destruction for the environment itself. sounds like a bunch of contradictions in there, but there’s not—or far fewer than some people would like there to be. i consult constantly, i respect difference, i believe we have our own journeys, i don’t believe in telling people what's what, but i DO believe in standing in front of the machinery, refusing as many products of capitalism as i can (and still function), and to reject as many of the benefits as i can and still help to look after my family. JK] I was disappointed that the main exhibits of the Schloss were closed. A few bits remained as they tied to the ‘theme’—the ‘prehistoric’ room of animals carved from mammal ivory 40 000 years ago, and other ‘moments’ (what is the moment in terms of the ‘monumental’, which is micro as much as macro in so many ways? ) such as cuneiform to show ‘human development’. There was a Commodore 64 keyboard, which of course I was so familiar with etc. Most disturbing was a display entitled ‘An Installation of War’, which included a platform on which three 9500 year-old skulls of a ‘family’ were the ‘target’ of a historic array of weaponry. There were mesolithic spears and arrows, axes and hoes, but most disturbingly, in their dead-black liveries of factory production, a number of modern (actual) weapons that looked like a military fetishist’s delight. These guns were named precisely, right down to brand numbers, and though I guess they were trying to suggest the irony of precision, it didn’t accord to the note next to it regarding 200 000 deaths through war alone in 2016. The notion that war has been a major part of human social interaction since pre-settlement days (as they put it), is as the case may be, but there are some things whose ‘preservation’ and ‘display’ perpetuate the enslavement of people and place. As Russell Monologues to Tracy IV 231 has written in terms of the post-World War Two occupation of this region, the markers of war (Cold War remilitarisation) aren’t allowed to go. They are part of the everyday. And then when entombed, we dig them up to define who we are now. I find the most poignant of those carved 40 000 year old figures not so much the famous (and exquisitely delicate) horse, but the mammoth carved from mammoth. In it is the symbol of the human condition—trapped in making an irony of existence. Where is/ are the choice/ s? They long pre-exist our being termed ‘human’, I’m sure. But maybe the compulsion to art and understanding of what we are doesn’t? I was also upset to see in the museum display a popou collected during Cook’s journey to ‘New Zealand’ (as they call it). I think it was a ‘gift’ to Banks (the destroyer! ). Popou are ancestor underpinnings of life, of the house literally, and the journeys of a family are written into them in so many ways. This conscious or subconscious mirroring of conquest and migration that seems to be bothering me today, is evident here, too. As if there’s a justification in paralleling journeys of discovery and belonging, as if enlightenment is relative. It is the Adani Mine in northern Queensland as colonial correction for the horrors of the British Empire, with those treated most unjustly (Aboriginal peoples of Australia, for example) paying again and again and being ‘sold’ notions that they are benefiting when they are NOT—as if they have control and choice where there is none. The get-what-you-can school of thought is a signing off on everything. Total loss. I studied the popou with some anxiety, as I feel it’s not for me to ‘see’, and as compelled by its spiral motifs as I was, something held me back from writing them in poems in a way that doesn’t happen when I ‘encounter’ Minoan and Etruscan spirals. Maybe because I know an ongoing colonial injustice is still in evidence, despite treaty and apparent ‘justices’ in Aotearoa... The destructions against culture are long-term and take absolute will-power (which exists, of course) to keep on resisting. Colonialism isn’t an historic period, it’s a mass state of human greed. Coming out of the Schloss I stared at the Swabian Alps for ages—remember seeing them under snow? I also studied the tiling of a steep (but snowless) roof— fascinating. As John will tell you, building techniques inform us so much about a location’s geography, weather, as well as culture (which arises from those other factors as well, of course—even when migrant, it adapts to the geography gradually at least and incrementally—I sometimes think that’s why greed is happy to damage and make the same... To make our needs in common, increase the market... But then again, capitalism thrives on difference to increase the desire for different goods—really, it’s a matter of just enough difference to the sameness to maximise profits and allure/ desire for goods). Oh, and I watched a butterfly almost fall from the walls like a stone before suddenly ‘coming to 232 Monologues to Tracy IV life’ and lifting way down below and flittering away. It was like a bird of prey falling then lifting on a thermal. Very odd—never really seen a butterfly behave like that before. I picked up a few more books today to try and get focused—one is just a collection of stories from around the world (I read a lot of those), one is a collection of ‘metaphysical poetry’ which I actually have in an earlier Penguin edition, but I bought because it’s the only English-language poetry along with Yeats they had, and I liked the forced constraint of rereading with only that available (ignoring the net! ) as it will make me focus on the poems in the context of this place and in different ways than I have previously. I have a feeling I will find some answers to my struggles over temporariness and permanence and slippages around these not so much in ‘metaphysics’, but in the incongruity of such rarefied and elaborate style (and stylistics) and fashion (court and religious form/ control/ manners/ ritual) struggling with an ontology of aesthetics which I feel so compelled to reject. Marcia Langton does a great disservice to those struggling to save such a vast area from destruction not only literally but in the destruction of spiritual values in exchange for the material. Now this sounds like a statement of complacent convenience, and in a way it is (though I wish it were not), but I do know a massive hole (as one elder put it—opposing the mine... Didn’t get his signature... All you need to think about is the affect of ‘signature’ and the compliance handwriting in script denotes... Already a betrayal of massive proportions) can only damage spirit—though I also recognise Julie Dowling’s statement (she is such a brilliant artist-commentator) that no amount of extraction can delete presence. But she’s also materially ‘wrong’ in this—delete the planet and presence is deleted in this universe, even if it remains an eternal echo or signature in the multiverse. My view of activism is pragmatic—people will always lose more than they gain in inflicting damage on country. The generations that follow the next couple of generations are being forgotten before they can arrive. Oh, and I bought Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners —a West Indian migrant story that greatly interests me because of all that’s going on, but also because of my intense interaction with the Yardies back in the early 90s. Remember I told you about the Jamaican-Brit woman I spoke to in London who was trapped in a cycle of cultural belonging and unbelonging, and who couldn’t get out because no one would allow her to make her own place, her own presence, and still retain the ‘identity’ she wanted to preserve. She had a kid and was caught up in prostitution and gang stuff, and her place was being used as a crack house, and it was terrifying. She was very kind to me, and in a sense, I still ‘belong’ in that conversation we had in hushed tones as her ‘man’ was rampaging around out- Monologues to Tracy IV 233 side. He was angry and wanted ‘goods’ and didn’t know how else to get them. A condition, a tragedy, but also a movement of presence, of need, of isolation. I am some sections in to Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind and though it is VASTLY better than the lukewarm mulch of feelings that is Ferrante, I am still disappointed. Not in the writing, which even in translation is ‘quality’, but with the belief that a life can be told, especially in conjunction with a place (Istanbul) and that we gain an insight into both. We don’t—NO fiction can do this. Narratives are constructs and simulacra and are not life any more than photos are. Hypertext might get closer, though the form defeats the utterance. A hundred novels read at once, all yelling and whispering in the ears and eyes and other senses? Maybe. But it can’t be. A few lines of poetry tells us more even if the place and the character are given no name. And maybe, just maybe, the glimpses proffered in short stories, if not straining for narrative effect. I can only write anti-novels because I don’t believe in novels per se, for all my obsessional and constant reading of them. They are a fantastical addiction, and the more realist a novel the more fantastical, and yet, a magic realist novel is also the least ‘realistic’ and gives us few tools to critique our own fantasies of a desired reality. I end up stranded and bereft. Actually, I have had two ideas for stories but can’t write them at present—one is about various people (I’ve encountered) who say ‘don’t touch my shit’ [an interpolated thought: think of Rage Against the Machine’s cover of the distressing Volume 10 song ‘Pistol Grip Pump’]—from those who have had nothing and have become very protective of their few possessions (see it a lot with people who’ve been on the road for years) or who see their (few) possessions as a resistance against white capitalist colonialisms, to from those with a lot who see their possessions as symbols of their accomplishment, personal holy (capitalist) grails, and actually portals of access to their very essences (thus also a kind of talismanic [protection] racket going on). The other story is about people changing ‘secretly’ in public but away from people who they don’t want to know that they are transitioning into another mode of being/ behaviour. I’ve told you about the Bedales senior students on the way to London to party, but when I arrived here I saw something similar to what I gathered were a sister and two brothers from a conservative Turkish-German family going out to party, and the boys literally changing across in first class (they snuck in because it’s more private), fed party clothes from a bag by their sister. It was astonishing. There’s probably a story out of those two incidents but my head isn’t working stories at the moment—or, rather, it is, but not in a fully formed way where I can sit and write them out. Mum and John go tomorrow morning and I will miss them... I have actually learnt a lot about place and space and presence from their visit, and their being here has given meaning to my being here as well. That’s the key, in the same 234 Stories stories way as us all being here the other time gave it meaning. Everything I do here I do comparatively in terms of when we were here together. I am not a unified self, and I don’t believe there is such a thing. Even the most isolated person connects with vegetable, animal, or mineral. We are all extensions of a communal self, though we don’t have to be together or communal. We can be separate and together. That’s hard to manage, but it has to be possible. Still, for me, my permanence is you and Tim. It goes outside time and space, but brings time and space into focus. When I saw those rows of corn in the fields I thought of the lines of our lives running parallel, separated in rows, but as the plants grow they touch and if not tangle, merge while also being separate. And what I liked about those fields was that instead of vast plains of cleared ground with endless seas of grain, they were small fields surrounded by trees and hedges, and birds were part of it. I will look out for the vole tomorrow. I hope you can find it in the pics (attached). The pics are part of this—and the distance and lack of clarity are part of the loss in transference, but taking the metaphoric intensity with it and the vole will be crystal clear and loom as large as it did for me. Say hi to the tawny frogmouths, the kangaroos and mistletoe birds where you are... JK Stories stories In recent years I’ve found myself more and more sceptical about the utility and legitimacy of training English teachers to teach English literature in the traditional sense. This, I feel, is an educational mandate that, though it is not entirely without value, in its present form has passed its use-by date. It seems to me to be an exercise in bourgeois high-cultural education, dating back to a period when cultural nationalism still possessed legitimacy, and when the literary text possessed a mediatic hegemony that it no longer possesses today. English literary studies, in the residual form that we have inherited in today’s universities, is somewhat out of place—though not for the usual utilitarian, profit-oriented reasons that are usually marshalled against the humanities—and thus hinders more than its helps the vital business of teacher-training for an epoch of multiple global crises. English literary studies is a temporary formation that has been left behind by the transnational, transpecies, posthuman (and thus transmediatic if not entirely postlinguistic) nature of the contemporary challenges posed to the planetary human and nonhuman community. This is why I have become wary of stories. When I do teach stories, I am constantly telling my students not to paraphrase or summarize the plot: not to tell Stories stories 235 stories that merely replicate the story. I don’t want to hear about the ‘what’ of storytelling, I say to them; I want to hear what you think about the ‘how’. Yet in the same breath I ask them to marshal their analysis into a narrative: what’s your story about the story, I ask them. And even when I am not teaching literary texts, I find myself telling stories, heuristic devices of course, but stories nonetheless. And here I am, co-writing a book that deliberately seeks to talk about the world and about time as the ephemeral yet vibrant fabric of all things in the world, a book that is nothing if not a patchwork of brief stories. Stories: we can’t live with them, we can’t live without them. And indeed, there are some genuine problems there. Nothing I can say, says Conrad’s narrator Marlow in a story that I return to again and again, no story that I can tell, ‘no relation ... can convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence, that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence’ (Conrad 2010: 70). And, closer to home, elsewhere in this book, John pillories ‘the belief that a life can be told, especially in conjunction with a place… And that we gain an insight into both. We don’t—NO fiction can do this. ... A few lines of poetry tells us more even if the place and the character are given no name.’ And Amitav Ghosh (2016), echoed by Philip Blom (2017: 15-16), rages against the novel for failing to depict, or even to intimate, the global catastrophe of climate change that we are sailing into. If we transfer these failings to the scale of world literature, we must acknowledge a failure of the writer’s responsibility to represent the world as it is and is becoming whose magnitude is similarly global. Yet Dorothee Sölle (1989: 22) quotes a frequent Jewish turn of phrase, which invariably prefaces the announcement of a word of wisdom with the sentence, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ And physicist Lee Smolin tells us that what we see around us is not space, but in fact time; everything we see around us is the sum of a light cone of a chain of events stretching back light years, that cumulate in what is here, now—so that a narrative is the only way to give any sense of the infinitely varied and intertwined processes of change that make up the cosmos from the very smallest to the very largest scales of magnitude. Smolin claims that ‘[m]otion and change are primary. Nothing is, except in a very temporary and approximate sense’ (ibid: 53). Consequently, ‘when you look around you do not see space—instead, you are looking back through the history of the universe. What you are seeing is a slice through the history of the world’ (ibid: 64). If, as Smolin (ibid: 54) suggests, ‘[t]ime and change are not optional, for the universe is a story and it is composed of processes,’ then, ‘whether it is a short story or a long story, the only kind of explanation of a process that is truly adequate is a story’ (Smolin 2000: 52). Ingold (2011: 169-75) and Cruikshank (2005: 3-4) trace the displacement of nouns as descriptors of entities in the languages of certain 236 Monologues to Tracy V arctic indigenous peoples by verbs that approximate beings’ active modes of existence in the world: the thing or the being is a story. And so it is that we move towards a notion of the story as the best way of tapping into the temporary and the contemporary. The story, the yarn, transpires to be a bundle of strands, a winding-unwinding skein, on the ever-changing meshwork of life living itself. Perhaps, when Joseph North in a recent ‘political history’ of ‘literary criticism’ (2017: 211) demands ‘the creation of a new paradigm for radical criticism proper’, combined with ‘a rigorous new pedagogy, both of which, I think, would need to be founded on an intellectual synthesis that addressed the various concerns of the major countercurrents in a systematic and unitary way’, this form of story-telling will be at the forefront. North’s agenda of ‘secur[ing] a viable site within the social order from which to work at criticism in the genuinely oppositional sense’ can only hope for some sort of success if, precisely, it abandons the notion of a ‘viable site’ except as a vibrant, vivified engagement with the temporal and the temporary, the site as constant transformation. Stories in that context, closely bound to the oral mode of pedagogy and the classroom itself as ‘Country’, would move to the fore again, reversing the demise of storytelling that Benjamin (1999: 83-107) lamented back in the 1930s. Storytelling in the classroom would supplant the novel as the genre which has so come to dominate English Literature as its curricular content rather than its communicative form. Place, site, mobility, temporariness and storytelling would once again engage in a dynamic dialogue. RWP Monologues to Tracy V I will begin with the unsettling, and the disturbance . There is a narrative, a journey, and it involves a river, though only tangentially. In my efforts to trace the circulatory system of our prior presence in this town, this area, I have been following the various rivers and tributaries—my method of mapping is by ‘following’ rather than surveying, by accumulating and compiling sensory data. For me, ‘mapping’ can only be through direct experience, and via direct experience I feel I can contribute to an unmapping of state authorities, state control of the experience of presence. Most of the rivers, big or small, have been managed in one way or another—concrete reinforcement of banks, stonework, and of course roads, bridges, tracks. But in some places, excessive rain—so hard to write this in the context of the ‘dry weather warning’ where we come from—has eaten away at human management and restraints, and eroded into the ‘walls’ and made new possibilities for river growth and movement. I saw one of these this Monologues to Tracy V 237 afternoon on the Steinlach river. I wanted to walk a way along this river that feeds into the Neckar, as you know, because it was the route to school Tim and I took every day on the return journey for him. You on the bus in the morning with him in the winter dark, the snow and ice and sub-zero temperatures, and me in rain and sleet and snow on foot in the afternoon. That river became very significant for him and me as it not only marked our journey, but our presence was also felt by wintering birds, who would fly to and away from us, register us. And it was along there we saw the woodpecker (I wrote a poem ‘about it’), and it was along there he and I discussed his day, and it was along there I unwound after my experience with the neo-Nazis near the school. One day, we saw a great heron lift up off rocks in the rapid-flowing river and it was like some major launch of a satellite into a degrading low orbit, but without the risk, the damage, the junk. Anyway, I walked it today and walked along the back of the school because it’s holidays and the track goes past the back and down to the next bridge to cross to the other side and walk the ‘far’ bank. This was interesting to me, because it was not pragmatic, and I thought I’d give it a go—Tim and I, to save time, and just to get home on cold days, always took the ‘direct’ route (a fair walk as you know, and Tim’s bag was heavy as he never ended up with a locker over those months! ). I saw things I hadn’t seen before—and the same things in different ways. I(t) was like Monet’s haystacks proliferating the same and yet very very different. The generative nature of repetition! I like nothing more. So far, so good. I saw various waterbirds and even photographed a few for Tim, and then walked into a swarm of gnats. I ended up spitting some out and took on the policy of the Jains of sweeping them away before damage can be done, and then covering my mouth and nose so I wouldn't accidentally inhale them. My mouth was dry and uncomfortable from spitting and wiping it. I thought nothing more of it, though maybe it is relevant in terms of what will eventually follow. Keep it in mind as a moment on the journey that may have significance later, or not. The picaresque is certain in its formula, but as I said, I doubt all narrative patterns, intentions, predictions or designs. Anyway, I keep walking. A lot of people on the banks sunning themselves in the evening sun. I cross back over to the other side not far from the old military barracks—done up and used for offices now... Tim and I cut past it every day from school (and I there in both temporal realities—back then , and also now ). It is an imposing and orderly building which always deeply upset me as a sign of inevitable violent control. The residues are everywhere and although this is a university town, it is also marked by these monuments to the past (as people might expect? It’s the ‘expect’ that’s the problem). All societies work like this, of course. But I don’t think they need to do so. Should the function be forgotten/ ignored—that would go against the imperatives of history, to learn for the 238 Monologues to Tracy V future. But I don’t cut across to the station on this occasion, but walk along that south-western bank of the Steinlach—wider than the Ammer and about as rapid—and glance across to the other side to see a naked young woman getting dressed in fine lingerie, and then slip on an extremely (and obviously) expensive and ‘elegant’ dress. Nudity is everywhere in warm weather here, so it’s neither a big deal nor interesting outside the statement of capitalism and freedom, a neutrality of nakedness and a fetishisation of clothing. Of course, we are not all ‘equal’ or the same naked, as some people’s nakedness can afford to be much better tended than others—though all of us ‘bare’ as the day we were born, not all of us can ‘afford’ the upkeep and capitalist-social approval of a rewarding nakedness, which is actually a propaganda-myth of equality. Nakedness is as fetishised as being clothed. But that’s not the issue either. What is the issue is noticing quite resentful ‘starings’ by some who, though clearly desiring the act of looking and consuming, were also deeply resentful on levels of class and culture. It struck me that this is why summer is such a violent time here—a confrontation with not only distressed sexualities with no ability to self-control (self-control being the ultimate liberty to my mind), but a deep resentment of the liberties of others. Also, public space is not actually a consumable entity—as long as we don’t hurt people, public space can actually be quite private. There are many ways of not looking (even if the person wanted to be looked at, which we can’t really know—we think we know by bird-like behaviours of display, but we can’t; it’s not a ritual, it’s a human thinking human things), and also to pantheistically see the person as part of the lush grass along the banks, the flowing river, a spirit of the place. I have no problem with that. Respect is a branching tree of awareness and growth of intactness. But that’s nothing to do with my disturbance—in fact, other than the capitalist aspect of it, it was neither here nor there to me. That German naturism and healthiness and embodiment fuses with state and culture and right-wingism, is not an absolute. It has and it does, but it doesn’t have to. It can equally be anti-state and indifferent to the codes of ‘healthiness’ and just be ‘isness’. That also exists here. I had actually been making a little joke to myself as I was walking the banks of the Steinlach, that I was marking my trail and presence with DNA by spitting every few meters trying to clear gnats that had got through my gentle deflections, my cautious disuadings... The perverse interaction with place that makes us part of it... I have shed DNA here and many other places, and sometimes that DNA builds over repeat visits. I shit, piss, shed cells, inform a place with my body. I don’t claim territory—I don’t want any—but I do claim a presence that is temporary on some levels, and ongoing and intangible on others. I thrive in the place I have most of my experiences, but I am also plural, and conjoined with Monologues to Tracy V 239 others. I have multiple presences, mostly those I forget or am barely aware of or never think of again. I am metamorphic, of many habitats, ectothermic (slightly), and adapting. How can I have a model of place or a narrative to subscribe to? Human belonging. I am reading a brilliant short novel (now, glimpse on glimpse without the narrative machinery crushing the insight into human character by overwhelming it with event) by Sam Selvon (2006) entitled The Lonely Londoners . As you know, because of the teaching of Global South and Post-Colonial Literatures here, there’s always a brilliant selection of decentring books in the large bookshop down the road from the English Department building. The Sevlon book is set in London 1950s among West Indian migrants and in the light of last night’s monologue on my experience with Yardies, it is amazing. And amazing in terms of present Brexit bigotry and protectionism, and the indissoluble ironies of (ongoing, I might add) British colonialism and its hatred of a two-way movement. It’s a mirror for these times, and maybe all times. One of the issues I had with Kaz on the way to Harwich, was his differentiating between the ‘genuine’ refugee (of which we had no trouble agreeing that people driven from their homes by force should be protected and supported) and the ‘economic refugee’, who he sees as a migrant coming through the ‘refugee’ back door, almost like a portal of opportunity. As one who was an economic migrant, who migrated under the opportunities of the EU prior to Brexitism, I thought he’d be sympathetic. Maybe it’s too harsh to say he isn’t or wasn’t, but rather that he sees it as the cause of broader resentment in Britain towards newcomers however and wherever they’ve come from. Maybe what he doesn’t see is that Britain specialises in economic migration, and many British migrants go to places like Australia where they publicly declare their Brexit-like beliefs and wish to apply them to their ‘new country’. Selvon’s beautifully written (idiomatic, but also designed to appeal outside idiom so I’d say watered down idiom for white Brit consumption which is probably its main problem—at this stage of reading at least) account of the alienations and aspirations of migration, of movement to where there are jobs and hope compared to ‘home’, where a centre lures because where you come from is manipulated by that centre, or the residual memories of damage caused by that centre through colonial intrusion and exploitation... I decided today not to walk along the Ammer to search for the vole... I walked on the other side of the road, paralleling it, and resisting the urge to look. A bit like people watching the naked people along the Steinlach riverbanks—see them of course... You can’t but, but then leave them be... Let them have their sunshine and thoughts. And thus the same with the vole. It is , and that’s enough for me. I don’t need to ‘see it’ to know and respect and delight in its presence. I grow through its being. Sounds solipsistic, but I think we all grow through it/ s being . The human community doesn’t comprehend how much the presence of 240 Monologues to Tracy V other living energies give it context and purpose and life. I mean, people spend so much time searching for life to validate their presence in the universe, to give it justification, and they ignore and abuse the diversity and brilliance of the life on earth. I have been wrestling more and more with the idea of metaphysics, and the whole ‘poetry that expresses emotion with intellectual content’ (OED as lifted and manipulated and loved by the editor of the Penguin metaphysical poetry volume [2006], Colin Burrow), and as much as I am, like so many of us, saturated in those seventeenth-century poets, I also deplore the ironing out of the natural world into scientific or generic artefacts. There are very few usages of specific creatures or plants—even when there are, they are reduced to symbol or conceit, and life becomes not only a puzzle to resolve (neatly), but actually extensions (outside the diversions and reroutings offered by the liberties of language in itself) of the poet’s self. Even if the poet is playing a game of manners, it’s about impressing someone with wit and skill. That bit I quoted from Dr Johnson (from the Penguin introduction [Burrow ed. 2006: xix]) at the beginning of my poem about the vole vole vole! , ‘ransack’, is actually spot on: ‘nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions’. Burrows discusses this as the pejorative attitude of a time resurrected into a new skill-set in the twentieth century, but I also find it to be what’s wrong with Eliot and his stylistics in the face of the wastes. The conservative observation of human destructiveness and vileness is one in which learning is given privilege over knowledge. Sometimes I feel Jeremy Prynne’s work plays against this trap (actually, he never falls into any trap—he makes conscious choices and his privileging of modernism is a political ploy), though not his recent work regarding which I wrote to Rod: ‘it is his most unrestrained and sublyrical piece for many years—a reinvention of the ethical pastoral that dismantles banking and commodities and consumer fetishism, is also superbly anti-Brexit and pro-refugee, while also dealing with the oppressive nature of information ‘flow’. And much more—I like its lyrical versatility... Goes from the stilted accumulation of data wording to quite beautiful flow in the latter sections... In dismantling systems his compassion for the oppressed becomes almost transcendent. So a stilted lyric of some power. Some bits are almost laments for the failure of (love) poetry and elegy. And there’s a sadness in there that keeps the anger not in check but in context. I also notice the most complex and layered self-doubt I’ve come across in any Prynne book. He has had emotional self-doubt but never political self-doubt—there is a little Brexit anxiety sublimation in this work. There is also Pound in there, of course—but it’s a questioning of certainties of reception of Pound. I think Prynne is trying to illuminate his disgust and it’s dragging him longingly back to lyricism.’ Monologues to Tracy V 241 As usual, I disagree with the editor of the Penguin metaphysical poets collection (Burrow, ed. 2006). He suggests the late metaphysicals are almost parodies of Donne, and that they had lost belief and energy and are really only left with style. But I disagree. There’s a transition there that makes them as or more interesting in some ways. He does recognise the skill and brilliance in some of Thomas Stanley’s poems (you might recall, I have admired Stanley’s work for three decades and came close to doing a selection—in fact, I did all the work! — of Stanley’s work for Salt publishing many years ago but it never appeared in print), but a number of my favourites poems/ poets are of this late period as well: Thomas Heyrick’s wonderful (look it up) ‘On a Sunbeam’ (which trembles or echoes through that ‘Leaf Sermon’ poem on the Tillman’s ‘Weeds’ photo I wrote for Rupert Loydell’s interesting project—I like Rupert a lot, far left, peaceful, and vigorously creatively and collaboratively), Richard Leigh’s ‘The Echo’, which while a bit stiff and formulaic has something undetectably weird happening below the surface of the pond (it might even be a sub-narcissus anti-song), Traherne has long been one of my favourite ‘weird’ poets of the undersoul, there’s Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Waterfall’... Of the ‘earlier’ poems I like Francis Quarles ‘On a Monument’ which might well be more iconoclastic than it seems... But Henry King’s ‘A Contemplation of Flowers’ irritates me for the reasons so many ‘metaphysical’ poems fail as moments of life activism for me—specific in form and language usage (and often in details of new discoveries, manners, conventions, patterns of wit, resurrections of the ancient world, and religious conceit, and, of course, the perils and enticements of love... And time! ), but never specific regarding the quiddity of living things. So, scientifically accurate in say the behaviour of a ‘nameless’ plant, but devoid of caring for it as a plant . But time is why I am with them. Permanence, vulnerability, the ephemerality of body vs the timelessness of love... Or, greedily, the ‘high’ of sexual congress that transcends the body and becomes quasi-ethereal. Witty arguments for bedding someone (and deceiving and using them), are the tactic, but in these military campaigns against manners (and, actually, the body), the strategy is to have the pleasure and the spirituality, and, in the end, to retain the manners! In Herbert he finds it in the body of Christ, in God ‘him’self (hymnself ? ). And to shift across the eras, the temporariness that torments a (Thomas) Hardy when writing of Emma’s death, is appeasement of his own guilt and fear of death as much as pining loss. The dog on the master’s grave pines for the hand that fed it, shared its days. But memory is what Hardy makes indelible, not the moments as they were. His poems are retrospective desires for a permanence he can’t make out of stone (‘failed’ mason) never mind words. And Hardy makes his own place based on real place so the fantastical can be real and not real: a multiverse of possibility. The sceptics’ hope, the atheists’ science, the agnostics’ preparation. 242 Monologues to Tracy V As I walk around town (and not just the Old Town), I notice a lot of stuff of ‘residency’. The bedding hanging out the windows to air when the sun comes out, the annoying smell of cigarette smoke on the staircase, the borderline familiarities with female customers of the fruit seller down near the Markt am Nonnenhaus, the clusters of heavy metal fans (Korn jackets, studs, shaved heads with long ponytails, boots...) separating themselves off from others in the street. Because most of the students are away with the holiday, it’s a very different town—they will be back this weekend. One thing I have also noticed and found quite invigorating (in that it shows justice and empathy is being enacted in some capacity at least with regard to the displaced peoples of the Syrian conflict), is the increased ‘presence’ of people clearly from the Middle East—I would guess part of Germany’s refugee intake. Near that Tübingen West station, there are buildings made out of what look like containers-demountables that click together to make two story buildings. I have seen a lot of young men around them when I walk by, so I am guessing they are ‘temporary’ accommodation for male refugees, maybe families. I am not sure what ‘temporary’ might mean here, or what they really are, but I am guessing so. And I do know these people need all the support ALL others can give. In walking beneath the great beech and other trees in their greenery here, I lament the wandoo crown decline and death of forests in Western Australia. There’ll be death here, too, but in town it’s less obvious. And all those trees we saw cut down when here—well, the stumps are gone now, and it’s as if they never were. People adjust, including people who loved and spent time with them for years. And after the new South Wales clearing laws opened the way for the destruction of what’s left of native vegetation in that state, so has the rightwing Tasmanian government done the same there—every farmer is allowed 40 hectares of forest clearing without hindrance, and no doubt more on application for a clearing license. This breaks up forest and destroys larger systems which will also be predated upon by industry. It strikes me that Australia likes to define itself as other (while othering everyone else, especially Aboriginial and Torres Strait Islander Australians), so it can, say, counter the myth of the Green Man (which souveniring might parody as bunyip). The destruction of ‘greenery’ in Australia is tied up with colonial national identity. De-greening is the making of the new paradigm (from the earliest moments of colonial intrusion). ‘Australia’ gives up its green(ery) as a nationalistic power-making gesture. Agency is the will to be economically patriotic, the colonial drive for purpose and wealth-accumulation come about through degreening. Australia still presents itself as an array of collectibles, of museum exhibits to be shipped out to the wider world, and if they get less and less, fewer and fewer (e.g. botanical specimens) they increase in value. Habitat loss is value-adding for the greedy. Temporary episodes 243 So Mum and John are in Zurich and leave for Australia tomorrow. It was special having them here, as I said, and I learnt a bit about them and myself I didn’t already know. They actually helped me feel as if the distance between you and Tim and I wasn’t so great, and that really helped. As said, it’s led to a big rethink about family as being place , as being permanence —including the way we configure family for ourselves, not just as traditional units (though they are part of it, too—as you know, non-nuclear family is as relevant and interesting to me as ‘nuclear’ families—one is not more valid than another). When I made my seitan burgers tonight (cooked seitan and cherry tomatoes in olive oil in the cast iron pan, had with slices of vegan cheese in bread), it also made me feel close to you. A familiarity of food as a vegan, of course, but also the kind of thing, say, Tim loves. So I think of this when preparing and eating. I am alone and not alone. In the end, I suppose that’s why I read fiction as well as poetry (and theory), to not be alone. I am going to read the long Pamuk novel and then the short Selvon novel and try not to think about the blood all over the back of my hand—I have cut myself somehow. This snippet in the non-narrative I am following. This love I share. JK Temporary episodes Our friend and colleague David Medalie tells a story about before and after. He relates an incident he’s been told of, at the end of the increasingly violent 1980s, as the South African apartheid system is in its death throes. We are on the campus of the University of the Western Cape, a militant tertiary institution on the Cape Flats near Cape Town. Yet again, riot police have stormed the university to break up a demonstration. The acrid smell of tear gas is everywhere. A group of lecturers are hiding behind some shrubbery, handkerchiefs to their faces. Abruptly, a bevy of students, masked and chanting revolutionary slogans (presumably ‘One Settler, One Bullet’, says David) march past, glancing back only to ask, fists still in the air, ‘When will the Chaucer worksheets be ready? ’ David’s colleague concludes the story: ‘Thank goodness, we don’t have tear gas any longer. But we don’t have Chaucer either.’ Perhaps the colleague speaks too soon. In fact, in the turbulent year of 2016, the campus conflicts over #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall escalate into naked violence, with buildings ransacked and burning, and riot police charging on students demonstrating for free university education and the ‘decolonization’ of the curriculum and the faculty. Tear gas returns to the university. Another colleague and friend reports her daughter being hit in the back by a rubber 244 Temporary episodes bullet on the Rhodes University campus at Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. One of our visiting PhD students from the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, sends us on WhatsApp a mobile-phone photo of her brother being bundled into the back of a police van by a bunch of helmeted policemen. Tear gas is back, though Chaucer, it appears, remains largely in abeyance. These recurrent contemporary avatars of the last years of apartheid don’t give the lie to David’s story though. If anything, they are typical of his fiction. His novel The Shadow Follows (2006), one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of post-apartheid writing, interrogates the way in which the ‘shadow of the past’ (Medalie 2012: 14) dogs the everyday life of the contemporary Rainbow Nation. David’s UWC campus anecdote rehearses a ‘double negative’ (to pillage a title by another novelist friend and colleague from South Africa, Ivan Vladislavić [2011]), characterized by the retreat of state violence sanctioned by the apartheid regime, but also by the erosion of the high-cultural bulwarks of European learning that once offered unlikely sites of discrete resistance in the interstices of everyday segregation. By contrast, The Shadow Follows implies a ‘double positive’, or at least something like a positive-and-a-half. Today, more than two decades after the demolition of apartheid, the same exploited majority follows largely similar trajectories of commuting between poorly-paid menial labour and outlying townships where often basic services and amenities are still lacking. (An exception of course is the substantial new Black middle class which nonetheless constitutes another privileged minority.) Under the post-apartheid dispensation, the erstwhile all-pervasive violence of apartheid persists as a ‘shadow’. Violence endures in an altered form and in a less spectacular fashion, but is by no means eradicated. The police massacre of 34 striking miners on 16 August 2012 at Marikana was the single most violent action by South African police since the infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960 (Alexander, Lekgowa, mmope, Sinwell and Xezwi 2012). A year later, Gauteng police dragged a handcuffed Mozambican taxi driver behind their police van until he died (Siddique 2013). Though exceptional, such events crystallize the ongoing violence of state and non-state actors that is indexed by Medalie’s ‘shadow’. The problem that Medalie addresses is how to make sense of this apparent continuity of poverty and violence across the jubilant caesura of the end of apartheid, and how to deal with the unrelenting legacies of colonial oppression in a manner that, as so often across the Global South, implies ‘a non-therapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery’ (Lloyd 2008: 29). In other words, Medalie seeks simultaneously to articulate the contemporary South African landscape in ways that acknowledge the ‘entanglement’ (Mbembe 2001: 14) and ‘foldedness’ (Hook 2014: 204) of the temporalities of oppression and emancipation. In the words of one of the char- Temporary episodes 245 acters in The Shadow Follows , this approach to the past seeks no ‘consolation in a shadowless purity’ (2006: 240). Medalie goes about this task in one of the most remarkable (but, and this is significant, also most ordinary) narrative experiments to be seen in contemporary South African fiction. The Shadow Follows is a low-keyed exploration of the mundane quotidian trajectories of his predominantly northern-suburbs Johannesburgers. The novel’s plots (I pluralize deliberately) focus upon the detail of the largely undramatic private lives of these denizens of the Rainbow Nation: Deanna who has separated from her husband Richard; Richard who is searching for the mother who abandoned him, and eventually finds not her, but instead his mother’s sister and that sister’s adopted son, that is, an aunt and a cousin respectively, Susan and Slush; Neil who cannot express his love for Richard, but forms a friendship with Helena the lesbian radio DJ… to name only some of a raft of loosely connected narrative strands. Somewhat surprisingly, the experience of reading The Shadow Follows is not dissimilar to that of reading the short story collections for which Medalie is best known: The Shooting of the Christmas Cows (1990) or its successor The Mistress’s Dog (2010). In fact, Medalie’s novel manifests the same mosaic-like pattern as his short-story collections. The successive chapters tend to have the compact form of short fiction, not merely in their scope, but also in their habit of beginning in media res and ending equally abruptly. Medalie’s ‘episodes’ are limited in their page-span and quick to read. They are, in fact, temporary sojourns in the micro-storyworlds of his characters. But the characters and their narratives disappear regularly, sometimes reappearing only after a considerable delay, making the abrupt transitions from one plotline to another one of the hallmarks of his fiction. In Medalie’s own words—though he is speaking of his literary role model E. M. Forster—‘it is in their elusiveness and inscrutability as characters and, literally, in their tendency to withdraw at crucial moments and to reappear when least expected, that their “prophetic” significance is felt’ (Medalie 2002: 190). It is this temporariness in their comings and goings that endows the characters and the stories in general with such a strong resonance with the con-temporary and thereby with the future. The ‘prophetic’ significance of these characters and their subjection to a narratological economy within which ‘the “separations and gaps” proliferate’ (ibid: 199) resides in the gradual emergence, often long after the reader has forgotten their earlier occurrence, of the respective overlaps and connections of the respective plotlines. It slowly transpires that the mosaic pattern is the surface manifestation of an invisibly interwoven plot structure. As Neil’s friend Helena comments, ‘Underlying everything is connection’ (Medalie 2002: 215)—itself a connection to Medalie’s mentor’s dictum ‘Only connect’ (Forster 1988: 3). 246 Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) The plot lines are interwoven—yet the plot itself never becomes singular. The plot as a whole retains its multiple strands and eschews any reductive unity of focus. No single plotline ever achieves dominance. In other words, the novel is an interweaving of short fictions whose respective trajectories criss-cross, link, but also interrupt one another. Medalie builds connections—between the violence of the past and the violence of the present but also between his characters and their lives—on the apparently grim basis of atomization and fragmentation. Fragmentation is one manifestation of the ongoing impact of an apartheid regime that sought to separate invented ethnic groups, corralled into ‘race areas’, from one another; it even divided those ethnic groups into tribal identities with separate township sub-districts. But fragmentation also provides the latticework for a restitched fabric of human reintegration, localized, limited in scope, modest in its ambitions, in which ‘the most intimate, even minimal, acts ... [r]emake the terms for collective survival’ (Lloyd 2008: 37). Medalie’s episodic plotting and its banal everyday narrative content in many ways exemplify Ndebele’s (1991: 38) celebration of a restored aesthetics of the ordinary after the ‘mind-boggling brutality’ of the apartheid regime and the equally ‘spectacular’ and ‘exhibitionist’ character of anti-apartheid writing. The limited, apparently disconnected nature of Medalie’s episodes is an index of their unassuming ordinariness, and of the modesty of his fictional project. The ‘temporary’ dwelling of the reader in one of his short chapters, and the ‘temporal’ nature of what we find there is borne out by the final lines of the novel: ‘They arrived so quietly that at first there was nothing more to discern than a gathering of small movements and sounds. Many did not even notice this faint clamour. ... The winds of August were come again’ (Medalie 2002: 244). In many languages (‘temps’, ‘tiempe’, ‘vrijeme’) ‘temporality’ also refers to the weather, to the quotidian but also cosmic mould of temporariness, what one of Medalie’s characters calls ‘misshapen seasons’ (ibid: 240). Medalie’s temporary episodes give shape to that misshapenness. RWP Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) I’ve decided to break tonight’s missive into two parts—before dinner and after dinner. Though it has been a difficult day and nothing has quite gone as I expected or planned, I have managed to get a little tangential thinking done about the issues of presence, belonging and ‘where’ one is at any given time, and the strangenesses of the temporary and the permanent and the reality of the slip- Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) 247 page we occupy as a constant in-between. Whenever we are most temporary, especially when vulnerable, we seem to need to make permanent markers of who we are—for example, how we arrange(d) the things we carry with us, how we deport our bodies, the patterns we consider as part of who we are, and even the quirks and habits we claim we are unaware of but have at least a vague notion from hearsay that it is the case... I am thinking how people under great duress and deprivation use long-term personal rituals as means of survival. I have been thinking a lot about location and travelling and journeying and what they really mean in terms of not only one’s own experience, but other’s experience of ‘you’, and thus their own experience. I am not travelling here, I am revisiting and recurring as a factor in this place. And over the coming years, there’s an expectation I will perform this ‘revisiting’ because of ongoing connection to the Global south programme/ community. Now, given my distress of being alone here and consequently feeling ‘isolated’, that’s conceptual and not physical, but because people I do know spend most of their time here, and because I work with them over a distance, I draw on my familiarity with the place to strengthen those collaborative bonds. In a sense, my return home (to one of our homes—i.e. Jam Tree Gully! our ‘main’ home), is both an act of travel and an act of repatriation, all part of the dynamic of coming and going, exists and entries. If we venture from our immediate locale, we create a stage for action and drama, and seek to control the plot, remaining within an awareness of the dramatic irony that we are actually at the mercy of. A paradox. This all came to mind in very intense ways when I tried to walk to the Botanical Gardens today (not the old, joyful Botanical Garden I walk through everyday when here, but the large more ‘modern’ version). It’s a climb up the ‘hill’ and one has to go past all the various clinics—the hospital complex is massive. I took a wrong turn at a fork and had to double back. More of that soon. But as I passed the last clinic and saw the sign for the Gardens on the road to Stuttgart, the traffic rushing by in search of the limitlessness of the Autobahn and the mock freedom it proffers, I noticed that across the road two great smokestacks of the hospital incinerators were at work. I had to pass by and under them and I decided I didn’t want to. You may think it purely a case of the ‘fallout’ from the stacks, but it wasn’t that alone, it was also a visceral illness at what these stacks can mean, especially burning body parts, making waste of diseased parts of bodies. Of course, the Nazis saw all bodies of those they wished to wipe out as ‘diseased’, and implemented an ongoing process of elimination, of taking the smoke particles up into the atmosphere. I felt like vomiting. Such markers and signs of the past are indelible. Anyway, I couldn’t walk past them and turned back, a storm brewing in the air. I am probably the only one who would be disturbed by this, and most would be inured to their presence and say, well, what 248 Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) else is to be done, but there’s a disturbing synthesis of temporal presence that I think constantly needs undoing in language, and that’s what I am trying to do now. Whether appropriate or inappropriate, I can’t remove it from my psyche. And it’s more than poetry, even more than Celan (though his markers are everywhere in how I can think about expressions of this)—it’s an extension of the human into the void of the industrial, the stacks being the stacks of all human mass-control and mass-consumption. It should be a sign of healing (medicine), but it is medicine tied to profit and capitalism and personal ambition. Of course, it’s none of these as well, and that’s the tension. I should remain silent, but can’t. I turned back and can’t go to those gardens because of proximity. But I’ve also been having trauma over botanical gardens as imperial zones. We know they are, as sites of collection and collation, but one could argue that in a decaying world any sites of vegetation are good sites, especially if they are not being made by removing existing vegetation. The trees are there and may they thrive. But it’s something else—it’s the zone of research, the active zone of control, the zone of chemicalisation, the zone of display and manipulation that bothers me. The Old Botanical Gardens here are really just gardens now, with some interesting species of trees as residue of colonial scientific desire, but an active research botanical garden is something else. I love the gardens in Cambridge, but the Sainsbury’s research facility is something else again—something invasive, manipulative, capitalist, exploitative, and anti-nature. Anyway, I went back into town and a bit at a loss decided to visit the Stadtmuseum—the Lotte Reiniger exhibit is still on though due to finish soon, and there was also an exhibition by the photographer Herlinde Koelbl. I didn’t like the Koelbl exhibition, though it had a couple of interesting collages and ways of seeing, but generally I found it exploitative. Enough said. But seeing the Reiniger again was an interesting viaduct as re-engagement with place—flowing into the stilted imagery of those old films was quite liberating, especially watching the animals engage with humans. Speaking of which, I noticed on the wall of ‘Mum’s and John’s room’, two pictures of birds seemingly talking with each other and carrying Arabic script. I am wondering if they are extracts from Attar’s Conference of The Birds —very beautiful. And birds have been a big part of my day, and I have been thinking about them when I see them as themselves, and also what we make of them in seeing, hearing and interacting. We make of them silhouettes, because beyond superficial (for all science, for all ‘observation’ they can only be that—such ‘readings’ lack ontological perception) interpretations of their ‘behaviours’, we can’t know what is being thought . So, are the tits here truly the ‘same’ as the tits in Cambridge? And the ravens? Of course not... And even migrating birds we see here that we literally then see in, say, Ireland or Britain, at a different point on their journey are the same Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) 249 physically but in a different mode because of the different place, the different space. Shifting place/ zone/ location changes them, as it does us—they take with them their contact with here, and ‘instinct’. But (their) interpretation is in flux, and shifts in re-encountering and conversations they have with each other and other living things—plant and animal—but also stone and the ‘inanimate’ alter (their) perceptions, surely. New buildings that have interrupted their (unless first migratory) flight’s previous knowledges, are part of the many points of localism on their journeys that change the experience of shift, of change. Nothing is completely as it was. It cannot remain so as it is all in flux. The definites and indefinite, even if they need certain continuties for such movements to remain viable. Dramatic shifts lead to collapse in the journey, in their biochemistries, their ‘faiths’. We see the silhouettes in the simple narratives we construct in the hope of telling complex stories. An aside: you said that ‘Hardy is a complex fellow’. The point you made in your email (‘But memory is what Hardy makes indelible, not the moments as they were. His poems are retrospective desires for permanence he can’t make out of stone (failed mason) never mind words’) is very interesting. It connects vividly with something David M was working on in Hardy, but which he (understandably) found distasteful, repellent, etc.—that Hardy’s got a prurient fixation (ever since he in real life witnessed a hanging, which keeps recurring in symbolic form in his fiction & perhaps in the poetry but I don’t know) with the reduction of live bodies to dead stillness (my paraphrase, not David’s words)— i.e. in his novels there is a terrible undercurrent of necro-stuff going on—very very like what you are saying about his wish to fix things in stone. It comes out particularly strongly in Jude the Obscure , but also in The Mayor . From distant memory I think it’s also there in The Well-Beloved (isn’t Jocelyn a sculptor? ). Even though the notion is repulsive and disgusting, I think it is connected to what you are observing about his poems of ‘regret’ over Emma, and the wish to fix with permanence like stone. Yes, I agree. Hardy had to revert to poetry not only because of the distress of and around Jude , but also because the novels were embodiments of Emma (she certainly ‘helped’ with all but the first one or two and the last, which offended her deeply) and his leaving them was leaving her in the flesh. He returns to her in poetry because his poetry is monumental in its shape and ambition—even the simplest poem is sculptural, and obeys the lines of stonework (in the forms that he wrote, with its rhyme/ stanza/ idiomatic-rhetorical fulcrum prosody—which way the emphasis tilts greatly affects the approachability of any given poem). People forget the vast sculpturality of a (dramatic) verse work like The Dynasts , and certainly of so many of Hardy’s greatest poems. He is concerned literally with the stone of the headstone, but also the slab of the poem. It is not coinci- 250 Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) dental that his freest and most joyful poems (e.g. ‘Weathers’ and ‘The Ruined Maid’ with its deadly irony) are maybe less sculptural (certainly less monumental) than others. Of course, his use of the colloquial offsets the slab-like nature of the poems, and seems to give them spring and allow them to escape his fixation with fixing time in stone, but that’s a ruse, because ultimately, a melancholy drives his affection for colloquial and a belief that fate will get the high and mighty as much as the ordinary folk. It traumatised him, and yes, I think the gibbet encounter was at the core of this. The Stadtmuseum. I went and looked at the general collection again and interspersed through it was a collection of ‘Tübingen portraits’. You have seen some of the old paintings of local prominent figures (sixteenth-century etc.), but there were photos of families and people from the here and now with them in their houses, with their names and addresses (! ) and their employment. The wealthy with their books and prints and comforts, the students with their smokes and ‘op-shop’ clothes, and communalism... But most disturbing (there were no refugees that I could see! ), aside from the large coloured portrait of the butcher, was a b&w family portrait of a husband and wife with daughter in a dining room covered in dozens and dozens of deer antlers. There were large antlers, and also numerous small antlers. The daughter behind her spectacles and in her dungarees leaning next to THE FATHER (mother to the side but in foreground of picture), looked so dazzled by how she was brought up that she was either very dangerous or very suppressed or just disturbed in an inarticulate way. Who she really is, one can’t know, but in the portrait, there were subtexts that marked place in the same way as the incinerators of the hospital did. I tell myself, that at least the university has given up its hideous (and long-term) animal vivisecting. I hope it’s true. But now I get to the essence of this ‘episode 1’ before heading off to read a bit more of the Selvon novella and then cooking my seitan—not only did I see the vole again, but also a duck with ducklings near the vole. I had decided not to look yesterday, but today I felt I needed reassurance after the morning’s experience. As I had been walking towards the Botanical Garden, I passed many fallen and open pine cones. As we often discuss, pine cones take us both back to childhood and school ovals—pines (Pinus radiata) were not only planted around school ovals (a statement of Euro-education), but schools were often built where native vegetation had been uprooted and pine plantations planted which were then harvested as new suburbs were desired (‘needed’), then built. Sitting under pine trees and playing with the unopened hard and inscrutable pine cones, green and sticky with a resin that’d stay with you overnight because nothing could move it, is a marker of childhood—not one that outweighs wandoo and york gum and even jarrah and maree for me, but a strong one nonetheless. Also, Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 1) 251 the pine plantations at what is now Winthrop, were places we ran the dogs and where terrible crimes were committed by people who came in from other suburbs, other parts of the city (crossing the cordon sanitaire into the then periphery of the city). And pine forests were what my grandfather replaced jarrah with for the state, though he loved the jarrah and the eagles that nested at the top of them. And now the few remaining pine trees in those now inner suburbs of Perth are the last refuges of the carnabys and red-tailed black cockatoos. The ironies. Anyway, on those beds of needles it was actually the open pine cones spent of seed that fascinated me—they seemed like keys to the past, and both logical and illogical. I took many home. I never spray-painted them like some trying to make European Christmases, but I did dismantle them to try and understand what part they had in the scheme of things. Later, native pine trees fascinated me and I left all of their seed housings alone. I digress, though I did say I would come back to my wrong turn—a lot of pine cones on that wrong turn along with cranes being used in the construction of new buildings. I always get lopsided with their balance, their plays as if it’s performance to make... Especially when forest has likely gone in the making of the ‘new’, the dwelling/ s. But! I saw the vole—this time ‘facing up’ at me—half seeing at least (my silhouette—as you’ll see in the photos, the sun was ‘blasting’ me into a parody of narrative-life... Those Reiniger tellings of exotic tales... The silhouette both parodic but weirdly and deeply empathetic? ), nibbling strands of grass, comfortable with its place and actions, at least undisturbed by my presence. And nearby, a duck with four ducklings. I photographed, so will send (attached). What was wonderful, was when a duckling fell into the fast-flowing Ammer, it pumped its little legs so powerfully that it stayed ‘still/ ed’ until it was able to ‘drift’ laterally to the bank and retrieve itself. At first I only saw one, but three others appeared from under the grass. This is my survival in my aloneness. This is what poetry is for me. There is a disturbing poem by Abraham Cowley entitled ‘Written in Juice of a Lemon’ (take a read; Burrow ed. 2006: 166-7) which is a perverse ‘description’ of design and ‘erasure’, of the sign being made and the sign being visible only under certain conditions and if we know how to see (the rules of exposure/ revelation); it finishes with these annihilating lines: 8. Yet if thine own unworthiness Will still, that thou art mine, not here, confess, Consume thyself with fire before her eyes, And so her grace or pity move, 252 Dialectical images The gods, though beasts they do not love, Yet like them when they’re burnt in sacrifice. (ibid: 167) ‘Lemon writing’ held to the fire reveals , and yet the fire consumes. And love is destroying and yet also a means to illumination, maybe the only one. It’s a brutal image—like the incinerators, the charred understandings we have of other ‘species’ (silhouettes), the spent pine nuts, the trophies of antlers in the family kitchen/ living room... And Hardy’s Gods via Aeschylus. We the beasts in their eyes, they who rely on Einstein the destroyer (atomic) who would worship peace, the flies to wanton boys, the planet given up to reach to other places to colonise? But love... Love IS place eternal and outside mapping. It can be destructive and in its name and sway many imperialisms have taken place, but in its essence it is outside science, and outside poetry, and certainly outside states of being. JK Dialectical images Once, staying at a friend’s place in Mainz, I got up early to make myself a coffee, and, looking out the kitchen window and across the rooftops, saw someone in a house a quarter of a block away clambering out of an upstairs window onto the window sill—some student wanting to sit in the sun on the roof, I thought to myself. Then the figure jumped in a leisurely fashion, and disappeared from sight as if it had sprung lightly—so I imagined it in that moment—onto what was perhaps an invisible terrace or a lower neighbouring roof. But later, I learnt that it was suicide: there was no roof below, only a deep inner courtyard. How strangely undramatic and unspectacular that momentary glimpse was, in retrospect. A last moment in a life, of which I was witness to two or three penultimate seconds—enacted as if they were merely a step from one room into another. During the same stay, I discovered for the first time Benjamin’s famous ‘dialectical images’, in a text by Sigrid Weigel (1990: 23-4) I’d bought in a bookshop near the main railway station. The passage she quotes, and which I vividly remember reading for the first time, is only one of many, themselves configured in a dialectical progression in the massive and messy convolute of The Arcades Project (2002). For me too, that first quotation was itself a sort of dialectical image, a brief glimpse ‘pregnant with tensions’ in Benjamin’s (ibid: 254) own formulation. In Benjamin’s work the ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (ibid: 462) undergoes a decisive transformation. In its first avatar, it is imagined by Benjamin as a sort of Dialectical images 253 an instance of dreamwork, with fetish character. This idea drew the scorn of Adorno, and Benjamin, himself dissatisfied with the notion, retooled it into a central element of his Marxist aesthetic of collage or montage (Benjamin 2002: 460; Tiedmann 2002: 942-4). In the second avatar, the image that bodies forth the ‘dialectics at a standstill’ lays bare and explicates the forces of history. The ‘dialectical image’ (Benjamin 2002: 460) displays ‘a configuration pregnant with tensions’, ‘gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad’, and thus works to ‘blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history’ (Benjamin 1999: 254). History as a flowing series of events is denaturalized, and becomes visible, in the momentary ‘freeze-framing’ of the image, as a heterogeneous montage of conflicting forces and warring classes (Benjamin 2002: 461). The fragmentary image itself is designed to lay bare these forces in conflict; but Benjamin’s montage technique, which joins fragments together, without commentary so as to show rather than tell the dynamic of history, is akin, in fact, to the whole of history itself, of which the crystalline moment is a synecdoche (ibid: 460, 461). The fragment and the collage are the material, literary objective correlatives of history and its constitutive forces: ‘only dialectical images are genuine images … and the place where one encounters them is language’ (ibid: 462). Benjamin has a vendetta with a notion of history as harmonious flow: ‘[t]he concept of the historical progress of mankind connot be sundered from the concept of its progression through an empty, heterogenous time’ (1999: 252). With his dialectical images, Benjamin wants to disrupt this flow, break it up into crystalline moments, which are not merely destructive of an ideology of natural forward moving time, but also constructive of a recognition of the true nature of things. They are destructive-constructive to the extent that they ‘teach us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’, and thus help us to ‘clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency’ (ibid: 248-9). This is, in part at least, what this books seeks to do. It offers fragments, dialectical vignettes, of a fragmented world. It works with the collage method in the hope that it will blast salient aspects of that world out of their naturalized place in the status quo, allowing us to see the fragmenting forces of capitalism in all its brutality. At the same time, it works actively with the collage method as a heuristic device, in the hope that the reader will become an expert in dialectical interpretation, constructing the larger picture herself from the fragments available. (This is not merely a cognitive exercise, it is also an exercise in political perception, which exerts an influence, however minimal I cannot say, upon the way things connect to one another. And here, one might say, I have already left the beaten Benjaminian track. So, here I must pause for a moment.) 254 Dialectical images A different voice speaks, contradicting what I, following in the footsteps of Benjamin, have just said. Here is Bergson (1911 [1907]: 302), militating against the very snapshots that Benjamin would appear to be taking: Now, life is an evolution. We condense a period of this evolution into a stable perspective which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition . Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. (Emphases in original; translation modified) Bergson’s take on the temporary exactly reverses what Benjamin suggests. Life is a flow, and dialectical snapshots are falsifications of that constancy of change, if one can use such an oxymoronic expression. The ‘Open’ (Rilke’s [1978: 71] expression for what Bergson is describing here) is a space and a time which perhaps undulates, but is not fenced. It has folds and ripples, but no borders or limitations. It does not have demarcations, but rather an infinity of phasal transitions. There is no sense of (self)-possession, no sense of loss, merely a non-profit economics of exchange which brings about transformations. Everything is temporary. Benjamin contra Bergson, then, in their views of the ephemeral moment and its registration in ‘imagistic’ (Benjamin 2002: 462) logic. Where bourgeois historiography, for Benjamin, sees progression, the same bourgeois common sense, for Bergson, sees a succession of states, between which progression happens. Where Benjamin wishes to show up a conflicted history of class warfare, Bergson wishes to show an ongoing process of change that is the basal reality of society. And where Benjamin crystallizes this in a dialectical snapshot that freezes the ‘perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded’ (ibid: 463), alienating it from an alienating historicism, Bergson eschews the snapshot, seeing in it something akin to the fetish with which Benjamin originally connected the image: something that, as in dream language, stands in for the unstanchable lack that drives consumer capitalism. I have always been struck by the way the German ‘Dialektik im Still stand ’ is reversed into ‘Dialectics at a stand still’ in English, suggesting that Benjamin got it the wrong way round, and that the translation somehow seeks to rectify this. But perhaps this bilingual chiasmus does indeed hint at a form of synthesis—if indeed this is the right term, which is why I am using it provisionally, to say the very least—of Benjamin’s antithetical notions of the ‘dialectic at a standstill’. Dialectical images 255 There are in effect two politics of time here, that at first glance appear irreconcileable. On the one hand, the Benjaminian temporal terrorism that seeks to blast a specific moment out of the continuum of German nineteenth-century historicism in much the same way as Conrad’s anarchists in The Secret Agent (2013) attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and the zero meridian. Benjamin notes how much the empty time of historicism has played into the hands of fascism (1999: 249)—whence the need to create a ‘counter-state of emergency’ to resist the state of emergency that fascism then (and now) installs itself as the norm. The political relevance of the universal, homogenous (historicist) time of productivity imposed by the Global North upon the entirety of the planet within the logic first of industrial capitalism, then consumer capitalism, and now in the age of speculative finance capital, is undeniable. Universal time connects local productivities in a global network, calibrates profit in terms of time, and articulates profit in terms of progress. On the other hand, the Bergsonian temporal mystic detects an invisible continuity of change beneath the façade of calibrated, segmented, commodified time, one that denies the coagulated immobilities of the segmented ‘states’ that capitalism sells and buys at ever more competitive prices and at every more rapid turnover rates. Because change is happening within any given state, it makes a mockery of the borders of the segmented moment that capitalism needs just as a currency needs units, or commodities need packaging. The commodity melts, the moment becomes viscous. But every chiasmus has a nexus, a point where the crossed arms of the figure intersect, and the two senses of temporariness at work in the (Benjaminian) ‘dialectical’ (Bergsonian) ‘snapshot’ also refuse to be contained in their respective temporal schemes (West-Pavlov 2010b). What capitalism captures and commodifies is the flow, which it can however, never totally subsume to its own logic—even if the workings of capitalism increasingly mimic that fluidity (Cetina Knorr 2004; Gilbert 2014; Massumi 2015b). The dialectical image blasts a moment out of that homogeneity, showing up the fractured façade of history, and what becomes audible in the silence after the explosion is perhaps also the sound of things ceaselessly going about their business—the sound of the rain on the roof, and the wind in the trees. At this nexus—not the still point, as Eliot would have it, but rather, a site of intense mobility and thus temporariness—we encounter, perhaps, nothing but a verb, or a plethora of verbs: with Ingold (2011), we might want to understand ourselves as ‘humaning’ (from the verb: to human). Or, we might wish to take this process a step further again, and iron out the difference already inherent in ‘to human’, so that we situate ourselves in a continuum: ‘to place’. Let us go back to the beginning, back to that temporary beginning: not to have, nor to be, but to place. By relinquishing the desire to grasp at entities, they can be 256 Temporariness and Photography allowed to unfold in their own multiply imbricated and networked complexity, with ourselves borne along in that flow. ‘Placing’ would be an intransitive verb of temporariness, one that would implicate into the constant transformation—a dialectic of transformative encounters without end, and without synthesis. No need for snaphots here—just for an attentive ear for the work of ants building an anthill, to the feel of bura as it buffets the olive trees… RWP Temporariness and Photography I drag and drop my terms from a previous investigation of presence (Kinsella 2017c) into this ‘new’ one, or into this present one. The multiplicities of polysituatedness, the echoes, murmurs and stains of temporariness. Here for a relatively short time, but not briefly, as I have been before, I am present ‘in company’. My company is more than my own, and as I age, I age with someone else. Tracy and I share much of origins in common. Ancestry, locality, the same television programmes as children, and decades together. We etch-o-sketch each other’s spatial and temporal presences. We overlap. And here, in Tübingen, we overlap in our temporariness. Both of us record our presence and observations of the town and environs in our own way—directly, indirectly—but we are also observed by others alone and together. We do not know what these observations, maybe recordings, mean, but they are there. We are background to the State’s (attempted, at least) observations of all who pass through, and we are in dozens of photographs taken by visitors and residents. The Old Town is a town that is photographed. The machine is used to capture, but each face or back-ofthe-head caught by the machine escapes the function of the machine. Mostly, photographers won’t notice the detail till later. And even then, they might well look around the ‘distractions’, the incidentals in the photos, to see what they want to see. One might be photoshopped out of existence, out of the time marked at the bottom of the image. I have Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (2002) on my lap, opened to the section on photography. I am recollecting and tracing because I want to show a poem is not a photograph. Not for me. Is it really for any poet? It might be referred to as such by a critic, as an insult, or maybe as an act of détournement by the poet, or as a commentary on how a photo sees and is seen as opposed to a poem. A sequence of poems: Photographs on... Or Snapshots of... Already the title ironises or at least ‘sets up’ the way we frame the poems that follow. All that is seen in the moment. But then, the still photograph in the next frame. Or run together through a slideshow, a different kind of movement, a disrupting film. Benjamin: ‘Symptom, it would seem, of a Temporariness and Photography 257 profound displacement: painting must submit to being measured by the standard of photography: ‘We will be in agreement with public in admiring... The fine artist who... Has appeared this year with a painting capable of holding its own, in point of delicacy, with daguerrian prints.’ This assessment of Meissonnier from Auguste Galimard’s Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1850, p. 95, cited in Benjamin 2002: 685). This is followed by ‘Photography in verse’—synonym for description in verse. Edouard Fournier, Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris (Paris, 1864, pp. 14-15, in Benjamin 2002: 685). And, of course, one must reference the referencing of this by saying The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (2002: 685). Whose reference system is this? I track my journey and you can follow, too. Scrutiny, gate-keeping, appropriate behaviour. See me as others might see me. See us as others would see us. But let’s go back a few pages, altering the sequence (dipping in? ), and read: ‘One of the—often unspoken—objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine. This the sentiment of Delacroix in particular’ (Benjamin 2002: 678). Why do I go here? Well, the strands of belonging and unbelonging take me to the photo Tracy is taking—I am there again, NOW—of me on the Neckar Island outside, across the river from the Hölderlin tower. Not outside, really, but almost opposite. At a slight angle, to avoid getting others in the shot—dogs and their walkers, people discussing their problems. We are in the alleyway of plane trees, the same trees Hölderlin would have looked onto out across the river, in their youth. The island. I feel most connected to both my aloneness and my sharing of life-space on islands. It was absence of family on Cocos; with family on La Réunion; with family again here, on this small river-island. The ancient trees have been tagged with graffiti. Between the old town keeping an eye on things , and the new town eyeing off? Both, really. Crocuses are out. There are no four seasons anymore, not even here, and the prompts to emergence are conflicted. Tracy takes all the photos of our presences beyond Jam Tree Gully. She carries the camera. She embraced digital photography very early on not in praise of technology—she shares my doubts, objections and often refusals—but because this way she could get around the issue of animal products in the manufacture of film and developing of photographs. I think of this as she snaps my photo. As a child, I did all I could to avoid being photographed. There are quite a few childhood photographs of me, but fewer than there would have been. Seeing myself disturbed me as much as hearing myself on cassettes. Early cassette-players. All these devices to show we’ve been, to carry our timbres to others, to say we have trodden here as well, maybe (slightly) before. The markers of presence. The painting marks the presence of the painter more than the subject. Does the photo mark the presence of the photographer in the same way? Our temporariness here has stretched to breaking-point; we risk becom- 258 Temporariness and Photography ing familiar. That familiarity of the outsider who stays and stays and sees what is uncomfortable even when not looking. It’s easy to see the overt badness: the hatred of refugees by some, the violent moments on a back street, the racist graffiti, the brutal presence of the past under the utopias of early modern architecture. It’s also easy to see the good (I don’t use scare quotes): people living as people, welcoming refugees, the anti-racism, and a strong environmental consciousness. As I would arrange good and bad. As I would picture the qualities of each. But the liminal comes into focus over time, and one realises the Green emphasis is also mixed with capitalism, that the head of the Greens in the state is proud of his Mercedes and wants the state to be used as a dumping-ground for radioactive waste. The blurring. The state party system adapts to the emphasis of place, and beneath all the good and bad is a commercial drive, a desire for goods. Telephones, cameras, computers. They might be used to undermine the capitalist enterprise, but they reinforce it more than they undermine. The violent ones, those from the circles of Dante’s Inferno , worship goods to remake the world in the image they ascribe to some other force but which is really a reflection of self-desire and often self-hatred. I think this while being photographed opposite (almost) ‘Hölderlin’s tower’ (it wasn’t his tower, it was the carpenter Zimmer’s and his family’s) and thinking of the industry that has grown around his supposed madness, his fall, his ‘lesser’ late poems which I think burst out of their formulaics to be masterpieces of subterfuge, mocking the very fame he had obsessed over when young. He was not insane. His tower glows. An edifice. Graffiti approaches along the walkway. It will be tagged. This end to Benjamin’s Photography section does something for me and maybe this text as well: ‘Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel can perhaps be considered a “critique of the snapshot”, insofar as in this piece the two aspects of shock—its technological function in the mechanism and its sterilizing function in the experience—both come into play’ (Benjamin 2002: 692). This notation to brutality (the consequences of a Sunday stroll? ), to Cocteau’s critique of the bourgeoisie reinvented in the gallery of the book, or the accumulation of notes towards the book, does not accord with the moment of being photographed in front of Hölderlin’s tower. (There was no violence; however, behind the façade of any pleasant moment within the State is the knowledge that the pleasantness comes at a cost to the world somewhere else.) But it does accord with the ecology of presence around it, and of which we make ourselves part. There is no beauty in ‘history’. The dialectic rejects it. I do not ‘watch the birdie’ when Tracy ‘snaps’ me. I am there, and she is in front of me, and I look at her obscured by the machine. But I see past the machine to Tracy. I know she is there, and that she will look at the picture later. I know it is part of a narrative she is making where a narrative is, but is also diffused and lost. That narrative isn’t fixed, and its pur- Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 2) 259 pose will change over time. I am happy to be part of it: a recording, of course, but also an act of temporariness against the hauntings of temporariness. Not to say we have been, but to say we are. Not to own presence, but acknowledge it. Tracy’s brother Sean, who died when he was eighteen, was a photographer and was going to study to be a ‘professional photographer’. I am told that as a child he liked the tricks of the camera, all it could do in terms of changing our perceptions of what actually was and is. The person standing on the palm of a hand, the warping of perspective. But there is no change to reality, just a play on the way we see. He was interested in temporariness, he died young, but marked his places in so many ways. Not damaging, but imprinting over so many other previous imprints, and in the imprint of presence continuous. In Tracy’s ‘snaps’ are her brother’s imprints. In a world where negatives are a fading memory, his negative develops the island without damaging the trees, a negative made positive in a place so far from where he lived and died. The ‘other side of the world’ (a place he never left), but here all the awareness of the indelible nature of ‘history’ and its images would have pressed on him also. JK Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 2) I had seitan and vegan ravioli from the Nonnenhaus shop for dinner, and now I am having a cup of green tea. In the kitchen just now and looking out at the rain through the glass door over the balcony, I noticed one of the landlady’s beloved creepers was wilting and losing leaves. On Saturday afternoon when I arrived half alive, she said that if they look like they need watering, please do so. Mid-week, I watered the more succulent herbs and left the creepers because they are in huge pots and on the edge so I assumed they’d get moisture. I was going to write something about the many photos in this place from her and her mother’s travels. They’re actually high quality images, especially the black and white ones. She has a lot of books not only on Jewish culture and Israel, but also Islamic culture and belief. And a large collection of general art books. I happened to open a collection of Sisley paintings up and came across one entitled (in its German translation) ‘Bucht von Langland mit Felsen, 1897’ which is a coastal scene of beach and rock and it immediately reminded me of the mushroom rocks (and the photos I took) at Point Peron those years ago. It was quite uncanny because in trying to find the image of the ‘bell clapper’ shell fossilised in rock for the Spiralling book (2017d) for the Newton Institute, Cambridge, I came across a photo essay I did for Alexander Deriev’s Ars Interpres Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 2) 261 journal which shut down before the essay was published. Going through it, the captions and images work, and it actually reveals more about place-encounter than anything I’ve done before or since. I will forward it to you sometime. So this image— plein air as almost all Sisley was (he had the time and leisure and money to be an impressionist from Britain via France! )—has nothing to do with Pt Peron in a literal sense, but then there’s (i) the coastal image (ii) the colonial representations of Australian coasts imported via European painting experience (especially via the Heidelberg colony/ school but many others) (iii) the Europeanisation of Australian art of the same period even when it was struggling to be ‘Australian’ (iv) my present desire to be reminded of ‘home’ (v) finding solace in the least expected places (vi) and the disturbing imperialism and relevance regarding the French British surrealist of the name ‘Pt Peron’ as marker of European management of time and space. Take a look at the image. One thing about my old photo essay that so interests me, is that it was done well before the Pokémon Go craze changed the ‘experience’ of being there, though the Garden Island Naval Base was off to the north, of course, and that is its own imbalance of the Point’s compass, but it was prior to the latest landgrab and marina development. Mushroom rocks are eroded limestone with rock on a remaining stem, and even a decade sees more erosion and change, especially force fed by intense over-occupation. Moments of being in the photos are implicated in visual semiotics of the moment (though slightly retrospective as I added the text captions about five or six years ago, a few years after the photos—so the temporality is out of kilter anyway... Another slippage heightening vulnerability of place-memory... Where place is the simulacrum of what we remember re what we experience in the now... In that slippage is ‘place’ and temporariness is actually an issue of disrupted chronology). I have been thinking about the German title for the piece I mentioned at the beginning of this part of the monologue (the book is a German edition... Südwest Verlag München, 1978... Printed in Hungary... Then still behind the Iron Curtain! )... By a rich British artist living in France to paint in the open air as an impressionist—a devout disciple—is a definition of the contrived stability of place. No place is stable, ever. And even a moment is a moment eternal, with the fluctuations of all others’ experiences of that space co-existent. Do you recall those photos of Point Peron? They’re on the old computer (a long way from here). I will dig them out. Being in this flat with its collation of other places underpinned by Jewish affirmation in a ‘German’ space (or German-Jewish space), is both calming because if its certainties and disturbing because of its restlessness. Though the mother has passed on, one has a sense of her constantly moving, returning here to gain certainty that there’s always a place of departure, of starting again, but also HOME that can’t be taken away, can’t be deleted. In some ways, in very dif- 262 Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 2) ferent ways of course, and I say this respecting the very different circumstances and traumas, it reminds me a little of my own mother and her need for home to make travel meaningful, to give it focus. She invites us into her memories because they excite her, because they give her hope in a brutalised and brutalising world. I found it strange going into ‘their’ room and left quickly—only there a few days, it’s their space from my point of view of the dynamics of the flat. I am two thirds of the way through The Lonely Londoners . Its problems are to do with the portrayal of women (it is the 1950s—though there is a little bit of internal deconstructing of male violence towards women and a strong older woman who is treated with great sympathy by the author, if not by her nephew! ), but it is an important book of migration and estrangement and a desire to ‘fit in’, and a means of showing different approaches (of characters) in dealing with racism. One character decides it’s not because he’s from Trinidad, but rather (studying his hand at night) because of ‘blackness’. And there’s the poignant and telling passage which made me think of your friend Maura and wonder about all that’s under such statements (from her mother—not the daughter, if I recall correctly), themselves migrants and I wonder about the distant, tangential subtexts of difficulty, of moral questionings that are actually straight forward but made complex by people because their conservatism (towards ‘race’, ‘sex’ etc. etc.) We read: ‘People don’t talk about things like that again, they come to kind of accept that is so the world is, that it bound to have rich and poor, it bound to have some who live by the Grace and others who have plenty. This is all about it, nobody does go into detail’ (2006: 61). I found this traumatic because the agony of inequality is exactly that, but ‘we don’t think about things like that’ because like sex under the stairs, it’s dirty to think about (when it’s not). That’s an elision, but there is a comparison to be made. Mind you, the characters in this book are constantly trying to get ‘white pussy’, as an affirmation of belonging and also just plain out sexual gratification: the act doubles because the act is ‘forbidden’ and looked down upon by ‘other’ whites. There’s a telling bit earlier which made me think of conversations with Kaz and the fact that Poles were very much part of Britain through the Second World War because of large units of Polish (escaped) military establishing themselves there and later being part of D-Day and the ‘reclaiming’/ ‘recovery’ of Europe from the Nazis. And the West Indians from the British colonies were and are as much part of London and Britain as the, say, ‘English’... A nation that set itself up as world and fed on it. And I think of Rod’s wonderful children—one who works for the forests (the very essence of the soil itself—not as blood myth of belonging, but as in nurturing ‘other/ ed life’... I might add that she lost a finger in the process and now calls what’s left ‘stumpy’! ), another who is a sculptor Monologues to Tracy VI (episode 2) 263 and assistant to the Chapman Brothers, British art institution. Grew up in ‘the UK’, but are also of Poland. We are all of many places, even if we never leave the street we were born on! That’s the default of human movement and conversation on one hand, and also the legacy of other’s imperial desires. Choice is removed in both cases in so many ways. Sorry, back to the book... There are so many slippages in this passage (one has to remember it’s a character saying this, not the author, whatever free indirect discourse allows or doesn’t... Or speaking through ): ‘There is a restaurant run by a Pole call the Rendezvous Restaurant. Go there and see if they will serve you. And you know the hurtful part of it? The Pole who have that restaurant, he aint have no more right in this country than we. In fact, we is British subjects and he is only a foreigner, we have more right than any people from the damn continent to live and work in this country, and to enjoy what this country have, because is we who bleed to make this country prosperous’ (2006: 21). Such an important passage—written in the 1950s when the fear of the ‘black’ migrant from the commonwealth was setting in, and when West Indians (say) went to London for better work opportunities and because of the idea of the metropolis. And one mustn’t forget, London sold itself for centuries as not only the centre of Empire but the modern Venice, the centre of world trade, of a cosmopolitan growth in which trade, science, and economics were bound together, with only the British class system oppressing the poor allowed for a separate ‘British’ culturisation of whiteness. Selvon’s characters are constantly pointing out that the white girls who go with them are also factory works and poor, and they have more in common with each other than the whites across classes. Racism is class, and racism in Brexit Britain is a weird trembling in class desire—because of migration from poorer (and Slavic/ Romany/ and refugees from Syria etc.) parts of Europe, certain white Brits see themselves as a class above and treat the Europeans as they treated the West Indians. Place is a seismograph of bigotries—one shifts to be replaced by another in an effort to maximise benefit from that place. Traditionally, the wealthy landowners possessed the places most Brits call their traditional homes now, forgetting they were in essence disenfranchised because of class until recently—serving in the armies of the wealthy and empowered, dying for them in the name of place and identity. Think Theresa May protecting the Anglican values of her father who protected the landowner’s and nobility’s spiritual and material ascendency... And now she is back in power with the support of the ‘light Brexit’ DUP, those arch moral conservative bigots from Northern Ireland. The irony is almost enough to sting the sense ... Again and again and again. Oh, yes, of course picaresque doesn’t have to be associated with rivers, I just prefer that as mode because I was so affected by Huck Finn (and disturbed by 264 Neg-entropy it). I always think of the picaresque in terms of compulsion fused to flow—the linking of the episodes. I am not sure what I will do tomorrow. I wanted to write another vole poem, but it hasn’t arrived, though I have thought of a story about kids (I knew of this) who ‘blacked’ themselves up like minstrels back in the 70s, and after reading the amazing The Lonely Londoners I feel compelled to do something with it... See if I can do some justice to ‘blackness’ as resistance to the white bigotry that constructs/ ed it as other where we come from, in our growing up lives. I’ve had this idea at the back of my mind for years, but wasn’t sure how to sensitively, respectfully and forcefully deal with it. I mean, when I was a kid, the black and white minstrel show was on TV! We lived with this crap. So, a story... If and when I write another story. I have the idea... But not the drive to write it at the moment. Actually, thinking more about the vole poem, I think it’s another peace poem... I think it’s about shadows and sunlight and the body and cultural difference and voles and swans and blackbirds and ducks and ducklings and peace. Somewhere in there. Not sure where. Well, have a safe drive home and a good day. This is a bridge to you from here. JK Neg-entropy Are we in a single world, or are we in a divided world? Are we part of a system that is heading towards catastrophe, or is this merely a doom-and-gloom scenario that has been purveyed by every generation wary of change? How should we respond: should we take action, or should we stay calm and sit it out? Is the crisis temporary or permanent, terminal or cyclical, and how should we couch our ethical obligations in the midst of it? I find a sort of an answer to these questions in Michel Serres’ essay on Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (2008). In that remarkable piece, he holds onto, strangely enough, two versions of entropy: entropy and negentropy. They appear in his reading to be quite independent of each other. I am puzzled by this. The universe doesn’t operate according to such binaries. What appears to be entropy (e.g. death) often turns out to be merely a phase transition to another state. The tree dies, falls, is attacked by beetles and gradually reduced to mulch, and then provides the humus that supports new growth. I die, but I become part of place, in a different manner than before. The temporary and the permanent are, from the most nano-scopic level of subatomic matter to the scale of the cosmos, utterly indistinguishable and intertwined notions. Lucretius (1951: 89-90) knew this two millennia ago: ‘Death does not put an end to things by annihilating the Neg-entropy 265 component particles but by breaking up their conjunction. Then it links them in new combinations, making everything change in shape and colour and give up in an instant its acquired gift of sensation.’ Our current politicians, megalomaniac dictators and warmongers, though, haven’t yet understood this most basic of ontological principles. So, there are not two radically opposed processes here, as Serres suggests. Why then does he insist upon this, where he, of all people (after all, he wrote about Lucretius [1977]) ought to know better? I presume that this is much more of a rhetorical strategy on his part than an epistemological, indeed ontological oversight. On the one hand, he would like to present his own shift in thinking, as he progresses, over the decades, from a body of work dedicated to the exploration of a universal culture of entropy (for instance in his book on Zola; Serres 1975) towards a discovery of a vitalist impetus in the universe (negetropy, or information). Separating out two agonistic worldviews, one based on entropy, and one based on negentropy, allows him to construct a personal and highly anecdotal story of his own discovery of a vitalist or animist paradigm at work in the world, and broader narrative of the transdisciplinary discovery of animism/ vitalism/ etc., for which Descola (e.g. 2005) stands towards the end of his essay as a synecdoche. (That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that his work on translation [1974], as part of the Hermès series on communication, already gathers up these two aspects of the informational loop.) On the other hand, there is a reason for this agonistic structure, that I suspect, is heuristic and political. The erstwhile naval officer and participant in the Suez campaign of the late 1950s (a last and pretty futile gesture of doomed European colonial hegemony of the old style) has never ceased to polemicize against the military-industrial complex (the domain of what he calls a ‘thanatocracy’ [1974: 11]) and the threat of nuclear catastrophe. The binary division between entropy and negentropy is a heuristic divison that shares out cosmic processes, albeit artificially, into two opposed tendencies. Within this heuristic framework, Serres can then delineate similarly countervailing human tendencies: those that aggravate a man-made anthropocentric entropy (pollution, environmental degradation, the arms race, global wars, genocide) and those that allow humanity to participate in the cosmic process of negentropy, or the sheer force of self-renewing life. In other words, the somewhat artificial divide that Serres opens up in his Woolf essay permits him to sketch out an ethical space—one that of course cannot but be antagonistic and conflicted—within the broader radius of the cosmic pulsation of life, which, I would nonethless insist, has no opposite term. Here lies the problem: there is in fact nothing outside life and its ambit; death or entropy is one part of that process. But the danger of sketching out a space of cosmic vitalism that has no exterior and no negative term is that it implies 266 Neg-entropy that there is no need for ethical action. Within this short-circuited logic, we would not need to oppose genocide, police violence, torture, the exploitation of child soldiers, the wilful complicity of the drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean, because this is all merely a phase transition. Vitalism as quietism! How then, in contrast to such a stance, to integrate political action into the ambit of vitalism on any other basis than that of an intuitive moral impulse—which, as we know, is not at all intuitive for many perpetrators of cruelty—or on the basis of mere decisionism? Serres’ ethical partition between entropy and negentropy, though ontologically and cosmically flawed, may be a pragmatic response to this dilemma. At the same time, however, it raises a further problem of the privileged role that it appears to award to humanity, thus bringing us back to the domain of man-made entropy, which is largely the responsibility of an industrial humanity that has arisen in the wake of another famous divide: that between nature and culture which permits humans to experiment upon nature with impunity, thereby constructing the industrial-technological carbon-fuel revolution which is now bringing about the death of the planet. To what extent does taking responsibility for the debacle we have perpetrated merely replicate the excessive arrogation of exclusive agency that was at the heart of the mess in the first place? The motto: You made the mess, You clean it up, may actually be part of the mess, and perhaps even at its core. Donna Haraway (2016: 2 ) has recently militated against both the terms ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ because, although they stress the catastrophic nature of human action, they remain stubbornly anthropocentric, and proposes instead, the ‘Chthulucene’, which implies the opportunity for new futures beyond, though perhaps not without, the human. John, in a recent ‘Graphology’ poem (Kinsella 2017b), intimates in equally picturesque language (in his colloquial expression, being a ‘dickhead’) that ecological activism may also take excessive forms of human agential egoism that are not entirely problematic. And this is the problem that Thoreau (1908: 8) addresses when he suggests that we should address issues of responsibility in a spirit of equanimity and equilibrium: ‘I think we may safely trust a great deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.’ Timothy Morton (2017: 18-19) takes a radical approach to this dilemma by suggesting that the most responsible path of action would be to relinquish our agency, ceding our capacity to act to a ‘default’ mode of co-existence within the ‘symbiotic real’: This is not as hard as it seems because the basic symbiotic real requires no maintaining by human thought or psychic activity. Western philosophy has been telling itself that humans, in particular human thought, makes things real for so long that an ethics Monologues to Tracy VII 267 or politics based simply on allowing something real to impinge on us sounds absurd or impossible. Solidarity, a thought and a feeling and a physical and political state, seems in its pleasant confusion of feeling with and being-with, appearing and being, phenomena and thing, active and passive, not simply to gesture to this non-severed real, but indeed to emerge from it. Since solidarity is so cheap and default, it extends to nonhumans automatically. To my Protestant-work-ethic conditioned ear, this sounds like a blank checque for laziness! Too good to be true! You don’t get anything for nothing, the paternal superego tells me. Serres responds to this conundrum by taking up his version of animism, which reposes upon the idea that all beings receive, process, store, and transmit information, that is, all beings participate in the process of information, which was Brillioun’s reformulation of negentropy. (This is the core idea of Serres’ book on translation, which sees translative variance as fluctuations within a grand scheme of cosmic invariance [1974: 11].) If Smolin (2002: 52) suggests that the only way to explain cosmic processes of vitalist translation is to tell a story about them, Serres implies that all life is a story of sorts—an informational story—or better, that to live is to narrate. To participate in the informational process is to be part of the cosmic movement of life, at the very most basal ontological level. All information involves some sort of assessment or evaluation, because every act of reception of information entails a decision as what to filter from the information received, how to re-encode it, and how to and what to transmit in the process of passing-on-information; thus, the very act of perception, which for Serres is always at least a two-way process, is not only ontological in nature (physical-material) but always already ethical, be it in the most minimal manner possible. To perceive is to participate and to perceive is to evaluate in a manner that is ethical to the core. RWP Monologues to Tracy VII One enters cyberspace knowing it’s manipulated and favoured and we see what it wants us to see as much as we choose it... There’s a search engine on the office computer called duckduckgo that tries to get around google’s manipulations... But it is, of course, its own form of control. I’ve heard ‘experts’ argue that algorithms have no subjectivity, and therefore are, in essence, incorruptible in a moral sense. Garbage. Utter garbage. 268 Monologues to Tracy VII Walking through the centre of the university today I came across a strange narrow asphalted bike path climbing a hill through forest and allotments, and it was alive with birds. It was like this enclave of relief from suburbia and university, and though I couldn’t photograph it, I saw a large strange bird right next to me, then watched it hop from tree to tree, climbing higher into the foliage until I lost it. I thought at first it was a blue jay, as it had a small amount of blue on each wing, but looking it up I am pretty sure it was the relatively uncommon Eurasian jay. It was inquisitive, confronting and involved. And even though that place isn’t ‘mine’, it incorporated me into its understanding of its place. You could see a whole process of factoring in going on. Then bikes raced past and I couldn’t even hear its movement. Moving on up the hill, I saw a wheatear which I tried to photograph and at least two types of tit (the conceptual portal to Germanic rights of fertility—not so weird considering there are strange almost temple like little buildings on lush allotments that look like Grecian places of worship and offering... Quite unsettling). It is clear that the ‘natural’ here is a kind of code for license of anointment, ritual, infusion with soil and (s)p(l)ace, and that this is tied with health and produce. Being an industrialised country par excellence and priding itself on industrial ‘craft’, plus its history, must make for a permanent ongoing crisis of identity. The more nationalistic, the more this seems to be the case. It goes with public nudity, and literally rolling and ‘cavorting’ (a subjective irony! ) on grassed spaces—as if one can become one with the grass, the air, the primary colours of place. Anyway, I walked on up and watched a red squirrel for a while (photographed it) near one of the strange almost secular or pagan maybe shrines to a parallel life (while the ‘owner’ drives a new BMW on the Autobahn), and then continued until I came into salubrious suburbs, rounded a corner, and happened on the Kunsthalle! I had been intending to go there but last time we were here it was closed and I hadn’t enough focus this time to make it a definitive point on my imaginary (non-imposing) compass. But there it was, and I went in and was confronted by an exhibition entitled ‘Kapitalströmung’ [Kunsthalle Tübingen, 11 May-11 June 2017], which in the main was deconstructing capitalism, but with the predictably disturbing caveat that some of the pieces required a lot of capitalism to make! However, the less-consumerist ironisings were quite deadly, and the flip Markiewicz series of ‘Euro notes’ (I took photos which I will send) were devastating. Their clear social-realist lines as both parody but also deep worker-left solidarity and sincerity, were hard-hitting. But the most amazing piece was an overt piece of anti-citizen pro-refugee anti-state ‘propaganda’, a photo that stretched an entire wall (photo coming, too): Holger Wüst’s ‘Venedig Refugee/ Non-Citizen Protest Camp—gegen Grenzen, Nationen und ‘die ganze ökonomische Scheiße’ (2014, Digital print, 3.73 by 19m). It was an Monologues to Tracy VII 269 experience and on one of the refugee banners were words I totally subscribe to, and believe are the key to all plac(ings), to all belonging: the temporary fused with the permanent, the state of flux that is being, the multiverse of presence: ‘freedom of movement is everybody’s right’. Also on this luxurious ship with the face of Marx as figurehead, you see on the bow a piece of artist’s graffiti that goes: ‘overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence’ and this is it. Another ‘printout’ style (with Benjamin? ) talks of the barbarisms of ‘culture’. Now, for me, culture doesn’t have to be barbarism against the ‘other’, but it can be. Culture is to be respected, and culture to function humanely must be respectful of difference. And ‘culture’ isn’t semiotically stable—it has many different meanings. When Charmaine Papertalk-Green uses the word ‘culture’, she is talking of community, of place, of heritage, of country, of family, of knowledge of law... And she’s also aware of how capitalism (via mining! ) exploits culture to make it an object which can be traded and ‘dealt’ with... A threat against its intactness, as if it can be preserved like in a museum of deals with mining companies. It can’t. And each deal that (has to be? ) made, is actually a way of changing that culture as commodity in the lawyer’s and ‘property owner’s’ terms... To fit with the mining nation’s paradigm, to actually absorb identity into the (arts funding) commodification of ‘Australia’. Irony of constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians is that the constitution needs them to validate itself, and when they are absorbed into it, it won’t be for their sake, but for the sake of ownership of country and resources by state and corporations—MABO twisted to give traditional rights but workable as a deal for land and control. Aboriginal Australia has the right to give non-Aboriginal Australia an ‘Australia’ they can also connect with, not the other way around. It’s non-Aboriginal Australia who should be asking to be part of the ‘constitution’, not the other way around. I have been thinking a lot about Sandeep’s ‘Citizens of the World’ project— her challenge to the fascist Theresa May, and that this image of the non-citizen is actually a truth [see earlier in book for ‘Citizen’ piece.] I am a non-citizen partly by choice, and also because I am disliked by many who hear my views (if reports from social media are anything to go by! ) because of my stance against leisure and comfort in terms of ‘fun’ at the expense of the natural environment. As an aside, porn on the internet is display and abuse and comfort and freedom all in one. But in the end, it’s about taking away our rights so someone can profit from the body. In the pictorial realm of the internet, we are all non-citizens. It has removed our ‘claims’ to place by mocking place. And yet, I feel compelled to verify the presence of birds, and soil, and trees as things in themselves, outside documentation. I saw other birds I won’t identify, just to let some be free from my recording. I do record to help protect, and to create those sparks 270 Monologues to Tracy VII across hemispheres (Brockman, but hopefully with more critique of the colonial project in this), to help the trace work as a means of witness and to make of memorialising not stoneworks à la Hardy and others, but as living portals into who and what we are/ were/ will be—an ‘isness’ of presence and responsibility. The exhibition’s critique of the capitalist/ consumer exploitation of Marxism was maybe not undercut enough by the cult of Marx as identity by parties, by Marx himself as representative of ideas (Engels in the background). But it was there. And there were failures of critique in which animals were not understood beyond the irony of calling them food—I mean, the artist would be conscious of a pig being an animal and being called ‘food’, but was more concerned with a critique (understandably in the context) of human inequality, more with the failure of capitalism rather than the fact it could never not fail as it is an outcome of greed, class, and exploitation. Johanna Kandle is the artist whose ‘poster-like’ parodies of the colonial ‘paved with gold’ (I take this from Selvon’s decolonising book The Lonely Londoners [2006] which I finished... More soon), are deployments of irony on irony as gentle but devastating critique. But the artist still only ‘sees’ so far, as you’ll get from the pictures I send to go with this. ‘Food is the new oil’ fails, ‘tomorrow is ours’ is optimistic despair in motion and agony because of this, but the most devastatingly effective is the gum arabic factory in the Sudan end of day—you just know the labour, even out of a conflict zone, is going to feed the western ‘enemy’, and these people ‘so ordinary’ wanting to (just) lead their lives, survive. ‘The artist’ can show that. All in all, for all its failings and unseeings (where all of its artists will be certain they see), it is the most relevant exhibition of its kind I have seen in my life. So at the end of the walk to ‘nowhere’, and after encountering the Eurasian jay and its undoing of continents and habitat realms just in its name-given alone, I felt like something was falling into place. Problem? Well, when workers from the gallery left, they drove away in brand new Mercedes-Benz cars. Cultural capital oozed from the building and the coffee shop would make the wealthiest couple feel good about themselves; the modernist white-washed walls of the stark display spaces would answer any exhibition need—one examining capitalism’s legacy, or one fetishising oil paint from the nineteenth-century that has value-added through the desirings of the wealth-cultured. And around the building are very comfortable houses looking out over the Swabian Alps. That the Alps are forested (at least in part) is a delight for the world, and a necessary reality against the damage, but one can’t help feel that it’s also part of the German ‘prospect’ of nature as ritualised health to offset the nastiness of their well-off existences. As if the view is an answer to exploitation. As if the view isn’t for the trees and birds and animals and microfauna of the soil, but to satisfy that the essence of Germanism is Monologues to Tracy VII 271 being preserved as identity. Does it matter? As long as the natural world is protected? Well, the view will always be vanquished if the house is becoming uncomfortable, if the view is no longer pleasing—in the end, such preservation is nationalistic economics, and no surety for nature itself. It will go if the nation demands it is no longer useful. So, as mentioned, I finished Selvon’s short novel, The Lonely Londoners , then I read the intro by Susheila Nasta, which was generally very good but had some (as I knew it would) major lacunae. She actually quoted that bit I quoted to you regarding the racism of ‘the Pole’, but she doesn’t critique the problem of belonging inherent in that quote. The racism is wrong, but there’s a problem in aligning with a system of oppression to validate one’s experience of racism. Now, the book as a whole tries to negotiate the ironies of being subjects of the Crown, of the Commonwealth, and interestingly looks at different characters’ way of dealing with this—some resist it, some try to become ‘English’, and some are are just trying to deal with their existential angst. But what she lacked was a critique of gender in the work—that’s a big part of any exploitation. I found it fascinating to read her accurately writing: ‘The contradictions of this predicament were heightened by the “open door” policy of the 1948 Nationality Act which welcomed migrants into Britain. Although the majority of colonial citizens held British passports and equal right of residence, by 1958 racial disturbances had begun to erupt. And with the passing of the Immigration Act in 1962, an explicitly exclusionist government policy emerged, designed to keep ‘coloured’ citizens out. Selvon [his book was published in 1956] frequently draws our attention to this volatile atmosphere, as the room-based existence which his characters lead becomes a powerful metaphor for their in-between existence both inside and outside English culture.’ (2006: xi) As you would have guessed, this touches on so much that interests me—my new book manuscript is entitled Open Door , my last book has an entire section (half of the book) entitled ‘inside out’, and it deals with a failure to belong made traumatic by a deep desire to connect/ belong. The British desire for perpetual timeless (sun never setting) empire leads to constant ‘correction’ to ensure rights of heritage are maintained, and control retained—in the end, its relatively few families, and especially the aristocracy, working to ‘maintain control’. And when the upstart industrialists of the ‘dirty’ northern coalfields and industrial towns added a nouveau riche element to it all, they were quickly knighted to bring them into class alignment of a sort (enough to keep them wanting more, and to keep them aspiring). It still happens. We ourselves have experienced the control over us living in Britain—as Australians ‘part of it’, but less so... Though the ‘right’ of movement of the Brit to Australia (or Spain or the South of France) is part of ‘their’ myth of identity, like a seafaring wanderer whose boat can enter (violate) any harbour. 272 Monologues to Tracy VII It’s all there. Also, Nasta notes the bit I mentioned about ‘blackness’, as it really does stand out. I am contemplating (not ‘processing’) the ‘flawed’ anti-hero Moses, who can make trouble and be kind begrudgingly, who doesn’t understand women at all and yet is just in complex ways and less so in others—a kind of very earthed prophet who has lost his vision... Which is the mantle now in the diegesis of the optimist ‘Sir Galahad’ who doesn’t feel the cold British winters that cause such hardship and depression among the ‘black’ population, but he does feel it in summer which is a time of liberation and comparative freedom for the wanderers of the city... There’s a many page single sentence riff on summer in there that IS amazing, though the creole of the story is more artifice than is claimed... Apparently, according to Nasta, Selvon originally tried to write the book in ‘standard English’ but it lacked nuance)... Anyway, Nasta didn’t really ‘pick up’ regarding/ on when it says that rich Brits were hiring young European women after the war had devastated their homes in Europe to be nannies... A kind of ‛one-upman ship’ to show who won the war, really... I might add, as the working-class Brits felt, in essence, poorly (or ‘generously’—bizarrely, both sides of the binary are truisms in the aftermath) treated by the comparatively ‘rich’ (‘big spender’) Americans during and after the war (I might interpolate, that pairs of silk stockings do not equate to generosity, whatever the claims by the giving culture! )... Some very interesting parallels... But women are ciphers in the book and white girls who go with the West Indians (and a Nigerian) are seen largely as ‘samplers’ of forbidden fruit, which may have been true, but pre-pill there’s more to it, especially post-war when the rules of interaction had shifted... To actually become conservative again entirely during the swinging 60s, which wasn’t as liberated as we’re sold! ! ! It was also the era of extreme racial vilification in the UK... Austerity followed. Anyway, it’s not a story of ‘women’ but of single men and one family... So maybe that’s it, really. Speaking of racism, because I see the comments by that appallingly racist and bigoted Irish boxer who has the same name as me (part of his Irish credentials! ), his latest is showing a mock-up of ‘European diversity’ which shows ‘pretty’ girls from different Euro ‘races’: ‘Nordic/ Celt/ Slavic/ Mediterranean/ Germanic’ as example of ‘enough’ diversity [As if Europe were a separate section of existence with its own evolution... Its own set of rules its innate ‘beauty’ and ‘femininity’]. Further, he is so racist, that he calls genocide ‘evolution,’ and displays false ‘IQ’ charts showing ‘white superiority’. I have been trying to write a story for a couple of years entitled ‘The IQ Test’ about a smart kid’s failure to do well because of stress, sickness and alienation, and the codes of the test being such that they are designed to exclude him before he even begins because his brightness is a threat (as is the brightness of all those outside the scope of any given ‘IQ’ tests... A true vestige of class, ethnic, cultural and Monologues to Tracy VII 273 capitalist exclusionism designed to make a consumer generation select its best proponents as ‘makers’ of increasing possibilities for wealth development often sold as science) apart from the extreme right-wing ‘sources’ of such charts, and their absurd and spurious statistical basis, and the complete ignorance of what constitutes knowledge (I refuse to use the word ‘intelligence’ because it’s already a construct of control and an abuse). This kind of stuff is used to justify what amounts to a cultural and personal terror(ism) so extreme, so under the radar, that unless it’s unpicked it will provoke endless aggressive response. I have written to Twitter in the past about such racism, and they have written back saying it hasn’t violated their ‘terms’. Of course, they want the widest catchment possible to make profit—when poets use Twitter and Facebook etc. to make their texts and promote them, they are sharing authorship with the most oppressive and exploitative forces of capitalism out there. Thing is, this Irish racial superiority cult is actually deep-seated and is a mockery of the abuse and suffering of all Irish under the British tyranny—our families went through that and came out of that, and I feel we have a right of challenge. I grew up being called ‘black Irish’! I was proud of something that undid the binary, that didn’t ‘belong’— because I feel ‘blackness’ belongs everywhere, and that outside ‘race’ the experience of ‘blackness’ is a knowledge that can mean liberation for white-bound societies—not only culturally, but spiritually and pragmatically as well. As one who denies nation and denies ‘ethnic identity’ in myself, I respect diversity of ethnicity and plurality of experience. Anyway, such (‘Irish’) racist propaganda as being peddled by this guy and his rightwing cronies has got to stop. We should all have the right of movement with a consciousness of how much the forms of movement we use impact the biosphere. I might add, this is the Breitbart world that Trump uses as real news as opposed to fake news which for him so often comes from not only ‘facts’ but also leftwing empathy-based reporting—i.e. reporting that doesn’t suit his fiscal and social plans. For him, the ‘fake’ is the unsympathetic to him. He’s quite literal. See the amazing image from the exhibition I send in the next email—it’s obvious, but it also works... Remembering it is the Euro... A rival currency and an ally ‘western’ idea of biospheric occupation. Sorry for the rush of observations—they create their own syntax, which I can’t unravel. A cascading trauma will inevitably produce something outside the containment field of ‘plain English’! • I have just had dinner. Though it was a lot of fuss, I fried onion, tomato and those ‘Virginian’ seitan ‘steaks’ (the faux concept is ultimately a desire to control we vegans, as much as to make us feel part of something we don’t want to be part of—I can’t understand it ultimately... Not necessary... And the US mark in modern Germany with the massive airbases and ongoing Cold War presence—it 274 Monologues to Tracy VII ain’t ended! —Makes it particularly disturbing as a drone flies over high up at night), and had it with spiral pasta. A real mess to clean up now, and I’ve just done the floor because the sunflower oil spits everywhere. A lot of cleaning up, but that’s actually good, too. As you have shown me over the many years of your culinary generosity, cooking isn’t just eating and feeding, it’s connecting— to family (a meal in your honour in your absence, too), to others, but also to the place one is in. To use space for the preparation of food is part of that food and the effort that goes into growing it. I try to buy organic, so I like to think of that being part of a kinder process to the biosphere, and I always (as you do) buy local where I can. So I thought a lot about those onions and tomatoes—most likely, I’m afraid, mass greenhouse grown for all organic status. But as I walk past the allotments and see the summer veggies, I kind of feel connected to them and the effort that goes into them, though I am also conscious of issues of property and access as well. And as I ate, I thought over all the ‘ordinary’ things I see I don’t report to you, and how much they matter to ontological survival, as well as, obviously in themselves and to (I hope) others. As you know, I love the Old Botanical Gardens, and at the moment parts of it are bursting with hedge parsley, cow parsley, various grasses, poppies etc.! That annual intensity has managed to get through its cycle without being mown, which is affirming. I looked at lots of flowers today, and especially the temporary flowering plants, the ‘ephemerals’, the so-called ‘annuals’. How in those flowerings and pollinations and seedings is everything , is the most intense kind of permanence so felt when it is interfered with, when it is lost. All the seed banks in the world can’t respect and preserve the continuity in situ . Among all those annuals, is the big pigeon house/ dovecote, layered with graffiti, but with its boarded up access to pigeon only ‘windows’, always a source of intense enjoyment for me (and them! ). The codes of sitting and cooing and shifting and entering and leaving are so complex. One of the first memories I have of Tübingen from the mid 90s, is seeing that pigeon house on its tall stem down on the island opposite the ‘Hölderlin tower’ (it was Zimmer’s tower, actually! ). I was really thrilled, and walked back and forth past it as unobtrusively as I could. I wonder if there’s much traffic between the pigeon houses across town? • Have cleared and cleaned up now. Phew. Back is playing up. Didn’t get out to get salt so I hope this sore throat isn’t worse in the morning! Received a message to say Mum and John are home, which is good. About to have a cup of organic fair trade green tea and am thinking a lot about the tea cycle and the economics of it all, as well as the human issues. Everything we are. Everything we are not. They, it, we, us, them... Language revolves around pronouns. A language without pronouns. An acceptance of dif- Ordnance Survey 275 ference within the communal. I’ve been trying to do that in poetry for decades— not anthropomorphics as exclusion and control, but as mutuality—the only one I can grasp. Thomas Hardy had some of that in him—his birds, their escape from entrapment, from ovens... From people’s amusement. John Clare’s work is a poetry troubled by human amusement (esp children but not only children) at the expense of birds... Though as a child he bothered birds, too. And I did, too. Though not for amusement, but out of fear of not being masculine, of not being hunter material, of failed genital identity. The cost that comes at—as bad in its own way as the bulging genitalia that wishes to truncheon all into submission, or to be worshipped, or to allure. Oh, the sun is shining on the Schloss (see it through the bathroom window) and the ‘ratchet’ bird is in full cry. There is a bird here that so looks like a chough—but we’re not Alpine here even if there are quite high hills and small mountains... The Alpine chough is in Bavaria, but not here. I wonder what it is? Well, I am going to go and read my Istanbul novel, and maybe look at a (German) book of Islamic architecture, and wonder why the poem I want keeps evading me. I have to go to the office tomorrow to do some preparation for the human rights event (read the essay they’re working out of and write some notes), so maybe it will come into focus there. Warm sunny day tomorrow followed by a stormy Monday (they say). I have a nightime image of Jam Tree Gully in my head that involves both of you and kangaroos moving almost silently around the block, grazing, and tawny frogmouths and owls watching for insects and mice (watch out, mice... No doubt busy in the ceiling and walls! )... And the plants trying to capture what moisture they can from the air, the cold brittle air of that dry dry winter. I am there—and the greater the distance, the closer I am... Photos to come... JK Ordnance Survey Sometime in the mid-1970s, my father returned from a conference trip to the UK and brought me back as a present an Ordnance Survey map of Birmingham, where we had lived for a year and a half in 1969 and 1970. It was an inspired gift, one that has continued to unfold an imaginative power for me ever since. The map embodied for me the schematic matrix of a mythological Englishness that, as a child, I opposed to what I perceived as the drab quotidian reality of an Antipodean existence. Birmingham, laid out on the then only recently re-scaled 1: 50 000 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 139 in the first series), was the site of an 276 Ordnance Survey alternative existence broken off by my family’s return to Australia: it was the index of a road not travelled, of an imagined ‘arrière-pays’ to which the track beyond the fork might have lead. The map my father brought me home is, within the imaginary cartographic cosmos that I have carried in me for decades, the Ur-map, the mother of all maps. The laminated cover, with its spartan, white-framed outline map on a background of pink-purple, unfolds into generations of earlier and later Ordnance Survey maps: the last of the one-inch maps (the 1965 editions of the Seventh Series had a red cover), and the even earlier avatars with the royal coat of arms and elaborate printing; or the later versions, garnished, against the background of the pink-purple signature colour scheme, with photos of local architectural or natural features for enhanced tourist appeal, and endowed with the tinselly label ‘Landranger map’—but very rapidly stripped of the sensible plastic lamination to cut costs in times of incipient Thatcherite austerity. About the same time as my father gave me this gift, I also discovered, in the library of my East Malvern primary school, a children’s novel by E. W. Hildick entitled Mapper Mundy’s Treasure Hunt (1963). The protagonist was, like myself, a passionate aficionado of Ordnance Survey maps. The cover illustration shows a scribbled sketch map, a compass, a pair of dividers, a pencil, and a reel of cotton that the boy uses to read off distances on the map against the scale. The book even includes a colour centrefold with excerpts from the one-inch seventh series showing the area where the treasure hunt takes place. The novel rehearsed, in my reading of it, the imaginary embedding of a boy in a quintessential imagined English landscape (also buttressed for me by the images in the British Tourist Board magazine In Britain , that we continued to receive for some years after our return to Australia). Mapper Mundy’s treasure hunt was mine. When, during a gap year between school and university, I worked in a rural area on the North Devon coast between Lynmouth and Martinhoe (to be found on Sheet 180 of the 1: 50 000 Landranger series), I discovered that the imagined England constructed during my Australian childhood did not exist: the reality of the English landscapes I yearned for among the eucalyptuses was shabby, grey, cold, wet, muddy, and smelt of manure-fertilizer. In the sunken lanes of North Devon with their high hedges, there was often no view of the landscape at all, making what I knew as ‘bushwalking’ but the English called ‘rambling’, with Ordnance Survey map and Silva compass in hand, a stumbling journey through a maze. A later stay in Cambridge for doctoral study, where I acquired other maps in the Landranger series (Sheet 154, to be precise), merely confirmed the grim unattractiveness of the UK as a place to live. After three decades of subsequent life on the continent the looming prospect of the Brexit has definitively confirmed this impression. Ordnance Survey 277 But the old dictum that the map is not the terrain is too simplistic to take account of this moment of cartographic disillusionment among the general existential crisis that overcame me during my first overseas stay. For the Ordnance Survey maps, however mendacious the imaginations I erected inside their cheerfully coloured scaffolding, continue to exert upon me a magnetic fascination. They represent futures past, in Koselleck’s (1979) fortuitous turn of phrase, the very idea of another life lived in another place, even though its practicability in any real configuration of times and places has long since been revealed as null and void, and its appeal has faded. A year or two after my father brought me the magical map of Birmingham, I stumbled upon another mapping tradition in my firstor second-form geography textbook. Alongside very early predictions of climate change by the Club of Rome, the book also contained vignettes of landscape types from around the world. One of these showed a conical volcanic hill and a snippet of a German topographic map, probably a 1: 25 000 Topokarte from the Vulkaneifel near the French border, or the Schwäbisch Alb volcanic area in the South-West, where I now live. (The Achalm and the Georgenberg, both close to Reutlingen and to be found on Sheet 7521 in the 1: 25 000 Topokarten series issued by the Baden-Württemberg State Government’s Office for Geoinformation, are examples of such volcanic cones.) The excerpt from the German topo map was like a piece of hidden volcanic scoria that would nestle in the topsoil of my imagination, accreting other elements drawn from sources as disparate as my father’s collection of tourist guides from a 1970 tour of eye clinics from Heidelberg to Tübingen to Basel, the fairytale castle in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (in fact, Neuschwanstein, which strangely enough I have never visited in reality), Preussler’s Robber Hotzenplotz , which was read to us at primary school, Uhlman’s Reunion , which my grandmother gave me as a Christmas present, or Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund , which I read in the Penguin edition during tollbooth-duty on the private clifftop road that crossed the estate where I worked in North Devon. Where my English cartographic imaginary was constructed of hedgerows, coppices of oak and country pubs, my German imaginary contained pine forests and medieval old towns of half-timbered houses always overshadowed by a mysterious castle and flanked by a stone bridge across a river (Heidelberg must be the template here, but later on Kafka added another layer to the mythic palimpsest). Inumerable unfinished novels of adolescence opened with such a setting. Curiously, this cartographic imaginary has not clashed with reality in the same way as the one nourished by my displaced Anglophile childhood eventually would. It is almost as if the weight of an Anglophile tradition accumulated via Cambridge great-grandparents on my paternal grandfather’s side and a 278 John on maps Cockney grandmother on the other side was too much to bear the brute force of the Real of Thatcher’s Britain. There is no German tradition in my family whatsoever, perhaps allowing that imaginary a more sinuous and flexible, contingent and responsive existence within my inner cartographic cosmos. That existence has culminated, despite the genuine temporariness of comings and goings and successive sojourns in seven German cities, not to mention a score of rooms or apartments, in permanent-resident status and most recently, naturalization. I have, as it were, become part of my own imagined cartography of the German landscape, less a temporary resident than before, but perhaps more attuned to the countryside’s own changing imaginings of me. RWP John on maps The South China Morning Post quoted Wang Naiyan, a scientist from the China Institute of Atomic Energy, as saying yesterday, regarding the thermonuclear test by North Korea which was staged at the same ‘mountain’ site they have conducted their other nuclear weapons tests, ‘We call it taking the roof off.’ This is because that site is at high risk of collapse and releasing the contents of their violent science into the atmosphere. In the same way as propaganda is leading reality rather than faking it, the notion of a hydrogen atomic warhead being detonated in the upper atmosphere to create an electro-magnetic pulse that will wipe out electronic technology in ‘nanoseconds’ has gained such persuasive terror because as much or even more than direct strike annihilation, it represents an end to technology and society, and the fusing of capitalism, the state, and the idea of ‘the world’. The effects on ‘nature’ are barely mentioned, but the chaos of humans without guiding e-technology is. The ruthlessness of the amped-up nuclear stakes game becomes familiarised as fast as melting glacier, no faster, much faster. It is absorbed into the newspeak of the individualised state, the controls with the Global North’s imprint, imprimatur, its stamp of authenticity. The megalomania of not only NK’s leader but it’s entire paranoid military, is a mirror to the same intractions and manias in the massive capitalist world (which includes China, actually). The ongoing state of war is because the Global North feels such a situation as that on the Korean peninsula is ultimately resolvable, pointing to the propping up of the regime by another regime in China’s government, and its supplies of energy etc. However, the ongoing state of war is also a desire of the ‘west’ to avoid admitting the wrongs of the domino horror, the massive causalities of the wars of ideology. In a sense, the brutal selfishness of the NK leadership is a reflection in a crazy mirror of the Global North. Un- John on maps 279 less there is dialogue, the lines of distortion will grow and grow and fracture entirely. Which brings me to frameworks and the lives we think we lead, the narratives we think we are part of, and those we feel we write (or contribute to authorship)—there are no stories available to the consumer who consumes for the sake of outconsuming others. Their stories have been sold-off, those stories so often robbed from the Global South, so often retold in their own image after being appropriated from Indigenous peoples and also their own heritages. Frameworks hold only artworks which don’t overly offend the state. They can be radical, but within reason. The hammer or the brush or the pen can run rampant, but within the framework provided by the interlocutors of state and capital. So the actants—the sellers, the buyers, the observers, the participants, the insider and outsiders—flow in and out of whichever narratives they can acquire or feel they possess (whether bought, borrowed, stolen, or part of their inherent knowledge—i.e. an a-priori becoming that has become long before they existed! ), and feel they have agency in the face of annihilation, in the face of loss of their tools for acquiring selfhood—the digital, the electronic—which is, of course, a furphy. As you imply-observe in your Black Forest running, the presence of ‘place’ brings the narrative of contemplation, of fusing with a temporariness of presence that is defined in part by the movement of ‘seasons’, cycle of life, but in greater part by human overwhelming of nature’s co-ordinates. The temporary isn’t the progress of temporal-spatiality, but the concept we apply to existence to counterpoint our own inevitable applications of these values to being. We make narratives with beginning, middle, ends—they don’t, in any provable way, actually exist. They are personal frameworks that the state has latched onto and collectivised without granting autonomies back. We offer up for theft. Progress in thinking about the colonisation of the Global North model of seasons: summer, autumn/ fall, winter, spring or wet and dry seasons, has led to nuancing according to the de-hybridising of the nomenclature of weather and connection: so here, in Noongar space, it’s six seasons which identify with fertility, birth, flowers, animals, cold and heat and other markers of ‘weather’— the markers are mixed with the organic. And that’s as in many other colonised places of the world—the true understanding of weather and place is obfuscated by colonial desiring to fit its own template of fertility, profit, and reward (and is inevitably at odds with the reality! ). But those six seasons don’t work properly now—not even in the fluidic way all definitions have in the face of drought or variations in seasonal predictability... It’s so out of kilter now, that even rough colonially imposed categories don’t fit, and the more nuanced the definitions born of millennia of presence in a place, with definitions of taking into account radical change which always comes over a stretch of ‘time’ or presence, don’t really hold, however much well-meaning members of the guilt generations wish 280 Hegel’s Pub to welcome them back. The destruction wielded by colonial machinery is so often permanent, and people whose belonging to country is pivotal, adjust their poetry and definitions accordingly, just the ‘whitefellas’ (no such thing, really, and I don’t use this as a marker of ethnicity or ‘colour’) catching up too late. So seasons can’t be the markers we thought. And maps, which I also love to dwell in and over, for the same reason lose their agency and become colonial markers of ‘wherever’ and the specific. My attempting to ‘demap’ or ‘unmap’ is a gesture where a reality serves otherwise. I follow the desire lines and contours of the land, and gather respects, and, in the end, do the same. But those maps I’ve learnt are my matrix, as they are yours, and young Tim lives in them. Strangely, one of the strongest bondings I felt when we first connected was your giving us (that’s important) your survey map of Tübingen—entry points all over, but there to be walked and understood then undone. And that’s why, I think, you needed that Brummie map so much—to undo the presence you had ‘temporarily’ and place it in a narrative that works outside the spatial or temporal. And no matter how much the framers say it can’t be done, it can. As a medical doctor friend who we ran into at the York Agricultural Show said the other day, we don’t even exist in time. And as he said this after a long career of tending the sick, and the people from the rural district walking past and greeting him. All of us who are conscious of our vulnerability to an ongoing war of annihilation, might think medically how we can tend our bodies outside the spatial, the temporal. How we envisage a universe without frames. JK Hegel’s Pub I’m sitting here in Boulanger , one of the oldest pubs in Tübingen, part of the town’s deep history, for it was frequented by the students at the legendary Evangelisches Stift (the Protestant theological college, founded in 1536) that is as far south of the Rathausplatz (townhall square) as the pub is north. Boulanger , established some time in the eighteenth century by the Ziller family, was taken over by the Kemmler clan in 1796, and then rebaptised Boulanger after one of the publicans, also a baker, returned from a stay in Paris sometime in the mid- 1800s (Sommer 2016: 86). In a flight of fancy I envisage illustrious former students of the Stift, Schelling or Hölderlin, spinning their yarns of revolutionary poetics intertwined with anecdotes of an idealized classical Greece, a mug of local beer or a glass of wine in hand. Boulanger , it seems, was also one of Hegel’s favourite haunts. I imagine Hegel the undergraduate sitting here next to the tiled stove, discussing Hegel’s Pub 281 with his mates the French Revolution, taking place across the border but soon to go dreadfully wrong, and cogitating upon the pattern of historical progress. I see him smoking his pipe as he scribbles the draft of what will later become his Philosophy of History, trying out the formulation, ‘Africa ... is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit’ (1965: 99; translation of 1961: 163). I have Theodor Litt’s 1961 little Reclam edition here in front of me, and can hardly believe my ears as I read the vitriol he spits over the African peoples. I am quite gobstopped by the time he announces the continent is so ‘unhistorical’ and ‘closed off’ that now, having brought it to the ‘threshold of the World’s History’ with his book, he isn’t going to bother mentioning it again (1965: 99, translation modified; 1961: 163). History-less? Isolated? It’s here that I sat with a South African friend and colleague from the Cape, discussing the current state of the nation in South Africa. Grim prospects, he says. We talk about possible future trajectories for the rainbow nation that has so disappointed the post-apartheid hopes of its citizens; it has left many of them more deeply mired in poverty than during the terrible years of the Struggle. We talk about the way the government careens from one corruption scandal to another, the rand falls, while the real problems the country faces remain unresolved; the welfare, health and education systems crumble little by little. And yet, so much is changing in Africa at this moment. We talk about the perspectives for our kids (his are a couple of years younger than mine), looking into a future of global warming, socio-economic polarization, retreating democracy and rising populism. This is history, and world history in every sense of the word: in part because the watershed of 1994 marking the end of apartheid, and the demise of the last colonial bastion in Southern Africa, was a global event of equal significance and intimately linked to the Fall of the Berlin Wall five years previous; and in part because many commentators look to Africa to see what the accelerated effects of neoliberal global capitalism look like, and thus to gain a glimpse how our futures everywhere might be shaping up. What the chat in Hegel’s pub underlines is that Africa is not off the historical map, but is up to its neck in history. Indeed, there is even a case to be made that in many ways, it has been one significant hub for global history since about the year 1000—first as one of the important regions on the Indian Ocean rim globalization that endured until roughly 1500, and then as the nexus of the fateful Atlantic Triangle (looking to the west) and then as one of the main configurations of colonization and decolonization (looking to the east) that lasted till the mid-twentieth century. And now it is thought by some to be a historical litmus test for the ways the Capitalocene is slowly unravelling, and how one might possibly be able to respond to that process. In this scenario, Africa becomes a ‘laboratory for the future’ as Congolese writer In 282 Hegel’s Pub Koli Jean Bofane (speaking in fact of Kinshasa) puts it (2014: 289). There is a lot of evidence that suggests that in the coming decades, Africa’s situation within global geopolitic—history in the making, in other words—will become more and more central (for a German perspective, see for instance Ackeret 2017). If Hegel consigned Africa to ‘the void of an imposed nonhistory’ in Édouard Glissant’s (1989: 65) memorable turn of phrase, which was tantamount to saying that ‘ Africa does not exist ’ in Amílcar Cabral’s even pithier outburst of spleen (1980: 141; italics in original), there’s no sign of that invisibility in the long discussion of contemporary political developments on the continent that I have with my South African friend in this pub. Maybe Hegel got it wrong? And maybe the historiographical savvyness of a scholar such as my friend from the Cape is not merely the result of a Western education benevolently bestowed upon the natives by the colonial benefactors—sadly, a merely temporary legacy, Naipaul (2002: 30) would sneer, seeing in Africa ‘place where the future had come and gone’—but in fact a worldliness active from the outset, making its denizens as worldly-wise as my friend is. Our common colleague Achille (Mbembe 2013: 13) suggests that ‘the African historical experience’ was one in which ‘[a]lmost everything was on the move. It was not at all true as Hegel, and all those who rely upon him, intimated that Africa was a closed continent—not at all. It was always a continent that was on the move.’ ‘On the move’ means ‘dynamic’ and ‘dynamic’ means ‘temporal’. ‘Time on the move’—unsurprisingly the title of Mbembe’s programmatic manifesto (2001: 1-23)—is what my colleague maps out for me, even if the direction is not very reassuring (but is it anywhere today, outside smug South-German complacency, emblematized in the cosy fug of Hegel’s pub? ) Perhaps Hegel didn’t merely get it wrong, but worse, got it the wrong way around. The contemporary German poet Durs Grünbein (1991: 61) satirically calls his native GDR, that quarter of today’s Germany that for half a century guarded its cramped territory with barbed-wire, concrete walls and watch-towers, ‘Hegels Schmalland’, ‘Hegel’s narrowland’. But perhaps Hegel’s narrowland was larger in fact than Grünbein intimates, making up the whole of Euro-America, narrow in its self-confident assumption that it alone made history, blind to the manifold histories unrolling all around the planet beyond its myopic ken? Perhaps it was Europe that, for all its intrusive imperialist and colonialist marauding, was ‘closed off from the world’ and caught in its own progress-obsessed temporal backwater—a longish but nonetheless temporary distraction from the real complexity of temporal entanglements (Mbembe 2001: 16) and dynamics around the globe? If so—well then, it’s time to leave Hegel’s pub and go back out into the stormy weather outside. RWP Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) 283 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) You have not long gone to bed and I have just finished reading Talal Asad’s (2000) ‘What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry’. I have to present on this paper at a symposium on Wednesday, so more of that shortly. I am hoping my ‘monologuing’ with the idea of you (sleeping warmly I hope... with Jam Tree Gully nightbirds watching over the block), will help clarify my ideas about this both satisfying and disappointing ‘landmark’ piece/ manifesto. Now I know why Russell asked me to write my own manifesto—Asad is right in so much, but he fails to occupy (I’d guess) a lived position of pragmatism regarding human rights that makes it real and not conceptual. But that’s too simple... It’s a complex picture which is maybe best got to circuitously. So let me start with the weather... And I have just looked out into the evening sunny skies up at the Schloss and wondered if the severe storms predicted tomorrow will bring the old copper lighting rod that peaks the turret of the castle into play... But it is warm and clear now. The fine weather in Europe seems to prompt specific behaviours of leisure and pleasure that are really no different from ‘home’, but happen in public more (though they happen in such ways on Australian beaches and at sporting venues). I have discussed the relaxed display of the physical self, but there’s also the conversation of being outdoors, and even in the towns, of being part of a greater warm (but pleasantly warm) world that is safe and welcoming. This is of course why violent people target such gatherings at such times, because it bothers the sense of a desire for control that they wish to enforce. Asad discusses culture a lot, and considers whether or not universal human rights (which historically come out of a western discourse of capitalist homogenising), are decisive to cultural intactness, or if culture needs to ‘grow’ with the idea of them. He is good at unpicking the western thread, especially the American notion of a moral guardianship of the world through extension of state power, but not inwardly reflecting on its own condition. The sales pitch through well-meaning critics and artists and thinkers about these issues, ensures a projection of a human rights culture that is also market expanding and homogenising. The same can be said, in a different way, regarding Europe. All of this is as you’d expect. This point clarifies how he positions a long branching argument: It is generally agreed that as an ideal, human rights are intended for a secular world. They derive their authority not from heaven but from this earth. Yet most human rights theorists don’t address seriously enough the thought that human rights is part of a great work of conversion. I have suggested that human rights are not simply found by the individual and invoked by her, that they serve to define ‘the human’. 284 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) The project of which human rights are part is less than thorough, often inconsistent, frequently subject to revision in its detail. But it is an integral part of our modern life. My conclusion should not be confused with the view of those who would attack human rights on the grounds that each culture has the god-given right to remain immune from criticism and change—that demands in the name of the human must always be rejected in favour of cultural difference. On the contrary. The world we live in requires us to recognize our interdependence—and hopefully to honour it. But it is not at all clear that this is done best through the system of nation states with their clear-cut boundaries and their gross inequalities in power and wealth, the system on which human rights law now depends for its interpretation as well as its application. Nor is it evident that human rights must be both cause and consequence of universal redemption. (Asad 2000, para 50) His argument actually takes us through a kind of validation of the state, whilst rejecting it, whilst he late in the piece also touches on animal rights, but it’s conceptual rather than real. This from the Guardian newspaper: Preparing to return to north Belfast, the Pride of Ardoyne bandsman basked in the DUP’s new-found strength. ‘Stormont is finished,’” he said. ‘After the [1998] Good Friday agreement, Sinn Féin got all the concessions and career advancement. The Parades Commission says my band uniform with boots and peaked cap is illegal. I voted for the DUP. They should get the Parades Commission abolished. Theresa May’s suggestion of tearing up human rights laws to tackle terrorism should apply here in Northern Ireland, too. When I voted for Brexit, I wasn’t asked whether it was soft or hard. I just want to keep Britain as a single unit’ (Bowcott 2017) The state’s selective application of the human rights it (originally) subscribed to, to apply ‘internally’ to make the state. Asad notes such contradictions, but offers no solutions. If the Orangeman who made this statement had the state go against his human rights, he’d have a very different view, obviously. But the point is that the state, desperate, is willing to offload or moderate human rights to protect itself at all costs. Human rights, as Asad intimates, have to serve the state before the state will apply what it itself has proffered. An imperialist control with an intellectual and social apparatus behind its application. He questions that fool’s argument that only ‘higher order’ apes can be accorded human rights, because they are close to us, while a million other species can’t have such rights, which is patently absurd. My problem with all of it is how these arguments are lived . We believe in animal rights and human rights and we are conscious of the construct—historically, economic, cultural selec- Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) 285 tive etc.—around these beliefs. And yet all that consciousness doesn’t alter the basic point that we know we should accord all humans the liberties we expect ourselves, and that whatever culture ‘authenticities’ (to redeploy his usage) are at work, violence against all life is wrong. Now that position which we live by doesn’t mean we aren’t aware we have to be aware that other cultural discourses in which the self is de-prioritised doesn’t see violence, particularly towards animals, as being inevitable. [Interpolation: As I said at the recent Human Rights conference in Fremantle—November 2017—we should accord animals human rights because human rights are our highest aspiration, and the most just discourse we have available regarding life.] We are able to interact with that difference, and state our different culturality, hopefully without engendering more violence, a violence tangential to the cultural norms of a given group. Now, ‘we’ have ‘culture’ too, but the culture/ s of capitalist-colonial privilege is culture working out of a combination of what we’ve inherited and been shaped by (some of which we can’t ‘undo’, some of which we can), and also personal choice mixed with communal support anchored in consumer acceptabilities (propelling the market economy, the underpinning of the state). We are the end of a fusion of cultural threads, and also the beginning of a new culturality. Human rights for me, at least, aren’t constructs of the UN or the US or the Australian or German governments, but an extension of natural law and a pantheistic secularism that connects human life with a cosmology, and the responsibility that goes with that. And in the same way that culture is inevitably boundaryless but imposed on by the boundaries of state (which Asad is right in saying that state works to make boundaries non-porous, to keep refugees out, to defend its intactness, and to widen those definite lines on the map—expand its territory), so too is a sense of universal rights of all animals (including humans), fused with a respect for all existence—we don’t need courts to impose these rules, we live them. And that’s the difference—rights enforced as an imperial enterprise (he is clear on this reality), but also the fact that though the origins are ‘western’ (and what is that? as he asks) and self-serving and tied to property, doesn’t mean that non-western countries (if not cultures) can’t see value in universal protections of citizen rights. But for me, the ‘citizen’ is the issue, because I am not citizen because I am of community and free of community. There’s a superb comparison made in his piece between the US-focussed language of Martin Luther King and its comparative success because it appeals to the prophetic and redemptive myth of America that shapes out of the desire for religious freedom and the creation of the state out of British colonies of oppression, and the fact that ‘black Americans’ are Americans not being accorded the right of the constitution, the basic rights of America’s humanising vision, and Malcolm X, who speaks in terms of universal human rights, and speaks of America needing to be 286 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) held to account, to be tried and found guilty for its violation of human rights, which was and IS true. Back to that shortly, because this digression is a vital tangent to all of this for me... the Tübingen peace oak! I am thinking this in part because Asad links war to the desire to acclaim rules for human rights, and in fact, there’s a slight subtext in the whole (though he would say he is anthropologically presenting scenarios, and subscribing to none—an absurdity) that (disturbingly) almost excuses violence when it is enacted to ensure alleviations of suffering, that there is (almost) a right time for preventative violence. Now, he doesn’t say this as such, but intimates it at times. In unpicking the problems of human rights that are focussed on the, say, tortures and harm done to an individual by, say, a state, he points out that something like aerial bombardment acts outside human rights violations. Again, absurd, because he has become entangled in legal theorising and not taking note of a natural justice that says however violence is done to others, it is a violation of the basic right to life (thus all violence is wrong, all violence denies/ prevents human rights). This doesn’t need a proof, and a culture that says sacrificing an individual for the well-being of community for, say, belief in religious necessity (Mayan harvests etc.), does not mean an awareness of death as being a major deprivation isn’t the case, especially in cases where the victim, family, and community are told it’s a gift—a mechanism of belief and brainwashing is activated to make it seem so... It’s not the natural state of being to want to die for the general good... The ‘general good’ needs to control the ecology of belief. But what upsets me is this kind of statement, whether the distance is irony (can there be irony? ) or not: The use of excessive force against civilians through aerial bombardment is regarded differently from the use of violence perpetrated by particular officials against identifiable victims . Human rights are typically concerned with cruelty to individuals. (I stress again that this is not a moral condemnation of US military intervention abroad. My interest here is in the consequences of different modes of intervention for the non-violation of human rights.) (Asad 2000, para 6) And then, we see him rightfully point out the abuse of individuals and people through economic means: But military action is not the only—or even the most important—form of intervention by powerful states in the affairs of others. Financial pressures can have effects that are more far-reaching than many military adventures. But the devastation these pressures can cause to social life, and the punishments they deliver to individual citizens of an economically weakened state, cannot be addressed as human rights violations. (ibid: para 7) Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) 287 So, my issue is with his inability to play the role he sees he should. He sees that the inequalities of class will always mean that human rights are not applied fairly and ‘evenly’, but he points out that even where rights are universalised and inequalities reduced, it doesn’t necessarily follow that human rights become the normative (ibid: ee para 57). He sees: As with all cultural material, ‘the culture of law’ is soaked in complex inequalities of power. And as with all law, it is necessarily dependent on violence. ‘Human rights culture’ therefore is not simply a persuasive and reasoned language that comes down from a transcendent sphere to protect and redeem individuals. It articulates inequalities in social life everywhere and at all times. (ibid: para 43) Again, he is right, but there’s a default position that allows law to be , a law that will control rights (just or unjust) with its only remaining tool when all is said and done: violence . In his analysis of American hypocrisies of cultural liberal rights liberation of the rest of the world, he never discusses the 2nd Amendment, that contradiction of liberty and control, that de-humanises rights freedoms, that is the implosion of American and world liberty. The imperialism of the weapons industry, that serves Third World countries as much as First World, that is Global North ‘feeding’ the Global South, that is a United Nations food program underwritten by the profits of gun ownership—individual, communal, state-wide, and universally cultural. That seems to me, along with animal rights as human rights, where we need to tread. [The gun industry thrives on the notion of ‛preventative violence’—the euphemistic paradox is the loophole through which they operate.] Which brings me (finally! ) to the Friedenseiche... Peace Oak of Tübingen. I came across this in a strange way because I want to write a poem about the Eurasian jay as being a case of universal rights whilst heavily culturated by what some call instinct and I call choice to subscribe to the cultural beliefs of the jay community, but also the other communities of life around it. So I look up places where there are concentrations of oak trees because Eurasian jays collect acorns and store them for winter, and came across this tree via one of those weird scavenger hunt websites (a mode of interacting with place I find ephemeral, damaging, insensitive, and abusive... though as much as anything else it incorporates a multiplicity of presences into the self and the community of scavengers... an über temporariness that is collated and ticked off, a GPS spatiality of having been)... Anyway, this site interested me because of a patterning of peace memorials around the world, and though there’s nothing more than a list, to some it will have meaning as a conversation of peace(fulness) on a global scale, a universal right of non-war ; and given the work I’ve been doing on memorials and memorialising, especially in the On the Outskirts book so much 288 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) of which is set here in Tübingen, I wanted to go further. And the idea of the wayside marker (which they’ve co-opted into ‘waymarker.com’), also interests me... But to find this tree, a tree planted to mark peace at the end of the Franco-Prussian war! This is what the website fetishises as being in the ticking off, the collecting of visitations: Long Description: This is a Peace Oak Tree (German: Friedenseiche) located in Tübingen, Germany, Baden-Württemberg. The tree has been planted in 1871 after the war between Germany and France as a symbol for peace. There’s a plaque with the name and the year. Text on Monument/ Memorial Sign or Plaque: Friedenseiche 1871 (Peace Oak 1871) Website about the Peace Monument/ Memorial: Not listed Visit Instructions: When visiting a waymark, please take a picture that clearly shows the peace monument/ memorial. Please tell us a little about your experience. (Friedenseiche n.d.) The ‘visit instructions’ are so upsetting! It’s like Asad seeing the points, and being insensitive to people actually trying to live the values rather than be forced to do so by the violence of the state and law. He knows , but there’s slippage in the fact of the discourse. Maybe it is better said in a poem—maybe a poem can engender an environment of equality. So the site gives the GPS co-ordinates, but as I refuse to use a GPS for such a purpose, I know I will have to search it out in a more ‘manual’ way, and likely not find it. So I walked miles up into the forest and couldn’t find it, but I searched for it. And that’s the point for me. That two world wars that involved those two countries followed, is a stark reminder of the ineffectual memorialising, but the tree still grows and still feeds jays and its existence is peace in itself. That it might have reminded some people of the horrors of war, and maybe led to non-violent interventions is possible, but the act, the gesture of the planting lives beyond official signings-off because it is of nature . A statue, a plaque (though there’s one on the tree, which speaks for itself), a monument, become sad reflections on the inability of people to make in stone a permanent truth, even a good one; but a growing tree speaks for life, and it gives oxygen, and supplies and creates habitat, and lives for itself, too. It is an embodiment of peace. Of course, the peace with Germany was not to the French advantage, and Bismarck was extending his power and took Alsace-Lorraine and declared the German Empire. It is argued, that though the French attacked first they were ‘set Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) 289 up’ by Bismarck (and the Kaiser), but this is clearly absurd. The Prussian military machine was poised, no doubt, but the French didn’t want to lose control (or ‘balance’ as they ‘saw it’) in Europe. So the peace tree must take on a strange undercurrent of violence as symbol, especially as this war was a prelude to the First World War in many ways. The tree is the tree is the tree. But how it was looked upon by the gloating victors is something else. Anyway, I am trying to work out what I want to say about Asad’s piece. What I had wanted to talk about was Aboriginal deaths in custody and the entire lack of human rights from not only the state but individuals operating under the protection of the state. No one has been held accountable in any real sense for Ms Dhu’s entirely avoidable death—no, I say murder. People saw the footage from the lock-up cameras being broadcast on news programmes, and yet people weren’t out in the streets to ‘enforce’ human rights, to change the system so it can never happen again. They rely on the state and the law to self-correct, which it will never truly do as it’s built on the bones of a people, on a theft that will never truly be remedied. Asad sees modernity as a tool of imperialism and one that ironically goes hand in hand with the development of human rights and the homogenising of western ways (though he doesn’t necessarily reject this, always trying to play the social scientist). We are, for good or bad, part of a dialogue in which we inherently know that the state murdering is wrong and natural justice is a law we all recognise—what we do with it might differ (culturally), but we know a violation so obvious when we see it. And I thought of reading Davis’s (1988) ‘John Pat’ poem sequence which says what needs to be said: a small room is a constraint which is designed to destroy a culture of open spaces before the murderers come in to kill you over/ on the concrete floor. A slab, a permanence of concrete, of death. Temporary life because the eternal spirit that is outside imperialism frightens them—the state, the police—enough to want to kill it off. I have to eat now and clean up for the landlady’s more general run through/ cleaning tomorrow! I am anxious about it all, and I have a meeting at 10 in the morning. I might go out now and have vegan falafel because I am too tired to cook... If I have strength after going out, eating, and dealing with the rubbish in its various manifestations, I will do a second episode of this monologue. The bells are ringing. It is Sunday. It is summer here. JK 290 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 1) Searching for the Tübingen Friedenseiche (Peace Oak) ‘The tree has been planted in 1871 after the war between Germany and France as a symbol for peace.’ Oak tree memorial to the end of war that served the newly laid-down empire well, though who’s pulling straws when peace is at stake, the sapling rising to make acorns for Eurasian jay, who will stockpile like there’s no tomorrow, only a winter that stretches time, or a summer that might incinerate if you don’t shelter under spreading leaves. I want to find this peace oak without the GPS scavengers use to collect points, to encompass the memorials to conflict, dead strewn on a battlefield bigger even than Zola. But I can’t find my way through the strips of lush vegetation hiding houses and roads, enclaves of middle-class virtue in a locally peaceful world. But the oak is tree in its own right and its one hundred and forty-six years of providing for tree creepers and jays, insects and songbirds, a wayside marker for the collectors of data, is massive in its soothing effects: the oxygen it makes, the carbon Two questions have never ceased to nag me 291 it eats, the haunting of a stark sky when the tree’s leaves fertilise itself, the compulsion to find the peace outside such ‘politics’, such history. JK Two questions have never ceased to nag me Two questions have never ceased to nag me. One is the way in which something critical and something affirmative, something politically dissident, and something embedded in the joy of the natural world, can be articulated upon each other. The other is how, in a triangulating move, the desire to write can be linked to these issues. Why is that desire important? Is it, precisely, just desire, the search for something elusive that has become irretrievably lost, that by definition cannot be regained, so that writing is a sign of the impossibility of the task it takes on? Or, in the pleasure of working with words, is there a double articulation of what has been lost with what is being affirmed, in the very act of writing, as immediately and dynamically present in the here and now? What is literature? , asks Sartre (1967 [1948]), answering that it is an aesthetic form that has developed out of art’s isolation from the masses. This may be a fundamental problem of literary production since the eighteenth century, when literary creation became linked to the medium of print—‘Reader, I don’t know who you are’ (West 2001). It is also one of the central narratives of twentieth century literary theory. Saussure disarticulates the sign, spreadeagling it into material signifier and conceptual signified, and never the twain shall meet, and political ideology critique insists upon the fallacious nature of the sign, its alienation from reality. A decade and a half after Sartre’s What is Literature? , he and a circle of like-minded intellectuals rephrased the same question in a cognate query, What can literature do ? ( Que peut la littérature ? ) (Buin, ed. 1965). It is the question, as our common friend Philip is formulating it as I write, of the social work of narrative (Griffiths and Mead, ed. 2017)—not just as a symbolic system, but also of something that is on plane with a heterogeneous continuum of the unruly ‘symbiotic real’ (Morton 2017: 1). ‘Doing literature’ eludes the issue of separation or proximity, and opens up the possibility of multiple modes of linguistic operation in the world. The verb becomes a substantive, not so much so as to anchor literary creation as an entity in the world, as, paradoxically, to transform the entity into a process. Literature is a doing. Agency begins to disperse all 292 Two questions have never ceased to nag me around that process. Who does literature once it becomes ‘participl-ized’? Do only litterateurs do literature, does literature do the doing as well? And where does that doing take place, or better, how does it ‘make’ place? In accord with this emphasis upon processual linguistic practices, a post-Saussurean strain of thought about language emerges. Kristeva (1984) stresses colour and texture and the immediate proximity of the foetus’ cradledness in the womb as the substrate of all artistic production, including literary creation; Fónagy (1983) insists upon the bodily origin of phonemic articulations, however ‘arbitrary’ their semantic overlay may be; and Lefebvre (2004) moves from a notion of the meaning of space to a sense of the rhythms of space, in which writing necessarily would participate via its own rhythmic character. Writing, here, does not stand at a distance from the world, but partakes of its materiality, dynamism, productivity, texture, movement—or better, only ever stands at a distance within the world because it partakes of its rippling, constantly changing fabric. The answers to Sartre’s questions lie in the proximity of words and the world. Words do not stand in for something that has been lost, nor are they, or their psycholinguistic realm, part of the Symbolic order, the cause of that loss, as Lacan might suggest. Rather, they are part of the world, so that words do their work in the world alongside other actants. They are entangled in the world of fully lived life just as they are entangled in the world of suffering, oppression and exploitation. A celebration of the world of things and of the natural continuum to which we belong cannot retain any ethical consistency if it is not simultaneously a protest, and a set of actions, however minimal, against the forces that violate both the world of nature, as a community of actants, and human co-actants. It has become increasingly clear that humanity’s onslaught on humanity (or rather, that which has been and continues to be designated nonhuman: a born-again guard at Guantánamo says to a prisoner: ‘I convince myself each day that you guys are all subhuman—agents of the devil—so that I can do my job. Otherwise I’d have to treat you like humans, and we don’t do this to people where I come from’ [Begg/ Brittain 2006: 165]) is cognate with, geographically coeval with, and causally linked to humanity’s onslaught on nature (that which ‘naturally’ is nonhuman). Thus, just as the world is one, so too is the world of ethics, both in its celebratory positive form and their condemnatory negative form. A ‘doing’ that is both a process without boundaries and this a dispersion of agency impacts upon the notion of time that usually dominates our worldly action. Temporariness may also be an appropriate way of acknowledging our subsidiary role in the universe, relinquishing a paranoid desire for control over our own place in the world. It involves accepting that our mortality is part of the larger pattern of things rather than something fought off at all costs, and Two questions have never ceased to nag me 293 conceding a looser grip on the plot of our lives... Temporariness would be the temporal equivalent of leaving a light footprint on the planet. Yet how does this encomium for temporariness square with the fact that neoliberalism, with its redistribution of wealth from up the social ladder, is increasingly throwing larger and larger swathes of the human population into situations of temporary employment, precarious financial relations, and making them vulnerable to the increasingly volatile swings of the economy and the climate? Read Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? (2017). It presents a grim, and I fear, largely accurate picture of the current swing towards precarity, that is, temporariness in the negative and disempowering sense. The temporariness imposed upon the environment, driven by a cynical short-sightedness that you, John, so rightly attack (the old stand of timber: here today, gone tomorrow), is then dumped upon the poor and getting-poorer of this world. Climate change impacts most intensely those who live in the Global South—just those populations who have benefited least from the industrial development that has driven, and drives, climate change. By contrast, the elites present themselves as the establishment, the established, those with a long-term vision, and indeed, they do have such a vision. That long-term vision envisages the consolidation of their own wealth, and the political, indeed military power to preserve it intact and out of reach of the (literarily) rising tide of precarity and volalitity via tax oases and gated communities... What is the solution to this knotted paradox? Is it some sort of golden mean between temporariness and security (the latter above all to be redistributed down the global social ladder if possible), with those greedily grabbing security from the poor willing to relinquish it and return it to those who do not even know where tomorrow’s food is coming from? And how might we implement such a redistribution, given that political classes globally are in thrall to, if not totally in the stranglehold of financial institutions that exclusively privilege the market over any human or environmental considerations? Such questions must be answered, albeit tempered by a sense of humility, by the realization of one’s own insignificance. Let us not take ourselves too seriously, Thoreau (1908: 8) enjoins us, reminding us in the next breath that nature does quite well without us—‘How much we do not do’, and yet nature continues on with ‘her’ work. More recently acutely aware of the irrelevance of political action in the realm of the linguistic, South African Mark Sanders (2016) writes of his own attempts to learn Zulu, the lingua franca of a new South Africa which, as an expatriate intellectual, he has left, probably for ever. For Sanders, learning a language as an act of reparation is a symbolic but also visceral way of refinding a communion with a polity split by apartheid at the time of his growing up there. But by the time he comes to make this gesture, he admits, white acts of 294 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 2) reparation have become largely irrelevant to the long-drawn-out birth-pangs of a new democratic South Africa. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, confined in his prison cell in Berlin’s Tegel Prison from 1943 until his execution after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, inverts the problem. Perhaps thinking back to his Heideggerian approach to the life of the Christian Church in his apolitical and abstract postdoctoral work (Bonhoeffer 1954), he formulates responsibility not in terms of limitless demand, but in terms of demanding limits. The limits of my life, he suggests, are the parameters of my political and ethical responsibility. The prison cell he writes from, and the notes scribbled on toilet paper and smuggled out by a sympathetic guard, are the embodiment of these ideas of spatial and existential imitation being turned inside out to provide the positive context of a modest ethical responsibility in a local, immanent, grounded and thus inherently limited range of action (Bonhoeffer 1965: 218; 1972). I am intrigued by the idea of writing a book on toilet paper: at the risk of Rabelaisian irreverence, how visceral, how close to ‘the Thing’ in all its abjection, can one possibly get? And yet in the midst of incarceration, with execution always looming, these scraps of paper celebrate the possibility of action in the world, however exiguous the dimensions of its location and the scope of its effects. I remember, immobilized and frustrated after a cycling accident at the end of my first year at university, being absolutely electrified as I read Bonhoeffer’s prison letters, and knowing that I had to escape from the constraints of well-heeled middle-class Melbourne suburbia. What followed from that moment of epiphany were minimal gestures: involvement in various projects with schizophrenia sufferers, homeless people and disabled persons over the years to come, in Clifton Hill (the House of the Gentle Bunyip [Munro 2002]), in Lille (ABEJ), in Wambrechies (L’Arche), in Thornbury (NORACCOM)—that doubtlessly changed me more than they changed the world. And always, the minimal written word, ineffectual, ephemeral, flimsy, but ubiquitous. RWP Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 2) I’m back from the falafel place. I had an uncanny experience—the ‘hippy’ who served me so reminded me of a German guy I’d seen at Lake Toba in Sumatra back in the mid-80s, that I had to check myself, and say he was thirty plus years out of ‘date’! That guy was one of the ‘lost’ Germans on the hippy trail one encountered back then, trying to dramatically shift their cultural referents because they still felt damaged by who their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 2) 295 been. On magic mushrooms and staring across the lake, talking to themselves, and staying there as long as they could. Always being on the road, living on almost nothing, displaced by their own class embarrassment and the agony of a collective past. But most exciting, is that I decided to walk back along the Ammer and there was vole vole vole! It was much further downstream—maybe thirty metres—and as the water level was lower and the river slower because there’s been no rain for a couple of days, he was dining on the succulent grass at the low water point. I didn’t have the camera with me, and the light wasn’t right anyway, but being at a narrower point of a narrow river, I was as close as I’ve been. If my presence here is marked by anything, it’s by that vole. I was (still) surprised to see four or so people walk past taking no notice—caught up in their evening leisure. But it’s a harsh world and people are distracted. And, nearer the flat, I saw a short-toed treecreeper, doing its treecreeping thing, searching the bark of a tree for insects! The whole time, I am thinking of the rights argument and the appending to Asad’s doc at the end of a kind of ‘and now we need to consider’ animal rights, as if it’s a surprise, and part of imperialist modernity (which he has both ways as something semi-desirable, I think), rather than something intrinsic in itself. The becoming animal of so many shamanistic interactions (beyond any conjuring of D & G! ) with the animal world have always been expressions of the difficulty of using animals and respecting their autonomy and integrity, and communally, maybe, not being able to negotiate a way out of it because of climate, food availability, the codes of (often masculine) violence, and ritual. Asad notes, of course, that no culture is without movement in itself, and that a static model is a false model (though some are more ‘mobile’ than others), but I can’t help feeling that there’s something culturally essentialist under it all—that in real terms culture is something we collide with in the application of human rights because cultures don’t recognise borders in the way states enforce them, and consequently will ultimately resist the imposition of the state’s ‘equalities’. It’s an irony to which there is no apparent solution if you doubt the state, but what’s lacking is, and I know that you’ve known this from point one, an anarchist pacifist (vegan) take on the condition of being. The idea that culture is a set of oppressive values that can’t be broken free of, and can only change internally unless it be by force and coercion totally ignores the international regionalist take that cultures, even closed ones, are in constant exchange (and I mean outside the net! ), and that values that are worthy and increase the spiritual knowledge of a group (especially) are likely to influence that group. The belief, say, that all Aboriginal people across 40 000 years were all meat-eaters is absurd—in every society there are exceptions, and the knowledge passed on as tradition is always conditioned by those who have 296 Monologues to Tracy VIII (episode 2) the power of saying / speech in a community. This idea of a dyadic being of tribe that is pure collective memory, is a construct of anthropology, or maybe identity self-preservation. The spread of Christianity is a case of imperial imposition and economic control, but the reason it worked is because so many different cultures recognise(d) in the Christ figure someone who would take what they wouldn’t take, and take it for them . Absorb their need for moral responsibility: a shock absorber. The personal God, the personal Jesus, that nonetheless works as collective. It suited western imperialism well. From an anarchist point of view, there can be no rights through a state for the reasons Asad clearly sees. But I feel he fears that without states there will be no rights because there is no control. For him, this is a paradox. For me, it’s a denial of the intrinsic will to collective survival, the mutual aid, that is the core of who we are. And mutual aid is a strength of the animal world as well, and we share it with ‘them’ as much as the sentience or biological markers of ‘animal’ and ‘life’. Living rights, are the rights of conscience are the rights of life are the rights of biosphere, and they are inherent and logical at once. The manipulation of rights while people are imprisoned is as hypocritical as a Geneva convention. We have rules of how to behave in war created by nation states who reserve the right to war. There are no rights in the convention, and there are no rights in imprisonment. Which doesn’t mean it’s open slather to treat people in inhumane (careful usage of this word) ways in either ‘condition’, but rather that the worst enemy or criminal deserves to be treated as a living being, and other than a loss of liberty when it is clear violent crimes are going to continue (i.e. that there is risk to ‘the public’), there is never an excuse for incarceration. Crimes against property, crimes of manners, crimes of dishonesty, are crimes engendered by the state itself. Remove the state and property and a whole raft of crimes don’t exist. The notion that war is a reality and we have to work within that inevitability—war is murder of the human identity, and indeed, all our authenticities. And yet, this is accepted as fait accompli and all who contest this are seen as naive fools (and the first used for cannon fodder)? I refuse! I saw so much violence in my drinking and addiction days, and was so caught up in it, that I know it only makes more violence. Even were it only conceptual, I’d know. Anyway, I have written a lot about this already. The separation of place as a thing-in-itself and the belief that place is an extension of human occupation and existence, is another reason why human rights aren’t a fact of being. ‘Human rights’, as if we have to denote them because the state needs to comprehend the rules it sets itself (always selective when it comes to those who enforce them). Rights of being, rights of existing, are implicated through place and how we treat it. To separate the animal and human in terms Walking in June 297 of rights is an act of convenience (we don’t need to eat animals to survive, fact), and an act of control (and no, Asad, pets can’t have rights no matter how hard we try to provide them because they are slaves to human needs—they are, well, pets... they have few freedoms in reality, even when ‘pampered’, that word of largesse that speaks of the human’s love of reciprocity), and further, to separate living things from rocks and soil, from air and water, and animal life from the right for plant life to have space (even if we have to eat it to survive, we can further its needs as well), is to deny rights of existence to existence. Our actions have consequences and we have responsibilities because in all societies (to startlingly different degrees, of course) we have enacted separations that mean a discussion of responsibility has and must continue to take place. As darkness starts to work itself out, I hear these weird hooting noises I’ve heard for nights—they keep me awake. I’ve finally worked it out. You know how during the day, small children scream and shriek to hear the echo of the tunnel under the Schloss, and it is actually ear-splitting? It seems to be almost a ritual with parents letting the kids go for it... And you know Tim and I saw the violinist every day because the tunnel creates a haunting lilt to whatever is played (that violinist is not there now, but another is tell Tim), well at night, youths who’ve probably had a few drinks go in there and yell and yell and yodel and sing. It amplifies out towards the flat and into the old town. They are marking their presence, and because it fades, they return the next night, or others do it for them... It’s a ritual, a ritual of claiming, of shared presence, of making the public personal and collective... Voice tagging. With the rain during the week, then two hot days, clumps of moss are falling from roofs and gutters and looking forlorn along streets. It’s sad, really. Maybe I will photograph some, though its seems strangely intrusive. I read James Quinton’s new ‘Shed Under the Mountain Press’ 31 page poem today, entitled ‘How to Cross the Rakaia River’—it’s a strange georgics of walking (walking will save the world, and he believes it, which is good! ), and has this wonderful moment (among many) where he talks of regretting (and also wondering why, really) not taking more photos of people... All of ‘place’... And though I understand his ontology, I have the opposite... I have a crisis over taking a photo of a vole or a person... I have concerns about photographing fallen moss! JK Walking in June One fine June afternoon, John and I set out for a walk around the hills on the south-east fringes of Tübingen, outside what used to be the French army bar- 298 Walking in June racks, and is now known as the French Quarter (Französisches Viertel). John’s stay in Tübingen was originally planned for the whole of June, but a variety of factors meant that he has had to shorten his trip. I have also been away for some of that time. Both of us have the feeling that in the few busy days where we are both in Tübingen, this is the one chance for me to show him the area I’ve been writing about, on and off, for several years. So we set off up the Panzerstraße, the broad concrete road the French built to drive their tanks up into their military training area and firing ranges in the forest. The route takes us up onto the high tops near Wankheim, with a view in one direction across the Neckar valley, towards the 1970s tower blocks of north Tübingen, and in the other direction towards the long shoulder of the high plateau called the Swabian Alps (Schwäbische Alb). We both have a sense of the fleeting nature of the moment. The walk is all too short, jammed in between various other pressing tasks. Yet I have an urgent need to show him, however ephemeral the moment may be, the natural features that give me the strongest feeling of permanency of place that I have had for a long time—worn paved tracks that may be a thousand years old, and a prehistoric hill fort that surely predates them. Other features are far more recent: the Wehrmacht’s mid-1930s barracks that now form the architectural backbone of the ecological and avant-garde design of the French Quarter; and, chronologically between the Wehrmacht and the departure of the French military after in 1990, the Cold-War military-civil engineering that has survived to become a walking route for locals and a toboggan run in winter for the kids. Temporary as the political ice-age of the Capitalist-Soviet stand-off proved to be, its monuments, it transpires, in this case possess a certain surprising and not unpleasant longevity. What is temporary? What is permanent? What is temporary or permanent about place? What is the nature of our human lives against the backdrop of so much that is far older than us, and so much that is more ephemeral? These are the questions that John and I are compelled to meditate upon as we set off along Provenceweg and Allée des Chasseurs on our way up towards the hill known as the Burgholz (or castle wood). Wordsmiths both, albeit of rather different ilk, and walkers to boot, we ask ourselves, as we pass through the crumbling gates of the erstwhile barracks compound to round the end of the cobblestoned road into the forest, What is the nature of writing, a mode of preservation of speech, so we are told, but so attached in its meaning to constantly changing contexts of interpretation. What is the relationship between temporariness and place? Place, it would seem, is always, and everywhere. And yet it can be desecrated, contaminated, excavated, so that its existence appears to be terminated in any sense except the most minimal: ‘bare place’, ‘terra nullius’. Place can be eroded, built over, ring-fenced, even irradiated until it is indeed a scarce resource with Walking in June 299 a shrinking half-life. Or, place may remain, but its occupiers become birds of passage, outlived by what they once thought to possess. Likewise, a series of places may impress upon those travellers the short-lived nature of their attachments to place. Our walk rapidly teaches us, however, that temporariness and permanence are not binaries. A bare two or three hundred metres outside what was once the French garrison’s perimeter fence, hidden in thick pine forest and only coming into view when one is at its foot, is the Burgholz: a steep bluff that rears fifty or sixty meters to the left of us as we climb the track’s gentle incline. The Burgholz is in fact an otherwise nameless prehistoric hill-fort overlooking the main dual carriageway to the neighbouring industrial town of Reutlingen. It may be a good thousand years old: a battle here is recorded around 1100 but otherwise the old chronicles are silent about its history (Goessler 1944/ 1948; Sydow 1974: 3). Nonetheless, the defensive earthworks, with ditches and walls protecting the vulnerable shoulder where the natural promontory (perhaps once ringed by a wooden palisade, whence another possible meeing of the ‘Burgholz’? ), blends with the high plateau behind, are clearly to be seen. This sort of military engineering puts the Panzerstraße to shame: I’m sure the already crumbling concrete slabs laid down by the French army engineers will not still be there in a thousand years. Of similar vintage, the paved track leading past the hill-fort up towards the plateau is probably the old main thoroughfare to Reutlingen south of the Neckar, long since overhauled by the main road that now skirts round the other side of the hill-fort. Some of the paving stones are ancient, with clear wagon-wheelruts forming a canted groove along the outer stones. This path may even be an alternative intinerary of the medieval Via Rheni, a trans-European trade route that lead from the Low Countries down the Rhine and then passed close to Tübingen on its way to the Alps. Our own ephemeral walking, leaving few tracks and stubbornly unassimilated to the grand workings of consumer leisure-culture, takes us through landscapes that are alternatively recent and marked by acceleration (the four-lane B28 that cuts through the escarpment as it rises past the hill-fort, takes you at 120 k an hour towards Reutlingen) or immeasurably ancient and virtually unchanging. Our walk takes us past the Wagenburg, the last legal hippy-commune in Germany, built of construction-workers’ trailers, strangely un-nomadic after several decades of existence, with its own power connection, postbox and pub, but its members often coming and going in a motley collection of vans and trailers. We need to think of a fluid spectrum of inbetween states, as well as a distribution of these attributes between agents that is similarly fluid. The temporariness Walking in June 301 of my own human life will at some point revert, in the most literally material terms, back into the transforming materiality of the earth. The span of my life, three score and ten, will segue into the longue durée of the landscape and the cosmos. As Thoreau writes: ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars’ (Thoreau 1908: 85). These meditations by Thoreau are no less relevant today, in an era of post-industrial financial capitalism, than when they were written. Industrial capitalism tends towards symbols of permanency (e.g. the monuments of Victorian progress) at the very moment of embarking upon a cascading process of ‘creative destruction’ (as Marx and Engels [1967: 83] recognized in their famous ‘All that is solid…’ manifesto), while late capitalism (in its commodity consumer and financial speculative variants) shifts more and more towards the fleeting and the ephemeral. Consumer capitalism places its bets upon built-in obsolescence and an increasingly shortened shelf-life and product-turnover, while the duration of flash-trading temporal segmentation is reduced to that of a split second. The impermanency that has become the paradoxical basso continuo of late capitalism is now turning back upon its perpetrators, as they are slowly beginning to realize in the face of accelerating global warming. Periods of stability in weather conditions become shorter and shorter, with more erratic oscillations between weather segments that are shrinking in length all the time. These oscillations are not only briefer, they take place between more extreme outer parameters, with storms, tornados, torrential rain and flash flooding, through to tsunamis and more frequent seismic activities, even in regions formerly temperate and pacific. All these manifestations of climate impermanence impact upon the permanence (or otherwise) of human time-spans. (To this one has to add the pressing issue of resource depletion, which is not separate from climate change, but has been overshadowed in recent years by it [see Meadows et al. 1972; Turner 2014: 16]). Our aspirations have made us, it becomes increasingly clear, a species that for three centuries has been unwittingly working towards its own extinction. This volume replies to that dilemma, one whose concretely catastrophic nature is becoming everyday more evident, by mobilizing an equally concrete set of micronarratives that mix the genres of the anecdote, the chronicle, the micro-travel narrative, the essay, and the philosophical/ theoretical meditation. They respond to the contemporary catastrophe by suggesting a sequence of placed-based soliloquies, deliberately limited in scope. This limitation is double: while they are humble in their theoretical purview and bounded in their pagespan (sometimes little more than a brief paragraph), they are also curtailed in a positive sense by their anchorage in specific times and places of writing, and 302 Walking in June times and places of a particular experience of place. Geography both sanctions and legitimizes a self-curtailing approach to a world in which catastrophes are interconnected and global in impact. By the same token, however, our microessays suggest a myriad of subterranean interconnections of theme, spirit, preoccupation and indeed geographical affiliation—what Edouard Glissant (1989: 67) described as a ‘submarine’ poetics. John Kinsella and I are both Australian, albeit from different sides of the continent (he’s from occupied Noongar territory in the South-West, with immigrant ancestors from colonized Ireland; I’m from colonized Koori territory in the South-East, of English colonizer stock). As white Anglo-Celtic Australians, we are nothing if not temporary on the continent of our birth. Both of us have a host of temporary locations: for him, Jam Tree Gully near York, in the Wheatlands, Cork, in Ireland, Cambridge in the UK; myself, my native Melbourne, which I visit every three or four years, Kaštel Gomilica on the Adriatic coast of Croatian Dalmatia, where part of the family lives, Berlin, where another part lives, the Griesbachtal, a remote valley in the Central Black Forest, and Tübingen, in South-West German Swabia, where I work. But we have also both, together and separately, walked the forest paths of the woodlands around Tübingen (where, during the walk described here, John was constantly remarking on the wheat varieties grown up on the tops, most of them familiar from his native wheatbelt)—not to mention other sites like the Fens or the slopes of Kozjak. In all of these places, like Sebald tramping the flatlands of Norfolk and Suffolk, we have found signs of destruction; but we have also found signs of a life that resiliently continues to flourish and create in defiance of the impending planetary catastrophe. What we would like our essays to suggest (though we only have a very small say in the matter) is that a return to the details of place, to the temporalities of place, and to the intensities or texture of space, may reveal immanent modes of resistance to the saturation and exhaustion of space, to its exploitation and depletion, and to the concomitant exploitation and depletion of its habitants, whether human, animal, vegetal or mineral. This assumes, of course, that writing and reading themselves are also ‘places’ or ‘sites’ with their own specificities, undulations and rhizomatic connections, many of which will be far off our horizon, even if they are related in what Morton (2017: 1) calls the ‘non-total, ragged way’ that the book itself seeks to mimic. And because reading is necessarily temporizing rather than totalizing, this section comes somewhere left of centre, not quite in the middle—neither at the beginning, where it would have forestalled the participative, disruptive work of reading; nor at the end, where it might appear to set a final gravestone on the book’s afterlives. Monologues to Tracy IX 303 These, then, are brief interventions, written traces of sundry forays into diverse natural biotopes close to the places we live in or have lived in. They make no claim to monumental scholarly permanency, but posit a defiant principle of the minor mode as a way to refind ourselves and those fellow co-actants that surround us, in an era of ever-shrinking half-lives. RWP Monologues to Tracy IX This is kind of to keep me focussed as I’ve not been able to write at length for the last few days due to exhaustion etc. First, I want to go back three evenings to the walk I did with Russell from the university English department through town to his and his family’s place in the old French occupation quarter, up through the forest and fields and back again. On my querying, Russell said: ‘The whole area is called the Wankheimer Täle (Wankheim Valleys)—those three or four ravines lead up to a village called Wankheim. The neck of forest we circled around, next to which we saw the Hochsitze, is called Landkutschers Kapf. Frz Viertel is at about 310 m over sea-level, at the top of the hill we were at about 430 m.’ From their flat which is in a building that, along with others, has been erected between the old barracks buildings, you look out onto the forest which runs as a ridge along the top of the hills. Behind them (unseen, though we saw them quite close after we crossed over) were the Swabian Alps, looking weird and odd-shaped and awkward yet sublime as well. Where Russell and family live is a strange case of recovery from a military origin, as so much of the land in Germany is. What is even more strange, is that it’s fundamental to human impact on the typology of the place: in the forest there are the treed embankments (riotous with blackbirds) of an early hill fortress. As you enter the walk to the hill which Russell told me the French concreted over so it would make a great tobogganing slope for the kids (and big kids) when it snowed (much less now), you walk past the only legal hippy commune on public land in Germany, which he says is called ‘Wagenburg—a joke on the “Bauwagen”, construction workers’ trailers, but which also means a wagon castle...’ I took some photos of the outside (it’s actually encircled by graffitied wagons and you can’t see in), feeling a little intrusive, but metal intrusions into the forest are truly bizarre. Russ says the kids go to the local school barefoot in all weathers and I talked about how bare feet were a big part of our childhood, and even at school (took shoes off) in the early years, though by the early 70s this had started to change. Climbing the hill past a meadow on our left, Russ pointed out a trail down to the treeline and said, ‘Down there is a place of Monologues to Tracy IX 305 bad karma—it was where they shot deserters in the last months of the war.’ He pointed out that so many revenge killings took place just to get rid of people (by Nazi officials) while they still had the opportunity to do so. I wrote this into my poem about the ghosts. As a prelude to this revelation, we’d been intensely discussing the issue of revenge against Germans after the war and while I agreed with him that any portrait of the Germans as victims is wrong, the act of vengeance (of killing the killers and those who underwrote them) was no corrective. In fact, it falls into the Nazi mentality of murder, and was/ is wrong. He said that people here even now don’t face up to the fact that in invading Russia there was a specific directive to literally wipe out as much of the Russian population as possible. I said the violent reactions after the war don’t surprise me, but they are still wrong. I feel consistent in this. Violence excuses/ makes more violence, no matter what. In some ways, walking past that area (roughly) shouldn’t make one feel more uneasy than anywhere else in the general slaughterhouse that was much of Europe of the time, but it did—the specificity of it, and there still being woods as witness, even though the woods are being forested and there were blue dots and orange slashes on broad trunks no doubt for future logging. Russ said they’d just been through the area and done an ‘extraction’, so I guess these are the next round—the trees of witness will go and if ever memorials are erected, as they should be (the only effort at made permanence that matters—the opposite of Ozymandius’s self-statue-ising), they will but be echoes of an idea of the horror because the real witness, the trees that were young or younger then and heard and saw and felt, will have been deleted. But I guess there’s the witnessing of the earth, the soil itself—the irony of the soil they so worship and which inculcates their being one with nation... Wagenburg for Russell and the commune I am listening and seeing and making a picture of a place through a single trek— someone’s daily routine, daily encounters, synthesised through conversation and vicarious participation, but nonetheless, I am there, walking and listening and seeing. Past the only ‘legal’ hippy commune on public land in Germany—Wagenburg, the fortresses of refusal, of declining what’s on offer in ‘townlife’, on the edge of forest 306 Monologues to Tracy IX with trees marked with blue spots or slashed with orange, separating the ‘mature’ from the rings of witness to make the grade, selective logging. But the barefoot kids of the Wagenburg know the trees must all stand to make the light and shade work the way it does, their palisades against regulation. This gateway that is not a barrier. Nor is the gateway of the old French barracks of occupation below, two concrete pillars all might pass through without hesitation, warzone colonised by civilians, friends living between recycled barracks, looking out onto the forest, up past the Panzer workshop, the Wagenburg. As we walk higher, past a meadow sloping down to the treeline, a warning: down there is bad karma, it’s where they shot deserters. We won’t go there. I will never go there. But the people of Wagenburg offer hope that ghosts have somewhere to shelter, to wander in barefoot, be welcomed. So we walked on up and diverged (could Robert Frost really comprehend? ) down a narrow path, passing the odd person and couple here and there, and a couple pushing a pram, and Russell pointed to a quarry that someone after the war apparently just opportunistically opened, eating into the hillside. And on from there up to the peak and along the spine till we came to a path between fields of wheat, oat and corn, at different stages of growth, with a full view of the Swabian Alps, a factory of some sort, and then a biomethane plant. Very German journey. The wheat fascinated me because I couldn’t recognise the variety—will research further. But disturbing (inverted syntax is to do with order of exposure and comprehension! ) were the lookout towers dotting the edge of forest and field which turned out to be hunting hides—‘der Hochsitz’. German hunters are supposed to wait for the deer (at this time of year—wild boar in the cold months) to emerge from the forest and shoot them in the open fields on private land (fields in crop and meadows being mowed for hay—there were no farmed animals in these fields). The hunters sit in their little fortresses, their litt- Monologues to Tracy IX 307 le frontier towers (waiting for the Romans? ), and shoot from above—it’s called ‘posting’. The lookouts are arranged so they cover all line of site. It is profoundly disturbing. We passed one (see photos) that was on wheels and had the picture of a doe and a fawn on the back basically talking about conservation—and as Russ said, ‘I fear it means conserve so we can kill it when we’re ready’... And, indeed, on researching it, I found it’s the case. There’s a huge amount of bullshit about the relationship between hunters, forests (especially), the land, farms and ‘conservations’, as if they’re all symbiotic. Take a look at this site, ‘Forest and Game’ (n.d.), as one example. This selling of folk and land and survival and entertainment and conservation and violence (a rite de passage ) is why ultimately there can be no breaking away from the past. Until this stops, the spectre of fascism (not of Marx! ) will always be there. So I mentioned this to Russell in an email later and he replied, ‘This is one side of what the Germans calla “Kulturlandschaft”, which I have been writing about in my meditations on the week in Croatia... Having passed the last hunting hide with its parody of Simon Stylites mixed with Germania versus the Romans, and having past a hill across a highway that is the town’s rubbish tip and builds towards being a mountain (covered rubbish covered rubbish covered like a Black Forest cake), Russell explained a theory of his that a pathway we stepped onto was actually likely an ancient stone road between towns. I am sure he’s right—cobbles remaining, ditches either side... Likely the major road he thinks it was. See photos of our feet on the path. The feet matter—it’s the measure of a shared trek on a path he at present jogs everyday (a circuit). And down into the forest again, and hearing something large and mammalian moving deeper in—likely deer as Russell says they’d been seen recently... Then down past the hill fortress rising to the left towards the fast highway, to the right as we descended some beautiful ravines, thickly wooded. Songbirds, but especially blackbirds, in the leaf-litter and eventually down to the back of the old French military quarter down to the concrete pillars/ gates that were its entry (see photos). One of the things I was thinking a lot about was the fusion of place and the temporal in the original title of our book: ‘Temporarities’... And this walk really clarified the active collusion of place as expressed in the multiverse... not palimpsests (that too easy textual chestnut which is an explanation for imperialism and the tyranny of time, but not for an ontology that exists outside the chronological, which is what I am increasingly believing in... So a Hölderlin poem isn’t just a product of its time and his ‘sources’—or as the water bottle I drank from in Rotterdam said: Sourcy ...), sorry, not palimpsests but of all time—forward as well as back... And if we believe him a prophetic poet, which I do (as we do with, say, Blake) then surely we must accept this. Hölderlin’s poetry is MORE than the sum of its parts. Our models need to be Running in the Black Forest 309 semiotic and textual at once, of course, we need ways of reading, but they need to be augmented by an innate awareness of a multi-presence of place and being. Is this spiritual? Maybe, but it’s certainly not ‘religious’, though I don’t doubt it actually has an undiscovered and undeclared or unsynthesised exact science behind it—as does the collapse of earth-place with human-induced decay of biosphere as opposed to ‘natural’ atrophy and time doing what time does. We have corrupted time itself without invasiveness, wrecking time through wrecking place... Again, sorry, no palimpsests at all, but rather an multi-dimensional active model of connection to all moments at a particular set of co-ordinates that in themselves shift and change with the movement of the universe itself. There are no such thing as GPS co-ordinates that are permanent—in the scheme of billions of years, they lose their relevance, but if we accept all points of time and place as exist in the moment, in the now, then it’s not difficult to understand the flux of presence and its reliance on all else. Pantheism, yes, but also science. For me, the shooting of the deserters makes ghosts and a residue that cannot be resolved— there is no redemption for anyone in this, and the act and loss extend through time and space—and all those other traumas of that same place long forgotten co-exist, too... I engage with place seeing both the affirming and the destructive, and a respect for presence and a culpability come out of it. In the human rights discussion (will write about this) there was a lot of talk of redemption and a bit about authenticity and for me an issue of rights is firmly connected to responsibility, to this range of trauma and affirmation that constitute place. So we are always with the ghosts, and in some places we are more aware of their presence because of memory or recovery or, actually, an intense feeling. JK Running in the Black Forest Running in the Black Forest, through the paddocks and into the shadow among the trees. The forest is a green lung that breathes me in through the gap in the thicket where the track enters the mix of pines, larches and the occasional ashes and oaks. The forest carries me along on the unending wave of a diastole, rising around me and relaxing again after me in a systolic undulation. On both sides of the track the immense lung breathes me along, breathes in, breathes out, transporting me along the crest of a running wave of inspiration and expiration. And then the long sigh of the forest’s breathing is interrupted, or so it seems to me for an instant, by the sight of a hunter’s raised wooden hide. Built on wooden stilts, with a small box-like seat, often roofed over against the rain or sun, these ‘Hochsitze’ often stand on the edge of a forest, usually looking out Running in the Black Forest 311 over a clearing or fire-break that gives the hunter a wide field of view to espy the prey. From his half-hidden seat on high, the hunter can take out the unsuspecting deer or boars as they come out of the cover of the trees to graze in the open at dawn or dusk. The raised hides remind me in some ways of the referee’s raised seat at Wimbeldon, and doubtless some hunters might be amused at this equation of their sport with a traditional English fairplay. Yet when I round a bend in the track, I see a hunter’s hide high on its spindly rough-hewn legs, with an army disposals camouflage net thrown over the high seat, the better to disguise the hunter gazing through his telescopic sights. This immediately alerts me to another sematic field for the hunter: not that of sport, but rather that of war (Household 1971). As the hunter scans his target, first with his binoculars, and then with the rifle sights, he participates in a modern technology of killing-at-a-distance that finds its acme in contemporary drone warfare (Chamayou 2015). Scanning the target, in the hunters’ lingo, is called ‘Ansprechen’ (a substantivized verb: to address), and once upon a time, the hunter would indeed have spoken to the quarry, to which he or she was related in an interconnected web of cosmic relationships. He or she would have conversed with the prey, expressed his or her respect and asked forgiveness before killing it. Today, ‘Ansprechen’ occurs via the medium of telescopic sight and laser rangefinder. No words are spoken, and no contact is made. Killer and quarry remain remote from each other, connected, if at all, only by the unilateral channel of imaging technology and high-precision ballistics. This is the idiom of modern warfare. Hunting is no longer a form of subsistence, it has become a form of leisure that brings it close, however strictly state legislation may regulate it, to the lawless killing of what Achille Mbembe (2003) calls modern necropolitics. And at this juncture, irresistibly, the iconic form of the raised hunting seat reminds me of another economy of killing, one perfected here during the Nazi period, which also reduced human beings to creatures to be slaughtered at will. Not too far from where I am running, there were three concentration camps around the small town of Haslach. The raised hunter’s hide evokes for me the raised guard towers of the thousands of concentration camps and internment camps for forced labourers that populated German territory from 1933 onwards. Such towers became architectural metonyms for Majdanek, Belsen, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and so many other places, indices of an industrialized thanatopolitics that treats humans like the animals that we today kill with impunity, to which the hobby hunter in his hide proposes merely a nostalgic pseudo-solution (that of ecologically legitimizing ‘culling’). The camouflage net in fact hides nothing: on the contrary, it displays to all the world the true face of a ubiquitous regime of killing that is the genocidal, necropolitical substrate of our civilization—a universal politics of hostility, says Mbembe (2016) in his Monologues to Tracy X 313 latest book—that has nested itself in the most apparently untouched niches of the natural world. This rush of associations disrupts for a moment my sense of being borne along by the forest’s rhythmic breathing. Where have these ideas come from? What devil of a quadruped parasite has lodged itself on the mantle of the forest and is contaminating its green life in this way, and my thoughts along with it? But even the hunter’s guard-tower is also a moment of inspiration: in its inspiration-expiration the forest also offers me that complex of ideas as part of its breath. And the forest has grown around the parasite, unimpressed by its fake vegetation and the four stripped spars that were once larch boles, and makes it part of the life of ideas that it offers me as I pass through its respiratory world. ‘Humanists, not used to thinking with disturbance, connect the term with damage. But disturbance, as used by ecologists, is not always bad’, writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015: 160); ‘Disturbance opens the terrain for transformative encounters, making new landscape assemblages possible.’ We and our cosmic kin are inhabitants not only of the Anthropocene, the Capitolocene, or the Necrocene, but also of the ‘Chthulucene’, an epoch of renewal through humble, earthy cohabitation (Haraway 2016). The forest holds its breath a moment, then exhales again, and the running (mine-and-the-forest’s) goes on. RWP Monologues to Tracy X Walking back after leaving Russell at those gates was strange because it was along the busy road, with the Neckar on the right as I headed towards the Schloss (as marker). It was like going into another version of the town, or other versions, because I have learnt after the various months spent here, that there are many towns, and some of them alienating. Which is what I encountered the next night at the Hölderlin tower when I gave my presentation with the wonderful Andrée Gerland and we were confronted by the deeply conservative protection racket of German professors and their ridicule. As said, I will always maintain that discussing Hölderlin in terms of nirvana, football teams, ‘event’ and ‘site’ and fantasia and pantheism is appropriate. And Andrée and I, in our efforts to reconsider ‘Half of Life’ (‘Hälfte des Lebens’), did so to energise it in the now, to show a text isn’t stable, and the where and why (and how) you read reinvigorates a poem. In fact, we felt we were doing what the language of the poem and work as a whole demands. But the reaction from the ‘old professors’ was intense, rude and abusive. But we both have become more determined to see postmodern textuality enter into the discussion of a poet whose fragmen- 314 Monologues to Tracy X tations have long been seen in that light, and who was seen as a precursor (by many decades) of many of the textual and artistic ‘isms’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but wasn’t appreciated until around 1913 and then within a disturbing nationalistic rendering which, I fear, is what still strongly remains among the protectors of the shrine. The next day saw a flurry of discussion around the university community regarding what had happened the night before in the tower. Yesterday, as you know, I did the human rights panel/ workshop, in which a group of us discussed the Asad document on human rights as well as the three poems I read (to open after intros) regarding Aboriginal deaths in custody. It was a strong and robust discussion. There was a strong questioning of the worth of the document for a variety of reasons, though it was agreed, that even considering the cultural imperialism of western rights discourses, that there is a common desire for human rights throughout the world that reaches across borders and cultures. However, as I noted, it’s also a matter of cultures going to those rights rather than having them imposed, and the rights of access is vital. Having said that, the basic right of the right to exist, to live, surely is and should be the cornerstone of all culturalities. Joey Slaughter made some good points regarding differences between human rights and civil rights, and there was a lot of discussion about the right of, say, a gay subculture in a part of Africa finding its own way in the face of extreme persecution, and not having westerners trying to force people out when they are put at risk of violence. There was a lot of discussion regarding Brazil’s raising of areas of addicts, and I pointed out that addicts (from personal experience) don’t tend to articulate outside their communities, though are often highly articulate, and this ‘loss of voice’ leaves them vulnerable. We also discussed Israel and Palestine and I mentioned that as someone who believes in communities and not states, I see it all very differently, and not as an oppositional binary. One of the slight awkwardnesses (rectified by the adjudicator) was when she said that I would speak in poetry, a less powerful and marginalised language in a discussion of the languages of human rights. I, of course, contested that, and the poems of Jack Davis (‘John Pat’) and Robert Walker (‘Solitary Confinement’) showed how powerful a language for human rights they can be... And she did rescind that comment. I also said, for me, the contradictions and complexities of culture and international rights can be more readily dialogued over in poetic language than any other—a poem can go into a conflict zone in the way that even legal language can struggle to do. One of the many disturbing things in the Hölderlin tower episode was the intake of breath I heard when I started discussing Aboriginal poetry, teams and self-affirmation, looking at the resolution of the paradox of stadia and place in Kim Scott’s brilliant poem we ran in the anthology. Someone got up and walked out midway Monologues to Tracy X 315 through reading the extract because, clearly, they saw no relevance to Hölderlin. Totally relevant, and respectfully worthy of each other. As I mentioned at the human rights event, a writer like Jack Davis in trying to establish advocacy for Aboriginal Australians reached out of Australia to the US (where he couldn’t connect with the violent discourse of some black power movement/ s), to Nigeria and pan-Africa (though he was distressed to see manipulation and oppression of black by black), and his plays went to Canada etc. as part of a connection to black rights empowerment. All of us agreed that internationalism and transparency are important to the protection of rights. Where it got more complex was animal rights, with my simply pointing out that to me, all living things deserve equal rights, especially human and animal. Another participant said they need to be separate, but exist etc. For me, the main point I feel I made was that the oppressed are also culpable for the problems of the planet as well—to a much lesser, almost infinitesimally small amount compared to the greedy and the oppressors, of course, but to take all culpability away is to remove agency and freewill, and to do that is to create a class system of existence. The oppressed don’t need to stay oppressed. We work on the assumption that liberation is always possible, and the struggle never stops. It can’t. Anyway, I met some fabulous people in that workshop/ panel/ presentation, and people I want to work with. It was a bringing together of concern from many different geographies and points of contact, and experiences of nation and state and pedagogy. Some were functioning more within nation and others less so, but we got there... We got somewhere . I like generative moments. I need them. I was given time to discuss my anarchist pacifist veganism in a certain amount of detail, and appreciated later Marc Epprecht saying it was ‘solid’! I might go out for one last walk on this fine evening... Before making dinner. They are predicting a strong storm later tonight (to water the summer crops...), but a clear and cooler tomorrow. I looked for the vole this morning, but it wasn’t out and about which isn’t surprising given the strong sun... But I will think about it. I will probably walk down to the fields (walking towards France! bit like Hölderlin...). One of the weird things is compositing memories into an active grid of ongoing presence, which having seen more than one season necessarily becomes more complex. So the grass cut on one bank of the Ammer outside the office, not on the far side. Thistles suddenly in raging purple flower, and the pigeons spreading wings to cool. The blackbirds have been everywhere with me, and sparrows. I saw an unusual striped and coloured songbird the other day walking from Russell’s gates along the busy road I haven’t yet identified. Then there are buildings and trees, the constant noise at night, the amplifier tunnel. Strangely, I suppose, as a kind of act of familiarisation and distance at once, before going to the tower to speak and read (ha! ) the other night, I went over Postscript (6.40pm) 317 onto the island, working my way through the summer drinkers, the summer picnickers, and walkers, to directly opposite the tower, and looking across the boats/ punts/ galleys carrying drunken students paddling and singing, I looked long and hard at that tower, watching the poet looking out at me, smiling. Not say ‘his majesty’ and swapping a poem for tobacco or the like, but looking seriously past all learning and Christ and God and nature, looking at the island and whatever growth it had on it at the time, hearing the birds winding into the evening, and looking way past me into a future we are all part of, that we are forcing the hand of, as if dredging the beginnings of the earth in its volatile torment in to an eternal now. Then I went across to the other side of the bridge and wound my way down to the tower, having to squeeze past the many young people sitting on the wall and drinking and being lit up by the activity of the river. And thus into the jaws I went... Postscript (6.40pm) Back from my walk a short while ago. Though the storm was listed for later, it came down when I was just starting the return journey! Got soaked. Sheltered for a while under the agriculture repair shop overhang near the railway—I could smell asphalt and agrichemicals as the rain hit (pounded) the ground before me. I walked up along the railway line past the graffitied trees (which I photographed—there’s a temporal spatial anomaly... I wrote about them in the On the Outskirts book when we were here before and the trees were leafless... Now they’ve got leaves and have been sprayed all over again! ), up to the road/ path to that odd pub thing at the base of the forest and back on the forest side of the railway line. I should have known the storm was going to break because the birds started getting manic and I saw three or four species I’ve not seen here before, including, I think, a roller. I tried to photograph some song birds but have no idea if they’ll show. What I did notice is that just before the storm I felt heightened awareness—the ubiquitous black butterflies seemed loud, the smell of the crops severe, and people cycling by became languid and dropped pace... The forest brooded above and cows with full udders dropped down into cud-chewing rest in the nearby field. I had a moment of our summers in childhood of the smell but it lacked the eucalyptus and was more earthy and overripe... But the agrichemical smell was sadly a familiar one, even if different ‘brands’ of the now. The contamination reaches out and is far from silent. After the storm broke, some people walking or jogging seemed to relish it, others ran for cover. The (what I think are) refugee portable housing had blankets hanging out to air which got wet, and walking past not long before the storm there was The act of writing in a new notebook 319 a lot of yelling and upset in there. I also noticed (after the rain had stopped) a red velvet couch on a slope outside the portable units, and it obviously reminded me of Darren Tofts sofas/ couches photos that I wrote poems for/ about a couple of years ago, but I felt no urge to photograph it for him because I felt there was too much sadness and tension around it. Unlike the couch I tried to photograph for him in St Denis way back! Those markers of movement and event in life, those sites of activity and loss, of passing and the ordinary moment loaded with pathos, comedy, incidentalism, and just life. But not this couch—it didn’t fit anything I might ‘construct’ (around it/ on it/ through it/ out of it). It wasn’t a marker I could even begin to understand. So that was my last walk—I will send the narrative in the form of pics, but a disrupted one because some won’t have worked and the order will shift... One other thing, as I continue to think about this stork poem for Tim I started in Rotterdam... The white stork is now very rare in Northern Europe and in Rotterdam the railways have a policy of building stork nests if they need to be moved or disrupted. They don’t want to lose the few that have ventured back to Rotterdam. So seeing it was actually quite something, as it presented an arc of its activity to me before passing out of my field of vision. Something like the astronomer Alec’s childhood epiphany of the shifting angle of the blind flapping in the breeze. Now I need to make dinner. JK The act of writing in a new notebook The act of writing in a new notebook—an intensity glowing in the texture of the paper, the pattern of the cover, the dimensions of the volume, however slim it may be… the physical gesture, so rare today and thus all the more pleasurable, of lifting the eyes from the manuscript, meditating, fixing briefly on the surrounding world, and then plunging back into the translucent but also resistant world of the paper and the pencil, swimming through the opacity and viscosity of the words as they form themselves in rushes and then reluctant traits onto the paper… RWP 320 A shy sun orchid A shy sun orchid This sighting , this presence, this persistence, of a Shy Sun Orchid flowering on the block is something astonishing given that all understorey had been grazed into nothingness, into a memory we can’t share in, not being here during the decades, the century and a half, of chewing and eroding, of clearing and grazing that has led to this. Yes, York gums and Jam trees (and mistletoes) and Manna wattles and even the odd sandalwood has managed to persist, and we have nurtured, and replanted, but understorey is a difficult retrieval. Of the various native shrubs we have replanted over the last (almost) decade, only the bottlebrush has succeeded. And now we have planted a variety of ‘scrubby’ plants we hope will persist beyond the difficulties of summer here, the dry, the burning heat. But what is astonishing—and I have written a poem realigning the provenance of the word ‘miracle’ in the context—is the ‘(re)appearance’ of undergrowth, of the narrative of plants of dappled light—the understorey—the first flower of the old botany, the flowering of this ecotone between wandoo country and jarrah country, the wheatbelt Yorkgum and Jam ( acacia acuminata —(‛mungart’) in Ballardong Noongar) country. Alone—a single orchid of the blue sun orchid family, though not a ‘Blue Sun Orchid’ itself, not the eponymous, not a Thelymitra canaliculata , but rather the family member, the Shy Sun Orchid— Thelymitra graminea —with its six petals, in thin gravelly-pyrites-Toodyay stone soil... Not blue, but a mauve-purple-faded colouring flowering in the dappling and striations of sunlight beneath thin York gums grown in the bank, the slope of the tier below the large red shed which blocks so much lowsun winter light, but now in October, the sun arcs above it, and gets through enough. The return! Not a rare wildflower when all is said and done, but thought extinct here at Jam Tree Gully. And not far away, down the next cutaway of hillside, wall of the valley that feeds into Toodyay Brook, where sound carries and is amplified among the granites, so close—maybe four or five metres away—I could be precise, of course, but this is accurate enough—‘Running postman’ or ‘scarlet runner’— Kennedia prostrata —a creeper with red peaflowers which we missed flowering but now identify via the cylindrical seed pods and the leaf and the creep along the ground, up the bank—another essential wildflower of the understorey. Have their seeds been in the soil, dormant, all along? Waiting for conditions to be suitable, to make their return under ‘friendly’ conditions? All these fallacies of the subjective, of the undoing of the colonial—destabilising the ‘settler’ presence through a return of ‘suitable conditions’ that can never be as they were, and never suitable as temperatures increase here and fire conditions rampant, and introduced weeds and climate shifting so entirely? Yes, but this is also a place no longer grazed by animals in a prison camp. No, roos A shy sun orchid 321 graze without interference (other than by outside forces—shooters who roam the valley, landowners fencing and poisoning illegally), and echidnas dig ants and termites, and feral cats and foxes predate as the humans that brought them here predate, but in essence, things have a chance here. We do not use poisons of any kind, the boundaries of this place we look over—look over as part of a complexity of return and restitution—are porous. The final—final in the sense of a manner of writing and documenting, not of presence—volume of my Jam Tree Gully cycle of poetry books is to be called Open Door as a resistance to colonial claims and ownership, of bigotry towards outsiders when the claims of authority are belt on theft and dispossession. This land I love and watch and try to restore, is Noongar Boodja. I know that, and words are not enough, not permission. I over-identify with the shy orchid which is not me coming back—I am here by virtue of the destructiveness of the land survey, the title-deed I reject. I disown all owning. I own nothing. But the shy orchid is here by virtue of awakening, or the workings of birds and other creatures. No human has ‘planted’ it. It has come outside the fallacy, and now I record and interest and converse. Otherwise, I—we—leave be. What in this annual flowering will be less than temporary? Will it ‘re-establish’, claim back its rights of presence? Will it falter after its return, lacking an adequate support system of persistence? Is its vulnerability a construction of colonial notions of the permanence of construction over the temporary? Observations are made, and will be made? How much are the co-ordinates of observations—of angst, of worry over it succeeding where we can’t—self-determining—creating its terms of re-adapting to what it had already adapted to, conditions so changed, and changing so fast in this Matrix ‘blue pill’ world, where we still wake accepting the world as is? Of course, the red pill world of the ‘wonderland’, of discovering ‘how deep the rabbit hole goes’ can only have been envisaged outside the colonial implications of the rabbit in Australia, the destruction colonialists who ‘unleashed it’ brought. We see rabbits here, but as it’s hard ground, not many and they don’t stick—not by our interventions, but their own decision-making processes (‘choice’). And as vegans who believe in no harm to any living thing, we’d never physically damage them to restore habitat—what we do is discourage in what we plant here and work with the natural ground aversioning, and not ‘encourage’. So, should the rabbits become a ‘problem’, we would fence (we mainly remove fences! ) the rehabilitation area (self-rehab, I might add) off until the shy flowers have reasserted their presence and completed their (self)adapting. Intervention needs to be monitored in every way. The matrix is not a human act of entertainment fulfilment dressed up as existential confrontation with what we make, but nature’s interwoven systems of sidestepping the arrogance and manipulations of a single species—humans— The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia 323 and especially the agents of narcissism serving themselves while purporting to serve humanity. The temporary is a liberty for reconsidering presence, and making something beyond its own envisagings of a binary permanence. Through the Shy Sun Orchid and the colonial naming of its preference for dappled and broken (sun)light—to call it ‘shy’, to give it allowance for a subtle care, a divergence from the crowd, there’s an undoing of human wishes and certainties and self-doubts as well as caution in the face of damage and loss. The excuse for diminishment in the name should be resisted. It should be let be outside the temporary-permanent binary. Beyond the ‘annual’. Beyond the limitations of the temporal we control with—the ‘fate’ we lie ourselves out of mortality with. What can be concreted, really? The moment, the lexical intervention, the flower. Camera dependent on light, which keeps the flowers open, closing with evening. What do we do with Blanchot here, in colonial meltdown that will leave contamination for ‘ever’? What do we do with ‘Infinite-limited, is it you? ’ (Blanchot 1995: 65)? I am here still, and the shy sun orchid is still waiting for other shy sun orchids to join it. But its flowering will be short, with its many flowers on the one, thin but starkly upright stem, enticing insects to help its fertilisation with self, with it, with its ‘you’. JK The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia What is a football team? A complex entity, I'm sure we’d all agree. It’s a team of players, of course, but also a team of coaching staff and their support system, a team of management, a team of administrators, a team of publicists, a team of corporate relations staff, and teams of supporters. All of these. I am going to be talking about the connection between the idea of the ‘team’ and Hölderlin, so please bear with me while I talk first about ‘teams’. Teams are amalgamations of people that cross over and augment, that network and make an entity of ideology and power that goes well beyond any game. Decisions are made by some, and diluted and/ or enforced by others. There is a slow rising up from the playing group, a cascading down from the management. In the end, best service to the football team, or ‘the club’, seems to be best serving sponsors, and best serving these vested, profit-making interests’ ideologies. These ideologies so often revolve around exploitation or, at best, indifference to social and especially environmental issues. And even when ‘concern’ is paid to an ‘issue’, it often lacks the complexity of thinking and sensitivity of approach 324 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia truly needed to protect the people or ecology that is being ‘supported’. I am not suggesting there’s always indifference, but in the end the financial wellbeing of the club will be paramount. Many would say ‘that’s understandable’, but I think otherwise—for me, the equality, justice, wellbeing of community expressed hand-in-hand with environmental respect are the very reason for the team to exist in the first place. The irony is, the team in the end falls prey to the most powerful voices—the team becomes subservient to the oligarchy, if not dictator. The team serves other teams, and in the end, the ultimate decisions (‘the buck stops here’ endgame) serve mutual interests, which finally serve those with the most financial power, or the most to gain financially (and who consequently gain ideological power). Now, I will seem to digress before coming back to the point I wish to make regarding ‘teams’ and the writing (and reading) of Hölderlin—that poet who so much wanted to be part of the modern, thinking, energetic team of the new poetry (and actually was), yet felt cast aside and neglected, misunderstood and even denied. The team in all its complexity wasn’t able to absorb his maverick difference, his personal complexity that wanted to embrace the paradox of difference and connection at once. I have been working with Hölderlin’s brilliant Pindar translation (they are beyond that! ) ‘fragments’ of 1805, and this reversioning seems relevant to this discussion in the performative subtext of a team competing/ performing in community, accompanied by song, dance: choric elements. Michael Hamburger’s translations of the Hölderlin fragments (1994) are in themselves reversionings of Hölderlin’s reversioning, but I am taking it exponentially further. The versions mutate into other versions, and so on. Hölderlin, in his Dionysian intensities, made a pantheistic theology of Hellenistic presence within his now, radicalising poetry as a place for the extraordinary to declare itself. Hölderlin’s love for Susette, the wife of the man who’d hired him to tutor his children, has a cascading effect in terms of fusing nature and ‘event’ from this Dionysian universe, and love, into a theology of unrestraint that will inevitably break down as the whole cannot remain unified. [This paragraph is largely taken from my recent essay ‘Resisting the Compliant’. Some fragments of what follows are also derived from that essay, though the essence and bulk of the argument and text itself are fundamentally different. They are intended as complementary essays, and both share some splinters of space with my essay ‘New Wave Taxidermists’.] Michael Hamburger, in his introduction to Poems and Fragments, notes, ‘In his tragic odes, as in his novel [ Hyperion —Hölderlin’s only novel], Hölderlin’s pantheism, his desire to be one with the cosmos, continually comes up against his awareness not only of the differences between human and non-human nature, The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia 325 but the isolation into which human beings are precipitated by their consciousness. (Hölderlin 1994: 28). Which brings to mind the single player training on the sports field, part of a team going through routines, thinking about his/ her/ its own health (and will go with ‘his’ here just by way of personal identification, not exclusion), his own situation, maybe taking in the ecology around him, of which he is part, temporarily and in temporariness. He will be back. And back. Does he think of the trees surrounding the sports field, does he hope that they will survive, say, the club’s redevelopment of the ground (to increase its potential for profit-making)? Has he been there, or passing, in the evenings when the red-tailed black cockatoos are ‘noisy’ and present, their roosting part of the tree-plantings of way-back? Is there a defensive alienation of one’s own feelings towards damage, a kind of embracing of the game’s aggressions as an inability to recognise or absorb the intense emotion behind acknowledging habitat loss (be it old growth or replantings)? —the team player will rarely risk himself/ herself/ itself in being the prophet unless the ‘plays’ are expected, permitted, allowed within the scope of the pre-agreed upon gameplay. Hölderlin’s outsider status alienated him from ‘his’ time, and in looking back to the Hellenistic world or to a more illuminated future, he was increasing his personal alienation with a time that had little room for him. Hamburger is good in talking about aspects of this, but is wrong in labelling an alienation of feeling and its loss as reasons for a kind of poetic collapse. I don’t think this is what happened in the poems, and though few, and seemingly sterile in obvious ways, Hölderlin’s late poems for me are intense containment fields of feeling for nature and ‘the world’ that are maps not of a hebephrenia, but of a restraint so tense it snaps with every line. Hamburger (1994: 36) writes: The voice of the heart—words that also occur in one of Hölderlin’s odes—was more than a sentimental trope in a poet who believed that the capacity to feel is a prerequisite even for religious dedication. It was the loss of that capacity—after the loss of the one woman [Susette] he had loved religiously—that marks the poems written not by Hölderlin but by the person he became when his sufferings had broken him. Whether or not we call that condition ‘catatonic stupor’—or ‘schizophrenia’, to use the later term—has little bearing on his poetry. I find this outrageous—Hölderlin was the same person and the same poet. His post-‘collapse’ poems, few as they might have been, and ‘occasional’ as they might have been, are still remarkable poems, and still communing with his ‘ideal’ of the poet and poetry. They are still prophetic if we know how to hear their ‘prophecies’. They are the poems of a poet who has decided the ‘team’ of poets 326 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia doesn’t want him, that the sport of poetry (for it can be! ) might not recognise (adequately) a ‘player’, but that doesn’t mean that player’s knowledge, skills, and vision have been lost. It’s like watching a ‘team sport’ played with one or two players who are outside the rules and format but are still doing remarkable things. As ‘Scardanelli’, Hölderlin wrote out of a retrospective time that is paradoxically still looking forward, even if into the nothingness and eternity of the present. Of one of Hölderlin’s ‘Der Sommer’ poems (Wenn dann vorbei...), Hamburger notes ‘The fictitious date and the signature ‘Scardanelli’ are typical of Hölderlin’s escape from both time and identity at this period. He would also call himself ‘Buonarroti’ or ‘Scaliger Rosa’ (Hölderlin 1994: 811) Again, Hamburger has closed himself off from the possibility that rather than ‘escape’ it’s a conscious ploy, a critique of the discourse around ‘time’ and ‘identity’. It remains visionary, and the self is displaced within nature (not ignored, not a matter of indifference because the poem is written to please a ‘visitor’—in fact, the ‘false’ signature is evidence of the importance of identity and its slippages). Here is my version, or ‘distraction’ of that poem: After Hölderlin’s ‘Der Sommer’—‘Wenn dann vorbei’ The vanishing of back-when’s spring-flowers, Summer’s now , entwining the year. And, as through the valley, Toodyay Brook— The ranges at full stretch to hold it back. Paddocks are exhausted but glassy-bright With day, arching towards twilight; And so the year hangs ‘round, a summer’s Day for men as impressions might fade with nature. May 24th 1778. Scardanelli And the team player, who lives in another town or suburb or locality, who will play his big matches at stadia elsewhere, how much do the vegetation, the animal life around him matter when he is training ‘locally’? How does the sunset affect him, the floodlights coming on—outside his seeing, his ability to pick up the ball? Do the colours of the horizon blend with leaf-shadow and the fiery tails—orange and red/ female and male—with his body making its artistry with ball, with the other players? Is the subset of team (Alain Badiou? ) himself, the trees, the bird? What of the people living around the ground, whose less temporary home it is? Intersections? Shared concerns? Prioritisings? As one The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia 327 who believes strongly we can co-exist in many places at once, who subscribes to what I call ‘polysituatedness’ and ‘international regionalism’, I think it’s very possible for that player to be concerned and even connected to the ‘local’ and still maintain connection with other ‘homes’. You are a participant in that space; you are at least a small part of that space as well, and are in a positon of care, respect and responsibility towards community and environment. This is not to say you have to behave or think the same, nor to say you shouldn’t remain ‘who you are’, but rather that you can have a positive input, that you can care and respect locally. In the same way, Hölderlin can be ‘Hellenic’ and Swabian at once; he can be of his walks through other parts of Europe and be local (if temporary) where he is treading and sensing and thinking, as much a local as where he came from, where he studied, and finally where he ended up in the tower by the river in Tübingen. He is active in all those places at once. All of us, including the football player from one country training in another, make entries and exits into place constantly, mentally and physically. This does not change our belonging, nor does it mean we should be excluded from conversations about those different places—though obviously different intensity of connection to a place will bring different responsibilities and weights. And Hölderlin’s entries and exits through Pindar? Of, say a local football team in Perth, Western Australia, and all those issues discussed above in play? What about this: After Hölderlin’s Pindar Extravaganza when he was Supposedly Past it: ‘Das Belebende’ Tackle the ball not the man, counter The Centaurs guileless and wanting The violent cornucopia Of booze advertising, tackling Above the shoulder, around the neck, The claret flowing, commentator, but celebrating From the corporate cup, overflowing silver Klaxons blowing, trooping the colour. Centaur-identity so wrapped up around the Swan River with lip-service to Whadjuk country which is out of the corporate inner-circle, the sand of the plain transferring energy up through branches planted or self-seeded. Wealth is the goal or points accumulating in Centaurville, the Perth Hills overlooking loss of territory, the bonanza of a premiership—tourism, the money flowing east to west, all angles covered that impossible kick from the back pocket. 328 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia Centaurs’ bodywork a sculptural science, a specificity of bodyform, and downfall through substances off script, left to run off the rails. Read about the fuck-ups as if, as if, all in the past. And then a career over, looking for that business leg-up, to make sense. Mates. And down through the Scarp the river makes another river one and the same, renamed. From those towns, those colonial outposts through the Valley, players emerge to claim back but mostly to be claimed. Their fame outsources, though some manage to outflank. This story-telling from far away overlaying with Cyclops watching one-eyed over his sheep, the corporate raiders, the military advertising during peak-time TV, to protect the sanctity of the team of teams, the long-term recoveries, the permanently injured. And Centaurs wild at season’s end, kicking up a storm, walking on red algae choking the river, from stadium to ballroom. And with beer in their bellies and approved supplements whirling through their bloodstreams, the Centaurs dance across the field, AC/ DC’s ‘High Voltage’ smashing its way into the home crowd’s identity banks, confirming this is one of ours, but then again, maybe it belongs to the derby rivals, all that sandy coastline and fallout in the Sound, another club’s claims to sponsorship? No, no, it’s Daddy Cool’s ‘Eagle Rock’, and from the horn of plenty pours the history of a city, gatherings of the great inland catchment. And so the colonisers burst out of the hollowed stomachs of the colonised. So Ossian is roped in, and Chiron who bestowed the secrets of the lyre on the warrior Achilles. And so for origins. And so for the drawcards. Sponsors lining up. [And from Pindar’s Poetics of Immortality by Asya C. Sigelman (2016) it is worth considering: ‘It has frequently been noted how ‘animated’ Pindar’s verses are. Gilbert Norwood compared reading Pindar to ‘passing one’s hand over a surface tingling with electricity. All is alive: at times one could swear the verse is full of eyes as well as music...’ (Sigelman 2016: 19) Sigelman goes on to add, ‘This uniquely Pindaric animating effect is due to a large extent to the poet’s abundant coinages of new, dynamic compound adjectives, many of them with verbal elements.’ (ibid: 19). This seems so pertinent to Hölderlin’s practice (consider comments on music and form/ ‘alternation of tones’).] I am also thinking of ‘temporariness’ here. The team is fixed and non-fixed, temporarily present, then gone; to be restated through the historicising of the club, the faux-memorialising of a (falsely) glorious past. In making the club greater than the present, points in time are called upon (such as club premierships) to show pedigree and worth, not only of players but the branch diagram of team structure. Many teams make the playing team, and they are collectively known as The Club, a club that reflects back on its sponsors, on its ecology of membership and community. This is at the core of ideology, and the tempo- The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia 329 rary—the game that passes so quickly—is fixed as a permanent, as a moment in history through which we can measure who ‘we’ are, directly or vicariously. The ‘site’ of the game—the games ‘away’ (visiting other teams grounds) or at ‘home’ (Subiaco Oval and soon the Perth Stadium) is transfigured through the place of preparation and training. Club headquarters and, especially, where the club trains. These become sacred zones in which sacrifice (of trees, birds) is part of a ritual iconography of presence that makes the temporary not only permanent, but archetypal. When Alain Badiou talks of Hölderlin, site, and event, and ‘homeland’, he focalises the necessity of leaving over presence, and in some ways the team’s home and away season; their non-being then their being as representations of the State’s now, a corporate-now, play into this. I find this relevant (though, as usual, I disagree entirely with Badiou’s ‘understanding’ of Hölderlin or his poetry! ): There is a paradox of the homeland, in Hölderlin’s sense, a paradox which makes an eventual-site out of it. It so happens that conformity to the presentation of the site—what Hölderlin calls ‘learning to make free use of what’s native and national in us’—supposes that we share its devastation by departure and wandering.’ (Badiou 2006: 255) In this I think of participation and exclusion of ‘Western Australian’ Aboriginal communities (on Whadjuk Noongar land but taking in many peoples’ territories! ! ), about the idea of the club as eternal family but many ex-players falling by the wayside and losing a sense of focus in their post-football career days, and the nature of the football draft, drawing on young players from all around Australia—the ‘local’ is corporate and often exploitational in its displacements—to present the ‘site’ of The Club (Perth). In negotiating these complex amalgams of presence and temporariness, some Western Australian writers are conscious of this, and none more so than Kim Scott—his ‘stadium’ welcome poem for the new Perth Stadium undercuts corporate ownership of event and site while celebrating the communal coming together, the contest, the expression of competitive no-war. No lack of resistance, but no assault either. He is one of the few writers who could pull this off. The achievement of the body is not separated from the achievement of the mind, of ethics, of ontology. His poem ‘Kaya’ is written in English and Noongar, and can be found in The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry I’ve co-edited with Tracy Ryan (2017). Here are the final lines: Our old people rise from graves of ash, They delight again in contest And in challenge. 330 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia Shoulder to shoulder we stand The ancestors and us; We stamp our feet We beat our palms, We voice a sound that lives: A crowd, reborn. You are welcome to Whadjuk country. Scott is sidestepping the corporate; he is ‘reinvesting’ the stadium ground not with sponsorship but a presence of Elders and people; he is allowing country to be a place of interaction, skill, ‘strength’, and community. This is what poetry can do to step beyond the reach of those teams who would have us perform their bidding. Instead of team, here, we have a people, we have other people/ s, and we have conversation. As we find a sense of place and language—in a very different way—sparked in the reinvention of the lyric of ancient Greece, of Pindar’s odes, in the late ‘versions’ of Pindar and his commentaries in Hölderlin (see the Anvil Press 2004 bilingual edition of Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments , with the tenacious and reliable renderings into a quite literal English by Michael Hamburger, along with his sturdy notes to the poems). New spaces and old spaces in conversation, without colonial exploitation? Or in the case of Hölderlin, is a ‘classical’ age colonisation of his contemporary thought being enacted? I think not—rather, it’s a distension of his oblique mental processes, his reimagining the nature of environment and nature of self through classical models. A form of mental survival in a negating world. In a world that would crush his poetic interpretations of what it was not . In his work, nature is more than an extension of the human. Maybe the ‘godly’ and the ‘mythical’ are a way of approaching nature as something beyond human control and ultimately oppression? And maybe the ritual and codes of behaviour of the Ancient Greek world, especially as mediated via literature and art, became a means of displacing his own concerns with the ‘modernity’ and correctives of his own time. Which is not to defend the inequities and moral compromises of the ancient world, but to speculatively distract them through creating an alternative diegesis. In criticising the numerous ‘errors’ in Hölderlin’s rendering of ancient Greek texts, his contemporary critics missed the point in his creating a hypermodern poetry of self and societal critique that worked at a tangent to the political constraints of his own life, his own upbringing, his own social environments, and his sources. Something ‘alternative’ is created—by default or intent or both! The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia 331 In doing some versions or distractions (more accurately? ) of Hölderlin’s work in recent times, I wrote this note in an email to a friend: Probably the bizarre poems herein are the Sophocles out of Hölderlin because they are notorious in translation circles because of their oddness and ‘errors’ re the original (the version he used was also likely suspect according to David Constantine), but further in this case because I have had Constantine’s effort at rendering a version in English constantly in mind as I’ve run rampant with the poem-plays to recreate something purposefully deconstructive (yes, I mean that precisely). David Constantine (2001) writes in his intro to his versions of Oedipus and Antigone : ‘I kept close to his strange German, in the hope of arriving at an analogous strangeness in English. But his language is beautiful and troubling too, and in carrying over much of that will be lost like precious water from a leaky vessel’. It’s this translation loss that delights me and that, for me, creates entry points and exits, voids and holes to weave through—in the slippages the new poem comes that is a splintered reflection of a original lost through translation of translation and (re)versioning of this and these through interruptions from the original into the attempts by other translators to make something of it relevant to English-language readers. I don’t want the relevance, I want the poetic implosion which I find generative. In all of this is tension and torment, in all the generative errors and ambiguities in that strangely so precise and so superbly architectural poetry, I want to say how wrong I think Badiou is when he begins his meditation on Hölderlin with this: The torment proper to Hölderlin, but also what founds the ultimate serenity, the innocence of his poems, is that the appropriation of Presence is mediated by an event, by a paradoxical flight from the site itself. For Hölderlin, the generic name of the site in which the event occurs is the homeland: ‘And no wonder! Your homeland and soil you are walking, / What you seek, it is near, now comes to meet you halfway.’ The homeland is the site haunted by the poet, and we know the Heideggerean fortune of the maxim ‘poetically man dwells, always, on earth.’ (Badiou 2005: 255) Let’s ignore the false lead of Heidegger here, for all Badiou’s desire (and insistence) that it be the pivot upon which we consider Hölderlin and his work. And let’s ignore the absurd declarations of ‘innocence’, which never was the case, and never can be. But can we ignore the transference in this of Heidegger’s Nazism (sorry, it’s there! ) and the blood/ folk of ‘homeland’? I would argue that Hölderlin’s texts dismantle such readings not through their late ‘madness’, but because of the necessary breakdown of language in face of his immersions in a classicism of ‘homeland’. His own poetic language undoes these ‘undertones’ that the right might use for false purposes later, even now. The site of the 332 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia homeland is being de-evented. The homeland is ‘temporary’ because the formal notion of it (loyalty, bigotry) is undone by the obsession with an ancient, ‘ideal’ elsewhere. The poems almost can’t contain the contradiction. I am reminded of the implicit contradiction in the anti-Nazi speeches ‘to youth’ of Ernst Wiechert and the celebration of blood and folk, of the nationalistic power of ‘nature’ in his early works and his fate as too ‘in the face’ as a reminder of the evils of a Nazi past after the war. Language and place. In Hölderlin’s case, his deployments of markers of Swabian dialect, the importance of language and ‘country’ as mediated through classical Greece, ‘nature,’ and ‘place’, can be read as a positive regarding the intimacy of language and connection to nature, but also abused as a propaganda tool for nationalism. As someone who speaks a language that evolved in another place, or places, a language that has colonially ‘adapted’ to very different country, I am always conscious of the disconnect between word and syntax when it comes to articulating the experience of being here (in this case, ‘Jam Tree Gully’). I fully understand that Ballardong Noongar is a language that evolved over tens of thousands of years as, in significant part, an expression of here-ness, of being in this place. It’s not only a matter of namings, or even explanations, but of an organic, even cosmological, movement between utterance and presence. ‘The word’, as a formalist might say, has so many semantic levels, that it is not recordable, and can rarely be understood without a deep cultural familiarity with its usages. Hölderlin’s poetry, for all its frequent, superb formal control (even when it’s fragmentary! ), its exhilarating expression of what (German) language can do, had to break down into fragments, and then later, during his ‘mad’ years (Hamburger himself doubts this label! ), into a deceptively ‘hebephrenic’ versifying that, nonetheless, in complying with the formalities of languages, also ironises and displaces them. In performing ‘the poet’ (as expected by others, and maybe expected by himself), Hölderlin was actually performing the self: he was present in those poems in one of the only ways literature will allow, as gesture . The business of literature is an exploitation like any other business. Like the business of football teams, The Club standing in for the team, a substituting of sign, and a simulacrum. The team, as the organism greater than its component parts, answers to larger teams above it. Interestingly, in football as with most team sports, there’s still rooms for ‘stars’ and plenty of awards given out for lifting oneself above the ordinary, to be balanced by ‘fairest and best’ team awards: for those, maybe, who sacrifice their own glory for the team’s greater glory. In some ways, the politics of the second half of Hölderlin’s life—‘cracked’ by the intensity of his poetic creativity and disappointment in life and mostly, the loss of his relationship (though not of its love), and Susette’s death at a The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia 333 distance—are enravelled in a ‘silence’ that wasn’t silent at all, but a non-participation in the machine of the state, of the language itself. Swabian was of German, which was of a growing nationalism: a threat to locality, to specificity of place. The English I use here is not the English of elsewhere—it is specific, and grows in the place, but its growth is an imposition. Aware of this, I try to open it to other language influences, without appropriating subtexts. What is this language? A language of the poem. A poem to be read and heard by others. Teamwork. Or, from an anarchist point of view, de-centralised community in which we all have our say, our input of language-making. Hölderlin’s poetry is dynamic as a field of temporariness and emplacement. It is never stable ontologically, though completely under control technically, and I include in this the ‘transcribed’ (by Wilhelm Waiblinger, apparently from Hölderlin’s notes during his ‘madness’, presented in Waiblinger’s 1823 novel Phaeton —authenticity may be ‘dubious’, but I have no doubt ‘In lieblicher Bläue’ contains the very essence of Hölderlin’s breaking out of the long-term temporariness of the tower, out over the river Neckar, and through time and space, into a place of ‘permanence’ of poetic language, though always slipping and changing). Hölderlin is actually part of no ‘team’, though teams of scholars and thinkers and poetry readers have, nonetheless, tried to bring him to various degrees and places of conformity. He will not be co-opted. The trees will not be cleared in his name, though I have no doubt they’ll be cleared for profit. His own family wouldn’t help Hölderlin in the end, and the claims of The Club to be part of the family, of community, are propaganda—in the end, only corporate sponsors and their vision of place and belonging, and the profit this might generate, are being served. [A sort of a concluding footnote to end an essay? Why not? The reception of a text is mutable, and closure is arbitrary in any discourse. And the ramifications of the abuse of Hölderlin’s poetry and life as a reinforcement to an aggressive German nationalism, the ultimate expression of team tyranny, of the suppression of liberty, is relevant to any ‘end’ we might proffer. This from Ross Benjamin’s Archipelago Books translation and edition of Hyperion : ‘But the nationalist interpretation continued to bedevil the reception of his work through the first half of the twentieth century. In 1943, the centenary of Hölderlin’s death, the Nazi regime issued a Feldauswahl, a special edition for the troops. That the words of this passionate opponent of autocracy were pressed into the service of the Nazi enterprise is the supreme irony of Hölderlin’s posthumous destiny’ (Hölderlin 2008: 228) I might add, that when Hölderlin as one of the three souls (Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin) desired a ‘team’ it would not hold, did not last, and the bizarre forced togetherness of Nazism was a concrete fate he couldn’t 334 The Problems of Team Spirit: Versions of Hölderlin out of Western Australia avoid. Hölderlin asked ‘What are poets for in times of need.’ and the abuse of this still resonates, sadly. Hölderlin needed team support, needed company, needed to share his ideas and revelations. He needs us as readers to resist the Nazi enforcing of nationalist readings. Let’s depart with the last lines of a letter from Hölderlin to Casmir Ulrich Böhlendörff, November 1802: ‘Please write to me soon. I need pure tones. Psyche among friends, the generation of thought in conversation and letters is necessary for artists... Otherwise we have no thought for ourselves; but it belongs to the holy image which we are shaping. A sincere farewell’ (Michael Hamburger’s introduction, in Hölderlin 1994: xxxi).] JK Patmos as palimpsest Two palimpsests. Sitting on the south bank of the Yarra near the University of Melbourne boathouse, waiting for the rest of the crew to arrive. Looking up from time to time at the river gums on the other bank, I am absorbed in Henry Miller’s The Colussus of Marousi . Epiphanies of an imagined Greece superimposed upon an Australian centri-urban landscape. Decades later, on the path that follows the old city walls along the Neckar, leading to Tübingen’s architectural trademark, Hölderlin’s tower, with its half-moon yellow façade and pepperpot roof. I’m here with our common friend, mentor and colleague Philip Mead, himself a poet. With the punts (not quite the same as the ones in Cambridge I spent so many hours on all those years ago) moored in rafts below us, we look across at the Neckarinsel with its avenue of gigantic plane trees. Nah ist Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch. Near is And difficult to grasp, the God But where danger threatens That which saves from it also grows. (Hölderlin 2004: 550-1) Here too a palimpsest: the imagined island in the southern Aegean, not far from the Turkish coast, and thus closer to Asia than Europe. In that imagined Patmos as palimpsest 335 semi-classical, semi-early Christian landscape, the God is imagined as present, felt in the immanent beauty of stones, light, wind, and the vegetation. And yet so far away, receding, elusive. In a chiastic inversion of proximity and abandonment, the second couplet focuses on the bitter wild herbs growing in the stony, windswept slope: they are both poison and antidote at once. But the imagined landscape (one I know intimately from Dalmatia: stones, bura and its incessant murmuring, the scent of desiccated wild grasses and Mediterranean pines) clasps together two sets of rather abstract double axioms: God is both near at hand and gone from the world; but when crisis erupts, in its wake rescue emerges. Nature itself is a redemption, but offers little comfort for those who cannot accept its simple thereness, all the more so when it suffers the onslaughts of technology. But like the matsutake mushrooms that grew in the contaminated landscape of Hiroshima (Tsing 2015: 3), nature appears to regenerate itself, against all odds, in the interstices of the destruction wreaked by industrial capitalism. The geographical-conceptual palimpsest lifts the poem out of one context, drawing it to the heights of a generalized theorem, only then to deposit it again in another context where it will take root, however briefly, like the herbal-medicinal pharmakon it describes. No wonder, then, that Michael Hamburger has returned again and again to ‘Patmos’, translating and retranslating the poem: ‘The two opening lines ... contain the essence of Hölderlin’s new poetric doctrine’ he notes in his first long introduction to his inaugural voume of Hölderlin translations (1943: 69). These lines, however, ‘contain’ less than they ‘open’, generating off-shoots just as ‘rescue’ ‘grows’. A list of Hamburger’s successive translations of the poem reads like a map of mid-twentieth-century to early-twenty-first-century crises. His initial foray into translating Hölderlin during the inferno of the Second World War was unmetered, but replicated the line-and verse structure of the originals. As a twenty-year-old exiled German-speaker in the British Army, Hamburger established a clear parallel between Hölderlin’s poetic task and his own as poet-translator: ‘Hölderlin’s indictment of Greek culture was written from the point of view of one steeped in Greek culture; it contains a comparison of modern life with Hölderlin’s conception of Greek life’ (1943: 31); Greek culture is for Hölderlin’s critique of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Germany what Höldern is for Hamburger’s critique of mid-twentieth-century Nazi Germany. There followed the Penguin translations of 1961 (now in foot-of-the-page prose, but closer to Hölderlin’s metrical form), a Kegan Paul and a Michigan edition in 1966 and 1967 respectively, a Cambridge University Press edition in 1980, the successively growing Anvil version of 1986 (304 pages), the Carcanet collection of 1994 (796 pages), with its Penguin off-shoot of 1998, through to the gigantic Anvil edition of 2004 (832 pages). Patmos as palimpsest 337 Hamburger’s Hölderlin may appear monumental, evidence of a more and more robust afterlife as the poet’s canonical status is increasingly cemented within academic discourse. But in fact what is evinced here, far from solidity of singularity, are, in their incremental sedimentations, the poet’s afterlives : a succession of reasserted moments of relevance which demand ever renewed reiterations. Similarly, Hamburger’s reiterated translations of the opening lines register slight alterations over the decades. As the constantly revised introductions demonstrate, the successive contexts and crises in which the respective editions were revamped and supplemented themselves inflected the largely recurrent phrasing in such a way as to give it a different timbre and tenor at every new publication. Threat never remains the same, it comes in staccato volleys (even though today, especially in the wake of the gradually dawning collective realization of the irreversibility of climate change, we may have the sense of an accumulating apocalypse). There is no enduring salvation. The struggle goes on, taken up again and again. And for that, one must have recourse, again and again, to modes of rescue that never remain the same. Hölderlin already knows this, as he translates the post-revolutionary present of the first decade of the nineteenth century via the biblical, apocalyptic past. The same thing is done, again and again, by each successive generation that reads (and thus ‘applies’, concretely, in the terminology of Gadamer [1965: 291-2], Ricoeur [1985] and Warning [1993: 20]), or literally translates, ‘Patmos’. Near and far (more precisely, ‘ungraspable’), the opening signifiers of Hölderlin’s poem, are spatial markers, and yet they are arranged within the sequentiality of the poetic lines, according to the mainly iambic rhythm, with its alternation of five and seven syllabic lines (sometimes combined in a single line) and its combination of single and double unstressed syllables between stressed syllables. The first line, (‘Náh ist’/ ‘Néar is’; Hölderlin 2004: 550-1) is an inaugural exception to this forward-leaning rhythm: its trochee might be thought to stage a moment of immanence that is immediately overhauled by a powerful dynamic of a search for a lost presence and an anticipated revelation. From our own present moment we can read into the poem just such a forward-reaching impetus. Yet the moment towards which the present lunges may be more apocalyptic than therapeutic. The sequentiality of our world is seriously disturbed, admitting of no easy eschatology of redemption (Scott 1999). Rather, it functions according to what Aravamudan (2013: 9) calls a ‘catachronism’: ‘The shadow of tomorrow’s impending ecological disaster leaps over today and reunites with abandoned conceptions of human finitude from a past rich with apocalyptic nightmares that the Enlightenment had temporarily vanquished.’ How appropriate for today’s reader, then, that Hölderlin’s poetry displays a 338 Patmos as palimpsest constant and violent dislocation of syntax. If we think of syntax as a serial grammar of causality (Todorov 1969), where there is a certain flexibility, as long as (in German as in other ‘second-place languages’) the verb is in the second place, Hölderlin dislocates this anchored regularity entirely. Hölderlin’s syntax thus embodies a concept of temporality according to which the time is out of joint and the poet is out of sorts or out of sync with his time. This temporal dislocation, both poetic and cosmic, past and present, in turn impacts upon the notion of the ‘lyrical I’ or the poetic speaker. In the current frame of reading, it may do even more than impact that speaker—it may even index its disappearence. If the anthropocene is a new wave of crisis, it may also be one that will perhaps generate its own rescue—but at that point, we may no longer be in a position to observe it. As Aravamudan (2013: 8) notes, ‘The “Anthropocene” has been proposed as the name for the new geological epoch of the Quaternary within which we suddenly find ourselves ... anticipated from some future standpoint that could very well be a vantage point beyond human existence.’ It is possible that the moment to which Hölderlin’s poem, in its present ‘application’, looks forward, may be one in which there is no human record to bear witness to that future time. The future anticipated by Hölderlin’s poem in its contemporary avatar may be that afterlife of the world itself, the signature of things alone. The poem may thus give us a future image of our own pastness. In a sense, this pastness is already anticipated by Hölderlin from the outset: there is a speaker in the opening lines, but the only figures in sight are divine or vegetal, followed soon by animals. Only at line 6 do we encounter ‘Die Söhne der Alpen’/ ‘the sons of the Alps’, already threatened by the ‘Abgrund’/ ‘chasm’ that they cross via ‘leichtgebauten Brücken’/ ‘bridges lightly built’, between the ‘Gipfel der Zeit’/ ‘summits of time’, peaks or spikes within historical fluctuations (Hölderlin 2004: 550-1). Thus Hölderlin spatializes, via the images of bridges, chasms, and mountain peaks, a transitional temporality and a transitory temporariness whose connective links may break away at any moment. Presciently, Adorno’s (1992: 137) mid-century reading of the poem suggests that Hölderlin’s language persistently erases the human speaker in favour of language itself. In other words, the poem’s syncopated temporality is a radically different one to the temporary temporality of any reader. Hölderlin’s (2004: 556) jarring ‘Itzt’, an anachronistic version of ‘jetzt’ (now), indexes a now that is past. Yet that past now will be reiterated in every reading, something the poem is aware of, so that it also indexes a future that will have been past. Via its echo of ‘ist’ (is) and ‘ich’ (I), it points thus to an ontology that will, in some posthuman future, have been undermined and a selfhood that will have disappeared. Hamburger’s translations generally replicate these syntactic and temporal dislocation of selfhood. Yet he does have an occasional tendency to glue subjects Patmos as palimpsest 339 back to verbs in the English versions at places where the German strenuously keeps them apart, often on separate lines only distantly joined by a precarious enjambement. Here his translations seek to resist, fairly pointlessly in fact, the very transformative, transgressive logic that they themselves necessarily enact—a logic carried along by the poetic translations’ overdetermined reiteration of a syncopated poetic syntax and in their active participation in, indeed creation of the dislocated temporality of the multiply translated work itself. Thus what ‘Patmos’, like so many of Hölderlin’s poems, does, is to work a disruption of time and of the self in time that is indexed internally by the dislocation of the syntax and externally via its own multiple reenactments in its successive editions and translations. Yet underpinning this dislocated syntax with its dismembering of selfhood and its fantasies of permanency is another rhythm, that of the metrics of verse—and an alternative temporality of rhythm which is embedded in material and its creativity, not in an abstract, extracted linear time (the dead-and-preserved time, ‘die präparierte Zeit’ of clocked chronology [Müller 1972]). Indeed, beneath the regular rhythms of European meter (based on syllabic stress), there may also be other less regular rhythms, those of the natural speech that Hopkins’ ‘sprung rhythm’ sought to replicate, or in non-European languages, those of syllabic length and tone (Ishov 2008: 50-4). Hölderlin experimented with such fluid and sinuous rhythmic patterns in much of his poetry (Burdorf 2011: 39-46). Hölderlin’s language and its translations thus themselves form a palimpsestic layering, respectively, of semantic language, the syntactic distortions of that semantic language, and the underlying rhythms of the language itself. The material substrata of language and its tonalities and rhythms is explicitly associated with the cosmic realities of the feminine ‘Mutter Erd’/ ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Sonnenlichte’/ ‘sunlight’. These are elemental realities that mediated via the materiality of the ‘veste Buchstab’/ ‘the solid letter’. And this is why, in turn, poetry is indebted and responsive to them: ‘Dem folgt deutscher Gesang’/ ‘German song follows this closely’ (Hölderlin 2004: 564-5; translation modified). When Adorno (1992: 128) speaks of ‘form as sedimented content’ in relation to Hölderlin, the geological metaphor may be more apposite than it appears at first glance. Poetry is an organic response to material realities (of the ‘earth’, ‘Chthonic ... beings’ [Haraway 2016: 2]) that it absorbs into itself while remaining mindful of the generative force that they devolve to it as linguistic work. There are two reasons for this. First, various layers of linguistic materiality (semantic, syntactic, a-syntactic, paratactic, metrical, rhythmical) are sedimented upon one another. By the same token, various temporalities are sedimented upon one another, thereby producing an interwoven temporal structure that ‘encloses multiple durées made up of dis- 340 Patmos as palimpsest continuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement ’ (Mbembe 2001: 14). Second, all these layers are material. We are used to thinking of language as something non-material, almost conceptual, but in fact language is a material entity, made of a conglomerate of audible and visual signifiers; at the level of neuro-cognition, even the semantic aspects of the signified may be thought of as electro-chemical material. Beneath the torsions of syntax that are coeval with the destruction of nature and the disturbance of its rhythms that were evident even in Hölderlin’s time, there is a interfused substrate of language-as-rhythm and language-as-metre that is no less ‘natural’ than the imagined world of Patmos and the Aegean. This language does not merely ‘express’ or ‘mediate’ ‘die Liebe zu dir…/ O Erd’/ ‘my love for you… / Oh Earth’, but is, as a spatiotemporal process itself, coeval with ‘deinen Pfaden’/ ‘your paths’ (Hölderlin 2004: 606-7), which grounds the linguistic relationship to the earth in the journey through time and on. There is no ‘time’ outside the spatial generativity of the material world, of which mobility is an index (Merriman 2012). All time is embedded in materiality, and in its own dynamic of constant transformation—or the disturbance of that transformation (West-Pavlov 2013). Thus the creativity of poetic language is coeval with the creative generativity of the world itself, and therefore related to the organic growth of an antidote that arises from the poisonous plant itself. Consequently, according to this logic of material cosmic interconnectivity, language brings forth the rescue it announces. Poetic language is an illocutionary speech act, and in its illocutionary, circular, almost self-confirming force (Patmos is where John receives his vision and the words that will become the Book of Revelation—not revolution! ) in turn becomes a perlocutionary speech act, taking effect in recurrent situations of crisis. In each new context of crisis, the poem must be re-enunciated, and perhaps even re-translated, in a movement that perpetuates and translates its own dynamic of internal translation. What Adorno identifies as Hölderlin’s ‘paratactic’ poetics of the fragment is a contestatory mode that does not quite coincide with Heidegger’s (1962: 28-30) retrograde notion of a ‘Kehre’ back towards an archaic ‘Seyn’ in the face of the ‘dangers’ of technology (however much we may concur with the latter notion). Rather, it generates something this is both contestatory and creative, on the basis of other substrates of spatio-temporal rhythm (compare Lefebvre 2004) that are coeval with the material world itself. In the syncopated rhythms of crisis and reaction, it registers, resists and responds to the forces of disintegration that predominately rule the world of today and may have largely eradicated its familiar contours in the not-too-far-distant future. But if something remains, it will, somehow, be related to the regenerative and translative force of poetry. RWP Bobcat 341 Bobcat Temporariness has been shaken deeply for me. The bloke who came in with his Bobcat—a machine I deeply distrust, related as it is to bulldozers (which he also roams around in, wrecking the habitat)—to do our firebreaks, has destroyed the root systems of hundred year-old York gums we have praised and been in awe of over the last decade, that are ecosystems to numerous species of birds, insects, reptiles and shelter for mammals. He’s been eyeing them off for years, and hasn’t been able to get near them, but after much pressure by him to do our firebreaks which we normally scrape but had reached a point where they need heavier scraping, and in the spirit of valley peace—I have had deep conflicts with the bloke before—we let him do them on the proviso he didn’t cut deep and avoided the trees. Smash and grab, annihilation, revenge on the zone outside the cold anger of his bulldozer. The damage is so severe that I have, for one of the few times in my life, felt as if I no longer want to exist, that every effort I have made to protect and nurture the environment has been wasted and defiled. Should I make it so personal? Well, yes, if one is on usurped land which one feels needs to be watched over till it is handed back—because handing back is a complex process if one has to live somewhere and one has to repair the damage done by the colonial machine; the inflictions of pain are felt acutely in cascading ways. The bloke’s assault on the land has been coming a long time, and I should have seen it. It was a failure of vision. Thing is, to use that loaded but double-jointed cliché that is also a mirror to the ‘self ’ empowered through text to state the case of things (point of view! ). I need to add that he no doubt ‘meant well’. And that’s likely a fact. But unless one factors in the goodwill in the ‛doing’, in the ‛helping out’, there’s no hope of understanding what’s going on and how these things happen. Mea culpa, too! The child Mayakovsky had seen the rivet factory lit up by electric light and forever-after looked to the future, against nature. His rantings and ravings, his performances of the self during the revolution, were part of this, as much as futurism served his thrust into the limelight of ‘the people’. The poet for whom the machine was the victor, for whom the horrors of the revolution were a time of exhilaration, and for whom Soviet bureaucracy became the thorn in his display, his moment, and which he satirised and ultimately felt from the root to the crown, in ways we can’t even comprehend. The paradox of being. The player of Russian roulette who is stimulated by his own temporariness delivered by his own hand. Who is the tax collector to him but a mechanism of censorship—HE, a giant wading across the Atlantic Ocean to wrestle with Woodrow Wilson, to worship the Brooklyn Bobcat 343 Bridge, all that bloody fury of change, of revolution. Tomorrow I will read a version—no, a response-poem—to his ‘tax collector’ poem and play George Harrison's (working class to the core, mate), selfish little ditty of fame and fortune ‘Taxman’, and think of Harrison's higher aspirations, of wealth accumulation. What can I do with all of this, but connect it to the social interactions of writing and making books and speaking out and protesting and doubting the veracity of existence, of my own, of me? But I do want all others to exist, and to thrive, and to find a way forward that is just and humane and fair, even the bulldozer drivers who smash the world daily. A YouTube video of a bulldozer clearing a forest has hundreds of thousands of hits, and comments calling the driver courageous and skilled and a wonderful example of what can be done against trees. What hope? As the saying, the cliché goes—those spaces where truth resides and we bury it through disparagement of ‘repetition’, like a staling Instagram trend to photograph one’s self or being photographed (revolutionary) in the yellow flowers, the self in a yellow field, an American painting of abstract liberation, none of the photographers knowing—none (how can I know? what arrogance? )—it’s GM cropping, the costs the costs, the Round-up friendly deathzone, these ferry people of a calenture we sell as creativity, of being. Mayakovsky and the tax collector. We went to Geraldton last week, for a week. I went to high school there, my brother—shearer, surfer, musician and artist—lives there still, with his wife Dzu. They spend a couple of months each year in her homeplace, Cheratting, Malaysia. They are getting ready to ‘head up’ so we timed our visit to connect. But my brother was very unwell, having had a serious shearing accident that put him in hospital. In Geraldton, which hasn’t changed much (as our friend Charmaine says also), I move around without thinking where I am going because it is templated. Where there is a change, I look askance, and question its... Veracity. Surely I am not wrong? But I am, of course, of course. I am full of residual trauma of roadside clearing coming up, the fencing trick—new fences and overclearing/ destruction (of vegetation) to erect them, to perform the act of enclosure and exclusion. It’s all the rage throughout the wheatbelt to beat what anti-clearing laws are left in place. To challenge the temporary and replace it with erasure, the destroyers have to be cunning. And they operate on many levels—in parliament, as shire officials, ‘homesteaders’ (I import the American intentionally here), as bullies in schools. It’s all laid out as an anatomy lesson. The fundamentalist urge for the planet to serve the here and now. Then planet will pay the death taxes, not the people. Mayakovsky is making posters and raving about the workers, the glories of the revolution. He is being praised out of Georgia by Stalin. Trying to bring 344 Bobcat freedom to her son, Akhmatova is writing ‘peace poems’ in praise of Stalin! After decades of persecution, of being watched over since the killing of her ex-husband by the Cheka, for her interactions (she believes) with Isaiah Berlin, for her relationships, those poems to be published after her death, without a hero and requiem and visiting the gulag, lining up, the three phases of life, and publishing again during the war, evacuated from Leningrad, and then 1949, and Lev alone and Lev released after Stalin’s death even then saying she didn’t do enough, selling the materials of her self to the megalomania of the dictator. Stalin knew how to invert temporariness, he knew that the Union of Soviet Writers (and variations) who keep social realism flowing will enact his will. And this is what I am left with, walking the beaches I slept on, looking out over the reefs I dived: Medallion Beach, St George’s Beach, Bluff Point Beach. And the colonial mansion once the nurse’s quarters opposite the colonial prison where I walked corridors late at night and watched door handles turning turning, bulldozed down to make way for a carpark, and standing where I stood looking out a window at the ocean with mineral sand ships on the horizon and lead shipments killing brain cells of school kids and those places I was beaten to a pulp and the racism that was made to explode outside the Sail Inn which is still there, luring the meth heads. This failure of vision. The Dome coffee shop where many Yamaji people feel they can’t go. Brute reality of conservative ‘settler’ town. And out at Ellendale pool, the ‘bottomless pool’ of childhood where bullies said you’d be thrown and never reach the bottom, the cliffs of martins’ nests overhead, the kestrel hunting, the long-nosed dragon in the sheoaks, and river redgums smoothing the blue sky into the amoebic meningitis waters where a caravanner wades. And a sign celebrating Randolph Stow who ran from his colonial horrorpast, who wrote a first novel ( A Haunted Land , 1956) so disturbingly and likely semi-unconsciously racist in its desiring that he disowned it, but it is brought back to consciousness and mentioned on a promo sign, and there’s another sign that mentions ‘The Indigenous connection’—I don’t need to ‘unpack’ the peacocking of this, the eye of the storm. Where I am wrong is thinking it’s memory stuff, and this bullshit on the ‘nature of memory’—that’s the colonial urge, the desire to decolonise but retain our histories, our own sad trajectories. What choice do we have as children, as students, as citizens as as as? A poem, a poem-response. Mayakovsky? If so, I have to unread him and unread myself while I'm on the job. I will be left with a bunch of neologisms and puns without referents—as if the machine of text is enough, generating its own meanings. Rhyme is always present in one way or another, and word packages fly back and forth be- Bobcat 345 tween terminals. But the firebreak man rides past on the top road watching for his opportunity—like a vampire he needs to be invited in. What kind of language am I deploying here? How responsible am I being in my textually privileged position? Property is inviolable in the wheatbelt—though hunters don’t hesitate. But neighbours loves their fences, and want them respected, and even when you take them out they want you to want them to enter the co-ordinates of survey. And then when the wrecking’s over, there’s a defence. But the defence is always there anyway—a jury would be hard to find outside the baggage of clearing and survey. Such a jury can exist, but its members would recognise a different law, a law of country that is anathema to the state. The firebreak man is the state—outside it socially like so many where we live... ‘renegades’... But also its best servants... The loud, partying stealth. What’s sad is that the bloke had said, ‘I lead a quiet life now... Just with the birds and the trees’. Wordplay? I retreat into poems to find answers as I go—no narrative to serve, on the shipwrecks of the white fella’s museum up the coast in Gero, on the shipwreck coast, where the companies of colonial science were courageous and skilled and preparing for their selfie future. They knew—wrecked and dead they might be, but the drive of capital ensured the neutrinos would keep expanding out beyond the stretch of the Big Bang, and the market would eat all, knowing no failure of vision. As for me, I am erased. Celebrate? JK 346 ‛ Tax Collector ’ A Response to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s ‘Conversation With a Tax Collector About Poetry’ in the Hayward/ Reavey translation, which begins ‘Citizen tax collector! / Forgive my bothering you.../ Thank you...’ Tax collector! I know I am just another Artist claiming exemptions but I am genuinely interested in discussing the zone of the poet in the job market. I pay taxes as if they were mine to pay as if the state were a business in which I get to play and have a say along with Twiggy Forrest. I am lucky enough to avoid the Cashless Debit Card but a couple of decades ago and I would certainly have been benefited one. The GST revolution has left me wondering about the ingredients of my production ‛ Tax Collector ’ 347 and the cost of ‘materials’. Never mind ‘rhyme’, which I know you’ve heard of because Gina the Miner writes (rights) rhyming directives! Take a line ending in ‘day’ then count our diminishing way through contracting refugee quotas to end up with ‘hip hip hooray! ’ compounding a lack of empathy. In your discourse rhyme is a credit card to en-profit the Big Banks never mind by the third line! — here, sign sign! good business being good for all? And you work your way through the syntax of greed, the profit & loss of parataxis, the over-valuing of nouns. This is the age of neologisms and puns — eventually they must lose their worth, that old fetish of wordplay. Tax collector, you’ve got to factor in the cost to the poet of coming up with words! Taylor Swift has trademarked all the best words, 348 ‛ Tax Collector ’ and it’s expensive travelling far into the lexicon! And what if I refuse your analogies with explosives, with the top end of town’s burning candles at both ends — what if I go for a pacifist vocabulary and make metaphors from the remnant vegetation still left on the roadsides? What will parse as proof of business initiative a genuine urge to profit? Such creative-industry collaboration, taking research to the coalface? You say, on the one hand, look at Venezuela (true, true) — but forget Chile under Pinochet or Argentina under the military junta or the numerous tyrannies you trade with? I travel North and South, I claim my travel expenses — making poems as I go, like this one, conceived between Mullewa and Toodyay — hip hip hooray! And those poems of protest — anti-nuclear to their core, the mines opening up on sacred country — ‛ Tax Collector ’ 349 a gram for a word, a word for a gram, and I can’t even take iodine to ward off the end! All that uranium ore you feed the world. ‘Builds our roads’, gives Christopher Pyne the impetus for his home-grown arms industry — even depleted uranium profits through history. These lines might not outlast plutonium, but they’ll hang around for a while yet — so someone will profit, but not me I am glad to say. And so many different types of poets! Such glorious exploitations of the system, the fragments you dole out and make us accountable for, saying, ‘Look at this garbage the taxpayers (you, not me — I can’t be part of your ‘we’) are funding — cough up something recognisably Australian — the new patriotics! ’ And as for salinity — an interesting image, but rather than plant trees let’s bulldoze channels to drain away the imagery. But once spent, 350 ‛ Tax Collector ’ what more have I to give — if you don’t want what I write, how can I pay up? Supply and demand? Incentivation hanging around like a bad smell. How far have you journeyed from home? How long have you been overseas? You are not entitled to a pension. Superannuation is life inside & outside The Company. But I am a worker, (a ‘horrible worker’) and I am accountable to my fellow workers, and I am subject to your battering down the unions 1 . 1 But not the Union of Soviet Writers founded in 1932 six years after Mayakovsky’s poem (appeared) and two years after his death. But not the Union of Soviet Writers which doesn’t ghost in the forethought of cartels selling artworks into boardrooms and parliament house/ s — capital’s hands on the levers of censorship, control, ‘security’. No, this IS a union for workers, this poem, its unities. ‛ Tax Collector ’ 351 Sole traders without community? Think again, tax collector, as your nuclear sun, your coal-fired future smothers us with the fat of the land — I will be dead and gone, the sea lapping at my inland grave, incinerated. You will extract what you can from the corpse of my oeuvre — claims that feed company profits, plunging me into a debt specially mapped — nice words on wine-quaffing evenings, comfort that I’ve been and gone. After all, the poet owes it to the cosmos s/ he’s plundered, these shares in our sun, the interest accruing though the poet was the one who agreed s/ he’s on land stolen from other poets, 352 ‛ Tax Collector ’ from traditional societies — that’s where the debt exists, tax collector, though you haven’t listed this factor in your version of the law. Read the Australian Tax Handbook! And all those poems of damnation of conflict, of nuclear weapons ready to go, of nations and their carts and abuse of horses, all of that I have yet to write? You don’t want to know, not really, but if verses do turn up, you’ll be there to collect! Dividends. You need us to keep your system going — we feed what we condemn. Hypocrites. We have our equivalents of the NKPS in this glorious (O that word aches for a rhyme like ‘serious’! ) ‛ Tax Collector ’ 353 free market economy — so, average my income over another three years! But you’ll need us because poets hang around like a stench — and the propaganda of the company is the propaganda of the state [ask ALL LEADERS OF THE FREE WOR(L)D]— O tax collector! I am here for you, ripe for the picking, stringing out clichés and deploying cloying semi-rhymes carefully. And if the State reckons one poet makes a crust by ripping off Great Predecessors, then think again — every text sent, every Tweet, every Instagram food pic, might be a poem, but only because the Companies let you think it’s the case and you’re winning the race to the Big Prize — recognition. John Kinsella JK 354 Sightings-failure Sightings-failure We often tell our son of birds and animals we saw frequently as children, now seen rarely or not at all in the same locations. This talk will look at not only the loss of habitat and ‘species’, but also the way we inadvertently accommodate loss and change through adjusting the language we use to describe place at a particular moment. Sightings-failure also becomes citing-failure in the immediate, with loss recorded and archived as fait accompli . The poem or story or essay can become a repository of an accepted past, when I feel it might become a dynamic affirmation of the present and the future as well as the past—a space in which life is valued, encouraged and respected. This talk suggests a language of rejection of loss, and posits a language of engagement and protection. A Rare Sight The bird seen first time here in forty years sings lightly on the wire, you turn to touch the shoulder of a friend and turning back together find nothing but sky and wire trembling. (from Kinsella 1995) Brushtail possum evidenced. We had not seen one here in nine years, and there might not have been a sighting long before this. But there might have been. A possum or possums may have been driven out, removed from the roof cavity— there are exterminators who will do this. But this too is conjecture, we’re only going here on the general condition of the bush block when we arrived—the hundred-and-seventy years of colonial erosion, the running of cattle and sheep and horses, the fencing, cropping (to a lesser extent because we are on the rocky northern face of a valley—that happens on the other side of the hills, a couple of kilometres away), and the machinery of colonial domestic presence—house, sheds, driveway, firebreaks. Once, this area, like Goomalling (‘Place of possums’) was prime habitat for brushtail possums, and even now residual and remnant York gum and jam tree woodland, granite boulders and granite outcrops, in patches of greater and lesser density, provide enough for native fauna to retain a hold. Since we’ve been at Jam Tree Gully, we have removed internal fences, planted trees, and—through not farming animals—allowed the beginning of a return of undergrowth. It’s an agonisingly slow process; this year is the first in nine years that we have Sightings-failure 355 actually seen, through self-generation, the reappearance of the shy sun orchid (a single example), scarlet runner (running postman), and a native fern. I am talking about Ballardong Noongar boodja [’country’], and not ‘ours’ but by the colonial reality of surveys and land titles, ‘allocated’ as our domestic jurisdiction because the decolonised is merely an academic desiring, an appeasement of administrative and infrastructural lip service, and a ‘say it but don’t do it’ paradigm, the act of survey and property hierarchising entitlement (though mining companies believe they have even more entitlement than that, as, of course, does the state, as anyone can tell you who had ‘their’ land reclaimed as part of the Cathedral Avenue widening of the road from York to Quairading and the destruction of hundreds of old-growth salmon gums, wandoos and York gums). As far as I and my family are concerned, we have an obligation to return this land to a health that though distant from its pre-colonial state of health, at least gestures towards it. One of the dominant linguistic behaviours of our family residency in the area, of our presence, is to discuss what other living things we see every day, and how they relate to the country we see them on. Our son Tim, an avid birdwatcher and naturalist, walks the block every day and reports back, verbally and on film, about what he’s observed. These are intricate and informed observations, cross-referenced with what is likely to be seen, differences in, say, behaviour (mating plumage, nesting processes, shifts in song, etc), numbers, and implication. Like his parents, Tim sees language as part of presence, and these observations are an essential part of his own poetry-making. Similarly, I spend my time out on the block doing restorative tasks and acts, and working their language into the matrix of my writing. The language is in flux because rather than a taxonomy, a nomenclature of seeing and presence, what happens is that experience of habitat loss, and attempts at habitat restoration, place words, syntax and utterance as we have it under pressure. Something else emerges, an active language of presence that needs to critique the ironies of its own impact, of its own vicarious (and direct) participation in the ongoing dynamics of dispossession and acquisition. Neologisms and new nomenclature might be one outcome, but more often it’s a shift in what constitutes the observing eye and voice, what makes the self in the process. In poetics, we talk about the ‘I’ in the context of the unified self and challenging the primacy of personal observation when language itself creates at the very least a simulacrum of self in which the poem is a cybernetic producer of opinions, surprise correlations and yokings, undoings and interjections. The poem itself is alive—made by the writer, it takes on a life of its own. So, does this mean I am suggesting the poem itself, for example, channels the disturbances and distresses of country? Well, yes, up to a point. The wasp 356 Sightings-failure making its mud cells and inserting caterpillars or spiders, stunned but alive with a wasp egg laid inside their bodies, to be eaten alive—in a state of life suspended—by wasp grubs, which break out of their dark cells into the light. It’s a poem that needs no explanation if ‘made’—it works on levels of allegory, symbol, a glimpse of habitat, and so on. Or maybe something a little more acceptable to a readership which ultimately looks for affirmation of connection with the natural world while benefiting from capitalist exploitation of place (look around us), an echidna moving rapidly downhill, its quills liquid in the fractured light of late afternoon sun streaming over the rim of valley, through the York gum canopy. We don’t see echidnas often here, but we see evidence of their diggings for ants and termites almost daily. And we see their scats. In fact, coming across scats is how we identify so much, including the brushtail possum. Scats, footprints, scratchings and sounds, especially at night. These languages are outside direct encounter, and often outside a description we might offer. Echidna sightings are coming less often, though evidence of their presence remains strong. The poem interprets this as avoidance and strategy on the part of the echidna— we respect the not-seeing, and delight in the evidence of presence. Same with kangaroos. But in the case of eagles, the (illegal) killing of an eagle in a pair that were resident for many, many years, is an undoing that is hard to resolve under habitat-loss pressure. It is brutal. But writing about this loss, about the wrong done, cannot be a fait accompli—it must believe in the imagined presence as likely ‘return’ as species, at least. All life we see on the block is vulnerable to human violence—thrill-killings of animals are sadly not uncommon, and there seems a strong link between farright politics of patriotism and shooting around the district. Scramble-biking, bush-bashing, and remorseless clearing are changing habitat around the zone we ‘protect’ at a far greater pace than when we arrived. It’s easy to use the ‘flyin fly-out’ dynamic as a distraction for the massive abuse that mining is in Australia, and to separate social issues of employment and purpose when discussing the obvious (‘clear-cut’) environmental abuses of miners and their protectors, but nonetheless it is a real impact on ecologies that needs to be factored in. The impact of flying, the obvious impacts of the mines themselves, but also the psychology of purchasing a country property within a couple of hours’ reach of the city airport to use as a base. So many of the farmlets and blocks around where we live appear to have been bought by FIFO workers (real estate ads often overtly pitch to FIFO buyers, and I offer anecdotal evidence of conversations direct and indirect with and involving neighbours), and in many circumstances the psychology of the mine looks as if it has been brought to those blocks—substantial bush clearing, clear indifference to wildlife, and a psychology of control, ownership and what manifests by intent or default as a disrespect of Aboriginal Sightings-failure 357 land rights. Of course, such attitudes to country are not unique to FIFO miners, far from it, and they have found around them a context of receptivity to such ways. And I do not blame the individual miners for this per se , but I do blame the mining companies and those who facilitate the abuses of land by those miners. A work psychology too readily becomes a life psychology. In creating writing that acts as witness to species loss, we too easily become contributors to the archive, to the seedbank of metaphors that substitute for the real thing. It’s like repugnant natural history collections that give us a record of so many lost species when the very process of collecting has been a part of that species loss. Science bears many moral ironies that I feel an active, restorative poem should not. I am not saying a poem shouldn’t ironise the limitations of its own production, its impacts on ecologies; in fact, the opposite. I am saying it should be aware of them and critique its own role in the destruction. A poem having a role in destruction? I hear you wonder. How so? Because industrialised consumer life is impacting and many, even the most environmentally-minded, make their art through the tools of exploitation. It becomes a question of genuinely weighing up the cost in terms of the benefit to the environment. Does getting the message out there regarding habitat destruction cost more morally and literally than not doing so? The notion of ‘costs’ needs to be placed under pressure before we begin. An economics of the figurative needs to be held accountable, scrutinised. Which brings me back to the language of participation, observation and instruction I intimated when talking of our son Tim and writing what’s happening on the block. Tracy and I are often confronted with the horror of having to say, We saw a lot of those (birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, trees, shrubs, flowers etc) when we were kids, but not often now, or not at all. In many cases, flora and fauna we knew as children are now endangered or verging on extinction, not only within the physical areas with which we were most familiar, but across their range. An example is the brown bittern, which I used to see and hear as a child when around swampy areas, and which is now almost extinct, certainly in the Northam region. Yet Tracy and I, travelling with Tim, had the remarkable experience of very likely seeing (unconfirmed sighting) a black or brown bittern between Toodyay and Perth last year. Tim, a most observant person, didn’t see it because he was studying something else outside the opposite window, and has been quizzing us about the sighting ever since. He has done a vast amount of research, and we have considered all other possibilities (too big for a little bittern, not the right size and shape for a night heron, a bird I know well), and so on. It was really, a notifiable sighting. Not in the sense of an ‘invasive species’ (the irony! ), but as an almost extinct species. Would such notification lead to 358 Sightings-failure an invasiveness that affected its habitat more, or would it lead to protection? I consider recent sightings of night parrots in northern Australia, and wonder. The ‘understanding’ to ‘save’ can be so destructive. The ‘leave alone and stay away’ approach can often be more effective. At least until the bulldozers arrive, which I’ve learnt over my life is eventually. So, what do we do? Write a poem of resistance, of embodying the bird but not appropriating it in a poem, of keeping an eye on habitat and acting if it looks under threat? In some ways, this turns the brackish water into a mirror of Narcissus, in terms of knowledge, and the sightings/ citings protection that might come is potentially lost. But it also raises a general awareness that habitat protection is a broader issue and the potential for such sightings might be anywhere within a range of possibility. Where a creature once was, a creature might be. Belonging and the marks of the endemic cannot be erased entirely with all the brutal means of survey and development, though the modus operandi of the state and its private apparatuses is to achieve that, and to convince us it’s been achieved. They want no comeback, to retrospective protections, and certainly no memorialising that cedes authority. Brushtail possum evidenced. The nature of our interaction yet to be decided— largely by possum, but also by us. Possum enters poems, enters essays, enters stories. But is it just sign, just a signifier emptied of its agency? So easily, yes. Yet tense has a lot to do with it. As an active presence, not a thing of the past, and as a generator of sounds, movement, and language. It is not an addition to here; it is here. It is not an exercise of painting a landscape; it is the land. Language used in the poem needs to be alive to the visceral, to a future in which it is not archival but an active presence, a declaration of rights. How can this be achieved? That poem is trying to write itself at the moment, and is finding its feet, its fur, its eating-places and shitting-places. It needs to be open to its own language. There is an obligation in how we write, and a social implication in all we write. We are speaking to fellow humans, but not necessarily in human. To quote in a tangential way, and as an extension of the obligation of the human in human society to communicate adequately, linguistic philosopher Horst Ruthrof (2014: 121): ...my analysis will be informed by what I have termed the imaginability thesis, according to which language can be viewed as ‘a set of social instructions for imagining , and acting, in a world’. Without imaginability , understood as both human capacity and a feature of motivated signifieds, I have argued, we would not be able to render the arbitrary sounds of linguistic expressions meaningful. In the community of the poem, which is both inside the text, and outside, a knowledge of species loss and its prevalence might inform an observing, inter- Anecdote as method 359 action with and imagining of a creature (or plant) as not only at risk, and on the verge of loss, but also as an anti-erasure, as a resistance to collecting, archiving and relegating. The creature is becoming (D & G), the creature is eternally present, the creature has claim, the creature isn’t ‘was’ but ‘is’, always now. We, the readers and hearers, participate in the speech-making of the poem, participate in this ‘imagining, and acting, in a world.’ There’s one biosphere of many worlds. In our writings we need to make the leaps, the segues, the conversations between the one and the many. Brushtail possum evidenced. Listen, listen —on the roof, now, tomorrow! JK Anecdote as method This morning, as I emerged from the forest onto the high tops, and struck out along the track towards Bläsiberg, I noticed a hawk or buzzard sitting grimly in one of the leafless fruit trees that line so many country roads or tracks in Southern Germany. As I approached, it took flight and flapped heavily across the hoar-frost whited rills of the ploughed fields, to a more distant tree. A hundred meters further on, another bird of prey took off to a nearby tree at a safe distance. The same one, perhaps? But if so, then it had flown a long detour around me without my noticing its circuitous route. Temporary vantage points or resting places for the raptor; a temporary passage across the frozen fields for me. Two trajectories, perpendicular to each other: mine along the track, the buzzard’s across the fields, crossing each other twice, albeit with a small temporal delay. Two temporarinesses briefly connecting, then disconnecting. Territorialize—deterritorialize—reterritorialize. And reterritorialize anew in narrative. This is the essence of an anecdote. A brief meeting supplies the basic ingredients of story (Propp 1968: 84). The tale is as brief as the encounter itself. But its brevity always does a lot of work, its flimsy structure carries a lot of weight. Two creatures, two trajectories across the fields and along the track hold this landscape together. This is what Meaghan Morris (qtd in Burgin 1996: xi-xii) says of such micro-stories: ‘I take anecdotes, or yarns, to be primarily referential. They are oriented futuristically towards the construction of a precise, local and social discursive context, of which the anecdote then functions as a mise en abyme . That is to say, anecdotes are for me not expressions of personal experience but allegorical expositions of a model of the way the world can be said to be working ’ (Burgin’s emphasis). Morris’ anecdote is a sort of functionalist synecdoche. Burgin’s anecdote of Morris’ theory unfolds the anecdote, peeling it away from 360 Anecdote as method the person that recounts. He makes of it a counterfoil: a double structure that is said to replicate the world, or at least the way the world works, within the reticulations of the anecdote itself. Let us keep on unfolding. The anecdote does not merely face the world (thereby modelling it). It also faces an interlocutor. In the words of Peirce (qtd in Lévi-Strauss 1962: 30—another scholarly anecdote), the anecdote ‘addresses somebody’. That interlocutor is also in the world, with her, his or its own set of anecdotes, allegories. Lest we give way to the suspicion that allegory may display too tight a fit, too suffocating a cohesion with the world (after all, brevity encourages closure) let us remember that every anecdote is open at least on one flank—towards the other who listens, and responds, perhaps even retorts, to its claims. Zig-zagging, we proceed forwards, from anecdote to anecdote. Jogging across the frozen fields on the high tops, briefly encountering the hawk and the buzzard, six months after that strolling discussion with John along the same tracks between the nodding heads of corn. The anecdote is not merely an allegory, it is a catachronics (Aravamudan 2013), something that unfolds another anecdote. It doesn’t merely replicate the world, it transforms it. Anecdote is futuristic because it almost always calls forth another anecdote—a response. Every new anecdote modifies the model that was proposed by its interlocutor. An anecdote almost never comes alone, but resonates within a dialogical speaking-back, as it recalls the experience being recounted, and a working-forward as a counter-anecdote is slapped down on the table. Anecdote is mobility, backwards-forwards, to-and-fro, a slow zigzagging towards the new. Here is the future. Close at hand. Looking at you in the face. Listening to your words. 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New York: New Directions. Wright, Alexis (2017) Tracker . Artarmon NSW: Giramondo. Žižek, Slavoj (2016) Against the Double Blackmail . Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 978-3-8233-8174-7 C H A L L E N G E S Challenges for the humanities / Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changes—these times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporariness—seeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility. “This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival. They write across hemispheres, they interanimate the speci c experience of place and history in Germany, Ireland, Western Australia, the Adriatic coast, Africa, New England. ˈtɛmp(ə)rərɪnəs is the chance collaboration of two writers and intellectuals that could never have come into existence before it did and that can never be repeated.” - Philip Mead, University of Melbourne www.narr.de