Shed of Interrelation (part three)

Meg and I insulated and plastered the ceiling of the Shed of Interrelation (SoI) today. You're looking at the small bathroom where a bath and composting toilet will go. The shed is for artists/writers-cum-woofers to take short residencies and rest, make art and work a little in the garden. The shed is a place to encourage transitional thinking in the arts, to encourage permapoesis where art and organic food generation are embedded activities.

In the meantime our winter seeds are rocking. Heirloom elephant leek, garlic, silverbeet fordhook, pak choy, sweet pea, broad beans, broccoli, carrots, black kale, spinach, spring onions, beetroot, baby cos lettuce and cabbage mini. Meg and I were discussing today how many families could potentially be living on this quarter acre in 10-20 years. I think it could feed about 15-18 people in the Summer months and maybe 10-12 in Winter. 

I'm looking down on young banksias and heavily mulched areas with lomandras, poa tussocks, broad beans, almonds, olives, peaches and my chain-sawed eucalyptus balls. The dry stone HaHa wall back-filled with rubble allows for water to pass through it without disturbing the integrity of the wall. You can also see a little of the social warming fence. We persuaded our neighbours not to have a fence that lined the whole boundary, but just enough to have a little more privacy. They also agreed that I could build it as a slatted fence, again for social warming properties. Of course the water tank finishes the picture and finishes an often quoted mantra on this blog spoken by Cuban permaculturalist Roberto Perez at our town hall last year–

Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.

Here's a pic of the main house showing flying fox route and solar panels. I'm also showing off my deck building skills here. Split level decks are party decks. You often hear of them collapsing and killing a dozen stomping teenagers, that's why this one is low to the ground. 

I love Zeph's cubby as much as he does. Apart from the obvious – cute, small, red, up-in-the-air – it frost protects our toms. Meg collected another basket full last week. Almost unbelievably the fruit was still ripening despite the plants having died weeks ago. They're not great, but fine for cooking up. You can also see the beginning of the flying fox route and the tail end of the social warming fence. The bed in front of it will be the kick-arse rhubarb patch. Rhubarb is year-round gold for food gardeners. I remember my Dad's awesome patch when I was Zeph's age.

And, finally a place very dear to my heart – the compost area. Underneath the new window of the Shed of Interrelation is a herb bed that's doing OK, but I have decided to dig them out and extend the compost bays to three. We'll also have the humanure from the dry worm composting toilet. Therefore we can have four brews at four different stages. I'm so excited about this. The building of the Shed of Interrelation has already led to so many possibilities, even before the first resident.

Chewers Borers Suckers

A friend of mine has some justifiable problems with the word 'permanent' and its use in the portmanteau 'permaculture' and in my portmanteaus 'permaplay' and 'permapoesis'. He writes:

I was reading Holmgren's 'Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability' last night and read a couple of passages which took me back to our brief exchange about the word permaplay, permaculture etc., and in particular to my mild general objection to the word 'permanent'. So I noted these passages when I read them: xxx "Even the idea of permanence at the heart of permaculture is problematic to say the least." And, xxvii 'The limitation of this concept of sustainable culture is that it suggests some stable state that we might arrive at sometime soon (by applying permaculture principles)".

It goes without saying that individual life is temporary. Cultures, however, are more ongoing. They are mutable and transforming, but ongoing. Some last longer than others, but of course no culture is totally permanent in a literal sense. The ones that last longer directly participate in, or mimic closely, natural systems. We can say these cultures are more permanent than others. The ones that die out more quickly have generally adopted linear, anti-ecological philosophies and economics based upon social divisiveness and relations of avoidance. As I've often quoted, the Dja Dja Wurrung lived in these parts for 40,000 years and aboriginal culture continues to survive in areas of Australia where their genocide was less fierce. Aboriginal culture is based on relations of common substance, they see themselves as contiguous with the world. If you compare continuous Aboriginal culture to our own, you can say it is permanent and ours is not, despite the fact that we have done everything in our power to make their culture impermanent like ours. We see ourselves as exclusive and separated, the corollaries of which (dioxins, warheads, plutonium, DDT) brand our culture abstract, fantastical and impermanent.

If you interpret the word 'permanent' in the above three portmanteaus as meaning 'static' or 'fixed' you've missed the point. Permanent here implies mutability. Nothing exists for very long in a rigid state. The most controlling regimes are generally the most vulnerable to collapse. Immutability equates to impermanency. The steady-state of a forest implies a forest in active, cyclical momentum, where everything is taken up by chewers, borers or suckers, used for life, excreted, only to be taken up and used again in a never ending cycle. The steady-state of a forest can only be mutable. Its health relies on constant change, active reciprocity and chance encounters. A natural ecology, operating within a non-hierarchical, closed-cycle where every organism is a participant, is what a modern permaculture mimics at a systems level. 

Our culture is currently predominated by post-structuralist philosophy: post-modernism. "Keep moving, even in place keep moving." (Gilles Deleuze). Post-moderns brought us some better thinking about race and gender and sexuality, and brilliantly critiqued the modernist male bully, but all this has done little to mitigate our abusive impermaculture. In fact our culture's aggression has only intensified over the past 30 years. Post-modernism coincided with psychopathic Neo-liberalism, as if they begat each other through oppositional warring. But by linear progression – pre-modernism, modernism, post-modernism – Po-mo is yet another urban-centric, ecologically disembodied school of philosophy that "rages against permanency." (Hamish Morgan). 

The sign below is representative of our culture. The three types of organisms found on Earth all coerced into being us, shooting off on their own singular path, everything operating autonomously, everything monological and separating out, everything getting closer to the end of their individual paths. Impermanence. Linear death. Chk chk boom.

From apocalypse to permapoesis

Our culture, in its dominant form, has an unstoppable death urge. Nice thought. Great way to start the week. Yum. Mass death. 

In a relatively straight line over six thousand years our efforts to wipe out every living thing including ourselves only intensify. Six thousand years of canonical philosophy has brought us merely doctrines for superior ecological disembodiment. Here, now, nearby, indigenous grasslands around outer Melbourne are next in line for the chop, to be replaced by a toxic sprawling development the size of Canberra. When it comes to the destruction of natural ecologies, Monsanto fan and state premier John Brumby would have to be the most extreme government we've seen in Victoria to date. As I said the death urge only intensifies, Brumby merely a wealthy (in relative terms) benefactor of its momentum. Be it grasslands, water systems, agriculture or energy consumption he is a major mass murderer of non-human life – life most of us don't even know exists.

Stasis. Death. The end of all life, if the dominant culture has its way. It's where we've been headed from the beginning of this several-thousand year journey. It is the only possible end for a culture of linear – as opposed to cyclical – progress. Beginning, middle, end. Self-extinguishment. The only solace and escape from separation: from ourselves, from each other, from the rest of the planet. Plutonium. DDT. Dioxin. Why else would we poison ourselves? No other explanation makes comprehensive sense. Apocalypse. Derrick Jensen p 227.

Put aside climate change and peak oil for a moment and think about how many other ways we can bring about mass destruction. The elimination of biodiverse systems; the collapse of insect populations causing widespread disease and pestilence to proliferate, in turn triggering a global chemical revolution that our governments will of course endorse. This will hand companies like Monsanto and Dow a license to stage more chemical warfare, causing further mass outbreaks of cancer, respiratory diseases and death to rich microbial life that does so much to keep us and our fellow organisms healthy. Apocalypse. The proliferation of factory farms; the growth of super viruses from live-stock antibiotic mutations and genetically modified grains; GM grains contaminating heirloom seeds that are generally hardier, more robust and more nutritious; dioxins and antibiotic pollutants (from paper mills and industrial farming) in our rivers and oceans killing biodiversity in our waters, triggering mass death of important ecologies which provide us and others health. More and more children raised in disembedded suburbs, completely unaware that their wage-slave parents, their toxic food, their creativity-destroying schooling – all constitute a dominant culture that is an unstoppable monster. Increases in self-harm, violence, anorexia, cancer, obesity, ADHD, mental illness, hatred, ecological ignorance, deafness to indigenous suffering, rape, warhead manufacturing, plutonium production, plastic waste dumping, and on and on it goes, an ever-expanding one-way road to annihilation. Why? Why do we agree to participate in a system so suicidal, so abusive, so destructive?

When you next read about a state or federal government making plans to wipe-out native grasslands, build new coal stations, mine wild mountains, ship soldiers, green-light GM crop trials, green-light businesses contributing to factory slave culture in poorer countries, throw millions at a Grand Prix, build new pulp mills, new airports, super farms, live-exporting, harvest old growth forests, dump toxic waste at sea, ask yourself what whole picture does this make. Is there anything sane about our culture? Do I have to participate? 

Imagine if there were no industrialised agricultures. No ADHD, obesity, cancer, tooth decay, violent mood disorders. Imagine most of us contributed a few days a week, from an early age, to localised food production. We only ate our own community's organic food in season. Children were given age-specific responsibilities within community food production that, in turn, gave them skills, bodily strength and healthy self-esteem. There was little mental illness as everyone had a place, a role. Our schooling was specific to our community's ecology and social wellness, and to online communities we developed as we got older. We rarely travel, import or export because we know that a system based upon transporting resources and human resources is suicidal to our species and to much of non-human life. Because we all share in food production there is much time to pursue creative interests. We have much free-time, and we have little money. We participate in a "free-poor" society where free time is valued as the greatest wealth. The cults of celebrity, anxiety and wishfulness have all died in the arse and are no longer valued because we once again like who we are. Dags are sexy and cool, we're all big cool dags now. There is no obesity nor anorexia but a great diversity of body shapes inbetween. The only mining that takes place is for the production of renewable energy technology. Technologies that fuel our low-energy houses and a few other essentials such as digital networking devices for global connectedness and creative purposes. This technology is given out in greater quantity to communities who actively show they are repairing their local wild ecologies. A federal government merely provides security from global corporate terrorism and oversees mediation for neighbouring communities who are in dispute. They do not interfere with or attempt to trade resources belonging to small local communities, or rather that small local communities belong to. People are encouraged to only breed to the capacity of their local landbase; to their local food and water bowls. All Monsanto, Coke, Halliburton, Walmart and Mcdonalds (a more extensive list will be drawn up in due course) chief executives and board directors will serve a minimum of 10 years in community compost fields, and be taught the proper treatment of humans and non-humans through social-ecology classes. On release they will be monitored and if they abuse again, they will be humanely destroyed and composted. Politicians known to have actively contributed to and were therefore abusers in the old system of pop-fascism, will be also encouraged to work in the compost fields and be monitored by the community in case they attempt to abuse again.

All this is highly possible. It is highly possible to participate in our culture while exorcising the dominant abusive traits – supermarket food, celebrity culture, two-party fraudulence, male-aggression, warring religions (monotheism), aggregate-growth economics. We can start now as individual households and build relations with others who share values based on permapoesis – permanent, cyclical meaning-making – not suicidal, linear apocalypse. It's time to ditch the old school.

Shed of interrelation (part two)

On dusk tonight, relations of common substance, the world comes in, relations of avoidance in decline. Some new, some reclaimed materials from the local tip. The future of food is under our feet.

Shed of interrelation (in progress)

Click for bigger.

Tomorrow we start work on finishing the guest shed. The idea for this shed is to encourage artist and writer friends to come and stay and work on their various projects while contributing an hour or so a day to food gardening. Permapoesis is permanent meaning making. Sustainable food is central to sustainable arts practice. This guest shed will represent the coming together of these two things, the coming together of a modern permaculture.

The text is in free-drag

Free-dragging, slow text and permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry (an excerpt)

Free-dragging, slow text and permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry (an excerpt)

The following is the final paragraph of a paper I finished today for UK journal Angelaki, which I am presenting at Two Fires festival this weekend on a panel called Social Warming. The festival's theme is "Coming Together".

Little by little the things that were once free and uncapitalised are increasingly legislated against, privatised or both – seed, birth, milk, school, water, art, death, etc. While free-dragging on road signs in country Victoria a few years ago Jason Workman and I were booked for “abstracting traffic”, and after challenging the police officer as to why we were being booked he told us “people have concerns when they see people doing things”. The fine was manageable at $120, however it was 100% of the budget for our day of practice. I managed to record the whole conversation I had with him, and have played it back many times to hear those words: “abstracting traffic”. But we were neither abstracting nor obstructing, which is no doubt what the country cop meant to say. Free-dragging developed for both Workman and I out of our own imprisonments. Free-dragging is thus a response to feeling enslaved. Free-dragging is a biophysics for self-liberty, a poetry form synonymous with composting where abstractions do not dominate but rather play their part in a material world. In coming out of these self-imposed sentences we began to understand that to hope was to project something abstract and unreachable upon the future and this caused considerable anxiety. We quickly came to reacquaint ourselves with joy and post-utopian play – non-deluded – our blood oxygenated with the liberty of hopelessness; endorphins as air in an aerobic compost. By becoming unstuck and uprooted we took greater refuge in ourselves as contiguous beings with everything else. Therefore our poetry/graffiti had to become public and participate in social space. We pulled down our garrets and with the materials reclaimed from an age of isolation and anxiety built raised beds for vegetables, chook houses, compost bays and are planning future alehouses based on steady state economics. Food sovereignty has become central to our work, which has developed as part of a broader permaculture community, a community of intensifying "poeverty" (post H D Thoreau and D T Suzuki), and through the development of a personal permapoesis. Thanks to Ian, Meg, Kate F, Jeff, Hamish, Jason and Pete O for your help with this work.

The title of the panel came from this drawing I did a few years ago and was first published in Going Down Swinging No.26 last year.


Click for bigger.

Making meaning (or, Alan Watts lives)

I've put together a few words, terms and their (in-progress) meanings here, which I've been developing over the past few years. But first a reminder:

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

Social warming – A social by-product of global warming, where good things come from horror and tragedy.
Permaplay – Non-delusional play invented by both children and adults within a permaculture.
Pop-fascism – Self-enslavement through debt as a result of aggregate desire and participation in capitalism’s slavery/destruction model. A Pop-fascist state is the private control of trade and industry in collusion with the state to the detriment of the environment and society at large.
Free-dragging – Street art. A mutant form of parkour or free-running (often practiced in drag). Physical graffiti tagged on the retina of the passer-by.
Permapoesis – Permanent meaning-making through active participation with one’s ecology and hence the localising of one's resources.

Street food: some minor alternatives to capitalism

Peter Tyndall opened my first (awarded) public work, Poemscape: a physical anthology, with a considerable talk critiquing the use of the word 'scape' and its problematic mediation of the natural world. We all baked facing west to a hot afternoon sun, listening to Peter outside the public library. The 18 Fujis that I planted, across the road from the town's supermarket, clung pathetically to sturdy timber plinths, each capped with a poem etched into a brass plaque. One of these poems was Michel Deguys' O great apposition of the world. I used three local poems, six Australian (from other parts) and twelve from other countries, each based environmental themes. Nearly ten years on, with various re-plantings due to drought and social idiocy, the trees struggle on. Each year I prune, water and feed them, and this is the first year the apples have coddling moth, which I'll need to treat over a period of time. 

This afternoon Maria, our neighbour, dropped over a large bag of green apples, produced by her trees. "No good for eating", she said, "but, OK for stewing". So I harvested what little rhubarb we had left and made a combined stew. For breakfast in summer we usually have organic rolled oats, that we buy in bulk, with stewed fruit or currants and local apple juice. In winter we make porridge and add local honey. The only time we have to visit a supermarket is when we have been disorganised, and missed the small produce shops or the Sunday market. Each time I walk into a supermarket I feel ambushed, and the more I learn about industrial agriculture and the plastics industry the more difficult it is to actually buy anything from these centers of mediated and fluorescent violence. 

Many people are talking about post-capitalist strategies. Here's a few of mine: If you are in the city join or start a permablitzing community, if you're in a rural area grow your own food and buy, swap and glean from local growers. If you're into graffiti, plant fruit trees – think espaliered tags – where council workers might ignore or not see them until they are established. Official public art, such as my Poemscape, seems passé today, but all of this thought and activity is in transition from a broken cycle toxicology to a closed-cycle ecology. We need to get incrementally better at the latter in order to mitigate the former.

Marcel Duchamp's early success as a pedlar of art, namely Brancusi's sculpture, afforded him about thirty years of independent income, which in turn provided him the time to pursue his thought and art. Gertrude Stein's independent income was afforded to her by her father's success as an industrialist. Along with her own dedicated temerity (and Alice) this income provided her the opportunity to pursue forty years of thought and writing.

For years I have tried to foster a Duchamp-like canniness, or pathetically longed for a Stein-like stipend, but mostly I've made work on the hop, so to speak, my method is based on 'stealing time'. And when circumstances amalgamate so as not even theft is possible I tend to overheat, breathe far too thinly, self-loathe and spiral downwards, sometimes taking loved ones with me. 

The Garden of Self Defence – an experiment based on self-sufficiency – is my most ambitious attempt to live, not of independent income but independent of income, not outside of an ecology, but ecologically co-dependent. I've come to realise that 100% self-sufficiency is hard-core living, and I'm not sure I'm capable of it. However, I think 70-80% food, water and energy self-generation is possible, and I'm determined to find out whether this will provide a post-industrial income. 

Maintaining this life (a 'lifestyle' is a mediated perversion of capitalism), using permaculture and referring to indigenous intelligence, may result in permapoesis – a term I've developed to define a practice of sustainable meaning-making – but I'm not sure, so the GOSD remains an experiment of life founded on giving time, rather than stealing it.

The crow and the chook

The eagle, the crow and the bat are the three totems that belong to the local mob – the Loddon tribe of the Djadjawurrung people, a clan of the Kulin nation – local, at least, to where I live.

Aborigines saw man as sharing a common life-principal with animals, birds and plants. They embraced all these in human social and religious life by establishing totemic relationships between them and people. (A P Elkin, 1967, from The Loddon Aborigines, Edgar Morrison, p.17., private press booklet, 1971, from articles published in the Daylesford Advocate newspaper 1963-1971).

The Loddon Aborigines, as anthropologists like David Graeber might suggest, had relations of 'common substance' with the land – a closed-cycle, single-broken-line homeostasis, where the body (as tribe) is contiguous with everything else. Here, the closed-cycle represents the tribal land, a clearly delineated food and water bowl where nothing is wasted, and the single-broken-line represents the necessity for other relations outside of this land.

Within these clearly defined boundaries their hunting rights were ordinarily respected by their neighbours with whom they normally enjoyed friendly relations and a measure of collaboration and inter-marriage. (The Loddon Aborigines, Edgar Morrison, p16., private press booklet, 1971, from articles published in the Daylesford Advocate newspaper 1963-1971).

This kind of collaboration can occur because the line is permanently broken. By contrast, the gated-existence model of industrial civilisation – the privatisation, capitalisation and transportation of resources – is represented as a solid double=white=line; a line of brutally imposed impermanent or throwaway culture.

Last night at a meeting at the Daylesford Town Hall, David Holmgren, co-originator of Permaculture, spoke with climatologist Rob Gell, in relation to the funding of a community-owned wind farm, Hepburn Wind. After their presentations, I asked them whether 6-7 years was a realistic timeframe to make the transition from industrial civilisation to a zero emission, water, energy and food relocalisation system, such as what we are attempting, with permaculture principals, in the Garden of Self Defence. Gell said effectively that yes, 5-10 years is the timeframe for radical change and that runaway climate change will result if we don’t all act significantly within this period. Holmgren went on to add that those who make the transition earlier, especially from oil dependancy, will find it easier than others to adapt because in a culture of high waste there is still so much to glean and reuse when only a few are doing it. When he opened his address, Gell said that he had just met with Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change and Water, which confirmed for him that those who place their trust in governments (to make the necessary changes) delude themselves.

Government, effectively, is in a war of contradictions with itself. The war goes something like this: good intentions plus millions of dollars of consultancy fees equates to greenwash, while old world industries pressure bureaucrats to retain business as usual in terms of consumption and waste. Last night’s sentiment and permaculture’s general call to arms since the early 1970s suggests that governments are sluggish beasts who cannot act as quickly as we can at a local level.

If we require a system to replace neoliberal capitalism, and I believe we do, then it is indeed Permaculture. Cuba has demonstrated this, albeit an easier task within a socialist country where there is little unburnt fat to start with. Which brings me to an issue that has been bugging me for a number of months, playing out in our garden as I write. Permaculture of course includes chooks as central to any design. Our two chooks are called Dirt and Cuba. Chooks give manure, eggs and companionship while we provide food, protection and a warm bed of straw reciprocally. A family of crows have come to enjoy the pleasures of gleaning the chook food and competing with them for local resources. Our natural inclination has been to frighten them off and protect our chooks' feed. Sound familiar? 

When German missionaries came to Central Australia they seduced the local tribes into following the teachings of Jesus Christ by offering white man’s food – mainly grain for bread – and when the cattlemen drove their cattle through tribal lands, polluting the water holes, the tribesmen couldn’t believe how easy (stationary) these beasts were to kill for food. As a result many indigenous hunters were rounded up and murdered by both white stockmen and police protecting privatised food sources. Until that time aboriginal men and women had observed public food laws in terms of tribal hunting grounds. After occupation black trackers also assisted in the killings of black people, they had been converted to the state of uniforms, surplus food and waste.

In order to understand the possibilities for our own localised, closed-cycle, single-broken-line ecological existence, we have come to realise we have to remain open to and not bully-away these potent black birds, whose environment we occupy. Indeed everything of our previous existence must be challenged, especially our double=white=line – the supermarket and the transportation of resources, and the interrelationship with the global market, conversion monotheism, profit-growth capitalism, our militarised and specialised education system, to name but a few of the most destructive hegemonies.

An ecological intelligence or permapoesis depends upon our sensitivity to indigenous intelligence. When our economists are equally our ecologists and our systems and resources are again shared, we will have reclaimed some of the intelligence for a permanent culture that the local mob fully possessed.

The crow shares a common substance relation to the land. Are we capable of this too; severing our relation to (private) property and therefore wealth, veiled violence and avoidance?

Nothing more, nothing less

There is nothing more self-determining, anarchical, pleasurable, poetic, subversive, exhilarating and intensely rewarding than growing your food. Today I planted 6 varieties of Banksia, two Blackwood wattles and about twenty stalks of sweet corn in the free soil, now weeded and mulched, that council dropped off last week.

Permapoesis

A well-composted soil fixes carbon in the earth where it’s needed most.

Permaculture bases its design principles on agro-ecology. A permaculturalist understands local ecology and applies this understanding to food production. This changes social, economic and cultural structures. If a poet’s food, which in part provides the material for poesis, is produced with her involvement, and within walking distance of her primary dwelling, her text is altered from one of capitalisation (reliance upon importation of resources) to one of ecology. The poet now participates actively within the environment that supports her, and the form and content of her life and work change accordingly.

The Readings Summer book catalogue arrived today which woke me from my slow text fantasy. I flicked through it in horror before heading back to my soil sifting. As I worked I imagined a publishing industry based on permaculture design and writers and poets stripped bare of their mediated existences; once dislocated, now active participants in the world that supports them.