Slow text (towards a definition)

Here's another excerpt from Free-dragging, Slow Text and Permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry, recently completed for a forthcoming Angelaki issue. To give some background I have just introduced the concept of hopelessness: By understanding that life is painful, unnecessarily destructive and generally hopeless, we have nothing to loose but to hop on it. 

A portrait of the artist as superscript type.

I think therefore I comment, I comment therefore I think

I regularly get stupid comments on my blog. I thought for a while I'd filter them, but went back to my original state of no border guard. The most stupid comments generally come from Anonymous, which I've discovered is a collective noun synonymous with gutless.

This morning I did some chance blog surfing and discovered this little line from a blog called Putting God First:

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

I thought about this for all of two minutes and left a comment (which of course can be tracked back to this site):

Delight yourself in the soil and it will give you unrelenting honesty about your Christian-capitalist carbon footprint.

But why is a C-c carbon footprint necessarily larger than my own? I'd like to get it measured to be sure, so I'm taking an educated guess that those who invest in desire, hope, fantasy and heaven aren't really thinking about microbial life, and therefore about carbon fixing. If only cops would breathalise us for greenhouse gas and humus depletion and leave drink driving to real chance encounters. 

Regardless of where we each stand on the god front (or booze for that matter), sincerity comes from direct engagement, not cowardly, anonymous and indirect commenteering. Here's a comment, albeit analogue, that I posted several years ago in Melbourne on a real-live Christian site - a public footpath.

Click for bigger.

It says (in a slow text):

Christ is the only Christian, become your own Ian.

I have a friend called Ian whom I love to call Ianian, and he is the greatest Ianian of them all.

The text is in free-drag

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

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.

Slow text (with serifs)

A Free-dragging Manifesto

Read Astrid Lorange's review in Jacket.