Conversations with non-humans

Story after story, they pile up, dozens upon dozens of conversations, with or without words, conversations with pets, bears, coyotes, rivers, trees, owls, hawks, eagles, mice.

A friend said, "That's all very nice, but do you have any scientific verification?"

I have plenty of empirical data, but that just means I'm relying on direct experience, not abstract theory. Strictly speaking, scientific verification is impossible, because science is by definition the study of objects, and a conversation is an interaction between two or more subjects. In science, you repeat an experiment in a controlled environment, and you eliminate variable after variable until any moderately careful person can make the same thing appear. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words, p.64

Portrait of the poet as a fixed address

A portrait of the artist as regenerating forest

Two Fires festival of art and activism

Uncle Max Harrison lights the fire at the opening ceremony of the Two Fires festival in Braidwood that took place over the weekend. Uncle Max is an elder of the Yuin people, who are the traditional people of the area. Other highlights included a wide ranging discussion concerning the work of Val Plumwood and Judith Wright, exchanging our presentations on "social warming" for hearty response, as well as hanging out with friends.

One thing that struck me while there concerned the design of the Aboriginal flag. Designed by Harold Thomas, a Luritja man from Central Australia, it has an immensely clear symbolism relating to land. And here I would suggest that Aboriginal culture participates in how it represents itself. In contrast the Australian flag is both skywards (Southern Cross) and across the seas (Union Jack), with no clear symbolic relation to land. Here, I would suggest, that Euro-Australian culture participates in how it represents itself. However a dislocated relationship to land is more broadly a corollary of industrial civilisation and is not only prejudiced to young colonies like Australia. In my paper for our Social Warming panel I posited this:

Perhaps why we know so much less about the trillions of microbes in the soil below our feet than we do about the stars and solar systems above our heads is because the "civilised world" is obsessed with transcendence, grandeur, spectacle and escape. And it seems apparent that art and literature are specifically implicated in this skywards obsession, which also concerns the cult of celebrity – a culture of anxiety and hypermediation directly related to food disorders and substance abuse.

Fire ball extinguished

Gift ecology (or, towards a biophysical economics)

click for bigger.

Peddle, gather, cook, bottle (food activity alphabetised by return)

Our community has a local benefit concert and fundraiser for the survivors of the fires this coming Sunday and I spent the early part of the week thinking what I could contribute that didn't mean burning cash or burning carbon. We both have no work at present, which makes us time-rich and extremely productive in all manner of non-capitalist activity, while at the same time shitting ourselves with mounting bills.

I borrowed Meg's bike, which has a handy detachable front basket, and trawled the town for street fruit. I asked the local librarian, Janet, if I could harvest the rhubarb from the small community garden at the back of the library and she happily agreed, and I found some feral apples and pears ripe and delicious. I also noted other varieties of apples, nectarines and pears that would be ripe over the next few weeks and noted that many of the feral trees which had a substantial build up of humus at their base had disease-free apples. I cooked all the fruit together and added local honey.

I then peddled to O's to exchange some of our old glass jars for his larger, uniformed, black-lidded ones. I stayed for lunch, talked about brewing beer and gathered more apples and a branch of red-flowering eucalypt for my gal on the way home.

These small bottled gifts are for the organisers of the event – friends – folk who have worked hard over the past few weeks to organise the forthcoming day. As a child my folks had a successful cottage industry manufacturing jellies, mustards, chutneys and jams and this week I felt the spirit of that familial activity return.

3g

1. gathering
   
2. gleaning
   
3. growing
   

What else is intelligence but adapting to one's continuously changing environment? And when environments change, no longer providing the conditions for life as we know it, new life, new thought and new activity flourish; remixing ancient modes of survival with new social and technological phenomena.

A young boy is alone in his room, feeding himself industrialised chips, drinking plastic-coated junk, playing with his Xbox. He represents an old dying world.

 

The technologies that fail us are the one's that help construct relations of avoidance, wholly attached to capitalism's cult of the individual. The technologies for a new world are those that will help us remain connected and supported as collectives of common substance.

F

E

d

d) that society can thus be seen as a gigantic engine of production and destruction in which the only significant human activity is either manufacturing things, or engaging in acts of ceremonial destruction so as to make way for more: a vision which, in fact, sidelines most things that real people actually do and, insofar as it is translated into actual economic behaviour, is obviously unsustainable. David Graeber, Possibilities, p78.

c

b

A

Ashes and boxes (some notes on death)

I'm thinking of Alice B Toklas in her seventies, and similarly an old friend, Val Herbst, trudging damply around her dry garden, fat fag smoking from her lips, high cloud drizzle falling on dying perennials, drought around, drinking coffee through unwashed glass alive with unnameable film, Alice, tasting her oldness in everything, listening to her thongs slapping the peddles of the baby harpsichord, punching out Scarlatti, lionising him while attacking the polite memorials, her mind that brave, her bed dank, a cat's bed under the Murrumbeena bowls and foxing shelves of printed thought. A lifetime corroding in full view of my early twenties, drawing her pictures; her decomposition a gift reversed.

Instead we burn our dead or box them tight from soil in coffins – the pollutions of avoidance. Val insisted on the right to be buried in her half dead garden and years later the same spirit home-birthed Zeph; the stuff of common substance becomes an argument with the fearful. 

The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free...they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living... Gertrude Stein, 1943

Zephyr's War Music

Compost & Cos

Today I killed Bill. She wasn't getting better with the garlic water and we couldn't justify the expense of a vet, nor the fantasy of industrial pharmaceuticals. I killed her as part of redressing the compost area, which looked like this at about 5pm. 

At 4.30pm I brought the black and white bins, full of kitchen scraps, back from Ben's cafe, laid Billy to rest at the base of the right-hand bay, tore up several cardboard boxes and placed them over her. I then wet down this elegiac layer and heaped on Ben's scraps, straw from the coup and Meg's day's weeding material, before covering up both bays to cook the compost.

The bay on the left (above), that I last turned here for Hamish Morgan – who today sent more reference humus: Katherine Gibson's 'The End of Capitalism' – is almost ready for use on the garden.

I picked our finest cos lettuce (above right) and returned Ben's bins, proudly presenting the first exchange of our casual gift-ecology.

Offline blog (1967) meets our girls

Photoshopping (old school)

Daniel Spoerri & co. do movement

"I hate immobility. I detest everything that is settled."

&

"keep moving, even in place keep moving."

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