I don't believe you Brumby

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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.

The text is in free-drag

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

Father and son free-dragging

At the local Neighbourhood House there are many great courses you can enroll in, including courses on self-sufficiency, crochet, blogging (taken by my great girlfriend) and Laugh Club. So last night after walking home with cuts and bruises from free-dragging with Zeph I devised a possible course I could run at Neighbourhood House. The ad in the brochure would go something like this:

Laugh Club not working for you? Then wreck yourself in a crash course in Free-dragging. The course tutor is one of the co-originators of this mutant form of Parkour (sometimes carried out in drag). Learn the poetry of hopelessness and the art of physical graffiti from a master free-dragger. Come with your own liability insurance and self-liberty assurance. Guaranteed to make you sore.

Film still from forthcoming video.

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.

Free-birthing (friend of Free-dragging)

Click for bigger. Photo: John Mayger

I read in The Age today about Free-birthing before attending a local gathering to protest draconian new laws attacking the right to home-birth. Free-birthing is unassisted birth – Wow! So hardcore, so great! Zeph was proudly home-birthed and while brewing in his mother's womb was regularly monitored by both his mid-wife and GP, his parents keeping options open all the way to the pop out. Z's face is hidden (in the picture above) by his placard which simply states: I WAS BORN AT HOME.

Risk advisors are a pox on humanity, their work manifests in the form of taking life out of living, which is part and parcel of this continuing age of anxiety. Anxiety is the reason JW and I developed Free-dragging, where self-liberty and resistance to orthodoxy are central to the practice. Today's protest was about exactly these things: self-determination, free-will and resistance to the dominant hegemony.

NB There were 15 dads there today, but most of us hidden at the back (plus one behind the camera).

Possessions of the sun

We're at the local lake. Dogs, ducks, yabbies, redfin, swans, swamp hens, flies, wasps, bees, mosquitos, jumping jacks, bull-ants, foxes, snakes, swamp wallabies, children and adult human beings share the water. I swim, cool down, then sit on the bank and continue my slow read of David Graeber's Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire.

The ultimate proof that one has sovereign power over another human being is one's ability to have them executed. In a similar fashion, one might argue, the ultimate proof of possession, of one's personal dominium over a thing, is one's ability to destroy it – and indeed this remains one of the key legal ways of defining dominium, as a property right, to this day. p73

Zeph gets out of the water and comes over to us, his towel wraps his shivering body, "You are under a rest Dad!" Which is true, so I reply "Yes, I'm under a tree, resting". "No Dad! You're under arrest!" he shouts. 

Until this Summer the highest recorded local temperature was 39 degrees celsius. This area of south-east Australia is known for its high rainfall and cool highland climate. Things are rapidly changing. Today is the fourth day of 41 degrees this past fortnight, and it is the most brutal, wind-charged and apocalyptic of all of the 4928 days that I've been living here. We're all on a high fire alert.

When you eat something, you do indeed destroy it (as an autonomous entity), but at the same time, it remains "included in" you in the most material of senses. Eating food, then, became the perfect idiom for talking about desire and gratification in a world in which everything, all human relations, were being re-imagined as questions of property. p74

After today "sovereignty" over something in terms of social relations, say between parents and children, masters and slaves, private property and public lakes (to name a few) has changed. Today the unsinkable Murdoch media empire crumbles, while the sun takes up the heirarchical slack, as if the financial crash and the nature crunch are wholly linked organisms. Of course they are. We are standing on the bank looking out over a body of cool water. Nearby, Ballarat's majestic Lake Wendouree is barren. Runaway climate change is just over the horizon, and our politicians and our own comfortable incontestability have sentenced us to nature's complete rule and wrath.

David Holmgren, at a recent meeting in our town hall (with climatologist Rob Gell), stated that growing your own food by permaculture methods uses between a fifth and a tenth less water than supermarket food. Additionally, Gell stated that by 2013, according to the most recent science, the Arctic ice will be gone, and that the southern part of Australia will burn and the northern part will become much wetter.

So I return to all I know: making useless art, embracing hopelessness, growing what food is possible, living intensely and actively with few expectations and sharing what's possible to share. Astrid Lorange, in her review of my book, writes it this way –

By decentring the kind of symbolism we might attach to an artistic manifesto for a sustainable future–that is, that hope will manifest as change–Jones sets up a far more mobilising set of propositions. Rather than hope and desire, we need to practise free-dragging, where non-delusional play and civil disobedience are the productive ferment of critical and creative hopelessness.

Others call it excrement.

Gifts of civilisation (or, how did we get here?)

In my Free-dragging Manifesto I talk about de-civilising activities aimed at mitigating civilisation's brutality. Composting plays a big part, as does the dispersal of cities (the word 'civilisation' comes from the Latin word civilis meaning centre or city). Derrick Jensen's massive two-volume tome Endgame: The Problem of Civilisation played a large role in the forming of my manifesto, especially his idea that any centre large enough to rely upon the importation of resources can never be sustainable. If you haven't got time to read Jensen's or my work then this little film, that I found today, is a micro-summary.



I close the screen and pick up David Graeber's book Possibilities, and the first thing I read is:

This leads to the interesting suggestion that, from the perspective of Medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization...is really a form of clinical depression. p67.

Past Present Future

Today I continue to work on a text that has inspired this blog's beginnings, The Garden of Self Defence: a postscript to a Free-dragging Manifesto. 

In this piece I take one diagram, which was originally published 

by the Situationist International as a poster –

New Theatre of Operations for Culture, 1957

And add 51 years of 'everything' compostable and reusable to create my own diagram (in draft form); based upon a return to a closed-cycle ecology – NO TRANSPORTATION OF RESOURCES and NO WASTE! – except of course for experimental anomalies like free-dragging and a trillion other cultural mutations based on chance and experimental behaviour.

Atheatre of Operations for Permanent Culture, 2008

A Free-dragging Manifesto

Read Astrid Lorange's review in Jacket.

This Is Not Art opening panel: an arbitrary 2020

(L-R) Marcus Westbury, Luke Dearnley, Patrick Jones, 

Fiona Maxwell, Julian Knowles, Lawrence Leung. 

Friday 3, October