convened by Marthe Reed & Linda Russo
archive: a place is an archive of its own ruins. A place is the archive of trauma as fact. It happened here. The ships came by to pick up people, their cargo and the people hauling cargo. The Pacific is our trauma and our desire. The rim is everywhere there has been a war to get caught up in—always carrying the officer's status in the body—always involved in the closed-door domesticity of empire. Your daily commute through it, or your tourist visit to it, or your wrong turn leading to it, or your binding obligation to stay in it may be a document of the place's ruin. You can sense the bodies that passed through the place before. Flown above. Eaten tunnels through. Exposed the brick and fuel spills. Paid out. Locked down. The body knows more than the curatorial eye of the drone or the tight porn shot. Or the preservation's weak references, the developers’ biopolitical commitments to life. Ruins and remains post-disaster is a place of present presence, neither past nor futurist. “Which by now have turned into ruins.” “He was there to collect the past.”
azhigwa: now is not a time for grief or silence. the earth spits forth its seeds; new life germinates in even the narrowest crevices. the waters surface and rush. azhigwa is to breathe time, to thread one's hands through the atmospheric filaments. there, on the branch. a dissimulation of birds. ask them to tell their story. it is not pretense or deceit to survive a cataclysmic extinction. listen to their songs. this note, how it trills beside the next. azhigwa. we are torqued and bleeding. already. we are alive.
earth: to bring (a person) to (the) earth. To cost the earth. Earth almond. Earth art. Earth artist. Earth auger. Earth bag. Earth-baking. Earth-bank. Earth-based. Earth bath. Earth battery. Earth-bedded. Earth-beetle. Earthbind. Earth-bird. Earth-blinded. Earth-bob. Earth-bottom. Earth-bred. Earth-built. Earth-burrower. Earth car. Earth chestnut. Earth-child. Earth closet. Earth coal. Earth connection. Earth-conscious. Earth-convulsing. Earth-creeping. Earth current. Earth dam. Earth-damp. Earth day. Earth-delving. Earth-destroying. Earth-devouring. Earth-dimmed. Earth dog. Earth-drake. Earth-eating. Earth-ejected. Earth-embracing. Earth-fed. Earth-flea. Earth-flea-beetle. Earth-floored. Earthflow. Earth fly. Earth-foam. Earth-fold. Earth fork. Earth-friendly. Earth girl. Earth-glacier. Earth god. Earth goddess. Earth-hauling. Earth history. Earth hog. Earth-holder. Earth-hole. Earth hut. Earth-incinerating. Earth inductor. Earth ivy. Earth lead. Earth leakage. Earth life. Earth-line. Earth loop. Earth-lord. Earth-louse. Earth-made. Earth-magic. Earth-maker. Earth-measure. Earth-measuring. Earth-moon. Earthmoss. Earth-mound. Earth-mouse. Earth movement. Earth-noise. Earth of alum. Earth of vitriol. Earth-oil. Earth orbit. Earth-orbiting. Earth pea. Earth-piercing. Earth-pig. Earth pigment. Earth pillar. Earth plane. Earth-planet. Earth plate. Earth-pole. Earth-power. Earth-puff. Earth-refreshing. Earth resistance. Earth-rind. Earth-roofed. Earth-rooted. Earth sack. Earths-amazing. Earth satellite. Earth-scraper. Earth sculpture. Earth-sheltered. Earth sheltering. Earth shock. Earth-shrew. Earth shrinkage. Earth sign. Earthslide. Earthslip. Earth-smell. Earth-smelling. Earth smoke. Earth soul. Earth-spider. Earth spike. Earth spirit. Earth spring. Earth-sprung. Earth-squirrel. Earth-stained. Earth station. Earth-subduer. Earth-surface. Earth table. Earth-threatening. Earth throe. Earth tilting. Earth time. Earth-tint. Also calling to (the) Earth. Earth to Earth. Earth-tone. Earth tongue. Earth-treading. Earth tremor. Earth-turned. Earth-vexing. Earth-wall. Earth-walled. Earth waller. Earth wave. Earth wax. Earth-wheeling. Earth white. Earth-wide. Earth wolf. Earth-worker. Earth-worn. Earth worship. Earth-year. The ends (also end) of (the) earth. To feel the earth move. To go to earth. To lose earth. To make the earth move.
The Great Plaints [plaint, n., roots: ME playnthe, ME plaunt, pre-seventeenth plante]: plant haunting. Conjured by uneven ecotones (echotones) carved out by homestead plows. Litany … bluestem tumblegrass purpletop needleandthread buffalograss western wheatgrass switchgrass mannagrass salt grass wildrye squirreltail threadleaf sedge … lamenting mass displacement of native prairie grasses, agricultural succession of soybean and feedlot corn. Ghost flora—toothed or hollow-throated—projecting auricles, pollen grains fossilized in sediment. Purple, blue, green, gold, straw, many-brown, black-voiced—plain to ungulate and glire.
orrido (from the Latin horridus, a derivative of horrēre, “to feel horror” (first half of the fourteenth century)): a rocky throat of tremendous depth and beauty, formed by the action of water falling through caverns and down ravines, making for tumultuous passage into an isolated valley. Under modernity, a corridor from which electrification for other, more economically generative valleys can be drained.
The Other: to talk about “the other” seems to predetermine violence against this other. Actually, the mere usage of the word “other” itself is a form of violence, even if it is used in a tolerant and accepting context. To acknowledge that differences exist without adhering or implying a whole or an identity: a skin color is merely different than another skin color, for example, or a genital is merely different than another genital. When “the other” is an impenetrable whole and not just mere differences, violence is possible: a person of color is formed by taking one—already constructed—feature and reducing a living breath to it. This is par excellence symbolic violence. An identity, final and rigid, hence, an “other,” also and by necessity final and rigid. Relying on the category of “mere differences,” in contrast, could help establish an ontologically flat surface where few points of attack/violence can present themselves.
phylogeny: coined by Ernst Haeckel (think drawings of diatoms, shells, jellyfish, spiders, etc.), 1866, to describe the organismal lineages we all passed through; phyla (φυλή, tribe, stem, race, branch) geny (born). Troubled by Haeckel's repugnant ideas of a hierarchy of “races.” Wrest it from his hands and give it back to all the animals and plants—we all passed through roots and branches of the same tree, beginning somewhere with a few molecules combusting (as Darwin suspected, as genome data confirms). In the mid-sixties, Lynn Margulis pioneered “symbiogenesis”: we came about not just through competition but through acts of symbiosis. We carry evidence of species merger in our cells, of species relation in almost every structure we daily rely upon. Lobefin fishes did protolungs, acorn worms might have done something like a heart, amphibians did shoulders, jellyfish saw first for us. If we let phyla be taken over by its bedmate phylla (leaves, petals, sprouts, sheaves, sheets of paper), we clear a mute space where we are all tangled in and leafing from the same roots. (If we take it further, to its homonymic neighbor, philo, we fall into love.)
resistance: to be rooted and unruly. To be integrated into locale circumstance so to dismantle monoliths. To challenge monolithic orders and defy language itself, to defy the ways of the castle. To deeply see is to seek the roots upwards, downwards, and sideways. To see which processes monoliths serve. To counter forgetting and root, to expand and recognize stories outside of the monolith. Working with both roots and methods of dispersal. To seek outside of usual patterns of perception by seeing the familiar in its multiple possibilities. To make against the production of unseeing.
shadow: even if I'm angry the cedar was cut down, part of restoring balance is my response. New ecology, collective mind, calls for expressions of growth. When a wood lily blooms, a chord sounds. I feel tremendous energy flow from beautiful earth, for the quantum is diaphanous, not dialectic, and permeated by starlight. Time, transformation, unifies. My anger at destroyed land provides a structure that's appropriate, so I also feel peace—two emotions, side-by-side, natural shadow. There's still a world of contrast, but in color, not black and white, and in change.
skirt: to lift up and away, to shirk, to walk outside or around a zone of responsibility or an imagined periphery of complicity. This describes the casual and everyday practice of imagining oneself as belonging to the outskirt, edge, or perimeter of an ecological disaster, both morally and physically. As observed in the act of kith lifting their saris and under-petticoats to walk around, beyond, past, or attempting to otherwise physically transcend symptoms of ecological disasters in urban contexts—oil seepage into ground-gutters, toxic wells, garbage mounds, human waste tributaries—in order to perform a moral transcendence of responsibility and codependence on urbanization, underfunding of municipal sanitation, informal or grey economies, and complicity with hazardous and substandard housing. As an everyday practice, skirting attempts to construct a cognitive map (see Fredric Jameson) in order to perceptually and imaginatively neuter one's own social alienation from the urban “barrage of immediacy,” where the cause and effect of environmental policy, like a diesel-fueled high-octane ouroboros, shit and eat the simultaneous fragmentation and homogenization of urban space. Skirting is a daily practice—lifting yards of chiffon, cotton, silk, and rayon blends away from organic and man-made waste—that underpins (but does not underwrite) a “system of operational combination” (see Michel de Certeau) composing a culture of consumption. It pulls back, folds away, lifts up, and partitions any zone of contact between the disaster and the self.
un-personism: wherein the poetic subject is a site of total permeability, of radical interconnection with the human and nonhuman living world. Not so much a negation as a dilation of O’Hara's “Personism”—which famously proposes an eros of poetic abstraction that evokes “overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity … while preventing love from distracting into feeling about the person.” Un-personism proposes a more inclusive embrace, an eros that extends from within-species to cross-species to the planetary, with “all life-giving vulgarity” intact. Un-personism can be poetically manifested by many means, including a probing of one's position in time and space, in which the individual dissolves into the gene pool, the species into the ecosystem, and the ecosystem into a continuum of changing relationships and dependencies. At its most extreme, un-personism may extend out to the universe, where it attains a state of cosmic anonymity, a form of the ultimate communal. At another extreme, it conjures an image of a rock formation in which human fossil remains lie intermingled with evidence of mass plant and animal extinctions. It is this apparition of future ruin which compels the backward-facing angel of history to turn around and face her destiny as the angel of the Anthropocene.
washland refers to the specific laundering (as with money) of a city park located between the downtown business district and an impoverished community undergoing gentrification in Cincinnati, Ohio. Washland also refers to any cleansing (e.g., by oil—see Standing Rock, merely the most recent example of neocolonial betrayal of treaties between conqueror and conquered) of a land, a cleansing of its biological, geological, and/or marine forms of life in order to extract its non-living resources. The United States of America is merely one country that can also be called washland, but to the extent this cleansing—primarily ethnic—was never complete (Native Americans were not driven to extinction), “we” have a moral imperative to resist the totalization of bio-geo-ethno-cleansing however much such erasures have found revived inspiration in the imminent future.
watershed: at the confluence of two rivers, the Schuylkill and the Delaware, William Penn settled his city, 1682. Built on the southeastern edge of fertile Pennsylvania piedmont, Philadelphia tilts; its creeks and stormwater drain into the Delaware's great basin. From landscaped lawns to the Wissahickon to the Schuylkill, from city streets to the Tacony to the Delaware—all the water that falls and runs, works its way, if it can, south, to the Atlantic. Everything the water touches leaves traces that travel with it: lead, Chromium-6, Roundup, PFAs, mercury, benzene, sulfuric acid. Plastics and microplastics. Hormones, antidepressants, countless pharmaceuticals. Because the rivers flow through our bodies, too: raw river water, once treated and drinkable, enters us and exits as urine and other fluids that flow back into the Delaware after they too have been treated. The water holds on to everything treatment doesn't remove. Though land, city, bodies all shed water, water, that universal solvent, can't shed its own memory, can't help but tell us of all it has touched.
[archive Kimberly Alidio] [azhigwa Aja Couchois Duncan] [earth Jordan Abel] [The Great Plaints Brenda Sieczkowski] [orrido Jennifer Scappettone] [The Other Maged Zaher] [phylogeny Eleni Sikelianos] [resistance Hoa Nguyen] [shadow Mei-mei Berssenbrugge] [skirt Divya Victor] [unpersonism Evelyn Reilly] [washland Tyrone Williams] [watershed Brian Teare]