Summary
βWe need geopoetics because geopolitics necessitate other ways of beingβ¦ Proposing alternate narratives to the hegemonic ones we are caught in is the work and play of geopoetics.β
β Erin Robinsong, Geopoetics in the Mess/Mesh
Enclosed is the last episode of our 4th season: a sympoietic stream of consciousness; on language, art making, and more-than-human interconnection.
The feet are the link
Between earth and the body. Begin there.
The lungs are the link between body and air.
The hands, these uprooted feet, are the means
Of our shaping and grasping. Clasp them.
The eyes are the hands of the head;
its feet are the ears.
β Robert Bringhurst, Selected Poems: VI SΔngzhΓ o
Click here to read a transcription of this episode
We encourage you to explore the further readings and citations from this episode.
Ink made from annatto seeds, red wine, turmeric, rainwater and lemon skin
by Flora Wallace
Flora Wallace is a ceramic artist, ink maker and illustrator based in London and Dorset. Much of her work is inspired by observing natural forms and movement and the behaviour of plants, animals and fungi.
Coral Bone
by Ebony Rose
Ebony Rose is a visual artist whose practice involves close observations of the natural world and her surroundings. Spanning drawing to large spatial installations she incorporates wind and water and materials from specific sites and locations. In a world of deep unrest and planetary change - slowing down, grounding and reconnecting to nature and natural phenomena are essential to her artistic research. She explores seeing cause-and-effect and interconnectedness over time.
At the Geopoetics Symposium Ebony Rose showed a driftwood sculpture and a series of inky rag paper works. Glint is a carved, charred and sheened driftwood sculpture positioned to reflect light. It is an amalgamation of moving light and weathered matter. As Rose works with charred elements she considers cycles of life and death, ephemerality, and the blackened forests from fires. Glint is a form of transience and an essence of entanglements and durational processes and transformation.
Glint, Black Water
by Ebony Rose
In the Coral Bone/Black Water series white silhouette shapes portray the phenomena of the bleaching of coral but also lean into ambiguity. In some the white shapes are celestial-like or bone-like imbuing interconnection. Ebony Rose was also influenced by a particular shoreline on Malcolm Island, British Columbia where over consecutive trips and during an artist residency she walked and considered the islandβs whale rubbing beach. There, orcas rub their bellies on pebbles in shallow waters at the seaβs edge. Rose collected some of the washed-up and dead coralline from this shore to respond thematically.
Show Notes
This episode was produced by Mendel Skulski, with help from Adam Huggins, Erin Robinsong, and Michael Datura.
It was composed with the voices and words of Michael Datura, Astrida Neimanis, Cosmo Sheldrake, Rex Weyler, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, David Abram, Megan Gnanasihamany, Stephen Collis, Eric Magrane, Hari Alluri, Nadia Chaney, Kaitlyn Purcell, Khari McClelland, Rita Wong, Jessica Bebenek, Vicki Kelly, Mark Fettes, Marjorie Wonham, and Cecily Nicholson
And with music by Cosmo Sheldrake, Anne Bourne, Meredith Buck (as arranged by Vanessa Richards), Jonathan Kawchuk (courtesy of Paper Bag Records), the Time Zone Research Lab, Emily Millard, Khari McClelland, Ruby Singh, and Nathan Shubert, with field recordings by Julian Fisher, and our theme song by Sunfish Moon Light.
A huge thank you to Erin Robinsong and Michael Datura, without whom these conversations wouldnβt have taken place. Thanks to Hollyhock for their generous hospitality and support, and thank you to Juliette Bertoldo, Megan Gnanasihamany, and Vanessa Richards for the help recording.
β¨ Future Ecologies is an independent production, and is supported by our community of listeners on Patreon. You can join them for as little as a dollar each month β at patreon.com/futureecologies π±
Citations (in order of appearance)
Donna Haraway (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press
Astrida Neimanis (2022) Learning feeling. A I S T I T / coming to our senses
Marcus Coates (2017) Dawn Chorus
Robert Bringhurst (2023) The Ridge. Harbour Publishing
Jan Zwicky (2023) Once upon a Time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination. McGill-Queens University Press
Hari Alluri (2017) The Flayed City. Kaya Press
Eric Magrane, Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, Craig Santos Perez (2019) Geopoetics in Practice. Routledge
Eric Magrane (2012) Various Instructions for the Practice of Poetic Field Research
Time Zone Research Lab (2019 β ? )
Susan Sontag (1978) Illness as Metaphor. McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd
David Abram (2019) Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet
Dylan Robinson (2020) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Leanne Simpson (2021) As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions
Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen "He Clears the Sky" Dan Longboat (2006) The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred. Space and Culture, 9(4), pp. 365-381
Cecily Nicholson (2017) Wayside Sang. Talon Books
Leroy Little Bear (2000) βJagged Worldviews Collidingβ in Reclaiming Indigenous Voices and Vision, edited by Marie Battiste. Vancouver: UBC Press, pp 77-85.
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSΓNEΔ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwmΙΞΈkwΙyΜΙm) Squamish (SkwxwΓΊ7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (SΙlΜΓlwΙtaΚ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Chorus 00:00
Begin there β
Introduction Voiceover 00:02
You are listening to Season Four
Chorus 00:05
Begin there β
Introduction Voiceover 00:06
of Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 00:09
Welcome back. Mendel here. And before we get started, I just wanted to say thanks for your patience. It's been quite a year, and it means a lot to have you with us. This is the last episode of our fourth season. So it's time that we listen to you, for a change. We'd love to get to know you better, and find out what you'd like to hear in Season Five. We've already got a number of stories in progress, but your input will help shape how we tell them. So please fill out our brief listener survey. We'd love to hear from you. Find a link to that survey in the show notes, or click the banner at futureecologies.net.
Mendel Skulski 00:55
After this episode, our feed will mostly go quiet again for a few months, while we're cooking away in the background. To do that, we're relying on your support to keep making this show and to keep it completely ad free. Without our amazing community on Patreon. This podcast simply wouldn't exist. You can meet everyone who supports the show, find out about all the benefits of being one of them, and join in for as little as $1 each month at futureecologies.net/patrons. And of course, if you're not in a position to support the show with your money, you can still help with your words. You know the drill. Tell a friend, tell a stranger and please say nice things about us wherever you find podcasts.
Mendel Skulski 01:44
Okay, now on to this episode. What you're about to hear comes from a gathering on Klahoose, Tlaβamin, and Homalco territory, specifically Cortes island, in the spring of 2022. It was a symposium of artists and scholars of all description, assembled to reflect on, discuss, and share their practice. Namely, that at an intersection referred to as Geopoetics.
Mendel Skulski 02:14
The word poem comes to us from the Greek "poiein", meaning to make or create, and which would also be borrowed into the word sympoiesis. Quoting from Donna Haraway, "Sympoiesis is a simple word. It means making with. Nothing really makes itself. Nothing is really autopoietic, or self organizing" end quote. In that spirit, what follows is not a perfectly condensed version of those events, nor is it attempting to be. Instead, these many voices have been recontextualized and collaged from where I sit β here as an uninvited guest on the unceded and shared ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh peoples β into a stream of consciousness on language artmaking and more than human interconnection.
Mendel Skulski 03:11
The sound isn't perfect, and sometimes you can hear a baby in the room. But hey, that's life.
Mendel Skulski 03:20
Here we go.
Michael Datura 03:21
In the field of environmental education, anthropomorphism β the charge of anthropomorphism is sort of a dirty word. It's considered a logical fallacy. So that it's a formal critique so that even the content of whatever comes is sort of rendered false. If so, what if you just talk about your experience with that, and anthropomorphizing the ocean, but also ecologizing the body, and how you contend with that?
Astrida Neimanis 03:47
Yeah that's a great question. And it's a funny talking to a room of a lot of poets and artists, as though qualities like this could not be transferred across species, but I think that my short answer to that leveling of that charge of anthropomorphism is always like, why do we think humans felt those things first, or had those things first? We learn our feelings, I think, from the world around us, we learn sensation, we learn inter-relationality, we learn communication, we learn language, from all of these things. So then to say, you know, to hold all of that stuff close to us and say, "No, this belongs to humans. And it's ethically wrong to consider that another kind of being would be tired or be angry or be upset or need a hug" is I think, even more anthropocentric in a way β because it like it hogs... it hogs all of those great words and feelings and sensations as though they just belong here. You know, where did we get them from?
Cosmo Sheldrake 04:52
Something to me that I find really helpful recently, particularly been thinking a lot about, because I've been working with birdsong for a while. And something that recording gives you access to β that just listening without recording can't β is your ability to slow things down and speed things up. There's this artists, Marcus Coates in the UK, who did this project called Dawn Chorus, where he, he slowed down birdsong, specific birds, by 20 times and got different people to learn the song 20 times slower, and then filmed them singing it 20 times, and then sped them up 20 times β their breath, their head movements, they become bird in this really uncanny way. And it just makes this really strong point about this time, this kind of temporal barrier between us and some other living organisms that exist on a different timeframe. And once you can slow down or speed things up, you can somewhat close that gap, and kind of meet in this weird, uncanny way.
Rex Weyler 05:50
It's not so much a statement as a question β what is the language of ecology? And there's an issue here with the word "environment" versus "ecology". People think of the environment is something that's out there, and we're gonna fix it or we need it or something like that. Ecology is something we're inside of. So part of what I've experienced in the ecology movement over 50 years, is that we just continually get hung up on language. And that I've kind of felt like I've been searching my whole life for a language that actually speaks ecology, and speaks of this undivided whole of which everything is a part.
Rex Weyler 06:37
All divisions are arbitrary. We cut up the world to describe it. And someone might say, "Well, we know the difference between a rocket tree we know the difference between a tree in the atmosphere." Do we? We talk about a tree, the soil, and the atmosphere, but none of those three things (tree, soil, or atmosphere β or fungi) exist independently in the others. So when we speak of them, were approximating. Language is necessaryβ¦ or useful, let's say. Language is useful so that we can just talk to each other. And we can talk to each other about the tree and the soil and the atmosphere, when we know that none of those things exist independently.
Robert Bringhurst 07:26
The real subject here is really how the Earth means. I just take for granted that the Earth means. It is so obvious to me that it has never occurred to me that it needed explaining. But I hear a lot of people say that they are engaged in making meaning, as if there weren't any until they made some. I just don't get it.
Robert Bringhurst 07:53
The ground we walked on to get here, the stones that got stuck in the soles of my shoes, and the other ones that are big enough to stay in their places, and the trees, and all the little plants underneath the trees, and all the little things way up in the trees β they are all meaning incarnate. This building is not meaningless either, but it ain't much compared to what's out there. And we are meaning incarnate too.
Jan Zwicky 08:27
You and the world are real together. You're built so that you can understand one another.
David Abram 08:35
To our animal flesh, to our creaturely senses, each thing I encounter is always withholding parts of itself within itself. And it also is hiding other things behind itself.
Megan Gnanasihamany 08:52
Their features refuse to cohere into recognizable form.
David Abram 08:56
Nothing is ever encountered, all explicit, open, total. For me, that's not a source of frustration, it's a source of delight. It's just the signal that I β
Stephen Collis 09:09
Anima, animal, animate
David Abram 09:12
β in my own animal body, am inside something much bigger than me, in which things dance and play with one another, and beckon to me and others withdraw from my attention entirely and hide off.
Jan Zwicky 09:29
Explicit β what that word means is unfolded, everything has been unfolded. Well, often what that means is to dissect something, or to flay it, to peel it, to expose it. A great deal of biological life must remain implicit, or it's dead.
David Abram 09:52
And of course, a way to gain the bare beginnings of an access to the interior of something (without flaying it), is to ask and to enter into conversation.
Jan Zwicky 10:08
Make eye contact
Vanessa Richards and Chorus 10:16
Listen. Let your water be your guide. Let the water decide. Lose yourself in the meantime. Listen.
Eric Magrane 10:39
How the world is organized is a function of belief. For example, here are just a few ways that climate change is understood or portrayed. As an apocalyptic threat to humanity, as a national security issue, as an engineering problem, as a social and environmental justice issue, as a hoax, as a business opportunity, as a crisis of capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, racism and or neoliberalism, or as an opportunity for radical transformation.
Eric Magrane 11:23
How climate change is framed then has reverberations for how it is approached or addressed or ignored. These framings also often map onto deeper ideologies about human-environment relationship, expressed through social, political, economic and land systems. When I think about the climate crisis from a geopolitical standpoint, climate change is about time and materiality. Time β the scales of time in which we must think to understand climate. Materiality β minerals, fossils, plastic bags, the decayed remains of marine life powering our machines. In short, organizations of matter.
Astrida Neimanis 12:12
Scale asks us to measure phenomena in terms of close or far, small or big, more significant or less. And we readily think of scale in terms of things like time or duration, minutes, years, eons. Or in terms of size or space β micro, macro, local, global. It follows that a scale of mattering might map onto these other scales according to things like intensity and heft, or sheer numbers. "We need to scale our actions up", we say. "Just a drop in the ocean" is a figure of speech for a reason, after all. But despite our desire for scale to temper the crass leveling effect of analogy, we also recognize another kind of brutality creeping into these scalar logics. Where Euclidean geometries assemble, to measure and mark and value, and with these metrics comes fungibility of each constituent part.
Astrida Neimanis 13:15
This is what anthropologist Anna Tsing might call the malevolent hegemony of precision nesting β an expansionist logic whereby scaling up means that any precisely measurable elements can be multiplied without consequence. So here, instead of the violence of analogy or equivalence, we face the violence of quantification and reduction and exchangeability. And neither gives us the tools we need for the kind of scaling up that we seek.
Robert Bringhurst 13:47
Many things in the world are a matter of scale. Sandhill Cranes are creatures whose song is within our hearing range, and whose bodies are large enough, and whose gestures are large enough that we can see them. And so if you are lucky enough to hear the Sandhill Cranes and watch them dance, you will be changed forever by this experience. But another thing that ought to happen is that it ought to occur to you that just because you can see the Sandhill Cranes dance doesn't mean that nothing else dances. What about the bacteria? What about the deer mites? What about the lichens? What about the other things that are outside your range somehow β the things whose voices are too high or too low in pitch for your ears; the things that are too small or too large for you to see. The Earth, for example.
Hari Alluri 14:57
I mean, we dance inside ourselves. Even when we're still.
Megan Gnanasihamany 15:11
Nature and its description into image β whether photo, drawing, or painting en plein air β has long been conscripted into the propagation of a historical myth β The untouched and glorious Earth, primed and waiting for your eyes, and yours alone, to appreciate to capture an image of your own.
Robert Bringhurst 15:28
A name on a map, like a contour line or a smudge of green or squiggle of blue, can never tell you all you want or need to know.
Eric Magrane 15:42
One β Note your elevation above sea level. What poems occur here?
Robert Bringhurst 15:49
What is is what has happened, Hegel says.
David Abram 15:53
Who cares what Hegel says?!
Robert Bringhurst 15:56
And what has happened
David Abram 15:57
What happens is what is.
Robert Bringhurst 15:58
is what is
Robert Bringhurst 15:58
What is
Robert Bringhurst 15:59
spread out through time
Jan Zwicky 16:00
is what is timeless caught in time.
Vanessa Richards and Chorus 16:13
[Magic Number Song]
Nadia Chaney 16:49
But what stuck with me was the walk, not the song. I don't remember the song. But the specific walk that I was doing. So then I started playing with this walk all over town. And I had the weirdest thing happen, which was this temporal effect. Where I started being β the slower I walked, the sooner I would get places.
Nadia Chaney 17:12
I was working in a restaurant. And I had my boss start timing it until he got super angry. And he was β he stopped. He refused to do it anymore. Like he really screamed it out. He was really angry, because it was disturbing at a really deep level to his sense of... his sense of the way things are.
Nadia Chaney 17:36
And the question that I had was "is time incarcerated?" I read and I read and I was like, ah... I can't actually ask this question before I ask this other question, "How can we be more intimate with time?" I need to first encounter time before I start asking is it incarcerated, because there's all these presumptions about what is it... and I was doing the NGO thing unconsciously β already making the other the object, and then trying to fix it and solve it. So luckily, I caught that before I started the project and said, "Okay, how can we be more intimate with time?" And then the second question, "is time incarcerated? And if so, how can we help to liberate it?"
Nadia Chaney 18:22
So these zoom windows I know, I know, it can be offensive to be like... I heard David this morning, right, the tone like "not on Zoom." But it was different! People would sleep, right? There were people from all over the world. So as that entire almost like 15 hour period will go by, we'd watch the sun, we'd watch the shadows, you'd hear the birds, you'd see the dawn. People would fall asleep, and they'd leave the sound on, and the video on, and sleeping! Right? That's the... it was both the informality and the safety, but also the study of time.
Astrida Neimanis 18:57
We are now all tumbling in the circulations of planetary exhaustion, where tiredness is both different and shared. Much has been made of our 24/7 neon-lit late capitalist cultures, the vertigo-inducing speed of the Sixth Extinction, the spectacularly swift and tireless resurgence of white supremacy and eco fascism, alongside the never resting rising heat of the noonday sun. But we have thought perhaps less about what comes after and with the end of this world, the insomniac one β our bodies see no longer hack it. We fall down, fall apart, exhausted. We need to sleep.
Nadia Chaney 19:40
And that happened all the time. It was like we were always right on time.
Astrida Neimanis 19:47
This is multispecies sympoiesis at work, in the name of flourishing. Although we often speak of sleep in terms of self care, paying attention to the ocean and its communities reminds us that even sleeping β the most inward oriented and perhaps solipsistic of acts β is actually about mutual care.
Astrida Neimanis 20:11
Some of the planet's most significant deforestation events have in fact occurred underwater. Off the east coast of Tasmania, 95% of the giant kelp forests that once dominated these seas have disappeared in the last few decades. In Western Australia, a particularly hot summer between 2010 and 2013 wiped out 100 kilometers of kelp forests. These forests are not only magnificent in and for themselves, but have been vital for the formation of habitat on reefs around temperate Australia. They are places for hundreds of other species of plants and animals to rest.
Megan Gnanasihamany 20:54
A desire for order is the most dangerous dream that is held by the majority of North American citizens. Technically, even the fascists dream at night. It is our obligation to dream differently.
Eric Magrane 21:08
Two β Map the quarter mile radius around your home in a poem.
Stephen Collis 21:14
Everything's going to be... alright. Everything's going to be... destroyed.
Kaitlyn Purcell 21:21
The world is going to end. Why is the world always fucking ending?
Khari McClelland 21:28
I dunno how to say this, but I feel like sometimes... I've had to observe a lot of like human life loss and precarity, so I have a different perspective sometimes about... I don't know, I feel like this is a weird thing to say, but I feel like a lot of you might be really sad because, like, things are really fucked up right now.
Khari McClelland 21:57
And I guess what I'm going to say to you is that... it's been fucked up for a while. And I just like I kind of live with that in my gut sometimes.
Khari McClelland 22:14
Just because, you know, for some, for some of us, it's been hundreds of years of incredible terror. And, you know, it's a great luxury to feel in this moment like something's wrong.
Khari McClelland 22:28
It's good to be agitated β to want to make things be different. When we start to become a little too comfortable with things being out of sort being unjust that's where if it feels like it's a problem. It's like that since the agitation is actually some kind of good fuel, I think.
Khari McClelland 22:48
[Song of the Agitators fades in]
Rita Wong 22:50
I struggle between being instrumental in wanting this outcome, and also just being unconditional that whatever happens we still need to do what we can. So it is late, but it is not too late.
Khari McClelland 23:14
Well here we are today, still pushing for equal pay. And these treaty rights don't hold. Their shiny like the Judas gold. Stain of blood still remains, a mother's only son slain. And our youth are crying out for more, continually being ignored. On that day, we will be family equal born and free. Dawn will come, night will cease. We'll rejoice, mind at ease. For that day we'll work and wait. That's when we'll cease to agitate.
Megan Gnanasihamany 24:32
So every morning, the Earth turns and day breaks over the horizon. And every night we spin away eclipsed by the planet's own great shadow, facing outward and away from the center of our solar system until we're back in the favor of the light. It's not so difficult to miss the sunset.
Eric Magrane 24:53
Draw a line. On one side of the line note observations. On the other side. write responses to those observations. Which is which?
Jessica Bebenek 25:06
I learned to rinse my hands with vinegar before lifting away the thin new mothers that formed on top of the brewed kombucha every two weeks. To tell mold from age spots, and to let go β to forgive myself for letting things turn too sour. The process of fermentation presents itself almost too easily as a metaphor. The way time transforms something bitter into something full of goodness; how the mother turns raw materials into something entirely new while simultaneously replicating itself. Perhaps we can follow in the footsteps of Susan Sontag's argument in Illness as Metaphor in which she insists that, quote, "Illness is not a metaphor." And that "The most truthful way of regarding illness, and the healthiest way of being ill, is one most purified of, most resistant to metaphoric thinking." end quote.
Jessica Bebenek 26:01
Likewise, perhaps the most truthful, or even the healthiest way of understanding fermentation is as it is β devoid of metaphor. Rejecting metaphor requires extending our feeling, stretching our empathy towards understanding something, not based on its use in relation to human comprehension, but towards attempting to understand it purely for what it is. To understand fermentation as not only a metaphor β because of course it can exist both to us as metaphoric and actual β is to understand it as a naturally occurring process with which humans are simply collaborators. And in understanding this, we can realize that this form of non-human life, this collection of symbiotic bacteria and yeast, is as vital a form of life as our own existence in the world.
Eric Magrane 26:53
Go with your gut, and repeat after me. I am mostly microbial flora. Great. How does that feel?
Rex Weyler 27:11
When do those molecules of apple become molecules of me? At what point? For me, I start to realize, well, you don't need to know that because it's just this constant flow. And that's part of the ecological consciousness as well β that we're not independent, isolated beings. And even though we have this skin, and so forth, that nothing about us survives or lives without this constant flow of energy, food, nutrients, and all of this. From an ecological point of view, there are no isolated things, and everything is a process. And everything is a process. So it's an interesting question, but maybe not that relevant to ask "when does the apple become me?" Because it was me before, and then me after, and it doesn't matter.
Rex Weyler 28:02
And, you know, this sort of ties into this, this whole idea of this expanded self. In human society, there have been many movements, which have proposed that we, that we expand the idea of self beyond the skin. So we have these social imperatives. And there's a social self. And we're one with our brothers and sisters all over the world. And we're a family. We've certainly bicker like one. But this expand itself doesn't stop with the human family, does it? And it doesn't even stop with all sentient beings. Because it's the soil and it's the rock and it's the earth and it's the atmosphere. Intellectually, we can arrive there. But emotionally and inter-relationship-wise, it's very difficult because we keep falling back into our language β which makes things out of all this process.
Astrida Neimanis 29:08
Bodies are not self-sufficient, zipped up in some diverse suit of skin. If imagining the sea as a body, however anthropomorphized, can help us understand its fatigue. What might it mean for us to imagine ourselves our human bodies of water as more oceanic? What if we understood ourselves to as whole ecologies made up of component bodies and supporting systems? What if the borders of our sovereign selves were to be a bit dissolved?
Astrida Neimanis 29:41
This is not only an ontological question of what a body is, or even what a body can do. It's a question of care. While our exhaustion can teach us something about the uneven distribution of sleeplessness as an index of other inequalities, it can also encourage us to consider multispecies ecologies of sleeplessness, and what it will take to help each other get some rest. We need each other. We are nothing without each other. Opening to share vulnerability, relying on each other, we might help hold each others fatigue.
David Abram 30:26
Then the long range migrations of certain creatures can only be a conundrum; a puzzle we'll try to solve by continually compounding the various internal mechanisms that might somehow in combination grant the creature the power to grapple its way across the world. But instead of hypothesizing more metaphorical gadgets, adding further accessories to a Crane's or a Salmon's internal array of tools, what if we were to allow that the animals migratory skill arises from a felt rapport between its body and the breathing earth?
David Abram 31:08
That a Crane's 3000 kilometer journey across the span of a continent is propelled by a felt unison between its flexing muscles and the sensitive flesh of this planet β this huge curved expanse, roiling with air currents, and rippling with electromagnetic pulses. And so is enacted as much by Earth's vitality as by the bird that flies within it. What if this dynamic alliance between an animal and the animate orb that gives it breath β What... what is this? What seasonal tensions and relaxations in the atmosphere? What subtle torsions in the geosphere help to draw half a million Cranes so precisely across the continent? What rolling succession or sequence of blossomings helps summon these millions of Butterflies across the belly of the land? What alterations in the olfactory medium? What bursts of solar exuberance through the magnetosphere? What attractions and repulsions? For surely, really, and truly, these migratory folks are not taking readings from technical instruments, or mathematically calculating angles. They are riding waves of sensation, responding attentively to allurements and gestures in the topological manifold; reverberating subtle expressions that reach them from afar. These beings are dancing, not with themselves, but with the animate rondure of the Earth. Their wider flesh, meeting β between oneself, one's creaturely body, and the vast body of the land.
David Abram 32:59
So perhaps it'd be useful to consider the large collective migrations of various creatures as active expressions of the Earth itself β to consider them as slow gestures of a living geology, improvisational experiments that gradually stabilized into habits, now necessary to the ongoing metabolism of the sphere. For truly, are not these cyclical pilgrimages, these huge creaturely hejiras, also pulsations within the broad body of the Earth? Are they not ways that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued flourishing?
David Abram 33:44
Think again then of the salmon. This gift born of the rocky gravels and melting glaciers. Above here, nurtured by colossal cedars and tumbled trunks decked with ferns, fungi, and moss. An aquatic muscled energy strengthening itself in the mossed and forested mountains, until it's ready to be released into the broad ocean. Pouring seaward it adds itself to that voluminous cauldron of currents spiraling in huge gyres, shaded by algal blooms, and charged by faint glissandos of whalesong. Until, grown large with the seas abundance, this ocean-infused life flows back up the rivers and tributaries, and spreads out into the wooded valleys; gifting the hollows and the needle highlands with new minerals and nutrient; feeding bears and osprey and eagles; ensuring that the glinting gift will be reborn afresh from the lump of luminous eggs stashed under a layer of pebbles. This circulation, this systole and diastole is one of the surest signs that this Earth is alive. A rhythmic pulse of silvery glacier-fed briliance, pouring through various arteries into the wide body of the ocean. Circulating and growing there, only to return by various veins to the beating heart of the forest, ravid with new life.
Eric Magrane 35:30
Go to a different elevation. What poems occur here?
Khari McClelland 35:36
I'm always kind of like, interested in like, who's not in the room? I guess I think about that, like, is this a space where my grandmother would be like, "Yeah, this is where I should be." And like, not just my grandmother, but like, so many of the people that I grew up with, who didn't have the luxury of particular kinds of education or particular kinds of experience. And are they actually less equipped to be able to provide solutions to some of the challenges that we're facing? Is there a kind of wisdom or brilliance that is overlooked? The mundane creativity that's practiced by poor folks, by women often, and how that sits inside of inside of here.
Nadia Chaney 36:26
People who would say to me over and over again, "I don't belong anywhere. I hate groups. I don't join groups. I won't go to school, I can't go to school." A lot of neuro divergence, a lot of children coming and feeling welcome to speak, and speak their mind, and be taken seriously. It just really meant a lot β like this place where people would continuously name "I don't belong, I don't feel belonging and I come here." And this here β there was no here.
Khari McClelland 36:55
There really is no way to presuppose what kind of miracle exists inside of each and every person. And when we look, and we think we already know what kind of magic exists inside of another, we've lost something.
Nadia Chaney 37:10
That's what I mean by inter-cosmological space. These whole like sets of knowledge could work together and come to life, and we would play with them.
Vicki Kelly 37:20
So in Anishinaabe way, we have our stories β we call them the sacred ones, the ones that are informing the worldview β the way to learn to view the world. And we call those sacred stories. And those sacred stories morph and form our imagination. And so the stories people us.
Vicki Kelly 37:48
Anishnaabe, the ones who were lowered here, were gifted with the capacity for language, but the language comes from the place. And the place is the sounds; the acoustic! And then when our language, respectfully, fits the place, and the place is singing it, and we're ringing it, it's a completely different thing.
Mark Fettes 38:23
I too, was thinking of Dylan Robinson and his citing of Leanne Simpson in terms of Anishinaabe internationalism. So thinking of the language as embedded in this web of interspecies, international in her terms, relations.
Vicki Kelly 38:43
And then we track the teachings of our relatives. So when we're tracking them, we have to know their names and their stories and their teachings, given this mythopoetic landscape, what we call the cosmology. And we call that way finding. We're finding the human way, the Anishnaabe way of walking in this cosmology, and the teachers are our relatives. In our story, in our sacred story, all the teachings that were gifted to the beings in the seeds of creation, were also poured into the human and overflowed into the body of the human being, as well as the mind. And so we don't know them only in our heads.
Mark Fettes 39:33
And so right across Canada, you hear and I'm sure in other parts of the world, you hear elders saying that the language is the way the land talks to us. That is in a sense, it's not our language, it's the land's language, which we have learned in order to listen better to what it has to say. So then, when the language has faded from daily use amongst the people, there could still be a sense in which much of the language is nonetheless embodied relationally in interhuman relations, and in interspecies international relations. And also a way in which even where those relationships themselves β as is usually the case β are also frayed, because of the same processes of colonization, capitalism and so on, dispossession. Nonetheless, if relationships can be re-established with the land, and a lot of knowledge has been transposed into English and other colonial languages about those practices, and the practices themselves are enduring and carried on and passed on. Then there's a sense in which language is also present in those things, even though it's not being spoken as the language itself at the moment.
Vicki Kelly 41:05
Robin Wall Kimmerer says that some of us, us the old ones, you know, we walk back along the path where our ancestors left, the broken pieces β the songs, the dances, the words, the ways, the ceremonies β and we pick them up, and we learn how to hold them; to carry them. We put them in our bundle. We have these words, we put them in our bundle, and they travel with us. Like a lens, they help us interpret. They help us to see in ways, that's where we use the phrase wayfinding
Mark Fettes 41:43
I think back to my entry into working with Indigenous people and thinking about the languages and my mentor at the time, my first mentor in this area was a woman called Ruth Norton, an elder from Manitoba, from Fort Alexander. And at one point, I was doing research on the Ruth's behalf for the Assembly of First Nations. And I had been reading the literature on bilingualism and so on. At one point, Ruth said to me gently but very firmly, "If some of our people don't speak their language, it doesn't mean that the language is still not deeply part of them. I don't expect you to understand that. I just want you to accept that."
Vicki Kelly 42:36
So the Haudenosaunee scholar Dan Longboat says "How long will it take our imaginations to naturalize here?" Right, how long will it take to morph, so that we can carry the teachings of the beings who are here as our relatives? As, respectfully, as they are given. Not interpreted. As they are given.
Eric Magrane 43:12
Choose a species you know little about, but that lives in your ecosystem. Learn everything you can about that species, then go find the species. Write what happens.
Marjorie Wonham 43:24
[Translating Pablo Neruda] You ask me perhaps about the Alcyonarian plumes that tremble in the pure origins of the Southern tides, and about the polyps' crystalline construction you have no doubt considered one more question, posing it now.
Eric Magrane 43:38
Find an urban ecotone. Stand there. Write a poem from the dual space.
Stephen Collis 43:45
Walkers are sometimes in flight. Have orbits that do not recognize the idiocy of borders.
Eric Magrane 43:53
Imagine a rise in sea level. How will that affect your elevation poems?
Hari Alluri 43:59
My dears, burglary has always been the surest way to get the gods to notice and give chase. Language, sunlight, the list goes on.
Eric Magrane 44:14
List everything that is natural around you. List everything that is not natural around you.
Cecily Nicholson 44:22
Sky is light grown over days, everything a coast of open bane, commerce winds up a bray coarse grit shoals dense blue green fluvial strips and the dark green delta dust β probably spores β hung in the air. Black apple fist fur fish and lumber. Gray deciduous claims heights all logged to stumps.
Cecily Nicholson 44:58
Conclaree has cht cht chp chp chp scoops blue ponded hard, to boat or hike you would fly, flap, soar and dart.
Stephen Collis 45:08
So give me the light of stars that strives to but can't quite reach us. The one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness, the wings blinding, forms beating, piercing, all songs singing, fragile light spiralling from every wood and window. The time now is for pirates, and possibly warblers.
Hari Alluri 45:29
And if I don't believe it when I say it, sunlight, language, fail me if you must. I know eventually you will. Divinity never forgets what's their's. The God's gave us healing willingly. We've been trying to return it ever since. Hand waving out front, shooing us away. They just won't take it back.
Eric Magrane 46:04
Stand up and put your arms out. The length of your arms is the circle of the poem.
Cecily Nicholson 46:12
We've learned to read the surface, like departed fluff and pollen husks. Phantom wings lighten up and fly away, wet and fall into soil, and a success of propagation rest and whetted loose trailing, roots dangle and venture.
David Abram 46:31
In the absence of the written page β the book β the land will be the visual mnemonic, and it will be speaking stories steadily to us, in various sites in the landscape, various powers potencies presences.
Robert Bringhurst 46:48
Yeah sure, the world, the land is the original page, if you like. And it's not written because it's constantly writing itself and erasing itself, and correcting or at any rate changing itself.
Megan Gnanasihamany 47:02
If the phenomena of the sunset is part of the natural, unfeeling world, and I find myself to be as well, then what applies to the sunset must in part apply to me. And if the sunset is beautiful, then the world must be beautiful, and I at least in part must be too. This revelation is present in viewing any great miracle of the random universe that patiently allows us to exist at the same moment as Northern Lights or Spring. And if looking is a practice of discovery, then the potential to find some similarity between ourselves and the sunset should be enough to sustain some faith in living.
Megan Gnanasihamany 47:41
So go now, and watch the setting sun. See its colors be devoured by horizons and skylines β the sky emptied out. There is nothing to prove. What gratitude, love and grace we might feel in watching the sunset has no recipient to greet it. And what good is a fiction of pure individuality when you are loving the world across the chasm between yourself and everything that is possible? The goings ons of chemicals in rotations, the marks of physics in their indifferent routines. We are so small in the glow of the setting sun. Nothing natural burns purely for our benefit. So love those last drags of light, and our love is reflected back β leading us into the quiet miracle of loving and being loved, with nowhere to go but on.
Vicki Kelly 48:40
And our responsibility, says Leroy Little Bear, our responsibility is to give it back through ceremony β respectfully showing that we're paying attention
Eric Magrane 48:53
Fifteen β Write a poem that takes place over 4.5 billion years. Thanks.
Chorus 49:00
The feet are the link.
Chorus 49:08
Between earth and the body. Begin there. Begin there.
Chorus 49:22
The lungs are the link between body and air. Between body and air.
Chorus 49:42
The hands, these uprooted feet, are the means
Chorus 49:50
Of our shaping and grasping. Clasp them.
Chorus 49:57
The eyes are the hands of the head; its feet are the ears. Its feet are the ears.
Mendel Skulski 50:22
This episode was composed with the voices and words of Michael Datura, Astrida Neimanis, Cosmo Sheldrake, Rex Weyler, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, David Abrahm, Megan Gnanasihamany, Stephen Collis, Eric Magrane, Hari Alluri, Nadia Chaney, Kaitlyn Purcell, Khari McClelland, Rita Wong, Jessica Bebenek, Vicki Kelly, Mark Fettes, Marjorie Wonham, and Cecily Nicholson.
Mendel Skulski 50:56
And with music by Cosmo Sheldrake, Anne Bourne, Meredith Buck, as arranged by Vanessa Richards, Jonathan Kawchuk, the Time Zone collective, Emily Millard, Khari McClelland, Ruby Singh, and Nathan Shubert. Field recordings by Julian Fisher, and our theme song by Sunfish Moon Light.
Mendel Skulski 51:21
A huge thank you to Erin Robinsong and Michael Datura, without whom these conversations wouldnβt have taken place. Thanks to Hollyhock for their generous hospitality and support, and thank you to Juliette Bertoldo, Megan Gnanasihamany, and Vanessa Richards for the help recording. And thanks to you, for listening. Donβt forget to take our survey, and to take care of yourself too.
Mendel Skulski 51:46
You'll be hearing from us again soon.