RESEARCH LINKS
DEATH WAIL BL ARCHIVE / SONGS FOR THE DEAD / SHAKING THE VIRAL TREE / LAMENTATION & MODERNITY / NTS FREEDOM TO SPEND / SPINELLI & MADISON / WAIL AF DEATH BL ARCHIVE / RICHARD POWERS, KINSHIP, COMMUNITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS / JARVIS COCKER RETHINKING AN ENVIRONMENTAL REVOLUTION / MUD & ANTLER BONE AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN SHAW EMERGENCE MAGAZINE / THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS / THE LORD GOD BIRD / 1 in 8 BIRD SPECIES THREATENED / UK CONSERVATION STATUS / BIRDS OF CONSERVATION CONCERN / AGNES MARTIN ESSAY ICA
Notes from Topic: Of Animacy Reading Group x All Flesh is Grass: On Embodied Language Time: Jul 21, 2020 07:00 PM Riga / 05:00 PM London: We’ve become dominant over other species or perhaps we’ve just stopped paying attention to the different ways of relating to the non-human. Susan Hiller looking into the last disappearing languages. The way life has been we haven’t needed the other forms of relation, letting it slip. Latin names as the embodiment of naming and categorising things. The human account of naming and categorising things through language. As humans when we have our own language how do we use it to understand or gain a different sense of consciousness. Naming and acknowledging is bound up in a source of power. Language and naming. Starting to attune oneself with a sympathetic gaze. Human language back to these other beings. The way we engage with everything is always going to be through an anthropomorphic gaze. Your experience will never be shared there is in this way also an otherness or failure to fully connect in the action of connecting. Young plants can connect through root crackle (research further). Moss are heavily gendered and usually studied by women, they are characterised by what they do not have. Nella Aarne on bird watching. I got into bird watching, walking through familiar paths and that they are full of life that you usually don’t see. there’s something about you beginning to notice. Hannah Toulihie artists, doing something that mimics another species as an echo. It doesn’t need to be what the animal does but a gesture!! To mimic is not enough but to create a language of empathy is more honest in some way (what does this look like?) Electromagnetic frequencies, The constant failure of language. A chemical exchange of plants.. what do we mean by chemistry? I kept thinking about this recently when dating again. I would meet someone and think ah there’s chemistry somehow before we even spoke. It’s not just a physical thing but a much more subliminal and nuanced exchange.
Notes while listening to Song for the dead: They are bodily representatives of mortality. We have marginalised death to a large extent. The body now, not loss or the afterlife. For people to try and make sense of trauma. Openness to lament as healing both personal and cultural. A culture of repression and restraint. The intimate release as part of the ritual of death. Her song gives voice to the grief, for someone to articulate grief for me, words for the living to cope with death.
Notes while listening to Mud & Antler Bone with Martin Shaw: Some animistic relation with the earth got lost. We need a tremulous falling back in love with Mother Earth herself. I know I am in love when I don’t tell it was it is. A difference between seeing and beholding. If you behold a tree you are just sitting in the presence of this. Western narratives begin there and end here. In other story telling a story can begin anyway. We are in the west addicted to climax but in myth the end of a story always jumps into its beginning. It’s the cyclical narrative. Amore, why is it you love her and not her, a particular relationship with a particular part of land, person or a story. Tell us about that curve in the ground and our heart begins to exfoliate again. This has a relation to remembrance. The request of this time are mythological nature. The lament of the dead Carl Jung. If you can’t hear the lament of the dead you’ve cut off all of your ancestors. If you don’t have ancestors you are haunted and surrounded by ghosts. To stand for a story to allow a story to go through you will allow you to lament and connected to the dead. We know a little about a lot of things, would you trade growth for depth. If you constantly move from one erotic to the other. A relationship with a patch of earth. The difference between being from and of a place. To be of a place involves you being alive to your own sensibilities. Trembling mysteries of a place. Are you prepared to trade comfort for shelter. Spiritual scarcity in the western world. When I wanted to get serious about myth I went out and lived in the bush for 4 years. I explored remaining pockets of English countryside living in a Yurt. Shelter not comfort. Your incompleteness is your authenticity is your longing.
Fragment from The Lord God Bird essay: The consensus couldn’t be clearer. Climate change is happening. It’s caused primarily by the burning of oil, gas, and coal. If we do nothing, the world will become significantly less habitable.
We’ve lost precious time, but if we act now—decisively and dramatically—we still have a chance at avoiding climate change’s most catastrophic impacts.
And yet, despite the fact that the devastating effect of human impact on the environment has become widely accepted as truth, despite the fact that the birds are truly falling silent, despite the fact that we have seemingly endless omens pointing decisively toward disaster—and that we believe these to be signs of an impending collapse—we have not managed to reverse the tide.
It begs this sort of question: Why are we inclined to strongly resist the disappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker, while the disappearance of three billion other individual birds has largely escaped our notice and failed to capture our imagination?
And this, perhaps, explains part of the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker. For this is a species that exists somewhere between a religious and scientific eschatology: between complete annihilation and heroic survival, between reality and myth, between a mark of our failure and hope for our absolution.
Tim Gallagher writes:
The bird is so iconic: big, beautiful, mysterious—a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with our relationship to the environment. There is such a sense of finality about extinction. I thought that if someone could just locate an ivory-bill, could prove that this remarkable species still exists, it would be the most hopeful event imaginable: we would have one final chance to get it right, to save this bird and the bottomland swamp forests it needs to survive.
THE FACT THAT there are those who continue to avidly search for the ivorybill and those who have long accepted its extinction speaks broadly to the human tension between hope for the future and resignation to the idea that things will come to an end and perish: We both log the forest and attempt to protect it. We both mourn the loss of a species and continue the activity that will result in the loss of many others. And we both resist and implicitly accept the fact that our own survival, our own apocalypse, hangs increasingly in the balance. The disappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker and other species become signs and omens of end-times that play out both mythically and scientifically in our collective consciousness.
Perhaps part of the answer lies in our predisposition to hearing eschatologies. While the data sets, predictions, and conclusions of science do not claim any final ending and are certainly not couched in religious language, we nonetheless are prone to interpreting them as such. Maybe the data is too painful or the solutions too large for our minds to comfortably hold, and so we seek another framework to hold this information for us. In the West, the cultural framework that we often turn to in these moments is biblical: God has ended the world before and God will end it again.
What if we didn’t jump straight into resignation but turned away from a future ending and toward the present, toward that which is immediately around us? Perhaps this is the real work to be done, here, now. Perhaps we can change the question from “How can I stop the world’s oceans from warming?” to “Where and how can I place my body, my senses, my mind, into direct relationship with the living world?” Such an orientation invites the possibility that at any point we might choose to engage differently with both endings and beginnings. We might turn away from the linear path—the image we have formed of the inescapable future—and ground ourselves in the present, where we can meander and explore, becoming open to the relationships that surround us, that we inhabit in every moment.