So of course I get my full-spectrum CBD from Bluebird Botanicals because they only uses hemp grown via regenerative farming. In other words: La lutte continue. Our struggle is a permanent struggle. To quote my favorite poem by Charles B:
Strike because the sky turns gray just before it blacks out.
Strike because when you were little your father told you too many lies.
Strike because the surf is up.
Strike because you are heartsick ...
Strike because things can’t go on this way any longer.
Strike because the thugs have replaced the thugs.
Strike because every grain of sand tells you the universe is an open field of infinite possibility.
Strike because you’re sick & tired of bait & switch.
Strike because the wolf howls in the garden’s translucent masquerade.
Strike because your grief overwhelms you and the other option is to sit at home and stare at a screen.
Over 3 days I was dropped off at several remote locations, scrambling onto rocks and climbing over into other bays to discover new shorelines. The plastic I came across was overwhelming, from all kinds of single-use items; plastic bottles, food packaging, household objects, toys, and fishing related debris nets, and line. From major drinks manufacturers bottles found on coastlines all over the world, to a kettle, an umbrella, and even a toilet seat. The image I created ‘WHERE? — No one wears a watch’ was inspired by the way the plastic presented itself on the beach in these secluded bays. The title came about by way of coincidence; one of the residents on the island of Sanday commented that on these islands, “no one knows what day it is, and no one wears a watch”. The very next day I found a child’s watch washed up on the shore. It is likely that the watch spent time in the sea — providing a metaphor of how long it takes plastic to break down – which can be up to hundreds of years ... Some of the objects I recovered and used in this image are listed here: Disney ‘Frozen’ watch, trainers, flip flop sole, fish sand mould, heel of a shoe, HP inkjet cartridge, Coca-Cola bottle, water bottles & caps, water bottle with Walker’s crisp bag inside, straw, plastic forks, plastic cups, yoghurt pot, comb, lighters, LEGO, golf ball, toy tennis racket, kettle, coat hanger, bicycle tyre, dog ball, floor mop head, toothbrushes, umbrella, bucket, nozzles, torch, plastic shell, reel, toilet fragrance holder, spade handle, half toolbox, medicine bottle, cup, print stamper, deep fat fryer lid, football, building blocks, toy doll, party popper, U-bend pipe, scouring brush, gun cartridges, Fairy Liquid bottle, plastic duck, knife handle, various wheels, dummy-soother, crisp bags, balloon & holder, various filters, flooring, fishing related debris; line, rope, buoy, net, tennis ball, blue bird, vintage Esso oil container, handles, and part of a sign with ‘WARNING’ printed on it. Which is to say that my pain’s naked grammar was: how doe sone go on like htis the days gone finally in a way that can’t be though I have a light on my face to hceer me and I took an advicl will take more take vitamin d fake every sunlight the world on fire ... The howls, cries, screams, shrieks, and whimpers of pain, and words like “that hurts!” or “I am in pain” or “that burns” or “this aches,” and various exclamations like “ow!” and “ouch!” and “motherfucker!” are undeniable. A dog or cat in pain is equally communicative. The look of a face in pain — even a non-human face — cannot be mistaken for a look of contentment. Winces, agonized expressions, leaking tears, and gnashed teeth are so, so ...
o dedi
o dada orzoura
o dou zoura
a dada skizi
o kaya
o kaya pontoura
o ponoura
a pena
poni
in the humus of the plot with wheels,
in the breathing humus of the plot
of this void,
between hard and soft,
ge re ghi
regheghi
geghena
e reghena
a gegha
riri
Because I,
I am there,
I’m there
and it is life
menendi anenbi
embenda
tarch inemptle
o marchti rombi
tarch paiolt
a tinemptle
orch pendui
o patendi
a merchit
orch torrpch
ta urchpt orchpt
ta tro taurch
campli
ko ti aunch
a ti aunch
aungbli
In other words, the new ICE training complex “will contain a multitude of basic, intermediate and hyper-realistic training devices, a tactical training warehouse, classroom facilities, and vehicle assault training area. The Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs requirement is for hyper-realistic training devices that emulate structures the teams will encounter across the United States and Puerto Rico, including rural, residential suburban, residential urban and commercial buildings.” Included will be a “‘Chicago’ style replica,” an “‘Arizona’ style replica,” and a “fishbowl” structure for supervised operations, each built using “Scalable, Portable, Modular” architectural techniques, such as shipping containers. These will allow ICE’s Special Response Teams to quote experience combat conditions in a training environment that truly reflects real world conditions, but in a controlled, duplicatable, and dynamic setting. Unquote. Combat conditions! That’s their language, not mine. The specifics are worth reading in full, as these simulations will be designed all the way down to “toys in the yard” and “dishes ... on the table.” Truly I live in dark times! This is a conversation about trees.
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree.
Truly I live in dark times. Now both the moon and the sun, shining from their sky paths, look after the People. Moila, the Moon, watches by night, and Temet, the sun, by day.
(No one can hide any wrongdoing
because they see it.)
They confront the discrimination they face through these masks; in their neighborhoods no one knows they work as shoe shiners, at school they hide this fact, and even their own families believe they have different jobs when they head down to the center of the city from El Alto. At the same time, there’s been a 29 percent population decline among birds in the US and Canada since 1970. That’s a net loss of nearly 3 billion birds. “The Swampy Cree have a conceptual term which I’ve heard used to describe the thinking of a porcupine as he backs into a rock crevice: usá puyew usu wapiw (‘he goes back ward, looks forward’). The porcupine consciously goes backward in order to speculate safely on the future, allowing him to look out at his enemy or just the new day. To the Cree, it’s an instructive act of self-preservation. Nibenegenesabe’s opening formula for the wishing bone poems (and other tales) consisted of an invitation to listen, followed by the phrase: ‘I go backward, look forward, as the porcupine does.’” Consider contrasting this with Walter Benjamin’s less optimistic notion of going backward while looking forward, as found in his Ninth Thesis on History: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. That which we call progress, is this storm. And now the earth opens up — La Cueva (The Cave), 2004, a photograph by Michael Lundgren. Where do you suppose that is? It might be Leupp, Arizona. I once got lost and ended up there. I asked some kids at the gas station what there was to see. And they asked, “Do you like crack?” I was like, “Excuse me?” But what they meant was this giant crack that opened up in the land; it keeps widening and sheep fall into it sometimes. People have gone down 500 feet or more, but there’s no bottom yet. So yeah, you are already communicating with plants. You are breathing and metabolizing each other at all times. Also, your third energy center, located around your navel, is where you are part plant. It is where you are the color yellow. This plant part of you is very watery, very emotional, and very giving. Plants are emotional creatures and will often communicate with you by giving you feelings. So, whenever you do a plant meditation, you can just start by noticing your feelings. Sometimes, just stand next to a plant, or smell it, and notice your feelings. Perhaps you offer your given name, your chosen name, your real name, or all your names. Perhaps you talk about your human and nonhuman ancestors, or where you were born, or where you live. Perhaps you talk about other incarnations, past or future or concurrent. Since plants resound with and are nourished by our dreams, you may offer a strand of your hair. But it’s between the two of you: when communicating with plants, some people hear words or music. Then when summer came I noticed lichens (plants that eat light and nothing more) growing on the trunks of the fruit trees like celestial skeletons. And so I must tell you a tale: the story of a Cyclops. There was once a Cyclops with hair made of stringed cottonseed (dyed blue) and a blue eye, with two equally large biceps that contained the strength of ten talking boulders and a vivid yellow building crane. So what do you think he did? You are tired of being right all the time. You are tired of having insights you will never be able to make anyone else understand. You are tired of this feeling. You are tired of being right all the time. If you are reluctant to wake up or wake up too suddenly, jarring the back, ignoring the windows in the room, small and grim and darkly solid in the bed, you have re-remembered. Re-remembering is the opposite of weeding. But it is not to be confused with planting. And if the stones and weeds and oceans in your stomach all die, well, to quote Greta, this is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. With today’s emissions levels, our remaining CO2 budget will be gone in less than 8.5 years. You say you “hear” us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I don’t want to believe that. Because if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And I refuse to believe that. [What can I say, she’s a kid. Evil is as evil does. Anyway:] The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences. To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5C global temperature rise — the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world had 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone in less than eight and a half years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. In other words, it only remains to pick up bodies, I mean
TO PILE UP BODIES,
what I’m attempting to describe here is what it is like to be ill inside “data’s dream” — that is, the way it feels when our bodies are imagined inside the network of information that constitutes competing version of our lives, one to which we have an alien and partial relation — and how data’s dream differs from the dreams of the incubants in the ancient world who got their prognoses and prescriptions from dreams inspired by the gods. My dreams in the book are meant to fit between the dream of data and the dreams of the ancients — to be a dreaming person in a dream / nightmare-like experience half-trapped inside the dream of machines which happen inside the legacy of all known dreams, too. So yes, I think our violability and fragility are not aberrant or totally horrible, but fundamental and sometimes positive aspects of all living things. We are not sovereign: we are not princes: we are not even, most of the time, what we think of when we think of a “self.” Wounds are like pores, in that what we once thought of as closed becomes opened, and our connection to everything else heightened, both what we give and receive. The sentence is footnoted: “I will let readers decide if I am here being sarcastic. There are many diagnostic tools on narrative competence that might assist you in this matter.” There are (perseverative?) repetitions about the Electric Light Orchestra, about shit-smearing, about Gerald Ford. There is a passage in which Yergeau quotes a science journalist to the effect that “autistics often seem to make no fundamental distinction between humans and inanimate objects, such as tables and chairs,” and attributes the line to “a chaise lounge named John Horgan.” On page 78 Yergeau quotes Kenneth Burke: “‘Madness,’ Burke warns us, ‘is but meaning carried to the extreme.’” On page 79 she does it again, word for word. One wonders: Was this intentional? Or just a copyediting mistake? And then one realizes: Don’t ask that question. It’s a trap! This is a book that seeks, among other things, to question the central role of “intention” in the history and theory of rhetoric, to “recoup rhetorics of involuntary acts” — such as arm-flapping, jumping, or other forms of ticcing and stimming — so that “autistic subjects [can] stake and deny rhetoricity by queering what rhetoric is and can mean.” These representatives of the counter-tradition spoke of souls whereas, again, we feel more comfortable with “individuals”, and they invoked infinite numbers of such beings in each body whereas we have lowered that back down to vast quantities. In any case, the counter-tradition has plainly proven to be the correct one, even if we remain sentimentally attached to the “one body, one spirit” formula. We still consider the acknowledgment that hands and faces are swarming with microbes to be impolite in most contexts, and this variety of biophobia has its spiritual counterpart in our effort to convince ourselves that Whitman is just waxing poetical and not capturing any real truth about himself and every other living thing when he invokes his own multitudes — that within the space of our own bodies, the ego has no amigo. Wrong. There is a fluke, the Dicrocoelium dendriticum, whose most stable home is the liver of sheep and cattle. But how does it get there, and how does it spread its offspring to still other livers of other livestock? It passes its embryonated eggs out in the faeces, which are soon ingested by a snail, who excretes the cercariae, or free-swimming larvae of the fluke, in a great slime ball that is in turn consumed by an ant; several hundred of these cercariae move down into the ant’s gut, but a single one of them seizes onto a nerve center beneath the esophagus and takes control of the ant’s bodily actions. Throughout the day, the ant is allowed to go about its usual ant tasks, but when night falls the fluke steers its host up to the top of a blade of grass. If the fluke is lucky and the ant unlucky, they together will be devoured by a ruminant; if the fortunes are the reverse of that, the ant will return to its colony for another day at dawn. But back to the seventies. In 73, the workers in the Lips watch factory in Besançon heard a rumor that their company, a French firm that at one time was one of the world leaders in watch making, was going to sell out to a Swiss firm. And the Swiss firm intended to fire all the workers and shut down the factory — as is the way of firms that buy other firms, a sort of ritual potlach they perform in order to show the neighborhood how tough and mean they are. Besançon was never a communist hotbed, but its factories had been radicalized in the sixties. In 67 there’d been a series of actions at a nylon manufacturer. Chris Marker filmed them, by the way, or not so by the way. He also showed films made in the Soviet Union in the early thirties, which documented working conditions and worker attitudes. Fast forward to 73. On June 12, having a prevision of what was up, the workers sequestered the management and went through the paperwork they had on them, discovering plans for a mass lay-off. It was then that they decided to do something that used to be done quite a bit once upon a time: they occupied the place. They decided to expropriate the expropriaters in real time. They declared that they were now going to manufacture and sell the watches and clocks themselves. As Andrew Kopkind, who reported on the takeover for Ramparts Magazine put it: “Operating capital came from sale of the expropriated stock. The bosses gave up without much of a fight and the French and European Left began a campaign of support. Thousands of liberated watches were sold on the streets of Paris, in London, Rome, Berlin, and Zurich.” All good things come to a bloody end in the struggle between labour and capital, of course. Near the end of the book, a student named Tchish is discussing these events with Dr. Arnoldi. Tchish has always been one of the fiercest critics of Naumoffism (the philosophy that since life is pointless we should all kill ourselves). He is an ardent socialist who still dreams of the revolution, when the working class will rise up and there will be happiness for all.
Dr. Arnoldi sighed. “Oh, you’ll get tired of that, too, one day.”
“You’re an awful pessimist, Doctor! Really, you’re worse than Naumoff,” he cried.
“Perhaps.”
“Then why don’t you shoot yourself, Doctor?” sneered Tchisch.
Again the doctor fixed his small, expressionless eyes on him. After a time, he answered:
“Why should I shoot myself? I’ve been dead for a long time as it is!”
I am sure that when Thayer read that paragraph, a little spark flashed in his brain. It set off other sparks, and they spread and flashed into a vast and awful vision which he knew he would have to get onto paper. And so he set about the task with his usual gusto, transporting the doctor from the steppes of Russia to the tenements of New York, and fleshing out the nightmarish vision in grim, relentless detail. And he was secretly writing another novel, too, but not just any novel. Thayer intended Mona Lisa, which was set in sixteenth century Italy, to be the longest novel ever written. The final manuscript — all handwritten — clocked at 46,000 pages. The first three volumes appeared as Mona Lisa 1: The Prince of Taranto in 1956, but alas, Thayer’s readers had slipped away by then, and the book was a flop. He was trying to cut the remainder down to more manageable size when he died of a heart attack in 1959. Does anyone know if the Australian sound poet Ada Verdun Howell is real? She supposedly wrote a book called Exit Strategies (zero copies in WorldCat) which includes a 400-stanza poem that begins
Eanie Meanie Minie Meanie
Mo Mo Moonie Minie
Eanie Moonie Moonie Meanie
Oonie Eanie Moonie Me
and plays changes on that all the way through. I would dearly love to read it. So please let me know if you know anything. Cool.
So huge above the wind
Strange and mammoth near the vapors
I eat arid faces beneath the spirits
We Reach! The stink is gone
Strangely comely near the fire
You poke electric teeth before the flock
We Reach! The life is dying
So huge above the wind
I dispel wanting eggs in the vapors
Way cool! The pleasure will vanish
So dark before the fire
You violate colorful eyes under the vapors
Zounds! The heat will vanish
Quite red within the flock
We prod hot fears about the earth
Crazy! The stink will vanish
Quite luminous among the trees
Quite electric over the spirits
I sense heavy leeches against the towers
Intense! The evil will come again
Totally colorful in the vapors
You stroke dream-like demons on the bullshit
Alass! The sin was hard
Quite luminous among the trees
You expel poisonous balls against the dreamscape
Alack! The night was good
The wind has come up suddenly and powerfully; I pause to consider what this might mean. One of the participants at our Council placed prayer ties in the trees surrounding the patio, augmenting the energy of the Tibetan ones. The sudden gusts are at least 24 mph. I learned to estimate from living for several years with the two climatologists. They are fictional characters but still they taught me about weather when I was writing the book. I sent a group of photos I took of Elephants in Botswana and Namibia to a friend. Notice the light on the ground in this one. It can only emanate from the Elephant himself. We had been with him for several hours as he led us, tested us. This is our last moment with him.
[Note: Sources: JBR; poster slogans from May 68; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “Strike!”; Mandy Barker, quoted in Marcela Teran, “Artist Mandy Barker onboard Beluga II”, at Greenpeace, 29 Aug 017 (“Greenpeace UK archived content”); JBR; Anne Boyer, The Undying; Antonin Artaud, “Te Return of Artaud Le Mômo” (tr. Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador), at UPenn; Geoff Manaugh, “Imperial Hyerreality”, at BLDGBLOG, 12 Sept 019 (refers to a US General Services Administration purchase request for nearly one million dollars’ worth of “hyper-realistic training devices”); Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity” (tr. H.R. Hays), quoted in Lew Rosenbaum, “Two Poems on Dread, Dark Times and Trees: Adrienne Rich and Bertolt Brecht”, at Chicago Labor & Arts Festival Blog, 9 Mar 015; Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”; Susan Suntree, Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California; Federico Estol, “Shine Heroes / Héroes del Brillo”, at Federico Estol Photographer; JBR; Candice Norwood, “Significant Digits For Friday, Sept. 20, 2019”, at FiveThirtyEight, 20 Sept 019; Jerome Rothenberg, JBR, and Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (tr. Harry Zohn), another proposed commentary for an anthology-in-progress; Prageeta Sharma, and James Thomas Stevens, quoted in “Prageeta Sharma and James Thomas Stevens”, at BOMB, 17 Sept 019 (a record of a conversation that took place during a visit to the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe); JBR; Amanda Ackerman, “Plant Poetics & Beyond: Plant Meditation: How to Communicate with Plants”, at Entropy, 17 Sept 019, and “The Book Of Feral Flora [Extract]”, at The Learned Pig, 21 Nov 2018; JBR; Greta Thunberg, “If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them”, at Guardian, 23 Sept 019 (“This is the speech Greta Thunberg delivered to the UN Climate Action summit in New York on Monday” [23 Sept 019]); JBR; Antonin Artaud, “Van Gogh the man suicided by society” (trs. Catherine Petit & Paul Buck), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 23 Sept 019; JBR; Anne Boyer, quoted in Shoshana Olidort, “Undying and Reparative Magic: A Conversation With Anne Boyer”, at Harriet, 23 Sept 019; Michael Bérubé, “Autism Aesthetics”, at Public Books, 23 Sept 019 (a review of Julia Miele Rodas, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe, Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, and Ralph James Savarese, See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor); Justin E.H. Smith, “Vessels of Others”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 12 Sept 019; Roger Gathman, “Review of Behemoth: the history of the factory and the making of the modern world”, at Limited, Inc., 14 Sept 019; JBR; Chris Mikul, introduction to Tiffany Thayer, Dr. Arnoldi, at Ramble House; JBR (a Wikipedia entry is the only evidence I have for the existence of Howell); bits of three computer generated poems using Language Is A Virus; Deena Metzger, “Morning Thoughts to Reverse Extinction”, at Ruin and Beauty, 20 Sept 019]
