Water, freedom & anarchic mythologies

 Water, Freedom & Anarchic mythologies

 I want my anarchy to be like the Hamper of Gwyddno Garanhir and the Horn of Bran Galed. The hamper multiplied a hundredfold whatever food was placed inside it while the Horn is said to have possessed the magical property of ensuring that "whatever drink might be wished for was found in it". 

We’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Where exactly I can’t say for certain, but I think that we need to either go back and try a different direction or stop and make a plan because right now we’re lost. 

 I guess that some of us are stubborn, we just insist on pushing through, hoping that we’ll eventually stumble onto the right path, insistent on never turning around because we think that would be a waste of time. Who’s right? Maybe we should split up? 

Personally, I’m ready to go back to the place where everything was fine. Maybe we can find another path from there. We’re not getting anywhere like this. We’re just stumbling through history, crashing through the forest, mindlessly trampling over everything, ruining everybody else’s habitats. 

     Digital domestication knocked at my door, scratched at my armour. I looked through the peephole, peeled back a layer of chainmail. It crept into the space between me and my insights, my intuitions, my research, my autonomy. Like the putrid smoke of burning plastic choking my lungs, or the creepy sensation of the chilly titanium digits of a lifeless techno-predator feeling me up, touching and prodding, not my genitals, but my other “privates”, up here, in my brain and behind my eyes.  

     My free flowing, mysterious, multifaceted source, the original well, is being poisoned. I can no longer understand the trees or the rivers or the boulders or the sun. My world is shrinking, my senses are atrophying, I am becoming a mere reflection, the audience, the trope, the member, the consumer, the victim, the cliche, the image, the user, the object. Although the fact that I can still step out of the dominant reality-culture to reflect on the predicament means that there is hope, that maybe one day we will be able to rediscover self-creating lives. For now we can shun the seductions, keep our feet and bodies firmly against the door so that the intruder might just give up and go away.

         One version of the legend of the Caleuche claims that it is crewed by the drowned, who are brought to the ship by three mythological beings: two mermaid-sisters and their brother. Once aboard, the dead can resume an existence as if they were alive again.

         Now that sounds like the good ship anarchy! A place where the dead are resurrected, where the debt ridden, anxious, privatized, stunted proletarian, decaying under authority and drudgery can come back to life! Can take the oars and the wheel once again! 

          Unfortunately we live in the dystopian alternate version of the legend, the one where the mythical ship sails in the sea of  Civilization, captivating free people with its enchanting music, its seductions- Progress! Reason! Transhumanism! - to enslave them as part of its crew. And these captives seem eternally destined to have a leg folded over their back- making them awkward, disadvantaged, humiliated. 

     And so we gather together and we disobey, we mutiny, and we open the sails on a new morning. We begin our network of floating autonomous zones, of bobbing buoys and Bolos, of ships where our spirits and imaginations are resurrected. Navigating the seas, following the stars, far from nation-states and prisons. For many the call has been for “Land and Freedom!”. But we seem to have neglected water, our original nest, our majority element, the blood of our arteries.  

     Human infants begin life as water beings-nearly 80% of their body weight is water! And our brains are almost all water too. Tom Robbins says that humans were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another. So here’s to anarchic communes on the high seas, to exploring waters without borders, to boats and ships and rafts and floating eco-villages. Here’s to nomads travelling from shore to shore, free of clocks and cops! Let boat building become one of our shared ancestral skills that we may circumvent authority as we navigate the waterways of our utopian dreamscapes. 

           I don’t want to identify with the masters categories, I want to identify with like minded neighbours and friends. I don’t want to be pathologized, I want to reject the constraints that make me sick. I don’t want the comforts of civilization, I want danger to awaken my instincts.

     Nature is all about gradations. Where does the one start and the other end? There is an abyss inside of me full of fear and the demons of self-doubt. But there is also a mountaintop, where I can see the oceans of possibility that beckon us to keep trying, to stop feeding the masters, to find ways to experiment, to flee, not strictly as refugees, but as bands of explorers and rebels, looking through our scopes for land defenders to stand with, for communards to share food with, for dreamers to dance with on the decks of our rebel ships.

My family is beginning to die. For most of us, all we have is the immediate family. Where is my clan, my larger community? I look at the ruins and wonder-what happened? Who or what has torn the limbs away from my extended family’s body? Where are my kin? Who has stolen my habitat that I might confront them, attack them and perhaps try to reclaim it? 

Without a habitat we are dispossessed, we can’t experiment, we can’t put down roots and thus we become like dead leaves, passively blowing here and there. So while we escape onto the high seas, let us also look for isolated habitats in which to create our anarchisms, and let us paddle to the shores to join with those who already have one and help them protect it. 

What is the basic unit of anarchy? For some it’s the rational citizen of the municipality, happily skipping between neighbourhood assembly meeting, community garden and democratic workplace. For others it is the free, ungovernable individual, ecstatically dancing between passions and friendships and carelessness. For the ancients it is roaming the natural landscape, running between campsites and water sources, following the elk and singing to the spirits. For the futurists its transhumanists on a trip to an enclosed bio-commune on Mars where robots build gadgets and grow protein in labs. 

None of this matters anyway because when anarchy comes, when real, unstoppable chaotic joy and passion in the streets overcomes Normalcy, it won’t be stopping and asking any of us for directions. In the meantime take control of your life. Sit in a tree. Climb to a mountain top and gaze out at Possibility. Build a boat with friends and go get high on the seas...

A version of this was originally published in The Oystercatcher 

        

    

 Tree tongues

A blog by my friend Suijin. Grappling with the reality of what developing a sense of place through relearning local subsistence practices, while de-colonizing, looks like. 

https://www.nightforestpress.com/post/tree-tongues 

Riotous ecology

Riotous ecology 

Fires, either intentional or from lightning, have been a component of many ecosystems for millennia. We know that prior to colonization on Turtle Island, controlled fires were used by many indigenous peoples to alter their habitats in favourable ways. It helped facilitate travel by eliminating thick underbrush, increased the numbers of game animals and helped nut trees be more productive, among many benefits. It was a subsistence tactic that had been honed for generations. 

To the outsider arriving from dense, sedentary Europe, most of what we call North America appeared as pristine wilderness, large tracts of untouched or barely touched land. In reality the whole continent was, in a way, a vast permaculture complex consisting of an incredible number of variegated habitats maintained through a variety of practices, including controlled fire, which, on a very large scale, was also instrumental in helping set and maintain the boundaries between prairie grasslands and forests.

All life forms need habitats, but cities are not habitats. Beneath the pave is the forest floor, the potential garden, the smothered berry patch, the drained estuary, the buried salmon bearing creek. A city is not merely a different habitat form, a giant efficient nest. It is not the loci of everything advanced and complex and progressive of the human story, of freedom, creativity and self-consciousness. It is the elite’s lair, a place of dispossessed captives, where repressive apparatuses are ubiquitous, beginning with the town clock which helped ensure that the activities of potentially self-organized, self-directed and freely self-creating individuals are synchronized in the interest of the elite, of economic and political efficiency.

 Imagine living in a hell world where you can’t eat when you are hungry, nap when you are sleepy, drink when you are thirsty, relieve yourself when you need to, because an instrument is what dictates when you are allowed to fulfill these basic animal needs. That is urban-capitalist civilization- millions of people jarred out of their rest and dreams by an alarm and then all synchronized to follow the same daily patterns so that economics can prevail over individual bodies and their processes and desires. 

The insurrectionary arsonist who burns down not only the bank, the corporate headquarters or the police station, but random buildings, becomes, as that primal and deeply honest gesture unfolds and manifests, both an ecological and a spiritual person. It is a communitarian act in so far as it stands up against Power and injustice and in defence of their kin and neighbours. It is an unmasking act as it tears away the veil that camouflages the monstrous social order that is behind centuries of elitism, injustice and violence.

We need to reject, renaturalize or destroy the city, the central site of authoritarian control and the ideology that prioritizes property over life, hoarded wealth of the few over communities based on sharing, of obedient and weak captives over self-assured and strong individuals.

There is no future if we don’t stop adapting to capitalism and start adapting to nature. And every molotov thrown has a message inside the bottle that reads: “ I am sick of adapting to capitalism, of adapting to a world of bosses and landlords and elites, of supremacist thinking, of pavement and concrete and vistas denuded of life.” Sure it might not explicitly state that the preference is to adapt to nature, but if all coercion is removed, don’t we end up living closer to the way we’ve evolved, closer to nature?

And so I make this connection between ecology and riots, between making space for healing and regeneration and the arson of the present insurrection. 

Make no mistake about it, I know that this uprising was instigated by black people responding to a world that has been violently anti-black for 400 years. I don’t want to twist that truth to fit a personal outlook, thereby erasing collective black suffering and agency. It isn’t to claim that this insurrection is actually located within an ecological impetus. It is to note that we are always ecological beings and as such when we revolt we also do so against our conditions as potentially free beings living in healthy habitats who are presently captives in the giant work camps and prisons which are cities, many of us, especially POC, literally in cages.

When you want to build a dojo or a shelter,  or to plant squash or corn, when you want to build a communal storehouse for preserves or an arsenal for your clan, you need to clear an area. Be it a seasonal campsite for subsistence practices or for a more sedentary eco-village, we need to make space. Destroying urban property while rioting is the same urge. It is both an act against and one for. How else to set our imaginations free, to visualize not anything specific, but to envision Possibility?  If the terrain is completely occupied by the designs and interests of a select few and has been for a long time, then space must be cleared, and probably in a frenzy of resentment. Regeneration is impossible without death. Fires have been used to clear areas for food production, to make travelling easier and for other subsistence practices. I believe that riotous arson can be seen through this lens as well. What better way to confront our alienation as dispossessed captives, as living beings without freedom or habitats, than to burn down not only the guard towers and prisons, but everything in the way of sustainable food production, local potable water, a returning woodland for birds, etc?

Capitalism prioritizes commodities and private property over life. Ecology is prioritizing reciprocity and life over private property and commodities, therefore looting is taking action against a system that erases life and for a system that prioritizes it. Riotous looting is a way of transferring wealth.  A way of immediately using things which are on their way to the landfill anyway.  A healthy community would only produce for need or for pleasure and everything within it would be freely shared, so looting commodified objects is really just direct action against capitalism. 

Vandana Shiva said that as capital grows nature shrinks. So in that sense decommodifying is an ecological act…because the opposite is also true. As capital shrinks nature heals. So in fact the more arson and looting, the more refusal - to work, to accept normative ideas, to live in the desolate, concrete lairs of trade and political authority, the better chance nature, which includes us of course, has a chance to heal and regenerate.

Cities rest on a set of violent arrangements - landlord/tenant, rich/poor, police/citizen, included/excluded, etc. Within them nature has been violently destroyed. The automobile dominates all design imperatives. It’s inhabitants are alienated, atomized, ghettoized, with the vast majority seemingly sick with Stockholm Syndrome, giving and taking orders, obediently spending their lives producing and consuming. Complex and healthy eco-systems that can support large numbers of life forms are destroyed by cities, so destroying cities, and the bourgeois and racist myths of progress that support and justify them, is an act on the side of nature, of the primal, of the urge for self-preservation. 

Riots can pull back the veil and help put on display the violent glue that holds the city form together as well as the results of such (coerced) social arrangements: police, laws, hierarchy, political power, racism, surveillance systems, military-industrial logic, poverty, mental illness, destroyed eco-systems...not to mention that virtually every city was once the home of anarchic people because they had the ecological wisdom to make intelligent decisions about where their settlements should be located. Toronto, Manhattan, Ottawa, San Francisco...I saw a photograph of downtown Vancouver Canada that was taken in the early 1900s. It was still an old growth forest and Salish people were still trying to hold onto their territory. I believe that decolonization means not thinking differently, but living differently.

Cities - and the ideological foundations they rest on, are to anarchic impulses what heteronormativity is to queer liberation. Just as we are taught by the school system, popular culture, by Power and Official History, that heterosexual relationships are normal and necessary and that anything outside that belief system is suspect, perverted, hostile, threatening to societal stability, we are also taught that cities, from ancient Babylon, to Athens to New York, are the apex of human achievement, the centers of Progress and enlightenment, a step ahead of the ‘savagery’ of traditional indigenous life ways, of hunter gatherers, of nomads and experimenters and village dwellers. 

It makes sense to want to destroy what is ugly when the potential for the beauty of nature to manifest is a memory in all of our bodies and psyches. I don’t want cities, I want Wild-Life habitats for me and my kin.

We should hope that the tiger can escape its cage and celebrate when it does. 

We need an era of greater and greater fire frequency.