Ask not “who am I?”, But “who might I become?”

 https://www.nightforestpress.com/post/ask-not-who-am-i-but-who-might-i-become

  Nature is the marvellous that the surrealist seeks

By Shaun Day-Woods

One of the most ubiquitous expressions in surrealist writing is the word ‘marvellous’, a term which harkens back to Andre Breton’s original declaration. In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, the founder of the movement wrote ‘Let us not mince words, the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful.’

With this in mind, what does the aphorism “Nature is the marvellous that the surrealist seeks”, from my book “Dancing and Digging, proverbs on freedom and nature,” mean? Most of the adages in the book were intended to be provocative and not have a single correct answer. And I must admit that my own use of the word marvellous, as a surrealist term, might be considered idiosyncratic, or even, a misuse. But let me thread a weird little web that might capture your interest and help you understand the maxim.

The surrealists have typically expressed themselves artistically - in paintings and poetry, etc. And while there are deep political, philosophical and psychoanalytic roots to their explorations, beliefs and experiments, they tend therefore to be largely situated within the art and literary milieus. This makes a lot of sense for a number of reasons. One of them being that surrealism rejects the notion that humans are uniquely and essentially rational beings in a rational cosmos. And what better spaces to look for the non-rational than within artistic ones?

But if Breton wanted to help us escape the prison camp of reason as the defining characteristic of human selfhood, then advocating for a reconnection with a landscape-as-home, for an embrace of the natural world in all its chaotic, convulsive beauty, seems like the best place to start, rather than in the universities and art galleries of cities. Because in my view, and, apparently, in the view of many surrealists, the non-civilized have the easiest and most direct access to the marvellous. Breton believed for instance that the lifeways of 19th century Caribbean peoples led to a natural contact with the extraordinary by virtue of their implicit rejection of rationalist belief systems in favour of a surrealist utopia of a constant and organic immersion of the senses in their magical landscape of occult religion, mystical beings and thriving flora and fauna.

Throughout its history there have been many observations made by surrealists that note how the non-industrialized “colonised”, “the primitive”, etc, lived lives unencumbered by the constraints of bourgeois life, by the cages of rationality and belief in a simplistic cosmology based around monotheism and causality.

Breton’s personal collection included many ethnographic artefacts he considered strange and wondrous originating from cultures outside of modernity and capitalism, for example North American indigenous masks, a small statue from New Guinea, Aboriginal markings on bark parchments and an amulet from the Solomon Islands, all indicative that being embedded in nature leads to cultures that are filled with expressions of the marvellous.

The surrealist of history was an activist wanting to overthrow the regimes of order, obedience and alienation, and the resulting boredom and miserabilism, that rule the lives of the modern citizen, regimes that have sovereignty not only over entire countries, but over cities, neighbourhoods and individual bodies. The subconscious became a source of an unfettered, raw and authentic reality. A single person could use techniques like automatic writing or drawing to access the subconscious and discover a truer, freer aspect of one’s Self and to explore suppressed or latent landscapes that were out of reach from the long repressive arms of the law and morality.

As the overthrow of capitalism, or modernity, became less and less likely, surrealism focused on artistic experimentation and convivial nights among comrades as the means to access the marvellous. Creative processes and art shows, games, experiments, drugs...I've personally explored all of these myself, some in excess, as part of my personal tactic of survival and resistance against the police and priests in and out of my head. But what I have rarely come across were exhortations and attempts to not simply withdraw your psyche, for limited time periods, from urban civilization, but to withdraw your body as well. As Breton and others clearly pointed out, the so called primitive, the un-modern, the one who still lives among gods and spirits, who obeys no political authority, who has no banks or landlords or police or bosses, who lives embedded in a habitat, they are the ones who experience the marvellous the easiest and, in fact, seem to be perpetually immersed in the wonderments that the surrealist seeks. Therefore it would make sense if surrealists were more vocal in advocating a withdrawal from city living and its domesticated culture and be fierce advocates of various primitivisms in order to live existences that are filled with the marvellous.

It is my view that the less domesticated we are, the more marvellous we become. Let me rephrase a now famous slogan - “beneath the pavement is the marvellous”. In other words it is in tearing up and destroying cities, with their massified, repressed lives, utterly disconnected from nature, that the marvellous - the spirits, the monsters, the unknowns and the dreamlands will have space in which to return. Cities intrinsically crush and erase the marvellous, not make space for it. In this sense, a rediscovery of our kinship with nature is the easiest path to lives filled with the singular and fantastic, not merely a passing art exhibit, evening with friends or artefacts on our wall, not that this is the surrealist practice or vision, I am speaking here to all of us who reject the precepts of modernity, who seek raw truth and more beauty.

We need to see ourselves as marvels within habitats of marvels, for this is the gift of the cosmos we have been given. Every aspect of nature is a breathtaking wonder. I seek a world in which we delight in the uniqueness of each other and of every iota of the planet we live on, not only of specific creations of human culture. We can move in this direction by withdrawing from civilization’s stunted world and forming unions of imaginative beings embedded in landscapes in which we daily interact with all of its marvels.

I've often noted how boring humans seem to think we are compared to other creatures, and yet we are as wondrous as any of the myriad other curious and bizarre beings that populate our landscapes.

Many surrealists have been enamoured with insects, leading one commentator to describe them as “totemic” within Surrealism. This is another example of how nature has always been viewed by surrealists as inherently marvellous and the primary place we should be seeking it. Cities are boring, civilization is boring, work is boring, school is boring...but what the earth has birthed is anything but. Who can deny the awesomeness of bear claws, of the scent of pine needles, the shriek of eaglets, the snake hissing nearby, the flavour of maple syrup...if one seeks a cabinet of curiosities, one need only walk along any shoreline or through any woodland.

 Un-domesticating ourselves will lead to our renewed ability to experience what is marvellous about each separate aspect of the planet and cosmos we inhabit...its flora and fauna, its sun and towering mountains, its hurricane funnels...dreams, sexual encounters, psychedelic adventures...the clouds, the stars, the galaxies...even darkness and light and the foggy unknowns in between. Embracing the chaos, with its surprises and mysteries, of undomesticated realms, including our own inner ones, will lead us to lives populated by the marvellous at every turn. Un-domesticating ourselves helps us see the miraculous improbability and singularity of every moment.

Even the marvellous needs a habitat. I speak of nature not as a place that one would seek out in order to temporarily experience the marvellous only to return to the planetary work-machine refreshed, but to destroy the planetary work-machine so that the marvellous can expand, can find new places to take root, can once again be as much a part of daily life as drinking water is. In fact the simple act of drinking water, and the sensation of water itself, can return to us as supernatural experiences.

The marvellous is most easily found where the a-rational resides and in sensual wisdom, by having such deep connections to a habitat that we can commune with its spirits, ghosts, hidden secrets and secret languages; it is accessed by being free to self-create and explore without constraints.

We can resist the tyranny of the belief systems that crush and deny and render extinct the intangible marvels of our landscapes. Let us heed the Surrealist call to demand the impossible, and let us do so by adapting to nature rather than capitalism, and in so doing, make ourselves marvellous, for it is in the realm of the undomesticated and organic where the unfettered spirit of Surrealism flourishes the easiest.

This essay recently appeared in The Oystercatcher

On Parks

 On Parks

Anyone who enjoys mountaineering, hiking, camping or exploring valleys, caves and canyons, is grateful that parks exist. They are a welcome respite from the hustle and bustle of urban living, an opportunity to delight in the slower rhythms, fresher air and greater diversity ofplant and animal life. Parks are refuges, oases of green in the otherwise dreary grey of concrete and pavement. The local and federal land areas put aside to a large degree for conservation and public enjoyment exist not only to provide a cherished escape from civilization, but a sanctuary for wildlife, whose habitats are fast disappearing under the guns of housing developments and industrialism. Parks, it would seem, leave little to complain about.

Recently, however, it came to my attention that some folk, particularly indigenous peoples, did have some complaints. And, as I did a little research, it didn’t take long for me to discover that these complaints weren’t frivolous. In fact, there are many real concerns around these seemingly benign oases. There is even a largely unknown history behind them, one whose basis continues to this day.

Indigenous peoples and parks

Most federal parks, not only in the US, but in Canada and indeed throughout the world, were once part of traditional indigenous territory. Following their introduction, millions of indigenous peoples around the world were forced out of their habitats.

Why has the public accepted this? First and foremost because parks have been viewed as necessary, benevolent tools for the conservation of nature. Secondly, many people have a personal stake in their existence, providing their only possible escape from urban living. And finally, most people simply aren’t aware of the displacement of those millions that was necessary for their establishment. And so activists, radicals, reformers, and green minded people have accepted them without much critical thought.

Parks seem to be bulwarks against continuing encroachment into wilderness, and thus storehouses of flora and fauna for a future regenerating nature. However, perhaps its time to reconsider whether parks and conservation areas, as we know them, are a significant, long-term solution to the destructive madness of industrialism and to look more closely at what wilderness is and the impact parks have had and continue to have, on indigenous peoples everywhere.

America’s, and the world’s, First Park

In 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed a Land Grant bill giving nearly 40,000 acres of federal land “encompassing Yosemite Valley to the state of California for public enjoyment and preservation.” The grant deeded both Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. This was the basis for the creation of state parks as we know them today: setting aside “scenic” lands simply to protect them and to allow for their enjoyment by the public.

On October 1, 1890, the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square miles of ‘reserved forest lands’ soon to be known as Yosemite National Park. But where did this land come from? Twelve years earlier, it was taken from a people known as the Miwok. The Mariposa Indian War, a territorial grab and an effort to subdue Indian autonomy, was the necessary precedent that led to the possibility of that first park being created.

Indigenous people have lived in the Yosemite region for about 8,000 years. By the mid-nineteenth century they were primarily of Southern Miwok ancestry. However, trade with the Mono Paiutes from the East side of the Sierra for pinyon pine nuts, obsidian, and other materials resulted in many alliances between the two tribes. There were plenty of acorns there and deer were abundant, making this a desirable place to settle. In fact, it had one of the highest densities of aboriginal peoples on the West Coast.

After the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1848, thousands of miners came to the Yosemite area to seek their fortune. Naturally, the local First Nations fought to protect their homelands. In December 1850, a trading post was destroyed at Fresno Crossing, and three settler men were killed. Later, a force under Sheriff Burney clashed with the Indians on January 11, 1851. As a result of this opposition to the invaders, the Mariposa Battalion was organized as a punitive expedition under the authority of the state to bring an end to the resistance.

The Battalion entered Yosemite Valley on March 27, 1851. Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, the company physician, who later wrote about his awestruck impressions of the valley in The Discovery of the Yosemite, wanted to “sweep the territory of any scattered bands that might infest it.” He is also known to have had a take-no-pris- oners approach to the conflict.

Three companies were formed and launched several campaigns. Indian food stores and even some villages were destroyed and tribal peoples pursued into the mountains through snow and slush. “Expulsion from the Park deprived the Miwok of their traditional hunting grounds, grazing areas, fish runs and nut collecting groves. When they tried to take anything back from the whites, they were resisted with guns and then hounded out of the area again by the Mariposa Battalion.

Ironically the veryword ‘Yosemite’ is, according to Simon Schama, a term of abuse used by the Miwok to describe the Americans who were assaulting them and actually means “some among them are killers[2].” Eventually all of the associated tribes were defeated and were forced to accept reservation life. Military units administered the park while the state continued to govern the area covered by the original 1864 grant. Civilian park rangers didn’t take over from the military until 1914.

The extraordinary landscapes that made Yosemite desirable from a scenic point of view were actually the result of the Miwok’s land use practices, primarily a direct outcome of the intentional burning of underbrush. After their expulsion, the activities of early entrepreneurs, tourists and settlers, (the construction of hotels and residences, livestock grazed in meadows, orchards were planted, etc,) wreaked great damage on the eco-systems, painstakingly and properly tended for so long by the Miwok and their ancestors.

We find this pattern of outlook and events recurring over and over again in the creation of parks in many places: a) the notion of wilderness as a place that doesn’t include people living there b) the recognition that an area has exceptional scenic, wilderness or industrial resource value c) the area is protected by being turned into a park d) the expulsion and dispossession of its inhabitants who were often largely responsible for creating and/or protecting its beauty/resources in the first place.

The Miwok petitioned the U.S. government in 1890. They called for compensation for their losses and denounced the managers of the park. “The valley is cut up completely with dusty, sandy roads leading from the hotels of the white in every direction... All seem to come only to hunt money... The valley has been taken away from us ...or ... a pleasure ground...” Their pleas were ignored and further evictions of remnant Miwok settlements were made in 1906, 1929 and as late as 1969.[3]

Canada’s first national park

In 1871, AS A CONDITION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA JOINING Canada, the Canadian Government had to agree to build a transcontinental railroad linking BC to the rest of the country. Of course, the construction of a transcontinental railroad also established a claim to the remaining parts of British North America not yet integrated into either the Canadian or America nation-states. It comes as no surprise that Banff National Park was created in 1885, the year of the defeat of the Metis Rebellion, which cleared and opened the west for settlement, tourists and capital investment.

The official story goes that in 1882, Tom Wilson, a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway, “discovered” Lake Louise, the most accessible centerpiece of the park, on the way through the Rockies. A year later the Cave and Basin Hot springs were discovered by three railway construction workers. People began to flock to the site, hotels went up and the town of Banff was born.

The truth, however, is that it was people from the Nakodah First Nation that guided Wilson to the Lake. In fact, they already had a name for it, they called it “The Lake of the Little Fish.” The Nakodah (also known as Stoney) are descendants of the Dakota and Lakota nations of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, part of the large Sioux Nation.

The name “Stoney” was given them by white explorers because of their technique of using fire-heated rocks to boil broth in rawhide bowls. The Nakodah were familiar with the area, having lived throughout it for at least several hundred years. They knew the trails and passes as part of their hunting grounds. There is archaeological evidence pointing to human occupation going back at least ten thousand years, but apparently the Nakodah came from somewhere around the Mississippi after an outbreak of smallpox in the 1600’s.

In any case, by the time the Railroad was being built, the mountains were part of their home. I’m not aware of any uprisings to protect their homelands, however the “Stoney” were signatories to Treaty 7. (In order for the transcontinental railroad to make its way across Canada, it had to go through what were recognized as the traditional lands of different aboriginal peoples. So it was important for the Canadian State to negotiate Treaties with the distinct tribes living along the route to allow the railroad to be built.) Regardless, the whole territory was evidence of long term harmonious human occupation, much like Yellowstone.

Sadly, during the first decades, park managers would do regular predator hunts, believing that mountain lions, coyotes and wolves, for instance, should be killed to save deer and elk. And now, only a hundred and thirty years later, many of the Park’s eco-systems are threatened, as are several of the animals who live within it, and the Nakodah live on a reservation.

In its 2007 annual report the Parks Canada web site states: “Parks Canada continued to work with the Siksika Nation and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada to resolve the outstanding specific claim in the park.” The claim is by the Siksika First Nation. Furthermore, in May 2000 the Siksika threatened “ to occupy Castle Mountain in Banff National Park to pressure the federal government into handing it over. The Siksika, who live east of Calgary near Gleichen, say they’ve been trying since 1960 to gain control of a 68-square-kilometre parcel that was used by their ancestors for rituals.[4]”

The Siksika are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which consists of four different tribes, the Pikuni/Peigan, North Peigan Pikuni, Blood/Kainai, and Blackfoot/Siksika. Banff is the most heavily developed national park in North America, entertaining more than five million visitors a year and has been the site of fights between environmentalists and developers. Environmentalists claim that added development “will put added stress on a fragile lake region where grizzly bears, lynx and wolverines are already threatened by the presence of as many as 20,000 tourists a day.[5]”

Closer to home

In 1989, I WENT TO THE SAVE THE STEIN VALLEY GATHERING. I joined with many others and climbed to alpine elevations in the Valley, near Lytton in southwestern British Columbia. I spent a couple of days listening to First Nations elders and activists and scientists from near and far. The non-native activists spoke primarily of helping to preserve an intact and unlogged watershed, a “pristine wilderness.” The First Nation elders spoke of protecting their traditional territory and of a hope of regenerating traditional ways.

The U.S. Wilderness Act states that parks are places “where man himself is a visitor who doesn’t remain.” But isn’t it industrial modes of living that threaten the organic world? Isn’t it how we live, and not simply our presence, which really makes the difference? From an essay by Marcus Colchester:

Many indigenous peoples remain perplexed by western views of what conservation means. “My Dad used to say: ‘that’s our pantry.’ We knew about all the plants and animals, when to pick, when to hunt,” remarked Ruby Dunstan of the Nl’aka’ -pamux people, who have been trying to prevent the logging of their ancestral lands around Stein Valley in Western Canada. “But some of the white environmentalists seemed to think if something was declared a wilderness, no-one was allowed inside because it was so fragile. So they have put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves.[6]”

The fact is that humans, like every living species, need a habitat. Call it a territory if you will, but we need a place that we know intimately, that creates us as we create it. And because indigenous peoples in North America had this intimacy, it was incumbent on them to protect their land bases from incursion and invasions, especially destructive ones. After all, as Ruby Dunstan pointed out, these were their “pantry”, land bases that were part of their sustenance and their lives in myriad ways.

The lands weren’t untouched by humans. In fact, humans lived within most of the “wilderness areas” that became parks. To an outsider they appeared “pristine’, “untouched”, “wild”, but, in fact, they were closer to a type of permaculture on a grand scale. Humans had inhabited many of these “wilderness areas” for lit rally thousands of years. That they were so rich in their abundance as well as appealing in their natural beauty is really a testimony to the organic ways of their human inhabitants who were determined not to spoil their pantries but to respect and understand them.

The Stein Valley, like Yosemite and Banff, was a living example of harmonious human occupation. The valley had been significant to the Nlaka’pamux people for thousands of years. It provided for them. There are a large number of pictographs still visible today throughout the valley, from small single symbols to one of the largest pictograph sites in Canada. At Asking Rock near Stryen Creek, the Nlaka’pamux can stop to pray and ask permission to travel the valley safely.

According to the organization BC Spaces for Nature

Evidence of the Nlaka’pamux’s inhabitancy is found throughout the valley. Where the Indians once wintered in gigantic pithouses at the confluence of the Fraser shallow depressions of their winter storehouses can still be found. Numerous culturally modified trees, cedar trees with large, rectangular strips of bark missing, can be found near Teaspoon Creek. This small grove of cedars provided an important source of fibre for cord, clothing, roofing, basketry, and insulating materials.[7]

In 1993-1994, protests in Clayoquot Sound, also in British Columbia, reached a climax with nearly 800 environmental protestors arrested. This was the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Needing to heal the fracture between itself and many environmentalists, the government at the time doubled the provincial park land-base in BC. As a result the Stein Valley Provincial Park was created as an area to be co-managed by the Lytton First Nation and BC government. There is allowance for the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park to be used for “spiritual” activities, but I don’t know at this time whether the Stein is also being used for subsistence activities or not.

Asia, Africa, India and Latin America

While we have been focusing on North America, the park model was actually exported throughout the world, forcing millions of tribal peoples out of their habitats/territories. The practice continues to this day in Asia, Africa and India, for example, where non-profit foundations and United Nations sponsored organizations are eagerly trying to protect what little land is left that hasn’t been destroyed by industrial modes of living.

Unfortunately, be it the Twa peoples expulsion from Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Maasai from the Amboseli National Park in Kenya or tribal people in southern India forced out of the Indira Gandhi National Park as part of an “eco-development” scheme funded by the Global Environment Facility, parks and conservation lands remain one more force which dispossesses tribal peoples. In Africa alone, one million square kilometers of land has been expropriated for conservation over the past one hundred years. Estimates in India range around three-quarters of a million people pushed off their traditional lands for conservation, in Africa the number is likely in the millions. Unfortunately, and ironically, land that has long been occupied and protected by indigenous peoples continues to be deemed “wild” and therefore suitable for “conservation” primarily by having them declared parks, thus making them out of bounds for the indigenous peoples who maintained them in the first place.

What happens to the people who once lived rich, meaningful lives within these habitats? They become like you and I. Dispossession leads to rootlessness, discouragement, depression, inability to be self-reliant, bad nutrition, broken communities, severed kinship ties, and anger, too often turned inward or directed to the nearest person.

I think we need to realize that dedication to creating parkland and conservation areas does not necessarily coincide with helping regenerate ways of living harmoniously with a habitat. More often than not it promotes a misanthropic outlook that posits intact, healthy land areas being by definition “human-free’’, rather than capitalism-free. We tend to ignore the fact that indigenous peoples seeking to maintain or renew their traditional life ways need to have access tothese areas, especially if the parkland in question was actually part of their traditional territory.

Even liberal organizations like UNESCO have begun to realize that there has been a negative social impact associated with many protected areas. In some places in Asia, Africa and Latin America, provisions have been made for local control so that traditional lifestyles might continue. But these tend to be limited “buffer zones”, where the original inhabitants can control “development projects”. These attempts have not succeeded.

Apparently coalitions of indigenous peoples have had some success in forcing international bodies to recognize their inherent right to manage their traditional territories. “In the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), the World Conservation Congress and the World Commission on Protected Areas all adopted new policies and resolutions which strongly endorse indigenous peoples’ rights and promote the co-management of protected areas, based on negotiated agreements.[8]” However, these organizations aren’t arguing for free access to one’s habitat, but to “negotiated agreements” with outsiders and centralized authority, and land bases integrated into the scheme of state regulations and subject to the pressures of politics and the market.

Regardless of some recognition, many parks and conservation areas, especially in impoverished countries, remain part of the greater theft of traditional homelands by arrogant, powerful outsiders who impose their views of what constitutes healthy habitats. It isn’t parks and conservation areas that will help stem the tide of destruction and plunder, but recognition that new ways of living are required. And these new ways can be informed by the old ways ofland based people.

Traditional Habitats and territories

In several parts of the world and in some parts of Canada many of the old ways have been lost, or nearly so. In the Pacific Northwest, however, this isn’t the case. It seems sensible to promote a return to the traditional ways of the people of the land, because, as we have seen, the empirical proof is there for long-term harmonious occupation. Naturally, in some countries, there could be real challenges for some peoples regaining control of these parks in order to live according to ecologically harmonious principles because it would mean reawakening and re-learning buried systems of subsistence and self-organization. There are also new environmental limits that might conflict with traditional life ways. But the simple fact remains; if it is their land, it must be returned.

Backhome, in Canada, in the Pacific Northwest, radicals can focus on protecting areas from industrialism and capitalism, while also arguing for the free access to those lands by the people whose territories they have always been, rather than for the creation of parks. And, if the lands aren’t under claim by an indigenous nation, why not consider making them your own home, regardless of what the authorities and misanthropes have to say?

New Booklet out

 https://www.nightforestpress.com/dancing-digging 

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. 

post-literacy

    I lugged my collection of books from town to town, across a continent, from place to place, for 40 years. It has always felt like if I didn’t have them, I didn’t have the knowledge or insights they contained: “Medicinal plants of the PNW”, “Against His-story, against Leviathan”, “TAZ”, “Foods of the indigenous peoples of British Columbia”, “How to make wild mead and wine”, “Living My Life”, “The Castle”, “ Les chants de Maldoror”... But I recently moved to a new place. I brought my collection of books and when it came time to unload and store them, I began to refer to them as ‘boxes of words”. “Damn it, another 50 lbs of words! I can hardly lift this thing!” Quantifying their content in this way was a liberating moment. I had finally put them in their place. 

Books are not literally knowledge or wisdom or insights - they are paper and ink and glue, the congealed labor and alienation of workers, commodities in the marketplace. And they are heavy! I have boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves of words. And once again I get the sense that I’m merely an object of history, a cliche, a passive being who has internalized enlightenment and civilized values and aspirations. Like the bourgeois who wants to live in their own castle, I’m the philosopher with his own library! 

 The emergence of literacy and its role in society is a large and complex topic,  one deserving of much debate and conversation. But it’s important to me that the reader of my essays is aware of my discomfort with, and ultimately rejection of, literate-centricity. It seems implied by the writing and publishing of my thinking that I must view literacy as a neutral, if not necessary or important, tool in the spreading of ideas. But this is not the case. In fact, I believe that a better world, an anarchic one, would have difficulty making a place for it. It would have to be an imposition, a misplaced, ill-fitting carry-over from the old world into the new.

Literacy presupposes many relationships between humans and between humans and their environment. 

Is orthography more important than say community songs and dances? In an ecologically sane, imaginative, horizontal world, are there going to be school buildings in which we are forced to sit quietly as children, being taught how to write and spell, or will we be at the river learning how to fish, or in the field learning how to gather medicinal herbs and edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its machinery and oils and noise, or honing our oratorical skills at gatherings? Will we be in the machine shop making parts for the press or reciting poetry from memory to our lover in a meadow? 

To my mind, books are like cars or computers or electric guitars. We make use of them today, within the context of this particular social order, but I assume that we have no intention of  maintaining the cultural values and social relationships necessary for their survival in a post capitalist world without centralized political power enforcing a homogeneous culture on a population. If anarchy is renewal, is a liberatory explosion of the imagination, a rejection of coercion, of monolithic lifeways, then I fail to see how literacy would survive in such a de-commodified, horizontal, de-massified existence.

I admit that I have greatly benefitted from books, from poetry and radical theory to how-to and fiction books. I’ve been enriched by their possession. But I’ve also enjoyed my toaster, electric piano, disposable lighters and automobile and sincerely hope and doubt that any of these would survive the dismantling of the global grid of authoritarian institutions and a rediscovery of our kinship with nature.

   Historically elite classes kept a great deal of knowledge to themselves, keeping the peasantry ignorant of important facts, which made literacy and books sort of levelling tools, a way to even the playing field. Clearly, in that context, we seem better off with them. But are we really? Aren’t there other ways to impart important knowledge? If all the municipal buildings and the banks were burned to the ground, if there was no longer records of ownership or debt as everything was freely shared, what sort of information would still be necessary to record and store?

So I am encouraging us to look more closely at literacy, the social order and relationships that created it and the way it forms our thinking, reinforces unhealthy habits, and reproduces oppressive and uniform social orders.  I am also speculating that truly free people deep-rooted in habitats would probably not pursue literacy. Without elites that have an interest in keeping certain knowledge for themselves, facts and philosophy would be shared and debated equally through daily activities, not contained in books.

Books are not just one feature of a beautiful web of learning. They are more like the hub of a mechanical wheel, with a set of hard spokes emanating from it. Each spoke represents a static, simple fragment of what might have been a holistic and complex culture. One spoke points to the alienation and coercion inherent in schooling as an institution, another to the ossification of language as the organic is forced to bend to the inorganic, another to alienated labor making the machinery and paper and ink and glue, and yet another points to a society of experts and the division of labor, etc. It seems so obvious that, given the choice, only some people might choose to maintain literacy and books, but many others, likely most, would not and it would be difficult to argue that the literate culture would be superior to the illiterate. In fact the literate one would plainly need a social order very similar to the one we are trying to dismantle!

There is a big difference between language/oratorical skills and the ability to communicate using script. If we were to live in organically self-organized communities that are entrenched in habitats, would we have an interest or the time to teach script and copy texts? Wouldn't we be busy mending fishing nets, making medicines, repairing our structures, preserving food and other daily necessities of survival? Isn't it likely that as authentic communities form and separate from the massified cultures of capitalism, localized dialects would emerge? Does it make any sense for local dialects and languages spoken by small numbers of people to have their own script? To what purpose? 

Without authoritarian institutions, private property records, large homogeneous territories controlled from above,  there would be an explosion of new languages blossoming over the planet as centralized control, colonialism, compulsory education and mass media disappear. We know that there was once an enormous diversity of languages, and that they were erased by economics, political imperatives, outsider interests, subjugation, invasion... If this is the case, ridding ourselves of these forces would lead to a re-emergence of this diversity. And in that scenario, why would small villages, isolated regions, roaming clans of nomads, experimental unions of egoists, autonomous tribes, etc ever want to take the time to build a script that reflects their language, perhaps only spoken by a few hundred or thousand people?  

It seems plainly ridiculous to assume that literacy will endure everywhere or even anywhere where anarchic social relations prevail. I doubt that the interest, ability and energy will exist to ensure its universal continuance. A few texts in some places might be copied and reproduced in some fashion, but we shouldn't project a literate world into a decentralized, non-industrial, de-massified and ecological existence. It seems much more likely that the average inhabitant of any given area will be expected and encouraged to nurture highly developed memory and oratorical skills rather than literate abilities. Of course there are social and pro-industrial anarchists committed to maintaining urban civilization, and, in the beginning at least, they would recognize literacy as an essential cog in that machine and therefore try to maintain it, but it would likely be a difficult proposition if coercion were truly absent, and overtime the effort would fail.

In the meantime I want to encourage face to face conversations and debates, public speaking, memorization of texts and other forms of direct, non-literate communication not only among eco-radicals, but among all who truly want  demassified societies, anarchic relationships and orientations, authentic upheaval, etc. Even reading to each other is probably better than reading alone. Instead of handing someone a zine or an essay, why not try to memorize it, make it your own in some way, then share it with your friends/comrades/neighbours? 

Memorization, public speaking talents and the ability to take the stories and ideas of others and make them our own can be powerful tools and skills in our struggle to dismantle the psychological and propagandistic institutions that dominate our lives, to help open our minds and hearts to what is truly important and re-discover new ways of learning about and sharing them.

Artisans

Artisans



“I consume, therefore I am” the radical poster humorously proclaimed, satirizing the more famous philosophical dictum “I think therefore I am”.

But there is no human essence, no defining kernel of fate and determination.  We contain multitudes. We can create ourselves.

Under the rule of coercive authority, we have become stunted and shrunken. But we are nevertheless not just consumers. What’s missing in order to form a more accurate picture of what primarily defines a domesticated person today is the other side of consumption: production. “I produce, therefore I am” seems as accurate as “I consume, therefore I am”. In fact the two descriptions, combined together, are nearly the whole personality picture, unfortunately, for the conscripts of capitalist civilization. Each of us is expected to produce and consume, this is what citizens do.

Human the tool-user we are taught. Homo Habilis. Somewhere along the way we lost our abundance of defining characteristics, our multitudes. Are we not dreamers and fornicators as much as we are producers and consumers? But urban civilizations spread their reductionism until all the dreamers and naked savages were taken hostage behind the walls, absorbed into a living hell. From now on, they were told, you must divide your organic lives into measurable units. Dream time will no longer melt into conscious time. From now on you will labor for the Pharaohs and the Kings. Accountants and landlords and priests will rule your world, not grandmothers and shamans and your own imaginations. Whatever skills you have will no longer be used for the family, the clan, the tribe, but will be used to produce commodities for the Market or products for the Empire. The Market became dominant and colonized imperial strengths. Thus today humanity has as its main adversary the Imperialism of the Market. From being wild women of the jungle and wild men of the forest, we eventually became wage slaves in the cities.

And the once free peoples stopped singing as they wove their fishing nets, stopped lying lazily, happily, in their comfortable hammocks, smoking their medicine, telling stories, fornicating. From now on they would chant sad songs as they broke and hauled stone for the hierarchs pyramids, tilled the soil and sent their children to war for the King and Queen or huddled on small reservations, dispossessed. At least until they too became forcibly integrated into urban civilization. And so the uncivilized became the civilized and went out and conquered other free people.

But there was a beginning when work didn’t exist, when play and community were basic ingredients in lives freely chosen, when reciprocity assured equality.  A time when ungoverned individuals knew that selling one’s labor for a wage is a form of slavery. And there was resistance to the spreading Empires of the urban hierarchs everywhere they came to impose themselves, to elbow the natives out of their habitats.

     I am an artisan. I make objects out of clay. I make vessels of every shape and size: boxes and cylinders and three sided bottles. I make tea-pots and bowls, cups and plates and candlestick holders. I also create individual pieces, intended for contemplation or for inspiring conversation.

     Does this make me a mere producer for the market? Is my pottery, the product of my labor and imagination, of my sweat and time, left with any meaning, beyond that of a commodity? Do the ones which I give away, to friends, family and neighbors, for free, escape their place in the capitalist scheme of things? Naturally I hope that somehow there is a separate value, a use-value that transcends its exchange value which gives my work, and therefore a big part of my life, meaning, regardless of whether it is given or sold or even stolen. And the joy in the process must count. Or is all the positive really just self-delusion?  Isn’t the whole things just a job?

      I ask because I like conversations, because I want all of us to think about our place in the social order.

     Clay play existed before horticulture, before the dawning of cities and ruling classes, before the market and private property.  Among the more sedentary peoples, those who used a delayed-return system, vessels were created for medicine, to keep water cool in the hot sun, to store food for another season and to collect salt.  And among both the nomadic and semi-sedentary peoples, figurines were fashioned as magical amulets and talismanic objects, jewelry beads materialized from the imagination for the living and the dead. Beautiful and mysterious creatures made for blowing air into so that music could lull and soothe the ears.

      No one signed their creations, no one left their imprint trying to make a name for themselves, seeking personal immortality or wealth. The creators contributed to the greater good or made offerings so that the gods might smile down on everybody.

     But what of the later humble village-based folk traditions, which survived for millennia and in fact still exist in some places today? Could they not offer inspiration, an opportunity to help us leave behind the fame seeking, shallow celebrityism and pretentious claims to intellectual and creative superiority widespread in art milieus? Why not encourage village potters, village weavers ? No need for galleries and curators and lifetimes spent deciphering arcane vocabularies and fetishizing producers of cultural artifacts. No need for anxiety and self-doubt if one isn’t accepted into a sub-cultural scene.

     And yet there is something unpleasantly proletarian and dull and self-sacrificing in the image of the humble artisan dedicated to producing only what is utilitarian, ignoring the opportunity to experiment, to play and explore, to manifest expressions of the marvelous and the impossible. Sensual and creative skills are all non-alienated languages. They offer the opportunity to use non-verbal methods for communication and inquiry.  Creative skills provide both a look through a different opening as well as a language to communicate what is perceived, thus sharing with others a different facet of our experience.

     Ultimately, mustn’t we refuse to legitimize market imperialism dictates of social roles, like “artist”? Shouldn’t we be creating for our friends or clans or communities and not for the market? But here we are. Trapped in an era, inmates of our atomized and privatized lives, conscripts of planetary institutions of domination. And it’s not just artist/artisan that are problematic, all roles and labels that we choose from are pre-cut clichés formed by the interests of urban civilization. Drug addict, tourist, rock star, vegan activist, laborer, soldier, mayor, religious believer, they’re all scripted characters, costumes we choose (or are given) from the small wardrobe offered by the current social order.

 
      The masters have made it so that living costs money, and money is our congealed labor, our imaginations and life energy spun into commodities.  And so I answer my question: indeed even an artisan, like everyone else, is but a component in the reproduction of capitalist social relations, an example  of the dictum that: “I produce therefore I am”.  But I am ready for a world without commodities, to join with others to terminate this social order so that we can use our creative skills as methods of inquiry and exploration, and voluntarily and joyfully create what is needed and desired by our kin, not what is demanded of us by the Market and Authority.

Artisan X