Walton Ford.
FLOCK THEORY
“ Magic then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different than ours. For it is likely that the “inner world” of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of our Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with animate earth. We are only human in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. ”
David Abram.
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
- Robert Haas. from ‘Praise.’
“ In today’s world the notion of the ‘entirely original’ is not just an impossible position, but also an uninteresting one. At a time when both knowledge and experience goes through intense interbreeding with the virtual, culture will reproduce in exciting, hybrid ways. My work would probably be unique only by virtue of the fact that it does not remain rigid in pursuit of absolute originality and instead becomes a flexible processing field to engage with and disentangle the million signals that enter my system every day.Terms such as ‘local’ and ‘global’ are not absolute binaries any more. They can be used in academic discourse, but they hold little value, except perhaps as mere tools of description, while you are actually making work in the studio. ”
Jitish Kalat.
ESSAYS: experiments in spaces, native and otherwise. not sure if i like writing these yet (images are not mine but captions don’t work on this).
RE: JONATHAN FRANZEN, I LOVE YOU TOO
You may or may not have read the recent Jonathan Franzen article in the New York Times, Liking Is for Cowards. Go With What Hurts. If you haven’t, you should read it here. It’s wonderful, as is to be expected, and after reading it I spent the rest of the day throwing sideways glances at my iphone while mooning after every bird that passed. He has, as a writer (and a person I’m sure), the uncanny ability to change your perspective in a few fleeting pages.
The essay is essentially about technology and the inherent problem real loving poses to the kinds of technologies we have become increasingly enamored by. How, the more wedded to technocratic living we become, the more poorly prepared for the kind of dirty, soul-bearing work real love requires. It’s full of cutting observations, admissions, and truisms, but more importantly for me, it’s full of birds.
Love, he says, is always specific.
Meaning, the idea of loving everyone, of concerning yourself with a whole planet, or even, the idea of a general passion toward life as a whole, is something we as humans might just not be wired for. We are creatures of specifics, and as love goes, are only capable of its alternatingly brutal and beatific qualities if the source is something more explicit than a general idea.
Franzen then tells a great story about his relationship to environmentalism, starting with his early life as young person enraged with the state of the world, angry at conditions, duplicity, complacence- angry with love for a planet he could not save. So he stopped. He actively stopped caring to avoid the kind of selfishness that comes from unspecific loving and went to pursue those things that made him happy.
But then he fell in love with birds. And he goes on to make a beautiful observation about how the specificity of that relationship, as compared to his former general anxiety for the planet at large, allowed for a connection to the environment that was simply impossible before. He was able, through his love of birds, to not only re-connect with a cause that was not about him this time, but to better cope with the despair that comes with connecting to an environment under siege. Because you can’t stay in your room, wringing your hands if the lives of your loved ones are on the line. And so their specificity compelled a selflessness in him that allowed for something greater than misery.
Professor David Orr talks about this idea often, this notion that, to be effective as an environmentalist or even just as a human, a person must first find gravity. The problem being of course, that our society raises us to have a distinctly opposite relationship to the places we inhabit, that the education system teaches only about other places, other times, raising adults that graduate from Harvard or Yale or the Colorado School of Mines with obligations to no place in particular. With knowledge that is mostly abstract, and equally applicable in New York or San Francisco.
In short, you can’t defend something you can’t define. You can’t love something you don’t truly understand. You can’t care if you’re preoccupied with yourself. Without specifics, you can’t ever really connect.
Seems easy enough.
But think about it. What do you know of the land you call home? Its watersheds, native plants, average rainfall, or even, what it might have looked like before IKEA replaced the blue horizon with their own. What large mammals used to live where you get coffee, and do you care? Even for those of us whose lives are focused on something other than bioregionalism or conservation- what do we really know of things that define us. Language? Textiles? The torrential history of wine or water? Have we taken the time to get explicit with our passions? Or are we trying to save the forests without knowing the trees?
Granted, our culture does not celebrate the kinds of thinking that lead to specific understandings. We leave our homes. We check our phones. We flit with schizophrenic urgency between places and imagined futures. We are rarely here, and when we are, we are not listening, let alone loving.
And yes, as both Franzen and Orr suggest, technology isn’t helping. We have gone from a place-specific nation of regional cultures to a country of kinetic, globalized selves whose collective and independent myths of identity can exist now largely outside of the context of place. We don’t need to be present to live our lives.
I guess what Franzen is saying is, You’re right. You don’t. No one is saying you have to be present. But for those of us who are concerned, however unspecifically, for the lives of non-human creatures that do need a here, love is the only real way in. We simply cannot indulge the self-centered fury that caring for such a fundamentally fucked minority seems to incite. We have to turn off the news and stop the endless stream of hopelessness barraging us on a global scale. We have to find a way to stop choosing battles and start celebrating those things we love more than we love ourselves.
Nature doesn’t need your altruistic misgivings. She needs a populace motivated by something bigger than obligation. So find joy. Find that thing you love nonsensically, and, as Gary Snyder has written, Dig in and defend it.
THE NEW SINCERITY
The New Sincerity isn’t something most folks are used to discussing, and the word out there anyway, on the streets of wherever literary and musical folks draw lines in the sand to delineate movements from other movements, is that where it does still endure is only in the circles of poets and philosophers, which of course accounts for its absence.
But even for those whose lives are not preoccupied with the invented taxonomy of swells in art and literature, the New Sincerity is worth knowing, if only for the ways it is unlike a movement.
In short, the New Sincerity is just that: real, direct, emotive and un-ironic. And in a post-modern world defined by its relationship to sarcasm and sharp wit, the poets and musicians of the New Sincerity stand starkly out against a landscape of cool. They are definitively uncool, nostalgic, slick-less, and sentimental. They are witless with romanticism. Essentially, they should have been eaten alive.
And in a lot of ways they were. Most critics see the movement as dead or dying, and none of the bands that were originally grouped within its receding ilk made big money or started any revolutions. For all practical purposes, it is seen as a failed experiment in earnestness.
I disagree. I feel like I see it everywhere, not least in the places it never officially existed: art, fashion, and photography. And maybe it’s because I’m looking, because I can’t stand to live in a world where sincerity is something that can go out of fashion, but I swear the eagerness for sentimentality is staging a comeback.
Take the images of photographers Neil Krug and Ryan McGinley. These artists have built cult followings on images that are wrought with the kind of imagined romance that post-modern art has done its damnedest to stamp out. They are gritty, accidental, young and irreverent; they long for magic, they fantasize, they raise up beauty. They do not care that we are looking while they reach for god, or each other, or some invented vintage past. Nothing about them is trustworthy or “real,” but they are completely without ironic pretense, and their success lies in just that- they make us feel. They vibrate with the hardcore melodrama of first crushes and folksongs. So much for intellectualism.
Leonora Carrington, the great and newly late surrealist painter said, “Sentimentality is a form of fatigue.” And she was right, I think. To want to over-feel, or to immerse yourself in longing, is to be tired in a way, and with regards to art and poetics today, it is to be exhausted. We are tired of being funny, of being anonymous, of celebrating harshness and acidity and even ugliness. We are tired of organizing the strangeness of being human into satirical one-liners and harshly lit portraiture. Some of us are just looking for the feeling you get when you’re smoking a cigarette with sea wind at your neck. Some of us want heat and brilliance and open space again and art that takes us by the hand to a place specific enough to inhabit.
And that’s something these photographers are bringing us. In every image, little of the industrialized world is present, and where it is, the contrast is so great that they feel like lost artifacts, relics archived from some future past.
We are immersed in the authenticity of the places, the people, and the out-of-body moment where art and life collide to make place a negotiable entity. The landscapes are so general as to become specific, unlike places most of us will ever see, but oddly familiar, like counties we drove through as bored teenagers, soaked in that muted cast of sky. They are shared locales, collective histories, sum-ups of lives none of us had but we all remember, and their connection to the earth, both in setting and nakedness, make them all the more feral, miraculous, and animate. And for me, ever the more sincere.
The odder thing is the success of these artists, whose images reflect nothing of the diligent and cosmopolitan selves we all curate as we move through life. For a society so above vernacular culture, folkisms, and living simply, we’re sure spending a lot of money to decorate our walls with just that. All over New York, expensive lofts are filled with expired Polaroid images of naked kids running through the New Mexico desert. That’s a strange thing. But it tells us something about what it means to live among the throb and thrall of urban spaces, what we miss and what we’re looking toward. That perhaps all our urbanity has neglected a kind of raw exposure to place and body that we cannot define, but can certainly try to buy back, at least in print.
The good news is this: sincerity isn’t over, nor is it confined to literary servitude. Nor is it a movement in any real sense of the word. It’s just a gaining sense of wonder and permission to be as naked and sandy and turned on as you can find room for under whatever desert sky is closest.
OF A PLACE
To be “native,” one must have originated in a place. I am a native Californian because I was born here. But to my mind it is much more than that. To be native is to be of a place- a product of not only the physical environment that defines a locality, but also its culture, its conventions, its stories. There is a tether that runs through all natives of all places, a line connecting them not only to each other, but also to a history and a future that they share as people and that they subscribe to as truth. In this way, I am not native of here, or anywhere for that matter. I am untethered.
Joseph Campbell talks about this extensively in The Power of Myth, not so much as it relates to place, but how the stories that guide our cultures keep us working toward similar truths, preserving similar ideas, and rejecting the same kinds of agreed-upon evil. Essentially, the stories define a society and keep things moving forward well. The rules of the game are set and people know who they are within that story.
For a long time, religion played that role for people, and whatever the faith, it set a sort of parameter to work within- created rites of passage, emblematic time markers, ritualized ways of assigning value, and expectations of responsibility to land and kin. These ways of being made us native, defined home and family and other, and more than anything, defined community- the where and what of belonging.
What happens when that story stops being told, or changes, or fractures until there are many partial narratives pulled from incongruous sources and applied ad hoc? Campbell suggests that’s when everything falls apart and a society is left grappling with the uncomfortable position of un-truth, that is, a story without parameters. Nothing is more or less true than anything else, gods are dead, truths are negotiable, and realities are defined by the egos of individuals and governments.
Take American teenagers for example. When do they become adults? Who prepares them for what that means? In what ways are they responsible to their communities and homes or to a higher power? Who oversees this radical transformation with guidance and direction? Often no one. Campbell would say that is what it looks like when a story breaks down. It stops guiding people because it is no longer universal between “natives.” Life become a kind of choose-your-own-adventure story, an occasion most humans are not equipped to rise to.
I don’t think it’s all that different when connections to place start to fracture. Part of nativity used to mean understanding a place with a thoroughness we as modern folks can’t even imagine. This was of course because survival relied on understanding your home’s physical dimensions- its animals, its soil, its weather. But with that perfunctory understanding also came belonging, a connection to place that informed some of the deepest parts of who we see ourselves as. We learned connections to time, to death, to our role in the community: hunter, seer, artisan, shepherd, leader, medicine person- our roles were defined by place and what that place needed and gave. Our nativity in essence wrote our story and became and inextricable part of our ideas of self.
And it was through those places that we established control, chaos, awe- all the experiences that gave our cultures weight.
Were they, on some level, imagined fictions? Of course. But they were also true because within the boundaries of the places we knew as home, they were tried and confirmed everyday. It is only outside the context of the place, of story, that they start to come apart.
This is not an argument for ignorance, far from it. It is a question: Why did “we,” as people, leave our native places? Do we look at “natives” with pity and think that their lives are myopic in some way, that we, in our untethered state have left behind the trappings of our homeland cultures and ascended to some kind of “universal truth,” some greater story which gives us comfort as global citizens? Or do we feel, as I do, a profound lack of connection to any story, any place, any reliable truth? What have we traded to become global?
I would argue we’ve traded much. We have of course, gotten much in return, the value of which is still up for debate. For me, I am homesick for a sensation of belonging that I know I have never even experienced directly. Maybe it’s genetic memory, maybe its romanticism, maybe it’s just knowing that people used to be able to look up and know the birds above them by name, and that I can’t, and that that feels subhuman somehow, like a communion I’ve given up my place in. But I know the names of car companies and computers, and jeans sewn in countries where I also couldn’t name a bird, and that makes me long for a knowledge defined more by experience and less by object, for a tether to a truth small enough to understand as home.
