FLOCK THEORY

i’m really interested in information and how we get/trust the information we get/trust. also, i love wikipedia. not because it’s real or right, but because it is, in its myriad falsity and authenticity, always true. i love it not because it is reliable, but because it changes; because it helps us understand and draw connections while severing any real ones. i hate it for all the same reasons. it is very hatable. and lovable. and unavoidable. so i’ve been making some poems of it: 




THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA

This article is about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. There is no (disambiguation)

Much happened.

Much happened before Korea
and then there was Korea
and then the halves
which was the mark of the thing happening.

Much happened.
Of which you and I were parts
even before we were you and i
when we were still Joan and saints and Yu
and even before that,

back,         to when stories had beginnings.
And of which we are more so now that we have bodies.

Much happened which is impossible to pronounce in the same language under whose signs we say love with capitals and with mouths—



 

What God let you die that way.

_




LOVE

For Daniel McGowan

This article is about the historical sea route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Arctic waters of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. For other uses see Northwest Passage (disambiguation)

Fully navigable. That is to say, we can get around this, too.

Only just not all of us.

Condolences white bear. Super sorry Inuit! Two of a kind of only one kind: the penny and the oil drum. 

                   When God closes a weatherdoor, He always opens a window—

Fully navigable.
That is to say, finally.
Finally the word means the thing.
Passable distance.
Circles inside circles.

Unless of course, you’re not a swimmer. 

But think of all the new ways to use archipelago in a sentence. At last we find it time to open all that watertalk we jarred for seasons without.

And we’ll need it. A hundred words for snow. A hundred for the deluge, for the too much
and the too not enough.

Example:      Vermont swims with the fishes.

                   Texas dries off the map.

                   Make it rain. 

But what is the dance for making it stop. What from here where ice reads only as the pink mass of satellites. Where we still say Eskimo and love a good adventure, even us, who dream in greyscale, the pornography of black bloc spreading across white land like the Little Ice Age. Like ink.

Until we dream: we close the gap.
With violence.

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.

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?