Industrial spirits

There is a very direct dialogue between civilization and the earth occurring at this very moment. Well, its not so much a dialogue as a series of terms being overlaid toward the earth, for at least the past 515 years this discourse has followed the path of greatest resistance, that of imperial trade and political expansionism. This dictate, although secular in its emergence, is entirely spiritual in discourse. After all, Spanish conquistadors dictated the Roman Catholic terms of engagement to Indigenous peoples in Central America in ways that could only be understood in Latin, much to the detriment of the entire populations that did not speak the language. They either learned very quickly or died.

This dialogue, at least from the occidental perspective, occurs on strict linear terms. The discussion follows projections and straight trajectories with very specific ends that very rarely justify the means because the ends very rarely benefits communities. These terms have been quite specifically laid out in grid mentalities and patterns of North American landscape ontology in the 20th century. One specific example of this grid line ontology is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and the Industrial Canal of New Orleans, where the way water flows is determined by the quick and easy access of goods, from the coffee I enjoy every morning to the excessive sugar I put in it. Instead of having this delicacy once a month, I am able to enjoy it many times a day, without a second thought of the energy or flow of water that allowed it to fill the empty space that makes my cup. New paths of least resistance are dug from the swamp lands and hydrological nuances that create and recreate land.

Mississippi River Gulf Outlet:
Image: "America's Wetland: Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana"

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (M.R.G.O.) and the Industrial Canal, as straight and narrow as they are, are entirely alien forms to the serpentine ontology of the Mississippi, acting as a syphon draining the millennial process of sedimentation required by the flow of water and sediment from across the Midwest. This is the new least resistance, the lines that allowed Hurricane Katrina a straight and narrow path for the storm surge that topped over into the Lower 9th Ward and Chalmette.

I had a conversation with Jim Igoe in Baton Rouge about linear and cyclical mentality, and how apparent the value of linear thinking over cyclical thinking exacerbated Hurricane Katrina, a disaster many years in the making, all for the cost of cheap coffee, sugar and inexpensive gasoline. Jim offered the premise that cyclical mentality should not necessarily be given absolute priority over linear thought (though there is a great lack of this in Western civilization), but that an intersection or confluence of the two, the convergence of the linear and the cyclical, resembling an internal conch shell, may reveal a more balanced approach to understanding.

Image from 2004, Dr. Rita Cowell ©, "Radiant Equations."

image by Jim Igoe 2007 ©, New Orleans.

I am curious, now, of the amazing intersections that already exist, such as this Zen negative silo, an image of New Orleans that exists through industrial meditation on the movement of water in a world that demands straight lines where there are curves. I am reminded of a recent documentary I watched on spiritual possession in Tibetan Buddhism, in which the narrator described how the first Dalai Lama rose to prominence. Apparently, while making his way through Tibet, the spiritual leader came across many different tribes in many different regions. In the areas he visited, there had been established long standing traditional belief systems based on the nature spirits inhabiting those regions. There were spirits that inhabited river systems, mountains, and forests, and these beings were deeply embedded in the cultural memory of the indigenous populations. On his travels, the Lama conversed with these spirits, wrestled with them, and on occasion enlisted these beings to join him. They are even now revered through the Buddhist oracles in Tibet.

The experience in North, Central and South American colonial expansion has been quite a departure from this exercise. After all, the language used to dictate the terms first came ashore through Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English, and not in the languages most familiar to the ears of the Indigenous inhabitants, or as Joe Sheridan and Dan Longboat have said,

"What concession has English made to North America? Why does English, the language that thinks us as much as we think it, continue to structure as imaginary the numinous experiences that happen in the territories beyond its origin? English clear-cuts cultural and biological diversity alike. Speaking only English, can we think our way back to the indigenous languages that are our ancient birthright? Does speaking English or its echo preserve this lousy Weltanschauung?" LINK

In other words, the shape of the land reflects that language that realizes it. However, Katrina offers another response, one that reveals that the land here still does not agree to the terms being dictated to it. Nor does it agree with the straight line ontology that results in MRGO and the Industrial Canal. The terms dictated by Katrina speak more to the syphoning affect years of development have had to the region's natural buffer system, the wetlands, that are continually being flushed into the Gulf of Mexico.

No, the spirits encountered by the first Dalai Lama were not industrial. They were natural and revered by the Indigenous peoples. However, this discussion has never been entertained on a large scale by the colonial visitors to Turtle Island, making the occasion a perpetual visit as opposed to a process of indigenization, one that would have required understanding the terms of the discussion as proposed by the serpentine structure of river systems and the languages used to articulate their stories. The beings that may have been recognized by Indigenous populations like the Houma were likely never even considered in the rush to secure Louisiana first for the Spanish, then the French, the British and the Americans. How could things have been different if a perceptive Frenchman recognized the all encompassing power of the Mississippi, overlaid with the millennial forces that created it and it's environs? Perhaps such a person would have recognized that conversing with this region required a humble approach, one that acknowledges both the cyclical and linear approaches to living within the means of one's environment. Perhaps the Mississippi itself could have confined development along the Old French Quarter as it intended, instead of perpetually flexing the muscles of development to the lowest lying areas.

Instead, the beings that dwell along the Mississippi have enforced a dialogue that can only be understood by Industrial spirits. Such a force is indeed one to be reckoned with, yet such a force becomes immutably small in the face of a counterclockwise wind pushing up straight line mentalities.

New Orleans

I just came back from my trip to Louisiana, where I took the above photograph. Its just a flower, nothing more, nothing less. At one point it was likely cared for under the shade of a welcoming home, by the someone who knew the earth by the hands. The flower is well rooted, as it has found it's way around this pipe, precariously positioned just above it.

I could have placed any number of photographs of New Orleans here, photo's that state 'look at the authentic experience I witnessed, oh the war zone that is the city,' I'm sure many people have done that. I think it is a bit tired now. Yet I am sure many people are engaged in the same process I was, 'people have to see to believe.' Yes, this sentiment is true, but it is also very dangerous. Taking in the scene leads to belief, but it is an entirely fabricated exercise, because too often the tour buses, rented limoscenes and cars are not authentic enough to be included in the frame.

There is a delicate balancing act going on between the blood red lily and the slanted pipe beside, a contrast that maintains itself as if it were the only authenticity needed to convey a particular story, say of a city under a deluge that has been over a century in the fabrication. I wonder, what draws people to the parts of New Orleans that have been most affected by Katrina? Is it because, as Robert Pogue Harrison suggests, the testaments of time and earth that are outside of humanity's grasp are revealed through ruins? Possibly, or is it because we want to fix a part of ourselves that feels alienated from the rest of the world? I like to think it is the former, rather than the latter, but I can easily see how the latter is the case. I found myself taking a few photo's of the tour bus and of the tour group, a reminder that I am not involved in some act of discovery, but I am taking part in something as old as civilization as itself, the continued negotiation between the desires of human development and the lasting memory of nature.

All of this while people still go about living on the other side of the limoscene, a place where the living remind the tourist that they are indeed human beings, just as the tourists are, and that despite how they are portrayed in popular media discourse, that they indeed need basic ammenities such as construction materials, food and water. I find it interesting how the memory of the living is conveniently displaced, relegated to an easy stereotype that seeks to justify neglect. Any metaphor that compares Katrina to an invading army casts the residents as helpless victims of war, removing any agency and autonomy to dictate their own stories, if they so chose to speak them. Popular discourse makes memory easier to convey survivors as hapless victims with no autonomy, they cannot be people who know the earth by the hands, and therefore cannot know or belong to a community. Is this justufying diaspora, the forced displacement of thousands of people with generations of presence in one place?

I think an ounce of empathy can go a mile in erasing this notion. Even further, an ounce of empathy can quickly turn the camera lense on the bus, on the structures and systems that pushed working class black and white New Orleanians to places like the Lower 9th Ward and Chalmette many years ago. These systems feed the discourse, merely out of self preservation. There is a definite structure to this discourse that needs some serious reconsideration. This discourse uses as its foundation the dichotomies of Biblical scripture, conveying stark images of light and dark, there can only be a sublime and an abject. Beauty and squalor are the operative terms, and where there is squalor there can be no little red flower in the foreground, it is a foregone conclusion that there is only despair. This is fabrication, however, and cannot be authenticated when there is a bus behind the lense. We feed like sharks when the latter symbols reveal themselves, it gets the blood going, and reaffirms these dichotomies as we clinically remove ourselves from the scene without a second glance back.

Ruination renews itself through ourselves, and through the authenticity we engineer. This is the same authenticity that pushes back the wetlands and defines the Mississippi River in linear terms to allow the quick and easy flow of goods from the Gulf to the heartland. The linear terms also allow the quick and easy flow of water back to the wetlands when the conditions are right for the wind to turn counterclockwise and contrary to capitalist notions of linearity.

The movement of people onto the wetlands is also a product of this linearity, creating the conditions for people to continue this way of living in the world by draining the wetlands and building communities below sea level. While this may have the appearance of linearity, it is also cyclical in its repetition. Dominant paradigms demand certain conditions to allow civilization to follow its linear projection upward. However, is this an exercise of inclusion or exclusion? Who is included and who is excluded? It was quite apparent in New Orleans who is excluded, in the Lower 9th Ward specifically the issues of race and class are determining factors in this exercise. Yet communities like the Lower 9th Ward defy this projection through their very existence and persistance. Some of the people we spoke to belong to the group "Common Ground Relief", a community based organization that is defying both the dominant paradigms and discourse. Meeting community members here reaffirmed what it was I was doing there. My greatest fear would be that I was contributing to the discourse that conveys New Orleans in the sublime and abject, and that I may have been crafting the story of someone else who had been through a far worse experience than I could ever imagine.

So, instead of revealing more pictures of devastation, I think the image above is adequate for crafting another story from the experience. However, the experience did have my mind replaying a video by Thom Yorke over and over. It is the video for Harrowdown Hill, and portrays quite effectively this broader exercise of crafting narratives of civilization, who is included and excluded, and the shape the world is taking because of this exercise. I see the eagle, obviously fabricated endlessly in the video, as portraying the physical, metaphysical and very tenuous qualities of championing the kind of possessive individualism that demands straight lines in the Mississippi River.

That which is much bigger II

There is a moment in the Mabinogion when Gwydion, trickster and uncle to the Welsh hero Llew Lagh Gyffes, must enter the underworld to find his lost nephew. This is my favorite moment in the story, because in an instant, Gwydion disappears into the earth as he chases a mysterious pig that flees from his pen every morning. This animal leads him to a broad river, which in turn leads him to his nephew. This moment is fairly significant, as it charts the cosmogenic elements of the Welsh, one that I cannot relay, but one that weaves its way through your entire being.

A group of my students gave a presentation on water as a sacred element and water as a commodified resource. They were very articulate in their religious depictions of water, offering examples of how water is sacred element from a Judaic, Muslim and Christian background, and how the sacred essence that these traditions convey are greatly diminished when water is bottled. One student commented that, 'the sacred essence of water leaves when it is left standing and concealed' in a bottle. I appreciated this sentiment, and I think Gwydion would as well, for the river he follows is moving considerably, just as the pig that leads him on. There is a sense of uncontained movement, or as Steve Martin and John Candy once noted, Martin: "I know, I know, just go with the flow," Candy: "Like a twig on the current of a mighty stream."

I offered my students another perspective on water, this one from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching

15
The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.
Their wisdom was unfathomable.
There is no way to describe it;
all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.
Fluid as melting ice.
Shapable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.

I think they appreciated the subtlety of the Tao and its dual descriptions of movement and stillness, and how both are elements of water. I also told them of a Buddhist saying, "all boats lead to the same shore." The last quote is quite revealing about the role of water, and the vessels we use to navigate it. To exemplify the tradition this last sentiment comes from, I found a trailer to a film I really want to see, Dharma River, which seems quite evocative to me of the movement of water and people.

That which is much bigger

Stephen Mitchell writes a wonderful introduction to the 2000 translation of the Bhagavad Gita (LINK), in which Mitchell asks the reader to consider the story as taking place before a great battle (as it does), but to imagine a great event unfolding in that one moment before battle when the adrenaline is high and when both sides survey the opposing force in those moments of fear and uncertainty. In that moment, Mitchell suggests,

everything is still. The armies have halted in their tracks. Even the flies are caught in midair between two wingbeats. The vast moving picture of reality stops on a single frame, as in Borge's story "The Secret Miracle." The moment of the poem has expanded beyond time, and the only characters who continue, earnestly discoursing between the silent, frozen armies, are Arjuna and Krishna.

Krishna, of course, happens to be much more than Arjuna's Charioteer, he is also God. He picks a fairly significant moment to reveal the cosmos to the hero. 'Whether or not he should fight,' says Mitchell,' is secondary to the question he faces through Krishna, and that is, 'how should we live?'

At his lowest moment, Arjuna crumbles from the pressure, and Krishna teaches him about being, and in closing, Krishna speaks of wisdom, sacrifice, of facing that which needs facing and letting go that which needs letting go,

The man whom desires enter
as rivers flow into the sea,
filled yet always unmoving -
that man finds perfect peace.

There are moments like this, when the veil between the profane and that which is much bigger is revealed, if even between the wingbeats of a fly. I recall reading a couple of years ago that serves a similar role. It was by an anyonomous author about a river near where I grew up, the Snye, which at one time was known as the Chenal Ecarte (which in French means the Lost or Blind Channel). This also happens to be the river I centered my Masters research on, so it was nice to find that someone, some settler perhaps, dreamt of this river as I did, as something much bigger. The poem appears in Frank Mann's 1968 book A History of Wallaceburg and Vicinity,

Chenal Ecarte
(the Lost channel)

Bright, eddying, shimmering, current.
Have you really lost your way?
From the course of common torrent,
Of the lake, the river, bay?

Men call you "Waif stretch of water,
That has run from other astray,
Your Neptune, the old Sea God's daughter,
A madcap, so blithesome and bray"

We've drifted with boat songs as lovers,
Gay, heedless of rudder or sail,
We have whistled to keep up our courage,
When the breezes were blowing a gale.

Thru' marshland and glade we have wondered,
The sport of the winds and tide
The days of that light childhood laughter
Are lost in the gulf deep and wide.

I'm drifting from my moorings, fair water,
From the banks that in childhood I plied,
I'm drifting on Time's swift flowing river,
And needful as you are my guide.

We are both sweeping to the ocean,
Through channels chance fortune has made,
We shall fade at last in its bosom
As inifinities in infinate fade.

Only someone kin to Arjuna could appreciate the Chenal Ecarte, in that one moment you are told it eventually flows into the ocean, bringing everything with it. This is perhaps the irony of the settler who wrote this (if it was a settler), for he or she realizes that the body of water that settled their childhood is the very same body of water that carries them home on time's swift current. Tide and wind, arms on the geological clock are also there, part of that which is much bigger, non-linear, absolute, and always wavering in its cyclical rhythms.

The Lion in the waves

I've wanted to write about the sea for some time now, not just as a narrative piece for this blog, but as a larger cathartic piece to exercise the ghosts of anxiety. I find there is something of a grander resonance when myth and contemporary life find a matching syncretic pattern, this to me is true serendipity. For me, at least, I find this in the motto of my Grandfather's home province of Zeeland, in the South of Holland. Zeeland, of course, translates as "Sea land," that land that has been precariously taken from the sea (or perhaps looking at it climatically, it vould be land the sea has willfully given up), and it is land precariously threatens to become the sea again.

The motto of Zeeland is "Luctor Et Emergo," in Dutch this translates to "Ik worstel en kom boven," and in English, "I struggle and I emerge." The crest of Zeeland:














The evocation of this image is one of the classical lion icon fighting like hell to stay above the water. An interesting representation of what is otherwise cast as a very powerful animal in practically every other crest it appears on in Western European iconography. Waves above, waves below and all around, even the crown that surrounds the lion is surrounded by waves. There is another representation of the logo that evokes an even greater sense of struggle, and this was from an early 20th century stamp:






















This second image considers not just the waves the lion is fighting against, but also the tangled mess of everything that threatens to pull it down. I am uncertain of the lion's representation in this context, but I know that in other Occidental myths it appears as the sun God. Without attempting to assign this designation to a lion that might just be a dutch fish monger, I think there could be some resonance with the mythic Occidental sun god as lion and the lion in this image. This is based solely on my wondering, but I often imagine (and we'll leave it at that... imagination) that the lion here is the sun, and it is fullfilling it's daily duty by looking to the west (it faces left) and is swallowed by the sea (which it would appear to do if you saw it from the banks of the North Sea on Walcheren or from Breskens). But, as the motto boldly declares "I EMERGE!" meaning it rises again in the morning, like the precariously positioned land itself, from the eastward flow that moves west.

So, is this some cleverly hidden gem of dutch traditional knowledge, encoding a lowland cosmology into a crest? If it is, I think there is a timeless quality to the story it speaks to Zeelanders, stating that we struggle to pull earth from the water so it can face the sun and we can live. It also speaks to the great anxiety faced by anyone living by a sea that threatens to swallow whole everything. To this I see characters like Beowulf, the northern cousin to some lost Dutch equivalent, after all, the epic does speak of wars against the Frisians. Beowulf possess that enigmatic quality of heros that are able to go into the sea, that place where no mortal dare. He is able to not only go into the sea, he is also quite able to wrestle with its beings, which he does so quite effectively, coming back to tell the tale over and over again, repeating the sacred repetition of myth. Beowulf, however, being written (and that is the key) at some point (was it 12th century?) suddenly becomes a story about how those undersea beings and the beings the woods lack the timeless presence of the sun, the sea, the earth. Suddenly, this cloak is given to the one celestial God and away from what would have been the timeless biological, terrestrial, aquatic, and celestial truth.

Could the lion in the waves be a remembrance of those timeless qualities, placed on a crest before they too were slain by a single and uniform cosmology? Who knows, all we have is our imagination to wonder.