Theses nailed to the cottage door

1/ Pondering what a performance reflecting on environmental change might be, it became difficult not to abandon the [walking] task in order to reflect on environmental change, as if the latter were necessary for the former. This may be a trap.

2/ That reflections are less distinct in experimental science than in popular science publishing, let alone those narratives of environmental change that surface in both ‘serious’ and clownish or abject mass media.

2/ For dramaturgical rather than empirical reasons, it is hard to believe (feel entertained or intellectually satisfied by) the narrative of the Good Earth (sub-plot: wicked humans). Even the most heartfelt and well-researched accounts of “pollution” read too much like laws of ritual purity. A spiritual or ideal cleanliness is an organic death.

2a/ Is there a kind of doubleness in the theatre of “green”? – that the Earth is good but that we should fear its anger at what we do; that the Earth will wipe-us-out. So the Earth is called “good”, but described as though it is what is otherwise called “evil” – a terrain of voiceless, unreflexive danger?

3/ If human consciousness is part of Nature, and technology, its objects and intentions, are parts of Nature (so much so that the word “part” becomes suspicious – as if it might have the same relation to Nature as a partial object to an individuation), suspension bridges and the skeletal structures of large plant-eating dinosaurs are made to the same pattern, are responses to the same physical forces. “The mathematics are out there” (Roger Penrose).

4/ It is (memetically) tempting to believe that ideas and images prosper and propagate in ways not dissimilar to biological information.

5/ Any ‘reflection’ will take place on a contorted and contorting “surface”, or rather on a series of contorting reflective surfaces weaving in and around each other while moving also in relation to the motions of changes in/being the environment.

6/ Empirical science is telling us that it is between very probable and a cast iron certainty that human actions have triggered an ongoing and accelerating warming of the planet, and that we cannot be certain what the consequences will be, but that we would be foolish to assume that the changes will be comfortable (or even life-sustaining) for much organic life on Earth.

6/ But…

6/ Apocalypse is a socially attractive fiction: like utopia it implies a bounded space (rather than city wall or island shores, apocalypse is bounded by isolation and the eradication of complexity). It allows everyone to play – if the game is feral survival – to drop the usual rules, it brings the cancellation of all rents, debts, appointments. A vicious holiday. The illusion of starting from scratch (following Jesus, Thoreau and Breton – abandoning communality to take a walk.) Despite these qualities, the narrative of apocalypse has become an assumed part of popular reflecting on environmental change. It is the something that the “we” (when this fiction of an aggregation of individual consumers forms an audience, assembled in the absence of “good taste”) secretly or not so secretly want: not surprisingly, as the narrative is constructed for the “we” to want it (and has survived by appearing to be constructed for, even by, us). It is the contemporary sublime, this time written by the landscape gazing mutely back.

6/ In Global Catastrophes, the vulcanologist Bill McGuire’s most credible narratives for a Sixth Mass Extinction are all “natural”. Human behaviour, more than it “damages” a planet separate from itself, makes itself vulnerable to a recidivist planet that has repeatedly generated “catastrophes”. And what if the planet “wants” this? In the same way that an aggregated and rough audience “wants” apocalypse? Does the planetus (the planet including us) have a memetics?

6/ We are now a geological force.

6/ A child sneaked in at the back of a recent screening of The Cove and watched with care as the nets of the fishermen herded the dolphins towards the thickening shallows; she saw the delegates from landlocked and impoverished nations smiling, she saw Sea Worlds that reminded her of the refugee camps, she saw the educational murals, she saw the tins of chemical tuna in the coolers, and she remembered the old old story that they were always making up in the camps and playgrounds; about how the instructions for people and machines are not written by good people choosing good things, but how they come from a spectre that no one ever quite sees, who is everyone and who no one is like, who no one has chosen and who commands almost complete consent and who hurts everyone even though it owes everything to them, and that it is this very debt that determines everything everyone does, from the direction of the cars to the colour for stop and the colour for go, and that no one who walks on two feet and wears a hat, a belt or a kimono can escape it. Running from the cinema, the child out-stripped the angry charity worker, pausing at the traffic island, hauling on the fumes and the smell of street food. She ran her own movie, an anime, of the flow of the cars that was the flow of the XXXXX, and of the cruelty of the fishermen’s knives that was the strike of a fish’s jaws; and everything that her human character did was seized on by artists and transformed; highways into the trails of slugs, plans into deserts, blueprints into reflections on the surface of a pond, and wounds into new organs.

6/ That if we want to understand (not sentimentalise) an ecology we need the (strictly limited) paranoia that we can accrue by first assuming that we are in a food chain with it (it-is-out-to-get-us), wary of revenging “Gaia”, defensive against the anger of “Mother Earth”… look at the building/s around you, and now replay Marx’s parable of the architect and the bee – does it still make sense? Look at the buildings again. Now walk the story, the buildings, the architects and the bees into the XXXXXXXXXXXX. (The task of advocating flood defences, and the quality of that advocacy, might be more important and more significant than it seemed at the time.)

6/ “Never set foot in a fallout shelter”, Mutant advised in the 1960s, for “it is better to die standing with all the cultural heritage of humanity, the perpetual modification of which must remain our task.” “Nuclear weaponry’s main function is to deter not the enemy but the state’s own population. Contrary to the Ban the Bomb movement, this position sees not nuclear annihilation as the main threat, but the disarming of critique… One wonders how much the twenty-first century’s obsessions with things environmental might likewise play a demobilizing role.”  (McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath The Street) Over and above the author’s political opinions here, what if stories are inadequate (asks the storyteller)? What if the storytellers are inadequate (asks the stories)? What if the vocabulary has been grinding the words down to letters again (vdesc w2.%st sdv^7=sst b3s)?

The invitation

After Steve had kindly posted on the blog some notes of mine under the heading “Footnotes for Apocalypse”, I received an email from Baz, inviting me to visit him at his cottage. I can’t recall the exact wording, but he wanted me to see a meeting point of what passes for heaven and hell in the contemporary world that had opened up on his land. I hope I do not misrepresent him when I say that his reasons for inviting me were partly practical (to test the opening – I think 5 people had previously tried it out), partly his partial identification with something in the “despair” of the Footnotes, and partly a pastoral care for my own wellbeing. These partlies all took on the qualities of partial objects – voices without bodies, shapes without substance, maps without mass. All of which were to coalesce in the complex, but organic and topological opening, a kind of intestine, which I now have as a part of my body and out of my control. Baz said nothing more by way of explaining the heaven/hell site. We arranged a date and then brought it forward ten days: the “meadow” had abruptly come to a good moment for me to visit. I caught the train a day later. An hour having passed along the flat valley floor, and I was met by Baz at the station and was at the meadow shortly after that.

The meadow and the matrix

Baz’s cottage sits at the meeting point of two valleys, each with its own stream. The streams meet close to the road, a former drovers’ route from XXXXXXXXXXX  to XXXXXXXXXXX, and one runs alongside it. Adjacent to the cottage are areas of garden, a pond, a fenced area for chickens and a large meadow, divided in various ways, and a small strip of woodland in which a tiny quarry is shaded. The land is overlooked and protected on one side by a wall of large, mature conifers that are due for felling: a kind of threat, at present mitigated by a [neighbour’s] private inertia. An occasional vehicle passes by on the old drovers’ route.

The heaven/hell confluence is a figuring of XXXXXXXXX “mapped” onto (trodden into) the meadow. I walk this “maze” for a while guessing what it might be (first guess: fish) and then Baz lets me in on it.

I walk it some more, climb up a long ladder leaned against a tree growing from the edge of the tiny quarry to photograph the XXXXXXXXX chart from above. Although it is on a slope the outline cannot be seen clearly from anywhere on the rising ground. We go inside for a cup of coffee. Talk about what it is, this meadow chart, how it might be used. About apocalypse and its narratives and the role of cottages in them. A woodpecker feeds on the bird table. Then we come outside once more and I walk and run the XXXXXXX for, say, 12 or so circuits. I have very little idea how long it takes – 5 minutes? An hour? The gut stretches. Pushing things around in peristaltic waves.

XXXXXX and buzzard

I began by walking the XXXXXXXXXXX at an even, brisk pace. Very quickly I was able to look around and began to notice rather large features that I had previously ignored: I was amazed to notice that there were power-lines hung across the meadow on tall poles. Through trees I glimpsed a building on a far horizon… it rained, the sun shone, the butterflies (meadow brown and cabbage white) retreated and reappeared according to the light, I trampled the grass that had been trampled, I followed the lie of the stalks as Baz suggested; what had seemed enigmatic became a simple spectral XXXXXXXXX down which I floated.

Only when I attempted to follow the circling of a buzzard while walking very slowly did I become giddy and stumbled.

At one point, in response to the dip of the ground, my skeletal frame crunched, then realigned itself into a more “satz”-like state of preparedness.

I wondered why neither Baz nor I had mentioned to each other the XXXXXXX that stretched across the middle of the “map”, a kind of XXXXXXXX, necessitating a step or leap when moving from one XXXXXXXX to another. I think now of the initiations of young XXXXXXXXX and the impersonation of the XXXXXX.

At times the path began to disappear and the meadow became a woozy mass of appearance, through which muscle memory guided me precisely. Whether by pigment or scintillation, the tops of the grasses appeared misty.

A couple of times I saw Baz moving about near the gorse. (Later we would talk about ordeal, and setting other walkers the task of walking the XXXXXXXX through the gorse and the bramble.) Then I saw him at the top of the precarious ladder. Another hawk. “Do you mind if I document the documenter?”

We were going round in XXXXXX.

And now that I am away from the XXXXXXXXX and trying to write about them, there is a swirl of desperation. I sit and stop, but the stiller I get, the tighter the vortex becomes. It has a life of its own, this desperation – a ghost sheriff emerging from the history of small company towns, a fleet of possessed tanks rolling down the streets of wooden shacks, a matrix of barbed wire pulling the countryside tighter and tighter – its personifications are utterly unhelpful, truly and unusually without meaning or allusion: the more I sit here the more they pass uselessly by on those looping XXXXXXXXXX. An accursed share. Refreshing the memory; unfathomable, mute.

Two days before my walk in the maze, I had stood on the very point of Dawlish Warren, a long spit of sand dune, where the plastic containers and fish skeletons are bleached white by sun and salt. Talking with a sculptor about her trodden path made in a wood near Darmstadt, walked and scuffed into the shape of a wolf, at the cost of a pair of boots – http://2010.waldkunst.com/kuenstler/caroline-saunders – and it had been all about meanings in the rip and pull and counter-current, the forces of the river meeting the forces of the incoming tide, forming the kinds of uzumaki that transform communities in a few moments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzumaki

How complacent that seems now.

Provisional Findings

The maze pushes the focus outwards. It allows little introspection.

The maze slopes and constantly challenges the body to shift its centre of gravity in response. The maze is somatic.

The maze “empties” the mind – by shaking the brain it opens up coagulated gaps, rendering them vulnerable to an outside that rushes in to fill the tiny sucking vacuums.

The maze strips and rips the shape from the experience, hurls meanings to the beside, by the centripetal force of the whirl of the meadow-XXXXXXXX, by its performance-likeness, by its flat globalisation of a place with the footprint of a large cottage, its conceptualisation and its projection; these XXXXXXX, unlike the deadly (to human and dunes) ones at the Warren, refuse to be employed for anything, avoid signing up to convictions, are on no payroll, do no work and are not rebellious. They plough on without decision, enigmatic – as if behind a faceless face things are gathering towards a spasm that never comes. Relax. Don’t do it.

I am not very affected by this. Except for this prosthesis that I have now got attached to me. Thrashing about.

On the way to lunch at the nearest village pub we pass through an enormous market square and by a huge parish church: Baz’s cottage sits within a nexus of routes and staging posts that have been of great commercial, transportational and religious importance. Baz’s XXXXXXXXXX meadow-maze connects to the flows of this greater (if now creaky) machine, slipping its gears, uncomfortable, revving its frame in surges of energy that fail to grip onto the shafts, whirring as if it might throw something off, suddenly, unplanned.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen here?”

Baz describes rising sea levels that might bring the water close by, but not as far as the cottage.

Cottages (and farmhouses) are sites for apocalypse narratives: 28 Weeks Later, Night of The Living Dead, The Happening, Dead Snow, Weekend, War of the Worlds, Tripods … they are foolish retreats to the domestic and the (slightly) extended or reconstructed family. They quickly become places of siege and once this happens the narrative generally runs out of steam – most sustained apocalyptic narratives are those in which new kinds of communities are established (The Changes with its neo-village including processional Sikh metalworkers, The Stand with its proto-societies of good and evil, The Walking Dead with its shifting mobile community détourning prisons). The Road is an interesting exception – its journey and its text barely pause long enough for anywhere to matter.

The “apocalypse” Baz and I discuss is the possible warming of the planet – which the XXXXXXXXX will partly motor – the increasingly inhospitableness of parts of Africa and southern Europe and the mass migration north of people in search of a habitable climate.

The drovers’ route might become a route for crowds of people seeking the temperate.

What rituals, what welcoming ceremonies, what performances of introduction could be devised to greet them?

What part in that could a place “to the side of”, “beside” the route play?

Now, where does the task of advocacy for “flood defences” fit in to this – what if we welcome the new flows of water, people, many-spotted ladybirds, forests of Himalayan Balsam along the rivers, Rhododendron stretching across Dartmoor, the spectre of agricultural communism. Not defences, but routes, flows.

Margaret Killjoy’s article in Dodgem Logic advocates establishing a communal permaculture as a response to the prospect of environmental change, deploying a very specific, communal, performative reflection – interweaving the use of voids and derelict sites as guerrilla allotments with an informal social agreement – but what if we build into that the necessity for developing forms and sites of ritual for the welcome and sustenance of those fleeing the heat? They will not be aggressive nomads. But they will transform the social relations of production in the English countryside – cheap labour in an authoritarian, segregated countryside? A return to manual labour? Socialised and common ownership?  Pockets of anomaly?

Would the meadow-machine (as part of a larger complex of public and private property) be an effective ritual space for meetings of socially reparative, pre-apocalyptic groups, preparing their local permacultures within and in resistance to the narrative of catastrophe, to the side of, beside the route of migration, on a map of XXXXXXX?

We can begin the testing now – what happens if 39 people arrive to walk the meadow chart of XXXXXXXXXXXX? What would happen if they re-ran our Environment Agency task, but as an advocacy not of defences, but of integrated social, human, water, narrative, cultural and performance flows?

Paula Kramer’s single word response to the “nature” of Cove Park resonated strongly with geographical, topological, political and climatic affordances that I for one, in such good and stimulating company, enjoyed there enormously.

Precipitous?

Yes because the land fell away from Cove with a steepness that left little between the perched accommodation Pods and Containers and the flat expanse of Loch Long, which sometimes in turn through the shifting light seemed tilted at an angle up towards us and next sloping away and downwards as if being sucked under the opposite shore and its rising mountains.

Precipitous?

Yes because the sky was one moment tumbling with clouds and sheets of light and holes through both and more, and next as still as a landscape of carefully painted brush strokes, and then slowly pulsing as one’s eye was caught by the wake of a bobbing boat then the flashing flight of a bird or a fell-side suddenly lit upright by a break in the cloud from below.

Precipitous?

Yes because just over the ridge behind was the perfect spot for harbouring safely the mega-death potential of projectiles which once armed could unleash a billion or more instants of suffering beyond all measure and just round the gently curving headland to the North was the armoury of plutonium tips that could upend the world itself if all launched off together.

Precipitous?

Yes because when the rain fell heavily the tracks, paths, culverts, channels, gullies, combes and ravines gushed with suckling strings and gurgling ropes and tumbling chains and spewed out thrashing boulders of irresistible waterways as the tilted land became a soft sponge of moraine squelching underfoot and slipping away across the downhill granite in a gathering rush to be engulfed in Loch Forevermore.

Precipitate presentations?

In retrospect the diversity of the network members’ presentations for me was a singular rich response to Cove Park’s fabulous environmental energies and wayward signifying dynamics, even in the fact that there was no group presenting but all was done by individuals finding their own ways into engaging its powers, whether Sally Mackey’s touchingly cool remediation of the wasteful path light gradually coming into its own at dusk, or Phil Smith’s carnival verbal storyboard of a wildly travelling performance party driven haywire by little white figures from an architect’s model of a centre, or Alison Parfitt’s deepening personal meditation on the dimensions of death and hope that even as she stuck her paper submarine to the window glass could have been lurking under the sheen of the loch’s surface, or Tim Nunn’s backdoor outdoor audio concert of out-of-place sounds as if birds and crickets and dripping waters were escaping from the kitchen into windy wet air being the actual source of the blown-about and amplified plip plop resonance all around us, or Helen Nicholson’s anxiously driven effortful find a grip on or escape from the rampant big wild in the widow beyond her via computer screen and mobile phone and left-behind boxes of cereals that she gobbled down so substituting passion for the landscape of excess outside, or Dee Heddon’s to and fro ritual splashing along the flooded path of a living Pod huddling her trusty owl but scared that all and everything could so easily fall apart and best to gather and present some tiny fragments of things around and under threat to raise our hopes which she did she did, or Paula Kramer’s upside-down embrace of the deep green massive low-lying horizontal tree bough with back legs feet ankles toes and an ever-so-slow slow moving refraction of its ageless pulse as if life could be and for sure became drawn from it to sustain a deep joy for just being what it was going to be forever, or Steve Bottom’s widow-framed arts-as-landscape Ship Container reading as white-box gallery critique thankfully left behind for rain-swept bridge over over-gushing streams which like a delicate downhill heron he picked his way below us across becoming witty survivalist despite bullshit art-worlds and pathetic DiY garden nature-facsimiles, or David Harradine also riffing on Container-gallery ironies of in-yer-face separation framing of big outdoors scenes but trumping that back on itself appearing kitted out in sparse undies on the horizon’s lip gesticulating and speaking we can’t hear what till he struggles through freezing pond to our side where the pane filters speech ‘I need you to feel what I …’.

This panorama of presentations did not directly reflect the rackety beauty of the rapid climate shifts that made the Cove Park scenery seem wilder than it was, having been raked by human history over and over in so many ways. None of them took up a position of sustained and deliberate – quasi-scientific? – distancing of that immediate environment, though each and every one shifted and sifted it through various presentational perspectives, from miniaturisation to abstraction, from contemplation to immersion, from commentary to storytelling of various kinds and mix-and-matches in between … but all directly embodied and embedded it in various ways. This made sure that all together they refracted the environment, as they were taking it in (embodying it) and turning it over and around (angling it) and measuring it by varied degrees (embedding its qualities).

Baz wrote the above more-or-less high-speed stream-of-consciousness style – or at least fast-writing style – to see what that might reveal (if anything!) of patterns or networks or lights flickering in the dark like stars, and of any shared refractive angles on Cove Park’s actual movement of environment change enduring from our visit’s brief duration. But particularly for what one might make of this notion of shared refractions though Steve’s keywords on a thematic carry-over from Fountains Abbey, of SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY, and his more immediate perception of an emphasis on TEMPORAL LAYERING for Cove Park. Might such a reflective retro-refraction give access to what might become from “reflecting on environmental change through site-based performance” that cannot be arrived at in any other way?

4.00AM 24 March 2011

All the presentations had performers and spectators, but relationally very differently positioned by each of them. All renovated their placing on/in the “site”, “landscape”, “environment” – of course it was no one thing – by responding with creativity to its fabulously diverse affordances.

Steve turned bridge into grandstand for a traverse of dangerous territory accomplished delicately well. Dee transformed a path that was a shallow pond into a pensive figuring of past and future survivals. Alison switched a glass window into murky loch to expose the flimsiness of its deadly cargo of looming threats. Paula massaged a low-lying tree into becoming a mossy alcove of knowing tentative tenderness. Sally transformed a wasteful daylight lamp into a beacon for saving the oncoming dusk. Phil took a model in a glass cage to wittingly scatter it across the slopes as seed for coming enjoys. Helen ransacked a room of leftovers and pulsing digital channels to reveal auguries of munchy hope. Tim turned a backdoor into a sounding board for elsewhere echoes of past lives still to come. David transfixed a picture-frame into a screen that filtered through whispers of un-ignorable needs. Baz turned a bombsite into a runway for…

Nothing was destroyed for good, one guesses. Deep respect was offered to temporally, temporarily borrowed niches. Even through their darkest angles, and however cautiously or recklessly, the performed events seemed to refract hard-won, un-pathological hopes.

These site-based “reflections” on the climate changes that had shaped Cove Park through past performances carefully introduced multiple SUBJECTIVITIES into a wondrous range of environmental SCALES, from microscopic miniature (moss strand on a tree-trunk) to magnifying gargantuan (nuclear warheads round the headland). Perhaps exposing new angles on potential niches for future sustainable lives, human and otherwise. Hence TEMPORAL LAYERING was integral to them all, not just in the archaeological sense of unearthing what’s past or in the geological sense of laying down materials to come but also in the (forgive the testy triplet neologism) “performalogical” sense of time travelling to-and-fro in evolved and evolving temporality. Was this a shuttling kind of refraction across and between climate change histories that cannot be achieved in any other way except by means of performances designed as such?

In the angle of critical engagement

Then – just as much embodied and embedded in Cove Park as the presenters described and discussed above – there was Wallace Heim and Tony Jackson and JD Dewsbury coming from yet other perspectives of reflection and refraction on climate change and site-based performance. Wallace asks: ‘Can sites learn?’; Tony asks: “How might children learn from sites?”; JD asks: “…how this space rewires thought and thinking [and] impacts on people’s practices?”.

A few further brief re-refracted reflections will have to serve as one‘s groats-worth attempt at reflexivity in regarding these profound queries.

Wallace’s question, as the young people my children would say, is a wicked one. It needs first to be dodged for emergent answers to have any hope of survival. So; are you sitting comfortably?

Learning by (human) definition depends on repetition or recycling; that is to say, on some form of memory, i.e. on “perceptible” responses to what has manifestly happened in the past. Water seems to have shown signs of this quality at both Fountains Abbey and Cove Park. When the Abbey river flooded (if one’s memory serves the story right) it tried to return to the course it ran before the monks – or their minions – dug its current route. And it seemed the Abbey’s minders were at least a little surprised by that. Nothing quite so striking a difference (but perhaps because one’s perspective of perception was somehow unprepared to serve it right) appeared on the loch-side slopes when the rain poured down heavily for three or more hours, as the water generally seemed to follow its former courses. But on the recently (re-?) surfaced paths leading down to the bridge it cut steep sided runnels that soon dried out but could possibly eventually become new streams if left unattended. Perhaps this was water “taking account ” of the “site’s” affordances; the “site” responding with – what? – “flexibility” to its flows? From these perspectives, the feedback between water and earth regarding old and new courses may be said to produce a quality possibly akin to memory, so it might start to become plausible to say that: “sites learn”. Somewhat dampish philosophical images, of course, but for one this reflection primarily relates to Wallace’s “differences that makes a difference” and Gregory Bateson’s impressively dry discussions of “deutero-learning” and his guiding idea of an “ecology of mind”, an idea of Earth as a becoming-refractive – “thoughtful”? – thing.

Is there any way in which this kind of relational analysis and theory could lead to a halfway plausible case for the “site” of Cove Park “learning” anything at all from our set of small performative responses? Another dodge to “save” time: a brief thought experiment. Consider that the World War Two concrete foundations for bomb/armaments stores at Cove Park are the positive to its waters’ negative; that is to say, energy relatively fixed rather than fluid in time. Still there were signs, if one “paid” attention, that their surfaces had been weathered a little by rain and wind and gritty dusts during several decades – maybe as much as half-a-century? – of frequent repetitions. Of course it’s ridiculous to compare that process to our performed presentations, which at most went through one-and-a-half or maximum three rounds perhaps! But in the speculative account above through a textual description of them being seen repeated just once, emerging half-automatically through an experimental/improvisational sequence of writing practices, potentially there seems to have been more repetitions of a different kind to the simply numerical; which – just possibly – together eventually could in principle create a difference that makes a larger difference (analogous, maybe, to the Fountain’s flood or Cove Parks converging streams gradually making a river!). For example: All of them made a material difference, however infinitesimal, to the “site” of a kind akin to the rain and the streams; a negative, a relatively very light-touch change to its TEMPORAL LAYERING. Then if one considerers their immaterially negative imprint, in comparison to the materially positive aspects of the “site”, to be in the network of SUBJECTIVITIES more or less shared between repeated different performances, perhaps their “impact” (to use the current jargon) in relation to the various SCALES of matters of concern (thanks Wallace) circulating at Cove Park could take on a different order of significance. However – yet more ridiculousness – that would entail treating human SUBJECTIVITY (and possibly by extension the sentience of all organisms, at least) as potentially having a durability, and sustainability, similar to the order – but decidedly not the qualities – of concrete. And how PRECIPITATE is that?

Set alongside this reflection, Wallace’s implication that the (precipitate?) learning in systems can be “toxic” is profound. Could this be the case even as such learning operates through “invention and improvisation”? Does this suggest the possibility of a toxic creativity that is beneficial? Did the presentations at Cove Park achieve something as paradoxical as that?

And what further implications might this have for the learning of young people that wonderfully preoccupies Tony, who echoes Paula’s “precipitous” by noting that “Perched as we were, everything seemed to point to the loch, even when it was out of view.”? An insight that could just as well be referring to the grand narrative of global warming and its unknown effects; another angle which, to make a little mental leap in these post-postmodern times, might partly explain the network’s emergent focus on the particular, personal, elemental-detailed responses to “site” as method for grappling with, among other matters of concern, the more extreme general frighteners of environmental change. Tony links well established approaches of educational theatre to “site-specific” projects and the innovative TIE programme “Whose land is it anyway?” His account of its focus on human cultures’ claims on nature notes a primarily discursive response (Brechtian debate, indeed), which made me wonder what cognate question would stimulate a complementary affective engagement at Cove Park: perhaps, what land is it anyway?

A peninsular with a history of intra- and inter-cultural colonisation, a rough 200 meter-high granite claw angled toward Glasgow by submarine-infested Loch Long, a steep-sided and precipitous place where flora and fauna cling like limpets on a submerged, but still-slippery, children’s slide. Add a geologist, a climatologist and an ecologist to the network’s environmentalist, archaeologist, engineer, geographers, historians, educators, artists, performance-as-researchers, etc., plus, say 150 young people and their tutors in campsite residence for three or four days and we’d be in business for a seriously funny affective/creative – i.e. inventive and improvisatory – investigation of how particular, personal, elemental encounters with the Cove’s slopes could be source for sustainable survival in the future. Expensive, yes; but possibly only around 0.00082% the price of a Trident class submarine. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/23/gordon-brown-disarmament-push)

But in what sense could such a project become “toxic”?

As I hauled myself up to the Nissan hut workshop from the Pods in the Saturday afternoon downpour to make my flimsy wooden cut out submarine I was amazed at how much the water everywhere seemed determined to slide the clinging-on plants, top soils, stony tracks and the rest down into the loch. And, in response, by their fabulous tenacity in trying to stay put. JD’s pointing out that the peninsula is a granite outcrop with a thin layer of other stuff on top reminded me that the Avon Gorge in Bristol reveals a similar structure, but its core material is Carboniferous limestone with Dolomitic conglomerates, often used as a concrete aggregate.

The Downs that border the Gorge were the imaginary “site” for the post-global-warming survivalist biome of Green Shade, a durational pre-construction performance installation created in the Wickham Theatre at Bristol University in 2004.

The event included a reiterated “Toxic Drizzle Dance”, a comical falling-down-dead ritual meant to cheer up the “survivors” – and their visitor-spectators – when the pressure to keep going got especially tough. Its environment was intended as a creative antidote to doomsday scenarios, using the toxin of calamity-for-humanity ecological determinism against its potential affects/effects.

That project’s methods overall would likely not be appropriate for a youth-oriented workshop at Cove Park, except perhaps in the attention they paid to the particular, personal and elemental qualities of an imaginary human-made biome based on the “real” ones in Cornwall and the Arizona Desert.

Green Shade – Filtration Survivors full swing air cleansing (Photo: Mark Simmons)

But it was, one hopes, creatively toxic – in the sense that an antidote is toxic – to the current general prospect of global warming as probably the worst and possibly the most insistent aspect of climate change: a newish grand narrative of our times that’s still in need of elemental deconstruction, perhaps?

In any event, to “reflect on environmental change though site-based performance” via toxic creativity in light of the Cove Park network experience implies one must probably return repeatedly to first principles (however defined) of some sort or another. Which for this current writer is what JD’s query brightly and hopefully pitched the network towards: “…how this space rewires thought and thinking [and] impacts on people’s practices?” And why? Because one crucial creative problem decidedly not solved by the event of Green Shade was how to plausibly include spoken human languages in its practised thought experiment. This was not just an effect closely related to Alison’s witty injunction: “…climate change is too hard. Let’s talk about something else.” It is also, perhaps, that discourse as language, a.k.a. reflective thought, treated as a first principle of human identity is a foundational aspect of both modernist and, in some of its forms, poststructuralist subjectivities. From this perspective, Steve’s reading of Bonta and Protevi on Deleuze and Guattari was – this one who is writing/written dares to think – both timely and salutary for the network’s next move. The two theorists who refused to be only two, possibly as a result of that “…do not deny that human subjects can initiate novel and creative action in the world. However, they refuse to mystify this creativity as something essentially human and therefore non-natural. For them, the creativity of consistencies is not only natural, but also extends far beyond the human realm.” (Bonta/Protevi)  So then, if creative toxicity is provisionally taken as a first principle emerging from the Fountains Abbey~Cove Park sequence, where might that take network members from there? From this further perspective, as a “global city” – culturally, politically, economically, environmentally and so forth – London could well provide the network, as current media fashion has it (pace Sabastian Junger), with its perfect storm.

Post-script

Mindful of the several calls on the blog post-Cove Park to focus on the detail of an environment before (if ever?) trying to draw out more generalising observations in response to it I wondered how something of this might be put into practice through writing: about the “site” called Cove Park and its “performances”, about the overt performances that the weekend network group played out in it, whether through localized presentations, descriptions of imaginary located events, or ideas/concepts that reflect more general and/or abstract qualities of where those performances, presentations, descriptions and reflections took place and/or what they pointed towards. So the contribution above worked to use different styles of writing practice to explore various perspectives on what may have happened in that sequence to further the emergent focus of the network’s work, i.e.

• quickly drafted one sentence paragraphs of six lines then subjected to one minutes  worth of editing
• quasi-stream-of-consciousness writing from memories of the presentations in an order evolved as they came to mind
• carefully crafted one sentence commentaries on what the presentations might signify relationally done at moderate speed but then largely un-amended
• more measured-pace ruminative writings on critical perspectives suggested by three  network members who did not make scenario-based presentations, towards the end increasingly edited and rewritten up to two or three times for clarity
• and so on …

but always aiming to let the results of the initial section inform the next, and that the next and so on till the end. The methods and their order were not planned in advance, but emerged through the doing of the writing practices exercise as a whole. The aim was to work from the particulars of the “site” and the group’s responses to it, through increasing attempts toward generalisation: evolving from the “local” to the (potentially) “global”, perhaps. Of course I make no claims in any way to privilege what the result might signify; it’s just one of myriad possible, always fallible, versions of the events of the weekend. But I hope that as a semi-structured method of consciously using varied but linked writing practices to reflect on the creative practical and analytical theoretical practices at Cove Park it might be of passing interest in light of the earlier comments on that network event.

In his posting about the ‘shrink wrapped’ qualities of performance studies Steve asks what we might do to broaden the reach of our network in order to avoid getting caught in the trap that the Living Landscape conference was accused of having sprung. I agree with Steve that the conference as a whole skipped adroitly over that trap, thanks to the lively diversity of views and range of practices that were obviously in play. I wonder, though, whether the whole ‘topic’ of ‘environmental change’ can be significantly engaged without risking the self-reflexive, self-referential and even self-promoting qualities that so troubles the Times Higher Education critique of the book about Sarah Kane? This is because such change, now almost automatically, implies questions of human responsibility for the environmental ‘effects’ that seem to signal that global warming, for example, may actually be occurring. So in identifying that type of change as happening, humans are, so to speak, gazing at something of themselves. There we are, looking at ourselves as integral ghosts in the environmental ‘machine’ … or ‘organism’, should you prefer a Gaian metaphor.

[So when I looked at the eyes of the bullocks I saw them as ‘doleful’ because – even if I did not have a right to be in the field, or was not the vegetarian I once had been, or did not agree that their methane production was part of a major environmental problem – I was complicit in their fate. Of course the dolefulness was mine, but at least I think one must be aware of that syndrome. (See my response to Shrink-wrapped.)]

I am aware that such awareness runs many risks of actually disappearing up its own fundamentals, i.e. of becoming ‘self-promoting’. But on principle I refuse to give up on such risks, as self-referentiality and self-reflexivity – otherwise known as various types of ‘feedback’ – are crucial not just to academic work, but also to all sustainable ecologies. And the particular principle I have in mind is the inseparability of organisms from the Earth’s environments – and vice versa – that all network members surely know is a foundational tenet of significant ecological philosophy, analysis and action, but especially those of a radical kind.

[Hence whether in wellies, boots or barefoot I am knee, thigh or more than eyeball deep in the ‘mire’ of humanity’s Earth-bound effects, which I find both extremely hard to swallow and impossible not to sometimes admire … and, yes, the pun is intended.]

Of course Steve was absolutely right to have reminded us of the dangers of a recursive turn that can easily become too acute for its own good. But also the emphasis on the ‘self’ in the Kane review’s trinity of no-no terms can be taken as an important reminder that only in theory or through ideology can humans pretend to be abstracted from the body of global life, so to speak. Which brings me to the main point of this posting, because when the network grant was successfully secured Steve asked if I might work to facilitate debate on the key issue of how site-based theatre and performance might variously address the ‘problem of integrating the local with the global, the conceptual with the practical’, as the network statement on Research Context puts it.

So what might this statement mean in practice for our network?

Here are a few initial and tentative questions for possible consideration (or, of course, challenge?), with a view to prompting discussion:

1. How do the project’s three chosen sites already more or less approach such ‘integration’ (or other types of interaction), both through their everyday and their exceptional theatricality and performances?
2. How might our planned brief residencies at the three sites together best explore, augment but/and challenge the prospects of their ‘integration’ of local~global dynamics through theatre and performance?
3. How can the contrasting ‘iconic’ environmental qualities of the three sites be drawn into the evolution of scenarios that express and extend their global~local dynamics in ways that may become clearly relevant to other sites?

And finally, as we now must all be wary of becoming shrink-wrapped as a group, how can we best use the project’s resources – but perhaps especially the networks we all and/or each of us are a part of – to ensure that ‘significant others’ can freely contribute to addressing its objectives, should they so wish and be kind enough so to do?

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