Neozoon...fur coat graffiti

www.neozoon.org
While on the road to our Tetons field-trip with Jack Turner, these women came up in conversation. They use old fur coats, cut into the shapes of various animals, to 're-inhabite' urban environments with non-human animals.

Dylan

Boundary in Human/Non-Human Relations

In nomadic societies a boundary marks a sacred site where the being of power dwells, where its power is strong and its children are protected. These sacred locales and sanctuaries are everywhere in Aboriginal Australia. In societies where village life is more rooted, there is a tendency to situate the boundary between nature and culture. In either case, this separation of the mysterious and the familiar has a practical advantage. It segregates the world of mystery from the world human beings have control over. Without that boundary, the world of mystery does not stand apart from the world of human making; each world contaminates the other. On this side of the boundary, a space needs to be held open for ordinary human ingenuity and predictability: it cannot become dense with superstition. On the other side of the boundary there must be room for intelligent nature to behave in all of its wild unpredictability: that realm can never become uniform with the human capacity to remake the environment, as on the maps of explorers and colonizers. The societies that have not survived are the ones that have not respected boundary or that have had their sense of boundary obliterated.

Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers pg. 102

Dylan 9/17/09

"Wilderness is the red carpet to Socialism"

Somewhere in eastern Utah, there is a bumper-sticker that reads “Wilderness is the red carpet to socialism.” I’m not sure what this statement is supposed to mean. I have never, personally, thought there was anything ‘socialist’ about wilderness. The Wilderness Act of 1964 passed the Senate 73-12, the House of Representatives 373-1, and was signed into law by President Johnson. Say what you will, but it’s a stretch to say that the US had 73 Socialist Senators and 373 Socialist Representatives in 1964.

I don’t see environmental issues as political or economic, and am always frustrated when they are framed in such a manner. I see wilderness as something that nourishes the soul, among other things, but never as such a base issue of monetary gain or political power.

Dylan 9/16/09

For the last few months I have been casually compiling quotes about reading one's surroundings, or communication in some sense. Here are a few of these:

...we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

-Thoreau

The field has eyes, the wood has ears; I will look, be silent, and listen.

-Hieronymous Bosch

The man failed to sense that here was something more than a bird call, that here was a secret message, calling not for rendition in counterfeit syllables, but for translation and understanding.

-Aldo Leopold

ALL THE WORM TRAILS UNDERNEATH THE BARK

OF A GIANT FOREST

write a name in a script

I cannot translate.

And I do not care to.

-Michael McClure

There's an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the land's marks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don't stop to read it.

-Rebecca Solnit

Dylan 9/15/09

Last weekend, I floated down the Green River, from Little Hole to the mouth of Little Swallow Canyon, with the BLM and various other state and federal agencies on a Bio-Blitz. There were two reasons for the trip: to eradicate teasel, and to map populations of Ute Ladies’-Tresses.

Teasel is an invasive species, introduced to North America from Europe as early as the 1700s. The plants are rather attractive in a prickly way, and are sometimes used in flower bouquets. The stems were previously used in fabric production, the thorns being used to raise a nap on wool. A single plant can produce over 2,000 seeds with up to 80% viability, so the plants quickly overwhelm other species, creating a monoculture. There are still relatively few of the plants along the Green River. An attempt is being made to remove them before they become a serious problem. Mostly, we removed the flower-heads from the plants so that they could not produce seeds. Some of the younger plants were dug out and pulled. There are plans to continue removing seed-heads, and a possibility of spraying the plants.

The Ute Ladies’-Tress is a native orchid. As a threatened species, attempts are being made to determine the full size of its population and range. It is not an especially showy flower, particularly when compared to other orchids. They blend easily into the grasses and sedges around them. However, like most things, these flowers reward closer inspection. Rooted in sodden, sometimes submerged soil on the edge of the river, the plants we charted had a spike of white, waxy flowers, rarely over six inches tall. The shape of the flowers reminded me of dragon heads on Viking ships.

Many of the people I worked with were botanists. They told me the stretch of river we were working on was in relatively good shape, considering all that had happened there. Flaming Gorge Dam altered the flow of the river and amount of silt in the water from 1958 through the present. This adversely affected the Cottonwoods, who do not reproduce as well as they once did. Tamarisk, Teasel, Russian Olive, Phragmites Bull Thistle and a non-native vetch are common, but still controllable. On the other-hand there are also healthy numbers of Buffalo Berry, American Licorice, and willows. Along the portion we floated, there was only a short stretch of private property that was overgrazed. All that grew there were Tamarisks

One of the biologists mentioned that it is sometimes nice to go places that are completely unknown to him, so that he can look at the landscape and see the beauty of the place, instead of the number of invasive, non-native weeds.

While on the trip I saw many Prong-horn, Mule Deer, Ravens, Turkey Vultures, Mergansers, Leopard Frogs, Horned Larks and Gray Jays. Also I saw Osprey, a Golden Eagle, a Coyote, Canadian Geese, Sand-hill Cranes, big Rainbow and Brown Trout swimming beneath our raft through the clear water, and a Great Blue Heron who I startled on the edge of the river in the dark. Other members of the trip saw a family of seven river otters.

The Nearer Your Destination

The Need for Science, by Katharine Coles

—for Chris, on the anniversary of moving into our house, August 14, 1989-1994

1. Invisible Weight

[I]f appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science. —Michio Kaku

Or microscopes, telescopes, steam machines
for stripping wallpaper—remember
that bathroom, navy blooming with pink

irises the size of my head?—poetry, news
analysts, physicians, the FBI, dating
services. The perfect match, we meant

ourselves for each other, at first sight
(allowing for the collapse

of what seems no time), so made
ourselves, over,
took

each other's measure, lip-to-lip,
did not count seconds speeding up

our heartbeats, washing
over our bodies—the past emptying

out the future's rush and roar
dimmed by the sound of our breathing, the hum
of his old air conditioner, heaved

down one set of stairs, up another. Every touch
left its smudge, its slow, cumulative,
invisible weight.
We'd had to wait

an age for each other. And we had
what still looked like forever.

2. Visible Weight

By simple rotation, we can interchange any of the three spatial dimensions. Now, if time is the fourth dimension, then it is possible to make "rotations" that convert space into time and vice-versa. —Michio Kaku

If I could turn a Kenmore washer into time
I could rotate it through this door
elaborated by a Victorian mind

that wouldn't have conceived it. Or
that I would want it, a hundred-

some years down the line. I have
misread again, willfully,

not only science, but history—
it is so hot, and the machine

so unwieldy in its space,
who could blame me for reducing theory
to mere machine?
The physicists,

clucking collective tongues
recisely measured. Their voices

take just so much space in my mind.
Call it x. In time,
they'll shrink to nothing, small matter

converted into energy I could use, now,
resting my back against dusty woodwork,

while this physicist watches over his glasses.
All before we married. He considers

matters of space and time,
machine
versus merely human mind. Counts
complications. The move, the wedding: all

sooner undertaken, sooner finished.
Since then, we've learned a thing or two,
have buried friends we held,

a mother who held us. We recover
nothing: holding each other, we hold

each other's absence. We are turning
into the past. In retrospect,
I would prefer to take my time.

3. Anniversary

Newton, writing 300 years ago, thought that time beat at the same rate everywhere in the universe…. However, according to special relativity, time can beat at different rates, depending on how fast one is moving. —Michio Kaku

Another finished orbit. Recollections
past, or passing, by the time we mark

a heartbeat, a line—anniversary
and universe both contain that turn,
the rhythm we walk. Long

days rush us through
the universe, the universe
through us: another year, or the nightly throb, his pulse

against my pulse, starlight's insouciant wave
rippling the screen. The blind

flaps in arid wind, the heatwave
we confuse with
five years back, summer

beating down two years before,
repeating
a house-of-mirrors' endless trick
reflections. Hell, it's only time. The day we fell

it must have seemed to him I stood still,
my hand resting on a book, composing

my response; but my mind moved
so fast he'd have seen its blueshift
if it were a star, he a star gazer watching

space collapse between us. It must
have seemed to him, but I don't know.
We move through different spaces, different times,

the same space and time differently—
I love the distances, roughnesses,

rotations, odd warps and woofs
we travel to touch each other.
On my birthday
two years after we met we moved in here;

in between, a love at first sight
took two years to ripen

then was there. It is my birthday today.
How long has it been? we ask each other. Yesterday,
forever. The bathroom's eggshell walls

needing paint again, a couch gone dingy, paired
chairs we sit on, staring
into space: all collapse, give

way to mystery. I still love,
over time, even the damage
time has done to him, though, minute-

by-murderous-minute, he looks the same;
though we move so fast
we only seem to have stood still.

Don't I Know You From the Cinematographer's Party?

Last night I coined a new aphorism: "If you can make a donut, you can make a cat."

This is not the point. The point, of course, is to talk here about the greatest and most famous of all aphorisms: "Know thyself."

Actually, no. Strike that. The point is to talk about the aphorism untold, but nevertheless present, in the previously mentioned ancient saying. What I'm trying to get at:

"Know thy place."

To ask: "Where am I?" seems to me to be more or less asking: "Who am I?" By which I mean to say that one of the ways we conceive ourselves, one of the ways that we create and then understand our identity is to know where we come from, or where we live--both the social and natural community which we are a part of.

But how? How do we know where we are? Know a place with the intimacy that will make us care about it? Or care about what it says about our own identity?

Perhaps it is an issue of seeing. Thich Nat Hahn writes: "When reality is experience in its nature of ultimate perfection, an almond tree that may be in your front yard reveals its nature in perfect wholeness. The almond tree is itself truth, reality, your own self. Of all the people who have passed by your yard, how many have really seen the almond tree? The heart of an artist may be more sensitive; hopefully he or she will be able to see the tree in a deeper way than many others. Because of a more open heart, a certain communion already exists between the artist and the tree. What counts is your own heart."

Annie Dillard after failing to draw a horse: "The point is that I just don't know what the lover knows; I just can't see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct."

So is knowing a place--seeing it--an issue of love? Must I become infatuated, falling head over heels for a place before really being able to recognize it, before being able to understand its inner qualities? And then will I know myself?

But love--true love--must of course come from true seeing. I can't fall in love with New York by watching all the movies that are set there (though probably actually filmed in a place like Winnipeg, Manitoba), can I? I've got to know what I know, not the artificial product of a secondary-source. (Though I will allow that these secondary sources can lead a person to a more authentic investigation.)

In the end, I think that to know a place you must occupy it--and only the devoted (the lover) will acheive occupancy. Only the lover will commit herself so entirely as to be able to see a place in its real self--and in turn to see herself more clearly in relation to that place.

By Andy, age 25