Structures of Interaction | Reflexivity

A reading from The Overstory by Richard Powers. 2018, p. 114-115

Transcript:

In this way, acorn animism turned bit by bit into its offspring, botany. She becomes her father’s star and only pupil for the simple reason that she alone, of all the family, sees what he knows: plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people. He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise. People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation and create the very air.

“It’s a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again.” He teaches her to tell a shellbark from a shagbark hickory. No one else at her school can even tell a hickory from a hop hornbeam. The fact strikes her as bizarre. “Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?

“Plant blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain’t it, kiddo?”

Her father has a little trouble with Homo sapiens himself. He’s caught between fine folks whose family farms are failing to subdue the earth and companies that want to sell them the arsenal to bring about total domination. When the frustrations of the day grow too much for him, he sighs and says, for Patty’s impaired ears alone, “ah, buy me a hillside that slopes away from town.”

They drive through a land once covered in dark beech forest. “Best tree you could ever want to see.” Strong and wide but full of grace, flaring out nobley at the base, into its own plinth. Generous with nuts that feed all comers. Its smooth, white-gray trunk more like stone than wood. The parchment-colored leaves riding out the winter—marcescent, he tells her—shining out against the neighboring bare hardwoods. Elegant with sturdy boughs so much like human arms, lifting upward at the tips like hands proffering. Hazy and pale in spring, but in autumn its flat, wide sprays bathe the air in gold.

“What happened to them?” The girls words thicken when sadness weighs them down.

“We did.” She thinks she hears her father sigh, though he never takes his eyes off the road. “The beech told the farmer where to plow. Limestone underneath, covered in the best, darkest loam the field could want.”

They drive from farm to farm, between last year’s blights and next year’s vanishing topsoil. He shows her extraordinary things: the spreading cambium of a sycamore that swallowed up the crossbar of an old Schwinn someone left leaning against it decades ago. Two elms that draped their arms around each other and became one tree.

“We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

Her father is her water, air, earth and sun. He teaches her how to see a tree, the living sheath of cells underneath every square inch of bark doing things no man has yet figured out. He drives them to a copse of spared hardwoods in the bottoms of a slow stream. “Here! Look at this. Look at this! “ A patch of narrow stalks, each with big drooping leaves. A sheepdog of trees. He makes her sniff the giant spoonlike foliage, crushed. It smells acrid, like blacktop. He picks up a thick yellow pickle from the ground and holds it to her. She has rarely seen him so excited. He takes his army knife and cuts the fruit in half, exposing the buttery pulp and shiny black seeds. The flesh makes her want to scream with pleasure. But her mouth is full of butterscotch pudding.

“Pawpaw! The only tropical fruit ever to escape the tropics. Biggest, best, weirdest, wildest, native fruit this continent ever made. Growing native right here in Ohio. And nobody knows!”

They know.

A reading from The Overstory, by Richard Powers. 2018, p.86-87.

Transcript:

He wants to keep heading west. Trouble is, the only strip still west of him feels like going east again. And yet he’s got his used but solid F100, new tires, a fair amount of coin, his veterans disability, and a friend in Eugene. Beautiful back roads lead through the mountains all the way to Boise and beyond. Life is as good as it has been since he fell out of the sky and into the banyan. The truck radio drifts in and out through the canyons, like the songs are coming from the moon. High lonesome blending into techno. He’s not listening anyway. He’s trancing out on the miles-long walls of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. He pulls off onto the shoulder to relieve himself. Out here on these ridges, he could pee on the highway’s centerline and humanity would be none the wiser. But savagery is a slippery slope, as he has often read to the horses. He steps off the road and into the woods.

And there, flag at half mast, eyes toward the wilderness, waiting for his bladder to lift the lockdown, Douglas Pavlicek sees slabs of light through the trunks where there should be shadow all the way to the forest’s heart. He zips and investigates. Walks deeper into the undergrowth, only deeper in turns out to be farther out. The shortest of hikes, and he pops out again into . . . you can’t even call it a clearing. Call it the moon. A stumpy desolation spreads in front of him. The ground bleeds reddish slag mixed with sawdust and slash. Every direction for as far as he can see resembles a gigantic plucked foul. It’s like the alien death rays have hit, and the world is asking permission to end. Only one thing in his experience comes even close: the patches of jungle that he, Dow, and Monsanto helped to clear. But this clearing is much more efficient.

He stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees, crosses the road, and peers through the woods on the other side. More moonscapes stretches down the mountain side. He starts up the truck and drives. The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state. The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry. The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York.

He stops at a gas station to tank up. He asks the cashier, “Have they been clear-cutting, up the valley?”

The man takes Douggie’s silver dollars. “Shit, yeah.”

“And hiding it behind the little voter’s curtain?”

“They’re called beauty strips. VISTA corridors.”

“But . . . isn’t that all national forest?”

The cashier just stares, like maybe there’s some trick to the question’s sheer stupidity.

“I thought national forest was protected land.”

The cashier blows a raspberry big as a pineapple. “You’re thinking national parks. National forest’s job is to get the cut out, cheap. To whoever’s buying.”

Recorded July 7, 2020

Location: Belchertown, MA

A reading from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 2013, p. 274-275.

Transcript:

Umbilicaria is often the victim of its own success. Accumulation is its undoing. Slowly, slowly, the lichens build up a thin layer of debris around them, perhaps their own exfoliations, or dust, or falling needles—the flotsam of the forest.

The dusting of organic matter holds the moisture that the bare rock could not hold, and gradually an accretion of soil creates a habitat for mosses and ferns. Through the laws of ecological succession, the lichens have done their work of laying the foundation for others, and now the others have come.

I know a whole escarpment covered with rock tripe. Water trickles down fissures in the cliff face, and the trees have closed in, making a shady paradise for mosses. The lichens colonized in an earlier day, before the forest was thick and moist. Today they look like an encampment of floppy canvas tents on the rock, some now tattered, with sagging rooflines. When I scan the oldest tripe with my hand lens I see they are crusted over with algae and other crustose lichens like microscopic barnacles. Some have slippery green streaks where blue-green algae have made themselves at home. These epiphytes can impede the photosynthesis of the lichen by blocking out the sun. A deep pillow of Hypnum moss catches my eye, vivid against the dull lichens. I move along the ledge to admire its plush contours. Sticking out from its base, like a ruffle around a pillow or the edges of Umbilicaria thallus, nearly engulfed by the moss. Its time has come to an end.

The lichen, in a single body, unites the two great pathways of life: the so-called grazing food chain based on the building up of beings, and the detrital food chain based on taking them apart. Producers and decomposers, the light and the darkness, the givers and receivers wrapped in each other’s arms, the warp and the weft of the same blanket so closely woven that it’s impossible to discern the giving from the taking. Some of Earth’s oldest beings, lichens are born from reciprocity. Our elders share the teachings that these rocks, the glacial erratics, are the oldest of grandfathers, the carriers of prophecy, and our teachers. Sometimes I go to sit among them, the proverbial naval gazer at the belly button of the world.

These ancients carry teachings in the ways that they live. They remind us of the enduring power that arises from mutualism, from the sharing of the gifts carried by each species. Balanced reciprocity has enabled them to flourish under the most stressful of conditions. Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them. It is changing now.

 

Recorded June 27, 2020

Location: Belchertown, MA

An excerpt from MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, p.33, read by Steph.

Transcript:

“Physical objects have shacked their tethers; mine, yours, his, hers, and they’ve gone wandering off on their own. It’s like the aftermath of those riots they used to show in documentaries of the early 21st Century, when kids would join phone swarms and then break windows in mob shops, and grab stuff, and what you could have was limited only by what you could carry.”

Recorded June 2, 2020

Location: Belchertown, MA

Transcript:

“You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need. Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.”

From Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (p. 111).

 

Recorded 5/25/2020

Location: Belchertown, MA

Transcript:

“When my daughters remember our sugaring adventure now, they roll their eyes and groan, ‘That was I much work!’ They remember hauling branches to feed the fire and slopping sap on their jackets as they carried heavy buckets. They tease me about being a wretched mother who wove their connection to the land through forced labor. They were awfully little to be doing the work of a sugaring crew. But they also remember the wonder of drinking sap straight from the tree. Sap, but not syrup. Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distils the sweetness.”

From Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (p. 69).

Recorded 5/23/2020

Location: Belchertown, MA