"Put them in your mouth": desperately seeking kinships
Geology is a site in the repetition of violence, as a material practice and a heuristic for parsing the category of the inhuman. Geology is also a site of struggle in the corporeality of geoscientific practices for the possibility of different earths and relations, and so must be considered a political medium of contestation in subjective states. (Yusuf 284)
Dear Jolene,
My rage at the lack of foresight and compassion that allowed people to type keywords like resistance or woman into a search bar and, without reading or understanding, cancel research funding is incandescent. We're asking how to respond to a polycrisis at the very same time as it is being exacerbated. Breast cancer, antimicrobial resistance, floods and forest fires won't go away despite the find and delete.
I feel impotent. Violated. Mute.
I wonder what tools, what epistemologies we can reach for or use.
What if we reach into small, deliberately performative gestures that yield small, highly personalized knowledge?
In her article "Soilkin," Alexandra Regan Toland designs a set of Fluxus experiments to test the proposition from Ursula LeGuin that soil resources could be seen as kin. Constructed as "relational landscape practices" (120), Tolan's "Soilkin exercises are envisaged as embodied thought-experiments, to be tested and developed in different ecologies with different actors, seeking kinships across spheres, knowledge-cultures, generations, and communities of practice" (120). (I'm at this moment quite weary of the thought-experiements I see some colleagues entertain while they passively watch their country become authoritarian, but the thought-experiment is a part of my disciplinary toolbox.)
Toland notes Kathryn Yusoff and Elizabeth Povinelli's work on the discipline of geology's approaches to rocks, contrasting them to indigenous animisms, echoed by climate activists at COP 15 protests: "This kind of animism implies both that stones may be seen by us as lively and having livelihoods and that we can become enlivened by stones to act urgently and politically. This stone in my hands is not only a historical witness but also a catalyst for change" (Toland 123).Exercise 1: "Take a hot stone from the fire and hold it close to the body. Pass it between hands and feet. Dissipate the heat" (Toland 123)
Exercise 2: Push a stone through the sand until it pushes back. (Toland 124)
Exercise 3: Become a stone observing itself (Toland 124).
My performance artist friend and student Paul Couillard, brought pebbles to his PhD comprehensive examination. They sat on the table, like shiny good luck charms, and then he put them in his mouth and began to talk. We could hear the stones scraping against the mineral of his teeth, clicks and taps and grinds; we could hear the gathering of his saliva; but we had a hard time discerning language for his mouth could not make the accustomed shapes of vowels and consonants. I remember marvelling at the experiment, and his explanation of his intentions that followed, and now offer it as an exercise:
Exercise 4: Take your favorite smooth stones, and put them in your mouth.
Next, read the Mary Oliver poem below while they're in your mouth. (Please don't choke.)
“Do Stones Feel?
Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?
When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don’t worry, I say, I’ll bring you back, and I do.
Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?
Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?
Most of the world says no, no, it’s not possible.
I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.”
Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?
When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don’t worry, I say, I’ll bring you back, and I do.
Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?
Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?
Most of the world says no, no, it’s not possible.
I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses
[mumblescrapedrool]
What?
[mmmumble]
Yes. I see.
Or rather, I feel.
What?
Sources
Toland, Alexandra Regan. 2023. “Soilkin.” Environmental Humanities 15 (3): 119–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746023.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2023. “Afterword: Geotrauma, or Geology as a Praxis of Struggle.” Environmental Humanities 15 (3): 284–91. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746159.
