‘In that the world’s contracted thus’

Posted on: 21 February 2017 by John Kinsella in Posts

All is in each of us, and we all deserve this acknowledgement, but as the sun shines across the planet it takes us collectively as well as individually. And human-induced climate changes alter the conditions under which the earth receives the sun’s bounty, shifting the range of sustainability through which life was nurtured.

Subjectivity and damage to the biosphere are as intimately linked as the inevitable vast movements of people are linked to human conflict. Cause and effect are the poles we struggle between and deny, remaking our own images to convey to a world we hope is eager to see who we are, the very essence of our being. Modernity of the now is tied deeply to the way we materialise the soul through consumerism, making our interiority visible, and it seems consciously or unconsciously, to many, a price worth paying. A price. Worth paying. Breaking it up, the absurdity increases as syntax is designed to retain a status quo of reason, to ensure information is conveyed in an absorbable, comparative, and recognisable way, however different we are as individuals, or cultural collectives.

But when language is broken free of its patterns, it bothers and disrupts, and the accepted forms of social media do all they can to pull these disruptions back into line. As we resist as poets, reworking language into new possibilities, we also subscribe to a status quo that has contracted the world to the self, to materialistic gain, leisure and pleasure.

In what follows I proffer specific instances of ecological protest, and a more general shared action against consumerism that I believe can dislodge the ruling elites that disempower citizens. As an anarchist vegan pacifist (and all these qualifications of each ethical and political 'component' are necessary), I believe that 'citizenship' denotes the rights to inclusive participation (through consensus) of all bodies in a community, should an individual wish to participate. I believe in small communities that self-govern outside configurations of centralised power, and that make decisions for a social good, with each other's welfare as well as that of the self kept in mind in all such decision-making.

The brutality of Theresa May's 'to be a citizen of the world is to be a citizen of nowhere' is emphasized when expressed within such a belief system (or dynamic), as the 'nowhere' is very much the small non-flag-waving community. Through what I term 'international regionalism' — respecting regional integrity while fostering international lines of communication in order to prevent conflict and promote understanding between different communities around the world — citizens embrace cultural diversity, pluralism of life choices, and tolerance of difference.

In other words, as citizens of small communities outside centralised power constructs, we are also citizens of the international, of the world. That citizenship is open, non-prescriptive, flexible in definition, and tolerant. We are citizens only insofar as we are individuals with obligations to other individuals, and these citizens (flagless, nationless) are part of all other small communities, as much as part of the one we make decisions in. The 'social media revolution' has created faux and facsimile communities that can activate but ultimately detract from a cause because of the costs at which they come. The centralised power in this context is the corporate machine behind software, and even if 'open' software, certainly behind the manufacture of the hardware. I search for liberty from these constraints, and to decrease the ironies of any protest activity through this.

Where I am going with this is into the heart of protest and how protest actions are communicated and engendered — now largely through Facebook, Tweets, and other social media via ‘devices’. We are witnessing the destruction of rare bushland and wetlands at Beeliar in Perth, Western Australia, and are part of a multitudinous voicing of opposition to abuse of the biosphere and locality, abuse committed by a Western Australian government hellbent on proving power in enforcing a toll highway that is seen by many, including town planners, as a ‘white elephant’. In witnessing this, I have seen desperation and trauma leading to individuals and groups of people deploying all non-violent methods available to them, in an effort to stop the bulldozers.

There have been legal actions, chants, yelling, the holding of protest signs, the massing of protesters to block machinery, individuals locking-on to equipment, tree-climbing and tree-sitting, poetry and music and art being employed as protest tools, innumerable articles and essays and radio interviews pointing out the destructive wrongs of the government’s actions.

In response to all this, we have seen hundreds of police deployed, and often quite aggressive retaliations to these protests. In many cases, the state has crushed and traumatised the protesters, over-riding all, and evoking signs and realities of a police state in which the constabulary become an extension of government policy. Nonetheless, this ‘Roe 8’ protest is much documented and is ongoing. The damage inflicted by government and its ‘partners’/contractors from ‘private industry’ has been extreme, with obvious trauma to the land itself and equally obvious trauma to the people who care about that land (in many ways, it is akin to the psychological trauma inflicted by war).

The destruction of habitat, the wiping-out of endangered animal and bird species, of rare flora, and the abuse of Noongar boodja, are an extension of the state’s remorseless attack on habitat and belonging throughout Western Australia, and there are numerous examples of this across the whole of Australia. I need not point out that the sun shines in a disturbed way on such abuses around the world as it works its way remorselessly round, witness to these serial and parallel desecrations.

Yet the very subjectivity that allows us personally to release and make collective bonds inside and outside our cultural norms, in order to resist such abuse, is compromised by the social media that have become pivotal in these resistances. As with the computer I type this on (a very old one I struggle to maintain, resisting the ‘outmoded’), the devices we use to communicate our actions, to draw the soul into the materiality of resistance, come at a cost that equates to what we are protecting. The rare earths that go into making a phone come from somewhere, and the destruction in mining them is massive. The power used. The psychologies of indifference behind the industries that manufacture hardware and software. I don’t need to list the causes and effects; they are well documented.

Nothing seems to be able to stop the juggernaut. In the same way that tyrants thrive in the late-capitalist Petri dish, so does the technology that has become synonymous with exploitation and resistance at once. It is a universal that opens lines — often angry and disrupted lines — across cultural difference, and allows access not only to ‘information’, but to the very essence of a constructed, publicised self. In this, cultural identity is diluted and fused with consumerism. Ideology is now consumerism, and inflections of control (from the self-proclaiming ‘free’ societies to dictator pariah states) are managed through range of access to devices/gadgets and ‘freedom’ to use them.

To stop an oppressive government in a ‘free society’, stop consuming. Trump and May and Turnbull et al. ultimately succeed because we purchase. Even Stalin aimed for five-year plans that would resolve consumerist urges, and this is at the basis of all buying-offs of population. I ask my fellow protesters — would you agree to no phones (ever), in exchange for the wetlands? Some would genuinely answer yes, and mostly we can tell who they are because they make their difference from ‘society’ clear in many ways. Others would say yes on principle, but most would feel compelled by ‘necessity’ if nothing else, to decline.

This is an argument not of convenience but of syntax — if we don’t disrupt and change the way information flows, we will consume right to the core of the planet and the sun won’t be able to help us. We are dealing with notions of alternative facts and alternative truths at present, but control of media has always meant that — you don’t think Goebbels was for the free-flowing supply of ‘facts’, or that Stalin wanted the truth out on radio and in newspapers at all costs?

Of course not. But now we delude ourselves into thinking ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, which have been handed to us via the military through the internet, via the exploitation of Global South communities, via the mass destruction of habitat, have meant that we ourselves control our own access to information, and thus ‘armed’ with that information we become powerful ‘selves,’ and through that can make choices of connectivity (the old collectivity) to increase our RAM incrementally? This is delusional, and a feeding of the ‘alternative facts’, a rerouting of altered syntax into a new conservative prosody.

I laugh sadly as I see the increased sales of 1984 written by one who spied on and sold out the left, and the horrors of language altering to brainwash, when every Tweeter (say no more, man in the high tower!), and every Instagrammer does this textual or visually many times a day. We wear sunscreen to protect ourselves against a sun we have exposed ourselves to in ways John Donne never envisaged — and he was progressive! — and we filter our corporeal selves to reimagine what we understand as the essence of who we want to be — our identity — through filters.

In some ways, I am disturbed by the conservatism that could be read in this identification of the self as the route to destruction, but I reassure my radical self that it’s nothing to do with the essence of who we all are, as that, surely, doesn’t wish to hide behind hypocrisies that will wipe all life from this planet sooner than we allow ourselves to think. In each of us is all place, all people, all selves: each of us must act for the other whether we can see or hear them over phones. Just know we are out there, know in your relationship to sun, in language. Disrupt the lines of communication, don’t rejig them and contribute to the paradigm of consumerist denial.

The Bulldozer Poem

Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils

of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do

as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they

tear the earth’s skin — from earth they came.

Bulldozers are made by people who also want new

mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families.

Bulldozers are observers of phenomena — decisions

are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions.

They will hear our pleas and struggle against their masters.

Bulldozers slice & dice, bulldozers tenderise, bulldozers

reshape the sandpit, make grrrriiing noises, kids’ motorskills.

Bulldozers slice the snake in half so it chases its own tail,

writing in front of its face. Bulldozers are vigorous

percussionists, sounding the snap and boom of hollows

caving in, feathers of the cockatoos a whisper in the roar.

Bulldozers deny the existence of Aether, though they know

deep down in their pistons, deep in their levers, that all

is spheres and heavens and voices of ancestors worry

at their peace. Bulldozers recognise final causes, and embrace

outcomes that put them out of work. There’s always more

scrub to delete, surely... surely? O continuous tracked tractor,

O S and U blades, each to his orders, his skillset. Communal

as D9 Dozers (whose buckets uplift to asteroids waiting

to be quarried). O bulldozer! your history! O those Holt tractors

working the paddocks, O the first slow tanks crushing

the battlefield. The interconnectedness of Being. Philosopher!

O your Makers — Cummings and Caterpillar — O great Cat

we grew up in their thrall whether we knew it or not — playing

sports where the woodlands grew, where you rode in after

the great trees had been removed. You innovate and flatten.

We must know your worldliness — working with companies

to make a world of endless horizons. It’s a team effort, excoriating

an eco-system. Not even you can tackle an old-growth tall tree alone.

But we know your power, your pedigree, your sheer bloody

mindedness. Sorry, forgive us, we should keep this civil, O dozer!

In you is a cosmology — we have yelled the names of bandicoots

and possums, of kangaroos and echidnas, of honeyeaters

and the day-sleeping tawny frogmouth you kill in its silence.

And now we stand before you, supplicant and yet resistant,

asking you to hear us over your war-cry, over your work

ethic being played for all it’s worth. Hear us, hear me —

don’t laugh at our bathos, take us seriously, forgive

our inarticulateness, our scrabbling for words as you crush

us, the world as we know it, the hands that fed you, that made you.

Listen not to those officials who have taken advantage

of their position, who have turned their offices to hate

the world and smile, kissing the tiny hands of babies

that you can barely hear as your engines roar with power.

But you don’t see the exquisite colour of the world, bulldozer —

green is your irritant. We understand, bulldozer, we do —

it is fear that compels you, rippling through eternity,

          embracing the inorganics of modernity.

(John Kinsella)