There's a short film among the 32 about
Glenn Gould where the Canadian pianist walks into a truck stop and
sits alone at a table. The background noise—conversations between
truckers, a waitress taking orders, breaking off a relationship—comes
forward like counterpoint from a Bach fugue. Among the scatter, Gould
is a gatherer, one who notices. For many of us, this is a rare
experience, this act of paying attention (odd mercenary verb). “You
missed that,” writes Alexandra Horowitz in her book, On Looking:
A Walker's Guide to The Art of Observation. “You are missing
the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in
front of you.” Until a few of us walked across a small section of
this campus on Tuesday, we had thought the campus pristine.
Forty-five minutes after we started, we had filled three black
plastic bags full of cups, sandwich containers, straws, bags,
styrofoam bits, a blue flag, a pink tassel, one pink rubbah slippah,
a sour and dirty melange of objects that washed up on the shores of
our campus (as Allison Cobb puts it). What we consume, consumes us.
On Wednesday, a dozen students and
faculty sat around this heap of trash; we made fellowship of it,
talked about our connections to it. Allison Cobb, who works as a
writer for the Environmental Defense Fund in Portland, Oregon, takes
walks in her neighborhood and picks up bits of plastic. She takes
photographs of plastic, labels bits of it, “desire,” “fear,”
“grief.” She does research on her trash, considers her relation
to it, thinks about networks of connections between us and our
disposables. To some extent, she argues, we are plastic, because we
have ingested some of what we threw away; it comes back to us by way
of fish and birds, even our beer. We throw plastic away; we don't
mourn its loss. Allison, whose book, Greenwood, detailed
history and reportage of a Brooklyn cemetery that my grad students
loved, will read from
her ongoing project, Autobiography of Plastic.
Steve Collis comes
to us from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he teaches at Simon
Fraser University's Burnaby campus. Like Allison, he is obsessed with
the materiality of networks: he is currently involved in protesting
the Kinder Morgan pipeline that runs from northern Alberta's tar
sands to Vancouver. Kinder Morgan, a Texas oil company, means to
tunnel through Burnaby Mountain on the way. The protests have been so
successful that Steve and his colleagues are being sued for $5.6
million dollars in damages by the corporation. In this work, Steve
has allied himself with indigenous groups whose land is being
desecrated. His own poetry finds connections to the land by way of
the commons, land that is shared, rather than parceled out to the
highest bidder and then made into a luxury condo in Kakaako. A recent
book, DECOMP, co-authored with Jordan Scott, follows on a project of
placing Darwin's Origin of Species in different bio-regions of
B.C., then picking them up a year later, tracing their natural
decomposition.
Brian
Teare grew up in Alabama, and has lived in Indiana and California
before his current stay in Philadelphia, where he teaches at Temple
University. At Temple, he asks his students to research their
watershed, find out where the water they drink comes from. In his
poetry, he meditates on nature, sex, dying, the big issues. He is
author, most recently, of the beautiful book, Companion
Grasses. He engages a natural
world ruined by human beings in this passage from “Susurrus
Stanzas.” Read page 20.
What we consume, consumes us. We
desire, fear, grieve over what was once contained by plastic, but
stays on this earth as an empty, permanent, impermeable, container.
But what we notice perhaps does not. To pay attention is not
to consume but to honor and to release, not to say “this is ours,”
but to let go of our need to grasp: On your next walk across campus,
pick up one of these containers. Spend some time with it. Think about
its relationship to you and your friends. Then let it go, in a bin.
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