Eclogues 3

           John Kinsella

A third and final post (for the time being) on eclogues. This is an intertextual eclogue I wrote around May last year making use of an Emily Brontë poem. There's a conversation going on with the text and contexts of the original Brontë poem, but there's also a commentary on eco-collapse. It should be noted that by the time Emily died in 1848, the Industrial Revolution had so accelerated Anthropocene climate change that she was embedded in the damage in ways that might have induced a sublimated form of anxiety about 'human progress' if not a material resistance because of awareness. 

Mind you, it was only eight years later that Eunice Newton Foote made observations about climate and carbon dioxide, and towards the end of the century (1896) when Svante Arrhenius noted the effect carbon dioxide could have on temperatures on earth. So even though there's an absurdity implicit in culture jamming across very different eras, it's maybe not so absurd when we consider the import of 'progress'. Juxtaposing Brontë's (anomalous in many ways) 'conservative' politics in conversation with an (Audenesque) 'age of anxiety' resistance voice is belied by the far-sightedness of her insights into the self with regard to 'nature', and the deep passion for the interconnectedness of life. 

This is not a song competition à la Virgil's Third Eclogue (which drew on Theocritus, of course), but rather a 'song fusing': a discussion that becomes the figurative annealing of a problem that goes back to the mass destruction of forests, the rise of metals, and the entrenching of the military state in all its forms. There's no third speaker in this poem acting as judge, but maybe the reader is playing that role: as much over their own role in climate change and eco-destruction as over the validity of the two voices. 

Over the years I have used intertext a great deal, but as I always note, there are problems attached to doing so. Brontë isn't given a choice, of course, but I think the need of the planet outweighs such proprieties. As one who opposes AI usage of writers' work but am also opposed to anyone owning words or even combination of words, it might seem straightforward that I believe such jamming is an automatic 'right'. Further, as I use what I call 'templating' to intertext with 'canonical' works in order to contest the control mechanisms that deliver them to us as 'authoritative' (in whatever way), it might seem that I am entrenched in this 'freedom'. 

But it's more complex than this: there are many texts I'd never touch (especially if I felt it culturally appropriative), and when I do it can be either out of massive respect or massive disgust. It's not an easy picture. Suffice it to say in this instance that Emily Brontë's poetry accompanies me everywhere I go (I literally carry her collected poems with me everywhere). Oh, and competition has been a big part of the destruction of the biosphere. There is no competitiveness in this!

Eclogue With Emily Brontë’s ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’

 

 

EB: Shall earth no more inspire thee,

Thou lonely dreamer now?

Since passion may not fire thee

Shall Nature cease to bow?

 

JK: I speak plainly: I’ve been keeping

records of failure, of diminishing rainfall

            and defoliation, of contaminated rivers

and erosion. Anti-inspiration.

 

EB: Thy mind is ever moving

In regions dark to thee;

Recall its useless roving—

Come back and dwell with me.

 

JK: I’m working on it. Where

I come from and don’t belong,

            I am trying to save a forest

from a ‘green metals’ miner.

 

EB: I know my mountain breezes

Enchant and soothe thee still—

I know my sunshine pleases

Despite thy wayward will.

 

JK: They do, maybe now

more than ever, but facts mess

            with the imagery. There

are mountains being converted to ore.

 

EB: When day with evening blending

Sinks from the summer sky,

I’ve seen thy spirit bending

In fond idolatry.

 

JK: I idolise the earth,

not the idols of capital —

            a ‘summer’s sky’

is a broken thesaurus.

 

EB: I’ve watched thee every hour;

I know my mighty sway,

I know my magic power

To drive thy griefs away.

 

JK: True, I rely on you.

But there’s less room for rhyme

            outside of advertising:

gadgets, oil particulate, fate.

 

EB: Few hearts to mortals given

On earth so wildly pine;

Yet none would ask a heaven

More like this earth than thine.

 

JK: Yes, that’s it  — ask no more

of heaven than we have around us,

            or had... going going but not gone.

A tree lost it seems too easy to forget.

 

EB: Then let my winds caress thee;

Thy comrade let me be—

Since nought beside can bless thee,

Return and dwell with me.

 

JK: Seems like we’re arguing

when we’re not — the flight

            of a pigeon is as glorious

as that of a goshawk. I love both.

 

 

            John Kinsella with Emily Brontë

Anyone interested in my eclogue work might look at poetry collections such as The Hunt, Visitants, Peripheral Light, The New Arcadia, Supervivid Depastoralism and The Pastoraclasm (essentially a book of eco-eclogues).

On the Western Australian State Government's Refusal to Effectively Protect Julimar 'State Forest' from the Threat of Mining (and other exploitation)

 

Herald Patches

 

(i) 2024: now

 

The minister for environment considers

Julimar forest’s availability for mining

 

            more important than its preservation.

            The chief executive officer of Chalice

 

couldn’t agree more, and praises

the official refusal to ‘sterilise’

 

            the forest’s ‘potential’. This is not

            surrealism but a radical departure

 

from the unconscious. There is violence

in city offices that spills out beyond

 

            low maintenance office plants, spills

            into the forest where fewer images

 

move as marsupials, lift as cockatoos.

Rhythm heralds consciousness.

 

 

(ii) 2019: prior

 

Rhythm heralds consciousness.

We seed an awareness in the vibrissae.

 

            Each livid patch, each resounding itch

            brings attention to the greater body.

 

One appears, then others. They will

scratch till the skin is damaged

 

            beyond repair. Make holes that can’t heal.

            A full scale ‘green’ battery industry

 

charges the assault. It’s a psychology

that goes back years. Take the 2019

 

            Indo-Pacific Defence Conference

            held at Crown Towers in ‘Perth’,

 

with a keynote on ‘defence industry

applications for WA's battery

 

            minerals and resources expertise’.

            ‘Green’ revolution destroying

 

all it contacts then making atopic collapse.

A minister’s or miner’s dream journal.

 

            A billionaire’s spacewalking view

            of Earth. A dermatologist’s similitude.

 

 

(iii) now unto ‘the future’

 

A dermatologist’s similitude.

Lost trees heaped for burning

 

            when up on the rise the house

            of the Big Whites overheats.

 

Largesse in the ore. Workers’

accommodation. Minesite infra-

 

            structure heralding State sanction.

            Words on the signs or the signs

 

themselves can be changed ipso facto.

Skill set. Application. Blue pencilled,

 

            each patch is forgotten. Bubble chart

            of raw data. Species lists. Red list data.

 

Environmental scientists, technicians,

supervisors, co-ordinators: on payrolls.

 

            Higher education for the conscious

            and unconscious. Illustrators.

 

Consumers. And open cut or under-

grounded into  the discursive,

 

            the body map

            is drilled into place.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

The Tree Killers

I was preparing to post the poem below which is about the pathology of those who kill trees to improve their views, or because they dislike the trees shedding leaves, or because trees cast shade over their gardens, or because trees 'harbour' birds that wake them, or because possums inhabit the hollows, or because they wish to 'develop' an area, or because they feel a neighbour is encroaching (via a tree) on their 'rights, and so on. This is a global disease, but has very particular inflections in Australia where it is not uncommon to hear literal hatred expressed towards tree life. The expression 'tree huggers' is mainstream and used pejoratively on bumper stickers. 

In this colonial/neo-colonial nation, the tree too often represents something to be overcome, to be defeated as part of the 'pastoral' control of space. Ancient trees are especially vulnerable, and today another grotesque case of tree murder is being discussed, with 'state officials' by their own admission having a hand in it (and tree drs and pseudo-arborists, 'pruners' and 'loppers') — an 800-year-old peppermint tree. 

This should be scrutinised and critiqued on a global scale, and is further evidence of the abuse of country that underwrites the colonial control still so dominant in Australia. This should never be able to happen, but it happens frequently. Too much of it locates around leisure and providing 'access to nature' — how many carparks, trails through forests, and so on are decimated in the name of tourism and entertainment? It's remorseless. 

Though there is the obvious large-scale bush clearing and destruction of forest around the country through logging (even where there's a cessation of old-growth logging, miners still make massive inroads... e.g. bauxite industry in WA's southwest jarrah forests), mining, housing developments degradation of forest by leisure activities, much tree killing is done 'privately' and secretively. 

In the last decade we've seen 400-year-old jarrah trees killed in the Challar Forest near Walpole and also the famous Gelorup Jarrah (300-400 years old) was 'mysteriously' felled during the horror discussions about the route of the Bunbury/Gelorup bypass (we witnessed the extent of this destruction a couple of weeks ago).  Among others! 

This poem focusses on the classic drill at the base and poison technique, much favoured by urban tree haters and also by rural retrogrades (sometimes arguing 'fire safety' as a trigger expression if they are caught... or some other such specious go-to...).  I was appalled to find that there's actually a Quora that discusses how to secretly kill 'unwanted' neighbour's trees, outlining herbiciding to 'girdling' (ring-barking... a favourite colonial-settler land-clearing technique, absorbed into the urban as part of the furtive neo-colonialism of Australian cities). People fuse their pathologies of tree-hate (and all it implies) into communities built on distance and anonymity. The world is killed anonymously.

To hate trees in this way is to hate the very essence and core of being. Without trees, the biosphere will be finished. The aim to control, confine and limit tree-life is part of a pathology of colonial control that merges with a desire for a legacy 'built' out of pioneering (as verb) habitat into conformity to try to (en)force disconnection from its sacredness.

The Tree Killers

 

 

To evade detection

they seem to come at night

with muffled drills

 

and slick injections

of herbicide

or cocktails of poison,

 

attacking the base

of the trunk

while lusting

 

for the roots — tap roots,

heart roots, lateral roots

even the fine and sinker roots;

 

to undress the crown

to suit their vision

of clarity and ‘silence’ —

 

bird homes removed,

leaf obscurantism in their vision

of skyscraper or oil-slicked

 

river, waking to traffic

without birdsong.

These tree killers

 

seem unaware

of the nature of souls,

poisoning opposite

 

a school, destroying

an ecosystem between sea

and cliffs, operating

 

as lone hands

or as paid-up hitters

to do the dirty work

 

of the moneyed

(the no proof who, me?

we're entitled brigade).

 

And sometimes,

it’s out of a deep ‘need’

for neatening the world,

 

for removing boughs

and twigs and interference

from their ambits;

 

it seems an untreated

pathology

given credence

 

by every mass

clearing of bushland

and forest, of trees

 

that have managed

to hang on till now,

offering their shade.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Short Play for the Protection of Native Forests Under Assault by 'Green Metals' Miners in Western Australia

 

After Deductions: an interventionist play for Julimar Forest

            by John Kinsella for open and free use

 

Three figures: two protesters and a reporter who lifts a mask (one side Tragedy and one side Comedy) to his/her/their face as he/she/they speak/s.

 

Reporter: Only two of you? Where are the rest of you?

 

Protester 1: Out of sight out of mind.

 

Protester 2: The town has been bought with water slides and the promise of jobs.

 

Protester 1: Not all of the town... not all of the district.

 

Protester 2: No... and more will join us in time... it just needs a seed... a nucleus for the protest to form around.

 

Reporter: And you’re it... looks like you’re setting up and in for the long haul.

 

Protester 1: Yes. We stand with you, forest.

 

Reporter: Why do you address the forest as if it’s a person?

 

Protester 1: It is an entity, an organism. It lives and breathes and is full of the living and the breathing...

 

Protester 2: and the transpiring... The CEO suggests the forest’s death will be a ‘net positive’ for the environment.

 

Protester 1: All those rare earths down below the root systems...

 

Protester 2: ...to be unearthed.

 

Reporter: The paper will say that it’s good for jobs good for the state good for business and an act of...

 

Protester 2: ...decarbonisation.

 

Protester 1: As easy as that... forest gone and more machines more consumables all weighed up...

 

Reporter: ... you means the feather against the heart...

 

Protester 1: No, that’s a ritual from ancient Egypt and this is Noongar boodjar and if you don’t listen and learn, if you don’t understand the stories of this country you’ll never find the language of care...

 

Protester 2: ...or loss.

 

Protester 1: The language of country the languages of an ecosystem are not fiscal are not profit and loss are not the triumph of capital as the biosphere collapses...

 

Protester 2: ... it is of the life you would erase would excavate would convert into batteries so the consuming can be eked out a little longer.

 

Reporter: So, you are saying what? That we should give up phones and cars?

 

Protester 2: We could... at least give up some of them cut back make do with a local life more and more...

 

Protester 1: I am for changing how we live entirely... minimising impact on what’s left of the world’s ecosystems... reducing the hypocrisies of our lives.

 

Reporter: Seems easy to say out here, with the cockatoos calling across the treetops, and the wattlebirds making comments.

 

Protester 1: Which is the point, really, isn’t it?

 

Reporter: The police will remove you when the time comes.

 

Protester 1: They will come and they will do the state’s bidding which is in the company’s interest. It’s always the same.

 

Reporter: You’ve done this before?

 

Protester 2: We have to... some of us have to be witnesses... people will come when there’s media attention and get roused up and then drift back to their phone-screens, the pressures and pleasures of their own lives... only a few of us will stay and then no one will see the last patch of forest vanish other than the miners themselves.

 

Protester 1: Who witnesses Alcoa eating the jarrah forests at an horrendous rate...? The bauxite craving... it’s as if even the most committed of us give in, fatigued. And the company recruits zoologists and ‘environmentalists’ [the protester exaggerates scare quotes in the air...] to exonerate them, to make it all okay, to let governments and their departments pretend they care... while those apologists convince themselves they are making the best of things... that if it weren’t for them, it’d be worse...

 

Protester 2: Worse being such a flexible word....

 

Protester 1: ...and then no one is there to see us witnessing... we become vulnerable... we are disposable. We have been shot at by logger and miners. Fact.

 

Reporter: That would have made a story... something to latch on to. You should have recorded...

 

Protester 1: There were no mobile phones when that happened... and we wouldn’t have been carrying them anyway.

 

Reporter: Which goes to show how vital technology can be in bringing attention to environmental issues. But this story needs that kind of human interest... otherwise it just sounds like a rant.

 

Protester 1: And easy to dismiss because it’s ‘just a rant’. But it’s all chicken and the egg...

 

Reporter: What do you mean?

 

Protester 1: The tech is why the forests vanish, why the mines are made in the first place.

 

Reporter: But you’ve got to get your story out there.

 

Protester 2: We have to stop the mine. The forest is an organism made up of innumerable organisms. It is part of the lungs of the earth. It is the home of so many creatures... and it has its own spirit as well.

 

Protester 1: And we destroy ourselves by destroying it.

 

Reporter: The CEO of Chalice Mining would disagree.

 

Protester 1: Well, as someone once said, ‘He would, wouldn’t he.’

 

Reporter: You mean Mandy Rice-Davies regarding Lord Astor, that seems a bit inappropriate.

 

Protester 1: No, I mean Tree Climber, a protester from the Hawke Block protest decades ago who was referring to a logger who said that a felled old growth tree served people better through what it provided than a standing one. These trees are entire ecosystems within ecosystems... they support much more than the human... and people can’t quite accept that they’re also essential to the human wherever and however that human might be living.

 

Reporter: Seems like a bit of a long-term profession, this protesting... I mean, it’s just opinion, really... it’s not an exact science...

 

Protester 2: ...unlike, say, journalism, mining, making weapons, being a politician, running a business, playing footy? And when we do present the ‘facts and figures’, they’re dismissed or manipulated... money and power control the science, control the data and how it’s used. Many of the people we oppose weren’t so long ago denying there was even such a thing as human-induced climate change.

 

Protester 1: They are opportunists...

 

Reporter: Who? Name names?

 

Protester 1: Speaking in general... about the mining lobby... especially the coal miners, but not exclusively.... their arguments... their declarations adapt to fit market circumstances and the ‘sensitivities’ [again, those exaggerated scare quotes in the air] of investors. You’re not dragging us into that trap... you do the research... isn’t that your job?

 

Reporter: Really, what bring the attention of mums and dads and families is people speaking they can identify with...

 

Protester 2: ...I am not sure what that means... no mum or dad is the same as any other and whatever anyone’s identity or beliefs or ethnicity the well-being of the biosphere is their right and their concern... we are not trying to appeal to a particular demographic, we are trying to save the forest.

 

Protester 1: ...we’re only speaking for the forest because there’s no one else to speak for it... we do not possess it, we don’t want to recolonise it... we want it to have rights and we want the traditional owners to have a say over country they know how to live with and preserve and respect. We learn respect from their respect.

 

Reporter: Sounds like someone’s shooting in there.

 

Protesters [together]: We hear it all the time... we see the four-wheel drives with spotlights... the shooters threaten us, yell abuse.

 

Reporter: You’re both poets, I am told.

 

Protesters: We are.

 

Reporter: Maybe you could read a poem about chuditches? I am told this is the healthiest and most robust population — or repopulation programme — of these carnivorous marsupials?

 

Protesters: That’s true, and they are incredible animals... but the forest is full of so many incredible animals and plants.

 

Reporter: Well, will you read something for me to share with our listeners?

 

Protester 1: There are so many ironies and contradictions in doing this.

 

Protester 2: But we’ve got to speak, haven’t we?

 

Protester 1: Yes... this is the season Makuru... the wet and cold months... and we would like the seasons to stay as close to what they were as possible... for the damage done to the biosphere means a breakdown of the seasons... only the nights remain as they were... and days as long as they were.

 

Protester 2: And the argument that the destruction of this 28 000-hectare conservation park or any section of it will be for the benefit of the environment is specious. Every miner of rare earths makes this argument to suit their balance sheet and their hope of wealth.

 

Protester 1: They pat themselves on the back that they’re doing it for the good of humanity when they greatly benefit from it personally.

 

Protester 2: Accruing wealth...

 

Protester 1: ...and power.

 

Protester 2: After deductions, they will live their lives in a denuded world quite well. They will meet their goals.

 

Reporter: The wind is lifting... it’s quite biting...

 

Protester 2: But the days have been much warmer and there’s been little rain this ‘winter’. The forest is stressed and the miners have been diamond-drilling deep, working their colonial patches: Hartog...

 

Protester 1: Janz, Dampier...

 

Protester 2: Baudin... not that they give a toss for Baudin’s cockatoo... that little bit of colonial renaming isn’t going to stress them...

 

Reporter: Anyway, poem, and I will leave you to it... I have another assignment to get to down in the city... gee, it really sounds like the sea, doesn’t it... I mean the wind through the wandoo and marri trees...

 

Protesters: ...through the forest... it does, doesn’t it... an inland sea full of life... and right now they are drilling to ascertain the boundlessness of their claim... of their gift to the planet... their climate coup de grace...

 

Silently into the sea of the forest

‘soft’-tracked vehicles will creep,

no wheels to crush undergrowth

they hope in future to delete.

 

Silently into the sea of the forest,

gently gently off-track — no tyres

pressing their case, just metal expecting

what’s flattened to shoot back into place.

 

Silently into the sea of the forest

those drilling rigs are determined to go —

to reach down further than roots

and mirror the hollow of sky.

 

 

Ecological Benefits Propositions

1. People are ecologically minded to serve their own ends

2. People believe that they have an intrinsic right over an ecology whether or not they have a totemic relationship with that ecology

3. People will damage an ecology to improve their own ecology or the ecology of their perceived community

4. People will address a social injustice that does not directly concern themselves through aligning it with protection of ecology but not if that ecology serves their own powerbase, even indirectly

5. People separate social injustice from justice to ecologies

6. Oppressive power structures will ‘trickle down’ benefits from the exploitation of ecologies while receiving minimum side-effects for themselves while maximising proximity-damage to those who are oppressed

7. Ecological activism will benefit the activist directly or indirectly, even when it benefits us all: this paradox is the empathetically just position designed to be incontestable

8. Ecologies rarely get to speak for ecologies and only do where their direct Indigenous or traditional interlocutors are given a voice over their protection and well-being

9. All being of ecologies give us all equal part and concern in their fate and yet the benefits from damage are lopsided and based on a series of oppressions worked through ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘gender’, and control

10. Ecology is aligned with dwelling and habitation and yet the houses of non-human species are undone or transposed to transfer power from ecology to certain humans or groups of humans

11. Human social structures make control of ecology more effective in order to control subordinate or peripheral parts of those social structures themselves

12. To claim authority and construct laws that have a central alignment with power will undo any ‘rights’ they legislate through controlling the nature of those rights (and the provenance of their being ‘granted’) — and this applies to the ‘protection’ of ecologies that then become reliant on the power demographics in the systems ‘offering’ that protection. Rights are inherent and beyond legislation which consumes those rights in underlying agendas

13. The elevating of human over animals in a conceptual sense will always mean animals will suffer not because humans should be respected less but because animals aren’t respected more — in the same way, ecologies being respected more can’t mean humans are respected less

14. The exploitation of individuals and groups of humans by other individuals and groups of humans (especially through institutions, state apparatuses, and larger social mechanism) relies on control and manipulation of ecologies — removing control over ecologies and allowing them to regain aspects of their autonomy lessens the ability of humans to create structures to systematically control, oppress and impose their ‘law’ on other humans.

John Kinsella