Vegan 30th-anniversary poem by John Kinsella (Graphology sequence)

by John Kinsella

Graphology Chronotype 24: Fantasias on Veganism (on the thirtieth anniversary of my veganism)

(i)

I lift the word cadence but improvisation is Bottesini’s

            different calenture, differing application

            of eating utensils: one model

            serves all

this interview with materials used in making an instrument

            the tip of a pool cue

all of it concrete

            variations

remember those ballet shoes you had made? — non-leather

            to dance with the troupe in & out of the wings

or gut of that doubling

I hear and integrate

what to do with, where to go

this Fantastic Voyage via

philosophies adapted to the way

they want to live    ‘They’

belonging to philosophies,

not the life story

(ii)

Not mentioning the craft of insectivore weebills

            so small

staying on track between wattles

in a high wind — you’d think they’d be tossed

and buffeted and dashed on the granites

knuckling through this fast-eroding hillside

but no, they are intact   complete   and don’t need me

and my inherited subjectivity, my wilfulness as they pinpoint

Not mentioning their craft, their particularised

strength to make landfall, line-of-sight

flight to branch on neighbouring wattle

would be to close out web of myth and facts

that might or might not catch all

            as full disclosure

and though no person you know eats weebills

there’s autonomy beyond your ken

and walking into the wind —

            shirt a tattered flag

without denomination —

is cross-referencing, an experientialism

hunkering down against

the ripping sou’westerlies

(iii) Ontologies Dreamed like the Benzene Molecule — an Address, of Sorts...

So, my ethical veganism becomes your ontological

categorisation to offset your own convenience store

of locality to qualify the ecology you know is right?

            Property settlements. Pay-slips.

Factory farm of belief as if it needs to fit your system?

These human dualists drawing animals into the realm

of human compassion, the imposition of separateness!

Flexible templates of locality. The beautiful

hypocrisies of text. Friends and loved ones

will always believe up to a point, or stage

their compassionate interventions. Agency

of each cell is beyond the networks of agriculture,

the grain plains of the Western Australian wheatbelt,

the utility of kangaroo-farming? The factories

of agronomy? See, I can oppose the out-of-kilter

of the plant-based — as much as you can oppose the factories

of animal production and still excuse the use of animals.

Delineating consumerism’s many faces. Threat of nirvana.

            Fetish of communication.

The interweaving of predators to tell a story,

to sinew experience as declaration.

No ecology is above what makes it sounds like an instruction.

Am I suggesting this? Am I ecology as definition,

an ontology of pantheism in which animals walk their way

because humans moved away, told stories

of human and animal selves separating and morphing

            and separating? Our rhizomes?

Kernels and husks, germs and ears of grain. The plains.

This tree arm, the rings of my tender body shedding.

The space about ‘food’ in the mouth:

light trapped in darkness, pockets and cavities

of air and darkness, the watery universality.

            Pure as the driven –ism. Re-

framed as signature terminology. Reference

in any contemporary discussion of veganism.

This infiltration of self. Of self-justification.

            Wholly holy ouroboros —

snake eating itself a dream invented to fit

the new mode of living. Here in the West.

(iv)

The choice

is made

and was made

outside product — each fad that means

fewer animals exploited and killed

is good; but we must

be wary of the product

that brings down

the ecosystem, feeds the state

which will eat animal and plant,

vegetable and mineral,

with an insatiable appetite,

shit out the planet.

An example? Palm oil?

Jungles are cleared

for the sake. These vegan snacks

can mean the death of so many individuals

that the term ‘species’ (as in extinction)

is the only collective noun

that is translatable

here.

So ‘product’

packaging of planet

will salve only desire:

ontologically or otherwise.

And all product is local

at this point, and that.

A mirror.

            John Kinsella

Land-clearing in Queensland: resist the exploiters

By John Kinsella

It’s not adequate to be aware of environmental horrors; we must act.

There’s a report in today’s Guardian newspaper on land-clearing by farmers and pastoralists in the light of legislation brought in by the last conservative Queensland government. This clearing is so extreme that it should be considered as a crime against humanity (which it is).

These rapacious land manipulators are even violating the destructive laws in place, and going further. And for a land owner and vested interest to claim,

‘Firstly, I state that this country’s greatest environmentalists are our farmers and our graziers’ 

is mockery.

I don’t need to draw analogies; its absurdity speaks for itself. True, you can get some farmers who are more land-care conscious, and, say, crop with a mind to the ecosystem in which they operate. But by and large, anyone engaged in land-clearing in a country already cleared to bare bones has no environmental credentials at all.

When we read this, we are getting closer to the truth: it’s a business...

‘What we are doing on our properties is taking proactive expensive measurement steps to protect the long-term health of our environment and the viability of our business. We are doing this through the practice of thinning using the current vegetation laws to restore our land back to its original open woodland condition, as much as we are allowed.’

They see the land as theirs to abuse. A tyranny of occupation, a state of war against anything living that doesn’t serve their business model, has been openly declared.

These acts of violence are part of the matrix of terror we silently endure, keeping our heads close to screens and gadgets, engaging with the outside world through Pokémon Go. We are part of an absurdist play of our own writing.

Will we act? Maybe this time — how about it?

Step outside, embrace the earth, resist the exploiters, show that non-violent resistance can bring positive change. (Can poems stop bulldozers?)

Write about it. Tell others. This is no incitement: the evidence is there for you to come to your own conclusions. But take a look, consider, respond.

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers — a poem

By John

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers

The new colonialism

eliminates or integrates

the water’s edge. The Avon River

is replete and despite the chemical

run-off it can’t quite process,

birdlife is rife along its banks.

Perched in dying paperbarks

spoonbills eke out nesting plans,

and sacred ibises preen

themselves with optimism?

A problem with me using this term?

Really? Try the trampling-under

of birds and riparian vegetation

as the eye of the telephone

mediates the real world

into digestible auguries: and where

a rare white swan swings

its neck, a Pokemon perches,

scowling and grimacing.

Trodden under, this nature

of encounter, this exercise

routine to coax emergence

from the caves of gaming,

this tracking of each and every

cybernetic soul, this savvy

that marginalises non-participants

and swallows tales of capitalist

liberty with addicted gulps,

is a travesty of seeing. Too blunt?

Each step into privacy,

each sucking of another’s skin,

each moment of worship interrupted

and over-ridden, each threshold

crossed to gather location

to conquest, is the theft

of reality from non-participants,

all sucked into a vortex of deadlife.

The sacred ibises preen with optimism,

believing, along with spoonbills,

that they will nest and raise their young,

and see what they see with their own eyes.

Violation of geography, absorption of ‘outdoors’.

            John Kinsella

Sweeney Encounters a Russian Adventurer in the Avon Valley: a poem by John Kinsella

By John

Sweeney Encounters a Russian Adventurer in the Avon Valley

Sweeney had to do his shopping at Northam Coles.

There was a lot of kerfuffle in the town and more

than a few foreign voices. He was surprised

to find the foreigners were not being attacked

by locals. On his asking why, a teenager stacking shelves

told him, It’s because they’ll only be here for a while.

What was going on? Sweeney took to the airwaves.

Birds of a feather, we might interpolate. Just outside town

he came across a vast balloon being spread out and filled with night.

He swooped down and found a man who looked like

a heavily bearded Dennis Hopper. He caught the name

of this wild man whom he recognised as a holy obsessive.

Almost like me, he said. A Russian. There were many voices

speaking Russian. I know Russian, said Sweeney — I get pictures

wired to my headspace from a poet in his country dacha

every winter, every summer. It’s cold here in winter,

but not as cold as it gets in Russia. That’s the definition of cold

in overheated times. The balloon was filling and the zeal

of the adventurer was palpable. All of this just for him.

His name was Fedor Konyukhov. He was aiming to loop

the earth from sunrise. To smash a record. The media, cloying and clinging,

were saying he sees the world as a place to conquer: mountains,

oceans, everything. Sweeney could see vast swathes of mangroves

dying in the far side of the country but in his gondola Fedor Konyukhov

would fly nowhere near them. Sweeney watched the balloon rise

with the sun, hung around and did a couple of interviews, then flew back

to Coles to finish his shopping. I feel like the stork delivering my own birth,

            he said, adding a few more cans to his stash.

            John Kinsella

A Call to Non-Violent Resistance: Save Wildlife NOW!

            by John Kinsella

Too many of us know something is wrong, think it, even say it, but simply do nothing.

I am afraid the placebo of social media campaigns is as much as expression of hubris and vanity as it is a positive act of engagement with vital issues that require change or prevention. It’s simply not enough, and it ‘costs’.

The most positive example of the social media campaign for positive change is the online petition, and this has been used to great effect in Britain for all sorts of local and regional issues (though I don’t think they’d have any chance to halt the horror of racism and bigotry that has been ‘unleashed’ there in recent weeks).

But that, too, is reliant on officials and politicians feeling they have enough to gain from following it up, or, say, once introduced to parliament, that there’s the will to implement change on the various levels of bureaucracy. Government is inevitably self-serving and inevitably compelled by its (bottom) fiscal line. Compromise will always be made.

The so-called will of the people, which is usually measured by ‘numbers’ rather than consensus or even a default understanding or consideration of the needs of ‘minorities’, is a variable which officials and the so-called representatives of the people manipulate, and with which they play with at will.

As a pacifist, I believe in non-violent direct action. I believe that each of us must act in accordance with our consciences, and also in accordance with non-vengeful, non-violent natural justice. Further, I believe that individual action has to be enacted through community on a small scale, and that those communities are rarely quantifiable or definable.

A community does not have to be those who surround us who might hold, say, racist or violent views. Sometimes we have to step outside geography to make communal decisions and implement communal action.

Community might be those who are concerned, for example, about the health of the biosphere. They might hold many different views on many different things, but there’s general consensus on that primary and vital issue. And thus I bring this horrific issue to readers’ attention: 'Threatened species face extinction owing to "God clause", scientists say' (Calla Wahlquist, the Guardian).

  

This ‘God clause’, a coinage by Western Australian scientists in the context of legislation being debated in the Western Australian parliament, seeks to give the government and the minister for the environment the power essentially to exploit an ecology that might see the extinction of an endangered animal.

As is pointed out by those opposing this on the level of policy, to give rights for clearing land where an endangered species lives kills the creatures, regardless. Further, the qualification of which species should be able to live, and which will (through the actions of companies or individuals) perish, is not only speciesist, but literally an act akin to genocide in human terms.

That humans destroy on a massive scale is obvious; that humans feel remorse is evident yet paradoxical; but that humans would wish to legalise and legitimise their death-acts is so criminal it should be looked at as a form of war-crime. If one believes, as I do, that all creatures deserve the right to exist, this is one of the basest pieces of legislation ever placed in front of a governing body.

So what do we do? Social-media our angst and forget about it until the next piece of propaganda comes through from the Taylor Swift camp to keep us all distracted? No, we write more than a few lines; we write our lives into our opposition. We change our interactions with the state on every level so the state can no longer act in our names. We point out that even majorities can be tyrannies, and that no one can represent animals, and that even the most dedicated pro-animal campaigner will waver at the edges due to the pressures ‘of life’.

It has to be individual collective action. Let’s not allow this one to happen. As we watch more and more land-clearing of less and less native vegetation; as we all sit back stunned and let it happen, participating in the crime with our every consumer act on the planet, let’s pause, slow down at least one consumer ‘necessity’; let’s not leave it purely to advocate groups of ‘scientists’ or ‘prominent people’ or volunteer or paid members of environmental advocacy groups, but rather make our own decisions, communicate in real ways where we speak to people — not to avatars and numbers of followers. Speak individually, converse, dialogue, exchange.

This legislation is symptomatic of a greed so great, of an exploitation in what they are turning into an endgame, of a mass extinction made by the cronies of developers, miners, agricultural interests, and anyone who thinks they can make a buck to buy themselves better material goods, that it is much more than a local concern. It’s the hand that signs the paper. Its synecdoche reaches every part of the planet. It is the ultimate form of terror.

Acts of Extinction

Don’t let the small unseen things

mess up a project. Project your desires

for profit (sorry, ‘jobs jobs jobs!’).

Don’t let hopping cridders the screen-

watchers don’t know much about

mess up a project. Buildings are life.

Don’t let fauna interfere with the molecular

integrity of construction — the guys who offer

to chop down to clear literally as you’re planting a tree.

Don’t let direct speech put you off the figurative —

there are still plenty of metaphors to hide behind,

long after the creatures are gone we can fantasize.

Don’t let the minister and the governor

scare you with their magic wands — they’ll

wave them over the earth with largesse. CEOs will cheer.

Don’t let any of this bother you watching

your favourite sport or watching your favourite

arts film. Think of what was done making Fitzcarraldo.

Don’t let someone with knowledge of land —

knowledge of what can’t be seen even with electronics —

distract you from your purpose. Your metals. Your living space.

Don’t let conjecture (bright light!) on how many

new species are left to be discovered upset your

ontological balance. There’s always the vacuum of space.

Don’t let me waste your valuable time for life

and all it can offer while the legislators sign off

on what doesn’t live on your clean, radiant screens.

            John Kinsella

New poems published in Eureka Street

By Tracy

Four of my latest poems have just appeared in the Australian journal Eureka Street. The first one, "Sea Pinks", is about the flower (also called Thrift) that grows on rocks and cliff edges in the northern hemisphere, as in the photo below:

Their hardiness is impressive.

All four of the poems are in some way about survival and persistence, and for me the sea pinks embody this in a very direct fashion.