Reverence ['Part One'] — Further Collaborative Work With Urs Jaeggi

    by John Kinsella

Urs and I spent an intense afternoon in late January working on this new collaboration entitled Reverence. It was on a day of protest against the rapacity of industrial capital. Urs's print-out texts and ink drawings are interwoven/interleaved with hand-written replies by me (with some hand-scribed moments by him, too!): extensions, riffs, diversions, responses and (copied-out) citations. Scribbles, scrawls, diagrams and 'errors'. It's intended as a 'living text', a rhizome testing the nature of the world around its coming into being. A conversation that took place in the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (thanks all there) with Finnegans Wake and commentaries (in the Joyce library), and with much else. So over a series of posts, I am going present the work: page by page... this is the first batch, and two more follow before the D & G 'body without organs' takes shape into something... corporeal vs. machine?

     [go to Part Two of Urs Jaeggi and John Kinsella Reverence]

Grammar of Protest - A Personal Peaceful Protest in Zürich Against the World Economic Forum

Away from the crowds and their own energies and disturbances, this protest in the streets of Zürich this evening. Allowing for the protest 'to' rather than protest 'at' or protest 'against', the sentiment is there. As the bullies of industry talk of 'doomsayers', they make the apocalypse; as they talk of 'hazard reduction', they leave no leaf unturned, as they say they are environmentally conscious, they devastate. Rapacity is rapacity is rapacity.

John Kinsella

In Memory of Barry Parsons Lost to the New South Wales Fires, November 2019

for Bazra - poet, activist and editor of TWOT - who was burnt to death near his shed in NSW, far away from here

Today hottest record November since weather began
today the burn inversion of head in the sand
the land quota of here-burn to make history of ends

this historical day, this array of false apples and Sky News suns,
this star chamber of aesthetics to claim a poet's line when it suits
and damn other poets and thinkers to the pit of 'alarmism'

on a day when feature is absolving though a list of 'historic fire events'
and a snarl at those who say ash will pile on ash and point to increase of ash
in the land of 'fire and drought' they'd repossess via dispossession

their love of capital vents fuels updraft only to lose pace
through lack of oxygen today hottest record since weather began
the stooge of capital demonstrates a predictable blame

of conflagration on those who see tree script against colonial
fire usurping Aboriginal fire culture to claim pattern to claim 'to be expected'
furious at climate activists as a poet dies near a shed died alone death unknown —

died alone without laurels and plaudits given out
by the machine of grace and favour wink and a nod
shadow-makers — alone with poems in the head,

liked by the community, unyielding to capitalism.
We knew him and his wild ideology his distrust of power.
Today hottest record November since weather began

today the burn inversion of head in the sand
and we think in mirage and melt and siccative art
kept in tins in chemical factory warehouses. Ash

of denial ash of trees and body and yes even air
burnt ash wavering as the wind turns about comes
about and the don't-speak-during-the-crisis brigade
     push eulogies to ends controlled by the living.

John Kinsella [from a poem-dialogue with Kwame Dawes]

The American President Hosts a State Dinner for the Australian Prime Minister in the Rose Garden, 2019

White-tailed Cockatoo Adjustment Villanelle

The prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees

to the president of the United States of America,

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

A ‘pure titanium’ lump-of-coal-in-the-hand-lackey,

the prime minister is serenaded along with mining billionaire fossickers,

the prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees.

With a Gulf war looming into coalitional collateral territory

the prime minister extends his oily tongue — his own red carpet botanica —

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

It’s the shop of Australia open for business bankrupting futurity

signed with the tail feather of a cockatoo searching for a hollow,

the prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees.

Here in the far away but scramjet-satellite-closeness of another ‘land of the free’,

the black cockatoos circle the valley and try to adjust to the slaughter,

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

Balance of trade is balance of flight is the feeding frenzy

where food is wing and a prayer and the faith of an arms trader;

the prime minister of Australia crawls on hands and knees

and the white-tailed black cockatoos weep for lost nesting trees.

            John Kinsella

Extinction Rebellion is Too Much About Image and Not Enough About Its Own Impacts

I was deeply disturbed to see this in the press. The 'greening' of the Limmat River in Zurich as an 'event', as an act of protest, is obscene. No more dangerous than table salt, they claim? Let's look at some of the background to uranine, the substance used to colour the river in 'protest'.

Uranine has a complex chemistry and a complex history. Sodium fluorescein has made appearances as part of St Patrick Day Celebrations in Chicago, and had coloured the Danube in the 1870s. It is used to trace leaks in water tanks and pipes, but with a strong warning that it is not suitable as a 'food dye'. The materials used to make the dye are from inevitably dangerous extractive industries.

Its apparent 'non-toxicity' means it is used in some surgery, but in undiluted large doses it can prove fatal. It turns up in a report for Project Shad — a series of tests conducted to see what vulnerabilities US warships presented to biological and chemical agents. The report is telling in its implications of industry and application, in the journey a chemical product makes to its eventual usages.

Unless Extinction Rebellion collectively start to comprehend cause and effect, the sources of the materials they use, the extended metaphors (their conceits) and symbolism in the world as a whole they enact, then they are performing and enacting their own (collective and individual) need to be doing something, rather than changing anything.

Phones are their devices, and phones are at the core of much mass extinction. These devices are manufactured. The irony of table salt — no more dangerous than... — is figurative and literal. The salt industry in itself is worth scrutiny, and salt on the human body... well, hardening of the arteries is more than a symbol. Collapsing symbols. This photo op of people floating on the greenness of wish-fulfilment contributes to planetary dissolution; it does not help prevent it. Let the phones you use now (and, indeed, this computer), be the last you purchase. If they are 'de-teched' out of existence, so be it.

Stop buying the crap with horrific environmental consequences and the city will become far more aware than it would from you impressing your friends on social media. Sorry, you disappoint me and many others. Now is the time to act — you/we have the will, but also need to think about how.

Not super strong glues (horrific chemistry and horrific side effects to people and the environment); not dyes (synthetic at that! seeing is also perceiving), no phones... people stopping the consumerist new-tech new colonialism. That way we might make a difference.

I once worked with these dyes in a lab as a teenager. As 'harmless' (!?) as the mineral sands industry the lab was ultimately serving. Not all the leaks were caught, either.

Extinction Rebellion needs to stop being a showpiece and start being a rejection of all tech consumerism. They need to understand that the 'non-toxic' dye down its chain of being encounters origins in naphthalene (hydrocarbon), sulphuric acid etc etc. (consider how we get phthalic acid anhydride, how we get resorcinol... how the reaction takes places etc etc!). Need to dig deeper, think deeper, and act less for performance's sake.

Protest is being there, and we are all here, in the moment. We don't need to see you, we need to see the changes brought by your (and our) non-consuming and non-self-privileging of access to goods. Altering the 'mere' look of a river is nonetheless altering the river. Leave it alone and stop pouring shit — any shit — into it.

Villanelle of a Green Limmat River: with great sadness

The disconnect between cause and effect

as Uranine is poured into sharp contrast like snow melt,

the damaged river through the city is made bereft.

Temporary... as chemical warfare?... temporary as the best

laid plans floating in the bright emulsification of death — a test —

the disconnect between cause and effect.

Social media traces through screen memory through distinct

moments of play in the horror of on and on it goes left right left,

the damaged river through the city flows bereft.

Rebellion that feeds the extinction that synthesises and treats

‘world’ as playground to announce the leaks — halt!

the disconnect between cause and effect.

This landlocked calenture this old city called to order this cost

of confronting like a green algal bloom swallowing each breath,

the damaged river through the city is made bereft.

‘As toxic as table salt’ — sum of the parts — investigate the collect

& refining of salt, the world’s hardening arteries, the logo the crest —

via this disconnect between cause and effect

the damaged river through the city flows bereft.

            John Kinsella