ENGL 6040: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts Keynote (SP22)

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The end is nigh.
The end is now.
The end was already.

“
In the end Thomas had saved a world, just not the world (Read 113).
Untitled, Jon Read, 2021
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haunted
landscapes
The Santa Ana winds in Southern California, NASA
“
To track the histories that make multi species
livability possibly, it is not enough to watch lively
bones. Instead, we must wander through
landscapes, where assemblages <strong>of</strong> the dead
gather together with the living (Gan + Tsing +
Swanson + Bubandt G5).
Considered through ghosts and weeds, worlds
have ended many times before. Endings come
with the death <strong>of</strong> a leaf, the death <strong>of</strong> a city, the
death <strong>of</strong> a friendship, the death <strong>of</strong> small promises
and small stories (Gan + Tsing + Swanson + {Bubandt G6)?
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haunted
landscapes
Discarded tires line the Tijuana River bed. Chris Stone
“
The movement <strong>of</strong> things. Things like tires. Let’s
take tires. Trees and tires and tomatoes all matter
here, all contribute to a shaping <strong>of</strong> the landscape.
But it is to tires and tomatoes that I will now turn.
Tires are everywhere in this canyon. Tomatoes are
not so much in evidence, but on this visit, I find
two small tomato plants. It is in the commingling
<strong>of</strong> tires and tomatoes that I begin to find some <strong>of</strong>
the answers to the question <strong>of</strong> canyons and
gardens (Stern G23).
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haunted
landscapes
“
I would never have thought that paved roads
might be the key to tomatoes. But so long as the
boundary between the road and the vegetable
patch is permeable, the potential <strong>of</strong> yet another
landscape unfolds, one in which vegetables and
people and nonnative trees cohabit in a
reshaped ecology, one in which continuity
between the canyon and the estuary is preserved
and tomatoes might serve to protect the
endangered species in the wetlands (Stern G26).
It is like this: a slow and Sisyphean project, a slow
{changing <strong>of</strong> the landscape (Stern G28).
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in the midst
<strong>of</strong> damage
footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
what remains
“Haunted Forest” by Michael Zheng
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in the midst
<strong>of</strong> damage
“
I teased him, “How can you study something
you can’t sense?”
“The most common truism about radiation is
that humans cannot sense it,” Kupny replied, “but
that is not true. With a dosimeter, you can hear
radiation. With a camera, you can see it. If the
levels are high enough, you can taste it on your
tongue. It tastes metallic.”
“And feel it?”
Kupny nodded in affirmation. After forty
years in radioactive fields, he said, he can sense
decaying atoms (Brown G40).
An interior view shows the house in the abandoned village <strong>of</strong> Zalissya near the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine, April 12, 2021. Reuters.
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in the midst
<strong>of</strong> damage
Islands <strong>of</strong> Abandonment:
Nature Rebounding in the
Post-Human Landscape
“
I shut my eyes, feeling cold fingers touching my
face, and visualize the radiation washing over me,
bathing me in a current <strong>of</strong> which I am only
abstractly aware. Whose existence is a matter <strong>of</strong>
faith. It is one thing to understand the concept in a
lecture, I think. Another altogether to comprehend
your body at the mercy <strong>of</strong> it. It takes a certain,
mystical, frame <strong>of</strong> mind; one I am not unfamiliar
with. I surrender myself to it, to its greater power. I
feel my boundaries blur, grow indistinct.
Gamma rays pass through me on their way
elsewhere.
After a minute or so, I step away, and hear the
siren fall to a crackle. I feel nothing. I think: I am
not afraid (Flyn 78).
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in the midst
<strong>of</strong> damage
“
These points <strong>of</strong> light are not representations.
They are energy embodied. The specks are none
other than cesium, plutonium, and uranium selfportraits
(Brown G41).
This kind <strong>of</strong> creative, spontaneous labor, for
which Kupny, the artisan, takes no payment,
{announces his freedom (Brown G41).
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in the midst
<strong>of</strong> damage
“
I use the term “aesthetic” in a nontechnical way
to discuss things that appeal to the senses, things
that evoke or capture feelings and responses. I
want to think <strong>of</strong> aesthetics, in part, in angiosperm
terms, that is, in terms <strong>of</strong> lures that both entice
one’s attention and <strong>of</strong>fer rewards. (Rose G53).
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in the midst
<strong>of</strong> damage
“
Instead, by foregrounding the exceptional
d a m a g e t h a t h u m a n s a re c a u s i n g , t h e
Anthropocene shows us the need for radically
reworked forms <strong>of</strong> attention to what marks the
human species as different (Rose G55).
We are called to acknowledge that in the midst
<strong>of</strong> all we cannot choose, we also make choices
{(Brown G61).
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footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
“
The reintroduction reinstated a series <strong>of</strong> trophic
cascades with important ecosystem effects.
Wolves began to limit the population size and
space use <strong>of</strong> American elk (C. canadensis) and <strong>of</strong>
the competing, but smaller, coyote (Canis latrans).
Hereby, the wolf reintroduction had strong
indirect consequences for vegetation dynamics
(Svenning G74-5).
The aftermath <strong>of</strong> the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. U.S. Army
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footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
“
The dense temperate forests imagined to have
covered much <strong>of</strong> Europe and eastern North
America prior to agriculture could therefore be a
sign not <strong>of</strong> “untouched” wilderness but <strong>of</strong> vast
extinctions (Svenning G76).
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footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
“
This hierarchical understanding <strong>of</strong> life, which
defines “progress” as a linear movement from the
so-called simple to the complex, has long
haunted biological inquiry (Hejnol G87).
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footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
“
But what, after all, is complexity? If there is such a
thing as “complexity,” it is an adaptation to
specific ecological conditions, not the outcome
<strong>of</strong> a teleological process (Hejnol G96).
The empirical is always stranger than we
{imagined (Hejnol G100).
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footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
“
E n t a n g l e m e n t s a r e t h e o n t o l o g i c a l
inseparability <strong>of</strong> intra-acting agencies.
Naturalcultural phenomena are entanglements, the
sedimented effects <strong>of</strong> a dynamics <strong>of</strong> iterative intraactivity,
where intra-actions (contra interactions
do not assume separability, but rather) cut
together-apart, differentiate-entangle. Phenomena
are specific material relations <strong>of</strong> the ongoing
differentiating <strong>of</strong> the world, where “material”
needs to be understood as iteratively constituted
through force relations. Phenomena are not located
in space and time; rather, phenomena are
material entanglements enfolded and threaded
through the spacetimemattering <strong>of</strong> the universe.
Entanglements are the iterative intra-active
(re)confi g u r i n g s a n d e n f o l d i n g s o f
spacetimemattering (Barad G111).
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footprints <strong>of</strong>
the dead
“
As such, the mud volcano is a tragic and dystopic,
but also illuminating, illustration <strong>of</strong> the
Anthropocene, conventionally described as the
geological period in which human activity
exceeds the forces <strong>of</strong> nature. What better
example <strong>of</strong> such excess than if humans caused a
disastrous volcanic eruption? The Indonesian mud
volcano, however, also highlights another, equally
important and unsettling feature <strong>of</strong> the
A n t h ro p o c e n e , n a m e ly, t h e i n c r e a s i n g
impossibility <strong>of</strong> distinguishing human from
nonhuman forces, the anthropos from the geos
(Bubandt G122).
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what remains
“
I prefer to think <strong>of</strong> “Anthropocenes” as
irreducibly multiple rather than <strong>of</strong> a singular
“Anthropocene.” We can remember the
sustainable Anthropocene <strong>of</strong> peasant chestnut
cultivation over the last fifteen hundred years or
the less hopeful Anthropocene <strong>of</strong> chestnut
abandonment in the wake <strong>of</strong> industrialization and
globalization over the last two hundred. Both are
Anthropocenes (Matthews G154).
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
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what remains
“Entire worlds established, and the worlds aren’t
static. While the interactions within each extant
Xanthoparmelia m a y p l a y o u t a l m o s t
imperceptibly, they will influence the growth <strong>of</strong>
the species within, creating a dynamic interior
ecology. And whether it is the interactions or
something else shaping the evolution <strong>of</strong> aging, it’s
clear these dynamic worlds will persist for a very
long time (Pringle G166).
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“
What is at stake in these essays is not what the
Anthropocene is but how it will be lived (Pratt
G170).
what remains
For most <strong>of</strong> the writers here, the question <strong>of</strong> how
to live the Anthropocene is inseparable from the
{question <strong>of</strong> how to write it (Pratt G170).
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“
These writers are not discovering Anthropocenic
landscapes; they are creating them, in language.
They are realized in the aesthetic (vs. anesthetic)
responses <strong>of</strong> the reader, driven by the artistic
principle <strong>of</strong> estrangement, the making <strong>of</strong> wonder
(Pratt G172).
what remains
Life perpetuates itself through orchestrated
{aesthetic display (Pratt G173).
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The end is nigh.
The end is now.
The end was already.