The rain returned as July came to a close here in Vermont. With it came a downpour. Streams running down the hill, mottling the path to our house with puddles. August has quite decisively foregone heat domes and scorching sun and returned to the evening its proper chill. At least for the time being. Even here in New England, our weather seems to be defined by dramatic and sudden contrasts: no rain, or only rain, reluctant summers, or wave after parched heatwave. The climate has taken on an undulating shape, like the green mountains themselves. Valleys and peaks rise and fall like ocean waves that stretch on beyond the horizon, and its inhabitants—all of us, human and otherwise—are having to take on something of that flexibility in order to make a life here.
How does one stay flexible? Remain in the middle of things? It seems to be one of the remarkable qualities of Earth’s ecosystems. Agents, or ‘holobionts’ are beings of the middle. They exist in and through relation. Making a world is always a social activity, whether one looks to the niche construction of flowers and pollinators or the remarkable consortium of beings (the greater majority of them being microscopic) that regulate the atmosphere and compose Gaia.
But what about human beings? How does one stay in the middle in their own life?
This question lingers with me as I hold the bundle of tensions that compose this season of my life: homesteading and co-parenting, deep research and manuscript writing, PhD classes, publishing, teaching and maintaining some semblance of a social life. My life is full and there have been many cherished moments of love and grace. I try to remind myself of what I’ve been calling the ‘generative tensions’ that arise from staying in the middle. They aren’t meant to be resolved, as C.G. Jung writes about. They are meant to be lived into as fully as we mortal humans can muster. It takes discernment when to know when the tension of opposites in our lives are a detriment to our flourishing, and when they hum with animate possibilities that break us open into a life of becoming.
Writing Fragments [Playlist Edition]
With the summer course complete and August arrived, I’m putting together a setlist of talks, events, and community discussions. Many of them revolve around the Fragments manuscript, because it’s finally nearing completion. Speaking of ‘staying in the middle,’ homestead construction is slowing down, and I have a short window before the fall to do a writing spring. Manuscript writing has come in bursts, seized whenever I could afford them (rephrase: whenever my saintly partner and co-parent could grace me, as Rilke describes, with the loving gift of solitude). I feel the electric rush that comes with nearing completion of a manuscript. Songs like “Minus Sixty One” from Woodkid evoke that electric feeling and remain in heavy rotation on my writing playlists.
Other songs on heavy rotation: Caroline Polachek’s “On the Beach.” Woodkid’s “To the Wilder.” State Azure’s brilliant modular synth work on “Gravity Assist.”
When I need to enter that more imaginative state and contemplate the nature of green things, and flowering things, “Hagoromo” by Susumu Yokota has been a great ally.
Then there is the expansive, ecological melancholia (‘solastalgia’) present in OPN and Rosalia’s “Nothing’s Special.”
OPN (Daniel Lopatin) gets a few mentions here as I finish up an important chapter towards the end of the manuscript. It explores his discography and its connection with ‘integral futuring,’ creative freedom, and living new forms of temporality that I believe the climate crisis has been calling our species into.
The simultaneous longing and resistance towards transformation in “Long Road Home.” The posthuman numinosity of metamorphosis evoked in “Imago.” In “Tales from the Trash Stratum” and “Wave Idea,” one has the sense that the ‘compost heap’ of lost futures, or what author Anna Tsing describes as ‘life in the ruins,’ can be refashioned and even reconfigured—like a mosaic, a weave, or a medicine bundle—that rescues time from stasis and opens the future. The songs evoke what Deleuze calls quality of ‘excess,’ or ‘multiplicity’ that he thought was present in living beings.
You may, or may not, associate any of these above tracks with the many ‘strands’ that compose our relational existence (think Donna Haraway’s wonderfully ambiguous term: ‘tentacularity’).
You may, or may not, conjure up images of bubbling brooks and waterways under the mountain.
You might, but then again might not visualize silent growing things, like rhizomes, mycelia, or the epiphanic weavings of text and hypertext. This is my attempt at an aesthetic gestalt. What writing Fragments has felt like and feels like: the many elements and pieces that shine through, quite suddenly, with the life of the world, the life of the whole. The breakdown, the dissolution, that becomes a solution and by any other name: a metamorphosis.
Maybe, when you’re holding the book in your hand, you’ll feel it too.
I am very much enthused by it nearing completion and expect to debut longer excerpts by late August/early September.
What’s Next on Mutations
I’m grateful that a number of readers enjoyed June’s event, “Paleolithic Retrievals” (I was floored, and truly humbled, to see over 100 registrations for the Zoom call) and have been asking me about a follow-up. I’d like to host a more informal talk, with room for discussion and breakout sessions, a few weeks out from now in August. Working on the title. Stay tuned for the announcement!
In the meanwhile, dear readers, I’m curious to hear what other discussion themes you would find valuable for a Mutations event? Feel welcome to share here (in the comments), or follow up with me via email.
More online events are coming, and for those interested, more podcasts and classes too. It’s always a balancing act—staying in the middle—protecting precious and fleeting writing time while showing up for just about everything else (much of it equally important and meaningful). It helps when there is synergy between any so-called ‘content’ I can offer here and wherever I’m at with the book writing/editing/publishing process. Writers must be all things these days.
If there’s enough interest, I might offer to ‘teach the book’ in the fall. What say you, dear readers?
Paid Subscriber Events
One more thing: paid subscribers are invited to join me next Wednesday, August 6 at 9:30 pm PT / 12:30 pm ET for a Mutations Zoom call. Topics pending, but may include a short reading from Fragments followed by an open discussion. Please, dear readers, feel welcome to join us! Zoom link will be shared to paid subscribers in the next few days.
Your resident holobiont and mountain mutant,
Jeremy