What Events…

Currently I am at work discovering, documenting, altering and re-discovering text in a process that began with an invitation from artist Brooke Holve https://www.brookeholve.com/ to explore the mysteries of crumpling and crushing. What happens to text on a page when the page is crumpled and then pressed? What does this process tell me about the haphazard, the unpredictable and the mysterious in my pursuit of meaning?

Having focused my writing for several decades on the protection of natural systems, first with bioregionalism and watershed restoration leading into salmon protection, and finally bearing witness to climate disruption, I found myself so saddened by the blind blundering of government and industry, propelling all life toward destruction, that I despaired. This coincided with relocating to a new home in a distinctly different microclimate. Closer to the coast, surrounded by a magnificent but unfamiliar oak forest, with my library and papers still in the old house, I felt such a sense of uprooting only the most mundane events grounded me — the puppy still being house-trained, the elder cat’s inability to make it to the cat-box, the beautiful garden my husband was creating, and bringing back to health the old apple trees still bearing fruit at the bottom of the hill.

Although I was intrigued by the idea of crumpling and crushing, I was also baffled. Brooke was thinking of text, or she would not have invited a poet to join her project. But she was pounding rock to make ink and folding pages into accordion shapes leading viewers to a precipice at the edge of the frame. How could I fit in? It wasn’t until I stumbled on the concept of precarity that I felt a link to the way Brooke talked about her creative process following what calls her into uncertainty, inviting her into what is unknown.

So little is really known about what lies ahead. Perhaps at no other time in history has the world been more unmoored. Our political system teeters on the brink of authoritarianism, wars boil in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the global financial system vergers on collapse — all the while the Sixth Great Extinction proceeds with heartbreaking species die-offs as the temperature of our biosphere climbs steadily higher. We have transformed life, and we do not know what will happen next. The values that determine meaning itself have been thrown into question. Have we ever endured greater precarity?

Emergence from crushing is always unpredictable and unique. The result of one crumpling is never the same as another. Taking my cue from Brooke, I write, then crumple my pages and crush the crumple flat. In this process I impose control, yet I cannot determine the outcome. The terrors and horrors of the moment recede into a fascination with what is emerging. Syntax and meaning have disappeared. The remaining words and phrases hold the magnetism of mystery, leading me deeper into the process. The mildly destructive and transformative process of crumpling and crushing the page, has yielded a surprising complexity from what has been lost in the creases. How can I give context to these fragments? Can I find meaning in what is still-visible?

What is the world becoming? The essence of what emerges is unexpected. Consider the processes of a living system such as a watershed — soil washes away, rocks crumble and shift, fallen branches and slipped banks alter the flow — no matter how much control we assert in restoration, we cannot anticipate what results from the influence of gravity and weather. Crumpling and crushing movement below the surface of the earth is of such magnitude that mountain ranges rise and seas change their boundaries. Earthquakes are capable of rearranging whole landscapes in just minutes. Precarity expresses itself in the emergence of conditions and events utterly unimagined.

Thus the process of crushing and crumpling text leads me in two directions, one interior as I continually struggle to find meaning, the other external as I recognize the complete mystery of what is unfolding around me.