Sofía Córdova:
I had a dream 11 days ago that I did this in real life. It was in a place unknown to me, but in the dream, we all used to go there, habitually, for shows, and it looked like a diner. The crowd was big and friendly. And then, a fire broke out, which my sister and I extinguished. And I realized I wasn't prepared.
I woke up from this dream to the tiny and clear as a bell experimental and jolly screams my baby was trying out next to me around 5:00 AM. So joyfully, they were just like, "Ah Ah. Ah. Ah."
They also recently began experimenting with sounds like [inaudible 00:01:30].
The idea of wilderness is a problem. I'm writing a new work that will be a performance or video. And I'm working synesthetically with the color green.
And we stood there looking down. Green is a solace, a promise of peace, a fort against the cold, though we did not say so a challenge above the snow's hard shell. Green might've said that, where small birds hide, and dodge, and lift their plaintive rallying cries, blocks for them and knocks down the unseeing bullets of the storm.
Green pushed me to the idea of wilderness, an inherently problematic notion, as it separates us from the world. It is, nonetheless, the parting language for this inquiry.
Some other words that have attached themselves to this project based on racist, and often violent, taxonomic notions that I would like to reclaim. Salvaje, savage, [foreign language 00:03:03], savage. I am working up and down from wilderness.
The thing is this, I want to reconnect to the network that is life on this planet. I don't know what that is, but I do know that I have spent many years skating above it and below.
I am a wayward spirit of the Cimarron en El Mangle. I am a teen in their feels in [foreign language 00:03:52], feeling love, and loneliness, and admiration.
They noted a relationship between us and the land that, for them, had become apparently lost. They invented a tie that, in their mind, they had undone for themselves. And this myth exempted them from calling what they did to us exploitation.
Us, the land; us, the people were deemed smaller. Us, the people, native to the land they exploited; and us, the people they brought from distant land to toil new worlds.
Separately, meanwhile, in a continuum not yet touched by the indigenous culture story, their vast time outside the time of the brutal settler had freedom to cultivate a series of relationships to the Earth and the things that live on it.
In a way, a network like the one I long to be in, but also, being very human, they decided what place to take in the network. They tended the land, shaped the land. So to start, we can agree that we have always shaped the land from within and from without.
I call myself by repeating, fires are meant to happen. Fires are meant to happen. Fires are meant to happen. Fires are meant to happen.
In the midpoint of the pandemic, I joined a school. It's an experimental school called Fire School and we originally studied fire in the West. Though we've meandered, as fire does, to the places, and where people, and their problems are.
This turned out to be important because it helped me with the tremendous building anxiety surrounding the fires that I'd been experiencing, and we all did, as it ravaged the land and our lungs last Fall. Though those fires, we can agree, were part of the way that we humans have shaped the wild. I learned that fire is meant to happen.
Fire is meant to happen.
That beyond the necessary halting of our excesses, we have an opportunity to make fire friend again by reviving that old, technological network where we observe and join in the patterns of other living things on the planet, seasonally, working with the flames to burn and heal the Earth, to grow things, to move around the forest as it does. To pick those things which grew. And if there is too much, leave some behind, hidden away for someone coming up the path.
I misheard a quote in the early days of this group about how many coastal indigenous peoples, the relationship they had was calculated, sometimes gentle, and sometimes hard, controlled. Not haphazard, but intentional. And how, when the settlers came, they destroyed that network.
I've since learned the quote goes like this, "The White man sure ruined this country. It turned back into wilderness."
And this was James Rust, a Sierra Miwuk Elder speaking to M. Kat Anderson.
I learned, too, in this cooperative learning space, that fire is what drove us inside; that we built our dwellings around it to protect it from the wind and the rain. Although it shouldn't, for many millennia, in many places, this indoors requires care and capital. A different type of tending because it's the tending that you demand of others.
Did you know John Audubon, that lover of wilderness, most specifically birds was brought up in great wealth accrued by his father from a plantation in Haiti, or Haiti.
These are images of his work without the birds in them. A simple Amazon search renders them this way.
I think about my own relationship to birds, how I seriously enjoyed taxidermy and bird watching. How I come to birds, first of all, because I thought that their song would be one of the first things we would notice as missing once our abusive relationship to the network did them away from urban zones.
We think of pigeons as gross and as rats with wings. But imagine a world without pigeons flocking together in the evening, without their weird purring, cooing sound as they shelter from the rain on your way down the stairs from the subway or from the BART.
Pigeons versus doves. Doves are pigeons, you know, but there is this holy hell division. It's too simplistic to say black and white, but that's in there too. Nobility, and delicate lace, and axles covered in grease are summoned here, too.
Part of my desire to replug myself into the Earth network is to heal an ancestral vision of a natural world, as seen by a runaway, or a slave, or a worker because there's pleasure in us just looking, just enjoying. We don't only want to talk about the pain because that place isn't always pain. T.
He Earth is a living thing, is a black shambling bear ruffling its black, tossing mountains into the sea; is a black hawk circling the burying ground, circling the bones, picked clean and discarded; is a fish, black, blind in the belly of water; is a diamond, blind in the black valley of coal; is the black and living thing; is a favorite child of the universe. Feel her rolling her hand in its inky hair, feel her brushing it clean.
Thinking back to John Audubon, back in Haiti, I think about the weird literary project that is The Fifth head of Cerberus. It's a book where they're shape-shifting Aborigines that may have taken the shape of their colonizers, settlers from another planet, and instead, become their own oppressors. It's not clear in the end. But the main character is more or less abandoned by his plantation-owning father. And instead, he is raised by a robot named Mr. Million.
Now, Mr. Million, and slavery, and collaboration with the land are all different types of technology.
I have a weird relationship with Instagram. I don't want to be on there, but I am and sometimes enjoy it. But ultimately, I think it is corroding a fundamental part of me, perhaps the very joint to the world I want to reconstruct so badly. It keeps me separate from life. It names wilderness as outside of me. It networks me to a network I want to detach from. While seemingly preventing me from the network I long to be tied to.
My name on there is Yagrumo [foreign language 00:15:30] if you want to follow. Yagrumo is a leaf. And [foreign language 00:15:36] is a girlfriend. People sometimes use the Yagrumo leaf, and its broad shape, and usually slanty stem, not like that one, as an umbrella.
It must be a gag because it doesn't work when protecting you from the rain. But I think it ties us to something that happened a long time ago.
The Cimarrones take refuge in an alien jungle and become allies, collaborators, conspirators with the trees. The jungle is the site for revolution and it's an ally. It hides you when you need to be hidden.
It also sees you when you need to be seen.
When the tension and fear of terror is absorbed into the Earth, like the rain water, the wilderness, the forest, the jungle becomes a place for love and poetic admiration. Sure, it can kill us if it wanted to, but if the replug really happens, then it's not it killing us, it's just it taking a part of itself like a dead leaf. And maybe that's how the place stops feeling outside and starts feeling more like faith.
To say that man is as good as God would be in most persons to seem like blasphemy. But to say that man is as good as nature would disturb no one. Man is a part of nature, or a phase of nature, and shares in what we call her imperfections.
But what is nature a part of, or a phase of? Is it not true that this Earth, which is so familiar to us, is as good as yonder morning, or evening star, and made of the same stuff? Just as much as the heavens, just as truly a celestial abode as they are.
Venus seems, to us, like a great jewel in the crown of night or morning. From Venus, the Earth would seem like a still-larger jewel. The heavens seem a far off and free from all stains and impurities of Earth. We lift our eyes and our hearts to them as the face of the eternal but our signs reveals no body or place there so suitable for human abode and human happiness as this Earth. In fact, this planet is the only desirable planet of which we have any clue.
Innumerable other worlds exist in the abyss of space, which may be the abodes of beings superior, of beings inferior to ourselves. We place our gods a far off as to dehumanize them, never suspecting that when we do, we do the discount to their divinity. The more human we are, remembering that to err is human, the nearer to God we are. Of course, good and bad are human concepts and a verdict upon created things as they stand related to us, promoting and/or hindering our well-being.
In the councils of the eternal, there is apparently no such distinction.
Let's name some plants that made it across the passage to comfort u in our new land. There's karite, or karité, which is shea butter. As some may know, of course, banana, which came from the Asian continent to Africa.
Three thousand years before the slave trade, you have the yam or nyami, batata, and yaufia. There is peanut or arachis hypogea. It may have been smuggled to North America by slaves who hid seeds of survival in their hair, despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench. If White men did not eat you, you might come to cool land where, tended by moonlight and exhaustion, the seed might grow to be your children's manna in the wilderness.
Each corked groove called a peg grows one to four peanuts in the soil near the mother plant. Each shell, two of her shots at infinity.
From the laboratory of slave emerged a varied balanced diet for the poor food stocks, ink, paints, cosmetics, medicine, promise, and purpose. The ancestors dream.
If it rains on you, it rains on me. Everybody's under the same cloud. If it rains on you, then it rains on me. Everybody's under the same cloud. And if it rains on you, then it rains on me. Everybody's under the same cloud. If it rains on you, then it rains on me. Everybody's under the cloud, if it rains on you, then it rains on you, then it rains on me. Everybody's under the same cloud. If it rains on you, it rains on me.
Speaker 2:
It rains on you, it rains on me, too.
Everybody's under the same cloud. If it rains on you, it rains on me.