Nation, anarchism, transition, lichen
What part of power have you not been able to participate in, and why do you want to?
What part of power have you not been able to participate in, and why do you want to?
How would humility be shared?
In what new ways can you own up to your ignorance?
Should you be spreading information or listening deeply?
What about speaking with the lonely voice, the one that keeps you scared?
If you find a chorus to join, how will you be able to tell when you're no longer in harmony?
I learn so much from my husband. Most recently, his newsletter “The Great Un-Plug,” shares tactics for mindfully building the alternative communication systems we want to be a part of as we leave behind the platforms and companies that have come to shape our reality. Like most of you (probably), I’m excited to be rethinking how I live online this year, and I’m looking forward to sharing that process here in the coming months. I solemnly swear it won’t involve Bluesky! I’m no longer interested in chasing after the next least-worst platform.
Similar to Ruune, I’m fascinated by the ways in which people converse, come together, and share their lives online. Many of our dinner conversations revolve around these subjects (both dreaming and lampooning.) Though we often come to different conclusions based around experiences in our respective art forms (music, literature) and their surrounding communities, I count myself incredibly lucky to have someone by my side who enjoys slipping through the cracks in the same way I do, and who can look at the ways we share our art online today and say “I’d like to imagine something else.”
Take, for example, the glamour shot of the writer opening up their box of books (which I have participated in), Amazon logo on full display, shedding layers of brown paper and plastic. How embarrassing that is, to have no connection to that process. I am embarrassed by it. I don't know how to have a relationship to this thing made by other people far away who also suffer like I do. Must we have these other layers in the way? Could we not make books and distribute them together?
To whom, after all, are our books being distributed to? There is much talk in publishing about the distributor, the one who makes choices like which Walmart or Target your book will appear in or whether it's face out at Barnes and Noble, the ones who trade books for money, but also, ostensibly, who build a reading public. And if these temples to extractive consumerism are where they're putting books, then that bodes poorly for the kind of cultural conversation these distributors and publishers claim to be building.
Some choices need to be made. By myself and others as to how we will position ourselves in relation to power, while remembering that where and how we publish our work is a set of experiences and choices related to power.
In his book Sand Talk, a varied exploration of indigenous thinking, Tyson Yunkaporta writes about transitional ways of being as something many indigenous communities have experienced in the wake of first contact, colonization, boarding schools, and subsequent post-apocalyptic stress syndrome. I don’t cite this as a point of comparison between what is happening now to trans communities. Only to say that living in a way that is outside of the mainstream has its benefits, especially when that mainstream is unapologetically fascist no matter the color of its tie. Take Sarah McBride, for example. The first “openly trans member of congress,” we are frequently reminded. A recent episode of the podcast AIPAC Zombies reminds us of the infusion of AIPAC money she received to fund her campaign, and her close ties to the Biden family (both being from Delaware.) Having more trans people in power does not equate to more justice, for trans people or otherwise. Having an out trans lawyer argue in front of the most transphobic and corrupt Supreme Court ever does not signify progress; getting rid of the Supreme Court is progress, an institution that was born corrupt on stolen land to further legitimize white settlers stealing said land to work it with slaves.
I’m not so naive that I don’t understand or even empathize with the reasons people seek power. They do it to feel they have something that belongs to them in a world hell bent on taking things from them. This notion of belonging has more folds than power, more nuanced meaning tucked away in corners of its usage. There’s one phrase that’s been ringing through my head the last month since I heard David Harrelson, the Cultural Resources Manager for The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, speak it during a Q&A as part of the Champinefu Lecture Series. “We want people to feel like they belong here,” he said, “because when they do they treat the land better.” Hearing this spoken in this context by Harrelson changed something for me. What does it take to really feel like you belong in a place? Is it pushing others out, staking a claim and saying ‘you don’t belong here’ because you arrived illegally? Or is it the radical invitation to welcoming in of the weak, the sick, the disenfranchised, hungry, tired, and scared that really makes belonging?
These are delicate threads of rhetoric that can be twisted easily in a light breeze, especially now in the paroxysms of a dying country. At their best, they can help us dream radically, respond to the calls for dismantling the empire of the United States, and build something very different in its place. But they are also just words, which are frequently parroted in bad faith, especially by liberal progressives who speak in the language of reform so slow and ineffective it only maintains the status quo. It can be difficult to know who to trust, and I don’t have the answers.
I still remember a phone interview I had with a young trans activist several years ago, during which they introduced me to the Just Transition movement. I was immediately skeptical of this new use of one of the most interestingly plastic words of the English language. Just Transition approaches workers rights through the urgent necessity of switching sustainable energy sources and technology; in other words, the choice has already been made by global superpowers and the companies with green tech to sell. But this completely misses the beauty of transition, in my opinion. One of the reasons I find transition to be a useful lens through which to look at climate change and our relationship with the environment is that transition requires choice. Transition posits the self as the site of change made with agency to your body, your name; every way in which you live your life completely changes. It requires a split, a divergence, and a figuring out how to live outside the norm and against the mainstream; it is not a top-down process. The scale of this complete and total reworking of one’s life is, I think, similar to that which will be required of us to keep living and loving and, hopefully, resisting power.
In his poem “Springtime in the rockies, lichen,” Lew Welch calls lichen “the stamps on the final envelope.”1 I’ve often wondered what he means by this. That they will long outlast humans? True, but if so, why include mail as part of this metaphor, a uniquely human mode of communicating over long distances? Maybe the mystery is part of it. Or maybe our connection or interrelation to these communal beings runs so deep that they will retain something of us long after we are gone.
)Lichen does not have parents; they explode the boundaries of the parenthetical, the parental.( they do not reproduce sexually. they are in constant relation. Everything that they are is due to interrelation and art, not the pedestrian zygote. Tear a little piece from one of their assemblages and they continue to grow and create a new organism. That word, organism, is in fact too bounded to encompass all that they are, their many constituents adhering and splitting off so often and with such complexity that there can be no defined boundary of who is who. Lichen is not just algae and fungi, as we’ve been taught )if we’ve been taught about them at all( but also yeasts and bacteria and viruses and many other tiny beings living together in a constant state of transition. I didn’t really plan to end up here, though if you’ve been reading for awhile you’ll likely recognize a familiar pattern or theme. There just keeps being more to learn from lichen.
Upcoming
Speculative Shorts is a 10-week short fiction workshop I’m running online on Thursdays from April through June. Sliding scale. More info & registration here.
I’m also teaching a monthly class called Climate Journaling in the End Times, starting April 1 through Corporeal Writing. Also sliding scale.
On Thursday, April 3, I’ll be reading as part of my friend Miranda Schmidt’s book launch for their wonderful debut novel Leafskin at Up Up Books here in Portland. If you like my newsletter you’ll probably like theirs, Writing Nature.
And over at smoke and mold, we just published a new interview with comics artist Rani Som. Check it out here.
For a deeper dive into Lew Welch, lichen, and how surfaces and the very small can shift our thinking, check out looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading by Orchid Tierney.
Thanks for this, Cal! I’m super interested in what you write here about the meaning of transition because of the implicit tension here between the individual and the collective. Now I'm curious as to the possibilities of collective transition, especially as neoliberal narratives of transition as a hyper-individualized and private act mediated in part by consumption and participation in a rights-based legislative framework already permeate our world and really set the cultural expectations of what it means to be trans.
oh my goodness I was that activist <3
I'd like to edit that paragraph slightly to reference the original strategy framework https://www.ojta.org/principles-just-transition which uses liberationist theory over neoliberal acceleration. Over the years, though, the resonance of metamorphosis has really encouraged me to slow down -- I attempt to apply it to every project centered on change, not just environmental ones.
Love your work Callum, keep it up.