In this particular text three emergent accomplices — Krill, Spore and Terra — give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. They express an ‘animistic perception’ mirroring humans’ ‘default setting’ to ‘encounter ... sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers’ (Abrams 2019: n.p.). These voices without organs, arising from an alembic transcribed with arcane symbols, had been channeled by IHI through field trips, programmatic word theft and the fugue-induced sympoiesis (Dempster 2000) of collaborative writing across timespace and collective production in open systems. The methodology was crisis, the results — generative. The notion of ‘creating-in-crisis’ is at the heart of a methodological approach which invites change, failure, destabilisation and ultimately, fleeting homeostasis as a generative model for creating new knowledges. Novelty can arise from crisis.

A mouth swallowing the storm places a Harawayan ‘making-with others’ (Haraway 2016) at its heart, both the writer and the written collaborating in a trans-disciplinary, trans-generational, trans-global, trans-feminist experiment in decolonising authorship. Collaboration as a method functions as a ‘critical gesture towards the individualised, market-driven agendas and neoliberal practices of the contemporary academy’ (Speedy & Wyatt 2014: 2). Rather than working towards a known end product, this approach privileges a Deleuzian becoming (Parr 2010: 25) — in unexpected and mycelial directions — over the relentless production of the new, the always-already finished. The outcomes of such emergent practices reflect a way of being-with the world, forging alliances across boundaries and reorienting relations away from the anthropos and towards the intra-activity of all beings in what scientist Karen Barad would call an ‘ethics of entanglement’ (Barad 2010: 150) — generating connections, rather than participating in the sedimentation of human exceptionalism and division.

The text is an active meditation on deep listening, engaging with the ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al 2017), and becoming attuned with our planetary ‘companions, before we kill them off entirely’ (Gan et al 2019).

*

On 8 February 2019, the artists Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini, collaborating as In Her Interior, exhibited the video and soundwork installation her eyes were as black as coal ... at 205 Hudson Gallery in New York.[1] They had produced the work for an event called Refiguring the Future, which sought to ‘push, probe, tear apart, and re-envision what the future can be’.[2] Three characters — Krill, Spore and Terra — emerged from the not-yet photographed black hole, conditions momentarily perfect to give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. These beings — speaking for the cosmos, the earth and the mycelial world — made commentary on the human condition in the Anthropocene and speculated on a multiplicity of futures. This polyvocal conceit works as an analog of a classical chorus. At the same time these seemingly individual characters are always part of a oneness.

 

field trip one: through settler eyes

The first time we went to Hallett Cove.

I slipped on the perfectly round surface of a striated rock. It was very beautiful, and absolutely unlike any other of the numberless rocks that seemed dumped at this site. My flesh reddened where the rock and I had sharp contact and I spilled some blood and my salts became part of the ocean. I’d just had a communication with a rock.

 

speaking to fossils

 

Krill

How do you speak to a fossil? How do you listen to opal?

 

Spore

I can hear the grey clouds advancing from the west.

 

Terra

All of the human strata will be pressed to the thickness of a single epidermal sheet.

 

field trip 2: foreigner stones

On the second trip to the cove of rocks, it was windy and cold. Four of us wandered along the shore, meandering, picking up shell fragments and dropping them, standing in the wind-blown spray, rolling our pants legs. I undressed and negotiated the stones, water creeping up my body as i stepped from rock to rock, or walked in the sandy crevasses between the stones. They seemed to quiver at my presence, rolling a little, shivering, moving with the waves, moving near my feet, or away. I lay down in the water, not so far from the shore, among the stones which were many and varied, shimmied between them so they hugged my body. The stones gathered around me as I lay buffeted by the ocean, they rolled against me and into each other. I wasn’t bathing alone.

Settler-named Hallett Cove is on Kaurna land, the traditional lands of the Kaurna people, who lived on the Adelaide plains and surrounds, in so-called Australia. Hallet Cove is known now in Kaurna language as Murrkangga, and is connected to a story of grief and lamentation. A dead nephew, his smoked body being carried back to country and a lake of tears forming a fresh water spring at the site. A story of country forming. The other story is of Permian ice sheeting and visitor rocks. The rock I had slipped on the first time we visited this cove was part. of a glacial dump, what our ethnobotanist friend from Denmark, Mae Britt, would call ‘foreigner stones’.

Rocks, boulders, stones, pebbles are picked up from different sites by a glacier as it gouges its way across country, marking its passage with lines of slow flight, deep cuts in bedrock. In the event of a melt, the gathered rocks are dumped far from country, together, elsewhere. Drop stones. Come-latelys. Erratics mingling with local middens of shellfish and earstones of the mulloway.

The cove, with its folds, chatters, ripples, striations is overcoded by settler geology language. Is not home, is not campsite, is not hunting ground, is not fishing spot, is not hearth and campfire, is ‘a treasure chest’ of ‘artefacts’, proudly collected and interred in museological displays, humidity controlled, protected against their journey towards dust, as their home would have it.

The otoliths have been listening across time that isn’t measured in ages but in moon rises, star formations, cycles of birth and death, times of plenty, in fire and in ice. In smoking ceremonies.

The second time we went to Hallet Cove.

I saw the darkness descend. I saw the moon rise twice. I saw the waves going backwards.

 

eromanga sea

 

Krill

I had a dream.

A field of acid yellow flowers. Yellow grass.
The river was red, red water, red dirt, a river.

 

Terra

I can hear the red river.

 

Spore

I can hear the fossils of the ancient Eromanga Sea.

I press my stone ears to the escarpment, listen to the sound of stratification, a large bird folding its wings.

I can hear the ants swarming home.

I can hear the grass seeds clasped in their mandibles.

I hear all these things, and much more, without seeing them.

 

the smoke of existence 1

I am driving back from West Beach with A, wrapped up in a light filtered through angst. The light is yellow grey. I am not sure if this is the light that everybody is driving through, but my meta-skin is pushing through the smoke of existence. And it is yellow grey.

He asks me: do you think when we die our cells meet up with the cells of the others?

The smoke of existence curdles, turbulent, then settles.

I’m not quite sure what he means, so I ask him again, and I guess he’s asking if we meet others in the elevation once we stop being our lived selves, once we lose our individuation and become part of an undifferentiated milieu. Once we become motes, glinting in a sharp of light. How does an unbodied energy recognise another unbodied energy? Are our dead friends molecularly dense for a while in the period where we are remembering them urgently, calling to them by name and then become sparse, spreading across timespace in a slow wave?

Attempting to give voice to the ineffable is painful and elusive, and ultimately impossible. The answer to how to speak as the dead speak, to live as a rock lives, to flow as a river flows is not a word. The answer is a yearn, the answer is an endless reaching out. I try to draw a line to a point along which to pull myself, but lines don’t exist as lines here and points are planets that just get further and further away.

 

spine of wonder

 

Krill

Lizards.

And wild dogs, howling,

hurling themselves into the red water, one by one.

 

Spore

What sound does a loping, flying, flesh-tearing body make, as it transforms into a spine of wonder, broken amongst earstones and erratics?

We reach towards it, strain to listen through the hot gales of the Eromanga Sea.

 

Terra

Opalised three-corner jacks pierce what’s left of my feet, red raw ribbons dangling from the end of my legs.

 

Spore

Death lies lightly on the skin.

Life teems in the microscopic folds.

The mites that feed on me are me, and I am no more than them.

How does an army of mites bring down a system?

 

Terra

We are all lice under the skin, no more no less, same-same.

 

Krill

The insignificance is astonishing.

 

the smoke of existence 2

The answer to this is ... well it’s not something i can know, but there is something about what i don’t know that makes sense. The answer is somewhere in this thought: when you put your fingers in the dirt you connect to the mycelial network, you make the earth your keyboard. When you do this — put your fingers in the dirt — then you connect to everything that ever was. somehow this is the way we reverse engineer individuation, back to the undifferentiated nature of the everything. We don’t need mouths to speak, and mouths cannot speak what we know of the dirt.

 

red raw ribbons

 

Krill

I can taste the sour yellow flowers, the red river flows over my tongue.

 

Spore

I remember you.

 

Krill

I know you only by your taste, as gritty as the violet wildflowers tethered to the ochre cliffs, as tangy as ruby saltbush berries.

 

Terra

But where did they come from, these wild strange children? They resemble nothing I’ve ever seen before.
As wild as the desert dogs, barks as bad as their bites.

I pull my red raw ribbons in; these children seem ravenous.

 

Spore

we are part-cloud

already hiving off

I am lightening the heft of haunch and head needing to say less

 

Krill

Needing to be more All and none

 

Spore

and when mouths *do* open,

the flight of butterflies, the march of ants, or the stream of time disgorges.

 

maria sibylla merian

Out of the azul ether, L sends some information about Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th-century woman of letters and pencils, self-taught (of course) scientist, collaborator with Surinamese Indigenous knowledge holders, and prodigious and ‘revolutionary’ illustrator of the life cycles of insects, butterflies, and their companion plants. A woman who at some point ‘abandoned’ her husband, taking her daughters to live in the Labadist religious order, where presumably she could live a life of the mind and the hand more unfettered. Anyway, the illustrations captivate us immediately, impelling us bowerbirds to both steal and honour them.

The wall above my desk is a carapace of printouts of whatever is intriguing me from year to year. It thickens in parts, as new segments are carelessly stuck over old, spawning new associations and lines of flight. Hags, weather witches, coins from a wreck in a volcanic lake, ladders of string and feathers, a banner unfurled to yell from St Pauls ‘Make Wealth History’. Somewhere in the middle of this flattened nest of heart comfort and gaze balm is a photo of the child when she was just a few months old. She’s all scream, the perfect red Cupid’s bow now rendered black, and the mouth a deep throaty well wherein monsters lie.

Adjacent to this idol’s rebel yell is Caravaggio’s Medusa, with a mouth more fearsome but shaped or angled similarly.

The child is always drawn to these two images, and although she is fearless by a nature that increasingly resists all bounds, she seeks reassurance about the woman with a head of snakes. ‘Yes, she’s angry, and she can turn men into stone. And yes, that’s a photo of you. I was with you. I took that photo.’

I have serpents in my hair too, green and golden. But this I don’t tell her.

 

 

become none

 

Terra

This is important: to become none.

My disaster is the warm cradle for what comes after.

 

something woke you

A supple curve, pressing a defence against the fanged night.

There is no reality that does not produce appearances, no praxis that does not generate illusions,
coming as the shark of the bush, with its conveyor belt of teeth, that fractal infinity machine,
so far from the ocean

Something woke you, first one, then a pack.

You stop breathing and listen to the bush/dingo/bush.

I shoot another arrow, then another and another.

Your sister sleeps. Luminous creature,

alive and skittering across sweet water.

The dark night, the fear of waves, the terrifying whirlpool. And now, the deep blue sky soaks into the back of my eyes.

How can they know of our state, those who go lightly along the shore?

All things derive from a void and are swept into the infinite.

 

a second midnight skin

 

Spore

Wherever I go I take them with me, they are golden and iridescent blue, and are opportunistic.

I am ignorant, but they teach me and we feed one another.

I walk through the world with my mouth wide open, harvesting the morsels that others shed.

 

 

Terra

A mouth swallowing the storm.

 

Spore

We are infolding like rows of teeth with tails,

 

Krill

The tails lash onto one another, they strengthen, soften, become string for knotting or weaving a net

 

Spore

a net not made to catch ordinary shapes, but to sieve the air for the imperceptible
to comb the waves for deep rumbles or high whistles
to wrap around thoughts and keep them together, patterning the skin of ideas

 

speaking directly to holdin

A is reading out the story about people committing suicide in areas where 5G is being rolled out, so i said that we need to leap straight to telepathy, and A says — Holdin has the right idea (Holdin died exactly 5 weeks ago to the hour, but time has no meaning since Holdin died and became everywhere all around forever, a dissipated energy, a sparse slow wave spread over a vast area). We both speak directly to Holdin then, bypassing the internet.

Neither of us moves our mouths.

 

fossil-becoming

 

Krill

Bodies are compressed, fossil-becoming. Beasts walk upon them with light feet or none. The powder of bones lifts into the thick air and scatters its motes. Finds its way into the smallest of fissures, trickles down rock faces, filters the light to turn the sun vermillion.

 

 

our bones are rocks

This morning i was listening to a podcast about how our bones are rocks and i followed a guided meditation linking human bodies at a material level with other waters, other bloods, other calciums, other atoms, other molecules. In, in, in and out, out, out. We are micro and macro simultaneously. This zooming through fractal fields is like speaking to the dead, the undead, a constant becoming.

We cannot deny energy.

a second midnight skin

 

Terra

We recline on the warm blue beach of micronised plastics in the atomic breeze

wearing littoral shoes
and a second midnight skin

 

Krill

A bird, lizard in its beak, dives into the mound springs. A woman who was once a tree, a tree once a child.
Goats fouling the waterholes.

Copper, gold, uranium. The poison, leave it!

 

plastic earth

 

Terra

The earth can cradle plastic as easily as it cradles forests. New mountains grow out of fecal waste and derelict houses.

Humans will disappear long before the last insect dies, and the insects, tireless, will carry away human remains for their own purposes.

 

Spore

The magic building site holds its queen in the foundations, fed by the mouths of machines, fattened by mites and concrete dust. The intricate procedures carry on above her, the dance of the cranes, the upward climb of scaffolding.

 

magic baby

From the many butterflies of Maria Sibylla Merian V chooses 5, and meticulously scalpels and sculpts them, transforming them into a small delicate swarm of blue and orange and red, that will eventually fly from the baby’s mouth across the video screen and across centuries and oceans into a gallery in downtown New York.

Before we leave Adelaide I show H the animation, calling it the Magic Baby. She is enchanted (Great, perfect response!) and makes me play it over and over again, nine or ten times. Later her parents tell me that she’s been going around chanting ‘I am the magic baby’, over and over again. Her brother was too young to be a magic baby himself, she explained, although she had witnessed his blue eyes emerging from the parched bed of the river of salt.

 

 

 

skinwalking stone

 

Terra

Songs for skinwalking the drone.

 

Krill

An elegy in stone.

 

Spore

The brush of an angel’s wing.

 

Krill

Their persimmon lips. Their violet eyes.
Their besotted murmurings.

 

this is the land speaking

 

At farmer’s twilight, you hear them before you hear them, a psycho-sonic encounter with the noumenal.
Wolf or bear or dingo or shark

ready to rip holes on either side of your spine

The spectres themselves are rarely seen. They melt into the bush: acacia cambagei, stinking wattle, gidyea scrub

you never see them become witch

‘boats of the dead’

hold a fondness for cellular information and your 12-year-old back

corpses in the machine graveyard drip your blood through the house that shouldn’t be there
ringed with rosy hue, they hang there in space, seven rungs tied to that big vine.

You shiver as they go.

As night falls the lake becomes a heavy, colourless, transparent glistening, trying to reach a tree that is always disappearing into the bush.

The storm bird calls.

This is the creation I know, this is the land speaking

a series of worlds mirrored, vast dark holes in memory.

 

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