This is a strange book—I’m the frst to admit it. An octopus dancing a slow famenco under water; Old Joe, a piano so enfeebled as to be unplayable, and yet the author of the book tells you that you should love Old Joe, even venerate it; Richard Nixon arriving in Brazil and greeting the populace with the OK sign, oh what a scandal; sponges and kitchen towels, which you squeeze and caress in lieu of practicing scales and arpeggios; counting a hundred beans, one by one, slowly, carefully, in ecstasy. And all of this is supposed to help your hands, wrists, and fngers.

I’m teasing myself for having thought up the strange book and for ofering it to you, the unsuspecting reader. Truth be told, I stand by the book. I think I’m onto something. I’m convinced that the octopus will help your hands, wrists, and fngers (Figure C.1).

It's an inescapable fact that a human being—every human being—is made of irreconcilable urges, inconsistent emotions, incoherent opinions, unwarranted assumptions and suppositions, blind spots. And it's also an inescapable fact that a human being—every human being—has incredible inner resources and potentialities, including imagination, resilience, and adaptability. We’re all made of hope and fear, reason and unreason, goodness and not-so-goodness. We are complex and complicated. We try to cope with the complicated play of opposing forces raging inside us by separating the forces and handling them in isolation.

The previous four chapters have explored various ecologies in the context of the interplay between environmental and immigration questions—ecolonial games, migrant ecologies, ecological relations and ecological frontiers. The path forward at this juncture consists in looking at how these intertwined ecologies have been woven into the fabric of contemporary propagandist discourse. Propagandist discourse can serve a dual purpose, humanizing migrants or instead furthering anti-immigration agendas. Likewise, analogous strategies have been operative in the context of environmental discourse, either promoting awareness of climate change or exaggerating denialist positions. What can the analysis of the ecology and propaganda nexus reveal? How has recourse to propaganda furthered anti-ecological agendas by describing climate change as a “hoax,” denouncing the perennial “prophets of doom,” or promoting a lifestyle founded on the exponential use of new technologies? Or instead furthered pro-ecological positions centered on an unrelenting efort to prevent the systematic destruction of the environment and aimed at enacting social change by promoting awareness?

A quote from Steven Shapin's (2019) review of Helmholtz: A Life in Science by David Cahan: ‘He had hoped, nevertheless, to discover universal laws of aesthetics comparable to laws of nature—but he did not find these laws and was eventually satisfied that he could not. The anatomy of the human nervous system might be more or less constant, but aesthetic responses were historically and culturally variable.’ There were ‘historical and national differences of taste,’ he noted, and ‘the same properties of the human ear could serve as the foundation of different musical system.’

This is ironic in its truth and also impossibility as aesthetics is a device of control and reduction of personal response through control of the terms of response. We are provided with a set of social–artistic–scientific language tools to gloss and record and compare response, all trapped within such a lexicon. Silence in terms of keeping response private and unavailable is the only ‘safe’ and possible response without it being co-opted into cultural control mechanisms. It's worth quoting Shapin (2019) again: ‘His [Helmholtz’s] treatise, On the Sensations of Tone (1863) radically changed musical culture – to some extent how music was made but, more fundamentally, how music was listened to, encouraging a new and focussed attentiveness to aural sensation. The book was read by musicians and instrument-makers as well as many scholars outside the speciality of sensory physiology (including Nietzsche, George Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry, Cahan says, was influenced by Helmholtz's understanding of meter).’

You only get a sense of its movement at the locks where the spill makes the flat fenlands erupt with depth

and the gathering garbage bumps against the wall, a game of buoyancy and Archimedes, a contusion of products.

A solitary rower hacks her way through mute swans who work the chevron and just slip past the slicing oars,

as if the obligation is all theirs—we might not want to read too much human in their motives, but they sure as hell

have to think human to keep clear of ours. Where no canal boats can moor by order of the river conservators, anglers

stick hooks through red grubs writhing in pollen. There’s plenty of information on fish types (shady, reliable, conservative,

radical?) in the Cam, but nothing extensive about the body of the whole, the confluence of species, the integrated network

of life. Okay: chub, perch, tench, chub, bream, skimmer, eels… and woodpeckers, mallards, moorhens, blackbirds, thrushes…

dragonflies stuck above the surface. But revelation for me was a pair of tiger-striped perch chasing a school of tiny fish

who would break the surface in their explosive release of escape chemicals, the stimulation of evasion. It had

nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with the anglers, silent, brooding, chewing the ends of their rollies.

The green waters nudge the reedbeds, and a swan strikes down with the full length of its body, a buoy or something

capsized suddenly rights itself. Then the clapping of wings on the surface, the popping of over-inflated balloons,

to run across water, wings locked into pre-take-off, that ‘clamour’, the mated pair driving off the whitening

cygnets, to pin the neck then enwrap their progeny with a definitive hiss. Well-meaning? Meaning business?

Writing to his representative in London in 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium could hardly conceal his exuberance at the potential for enrichment ofered by the abundant commodities and resources available in what would become his personal possession in the guise of the Congo Free State, a territorial confguration almost eighty times the size of the Kingdom of Belgium which he ruled from 1885 to 1908: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnifcent African cake.”

Your life is made of a constant manipulation of objects of all sorts. Brushing your teeth, you handle a toothbrush with skills acquired in your childhood through trial and error, imitation, and instruction from parents and siblings. Perhaps you take toothbrushing for granted, but it involves complex rotations of arm, wrist, and fngers; the use of the opposable thumb and the other fngers to hold the toothbrush with intelligence and sensitivity; and attention to the toothbrush itself, to the graspability of the handle and the frmness or softness of the bristles. It's a whole microcosm of psychomotor intelligence, not to mention its ritualistic dimensions and its power to evoke deeply held feelings about your teeth, your health, your looks, your family history, and much more besides.

Let's zoom in on the toothbrush as an object. We’ll imagine you’re using an average old-fashioned toothbrush. It may seem foolish, but compare your toothbrush to a pair of scissors, and you’ll be immediately struck by a simple but powerful fact: they’re completely diferent, in size, shape, construction, form, function, looks, and materials; they’re also completely diferent in their symbolic dimension and in their presence in your life. They tell diferent stories (Figures 9.1 and 9.2).

Object Wisdom brings these stories to the forefront of your awareness—the stories that the objects themselves seem to be telling you, although in practice you’re telling these stories to yourself and about yourself, prompted by the toothbrush, the scissors, the kitchen knife, the pencil, the fute, the cello, the piano.

How many handshakes have you given and received in your life? Thousands if you count specifc individuals, tens of thousands if you count all handshakes.

You’ve sensed hands both hot and cold, tight and loose, reassuring and aggressive, invested and indiferent. A certain handshake brings on a clear message: “This is a very masculine energy.” Another handshake triggers a diferent thought: “Feminine energy. Strange, I didn't expect it from this particular person.” Oftentimes the handshake suggests images, metaphors, stories: “Ouch, he's just like a used-car salesman in a B movie.” “Osteopath for rugby players, or something. I could get into it.” “She thinks I’m cookie dough. If this goes on for another minute, she’ll try to bake me.” “Friend.” “Enemy” (Figure 13.1).

Over the years you played for many types of conductors, or you watched them in action. Some have jagged movements with sharp corners, like a Cubist painting in motion. Others evoke military drills, strict disciplinarians, robots. Others still have the shakes: arms, hands, fngers, hair, shoulders, convulsions, a tornado, an earthquake. The convulsive conductor might produce great results from the orchestra, or not; the Cubist, maybe or maybe not; the drill sergeant, maybe or maybe not. The main thing is for us to note that there are many, many types of conducting styles.

Handshakes are a dialogue of energies. Conductors are fountains of propagating energy. Every person you meet gives of energy. Whether you’re alert to it or not, you too give and receive energy all day long. To play one note is to direct and propagate your energy.

This morning when I went jogging up towards the firetrack, a small snake blocked my path before I had even got to the first hairpin where the pylon-borne overland powerlines cross the concreted track just above the Kambelovac cemetery. The snake was perpendicular to the track, its tail in the weeds on the side of the track, its head in the middle of the wheel-rut. I stamped up and down on the spot, and threw a couple of stones in its direction, but it didn’t move. Could it not hear the vibration of my paces through the ground, or sense the emanations of my body-heat, or pick up my scent? Or was it, like the South African puff-adder, simply disinclined to shift for my sake? Deciding it was better to let it have its personal space, I turned and went back down the track, splitting my usual route into a several shorter trajectories. Live and let live. At the front gate I turned about and climbed the hill once again. Another snake slithered into the bushes when I got about half way up. When I again arrived at the point where I had seen the first snake, it was still there. It had merely shifted to the other side of the track. This time, however, it made a getaway when I approached. Perhaps it had made its point, and I had read its signs.

My brother Ed replies:

Your writing on snakes along your jogging trail reminded me of a moment a few years ago beside the Maribyrnong river in Footscray.

There used to be extensive cattle yards, that have largely been developed into a ‘better cities’ housing estate with space preserved for a trail and some of the historic cattle yards infrastructure preserved.

Surprisingly harsh sound of passage—sand-blaster, stone-grinder, percussionist; quickly on my distraction;

no gentle swish, no frisson with a slippery earth;

abrasive rustle, callous susurration, allegro vivace, heavy-duty male in search of futurity, dugite to dugite compulsion;

no gentle swish, no smoothness with slippery earth;

head raised in functional emphasis of serpentine locomotion; tongue flicker sensorium, scales modulating to shift states, terrain;

no gentle swish, no frisson with a slippery earth;

mating season, overwriting mouse burrows, close to my bared foot but finding way of least impediment through to potential mate;

no gentle swish, no smoothness with slippery earth;

I am to be avoided and wish to avoid it, surprised; I remember my elegy which spoke of the soul;

no gentle swish, no frisson with a slippery earth;

my diminished eyes will pick up a signature where warmth was extracted from red bricks;

no gentle swish, no smoothness with slippery earth;

a confidence, a toner of toxin to print my exclamation though I keep walking the same route, immediately after.

—JK

‘The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability – it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something – of a center starting from which an observer could master the field – but the very concept of the game […]

‘Derrida’ via ‘Sokal’

‘After all, I’m a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua).’ and ‘But I’m a leftist (and feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it.’

‘Alan Sokal’

Metaphor-away such ‘practical relevance’ solving the parataxis of GLOBAL WARMING—

don't believe in metaphor but believe a fall from a bird a plane a sky an apartment building

a game console a platform relying on the laws, purity cult of knowledge played against consequence

as erectile dysfunction is metonymy, anyway, which is as precise as any ‘change of name’ SUPERMAN—

science! operating outside objective obscurantism flows as evinced by self-advertizing gender righteousness

sealed with a kiss. No sense is modifier to versification which can be as precise

as ‘quantum gravity’: note scare quotes slack as metrics. (But) precise as the sap bloody

on the stump, the killed forest pun, precise as the angle of a logging machine (harvester) when the log flies

as extinct bird, precise as goodwill in what we agree is reality [ forest there—blink—forest gone]

in ‘mathematical theory’, we embrace a satire of purchase, the jouissance of discovery

against labour in the fields, the deep echoing ore holes, the smart offices, apartment buildings, shops, publicists.

—JK

The day after I left Melbourne in late December, the smoke came. It was blown down from New South Wales, where fires had been burning for six weeks already. It covered the city in a brown haze. The shock that smoke could travel that far (a couple of weeks later the same thing happened, but it was smoke blown up from bushfires in Tasmania) rapidly transpired to be ridiculous. For soon the smoke covering Melbourne would be smoke from our very own East Gippsland fires, a couple of hundred kilometres east of the city. And as that smoke combined with the smoke from further north, the whole pall would take on enormous proportions. By the second week of January the smoke was drifting across the Tasman Sea towards New Zealand to turn the sky in Auckland orange, and on across the Pacific Ocean, a day or two later obscuring the sky in Santiago de Chile in a grey veil, before then staining the horizon in Argentina (WMO 2020). NASA, whose satellites were tracing the smoke's progress after it had risen to an altitude of 16 kilometres, revealed that it did a complete lap of the globe, returning to Australia via the Indian Ocean within about a week (Jenner 2020a, 2020b).

Gnarly Mizen of flow – where drizzle

collates and works gravity shallow-deep,

these conundrums of pink & black pvc’d

hay-bale lozenges snaking down a crevice

to fill out weather. Where there are no snakes

there is an obsession with snakes, as driving the roads is a template,

and danger granted its mechanics. Walking Crookhaven

Napoleonic crud where the horse trims

even winter grass year in year out.

We ask it: Gnarly ground? Compared to what it says,

swishing its tail, the calm harbour sucked by tides

which chart the contraband of disruption—Marconi's

signals still burrowing their way through

rock and sea and gnarly air.

—JK

Jackie gave Mum a copy of William Wordsworth’s lyrics when I was a child, and the gift stuck – especially Jackie’s intense, sharp writing of gifting in the front. We spent a lot of time on my Auntie’s and Uncle’s Wheatlands farm, and Jackie would often go out with ‘the blokes’ and help around the farm – feeding the sheep, fixing things, checking out the way things ran. Mum loved Wordsworth’s poetry more than any other, and my Auntie, her sister, admired it, too. I was imbued with it. In this Western Australian wheatbelt farmhouse, I first discovered the work of a poet of the Monaro district (Southern highlands) in New South Wales, David Campbell, and though he spoke from the other side of the country, he spoke of ‘settler’-colonial rurality in a way that was familiar to me even as a child, with some worrying edges as well that would later allow me to open into a poetry of critiquing Euro-agricultural monotheism and dispossessing and occupying of Noongar Country.

Neither Wordsworth, as part of the Empire’s centre (he was, after all, poet laureate), nor Campbell as the product of station life in what was still a colony (and given the official head of state in Australia is still the British monarch, one might argue remains so) in the mid-twentieth century, offer the tools of deconstructing a position of rurality in Australia, per se, but they do offer materials and insights which might help provide linguistic and conceptual tools for challenging languages of occupation and agri-industrial-propertied presence.

Assuming the respect of social distancing (in the forest!), just bringing to people’s attention what is still going on unabated in the forests of the southwest of Western Australia. See this article1 regarding those who are still trying to save what’s left of the native forests. And for an ‘industry’ view look at this incredibly propagandistic piece of pseudo-journalism in a trade publication. I will let readers unravel its contradictions and misleadings: it speaks for itself. I might point to the irony of dieback spread when the ‘industry’/government nexus was responsible for a road being put through the forest to a new coupe3 which would have been horrific in terms of pathogen dispersal, let alone other devastations.

Below is a poem that speaks, I hope, for the forests, the wildlife, their peoples, and those who act as protectors and guardians against this unnecessary destruction of habitat which is not replaceable, for all the claims of ‘sustainability’. Species extinctions are accelerated in such ‘industry’ situations, whether they are regrowth old forests or ‘intact’ old growth forests. All native forest that remains needs protecting and plantation should be the way, if there is to be a way, and should only be on already cleared land, not on land deliberately cleared for ‘timber products’! Jobs? Protection rather than exploitation; planting and genuine renewables rather than devastation. So little of the pre-colonial forest cover remains: this form of forestry is ongoing colonialism through and through.

This utterance does

not fit a long tradition

and there’s nothing

pastoral about it—

the mowing

was done, then

the mower loaded

on to the utility

vehicle, then

the vehicle

was driven off

the edge

of a gravel road

into a culvert,

twisting through a fence,

so it rolled on its top

then upright again

in a field of darkness.

The driver was injured,

the mower destroyed—

the mowing machine,

not the mower—

the machine’s

operator.

And when someone

found the mower (human)

and the mower (machine)

he rang his wife

to come with towels,

to mop up the blood

but not the oil—the machine

wrecked beyond

repair, on Mokine Road

which is a gravelly

nightmare, as some of you—

few of you—might know.

And now I look out

at the moved lines

where capeweed flowers

spring against the cut—

interstellar smiles—

but the high grass

is gone and songbirds

are too full-mouthed

to sing about revelation,

bonanza, the fruits

of fall. The mower,

the mower, the mowed.

—JK