Curry Tree

We brought five curry seeds back from our honeymoon in Costa Rica -- not in our stomachs like invasive seeds usually travel, but as part of a clandestine collection of naturalia (sand dollar, volcanic rock, other seeds) that made it through customs and onto the airplane. The curry trees, themselves transplants to Costa Rica, help stitch our yard into a pan-continental crazy quilt of “patchy landscapes”* traversed by plants, water, animals, pollutants, forms of energy and information, and other flows. One of the potted curries has seeds, and we'll see if they're fertile.

Like eggs, seeds are fleeting proto-forms, containers for something emergent. Seeds usually propagate by being consumed and pooped out by animals or strewn to the wind, trash in either case. I wonder if curries will naturalize in North America -- a future as vulnerable and precarious as dormant wildflower seeds in winter, when no blooming flower yet lives. Curry groves overgrowing abandoned mall parking lots in New Orleans.

We ate the curry berries on a salad served at Finca Exotica, a "wildlife rescue ecolodge" in Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula near the entrance to Corcovado National Park. A biodiverse paradise: you sleep in ocean-earshot canvas tents designed as bamboo tiki huts, surrounded by exotic fruit tree gardens, nestled up against steep jungle hills. Scarlet macaws flock overhead. The land had been clearcut for cattle. As part of the Saimiri biological refuge, the resort doubles as a reforestation project, and gardens have reclaimed most of the landscape. The monkeys and cats have come back to the foothills. The couple who run Finca Exotica are involved in a cat conservation pilot program based on tourism (while pelts or live animals fetch poachers more money). One day at lunch we meet their friend, who documents the cat's spread outside Corcovado National Park using auto-triggered night cameras. He's also passionate about the indigenous Ngäbe as an endangered culture, their youth leaving reservations for the cities.

Curry trees come from the Indian subcontinent, where they grow wild in forests and post-agricultural and post-industrial landscapes. People harvest the leaves as key ingredients for food and medicine, bringing them all over the world in a patchy landscape of flavors and therapies. Biochemists say curry's antioxident powers have healed the pancreases of diabetic rats. We give one of our seedlings to Boggy Creek Farm so they can propagate the trees. They can get to be fifteen feet tall, and the flowers attract butterflies. If the atmosphere warms up over the next twenty years, curries just might acclimate to Austin, joining Chinaberries and Ligustrum in our "invasive," bird-propagated urban forest. Last winter the curry we planted in the ground died back during the freezes, but regrew in the spring.** I daydream about what it will smell like after a rain, if it lives to get big.

When I ask our tour guide at the Wilson Botanical Garden outside San Vito why the fruit of the Noni trees smell so horribly rotten, he sagely says, "Things get used to things." The plant adapted to keep away some voracious eater, or to attract a certain pollinator that found its blue cheese stench irresistible. Conversely, when you patch things into new lands, they take on new sensory qualities in the encounter with new life forms. The various deterritorialized characters compose patchy landscapes of scents, colors, healing properties, shadows, leaf litter, and a thousand other things. I learn to cook with the curry leaves, frying them with onions and mustard seeds before adding pinto beans. A flavor of India, via Costa Rica and uneaten seeds.

*Eugene P. Odum, Ecology and Our Endangered Life-Support Systems (2d ed. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc., 1993), p.54.

**Curries are adapted to climate zones 9 and 10, and Austin has something like a zone 8 climate. A freeze might zap a sapling if a dry, hot summer doesn't knock it out. If you wanted to introduce curry trees as useful invaders to Austin, it would be best to strew seeds along a creek or a steady stream of wastewater runoff.

Bottle Hoard

For some reason photographers love the stacks of green, brown and clear bottles we accumulated over seven years. The hoard invokes jokes like “That looks like my liver!” and concerns and critiques that “I hope you didn’t drink all those yourselves.” Those bottles are waiting for something. Maybe they’ll be mortared into luminous walls, or stacked to retain a bed of soil. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped collecting.

Recycled bottles in Austin are taken to a sorting facility with the rest of the curbside recycleables, but they are not melted down into new bottles or washed and reused. Glass is trucked to the FM 812 Resource Recovery Center (formerly called the FM 812 Landfill), joining a hoard that must make my stack look like a little shard. The City grinds up some of the glass and gives it away as “glass mulch,” free if you bag it yourself.  You can use it in landscaping instead of decomposed granite to add some color and sparkle, or pretend to be a circus performer who dances on broken glass.

I was surprised how fast our bottles accumulated. A big party could bring in over a hundred. At one point the yard had multiple stacks that got so high the bottles started rolling off the top. Now wine bottles are hidden in the storage shed, gallon jars line the chicken coop, and all the beer/soda/sparkling water bottles are in an eight foot long stack about fifteen bottles high and three deep against the shed.  The stacks are kept in place by gravity, a pattern of arrested flow. They would roll away if not buttressed by cinder blocks on one end and a wood scrap and concrete stairs on the other. The pattern has the grace of holding together without money and permanence. Bottle wall building requires a surprising amount of mortar, but stacking just takes time.

The front of our house is festooned with bottle cap snakes. Like our stacked bottles, the caps seem to index a habitual drinking habit (or at least obsessive collecting, or having too much time one your hands, or the willingness to waste it, or something not quite right). John Milkovisch’s Beer Can House in Houston is similarly armored with all that remained of what he drank over eighteen years, a shameless display of what had piled up through everyday consumption routines. The creator of the Mano Poderosa art yard, Mary Kraemer, dispels the drinking stigma by pointing out that the half-buried blue bottles that line her garden labyrinth come from the Ecology Action recycling center. The glinting bottles drink in the sunlight, concentrating its presence in the garden.  

Although our bottle stacks are so orderly they are photogenic, the bottle pile signals disorders like hoarding or alcoholism, bad attachments to forms of waste or getting wasted. As living garbage, the bottles are filled with danger and promise. They are tiny habitats that might have been filled with beer yeast and bacteria, or where mosquitoes might breed (something code enforcers scrutinize). They are at once cast-off traces and unrealized projects. The stacks reveal and embody the slow, steady piling up of routine desires and immanent possibilities. What would your bottle hoard look like, if you saved them for a few years? What would you do with them all?

2012

Eggshell Blue

We found the blue eggshells under the figs. An old pecan looms above, and the empty eggs dropped from a long branch cradling a perilous stick nest built by herons.

The first spring after we moved into the house nine years ago a pair of yellow-crowned night herons nested in the empty lot across the street. They came back every spring, new pairs joining them every few years. This spring their nesting habitat spilled over to our yard with two nests in the pecan. We watched them break off twigs, maneuvering them across the fork in the tree branch till they locked into place like a kind of hammock.

Their waste rained down on the fig trees. Dropped or rejected twigs became heron trash (etymologically, "fallen leaves and twigs"). White urine streaked the green leaves like a Pollock painting. A tight ball of crushed crawdad shells landed on the Thai basil. This morning I found a little crustacean's pincer arm on the eggplant. This fall when I sweep off the roof I will find a charnal ground of shells and tiny frog bones.

The heron are supposed to breed in swamps and bayous, but here they are in the City of Living Garbage, nesting in the Boggy Creek Watershed. Maybe they hunt in the greenbelt where the creek flows a few blocks away. Every year they migrate from Central America, the Caribbean, and mangroves in the Yucatan up to Austin and beyond. They seem so worldly and free, flying in from places I've never been, without airplanes or passports. When winter comes, the heron will fly South to overwinter in some remote swamp or art yard, their bodies composed in far-flung landscape patches. 

Inside the vivid blue eggshells are white clinging membranes that dry into paper. On Easter I met an Australian painter and ceramicist who uses only dirt for pigment. He told me the color blue is hard to find in soil, but red, brown, black, white, yellow dirt pigments are abundant in the landscape. Blue and green can't be found except as subtle hues. He shows me the pan flute he made from different-sized plastic bottles held together with blended-up paper pulp, painted with dirt. He records ambient sounds of nonhuman worlds, then layers in his own music. The heron let out throaty caws. Now we can hear the fuzzy hatchlings peep for food.

The egg is the throwaway, temporary habitat, a little atmosphere of its own nested in this one. We put the eggshells in the Museum of Ephemerata. What fragile, worthless things--why save them at all? Collecting the eggshells borders on hoarding, but the blue is so beautiful.

2012

Honda - Made In Japan

A teardrop mirror floats around our garden. The Honda hood ornament is bashed in on the bottom so the reflection ripples. Mortar seals the back, some of it smooth and flecked with rust, the cast of some missing metal bar, but most of it cracked crosswise off a larger body of concrete by a sledgehammer blow. A holy fragment of the Cathedral of Junk that came to live at Ephemerata Gardens in 2010, when Vince Hannemann and helpers tore down around 40 tons of Cathedral to satisfy the Department of Code Compliance.

The Cathedral of Junk is a world class DIYsneyland, a do-it-yourself roadside attraction/art environment pilgrimage site. People have gotten married there, put on plays and concerts, celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. It has been captured on film by Japanese tourists, documentary film makers and photographers, and a Bank of America film crew. Suddenly after twenty years the Cathedral is no longer invisible to the Department of Code Compliance. Someone called in a complaint (not that it hadn’t happened a half dozen times before), and for whatever reason, this time the event activated the little bomb that had been imbedded in the Cathedral all along.

Overnight the giant sculpture becomes an unpermitted structure, well within the 5-foot no-build easement along the property line. Also, the property is zoned residential, but it is being treated as a public space, with 10,000 visitors in 2009. Vince is forced to close for a painful half-year, a limbo of back-and-forth with the Code people. Tear more down; not good enough; tear more down. Once the dust settled he could host no more than 30 carloads of tourists a week (so walk, bike, or bus to the Cathedral). Vince mortars in glass bottles to buttress the lower part of the sculpture/structure, and rumor has it he is working on making it levitate.

After surviving Code, the Cathedral’s body of living garbage is shifting from a kind of bird nest of salvaged metals to the magically contradictory medium of concrete light, better known as “bottle walls.” Cement's common use in large-scale built environments “secretly [deploys] malign alchemical forces to make consumerism into the dominant ideology, concretize the imaginal, and … oppress the masses with the heavy hard time of rationalized labor.”* Vince plays with cement's alchemical magic to build a vessel for luminous atmospheres. From inside, the holey walls glow blue, green, and brown, illumination puncturing the solid world. Mortar envelopes the bright windows and the metal skeleton, making a single, strong block of masonry work that is equally light and airy. Before this mode of composition, the Cathedral was mostly held together by gravity and wire, long pieces of metal puzzled into each other like twigs in a nest. Now Vince feeds an amoeba of masonry and glass, one eighty-pound bag at a time. Bring him some nice bottles if you visit, and you can return a few decades from now to find them.  

The singularity garbage can accrue depends on our relationship of care and attention. Imagine all the anonymous Japanese car parts that have settled like mist in global landfills and scrapyards, only a select few salvaged for homemade Kami shrines to machine gods. The carbon dioxide exhaled by the Honda while alive joins all the rest of the emissions in the atmosphere. By now a few motes of radioactive dust made in Japan have settled in the Cathedral and Ephemerata Gardens. The reactor meltdowns change the dust everywhere, adding another layer to the Anthropocene sky.

*Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Black Pyramid/Concrete & Cement,” Cabinet 27 (2007): 17-19, p. 17.

a guidebook to Ephemerata Gardens

“The City of Living Garbage” is a guidebook to my backyard, a holographic catalogue of a whole city/world crammed into a quarter-acre of land called Ephemerata Gardens. Parts of other Austin yards are grafted into Ephemerata Gardens through flows of things – windows, doll heads, morning glory – and practices – building junkitecture, cultivating tiny wetlands, excavating rain catches, making soil. Each piece of living garbage takes us to another site in Austin, vernacular art environments around the US, or global sites that practice informal accumulation and recycling of urban waste. Each thing comes into being through trash, decay, or pollution, transformed into unanticipated life forms and landscape patches. Each is sustained by the creative labor of human and nonhuman agents in long-term relationships of mutual education and full-bodied sensory labor. Together they make habitats that thrive on urban waste, a utopian resistance to the ecological apocalypticism that permeates global climate change and other environmental discourses. They are post-apocalyptic in that they start off with the substances of the trashed world and end up in relationships of care and repair.

Like Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Gardens of mosaics on South Street in Philadelphia, the City of Living Garbage inhabits a dream of junk art environments seeping out of their backyard confinement and taking over the city. Zagar moved to South Street in 1968 and began what became a lifelong project to mosaic everything--first walls of alleys, then entire buildings. Zagar stockpiled ceramic shards of all kinds, then composes mosaics out of the beautiful fragments. Each fragment resolves into a busy composition at the scale of the mosaic, and then up a scale to the city itself – a mosaic of mosaics. Zagar wrote on some of the tiles, and signs pop out of swirling fragments: “art is the center of the real world,” names of jazz musicians or the builders of art environments, and prophetically, "All wars ended on planet earth 2038." At Zagar’s Magic Gardens, a vacant lot transformed into a multilevel labyrinth, mosaic stairs take you down into an underworld of body parts and mirrors dancing across surfaces. Zagar spoke of art like a quack ecologist: “No one can predict where art will emerge. It’s like a mushroom, with roots that extend for miles and miles underground, unseen. If the climactic conditions are right, the fruit will emerge.” It might emerge without recognition as aesthetic, in the sculptures of monk parrot nests, jerry-rigged home plumbing, or the decompositions of compost heaps.

Here, art is an aspect of ecology, and vice versa. Rather than being the special purview of trained people, aesthetics are something that just happen, infusing places with patterns and possibilities of inhabitation. Aesthetic improvisations strive to make a living and a home for their practitioners. Sometimes they break codes and magically cross categories and borders, becoming something else. They transform thermodynamic matter in mysterious ways, into rhythms of color or flashes of sounds.  Wind in leaves and falling water compose a different-feeling atmosphere than the sounds of desertification or traffic. The patina of aging bottle walls feels different than rusty galvanized sheet metal. We may not know exactly what bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and macroinvertebrates enact the art of composting, but the collective works its magic, offering up the conditions in which the intensity of gleaming purple eggplant and bright yellow crookneck squash might dot the garden.

Seasonal colors amplify time or mortality; they enter us through the eyes and then the mouth, then find some way out, too. The vibrant colors get lost as little pixels in a screen flood of colors washing over urban senses, propelled by electricity, satellites, fiberoptics. Color grays when screens fail or the power goes out. Mosaics last much longer in color transmission time, while the bloom and fade of garden hues depend on our coordinating multispecies and elemental labor--saving seeds, cultivating soil, tending with water, primping dead leaves, managing sunlight. This guidebook collects and preserves some of these ephemeral practices. The City of Living Garbage is a chancy refrain laid out across Austin's futures, a place to inhabit and wander inside, a place to build. The writing is a form of bricollage or gardening that cultivates improvisational aesthetic expressions, a mosaic of places and moments that could only happen thanks to trash. A public dreaming of possible real worlds caught up in the catastrophic mess of this one.

2038

possibility city

Following the City’s bankruptcy in 2038 and the Code Compliance Department’s official dissolution, more and more Austin citizens start making their backyards into art environments/recycling centers/permaculture gardens. By the 22nd century, most of Austin looks like the Cathedral of Junk – thousands of overgrown sculptured landscapes that feed over half the population in an informal economy. Plumbers, electricians, and musicians trade their services for food. It is estimated that 45% of the city’s solid waste is diverted into the City of Junk, and 15% of homeowners have taken to squatting in handmade buildings in their yards while renting out their houses.

But we're getting far ahead of ourselves. The gas and water have yet to run out. Poop is still some kind of public secret that vanishes from houses without effort, and eating food fertilized by it is unimaginable. Cooked meals appear like magic when you flash money around. And the City of Living Garbage is still a fragmented dream that crops up in private backyards without hinting that it's an overarching future. Little glimpses of the possible City still look like the whimsical fantasies of crackpots and hoarders, not a collective strategy for survival.

Junk, litter, trash, refuse, and all manner of polluted, unvalued, and forgotten things compose this City. Garbage is a vast cultural category of entropic things, decomposing forms, and abjections that have crossed the threshold of being discrete objects or entities. The post-mortal world. Broken machines, shattered toys. Metabolic byproducts: urine, feces, and other biohazards. Moldy, melted vegetables. Dust as the ultimate steady-state attractor. Garbage threatens as a polluting substance that has fallen out of economic value to become a harbinger of ecological collapse at various scales. Every accumulation of capital has its accumulation of waste that might clog and overwhelm the moneyed world. Garbage is a dangerous and valuable substance, riotous with threats and promises, that we must regulate or vanquish. Toilets and trashcans suck it out of existence – someone else's problem. This rotting world we send off to landfills – our very bodies and thinking are a part of it; we might come to think of it as worth preserving, repairing, and keeping among the living.

And just what is this living that something like garbage does it, too? Living is a word or music of uncanny intelligences, senses, bodies, and forms caught up in loving and fighting and killing and dying with each other. But living is sadly and inevitably mortal, the flash in the dark before the dead remains become the food or home for some other life form. Living is about the mortal arc of presence and dissolution, and nothing lives without being in an atmosphere, affecting and being affected by other beings. Living is intensely relational, like when you only feel really alive when a certain person's around.

The quality of vivaciousness depends on a politics of attachment (over emancipation) whereby beings become dependent on one another, or even use each other as components in “living machines.” But these machines are unpredictable, articulating at unknown scales, growing through accidents and auspicious, unplanned unfurlings. “Living garbage” animates a thinking and language oriented away from trying to control how life forms, atmospheres, systems, or patterns should be, towards caring for and preserving their self-emergent vivacity in processes of symbiotic survival that are never finished and thereby eternal, for the moment. 

This 22nd century gambit for survival posed by the future City of Living Garbage might be the grim kind of survival that lives off boiled dandelion greens and beetle grubs. But it just might be the survival that glorifies in calling out, "We're still here! We survived!" while joyfully improvising ways to make a living. If the luxurious present gets yanked away from all around us, what is left but garbage? Under these conditions the residual and the ruins take on the presence of gifts. Then improvisations that transform death and decay become ordinary, humble, and thankful. The dusty, rotten world becomes fertile soil, and that's the ground for the City of Living Garbage. It is growing in my backyard.