Homer's Feather

In the 2012 “House” exhibition in Ephemerata Gardens, the Santa mug, a Kinkaid nightlight, and other tchotchkes were props in our dwellings’ happy cocooning into private, cozy dreams. Others explored the pressing risk of collective vulnerability from elemental forces that could wipe our cities off the earth’s surface. I built a window display case from the neighbor’s remodeling debris and parts of an abandoned bed frame found down the road. Inside a white feather floated above a Hummel figurine modified by artist Michelle Foster with little bindles to look like depression-era hobo children. In 1988, activists with the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) bought a goose from Callahan’s and threatened to kill and grill him unless Austin city officials would meet to address helping the homeless. Although it outraged animal rights activists, the publicity stunt resulted in some office space and funding for homeless advocacy groups. For several months Homer camped on a SPAC raft, the SS Homer, in Town Lake with two homeless men. After fainting at a summer political rally, Homer moved in with activist Lori Cervenak-Renteria where he lived for 18 years before retiring at Austin Zoo. His theme song goes:

Oh, give me a home

So I don't have to roam

Through the alleys and dumpsters today.

Where seldom is heard an encouraging word.

They just wish we'd all go away.

I can't pay the rent

So I live in a tent

Beneath the Montopolis Bridge.

I just need a home,

With a bed and a phone,

A stove and a toilet and fridge.*

The Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary got its start in 1990 as the Good Day Ranch, Cindy and Jim Carroccio’s private petting zoo of goats and other livestock. The local paper’s 2002 Day Trips column described “the zoo [as] a natural progression for Cindy's love of animals. When she lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin her back yard was full of strays and homeless critters.”** Good Day Ranch’s population grew by accepting rescue animals seized from abusive situations, like the crowd-drawing leopards in Reverend Lavender’s traveling revival tent that PETA helped save through the courts. In 2000 the business gained nonprofit status to protect its animals in the long term and have more access to grant money. By 2005 the Carroccios were getting divorced and the zoo’s financial situation was an unorganized mess. The nonprofit board discovered boxes of uncashed checks and $700 cash, bags stuffed with receipts and vet and bank records in the barn.*** By 2008 the nonprofit board had taken over, firing Jim as executive director and replacing him with Patti Clark. In 2009 the nonprofit bought the 54-acre tract of land from Cindy for about 400K. There is a mini-train you can take on a loop through the Hill Country past gazelles and llamas.

Lacking the slick Disneyland aesthetic of places like the San Diego Zoo—intense theming or “landscape immersion,” concrete rockscape waterfalls, and an exorbitant entry price—Austin Zoo strikes some visitors as a rinky-dink knock-off of the real thing. They ask just $8 to get in. It retains the feel of a DIY menagerie, partly improvised out of everyday objects donated by local businesses and families. You can sense the collective effort that composes the sanctuary. The zoo has a strong volunteer base, and you can help with daily chores around the facility, even work directly with some of the animals. They have a sponsor an animal program (“$150 feeds Austin Zoo’s monkeys for one week”) and accept meat to feed the large cats (no pork or horse), hay, fruit, veggies, nuts, and so on. Their Amazon.com gift register features an array of specialty products like a $400 lion bungee toy and chandeliers for parrot play, as well as commodities put to unintended uses: buck and raccoon urine to spray around for tigers to investigate, rattling baby balls for the coatis and kinkajoos. The new Primate Palace is a converted pony barn. The zoo’s homemade habitats include repurposed postconsumer products, like 55-gallon drums the tigers toss around, a castle of milk crates wired together for the goats.

Sometimes salvage animals arrive at the zoo needing intensive veterinary care and rehabilitation. Some of the large cats are retired circus performers or private pets that otherwise could have ended up at “canned hunting” ranches where people pay to kill. A lion from a junk man’s menagerie was so malnourished it had broken an ankle from its own weight. Former lab-testing primates are missing digits or tail tips crushed by cage doors. The Zoo gets 50 requests a month to take in new animals, but they generally accept a dozen a year to stick within their space and funding limits. They say it’s hard to turn animals down.

In 2010 Austin Zoo took in two lions from a private owner that were suspected to be Barbary lions. Their extinction in North Africa is knotted up in Roman, British, and French imperial cruelty. Moroccan royalty who saved captive lions in private menageries preserved a few dozen specimens. This led to Austin Zoo’s first involvement with a breeding program: the Barbary Lion Project, a collaboration between the Rabat Zoo in Morocco and a professor at the University of Oxford funded by the UK-based Wildlink International. The Project’s goal is to selectively breed lions with mitochondrial DNA from the Barbary sub-species gleaned from a museum specimen's bones. By salvaging and amplifying shreds of gene sequences in captive lions breeders hope to reconstruct purebred Barbary Lions to be released on a preserve in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and reverse extinction. The species is doubly homeless, lacking bodies and a safe habitat. Austin Zoo provided DNA screening to assess if their lions were indeed Barbary lions (measured as a percent of the animal’s genome). They bred two baby lions that drew record crowds on Spring Break. The growing cubs found a new home at the Texas Zoo in Victoria. But Wildlink International mysteriously vanished as an institution, leaving the breeding project in unfunded limbo.*** (Did they ever find out about the DNA?)

What happens when we try to cheat extinction and reverse calousness by salvaging animal lives? In The Chances of the World Changing (2006), a moody documentary directed by Eric Daniel Metzger for PBS, we watch Richard Ogust’s life spin out of control as he encumbers himself with caring for his family of 1200 rare and endangered turtles in their improvised habitats of tanks and tubs. First they take over his loft, then rented warehouses. His “assurance colony” (to preserve species diversity) grows by accepting turtles seized by customs agents and by relieving other turtle conservationists of their burdens. The film meditatively lingers on the turtles’ expressive and colorful faces and shells, their slow floating and leisurely eating. For Ogust, the turtles become at once an ecstasy and a woeful impossibility, their very conditions for preservation leading to insurmountable technical and legal troubles as his collection becomes too big to handle. He hatches the plan to overcome these problems and limitations of the individual by founding an institute.

I in some way wanted to prove to people who were close to me that my having them had some value to it, and it wasn’t all based upon (sigh)…you know, emotional weakness and collection mania and stuff, but that it would somehow be… the whole project would be converted into something of real value.

Another turtle collector shares Ogust’s dream of a collective atmosphere for turtle conservation: “It would be nice to have one giant institute that could take care of everything. It’s called the world, and it’s not working. You can’t build a big enough greenhouse to house everything the way it should be, so maybe keeping fewer things in better condition, more space in smaller areas…” In this daydream the atmospheric institute of the world is broken, and atmospheres maintained by individuals and institutions alike are in constant danger of overburdening their carrying capacity. A third collector commiserates that to ensure the health and manageability of their turtle atmosphere, “we’d have to pass animals by, and that’s the hardest part, is learning to put your hands over your eyes and say, ‘I can’t take these animals even though they need me.’”

In Ogust's world, evolutionary fitness has been replaced by a measure of happiness. Since long-term species survival is out of any individual's hands, Ogust tinkers with making the turtles look "happy" in their homes, an end result determined by meeting their health, food, and social needs. He delivers some of his ward to another collector's outdoor turtle pond where he thinks they look really happy as they slip into the murky water. But his dream of founding an institution recedes as the Environmental Protection Agency seizes one of his turtle shipments. The film obscures exactly how Ogust was able to fund his turtle world, but in the end lack of money impedes his institution.

Institutions in the City of Living Garbage emerge through unplanned, slow aggregation by giving home to undervalued beings. Projects and missions are tacked onto old forms as they are given new capacities and become parts of new processes. Institutionalization of DIYsneylands involves a changing of the characters in the landscape and the professionalization of roles that regenerate landscape patches (as we see with Austin Zoo, as well as Magic Gardens, the Healing Machine, the Bottle Village, and many other landmarks in the City of Living Garbage), but also a constant making do with inherited forms that have taken on lives of their own. While institutions firm up to preserve and save idiosyncratic, vulnerable beings, they are themselves vulnerable. Hoping to save trashed things that have no clear value, they risk underfunding and not being able to pay the rent. They turn instead to an economy of happiness, building just the bare forms of home as refrains in this homeless ecology.

2012

*Austin Avian Rescue and Rehabilitation, “The Story of Homer the Homeless Goose,” http://www.austinavianrr.org/homerpage.htm.
** Chronicle Gerald E. McLeod, March 29, 2002, Day Trips, http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2002-03-29/85377/
***(http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/new-day-for-the-austin-zoo-1/nRWPS/ Andrea Ball, “New day for the Austin Zoo: Animal sanctuary overcoming problems, board says” Jan 6, 2011)
****Being Lion, http://beinglion.com/barbary-lions.php. The author is “a Barbary lion that grew up human,” longing to have its body back. She is an animal-person, feeling transspecies as some people feel transgender. “Even though I take many shapes that seem solid, seem to be built of fur and muscle and bone and claw, when you zoom in to see the essence, it is always Water flowing” (http://beinglion.com/being-water.php).

Happiness

Happiness bubbles up in Ephemerata Gardens in fleeting things that happen.

The season's first tomato or strawberry drop of blood on the vine. Gathering food grown here, cooking and eating and sharing it, sometimes doing the dishes humming an uncomposed song. Prickly pear cacti bloom yellow bursts echoed by the sunflower patch. 

Chickens catch a purple plastic snake and chase each other around. Monk squawks fly over, the birds rarely landing on the alley power lines. Gangly juvenile Yellow-Crowned Night Heron come down to the baby pool of water. Also, cardinals, blue jays, and butterflies eat the figs. Dragonflies and toads in the greywater pond.

Sunsets hit the top of the pecan in a golden glow while the rest of the yard's already shadowed. Sitting in the shade.

Happiness is not an object or pursuit here but a relational event of light, color, sounds, foods, life forms pulsing in the landscape--qualia of life held together in a harmonious sensory expression. A collective curling up of a smile or jiggling of laughter. Also, happiness is shot through with an all consuming love between lives, a kind of clinging that veers into sadness and loss. It is a way of being for the world that plays on becoming part of a living machine, where you are not liberated but attached and made responsible, eaten alive. Happiness becomes a collaborative sculpture planed down by multiple artists with different aesthetic visions.

There are surprises like fat green caterpillars eating the sprawling tomato vines that I should kill, but don't. Vince's neighbor next to the Cathedral of Junk kills butterflies since he doesn't want caterpillars eating up his yard. Longlasting bumpy brown clusters of fungi on the composting diapers. Snow on the bottle wall raised beds. Happiness is not a state of being but little melting crystals, totally uncontrollable. I can't say if the other entities involved are happy about being in Ephemerata Gardens, or even other people who visit. The elderly woman with her granddaughter aprovingly called it a "bushy garden" with everything overgrown. She held my arm as we maneuvered the perilous gravel walkway. Her light touch also made me happy, and her exclamations: "Oh! A cactus flower!"

Tinkering and wasting time here makes me happy, finding a use for salvaged things nobody else wanted. Telling jokes and stories to visitors, performing for and teaching them. I'm happy when visitors leave a cash donation, like a tithe. Last weekend we earned about a hundred bucks from twenty visitors to our micro-tourist roadside attraction (realizing Disneyland expects this from each visitor). We "sold 'em a look" of the "House" exhibition.* Money is a clotted form of sharing gifts with each other. More to the point, making something out of nothing makes me happy. 

Happiness over nothing, just a nice breeze or watching my son dance to the alley neighbor's Mariachi music. He claps when the song is over. "Yaaaay!" Happiness happens when things like minds, bodies, objects, and events all line up in a brief refrain that suddenly glows while its fading.** This coinciding is hemmed in and even intensified by blanketing unhappiness, suffering and hardship, lurking malevolant forces, or the tenderness of knowing mortality. So happiness is not necessarily about innocence, purity, or naivety. 

There is even melancholy happiness, like poppies on the pet graves every spring. Cold winter moonlight.

In Bhutan, happiness is a metric opposed to the bland measure of Gross National Product. Bhutan surveys citizen happiness by sex, age, region, occupation, education, and other factors to quantify Gross National Happiness. The Center for Bhutan Studies developed the sociological survey tool to measure habitual subjective states as a national development aid. Money ("sustainable economic growth") is just one of four elements that are supposed to guide national development (alongside cultural values, the environment, and good governance). International conferences help to transmit the concept of this alternative development mode and measure of national growth. Over half of the people in Bhutan are farmers, and in 2010, their mean happiness--5.8 on a 10 point scale--was just slightly above the least happy people in Bhutan employed by the National Work Force, while Civil Servants were the happiest.*** Women experienced anger more than men, and in general were less happy.

Ephemerata Gardens and Bhutan are trying to engineer affective atmospheres where happy patterns can happen. We're serious about happiness. Characters in these landscapes are potential parts of circuits of happiness. Feelings are quantified or listed as artifacts, becoming self-reflexive to enhance or preserve harmonious relational patterns between selves/societies/ecosystems. Like in Disneyland, there is almost a coercive element here: you should feel happy, you will feel happy in this magic kingdom. 

2012

*In the 1950's, Ray Bivens of the Black Hills Animal Farm roadside attraction taught Tinkertown's Ross Ward to "sell 'em a look!" "They'll pay everyday to see the same old bear and you won't need to buy a new bear every day either." Ross J. Ward, "I did all this while you were watching TV," published by the Tinkertown Museum, p. 2.
**Sara Ahmed, "Happy Objects," in The Affect Theory Reader, 29-51, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Durham: Duke University Press (2010), pp. 36-7.
***2010 survey http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/docs/2010_Results/PDF/National.pdf, p.19, women's anger p.65.

Catmospheres

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens inevitably ask, “So just how many cats do you have?” For years, Delphi was our official greeter and Mia did her hoop jump at the end of the Museum of Ephemerata tour. Cats lounge everywhere, throwing together temporary forts and bedding out of whatever's handy. Laps and bathroom sinks serve as improvised hammocks. The shed roof provides the perfect patio lookout. In the winter they seek warmth, discovering accidental passive solar junkitecture like Perlita’s greenhouse, a broken window leaned against a wall. There are also cats you don’t see who sneek away from the clutter of other felines to enjoy solitary catnaps, like PT’s burrow under the kitchen sink where we used to save plastic grocery bags.

The yard came with strays  – a tatter-eared tom, a soon pregnant golden tabby kitten, and six or seven other felines who depended on scraps from the butcher two doors down. Every day an employee fed them in the alley, calling out “Here babies!” to summon the clutter. The colony was growing fast thanks to steady food and no sterilization. Over the years we “fixed” more than two-dozen (as if their reproductive capacity was something broken).

Our second winter at the house, the tomcat lost his left eye. As the cold came on he stopped roaming the yard and just lay there, missing eye suppurating a clotted yellow flow. We were letting him waste away. My stepmom, also an animal person, asked, “Shouldn’t you just put him to sleep?” Instead we used holiday gift money to take him to the vet. Tricked into a cat carrier with wet food, he was neutered, vaccinated, eye sewn up, body purged of parasites, gently “interpellated into the modern biopolitical state” under the aegis of love and care.* For three days he healed in our bathroom, saturating it with litter box smells and a polecat stench of spray from his oily coat.

The missing eye healed well, stitched skin dimpling into a little bowl of fur. We called him One-Eye. He became the guardian of our TNR (Trap-Neuter-Release) colony. He even began to purr. His territorial aggression to male cat strangers dwindled, but he still sprayed everything and fought off dogs by leaping on their backs despite his partial blindness. Then one cold November night we heard a dog growling in the yard and One-Eye went missing. He just vanished from our vulnerable cat preserve.

Cat characters like One-Eye saturate spaces with their presence. Cat fur finds its way everywhere. Purrs resonate bodies with healing frequencies.** Hints of spray or urine linger in the air for months, marking objects with pheromone messages about an animal’s sex, age, and health that humans, lacking vomeronasal sensory organs, can’t comprehend. It is an affective writing that is smelt and felt, not seen and read. Becoming a part of these atmospheres by caring for cats involves daily feeding rituals, close contact with wounds, suffering, and feces, and crime scenes: dead roaches, anoles, bird feathers, the occasional baby possum or squirrel. Sadly, caring for mortals inevitably involves burying dead cats or wondering if missing ones will ever return. Worrying about cats, slowing down and enjoying their company on your lap, stressing out over vet bills, being annoyed by nagging midnight meows or stepping in puke – a welter of feelings spins out of our self-imposed responsibilities to the felines. And you can’t care for an animal without caring for its life-support habitat. Like any form of life, cats need a certain kind of atmosphere in order to survive, but also emanate an atmosphere of their own. We cohabit that territory, a catmosphere crossed by little weather patterns of feline love, need, and aggression.

For cats, love, aggression, territory, and smells are not linguistic or symbolic statements, but relational atmospheres expressed through layered sensory patterns of purrs, meows and hisses, touches, bites, scratching, and phermones. As Gregory Bateson puts it, “the cat does not say ‘milk’; she simply acts out (or is) her end of an interchange, the pattern of which we in language would call ‘dependency.’ But to act or be one end of a pattern of interaction is to propose the other end. A context is set for a certain class of response.”*** Developing his cyber-ecological model of identities, Bateson argues that relationships between self/other or self/environment

are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called “feelings” – love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the “feelings” are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern.****

Feelings are not strictly internal events, but waver somewhere in between individuals, saturating a common atmosphere through repeated relational experiences. Each kitten's features, mewls, and purrs tug at something in us that wants to care for them, to become responsible for their lives.

Catmospheres are inflated with feeling responsible for other life forms, but it is unclear where catmospheres and feeling responsible begin and end. The intimate little catmosphere balloons out to problematic landscapes of open pit bentonite and clay mines that become kitty litter, and landfills where bagged animal feces and litter make up around 4% of municipal waste. At the urban scale, ornithologists are concerned that feral and pet cat populations turn cities into “sinks” that suck bird species diversity out of the atmosphere.***** The American Bird Conservancy blames cats for 500 million bird deaths a year, arguing against TNR colonies as bottomless bellies.****** Cats are atmospherically judged as far surpassing wind turbines in their deadly impact on bird populations, while still falling significantly behind windows.******* Feeling responsible floats out of control. We want to do something for all the strays, but they can’t all live inside with us, and that makes us accomplices in the ecological crimes of our “subsidized predators.”********

We became crazy cat people. One winter freeze we had over a dozen cats inside, with temporary barricades to keep the eight indoor cats separated from the outdoor ones, each with their own food, water, and litter boxes. Every year we weatherize the back porch with sheet metal and plastic bags and set up a heat lamp bulb to warm them. Catering to the cats and their litters can become overwhelming and take over our lives, like the eight kittens one spring that all needed sterilization. Or chores back up, dried poop on the litter box room floor with empty 10 pound food bags (saved for some reason) falling over on top. Scenes that tire me with the recognition that I have hours of work to do.

A special voyeuristic fascination is reserved for people whose atmospheres become glutted with life forms, who can’t say “no” to animals or objects in need. Building on the morbid popularity of A&E’s Hoarders, Animal Planet’s Confessions: Animal Hoarding adopts the soundtracks and gritty aesthetics of horror movies. Shaky cameras maneuver houses swarming with cats or dogs or both, stacked floor to ceiling with animal cages and aquaria of captive life forms. We see catmospheres layered with scratch marks, walls browned knee-high with wreaking phermone graffiti. Cats give up on the moldy, overflowing litter boxes and use beds, couches, and piles of clothes. Feelings of nurturing, saving, and rescuing animals in need have tipped over into scenes of excess, transforming houses and people into overwhelmed life support systems. Watching these scenes, a sense of disbelief and the humor of excess mingle with pity and disgust. Something familiar and ordinary has taken an extreme trajectory, without the atmosphere’s inhabitants quite noticing.

Once we had two kids, the patterns of our relationship with the cats quickly changed. All the indoor cats now stay outside in the front yard. Our oldest cat Mia and three-legged Lacy get to come in for rainstorms and extreme temperatures. It wasn’t the occasional scratch, but the constant sweeping up of fur, one too many meows that woke the baby. Our son likes to eat the cat food and tip the moat that keeps out ants. He thinks the litter box is a sandbox. Maybe we were unfairly treating the cats as surrogate babies. Now we are a little hardened to the cats' neediness. Why change the litter box when they have the whole yard?

2013

* Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2008), 281.
** Elizabeth von Muggenthaler of the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina studies the healing qualities of cat purrs. She patented a therapy device based on findings that frequencies from 25 to 50 Hertz – the cat purr range – help heal torn muscles and broken bones (von Muggenthaler 2009). Her research dovetails with claims that pet owners make fewer doctor visits and have lower stress levels. In a 2008 study, researchers found that cat people’s risk of suffering fatal heart attacks are 40% lower than those without cats (BBC News 2008).
***Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2d ed., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (2000), 275.
****Ibid., 140-1.
***** Anne L. Balogh, Thomas B. Ryder, and Peter P. Marra (2011), “Population demography of Gray Catbirds in the suburban matrix: sources, sinks and domestic cats,” Journal of Ornithology, 152(3):717-726.
****** http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/120329.html
******* http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
********Balogh, Ryder, and Marra, 724.

Trilling

After quiet winters, trilling begins again around the time yellow-crowned night heron fly back into town. Gulf coast toads come out of hibernation to talk at dusk around the pond with chirps and burbles. Our two year old knows the sound and says "night toad," sensing not just a being, but being-in-time. You can hear them over the A/C. When they spawn they chorus. Sometimes a few days later we find strings of white eggs, then hundreds of tadpoles thriving in our shower greywater.

Why does this soundscape make me feel happy and relaxed? Maybe it cues remembered feelings of our two tropical vacations to St. Croix and Costa Rica. We stayed in open-air bungalows with no A/C surrounded by amphibian choruses. All night multirhythms lulled us. Our getaways were romantic couple vacations melded with a desire to support sustainable economies. We were nature-loving eco-tourists experiencing the beauty and force of the tropics. Then there was the bed and breakfast on the way to Grandpa’s in Missouri, where a couple had built a two story waterfall out of local rocks surrounded by a deck, and tree frogs that moved in serenaded you all night. The sounds conjure atmospheres of the Global South—swampy regions, jungles, islands, humidity.

Maybe toad sounds tap what biologists like E.O. Wilson claim to be a hard-wired human biophiliac response. Amphibians are indicator species that index a healthy ecosystem, and hearing them lets my body know "the environment" is okay, at least in the backyard. But "we need not naturalize [the love of nature] as a universal biology in order to appreciate its global spread."* In an ethnographic account of environmentalisms set in Indonesia, Anna Tsing argues that loving nature expresses a nascent cosmopolitanism, an ethical sensibility and self-building project that steps out of a parochial blindness to one's environment to appreciate local peculiarities in a global context. Cultural and national modes of nature loving have their regional flavors, but share the sense of “the environment” as a human-free thing out there, to be protected against a different kind of objectification of nature that destroys its object.

So maybe it is just a US middle class environmentalist/nature lover response, delight in a lively nonhuman atmosphere that is supposed to be the opposite of urban. The pond is what landscapers and Home Despot call a “water feature.” Aquatic habitats are key parts of “wildlife gardening” design schemes that try to attract urban animals and maintain their eating and mating habitats. Our pond fits into biophiliac markets that include bird keying guides and hiking gear, the pet world, perhaps even the vast formal economic sector of the food industry (for those who express their love of living things by eating them). My qualia of life is enhanced by this nature soundtrack** of toad jazz.

Something else in the sound itself moves through my body. The trill's texture, like rapidly rising flute notes, and the response from another part of the yard, is a musical composition offset by a deeper range of wet growls. Sometimes the splash of a diving toad, and always the sound of the pond's waterfall. The sound itself is compelling, regardless of where it comes from.

Sounds are one of the sensory modes through which toads live in our yard. The texture of their seasonal refrains conjures synaesthetic impressions of their molten bronze eyes and dried leaf patterns on the backs of their heads. The toads and I indulge in the pleasures of feeling and seeing sounds, the work of listening, acknowledging talk, exercising sensitivity. I would miss these sensory habits attached to the toads if they went away. They live in cracks, unintended spaces in anthropogenic landscapes that provide an atmosphere where autonomous things can take care of themselves. Caves accidentally formed when I dug out a pit for the Jacuzzi shell that serves as the pond’s lowest pool, in the hollows under the front courtyard’s juniper tree, under logs around the garden with stripe-backed walking sticks. They inhabit a captivating little world of their own that has nothing to do with us, except that we assembled the junk art yard they call home. Despite the toads’ autonomy, I suspect we need each other.

Inside the museum, silent toads play pool. These taxidermy bufos are notorious for a hallucinogenic excrescence from glands on their backs that poisons dogs and makes teen toad-lickers trip. Cane toads, a bufo species introduced to Australia to control beetles eating sugar cane crops, are invasive nuisances that eat everything. In the Monstrosities exhibition, we displayed a gaff “Flesh Eating Toad from Madagascar” doctored out of a bufo with a set of piranha teeth. The pool players enjoyed a toad mariachi band with a horn section, drummer, and guitar players near the toad bartender. But their eyes are dead unseeing black orbs. Small nails through their feet and hands give them a crucified effect. Their bodies look bloated, overly stuffed, and their mouths are sewn shut. Somewhere in Mexico someone is preparing them, right now.

While bufo species like the gulf coast toads (Bufo valliceps) that inhabit our yard are not particularly endangered, since the 1980s, ecologists and biologists have documented rising vulnerability and extinction of amphibian populations. Suggested causes include habitat destruction and fragmentation, lethal funguses introduced from non-native frog species, climate change, and increased anthropogenic noises that drown out the sounds of amphibian mating calls.*** Industrial pollutants, insecticides, and herbicides also contribute to these population crashes. Controversial research on the widely used herbicides glysophate (first engineered for Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide) and atrazine have found that the chemicals cause changes in amphibians ranging from nervous system disorders to hermaphroditism. Amphibian die off joins bee colony collapse and bat white nose syndrome as troubling and mysterious ecological crises.

Publics gather around these vulnerable life forms to mitigate crises and preserve biodiversity. In Great Britain and Scotland, the nonprofit Froglife works to rebuild wetland and pond habitats in urban areas and help frogs and toads cross roads during spawning season. For twenty years volunteers with the Toads on Roads project have documented crossing sites, pushed road builders to install “wildlife crossings,” and manually hauled over 60,000 animals a year in buckets during “toad patrols.” The Living Water project “is creating and restoring prime wildlife habitats in gardens and parks throughout London and Glasgow.”**** They do this partly by using a chemical called rotenone to kill invasive stickleback fish that prey on tadpoles and newt larvae.

Bruno Latour tells a story about toad ethologists who “transformed the mores of these creatures into indisputable essences, and this in turn obliged highway builders to hollow out costly ‘toadways’ in their embankments, so that the toads could get back to their birthplace to lay their eggs.” But the toads rejected the “costly and dangerous tunnels” in favor of the new ponds on the road embankments. “After the experiment, the location of the egg-laying site was thus transformed from essence to habit: what was not negotiable became negotiable.”*****

These little toad worlds are different than approaching “the environment” as a pre-human thing out there that becomes perceptible through its decimation or conversion into resources (whether sustainable or not). The capacities of ecological beings to act on and in the world have become less about timeless essences and more of a set of problems in engineering and behavior modification within a common world -- problems to which nonhumans sometimes find their own surprising solutions in excess of objectifying knowledge that claims to know how things should be. The learned and shared behaviors of toads and humans change. Landscape patches emerge through these collective behaviors, through extended or collaborative bodies like the toads-in-human-carried-buckets living machines.

Intimacies and couplings are taking shape here. People are helping toads mate, and toad sounds wrap couples in romantic soundscapes. Children learn to talk, listen, and love nature by relating to toad vocalizations. Teens experiment with toad secretions. Scientific and conservationist communities gather. Friendships and careers are made. “We”s and worlds firm up.

2015

* Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 154.

** “Qualia” are sensations or feelings (not meanings) in response to aesthetic forms like sounds, colors, or gestures. Conservation and habitat restoration efforts can be driven by desires to preserve nature or the environment as an asset for quality of life in urban areas, and/or by an ethical orientation that protects species for their own sake, in political support of their autonomous existence. The latter orientation has to deal with questions of who belongs and how to control unwanted/invasive populations. Despite being the major ecological source of habitat destruction, humans are, of course, excluded from consideration in invasive species eradication programs.

*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations

**** http://www.froglife.org/habitats/ponds.htm

***** Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press (2004), 87.

2012

In 2012 we mosaiced a newly minted quarter into the greenhouse bottle wall as a date stamp. A patina dulls its shine from the accumulated touch of fingers, cat faces, and weather. As "the visible surface of a temporal depth"* this layer of grime lets you see that life happened. The 2X4s that framed the greenhouse window-walls rotted out, the old wood door decayed, and the greenhouse bubble is no longer a sealed up atmosphere, but patina lives on. It is the mark or scar of survival.

By 2012, potential catastrophes like food and water scarcity from climate change, or pandemics from chickens or pigs, had settled over the present as a nebulous threat. An ominous future saturated the moment with "affective facts,"* virtual events (at once real and/or imaginary) that demanded response and preparedness. Every year some wave of destruction crashed down on large populations, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Plant meltdown in northern Japan, famine in East Africa... Such events drove new anxieties, moralities, ethics, and changes in ordinary habits. They saturated political and environmentalist discourses with what Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart identified as a "pervasive apocalyptic sensibility"—a voice in American politics and publics that "mixes horror and hope, nightmare and dream, destruction and creation, dystopia and utopia."*** Some final retribution or redemption loomed.

Cosmic agents of planetary destruction also troubled people with fantasies of unavoidable ruin. The Biblical apocalypse had become unmoored from any savior's return. An asteroid might hit the planet and kick off a new ice age. The Mayan calendar ended December 12, and some New Agers thought the world would end with it in a final meltdown. The 2009 movie 2012 was a disaster spectacle released in time to rake in some money just in case its plot came true. Wild stories circulated on conspiracy radio: Planet X, a.k.a. Neburu, a hidden planet with hordes of demonic aliens, was swinging into orbit to enslave Earth. Or the billionaires behind the New World Order would massacre the masses, first weakening us with chemtrails. Why even get up and go to work?

It was as if the bleak future had concretized in the present, the concerns of one or five generations down the road urgently pressing on us now. Happening to us yesterday, not in a decade. The sky itself had a patina, the atmosphere smudged with greenhouse gas emissions. But somehow humanity survived in the billions. The catastrophists warning about Earth's peak carrying capacity maxing out by 2020 were as surprised that so many humans were still around as the 1970s' Casandras had been when we hit the year 2000. Certain ways of living had died. The fate of other species was also a different story, but genetic engineering made their final endings uncertain.

In those days the apocalyptic atmosphere felt like a homogenizing mood. After the world failed to end so many times, the post-apocalypse became a kind of patina, the visible surface of damage suffered that leant a gloomy beauty to what survived.  Patina's aesthetic quality suffused old things, worn infrastructure, and ragtag DIY techniques, giving them the queer charm of the survival circus. Rust was both inevitable and pretty.

We repaired the greenhouse bottle wall in 2023, embedding pennies in the mortar in a spiral shape. I patched a broken wine bottle with a smaller one cut down in length to fit. The clear gallon jugs cultivated a little habitat of mold mottled green, brown, and black. One penny popped off but I shine up the others with a scouring pad on a day with nothing better to do.

2038

*Madalina Diaconu, "Patina-Atmosphere-Aroma: Towards an Aesthetics of Fine Differences," Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, (131-148), 132. Like patina, "the atmosphere [can also] be defined as a precipitate, as a cluster that brings together and condenses quasi-immaterial, invisible particles of inhabitants, that are at the same time highly personal and impersonal... The most common reaction to atmospheres encountered in public or private places consists in a spontaneous attuning or homogenising of moods" (137).  While patinas are aged skins, "the atmosphere is spatially open and itself opens moods and life-worlds... By experiencing an atmosphere spread out by a place, the contemporary perceiver is brought nearer to the anonymous succession of all those persons and generations who ever lived and left their olfactory traces there, and becomes himself part of an enormous collective organism. In this respect, feeling an atmosphere is a matter of symbiosis with nameless and faceless bodies" (137).

**Massumi, Brian. 2010. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat.” In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010: 52–70.

***Harding, Susan, and Kathleen Stewart. “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285-310.

Greenhouse

Just before the housing bubble went POP! and Code enforced the Cathedral of Junk to comply, Vince brought me by the Professor’s house, a south Austin old-timer who collects special rocks from the railroad tracks down the street. Over the decades a landslide accumulated: cairns in the yard, smothering steps and porch, covering the house’s floor, stacked around the bed in a nest. Then the water heater burned a hole in the house’s center. Rain-soaked sheetrock melted down on the rocks below. The Professor was living on the back porch with his red dog surrounded by piles of stones.

We were visiting The Old Place to help move windows stacked against the house, and to take some home. They're weatherproofed with coats of mistint paints, pink, lavender, and lime dribbles down the panes. Some had been there forty years, salvaged from the University of Texas’ Mary dormitory before its demolition. The Professor says they looked out on Town Lake before it was dammed, when a waterfall flowed where the pedestrian bridge now stands. He lives in and salvages fragments of Austin's lost landscapes, some thousands of years old, barely buried under the present. Traces of the past no one else wants or can see engulf his house, awaiting scavengers who can archive or make use of them. That is how dorm windows that looked out on the vanished city came to peer in on the dream habitats of art yards. The windows now form the glass walls of Ephemerata Garden's greenhouse, a workshop at Further Farms, Smut Putt Heaven's windows/crutches structure filled with San Pedro and other cacti, and seasonal forms at the Cathedral of Junk.

Rock pile couch, take a seat. The porch overlooks a big drained pond once full of tropical fish and water lilies. We watch grackles dig for bugs in the ruined pond’s roots while the Professor pours out stories in a creek talk of whirlpools, grabbing things from piles to illustrate meandering lectures. He pulls animal bones and skulls from a black suitcase. “See how the antler was scraped away to make it balance? It’s weighted to your hands. Put it around your neck. The Apache and Comanche who lived here used this as a tool.” He shakes a piece of glass and a little bulbous stalactite from a pill bottle: “This is a piece of fulgurite, from lightning hitting sand. And this calcite formation has been altered, carved into Ixchel, Mayan Goddess of the moon, who walks with a rabbit on her shoulder. You can see her when the moon is three-quarter’s full, and the rabbit is very clear on her shoulder.” Hanson earned the nickname Professor for this constant stream of learned discourse. But he thinks of himself as a smart aleck scholar, ready to deflate expert knowledge--all those experts who don’t take his relics seriously.

According to Hanson, this neighborhood was one of the first spots in Austin colonized by the Spanish. “They found this populated garden and took over.” Anglos eventually built a narrow-gauge railroad steam-powered by a wooden locomotive--forgotten history down the block, where the railroad still runs freight into town. With a big pre-invasion population having lived around the modern-day tracks, he finds hand-hewn rocks everywhere down there and hauls them back up on his motorized wheelchair. He says every rock, bone, and piece of metal salvaged from the tracks carries some trace of human tinkering. Some stones have been hewn and weighted to spin perfectly, or to stand upright on a ledge's lip. Others have exposed pockets of glimmering geodes, or concave fishscales from flint napping. You can see whirls of amber in a piece of fossilized palm wood. There are animal forms and profiles of women wearing elaborate headdresses, carved by women otherwise constantly grinding on matate. He passes around a heavy fossil mammoth bone excavated in the backyard while digging a well. Someone tuned this fifty-pound sitar-shaped limestone rock to produce two notes. See the wear marks where drumming fingers endlessly slapped the stone?

Like the rocks and relics, the drained pond embodies a possible past, tracing a lost ecology of relationships between characters and landscapes. While anoles, geckoes, spiny lizards, and the bugs they eat burrow in the rock cairns’ million caverns, the pond habitat manifested the animal realm most intensely. “It was one of the most successful things I’ve ever done. It just worked: I built it, and all the animals came!” Two kinds of native tree frogs live in Austin, and one species moved in to the habitat. Sometimes they visited Hanson’s bedroom. Once a Great Blue Heron came down to hunt them. Vince remembers blooming lilies and insect dramas. “There was sort of an arms race, where the spiders built big webs over the pond, and the dragonflies would come down and cut the webs where they joined the trees. They learned to cut all the right places.” Not so many animals, since the pond’s been drained. Now the pond’s a concrete ruin, awaiting mortar patchwork and resealing with paint. Papyrus, pickerelweed, and dehydrated water lily roots survive in shallow puddles. Every day mockingbirds pick for bugs. Like the bamboo grove behind the pond, the patchy landscape is in ruins, gone wild and overgrown. Sun spears through bamboo blades to magenta and sky blue wood planks leaned against the back of the pond. More salvaged materials are propped against a little hand-built house beside the pond. The scene draws out a feeling in me of wanting to get to work, see it unfurl.

But what Hanson really needs help with is moving all the salvage wood, windows, rocks, and relics way from the burned-out house so it can be repaired. One day we work on relocating rocks to clear a path to the house. Another day, Vince gathers David and Susan, Scott Stevens, and Jen and I to make human chains and get some windows out of there. A good crew of six--we could start a moving company. While Vince hacks a path through the bamboo, Jen and I offer Hanson a Museum t-shirt illustrated with a Moontower, Austin's first public lighting from 1895. He reminisces, “I lived right under a Moontower in west campus. Back then a lot more bugs clouded the lights, feeding flocks of nighthawks.” The bugs are gone now, so the birds are in decline, but the Moontower is preserved as a historic landmark. “There used to be a lot more bugs all over Austin--and butterflies!” Like the Colorado River waterfall that disappeared with the damming of Town Lake, this is the city that vanished. In the face of all this ruin, he sobs, “I identify with critters more and more, because the same people who want to crush critters want to crush me!”

The Professor likes old things, ways, and knowledges--anything that somehow survives--and The Old Place is a sort of database of these. "I've researched all kinds of hippie industries, like fruit silviculture, making soap, raising tilapia." One day I drop by to see his repaired house with wheelchair ramp. A few folded blankets sit on the floor beside the huge loom he made them on. We talk about trees, a Chinaberry grove at the street's dead end that Hanson watched grow about forty years ago out of a scrapmetal "junk ecology" that sheltered saplings from the mower. “It’s good wood--they used it to build China cabinets,” professes the Professor. I complain about Hackberries at our house constantly dropping branches. Planted for fast-growing shade during Austin’s 1950s housing boom, now you see them falling apart all over the city. But the smart aleck scholar argues, “It’s a food tree. People lived off hackberry pies in the Depression. Lots of birds eat them, too.” Now the Hackberries provision invasive monk parakeets and migratory birds like cedar waxwings.

At first Hanson's windows formed a greenhouse tacked on to our front car port. Last fall I
framed out a new greenhouse in the backyard with lumber, concrete, and UV-blocking plastic roofing from Home Despot. On the north side I poured a narrow foundation for a bottle wall to build this spring or summer or some other vague future. The glass walls can be seasonally broken down and removed. They're cobbled out of double-pane glass doors salvaged by a friend and variously sized windows from The Old Place and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Painted with gallons of cheap mistint lavender and bubblegum, Jen's mom nicknames it "Barbie's Greenhouse." It's an imperfectly sealed atmosphere that captures light and a little heat. We stuff all our potted plants in this bubble, just in time to survive winter.

2012

Busybody

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens often ask us how long we've lived here, how long did it take to get this way? How many thousands of hours tinkering? What sightseers see is only a snapshot of something non-visual: ways of living in atmospheres. Landscape patches are composed of different tempos and rhythms, the blur of hands seeding and weeding, the speed of root growth and heron migrations, the slow collection and decomposition of garbage. Yardist symbiont people become contented busybodies, endlessly encrusting landscape patches with aesthetic layers as the years fly by. Isaiah Zagar in the Magic Gardens grew three left arms because he works so fast: "My work is marked by events and is a mirror of the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously." Far from being in control, a living machine's engineer just tries to keep up with emergence, just one of the processes that holds the superorganism together.

Over a dozen years every surface in Spunky Monkey Ranch became permeated with art. Visitors entered the land through a twelve-foot arch cobbled out of deadwood, skis, crutches, and scavenged wood panels painted with a bright monkey face and vibrating letters spelling out the yard's name. A smaller arch spanned the path down to the creekside bamboo grove. Held together by wire and tension, the arcs bristled with gravity’s potential, poised on falling apart; they want to move. They match David Pratt’s body – a shaky livewire, hands and boots tapping out excess energy. He likes to work fast to override making too many decisions, swinging lengths of wide transparent tape over a pile of collage scraps so static electricity sucks up an image. Slapped directly onto picture frames, compositions emerge with a depth of multiple layers, some obscured. Art lives off the frame, swallows it up, the same way Susan’s mosaics live on house walls and garden paths. They match her, too – still and patient. Susan has a quiet presence that blends in, then pops out with simple joy and generosity. Spunky Monkey Ranch embodied Susan and David’s still and jittery ways of being.

When they moved out to Further Farms in Elgin, some people were shocked that David and Susan could abandon the art environment and just leave everything to its fate. David and Susan accepted it as part of the place’s lifecycle. David wondered, “How can I take it with me when it all lives here? It’d be like dragging a heavy load around by my neck. I’ve never stuck around anywhere long enough to build a foundation like Vince has” at the Cathedral of Junk. David keeps moving, starting over. Maybe Further Farms will emerge as a foundation, maybe not. While their “everything must go” yard sale moved as much art, plants, and materials off the Ranch as possible, the rest stayed or got tossed. Vince helped move the mosaic Monkey King on his throne. What about the small portable pond? “Well, if it looks like it belongs here, it stays.” It belongs to the place, and maybe some other artist will tend to its life there (which is what happened to the mini-Old West town at Spunky Monkey Ranch in the first place). If not, it goes the way of all mortals and falls apart. Like any garden, it needs tending to exist. Art environments take on a life of their own, but need a spunky cultivator to repair things as gravity, weather, rust, plants, and animals shuffle forms around. Aesthetic patterns materialize through processes of constant recomposition – tending a place’s emergence, laying down layer after layer of endless care and repair. From one day to the next, art environments are never the same.

Before Spunky Monkey Ranch, Susan and David ran the Alternate Current ArtSpace in a rented building on the same South Austin lot. Opening in 1991, this live-in art gallery hosted unjuried gallery shows that art critics and careful curators described as “cluttered.” It was a hodgepodge place where anyone could show art. Themes for group shows were inclusive and quirky: “The Mojo Show,” “White Trash/Black Helicopter,” “He Said/She Said.” Their last show in 2002 focused on 9/11 only nine months after the event. Alternate Current aimed at being a habitat to encourage and support south Austin artists and connect them to an older generation of creative people. Both the gallery and the Ranch were places that gathered an eclectic public of artists, musicians, gardeners, filmmakers, and their kids into a welcoming intergenerational scene.

Like the Alternate Current art gallery before it, Spunky Monkey Ranch reveals the fluidity of places, how fast they change, the inescapable vulnerability of aesthetic patterns in time. In “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,”* Roger Cardinal laments the loss of vernacular art environments as an almost inevitable fate. Given their improvised aesthetic compositions like mosaics or structures held together by gravity, these singular places share an in-built precariousness of form. Without their perpetually tinkering creators (who abandon them in pursuit of lower rent, or are institutionalized, or die, or commit suicide), the places swiftly fall to pieces. Often built of junk, the public can see them as eyesores or rat farms; arsons and vandals assault some places, while municipalities dismantle others on the grounds of code violations or health hazards. Very few are preserved by nonprofit institutions (like the Orange Show Foundation in Houston). As an art historian, Cardinal mourns not only their "extinction," but “that extinction should lead to oblivion: we can only guess at the number of outsider sites which have vanished across the years. The only consolation is that a number of demolished structures enjoy an afterlife” through visual documentation (2000:172). A powerful mode of melancholic narrative presents itself in vanished or decayed expressive forms, lost arts, and extinct species of beauty. The affective pull of lost places, or their potential loss, motivates preservation – the avoidance of "extinction" of singular atmospheres that will never grace the world again.

Is there really any way to freeze these places? Aesthetic patterns in vernacular landscapes cannot be preserved without preserving the process of perpetual emergence, the relationship between spunky monkeys and their homes. If "outsider architecture" takes form through the pleasures of unfolding processes – tinkering, gardening, creating, scavenging, dreaming, partying – preservationists should follow by shifting attention to the vulnerability of action. This reframes preservation and destruction as generative actions in themselves. Rather than a melancholic vision of the loss of place, the vulnerability of art environments helps us to see these landscapes as momentary triumphs of doing or living against the odds -- despite thermodynamics and capitalism. At the same time, animating places through historical narratives helps us understand what drives the pattern of vulnerability itself. Rent goes up. Economic development patterns recognizable as gentrification and code regulation bring about the abandonment and destruction of these precarious urban landscape patches.

Meanwhile, out at Further Farms, Susan’s mosaic and collage patterns begin to encrust the kitchen walls. The trailer’s living room offers plenty of wall space for a gallery of David and Susan’s paintings, collages, and mosaics, as well as art they’ve collected over the years. The sunny open spaces outside called for gardens, and the farm is taking shape as veggies watered with caught rain in raised beds of cinder blocks and car tires. Vince helped assemble fence wood and windows into junkitecture walls for the carport turned studio workshop. The circle of lean cedar elms suggested a sundial, and every equinox and solstice David is out there at sunrise calibrating a solar calendar out of metal poles and mortar chunks gathered from the land. A skeletal metal arch unfolds near the sundial with a chair up top like you could sit there and enjoy a fine view. David calls it "the East Gate to the Garden of Eden, or the West Gate, depending on which side you’re on." The potluck gatherings that connect generations of creative people and families continue at Further Farms with Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts, when people come together to catch up, share home-cooked food, and play some music. And then there is the new pattern of driving from the exurbs into town, where Susan works for the City, and David has seasonal work with the IRS or as a movie extra. Life is quieter out there, stars brighter, and the art of wildflowers, deer, and hawks graces the fields.

The busybody is ready to mosaic, aching to dig. The relationship between the busybody and living garbage surges with a dream or possibility. Never finished, always ready to start over or go further into what is emerging.

*Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Ousider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 1-2 (2000): 169-186.

Amaranth Weed

"Seeds the size of little freckles potentially grow into plants taller than me..."

Posted on FlowTV.

Monk Refrains

Throaty heron caws, bluejay songs, monk parrot squawks. Heron fledglings fall through the fig trees into the yard. Six pack rings drop from the pecan where junkitect bluejays build a nest with plastics and frayed rope scraps. They call out beautiful two note whistles and mad barks at the cats. Monks vibrate the sky with their racous chatter, calling it down to your sensorium. Look up and see them in the busy blue nonhuman city among red cardinals, starlings, little migratory birds, vultures, butterflies, dragonflies, airplanes, longings, nothingness. The monks' calls are only one aspect of a multisensory art project that crosses the sky over Ephemerata Gardens.

Monk parakeets are native to extreme climates of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where their communal nests can weigh up to a ton. They prey on human crops, colonizing tall, non-native Eucalyptus trees cultivated on plantation borders as windbreaks – perfect aeries from which to launch pirate raids on grids of crops below! In the 1970s, Argentina launched an eradication program against the pests. Although a government bounty “resulted in a return of over 400,000 pairs of monk feet in two years” and 64,000 birds were exiled to the US as pets, native monks are still at large in Argentina.¹ Ornithologists consider them an invasive species to North America (where European settlers made the continent's only indigenous parrot, the Carolina Parakeet, extinct by the 1920s). Naturalized colonies of escaped and released monks have popped up in California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Connicticut, New York, and other states. One ornithologist who visited Ephemerata Gardens said monks might be like pigeons in a hundred years, flourishing in every city. Todd S. Campbell with the Institute for Biological Invasions remarks, “monk parakeets are probably not beyond control from a biological or logistical standpoint, but they are likely beyond control from a public sentiment standpoint” thanks to human guardians who mobilize against their eradication.¹ Urban monks construct communal nests on cell phone towers and electricity junction boxes. In winter 2005 public protests broke out when Connecticut’s United Illuminating (UI) dismantled monk nests on electricity poles. In addition to rallying at nest removal sites and launching a press campaign against UI, people from neighborhoods where nests were being removed built fake nests installed in their backyards. Not many monks moved in.

Monk nests remind me of yardist David Lee Pratt’s description of his interlaced arcs of mangled rebar and other scrap metal at Further Farms: architectural forms that use no nails, no concrete, just intuitive balance to puzzle together a structure that gravity keeps from falling apart. Monks sharpen one end of a stick with their beaks, then jimmy it into the other sticks. Each mated pair builds four or so rooms. They defecate inside, then use their waste as stucco so the house interior becomes sealed against wind and rain. The nests are constructed using the improvisational principles behind the Cathedral of Junk and the open-air rooms at Biosquat. They are composed by weaving things together; they are never finished being woven; they are all built of trash (especially Monk nests, given trash’s etymology of “fallen leaves and twigs”); they are all "beyond control." Like Austin junkitects, monk parrots build something out of nothing, and in the process, pull together communities through their semi-public homes.

As immigrant settlers or refugees from South America, the monks haul tropical sounding atmospheres north in advance of global warming. Like the sonic envelopes of TVs, sirens, and traffic, birds give atmospheres trembling contours, making them moodily alive through repetitions of sounds and colors. Monk parrots alter what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call refrains, “an act of rhythm that has become expressive, ... become qualitative... Not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode, ... the chancy formation of a domain” through synaesthetic labor” (315-16).² Monk refrains crystallize as chatter, green flashes, and patterns of sticks. The concept of refrains does not approach aesthetics as symbolic arts limited to people, but rather, as embodied expression or distributed somatic intelligence that communicates directly through the senses, literally making sense, sustaining life. Refrains double as a vocabulary for describing patchy landscapes, but also as a compositional methodology. We cannot talk about refrains without making and sensing them. This non-representational approach to built environments recognizes the aesthetic agency of plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing sensations of unison.

Deleuze and Guattari elaborated the concept of aesthetic-ecological refrains by mining natural history and behavioral ecology to illustrate how nonhuman artists throw out “planes of composition,” design territories that improvise homes out of chaos. They love “the magic bird,” the bowerbird (331), that flies into their writing to perform refrains.³ These natives of Australia and Papua New Guinea create elaborate nests to dance around inside, their patterns of color and gesture resounding with songs, including those of other birds. Bowerbird refrains are made of synaesthetic “sounds-colors-gestures” that shuttle between bird and forest (333). In this way, “landscapes are peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes” (320). Refrains fly away, a nonorganic life of sounds coexisting in the forest with bowerbirds that is open to becoming something independent of them.⁴ Refrains are the becoming-forest of the bowerbird, the becoming-sky of the monks.

Music, melodies, and refrains breath life into regions, landscapes, houses, and other atmospheres. They are alternative energy forms that power the City of Living Garbage under the banner "The Survival Circus Marching Band!" Try it: whistling and humming when hungry or tired can recharge you. The affects of sound are strong sensory forces that jump between and vibrate sentient beings as their medium. Katherine Hayles notes, “researchers in virtual reality have found that sound is much more effective than sight in imparting emotional tonalities to their simulated worlds” (219).⁵ Lawrence Grossberg explores music's “unique and striking relationship to the human body, surrounding, enfolding, and even invading it within its own rhythms and textures” that open up feelings of possibility, freedom, and belonging with such force that it can hold together social movements (152).⁶ Refrains are collective  improvisations that express Ornette Coleman's harmolodic musical theory. “Harmolodics is the use of the physical and mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group” (43).⁷ Coleman grasps sounds as belonging to landscapes (e.g., in regional musical styles), but also as expressions of individual intelligence released into refrains that recompose minds and moods. The collective song is its own form of life or "unison" that endlessly doubles back into and out of the musicians that colaboratively release its expression. This form of life needs musicians and instruments to shape its refrain, but the harmolodic refrain becomes the aural house where musicians live and that gave them life and instruments in the first place.

So the monk parrots' chatter and green feathers expressed tropical Southerness even as they refrained a tentative inhabitation: is this the South? Can we live here? Can we enter the fossil record and become native to this new place? 

2012

1 Campbell, Todd S. “The Monk Parakeet.” The Institute for Biological Invasions, posted December 2000, http://invasions.bio.utk.edu/invaders/monk.html (no longer accessible).
2 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
3 They also fly into Jill Noke’s description of the Cathedral of Junk’s domes as bowerbird nests (Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home. Austin: UT Press, 2007, p.99).
4 While researching Kaluli ornithology in Papua New Guinea, Stephen Feld asked his informant Jubi to match up bird sounds with species until Jubi clarified things for him. “Listen – to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest” (Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1990, p.45). Jubi’s remark helped Feld to understand why the birds and their sounds require separate taxonomies among Kaluli ornithologists: they are distinct beings. The bird artists of Papua New Guinea sing and dance refrains, the sounds of which become nonorganic life forms captured by Kaluli songs and dances. The birds’ sounds and colorful feathers enter into a becoming-human through Kaluli ritual practices of “becoming a bird” or “man in the form of a bird” (236).
5 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
6 Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
7 Quoted in Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Arc

The arc of rebar abandoned in our backyard took only a little bending to make a half-circle. Simon Rodia used train tracks to leverage rebar into Watts Towers arabesques. I used my body, standing on one end and bending the other, rocking back and forth to get the right shape. I snipped metal siding from a demolished shed into letters painted white, yellow, and sky blue that spell out EPHEMERATA GARDENS and wired them to the arc above the gateway to our food patch. That's the name of a tenuous possibility, a roadside attraction/wildlife sanctuary/permaculture sideshow. A survival circus. Maybe one day instead of real jobs I can tinker in the yard as tourists drop by and leave donations -- enough to live off in a humble way. Maybe with enough labor and learning the yard will grow most of our food.

Micro-tourism business models combine wasting time playing, tinkering, yearning, and daydreaming with the pragmatic matter of earning a living somehow (or having good things to eat, paying the mortgage, etc.). The cultural form of DIYsneylands (itself a vulnerable survival that goes back to Rodia, Zagar, Finster, Blagdon, Prisbey, and others who built lively yard art environments) are living machines that capture engineers who must hoard and categorize junk to feed their monstrous patchy landscapes. The engineers live off money tithed by toursists, subsidized with a steady job or multiple odd jobs. While cultural tourism and eco-tourism manufacture voyages to somewhere authentic or pure (linking up a big world through traveling machines), with micro-tourism, the neighbor's backyard becomes a fantastical realm where an odd but friendly character tinkers endlessly on their peculiar atmosphere. There may be big plans for mosaic grottoes or wheeltowers. Sometimes hallucinatory forces speak through doll heads and other mediums of reincarnated trash, or visions of the future puncture the ground and infectious desires for inventive simplicity or a slower life permeate tourists with "ideas."

The survival circus is an atmospheric mode particular to times of ecological apocalypses and economic calamity.* Forms of making due driven by a lack of money or resource scarcity have crystallized as an aesthetic variously identified by home and gardening magazines as shabby chic or Japanese wabi-sabi. Texture, rust, distressed "antiques," patina! The Transition movement more seriously arcticulates survival circus as a move away from oil and back to DIY assemblages of communal self-sufficiency in advance of social/economic/ecological collapse. Things that survive through these social aesthetics include weathered wood and furniture, ceramics (re-replacing plastics), backyard chickens, and various skills like canning or sewing that strive to retreat from global circuits and relocalize. "Voluntary simplicity" might involve giving up habits like cars, A/C, or refrigerators in moral spasms. The arc of threatening futures animates and saturates survival forms. Individuals catapulted along this arc's trajectory begin a dense reinhabitation of patchy landscape, hunkering down into the recycled, homemade home, its worn wood benches or railroad ties on cinder blocks, the gardens that need constant tending. You become a character in the landscape.

When tourists come they like to pose under the arc for pictures. Some take photos of our chickens and others talk about their beloved Plymouth Rocks. We trade plant tips, and they rattle on about their determination to garden even just one edible cantaloupe off the potted sidewalk vine, or what to grow in Maine, and when. They get inspired by the raised bottle beds or wonder what's wrong with us. Maybe one day I'll build a cement stalactite grotto against the back wall, with a mosaic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Something to draw the tourists.

*Thanks to Halide Velioglu for honing in on "survival for fun" in her writing on Sarajevo, where a televisual imaginary of a post-Soviet stateless existence of subsistance farming sits uneasily against rural poverty in Bosnia.

2012

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.

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