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.

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

Hot Cold

Early September the temperature drops ten degrees from the summer's unbroken triple digits, falling down with scorched leaves. The feeling of winter coming on, when stars look brighter and sounds carry further in cold air. Early sunsets, less light in a day. In January, twenty-five degrees for five days, snow on the garden greens. When the weather is perfect, it is only shifting from one extreme to the other, a little window stuffed with feelings of anticipation for spring’s seedburst or the cozy melancholy of long winter nights.

We have been ricocheting between ever warmer summers and colder winters. This summer with the water blackouts the ground cracked open like it did in the middle of last winter's long freeze. The cracks are wide enough to shove down hay and manure. The ponds freeze six inches thick, goldfish and gambusia hibernating beneath the ice. Fleas and mosquitoes vanish. We weatherproof the chicken and bunny coop with shower curtains and heat lamps. In the summer a standing fan circulates the hot, stagnant air.

Sometimes we burn chopped up fallen branches in the chimenea, more for atmosphere than warmth. Compost heaps radiate free heat, warm enough to keep seedlings happy if you set them on top in the spring and rig up a plastic cover.* On hot days you can make a simple evaporative cooler by sticking your feet in a bucket of water. Wear as little clothes as possible.

We used to run an A/C that cooled the bedroom while shooting hot air at the pond. On the hottest stretch of days the A/C became useless with electricity blackouts. The big ice storm last winter knocked out the power but we still had water and gas. People are learning to conserve water and electricity not only because they got too expensive, but because they become unavailable to most for days at a time in peak use weeks. The cold isn’t bad because we have surprisingly cheap gas, but there’s not much you can do about summer heat.

Which is more inescapable and miserable, extreme cold or heat? Conditioned by air conditioners and heaters, bodies sweat and shiver outside. So vulnerable without our coolers and heaters, not to mention clothes. We get heat stroke, or body heat wicks off into freezing air. What are bodies, what is life, but this fragile balance of heat and cold?

2018 

* Gene Logsdon details his sheep manure heater for seedlings in Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing [2010], 132-133). "I keep wondering, nevertheless, if I am taking as much advantage of this free heat as I should. Red Cat Farm in Germansville, Pennsylvania, is testing an idea to use that heat in one of its greenhouses." 

Amaranth Weed

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

Posted on FlowTV.

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

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.