Glow Rose

For about an hour after dusk the rose glows softly like ghost flowers. A gift from Janice Washington's GMOasis to Ephemerata Gardens, we had to strategically plant it to catch the sun's last rays, and it only works in the summer and fall. You can also zap it with a blacklight any time at night to see it phosphoress.

Janice is a former Monsanto employee who lost her lab job when the Supreme Court blockbusted the corporation. She wound up teaching at UT Austin and started her own little garage lab as a hobby. Everything she modifies winds up in her garden, from aphid-resistant arugula to vine borer-immune zucchini. She also practices organic gardening and biocontrol, and insists on irrigating only with rain water. This indiscriminate melding of natural and artificial made the GMOasis one of the most befuddling gardens in this year's Austin Art Yard Tour.

The rose garden features carefully bred miniature black roses, "GM  heirlooms" with green petals, roses that smell like rotten meat, and the famous glow rose that expresses a mushroom species' phosphoresence. Turning away from instrumental modifications for insect resistance, Janice likes tinkering with plants' sensate aesthetics, their shapes, colors, and odors. Her fig has perfectly heart shaped fruit. The lemons are cubes. Purple San Pedro, magenta and albino mother-of-millions. Oak leaf lettuce that smells and tastes like marzipan.

Then there are bacteria that devour plastic. She sprays them on her fence of decaying dolls and trucks. She shows you the microphotographs of polymer chains that break down completely. Janice is most proud of this innovation and is working with her grad students to develop commercial application in ecological restoration projects. She gushes about the bacteria like they're her kids: "They're such great learners and hard workers! I'm so happy they have plastic to eat."

The neighbors are organic gardening purists. Their food patches just happen to back up against each other, divided by a chain link fence in the sunny part of the yard. When an almondy-tasting oak leaf lettuce sprouted in their garden, the neighbors lost it. They jumped the fence in the night and went at GMOasis with shovels and clippers, killing all the monsters while Janice secretly watched from her darkened window.

As far as I know our glow rose is now the only one in the world.

2020

Blue Corn

In one of the digital photos we can no longer access, the blue corn stalks are as tall as our six year old daughter. The seeds were second generation from two ears we were able to grow with kernels planted as part of a public protest in 2016. We donated five bucks to the nonprofit FreeSeeds for a packet of organic heirloom corn with drought-tolerant gene sequences patented by Insanto. The corporation more or less ignored this performative flaunting of patent infringement as thousands of backyard farmers got to feel radical while learning that corn is pretty hard to grow.

Last night I was thinking about Insanto's fate and strange rebirth. The first mysterious GM corn and soy field meltdowns were exciting. As thousands of acres of crops withered almost overnight, people thought "nature" was finally retaliating against Insanto's will to control. BT-resistant corn rootworms were winning the arms race. But the bombing of Insanto's corporate headquarters in St. Louis made it clear that the dead fields were also terrorist attacks. Then arsonists started torching the dried up fields. Another drought year.

The self-declared Organic Militia's attacks forced a sudden, glaring clarity on what Insanto had been doing all along: weaponizing food. The armed rent-a-soldiers on hire from Nergal LLC (formerly known as Academi, Xe Services and Blackwater USA/Worldwide) stationed around Insanto's HQ and various test sites were just the human analog to the weaponized food itself, life forms of mass destruction aimed at multitudes of micro- and macroorganisms. Whereas the corporation could kill targeted plants and insects with impunity, the militia had blatantly crossed the line into a categorically different form of violence by killing Insanto employees. Insanto's undeclared war against nature had blurred into an undeclared war between a corporation and a citizen-militia.

In contrast, Organic Militia's first press release was quite open and rabid in their declaration of war against Insanto. There were spies and saboteurs on both sides, comparisons to the French Revolution -- peasants trying to take down a monarchy with organic seeds, mushrooms species, and flames and drought conditions as weapons. They compared Insanto to the East India Company of the 19th century, widely hated while still touting its benevolence in "improving agriculture" and gifting food security to the masses. Both corporations enjoyed paternalistic fantasies of development and state sanctions on their virtual monopolizations in international trade. Organic Militia cast backyard middle class gardeners in the US as peasants, urging them to take up arms and get militant along with some of the laborers in the Global South demonstrating against GM agriculture by burning Insanto seed. Groups like Occupy Insanto committed to non-violent protest and civil disobedience condemned the Organic Militia while still leveraging new images of Nergal troops with rifles protecting HQ and fields.

GMOs were inescapable, showing up in non-GM labeled food, slipped into recipes at supposedly "all organic and locally grown" restaurants. For every fraud caught passing off BT corn or flounder-tomatoes as the natural thing, there were dozens undetected. Government regulators with the FDA or USDA just helped Insanto push through more GM quasi-species. Of course everyone was shocked and saddened by the St. Louis bombing, but we all kind of expected it after a decade of public frustration over foodflation and fundamentalist outrage over landscape impurity and genetic pollution. A speaker at the second GMO-Free Midwest conference in 2013 even predicted the attacks. Strapped state police forces remained surprisingly impassive, as if to say "this fight is between you guys." (Or the '17 Crash caused their non-intervention; the National Guard was far too busy with emergency response on the eastern seaboard to get involved). Multiple court cases ruling in favor of plaintiffs -- organic farmers, people with cancer, etc. -- crippled the corporations' profits with billions of dollars in ongoing settlements. But the clincher was evidence that Insanto labs had engineered a bacteria into corn and soy specifically targeted at degenerating human liver function at the same time one of their biopharming subsidiaries developed medication to help the resulting condition (splicing the same bacteria into fungi). Like a dream, a landmark Supreme Court ruling shut down the company and blockbusted it into little subsidiaries, with a harsh ten year moratorium on planting GM seeds in the US and territories.

Millions of acres of GM landscape patches with dead dirt and thriving superweeds needed remediation. Volunteers cropdusted them with fungal spores that are natural herbicides also capable of breaking down glysophates in the soil. Manure spreaders fertilized the fields with raw human poop. The alien acres of mushrooms seemed to glow at dawn and dusk.

Ultraviolet rays from the rising and setting sun also made our blue corn glow when we peeled back the silk. The stalks grew twice as tall as me. We babied the plants, picking off worms, carefully fertilizing, as if the few ears we might grow could feed the world. But the third year our seed wouldn't come up. We haven't tried growing corn since.

Now Insanto is back with odd new benevolent products. Nanotech waterbeads that manufacture water from soil air. Anti-depressant and anti-psychotic GM corn and soy. Pesticide resistant carabid beetles that eat rootworms. Insanto has realigned itself with the World Peace Council, the UN Peacekeepers, and other international organizations and publicly apologized for its long history in weapons manufacturing (from Agent Orange to glysophates). Strangest of all, Insanto open sourced its entire patent library. Everyone's skeptical: could they really be good guys now?

2028

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.

The Thing in the Garden

Billows of white flesh erupted from the ground. At first the mass doubled daily, then slowed down but kept unfolding. It absorbed other plants, leaving them alive but trapped in its form. It dusted a glass light fixture scavenged from the Cathedral of Junk with its powdery spore. After a few weeks it was a yard across, with shelves of tissue in ripples like a small, solid cloud, an uncanny thing sprouting between the figs and roses in the front garden where the cats poop.

The fruiting sex organs of other fungi have popped up in Ephemerata Gardens. Bird Nests with their tiny cups of spores. Brown umbrellas that open up and rot in a day, bright yellow ones in potted plants and the kitty litter compost. What other cthonic aliens live invisible in the soil? Bondarzewia berkeleyi, the huge Berkeley's polypore, is an edible fungus best cooked when the flesh is young. I learn this on Google and see pics of fungi in dense forests that look like the one in our yard. A museum visitor has a distrubed reaction like the thing scared him, and I realize how fond I am of the mushroom. Something about its unlikely visitation in a "human dominated ecosystem." In a restaurant I overhear a guy reminiscing about his irises. "They died back after we put the fungicide in the yard. Now they're saying iris patches need certain kinds of fungus. They're learning so much about that."

Living soil and its suprises seemed to be endangered. There were reports in peer reviewed journals like Current Microbiology (1) that glysophates, the key ingredient in Roundup and its Chinese knock-offs, were decimating non-targeted soil microbes and mycelia in agriculture fields. Controversy whirled around these texts -- allegations that Monsanto was actively blocking scientific research on its many products' unintended toxic effects while falsifying their own reports, or that the biotech giant was purposefully destroying the biosphere and food security just to maximize its own endless growth, or worse, to kill everyone but "the one percent." Scientific paranoiac visions charged court hearings, public protests, and Occupy Monsanto actions as people tried to get a grip on exactly what the corperation's products were doing to landscapes and bodies. Scientists on both sides of the debate reasoned that lab testing of glysophates and genetically modified plants were always suspect, since things don't work the same in the agricultural fields (e.g., varying in dosage amount, humidity, and the like). Meanwhile the fields themselves were the real experimental labs; the world itself had become the life-size lab.

Like the polypore in our yard this Monsanto worlding turned up in unexpected places. The US Geological Survey isolated glysophates in Mississippi rain (2). Doctors in a hospital in Quebec discovered BT toxin (produced by a soil bacteria's transgenes in GM corn) in the blood of pregnant women(3). In 2009 President Obama appointed former Monsanto lobbyist and VP Michael Taylor as senior advisor to the head of the FDA. Glysophates and GM seeds drifted to neighboring farms, and GM rice cross-pollinated patented Monsanto gene sequences into organic wild rice in a case of genetic pollution. Because there was no mandatory labeling for GMO ingredients you could hate Monsanto and unwhittingly eat its spawn at the same time unless you can afford all organic. Even then Monsanto corn or cotton might be in everyday objects you touch. You could become obsessed with purging Monsanto, get politically active in an international movement "building a world without Monsanto"(4). Like Climate Change, Monster Monsanto became one of those conspiratorial things you could wrap your life around researching and fearing -- its mafia capital built of commodites that kill, first Agent Orange (to kill people, a commissioned product sanctioned by the state military's monopoly on violence), then DDT, now Roundup and corn (to kill pests, no state sanction required). The corporation's living garbage, polluting the minutia of ordinary life, is facilitating cosmopolitan publics of concern, outraged people who could only come together around a trashed world and its remediation.

Besides their ability to manifest in unlikely spots, mushrooms and Monsanto have another thing in common: they eat the death of other beings. They cultivate certain kinds of landscapes by kickstarting a chain of ecological relations by tinkering with forms of death. Mushroom species are living machines, medicinal or toxic to certain life forms. A few lots down from Ephemerata Gardens they might be cutting back oak trees to build a new house. I need to buy some oyster and shitake mushroom plugs and beeswax. The rainbarrels are full of (glysophate?) rain to keep the logs sodden. Maybe a year from now we'll be eating succulent stir fry.

The polypore's mass has yellowed and is no longer tender. I couldn't dismember and eat the thing anyway. Its mysterious autonomy. Plus it's growing in cat poop.

2012

(1) Clair E, Linn L, Travert C, Amiel C, Séralini GE, Panoff JM. "Effects of Roundup(®) and glyphosate on three food microorganisms: Geotrichum candidum, Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris and Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus." Curr Microbiol. 2012 May;64(5):486-91. Epub 2012 Feb 24. Also, researchers in Portland found that BT toxin in GM corn has lethal effects on a non-target species of beneficial fungus. 

Tanya E. Cheeke, 

Todd N. Rosenstiel,

and Mitchell B. Cruzan. "Evidence of reduced arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal colonization in multiple lines of Bt maize."Am. J. Bot. April 2012 99:700-707.

(2) Chang, F. C., M. F. Simcik, et al. (2011). "Occurrence and fate of the herbicide glyphosate and its degradate aminomethylphosphonic acid in the atmosphere." Environ Toxicol Chem 30(3): 548–555.

(3) Aris A, Leblanc S. "Maternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods in Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada." Reproductive Toxicology (2011), doi:10.1016/j.reprotox.2011.02.004.

(4) Combat Monsanto website (http://www.combat-monsanto.co.uk/). See also GMWatch (http://www.gmwatch.eu/).

Parasitescapes

Aromas float through the yard in seasonal waves. Each fall there is a night you can smell the crisp air tip into winter. Spring rains chase the scent of wet creosote I remember from growing up in Arizona (or maybe I’m imagining things). If the early summer has a lot of rain, the humid air in Ephemerata Gardens has a tropical odor of sweet flowers and rotten fruit.

Once the summer heats up, sometimes the driveway smells faintly of shit. The white gravel is too big to cover the cat poop of the same size, and the decomposing leaf litter in the concrete courtyard is too thin to hide anything. Cats also use the dirt under the roses as a litter box. Roaming chickens add to the pungent sulpherous odor. Flies are happy with the situation, snacking on fresh stool. The neighbor’s dog loves to eat cat scat. The sun cures feces in a few days, but there is a constant flow of fresh excreta.

The human body recoils from the stench. It is an emanation of dangerous living garbage, polluted matter potentially loaded with the viral spores of the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii. A cousin to malaria, the pathogen infects host mammals like rats and humans through feline feces and undercooked meat. It can be lethal to people with compromised immune systems. Because the parasite can cause fetal brain damage, encephalitis, and miscarriages, pregnant women are warned not to change litter boxes or garden in potentially contaminated soil. Surprisingly, epidemiologists estimate that 40% of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people, are hosts to T. gondii (Boulter 2007: 35). And its patchy landscapes are growing as the parasite reaches new host populations in the Pacific Ocean.

In 2005, researchers began finding a “Type X” strain of T. gondii in dead sea otters and other aquatic mammals. They suggested that the parasite’s egg-like oocysts are reaching the sea through freshwater runoff from the densely populated coast. Once in the water, mussels, oysters, and anchovies ingest the oocysts, and are in turn eaten by mammals that contract often-lethal infections (Conrad et. al 2005). With the help of Californians who flush cat feces or have trained cats to use toilets, the parasite may also find its way into the ocean after moving through municipal sewage treatment plants that are not equipped to kill the oocysts.

While news coverage of T. gondii’s devious urbanization have been cast in catastrophic terms as another threat to oceans, media attention to the parasite's manipulation of human behavior has a playful sci-fi, Body Snatchers flavor. Behavioral ecologists have shown that the pathogen alters risk avoidance in infected rats, making them curious about the smell of cat urine instead of running the other way (Zimmer 2000: 92-4). So what does it do to us? US researchers link the pathogen’s manipulation of dopamine levels to schizophrenia (Torrey & Yolken 2003). Scientists in the Czech Republic and Turkey suggest that infected people are more prone to car accidents, and much like cell phones and text messaging, “latent toxoplasmosis of drivers should be taken into account while developing strategies to prevent traffic accidents” (Yereli, Balcioglu, & Özbilgin 2006). More controversially, Czech researchers correlated toxoplasmosis with behavioral changes that differ in men and women. Australian epidemiologist Nicky Boulter sums up their research with what feels like a list of outrageous bio-determinist claims:

Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed to be less attractive to women. On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with noninfected controls. In short, it can make men behave like “alley cats” and women behave like “sex kittens”! (2007: 36)

Pushing this logic of parasitic agency further into netherworlds of quack science, Kevin D. Lafferty hypothesizes that the pathogen’s alteration of individual personalities – neuroticism and macho sex roles in particular – must alter “aggregate personality at the population level” (2006: 1). He then goes on to compare culture formations at national scales in correlation with differential rates of toxoplasmosis infection. For example, 12% of Americans carry T. gondii vs. 66% of Brazilians, so this must explain something about machismo in Brazil. By number crunching and jettisoning a good deal of contradictory data on Asia, he concludes, “the effect of T. gondii on culture could be broader than postulated here” (5). Science writer Carl Zimmer picked up Lafferty’s dubious findings on his blog, extrapolating wildly: “What about other parasites? Do viruses, intestinal worms, and other pathogens that can linger in the body for decades have their own influence on human personality? How much is the national spirit the spirit of a nation’s parasites?” (2006). Blogger comments ranged from outrage at another form of scientific racism to speculation that the parasite “is responsible for the condition known as ‘being a cat lover’” by recoding ‘child’ as ‘feline’ in the crazy cat person’s virus-addled brain. Cast as the vector for crazy cat person syndrome, cat poop will never be the same! We handle it with fear and awe as the mobile home of parasites.

Feline shit became known as ordinary sublime matter, the “divine materials in manure” a source of death and life alike (Logsdon 2010:153). In 2009, microbiologist Laura Knoll began experimenting with a potential malaria vaccine with the premise that purposefully inoculating human hosts with T. gondii might provide immunity to its more lethal cousin malaria. She was inspired by the fact that “Toxoplasma is on the category B list of bioterrorism agents” (University of Wisconsin-Madison 2009). This year in Tanzania, working through the Red Cross, Knoll administered the first experimental rounds of malaria vaccines with oocysts isolated and prepared from infected cats’ feces (risking side effects of schizophrenia and bad driving).

Meanwhile, back in California, a Type X pandemic hits the Pacific seaboard. Somehow the Los Angeles water supply’s oocyst load spikes, sending over a hundred thousand people to hospitals and doctors with flu-like symptoms at first feared to be a swine flu epidemic. Since shit, soil, and meat are Toxo’s vectors, the outbreak is proving easy to isolate unlike SARS and other diseases accidentally transported by airplane. Presumably, Southern Californians are now immune to malaria but more cat-like in their behavior.

In San Francisco and Toronto, curbside cat and dog poop pickup are in full swing. The programs divert pet feces from the landfill to methane digesters that generate electricity when the gas is burned off, in the process effectively isolating Toxoplasma from other urban waste streams. Back in our driveway, cat shit decomposes into dirt loaded with oocysts. The spores can live up to two years, dreaming of mammal brain landscapes to inhabit. We buy more gravel so the cats can bury their stench. I finally spread three-year-old mulch from our pine kitty litter composter in the front rose garden, right where the cats have pooped for years. The roses had been getting yellow leaves with brown dots and falling off. Kitty litter mulch solved the problem, loaded with "divine" microbes that produce antibiotics to keep plant pathogens in check (Logsdon 2010:153).

In the coldest stretch of winter the buds open white and red, spilling their lemony scent.

2015

Boulter, Nicky. “Alley Cats & Sex Kittens.” Australasian Science (January/February 2007),  35-27, http://www.control.com.au/bi2007/281parasites.pdf (accessed March 23, 2010).

Conrad, P.A., M.A. Miller, C. Kreuder, E.R. James, J. Mazet, H. Dabritz, D.A. Jessup, Frances Gulland, and M.E. Grigg, “Transmission of Toxoplasma: Clues from the study of sea otters as sentinels of Toxoplasma gondii flow into the marine environment,” International Journal for Parasitology 35 (2005) 1155–1168.

Lafferty, Kevin D. “Can the Common Brain Parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, Influence Human
Culture?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2006), http://www.werc.usgs.gov/chis/pdfs/
Lafferty06toxoPRSLB.pdf (accessed January 13, 2010).

Logsdon, Gene. Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.

Torrey, EF, and RH Yolken. “Toxoplasma Gondii and Schizophrenia.” Emerging Infectious
Diseases (2003), http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol9no11/03-0143.htm (accessed January
23, 2010).

University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Medicine and Public Health. August 11, 2009. http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/cats-provide-unusual-source-for-potential-malaria-vaccine/1320

Yereli, K., I. Balcioglu, and A. Özbilgin. “Is Toxoplasma Gondii a Potential Risk for Traffic
Acciedents in Turkey?” Forensic Science International 163, no. 1 (2006), http://www.ncbi.
nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16332418 (accessed March 23, 2010).

Zimmer, Carl. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures.
New York: Touchstone Books, 2000.

–––––. “A Nation of Neurotics? Blame the Puppet Masters?” The Loom: A Blog About Life, Past and Future, posted August 1, 2006, http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/08/01/a_nation_of_
cowards_blame_the.php (accessed March 4, 2009).

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.

Biomortar

Ephemerata Garden’s back wall mosaic grotto is starting to crumble, and I can’t find any mortar. We used up the last of the half-ton I bought three years ago from a bankrupt construction company to repair the Garbage Gyre mosaic and patch up the greenhouse bottle wall. Sinking foundation on the grotto’s left side is causing the façade to crack, and a Chinaberry seedling that got in the crack on the alley side of the wall is speeding the process.

Given cement scarcity since last year, I’ve been making do by bolting parts of the façade to the substrate. Limestone and clay mining operations are at a slow dig with their limited solar energy rations, and the coal kilns used in the calcination process work within strict carbon emission regulations. All available cement is first allocated to government agencies for infrastructure repair, and to public sector institutions like hospitals and schools.

In Philadelphia, the Magic Gardens’ caretakers are experimenting with bacterial biocement using castoff concrete chunks pulverized with sledgehammers. Following Ginger Dosier’s method,* they mix the powder with Bacillus pasteurii and urine to make a very slow setting mortar suitable for repair work. The nonprofit Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, instituted in 2002 in response to the art environment’s threatened demolition, preserves Isaiah Zagar’s mural works around South Street and organizes events focused on folk and self-taught art.

I was encroaching on somebody else’s land and we had to buy it. The owner came back and wanted to sell it. He didn’t care about the land, just about the money, so we paid him three hundred thousand – where you gonna get that kind of money? So Lawyers for the Arts made me into a nonprofit organization and raised the money. It became a wonderful thing for me. It scares the shit outta me too, now I got some kind of responsibility. We’ve been very lucky about code. [When Zagar started Magic Gardens] the area was a derelict area so there wasn’t a big problem. But now, nobody could do anything now. It would be impossible to do now. He bought it for 70K and sold for 300K in ten years – maybe because of art. Maybe art has that power.

When I first talked with Zagar by phone a dozen years ago, he was busy repairing one of his mosaics with a volunteer. He had become an ant at the center of the hectic nonprofit nest.

Everything is vulnerable to the weather. Any kind of thing like this has got to be eventually taken over by an entity to preserve it. To actually pay people to preserve it. Preservation is the key – but you can’t always do this. Vandalism is a big thing. People will feel that what you’re doing is ungodly. “Squash it, kill it, kill it!” But I’ve certainly been very lucky… In the nonprofit there are administrators, I have an executive director, someone for education, for outreach, a daily manager, garden guides, people who tell my story to 35-40 people on a tour. It’s very mysterious to an artist who is still living. 

Art is a collaborative social-economic venture that can inflate an excess nonprofit value within a rarified atmosphere assembled by aesthetic practices themselves. Aesthetics and cement can hold together bits of broken ceramics, cast-off glass bottles, bent bike wheels, sensations of unity, and derelict urban areas, but these borderless compositions are materially fragile and in a sense require undervalue or abandonment to firm up. Some other form of wealth rises up out of conditions of poverty or making do. Preserving fragile art environments often depends on unpaid volunteer labor at the same time it makes jobs for a few administrators and skilled restoration workers. But when cement prices inflate, mosaics struggle to take shape or stay in good shape. Philadelphia's seasonal heating and freezing has its toll on the Magic Gardens' mortar. And there are vandals who kill someone else's sense of beauty for cruel fun or righteousness.

This mortality makes evident that mosaics, junkitecture, and other urban forms in the City of Living Garbage only survive through aesthetic behavior or the relationship of care and repair between artistic characters and landscape patches. Agencies and institutions are epiphenomena that mysteriously redistribute the behaviors, supplies and moneys, and affective attachments required for preservation; their support and continuity is itself vulnerable. When the 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pledged close to a half million dollars in restoration funds (while the Watts Towers, another self-taught architectural art environment on the National Historic Register with the Bottle Village, received nine hundred thousand). FEMA responded to controversies surrounding the worth of the Bottle Village, including a petition to block the funds introduced by City Councilwoman Sandi Webb, by rescinding the restoration money, claiming that it was inappropriate as the Bottle Village had not been regularly open to the public for years.** Webb was joined by Representative Elton Gallegly in the call to bulldoze the Bottle Village, “an eyesore 25 or 30 years ago that has gone downhill dramatically ever since … How in the world can we spend half a million dollars on something no one wants” when so many real world problems need money thrown their way?***

Grandma Prisbrey wanted and needed her luminous Bottle Village where she lived with her collection of 17,000 pencils. Volunteers with the nonprofit Preserve Bottle Village continue to give occasional tours, organize events like weeding parties, and rally small injections of money from individuals and private foundations. Their mode of survival is more about preserving Bottle Village by asking people to help physically create it, more than by donating cash. In 2010, Disneyland offered support by including the Bottle Village in its “Give-a-Day, Get-a-Day” program whereby volunteers earned a free day at the theme park by donating a day of work to a nonprofit, including Prisbrey’s DIYsneyland. A group from the Anthropologie store took a tour as part of its “Inspiration Day” for drumming up design ideas. By 2016, the Bottle Village had still not received enough funding for a major restoration, and Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens stepped in to help with preservation efforts—sixty years after Grandma Prisbrey started building. By 2020 masons and mosaicists had repaired the remaining 14 structures, just in time for the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that hit, like the weaker 6.7 magnitude quake in 1994, only eight miles form Bottle Village. Rebuilding is still underway, but five of the buildings are large piles of glass shards and masonry that the engineering assessment deemed “beyond repair.”

To Isaiah Zagar, the five destroyed structures are mosaic shards for a new composition. His team plans to pulverize Prisbrey’s old hand-mixed mortar to use as the grit for biobricks. The broken glass from bottles dating back to the 50s and 60s**** will be used to mosaic the bricks’ outer sides, and a new building will be constructed out of the resulting modules. They are learning to cultivate their own B. pasteurii colonies to make the restoration project more independent of money; the other main ingredients are our everyday urine stream and worthless cement chunks like highways after earthquakes. Zagar talks about how things like mosaics, mushrooms, and  B. pasteurii spread as spores with roots in particular cultural landscapes, something that's "in the air, they spread in the air ... For the mural projects in Mexico, the roots are all in the Renaissance. Diego Rivera – he loved to see the murals and mosaics in the churches. He dug it. ‘I can do this thing, I can do it. I can give it a twist,’ and then others followed him." The roots of preservation and reconstruction are more ecological, with the model of a landscape that never stops making itself out of its own life forms. The roots are also biotechnical, and artists and self-taught biologists are saying "I can do this thing" and giving their own twist on scientific bioengineering.

If you have any B. pasteurii or know how to culture them, please get in touch so we can repair Ephemerata Garden’s back grotto. The Cathedra of Junk could also put the biocement technique to work in its constantly growing amoeba of mortar, bottles, and junk.

2024

*Mike Larson, "Professor Uses Bacteria to Make Eco-friendly Bricks,"  Engineering News-Record online, July 7, 2010, http://enr.construction.com/products/materials/2010/0707-EcoFriendlyBricks.asp 

**FEMA eventually dedicates close to 20K for an architectural engineering assessment for rebuilding and preservation. 

 *** Quoted in Patricia Leigh Brown, “Reading the Message in the Bottles, New York Times, February 6, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/06/garden/reading-the-message-in-the-bottles.html
****See wonderful letter to Grandma about bottles at http://www.myspace.com/bottlevillage/blog: "Nowadays, most of the bottles are plastic and they are EVERYWHERE! ... We have these big gray 'Recycle Cans' and I know you'd get arrested for messing around with those cans... Well Grandma, all that stuff and all those bottles you got from the dump; it's hard to find today, except maybe on eBay."