Spring has sprung and, locally, the human capacity to create even more noise than usual is in full swing.
Lately, I have recorded on my phone a plague of noises generated by people and their loud, intrusive tools, be it an iPod and speakers aboard a stand-up-paddleboard floating down the Wye, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, and mulchers sounding their destructiveness and scaring all the birds from the trees and fish from their shaded retreats under the riverbanks, or even the abominable racket made at the local recycling yard next door to a so-called off-set ecological site at the new Skylon Park, Rotherwas Industrial Estate, Hereford (see below).
I know other humans have found it a profound nuisance, more, wholly detrimental to their overall wellbeing.
Whether these noises are short, sharp and ugly, or long drawn-out oppressions, like traffic noise in cities, they will be creating acute or chronic pain and distress in proximate interconnected communities, human and teresapien.
Modes of transport are some of the worst culprits, air, land, and sea. But music can be intrusive too, played loudly or inappropriately in nature, as well as the more obvious terrestrial building and landscaping noises that are created at every moment, in daylight at least. Industrial farmers and foresters are by no means innocent bystanders!
And the internal combustion engine at sea and on navigable rivers has wreaked havoc in the form of “noise pollution” on aquatic wildlife.
We know humans and some animals may attempt to adapt. Think of the louder birdsong recorded in urban areas, or cetaceans and their prey moving away from shipping lanes or active military zones due to the impact on their sonar senses, but at what ecological cost? Mass strandings are real and incredibly harmful.
The pain is both individual and collective. At global scale, it is nothing short of an evolutionary force, and not for the good. It’s time to count Anthrophonalgia as a key manifestation of the ongoing Sixth Extinction Event, the worst of which will be an awful silence, for sure.
~~~
Anthropophony – noise emanating from humans and their tools (Drs. Stuart Gage and Bernie Krause) often shortened to Anthrophony.
Algia – general medical suffix for pain.
~~~
This particular pain and distress is not limited to the physical, but also the emotional, mental, and spiritual. We know that such distress can lead to the lowering of immunity, and other perturbations such as anger and rage that can lead to violence instigated upon others.
We talk so frequently about noise pollution, but very little is done about it. Perhaps naming the pain and distress it causes might just help in the resistance against it.
Anthrophonalgia – pain and distress caused by human noise, including vibrations, either naturally or by the tools humans use.
I’ve suffered myself, as have countless humans and nearly all interconnected species within our one biosphere. Let it end, for goodness sake, now.
Breaking the atmosphere: This is literally what rockets are designed to do. To break free from Earth’s immediate gravity, to escape from our atmosphere and into the beyond whilst stealing supplies, all without Earthly consent.
The ultimate dying consumer is one that devours the systems it relies upon. These men (the gatekeepers are white men), are raping the atmosphere, creating a hellsphere most religions could never have imagined.
Over the next few months, I’ll be doing a series of moments on the Wye; an in situ telling and collection of personal experiences that helped shape my creation of Fluminism as a symbioethic.
One: Eaton Camp, Wye.
Trigger Warning: Contains distressing descriptions of the memories of suicide ideation and behaviour. If you are feeling vulnerable in anyway, please, don’t listen. Seek urgent help. Help is available. If the first help isn’t positive, try and try again until you find the RIGHT help for you. You are unique. The right help IS there.
Convergence of root to trunk, Cage Brook, Herefordshire. Photo by me.
Flumilightenment: A resistance to birfurcated thought, and a rejection of the word “environmentalism”.
For too long, environment has been treated as something external to us. We are drip-fed news about the non-descript environment as if it were:
External to us – somewhere “out there”.
A choice, option, preference, or hobby.
Something that others make a fuss about because they don’t have to worry about daily traumas such as racism, all other kinds of prejudices, conflicts, ill-health, paying the rent.
This is a blind alley, and perpetuated through words, phrases, and headlines every day. We live with language and meaning as something that shapes how we live. We shape all because of it.
Our young are being cultivated, too, in this now damaging misnomer ~ the “environment”.
I am suggesting nothing short of a new Enlightenment.
~~~
The physical reality is that ALL IS FLOW, AND ALL LIFE FORMS (EVEN IN DEATH) ARE INTEGRAL to all. Nothing is truly separate in the realm of reality.
What has been separated is our mental and emotional state of being. And continuing to use separating language perpetuates planetary catastrophe.
We must now DROP the term “environmentalism” for the sake of saving life itself.
What we *think* we are putting into the *environment* is actually going into living beings and ourselves in our one shared biosphere.
As symlings, we are infinitely connected at every point within our porous bodies, and the bodies of all symlings, and our porous bionts (our microbiome, including bacteria and their viruses), with all other dazzling matter AND their wave effects within our biosphere and beyond.
Every moment, we are penetrated by atoms and electromagnetic waves, chemicals and biologies of so-called others. And we do the same to and with them. We are flow.
It’s like a kind of giant melding, a sexstorm, a kinmaking, the ultimate anti-racism, anti-speciesism, anti-anthropocentrism, a oneness in flow.
Sometimes, our imaginations are able to envision, though the crisis of imagination right now is profound. Sometimes, we may even think we feel it (I call this symnexia). I want us to be able to protect it all (I call this praximund – processearth).
Life-changing, Earth-saving stuff.
~~~
This is not an Indra’s net I speak of, nor even an entanglement (suggests that we are still separated, at least by a single barrier), but an incredible, complex, porous flow, from the cosmos down to quantum level, in constant exchange in what I call the nagorasphere, which I write about in more detail in Humans and Nature’s Kinship Anthology series published in September later this year.
Within the chaos of the formation of this universe, at least, come patterns and exchanges (Bookchin) that exist through our every cell, breath, heat, and every cell is a symbiosis of other beings (Margulis).
~~~
It IS our absolute existence, even without sensing it with biological organs (we glimpse so much more via the tools we have created). But now our minds and emotions MUST follow, and the way we express all through our utterances and the way we live our lives, each and every day. Please, don’t use the word environment without, at least, considering fully what I am saying.
A FULL KNOWING of fluminism and being it every moment in complete union is a new enlightment; the physical reality, but also the mental and emotional consciousness of this reality. A Flumilightenment: The Great Mental and Emotional convergence.
I hope this makes you feel alert and empowered. You need to be.
Last summer, I am swimming in the cool Arrow just west of ye olde Penebrugge, keeping my nose above the silk-smooth, trying to find a rhythm against the strong flow. The sun is strong, and all winter’s ghosts abandon me for the ocean.
Under me swim a million Atlantic salmon lost to hunting and distress. Above me are the spectres of a thousand white men culpable for the loss. I’m not grieving for the men today.
I get out of the water, and warm blood returns to my cold skin, flush-blush, and I breathe deep the oxygen offered free by the immigrant balsams that shoot from anthroturbed, hot, shade-less, phosphated banks.
Man ~ anthro ~ disturbs ~ turb, from Latin “to stir up”. Anthroturbs.
You ghosts! I ache for you to come back to me, animated and full of the essence of life, like the blood returns to my epidermis, as real and vivid as you ever were.
I look up to a mewing raptor circling under a bright cloud in a deep blue sky ~ a fantail. Buzzard in all her glory, kindred buzzard; your lungs take in my air and mine yours. What are you saying to me? I think I might know. Your polarising eyes bear witness to my dullness under all the silver drops of water and soaked, sun-bleached hair. You’d rather talk to the others who might come to you, and avoid my predatorial shadows. I understand this. I am whiteness, and with all the river washing, I cannot get rid of that.
But you are utterly safe today in the brightness, as I neither possess the inclination to kill you nor a gun. My love for you is about as iron-strong as things are. Do you know it? Others are harming with poisons, and game rearing, and poultry sheds, and I do fear they will turn you into a ghost if you don’t stay away from people who look like me.
Can we ever stay away? “Stay away” is really an impossibility of matter in our dimming biosphere, because we are altogether in flows, bound into processes, like it or not, even in death. You are inside me, and me you. I’ll just sit here and warm for a while, and smell the undergrowth, and keep my eyes open for any other symling to greet who flows into my senses. The river will do its thing, taking my skin cells and some of my microbiome with it.
~~~
This early Spring, dressed hard for cold weather, in boots and jeans and overcoats, there is a human path I follow worn down under cracked willows, where the tree creepers hop from bottom to top. It’s a place forced under pressure between the sewage works ~ subcontracted to a profiteer by the not-for-profit water company ~ and the banks of the Wye just South of Bartonsham Dairy. Raging floods dig down deeper into the buried shingle of ten thousand years, like salt in a wound.
I’m going to check the sewer outfall for a point-source phosphate pollution event.
The path here is the beginning of a chasm, and there’s a terrible and awkward dance to walk it. I call it the Bone Path, where salix roots finger across it like skeletal hands. Fishermen come here with their maggots, their carbon rods and alum hooks. I sometimes find the nylon bits in tweavelets, and they do anger me on behalf of all the animals.
I find the outfall and it is spewing white foam that reeks of soap. White foam of phosphates, the wastes of capitalism down the supermarket aisle where you and I buy our plastic bottles full of washing liquids and chemical softeners. I take pictures, imagining the entire journey to get these eutrophiers here.
There are three fishermen waste-deep in the channel across from the spewing, and I am not sympathetic. But then I change my mind, worried. So I shout across through twigs and willow tits, and suggest they take care with all the phosphates coming straight at them.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” one man shouts back in a heavy accent above the din, and continues to throw his line.
I repeat my concern and he waves me away like a bothering mayfly. They laugh at me. I reach for home, passing more flood erosion, where the river in its fury took more lives from the soils and dumped them somewhere downstream and unappreciated. Ghosts.
I am thinking about the freshwater, which is hardly water at all, so full it is of symbiotic life. Here is where all is easily indivisible like me swimming below buzzard kin and breathing balsam air. We are to them, and to everything in the air, and everything that has been stolen. All matter leads to the ocean, oceans to oceans. We are all ghosts, and that is my exquisite grief.
I have just sent my pictures to the non-profit. We’ll see how it goes.
Candlemas bells, Galanthus, you still sound just north of the Levant, drifting across the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. You came to me via the piety of Benedictines serving the faith in rejection of most else—they brought you from Renaissance Subiaco on foot or on horseback, in canvas bags tucked inside leather satchels— and they poured you out into the sunlight, then buried you in chimes a stone’s throw from their dark nocturns and early morning prayers. They did love their gardens, the monastics, as they loved God. They must have loved you.
The candles that were lit in these cold, stone buildings each February, where congregations gathered to beeswaxed pews from all corners of the shire to pray, now spill into the graveyards in the form I find you today on the Goggin, all the way from the Abbot’s fields of Lazio. Now you are the candles and the incense burnings along the lane, up on the mown verge. You ring far beyond the Church of England walls, and we are glad, pushing up the hill into the coppice. You are the flowing immigrant to enshrine the earliest of Spring, the short days of hibernation breaking into longer spells.
The light and the change-ringing is coming back, in you.
Your little bell-bulbs are set strong in the hedges and woodlands, and even your seed will sprout if the Queen Bumblebees are early. We love this kind of campanology, and the shadows you cast on crushed, rusted bracken, when the early sun rises low to the East, and your heads bow low to the breeze that swings in from the Baltic and then from the Irish sea. The glistening cells of your petals are clean vellum in that light. You are a bright manuscript awaiting attention; the illuminations of that life, the gold leaves at sunset.
Thank you for it all, dear snowdrops of the Galunaissance. Your familiar sound is a salve for me. If you didn’t ring, what terrible sign that’d be. My genes chime deep in the Brythonic, pre-Roman. But Celts too hailed from elsewhere, from the South. You are an Islander bell, just like me, and all incomers, aged and new. We all wash over these lands in the change-ringing. In the time we are here, best to care for it all.
Note: There is no certain origin, as yet, for the introduction of snowdrops into great Britain. I am making a calculated guess, is all.
We know the forces for good in walking as part of nature. And I do it myself. So I have been considering a word for it.
Walking doesn’t have to involve legs, let me just say. It might mean all kinds of devices as extensions of our bodies ~ enabling. Moving through time/space at walking pace.
Med ~ PIE root for “take appropriate measures”. Also root for meditation.
Ambulare ~ latin for “walking”.
Medambulare ~ walking as welldoing for wellbeing. Also, the closer within nature’s flows we are, the growing fluministic love we have for all life, the more we will defend and protect. Soul food.
Foxing along the riverbank, you two orange drops stop still at the scar that leads to the water. Lowering your heads, take a deep draw of matter through your nostrils; this cleaved soil is where all the scents of the hill fall from its westerly face before hitting the water. The cold hangs low just here, sunk into the light on the edge, trapped between cracked willows. Much of it smells of duck.
Everywhere you turn, my eyes look to what you are interested in. I want to protect those things, for them and for you. We are all running with them, in flows.
The moorhens are struggling to hide from you: one is quiet beneath the fallen willow. There are the tiny beings we both cannot see, even with your amber cat-like eyes, drifting without and within. You can smell them, they are now in your blood; raise your noses in nods to the big, open sky.
But you aren’t bothered about the moorhens, are you. You might be if they were injured, or old. There will be young here in a few weeks time. This scar gathers new blood way below the brick and glass houses sitting on the ridge with their oil tar road; a bleak spine on the way to Mordiford.
Meanwhile, where the warm January rains scour into this red sandstone point source, you continue to cross it with little leaps on your padded paws every day. Weave your scent ribbons together in the air, nose all the mallards out from reeds into a wide, silver Wye-flow. It is a meeting place, of hunter and hunted, and all the lives that support the moment.
Further on, near the railway bridge, you meet a concrete edifice, where that human spine has twisted down to the water’s edge and the strip gardens have evaporated. The river is supposed to be protected from mortgages and building contracts. Yet they are poured and bolted here to blunt your linearity. Who gave them consent? You never did. Nor the willows, nor the mallards, nor the moorhens.
Out-foxed, you are forced back along the riverbank from where you came, and all the food has vanished. And that is your daily trouble. Where to go next? You are both quite thin.
My whole house now smells of fox. Your den, of hunger.
She’s there. I can hear the familiar peep of Blackbird, even under low light. I can just make out the colour brown and not black, and a dullish beak, so she is female.
Small by comparison to others perched in this same gnarly hawthorn, she spies all the berries as she flicks her tail feathers and hops from twig to twig. Mine is the quietest of observations I think is possible. Hers is an instinctive judgment of self within the whole floloca, and an internal vision of the safe movements required to get from where she is now to the red haw ‘pomes,’ to put one in her beak and then inside her belly. I call this patientism. Then, to fly in a straight line home. I love everything about this little bird. There is a glint in her eye.
Her presence is the result of the devotion of several birds before her. The crowd have scoured for bounty, found it, and tested it for ripeness. They have spread the news: they made signs. And now she knows to be here, that bright UV light, a fourth primary colour we simply cannot see, on waxy fruits that are good this Winter. The waxy shine on the berries helps. If you rub it off, birds don’t find them so well. Unlike some red berries, pomes, or drupes, these ones are safe to eat. They will help her to store energy in every cell of her body until early Spring, when she will thrive on worms and emerging insects, and lay her eggs.
I try to match her devotion, in that I stand perfectly still, staying present with her quickness and intelligence. I try really hard not to distract, not even to raise my phone lens this time. This food is too important.
I gaze at the jungle of twigs and am in awe of the birdish ability to fly through them with ease. Birds see unlike us ~ and this UV sight helps them to navigate complexity without injury. I wonder how UV reflects off of me.
Blackbird suddenly dives for the berries, plucks two from their skinny stems with her beak, and launches away with a familiar “tweet de tweet twit twit” melting into a darkening night. She leaves her droppings of earlier morsels (and seed) on the twigs below for lichens to grow. A small feather that grew soft on her breast this summer drifts to the ground to be foraged as nesting material by a long-tailed tit early tomorrow as the sun rises.
I am not afraid to tell you, I care for her, and all these lives, as I care for this place–a happy place–down on the banks of the River Wye in Winter. I care for the microbiota and the symbiotic relationships that sustain all the lives that exist right now, though the majority I cannot see nor hear. This love means more than one might think. It’s not a totally selfish act, but specific for this place linked in flows to all places, and little to do with my brain’s reward centres—though there is that. It’s just I understand that this flow is part of larger flows, that are part of the flows of life that distinguish planet Earth from all else yet known. I wish people would stop talking about entanglements. It’s still so separating–dividing–as if we are simply a knot to be undone. I was once a paraglider and learned to untangle entangled lines very quickly. After a while, it’s too easy. Death is something else.
The things that creep in and out of the water, the things that never enter the water, the things that never climb trees, share everything through drifts in the nagorasphere. It is felt by evoking the imagination. This is a process too. Being a fluministis a process. Are there any objects, ever? All is process through time and space. I have come home to write about this encounter in all hope that others may wish to protect the interests of these beings as a community in a constant flow, and to remember that this flow between all lives is a true beauty to celebrate and protect. I hold this place, and this tree, this bird, these berries, and the lichen that will grow–these processes–carefully. I share with hope for a unified love of the exquisite nature of natural moments, everything joined at the hip, undivided, and for the continued liberty of life and the living. It is, in a way, a small act of resistance.
Audio:
Now for version two (second person, as suggested by my Director of Studies, PhD)
Are you there, with your familiar peep of Blackbird under low light? I can just make out your browns and a dullish beak, my avian kin.
Small by comparison to others perched in this same gnarly hawthorn, you spy all the berries, flick your tail feathers, and hop from twig to twig. Mine is the quietest of observations; yours is the instinctive judgment of self within the whole floloca; an internal vision of the safe movements required to get from where you are now to the red haw ‘pomes,’ to put one in your beak and inside your belly. You are a patientist. Then, to fly in a straight line to your January nest in the scrub thicket below the dairy at the end of my road. Everything about you is loved by me, little bird. There’s a glint in your eye.
Your presence is the result of a flight of magnificence, from misty Baltic birch slopes to this moment by the Wye slick and threatening the city with flood. The crowd who came before—some resident, others transient—have scoured for bounty and found it. They have tested it for ripeness. They have spread the news: they made signs. And now you also know to be here, pulled by that bright UV light, a fourth primary colour we human sisters simply cannot see on waxy fruits that are good this Winter. The shine helps. If it should rub off, you won’t find them so well. Unlike some fruits, these ones are safe to eat. They will help you store energy in every cell of your body until early Spring, when you will thrive on worms and emerging insects, and lay eggs.
Ah, sister, to match your devotion! Standing perfectly still, staying present with your quickness and intelligence, my distractions would be unwanted, not even to raise a phone lens. Your food is too important.
Your birdish ability to fly through a jungle of twigs with ease is for all to see, and fewer to notice. You see unlike me ~ and this UV sight helps you navigate complexity without injury. How would the expanse of North Sea shine as you fly high over rough waves and whale backs, concrete ports and all those chimneys, to where my human sisters there, the foresters, speak Latvian?
How does UV reflect off of me?
You suddenly dive for the berries—no sparrowhawk about—pluck two from skinny stems with your beak, and launch away with a familiar “tweet de tweet twit twit” melting into a darkening night. You leave droppings of earlier morsels (and seed) on the twigs below for lichens to grow. A small feather that grew soft on your breast this summer drifts to the ground to be foraged as nesting material by sibling-long-tailed tit early tomorrow as the sun rises.
I am not afraid to tell you, I love you, and all these lives, as I care for this place–a happy place–down on the banks of the River Wye in Winter. I love the microbiota and the symbiotic relationships that sustain all the lives that exist right now, though the majority I can neither see nor hear.
Fluministic love means more than they think. It’s not a uniquely selfish act, but specific for this place linked in flows to all places, and little to do with the brain’s reward centres—though there is that. My life is an expression of your way in the flow, you as part of larger flows, that are part of the flows of life that distinguish planet Earth from all else yet known.
To my human kin, less talking about entanglements, please, still so separating–dividing–as if we are simply a knot to be undone. My paragliding days were filled with untangling tangled lines very quickly. Things that are entangled tend to start separate and end separate, and after a while, it’s too easy. Flow runs into itself and all matter, even in death. This is the truth continuum.
Blackbird, the things that creep in and out of the water beside us, the things that never enter the water, the things that never climb trees, share everything through drifts in the nagorasphere, as you do. It is felt by evoking the imagination—you have it, like the herons and the little egrets. This is a process too. Being a fluminist is a process. Are there any objects, ever? All is process through time and space.
Now to write about you, in all hope that others may wish to protect your interests in this constant dynamism, and to remember that flow exists between all lives, the true beauty of life to celebrate and protect. This place is held close, and this tree, you, these berries, and the lichen that will grow–these processes–and care-fully. We share hope, in our kindship, for a unified love of the exquisite nature of natural moments, everything joined at the hip, undivided, and for the continued liberty of life and the living. It is, in a way, our small act of resistance.
You must be logged in to post a comment.