(Originally published for the Anthropocene Curriculum.)
Adam Crosson: Right. What’s our exercise to do this?
Monica Haller: I don’t know. I guess for myself, I’m just trying to think back to November when we were together during these two days, running this thing. What is it that we would like to regroup about?
Adam: I think that helps, thinking about what would we like to regroup about?
Monique Verdin: I have a prompt—what site was most memorable for you? In our two-day journey, what was the place that stood out?
Monica: How would you answer it, Monique?
Monique: I was surprised that doing the listening exercise at Congo Square, that “tuning in,” and then standing in that circle and thinking of the significance of that place and the complexity… and [activist and researcher] Shana M. griffin speaking up and helping to expand upon it—there was this sense of “we all have different backgrounds but we’re all learning together.” That was an important site for me.
Monica: Yeah, the way Shana talked about it on multiple levels, from how when the sole of her foot touched the ground versus her shoe and what that felt like, and how that then brought her into talking about her own relationship to the history there, talking about multiple generations and her family.
Monique: The specificity of that really matters.
Adam: The time that we spent at Congo Square, for the hour or so that we were there, it did seem that there were multiple voices holding that space and that experience in a way that I think that we had discussed beforehand; not only the structure of introducing who these “experts” were going to be but the emergence of more voices, in terms of improvising. Matt Sakaeeny’s voice and his expertise [as a researcher on music, race, and power] as well as Shana’s. But it seemed to be that space, more so than others, where these individual voices really became a group.
Monique: Something that stood out for me in a different kind of way than I have experienced before relates to disaster tourism and the aftermath of Katrina: I think that us moving through the space in these huge buses was really offensive. And I totally supported all the fisherman who flipped us off. There was this moment where I was just like, oh my god, is this environmental disaster tourism? What do the frontlines of the Anthropocene look like? And recognizing that this is an important place for us to learn from. That’s thinking about the other seminars too, the idea of “oh, where just going to cruise through Cancer Alley!” You know, what is that?
Monica: Let’s talk about that for a little a bit. I think on the front end, I felt that I wanted to do this for really specific reasons: I wanted to work with you two, I thought that this could potentially be generative, it felt really important to do the work, to be thoughtful about how to do that, and if people from my own community were going to be involved, to be thoughtful about how that would look. I also felt anxiety around doing this for all the reasons you just mentioned, Monique. And then there were these varying degrees of like “Oh shit, and now we’re going to have tour buses after all,” things that I think we tried to break up. But then it happened, and we haven’t really had a chance to talk about exactly what you bringing up Monique. Do you two want to talk about that a little, what felt good, what didn’t? I don’t know what this means going forward but I think it’s worth talking about, because these kinds of activities will keep happening and what do I want my own relationship to be to it?
Adam: When you were just talking about that, I was thinking about the nature of this enterprise over the past couple of years as being situated in these various places up and down the river and as much as the impetus was to read this river as a kind of unified body, the way that these exposure points and places reveal themselves is, I think, quite different, How we experience the Campus being located in New Orleans, I would argue, is much different to how St. Louis experienced it, or other locations upriver. So what does it mean to understand and express the specifics of place in terms of creating these points of exposure for multiple audiences participating, along with the citizens that live there?
Monique: There’s so many missed connections between up and down river—the further south you go, the more disconnection there seems to be, right? I may be speaking without real understanding but it feels like that. I think that all of these places are vulnerable though. Caught between the vulnerable and desirable. The riverbank is really an uncertain territory.
Monica: The disconnection comes out in different ways and of course you can’t generalize. Several years ago I did this series of conversations by water, Skyping with people on the river in the Twin Cities on a boat and people in Louisiana down in New Orleans in a boat and we would just have a conversation. People in Louisiana were like “Okay, what are you levees like? How does it work for you?” And the others were like “Levees? What do you mean?” There was a lack of awareness of what some of the infrastructure was around the river. Because of course there are no levees in the Twin Cities in the way there are in Louisiana but there’s a ton of infrastructure around the river. So again, I don’t want to generalize but there’s a really interesting lack of awareness. It’s to do with the specifics of the place and why people are connected or disconnected; there’s different reasons for that, which are interesting. That relates to what you saying, Monique, that all these places are vulnerable in some way or another, but getting into those specifics of vulnerability can tell us a lot.
Adam: I can’t help to think, as we were talking about these distinctions between relationships with the river, that it is absolutely connected to the historic uses of the river and the evolution of use of the river and the divisions of the south and the north. I think about the river here in New Orleans, and the structuring of it coming out of the plantation economy and the levees here being constructed and built by enslaved black laborers. And how that has both been obscured but also laid the foundation for the current scale of industry that is situated along the river in the south. I think about the scale at which those industries and those enterprises both historically and contemporaneously affect the relationship that people in the south have with the river. I haven’t spent much time along the river in Minneapolis or further north to have a sense of the infrastructural language that exists there, but I think there are these separations and divisions of historic use, which have obviously created contemporary—and vulnerabilities. These levees aren’t being maintained in the way they were created, and now we have these situations where there are so many unknowns about their structural integrity.
Monique: I have to think about how the words, “enterprise” and “infrastructure” and how these intersect with “imagination”—what humankind has made possible for commercial gain and how that ends up influencing culture in these unimaginable ways that makes this place [New Orleans] so rich. So rich and so exhausted and depleted and pillaged, in regard to just not respecting the natural intelligence of this place. I think that what our fellow journey folks really appreciated was the ability to travel through the space and I feel like we really were able to allow them to use all of their senses and to be reminded of the seen and the unseen. I don’t know where we go from now. I’m just feeling very exhausted and unsure what the best next steps are or what’s worth investing time and energy and interest in. In us debrief what was really interesting was to see so many people wanting to have a site where folks could come to learn and be and share and experiment with something “other,” as a solution and a learning laboratory. That was really beautiful to see.
Monica: This was in your debrief, Monique, afterwards?
Monique: That was during an exercise when everybody had to draw their piece of the river. People got really into it; I was sad that we had to cut it short. But I felt that that was kind of beautiful.
The seminar's debrief drawing exercise. Field Note by John Kim
Monica: That experience makes me bring it back to two of your questions. One is: in the face or the spirit of exhaustion, what would be the next best step and what would be worth spending time on? And also, back to the point integrity there—I’m kind of with the people who flipped off the big bus too—what would we want to be different? Some of it is practical, for me, small groups for example. But is that just too simplified? What do you two think?
Adam: Well, the points Monique was bringing up points about the language around the enterprise and infrastructure— I’m really curious about that. But in terms of an idea situation, back about when the Campus was taking place in November, the river was at a low point, it was at its respite. There is a dissonance between an experience of the river at its lowest point of intensity and the experience of the river when it’s at flood stage. There’s a kind of greater awareness of certain vulnerabilities that occur like right now, as we’re recording [February 2019], when the river is extremely high, very early. Ideally, if we’re talking about the Mississippi River as an Anthropocene River, there needs to a full experience and expression of that I think having multiple experiences with the river, understanding its fluctuations and how it impacts our day-to-day lives and how we live on and with the river, and how this affects us and our anxieties about it—I feel like that could be the flipside of the coin that’s missing.
Monique: Humankind’s imagination has created this infrastructure that has allowed us to believe in these artificial realities—the norm of “staying dry.” I think we’re at a time where we’re still wanting to hold onto that. Being at the bottom of the river, we know that so much that happens north of the mouth is affecting the health of the oceans. The concentration of the outfalls that happen here is contrasted with this being a place of entry, and all of the commerce that’s flowing through, all the time, from all over the world. Historically you have these waves of immigration and also these waves of commodities—whether it be bananas being brought up from Honduras, or medicine being developed through Tulane—so they can keep the plantation workers alive. So there is that culture of commodification of whatever resources are being traded and in our modern times we have this petrochemical bonanza. We can talk about what that does for people and how they can be conditioned to think that plantation society is ok or having petrochemical industry across the street from my house is okay because, y’know, that’s why I’ve got a job. Then we can talk about how that plays out in the justification of our politics locally and also nationally as well, as well as what that means for international markets, with this trade happening on the banks. The exhaustion part comes from the fact that this little microcosm of the world that is the Mississippi Delta has so many global connections and reflections.
Monica: It does. Which is why in the debrief the context is important because it does have so many connections and is a microcosm of so many things. That’s why I feel like when we’re asking people to orient towards their senses and to attune to both the seen and the unseen, when you do that, and focus on the details or what the seen and the unseen are in one location, such as in Congo Square, then that one site pulls forward the seen and the unseen and layers of the past and the present and towards the future. But it’s also a microcosm and references so many other places and things globally. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why, for me, at least, a site where people can be, and learn and share, and also come back becomes important. You need to ground this in something very specific, because that gives justice to an individual’s experience and to very diverse levels of experience for different people. It gives justice to a place and in some ways it’s the only way to get at that microcosm of a much bigger system. Otherwise it just stays an abstraction.
Monique: I also think that challenges such the ferry not operating one day during the seminar and us having to be flexible—that very much felt like, ok, we are living in the outfall of the Anthropocene. Whatever that might really mean, with “Anthropocene” having a very broad definition of course, but it relates to just to being able to survive here when we’re so dependent upon there being energy that’s pumping water from the Mississippi River into like a series of tanks with a bunch of chemicals that are probably produced by a bunch petrochemical processes. Or energizing materials to be used so we can have clean water that can be pumped into our homes using energy. Or just pumping the water out of the city to keep us dry. These times that we live in and just how we’ve become so accustomed to being dependent upon extraction and energy and different forms of these dark processes—our comfort allows complicity. And so I think again about how we were cruisin’ around in our big bus.
Monica: The fact that the seminar was disrupted by the ferry not running, as Monique was saying, that all is the content of what we’re talking about. That’s really an important point. It’s something I feel I’ve been better at keeping in mind in own work: that is the content—anything that seems like a disruption is actually what you have to work with, in a way.
Adam: Information.
Monica: It’s generative, it’s information, it’s part of it. It’s never taking you away from the thing, it is the thing. But in terms of organizing something with big institutions, I think I still have to work at finding ways to make of room for when something like that happens—because that is content to focus on just as much as anything.
Adam: It really reminds me of what Monique said before, about believing in artificial realities, such as “being dry”, and how that breeds artificial securities. So how do we adapt and respond when the holes in that Potemkin façade are broken,? Now just when we can see them but when we’re experiencing them?
Monica: Exactly, that’s well put.
Monique: I think the contradiction in these times of the so-called Anthropocene is that the solutions are often rooted in the problem. A classic example being that the restoration of the coast of South Louisiana, which is rapidly disappearing at one of the fastest rates on the planet, is essentially going to brought to us by all of these BP Deepwater disaster clean water act fines and so much of restoration will be dependent on royalties coming from Deepwater oil and gas heading into the future here. I think in our exhaustion we need to get out of that cycle of “oh, this thing that’s killing us is maybe possibly going to help save us.” When you feel like you have nothing else, I get that fear. Your fear can allow you to fall for ultimately false promises or short term solutions.
Monica: So it’s about how to generate and use both reality and imagination to generate something else. Well, the “something else” that’s already there perhaps, just not as dominant.
Adam: Just thinking about solutions rooted in and emerging from the problems, that seems to be a dangerous and entropic cycle that will eventually come to an end.
Monique: Hopefully!
Adam: [laughs] No, I mean like one way or another, the end will come! That’s like the definition of entropy—repeating the same thing, compounding the nature of it, and then hoping for different results. That’s just a downward spiral. I think about that in relation to dominant languages of where to place the blame about issues that we’re confronting, such as the flooding that’s happening right now, the flooding in Jackson, the flooding upriver, the record soil saturation rates—and that’s before the snow’s even melted. This greater language of blame being placed on the environment or rainfall or whatever, and not this acknowledgment of… I mean this is all basic stuff but it’s also not the dominant language that exists. Where is there room for that? Is there room for that to shift? How does a convening of a River Campus begin to distil pertinent language that can then have a larger, greater, more extensive impact?
Monica: I’m thinking that when we have this transcription, some of these questions might be really good starting points! For example, this question of how does convening in a Campus begin to have a language? One of the things that I really noticed or felt, both in terms of where we took people and what we asked them to do and attune to, and in the little pamphlet that we made, was the fact that, for me, a constant for was time. And this is a lot less rooted in certain practicalities maybe but time as in past, and present, and future. Just yesterday I was listening to this podcast by Ruby Sales, who is a public theologian and civil rights activist, and she talks about the ideas of hindsight, insight and foresight—having all those visions is important. So in Congo Square, for example, we were asking people to be there right now, we were asking them to feel into that, to listen into that, to think about what came before and is still very present today —the history of that place, the presence of that place. I think about when we were on the bus and driving down through St. Bernard Parish and Monique was pointing out so many things and talking about its present and its history. I think too about the skeletons of the live oak trees in the area, one in particular that’s nearly 600 years old, that’s been around since the 1500s at least. And so many examples like that in the city. And then in the pamphlet, every page is thinking about time—from the cover where we quoted Yaa Gyansi, who said what he wanted to capture with his project “the feeling of time, of having been part of something that stretched so far back, that was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it – not apart from it, but inside it.” I played this out in New Orleans and you can focus on so many specific places or specific histories and what they mean today, and it just highlights how, again, it’s this microcosm of a lot of things in the country and a lot of things globally—it calls out other systems. We’d need more time to really get into that, but it’s so productive to think about. Maybe “time” isn’t even the right singular word here, but it has a lot continuity among all the things we’ve been talking about and asking people to do.
Adam: In referencing the quote of something being so large, I think about this either lack of awareness or emergent understanding of being inside of something. I think about evaluating my own internal systems and the conditioning that I’ve had and what I bring to this and how every time I interact with you two or a situation like this, I go away being critically aware of what I bring and my own conditioning. I go away aware of what I need to do to recondition myself in order to have a stronger understanding to approach things from a more informed and broader perspective beyond just my own internal system. So the importance of this kind of space is also about providing these individual checkpoints of self-criticality and forcing myself to be honest with myself about what it is that I bring and my own perspectives.
Monique: Yeah, I feel like as we’re… I don’t know if it’s that we’re decolonizing ourselves or deprogramming ourselves or recognizing how we have our individual roles but there’s also that comes from thinking about the Delta has being like this organism. When you look at this land from above, it’s always super fascinating to me, just how it feels vascular—there is this network, the imagination of nature to create this place. And then I think: what is our long-term collaboration with this place?
Adam: That might be a really good question to leave with.
Monique: Whatever this turns out to be I do like the idea that we have a series of questions and reflections. That we didn’t have an answer or really a destination but that we brought people along on this journey in the hopes that it would continue to resonate—I think that my hope was that we continued to create space to be honest with each other and analyze the data and recognize the life in it, those souls that are deeply connected to surviving the Anthropocene in challenged places—which is everywhere. Some more than others!
