Each year, I join the Earth Celebrations; I’ve done so for years now.
A different story takes shape with each passing year.
I guess this is part of the cycle Emily understood:
“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –
The Steeples swam in Amethyst –
The news, like Squirrels, ran –
The Hills untied their Bonnets –
Then I said softly to myself –
‘That must have been the Sun!’”
I guess it must have been.
In the late 1990’s when I first joined the pageant, we were fighting to save the community gardens and green spaces of the Lower East side.
The year since the last procession, we went to Glasgow for the Climate Conference. With tens of thousands in the streets demanding swift action, delegates dragged their feet, kicking hard decisions down the road when urgency was what was needed. COP26 left more questions unanswered than solved and long term solutions deferred.
Riding over to the Eco Procession for Climate Solutions, the teenager and I look at the water below, pedaling hard, making our way up to the apex of the Manhattan Bridge.
For a second, our muscles ache, ebikes zipping to and from.
“I know that no matter what challenges I feel inside, I feel better when I ride over this bridge,” they tell me. “No matter what physical, or mental, or covid or isolation I feel, I feel better when I cross this bridge.”
The bridge between Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn opens countless stories.
I always think of Whitman, “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry.”
“The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east…”
Perhaps we are those others Whitman imagined crossing “from shore to shore.”
Riding, we look Northwest, to the East River Park, where the city is killing trees in the name of resiliency, even as voters called for the city to plant more trees as a budget priority.
East Village residents remain in shock about the destruction of the 700 trees in East River Park, soon to be a thousand.
“Those trees were planted during the Works Project Administration that actually saved our economy,” says the teenager. Now they are being bulldozed to make way for a designer dream of a neoliberal city.
Still we ride.
Off the bridge, through Chinatown, to the East East Village.
Riding through the city, there is nothing more fun than exploring the gardens we fought to create and defend all those years ago, each a gem.
Making our way, we ride by 6BC, a garden where the teenager and I stopped for lunch after the pageant last year, wild green friends rising into the sky.
Arriving at the Sixth Street Community Center, we get oriented to the pageant, picking puppets to carry.
One of the first people I see is Todd Tif.
Todd, who has been working to get the Earth Bill Introduced in Congress.
Smiling Todd and I chat about it all,
“UP UP UP IT GOES!” he says, referring to the latest data on climate pollutions.
“We can't say we didn't know. What will the future say about us!!????
"The new data, from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, were released ..Monthly average carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have reached above 420 parts per million (ppm) for the first time on record. Last year’s highest month, May, recorded 419.13 ppm. Twenty years ago, the highest month of the year had 375.93 ppm – and in 1958, the first year scientists started collecting CO2 data at Mauna Loa, the highest month of the year had just 317.51 ppm….The IPCC has cautioned that greenhouse gas emissions need to max out by 2025 at the latest if the world wants to keep warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius."
Coming out of Glasgow, few believed that “limiting the rise in global temperature to 1.5C” was going to be possible. Paris is feeling like a dream.
Perhaps this is what earth celebrations is about.
I used to bring the teenager’s older sister, seeing all my friends in the East Village at the actions, Elizabeth, Brad, JK, everyone, converging for Earth Celebrations: “An urban ecological pilgrimage featuring a spectacular procession with 20 sustainability site performances celebrating climate solution initiatives throughout the community gardens, neighborhood, and waterfront on the Lower East Side of New York City.GARDENS TO WATERFRONT – Lower East Side NYC.
The GINGA PURA BAND is warming up the crowd, drums filling the air, dancers lining up, puppets, earth creatures. I carry the climate solutions puppet, the teenager the biodiversity one.
We line up and start walking in the procession, seemingly tripping over props on the ground, into a dream, full of butterflies, garden creatures, and performance art pieces. Each garden feels like a stage to imagine, to experiment, to survive.
At 11th St btw.1st Ave A, we join the “Party in The Compost” -FARM ARTS COLLECTIVE CLIMATE SOLUTION: COMPOST Soil fertility cocktails and compost... merging of organisms ... I eat so you can eat when I thrive so you can thrive... i break it down so you can ... organic soil is rife with beings...the world relies on souls....
Our next stop is EL SOL BRILLANTE GARDEN
12th btw. Aves A & B.
“2022 Spring Trash Collection”
-DANCE TO THE PEOPLE
CLIMATE SOLUTION: RECYCLING & UPCYCLING.
No More Waste, say the cardboard signs the dancers are holding, dressed in plastic bags and various refuse, flowing through air, filling our rivers, etc.
Dance To The People (DTTP) makes art without waste …demands justice for … the world, as for the stopping of the annihilation of natural systems. Dancing, the dancers liberate themselves from the plastics. Disco music follows, bodies moving, free from wastes in our physical, and mental environments, out free.
On we walk to the next stage at 610 E. 12th St. btw. Aves B & C to talk about “Climate Solutions” with NATE & HILA. Find #climatesolutions!, they implore us, dressed as globes. The earth is so great eating that kales, building those bioswales... gardens on the roof...They can only perform one song, before the procession continues.
At CAMPOS GARDEN, we look about the seedbeds and hear a story. In loving memory of STEVE DALACHINSKY (1946-2019), a Poet & Collagist… Mindy Levokove, an old friend of Steve and Yuko’s, reads Steve’s poem:
“to sustain to be sustainable to be able
I was born of nothing came from nothing
and remained nothing where soil is an
absolute interrogation a prepared
expression of the opening up of things
the dynamics of language and sound what
seems like a closed book is more like an
explanation of logic for of nothing came
of nothing remain nothing lingual
tap-tapping haunted wind growling
howling as it approaches times demise
referencing the slowly melting mountains
to sustain to be sustainable to be able
there is a trunk composed of ashes and
limbs and paper and plastic and oil and
fire and ice the painted relics shudder
like mirrors shuddered like windows
punctured like memories reproduced
replicas of the seats things vanishing
language vanishing species endangered
cities vanishing concepts impermanent
birthdays where the earth where the
earth where the earth is where is the
earth when we need it the most the earth
where the earth is where is the earth
what is the world turned into whatever
happened to the rainforest an acid rain
AIDS and tolerance the 10,000 things are
all things the clouds an ageless jawbone
what does a whole earth mean what tools
are left in our catalog to sustain to
be sustainable to be able they sang we
are the world and we are the children
before the blue lake and the green lake
and the white length before the
mountains and before the extinct birds
and extinct markings of all that has
come before us and is now gone the song
trapped in a wind-up box trees volcanoes
seas we were not always this we were not
always land creatures mother earth
mother mother we must all go back to
mother to the mother sustainable
sustained and able everything belongs to
us nothing belongs to us we belong to
the earth the earth does not belong to
us I am a corporation and I incorporate
all the things I encapsulate all things
I am one selfish …the suffocation
of blindness of a million dollar beggar
the compassionate big rig operator the
distorted concept of survival and death
I am sustainable I sustained I am able
looking only now while pretending to
protect the future only now while
pretending pretending to late to live
for others even for just a small amount
wild animals always shooting other wild
animals it is a shame that in order to
build a railroad we must always demolish
a mountain it is a shame that in order
to build a dam we must destroy a canyon
Our next stop is La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez Garden, on 9th Street and C.
“Birth of Climate Solutions” and “Story of Water” -GLOBAL WATER DANCES
CLIMATE SOLUTION: SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY CULTURE
Gaia vs the Machine, swirling about the garden and the city.
Standing watching, my friend JK and I talk about the movement, two decades ago we fought Giuliani over the gardens and won more than we lost, saving many gardens here, as models of sustainable urbanism. Years later, we are still fighting the machines vs gaia.
We lost the fight for East River Park, says JK.
700 trees turned into much in the name of progress?
Says KATHRYN FREED:
At DE COLORES COMMUNITY YARD & GARDEN, my friend, ELIZABETH RUF MALDONADO, who I met during the defense of Esperanza Garden, sings, “A Song To Water” acknowledging the losses and successes of the last two decades.
The teenager was ready to keep walking all the way to the water.
I had to run home to meet friends for book group, passing the “Bans off our Bodies” Rally for Roe on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Back home, our activist informed reading group is discussing, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Jean Rhys's second novel. Set in interwar Paris and London, the autobiographical novel feels familiar and resonant. Some of our members still positive, joining on zoom.
“I didn’t believe much in bad luck. But after the war I felt differently. I’ve got a lot of mad friends now. I call them my mad friends,” writes Rhys. So do I.
We love the feeling of the story, the cheap hotels, the cats, worries over dwindling resources, the feeling of running out of luck. Somehow the novel fit the mood of the day. The idea that beauty is shifting, passing, but parts still remain. A lot of us feel a kinship with Julia, the novel’s protagonist.
“When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.”
I think we all experience that, feeling something real, encountering realities, losing ourselves to fit into this world, a feeling that breaks us, even as it's opening something for us.
“It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe.”
“The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her,” writes Rhys. Yet, we are the environment. It is not outside it. We are it. It is us.
She’s looking for men who will paint her, tripping through the demimonde, losing confidence, grasped by foreboding anxiety, depressed as life’s best feels behind her, “long successions of ruinous efforts,” separating men from money, finding common cause with the mad ones, the mad friends, lost in the city, in their heads after the war, bombs still bursting inside, wandering into the labyrinth, one more glass of pernod.
Something about the book feels comforting, the critique of people using and disposing of each other, of making the best of it, of living and imagining.
I think of my family, my friends, of our struggles to stay ahead of something foreboding, an encroaching supreme court, foreboding storm clouds, eroding our privacy, rights to the unborn, once they are alive, screw em, says George Carline from the grave, gun shots in Buffalo, encroaching madness.
PincLouds was playing at Tompkins Square Park on May 15th.
I join them after lunch with mom.
JK and Peter are there.
So is Elissa.
I get advice from her puppet.
Colin and I chat it up.
JK and I talk about earth celebrations.
@pinclouds in the park... everyone dancing....!!!!
Last show for a while says a post on instagram:
“THIS SUNDAY at Tompkins Sq Park: come see our last full-band show with the amazing Raimundo, who is going on new musical and creative adventures. 🚀🚀🚀
@ratal has been with Pinc Louds since the beginning. From playing buckets at Delancey st. station to drums with us all over the world (including a magical boat in Venice). What he has given Pinc Louds and all the communities we’ve played for throughout the past six years is more than I could ever put into words. But it is definitely love… And it is definitely joy. And you could make 1,000 ladders to the moon with all the dancing shoes he’s made wiggle, slide, tap and jump to the rhythms of his passionate drumming. 👞 👟🥾👠🥿👡🩴👢🥾 🌝
EVERYONE come this Sunday (event starts at 2; Pinc Louds at 4) to dance with us and the Great Rai one last time“When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.”
Later that night,
Evan Malater posted a note about the news from Buffalo.
“dear dU,
It is said that the 18 year old shooter in Buffalo was inspired by something called "Replacement Theory."
Replacement theory says that white people will come to be 'replaced' by black people or immigrants or Jews. It originally came from France where those who will replace the French are Muslims. Those playing the role of replacers in the theory are, ironically, replaceable. What remains constant is the paranoia of being replaced, with the replacers shifting according to cultural context. The murderous aggression is framed as self-defense. But clearly, the fear of being replaced expresses an already fantasized replacement that only can operate due to an unconscious identification and disavowal of that same identification.
Psychoanalytically , replacement theory amounts to aggression in the im
But where is the “place” in this replacement? This act was carried out by an 18 year old who, following HS graduation, presumably has felt dread about having ‘no place’ to go. The act itself had little to do with the actual place where he lived, seemingly comfortably, seemingly in no danger of having his place taken, his home robbed, his parents substituted by faux parents of another race. In this case, as in many others of its ilk, the place of no place is the fantasy realm of the internet and its theories and manifestos. (Strangely, this places the shooter on the adolescent continuum of internet hysteria and mimesis that includes young women developing tics after immersing themselves in Tourettes Tick Tock videos).
When the shooter was finally able to return to school after being virtually present in the Zoom place, he came dressed in a hazmat suit, a weird gesture that is either meant as a taunting ironic commentary or a sincere enactment of the felt danger at leaving the non place of virtual seclusion and being once again forced to take his place in the non virtual world.
Thus it doesn’t matter that the shooter went to Buffalo, a place he is not from. The Buffalo sheriff noted that the shooter is “not from here,” in essence noting that the shooter was out of place, a gesture that unwittingly mimics the logic of placement, belonging and non-belonging inherent in replacement theory. The shooter's logic of killing black people is especially nonsensical since they are not immigrants and were not coming to his place to take his place - he came to them. But in the imaginary, they are in his head, in his place.
The theory of replacement has come to be an especially prevalent structure to bind together psychotic fears of losing place, body, identity.
Here is a good brief interview with an expert on the Great Replacement theory:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/making-sense-of-the-racist-mass-shooting-in-buffalo”
I think about Molly Ringwald in the Breakfast Club, seemingly paraphrasing Jean Rhys.
We used to have assault weapon bans and protections for reproductive autonomy.
“Everything’s just getting shittier,” says Molly.
VoG also requests investigation into: EPA's failure to enforce multiple Superfund Administrative Orders mandating New York City to build two Combined Sewer Retention Tanks in Gowanus to reduce the overflows into the canal during weather events; the inappropriate curtailment of National Grid cleanup requirements at manufactured gas works sites to otherwise reduce rate base charges and potentially mislead shareholders regarding National Grid’s full cleanup liability; and retaliatory personnel actions against USEPA staff for sharing accurate information with the public.
No comments:
Post a Comment