New Story The Machine And The Grove Published

 

Edvard Munch's The Scream. Public domain image Wikipedia

 

 

 

I briefly saw the above painting while visiting the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. It was a bit anticlimactic to look at the small work behind protective covering, and already being familiar with the iconic work, I think I quickly moved on. In his writings, Munch describes the genesis of the painting as: "I heard an infinite scream passing through nature.", a phrase that rings more true today than when he wrote it. Munch painted this, the first of many versions in 1893, the same year industrial civilization was doing a victory lap over a subdued world and humanity at the Chicago World's Fair. At that early hour, his artistic temperament already heard the quiet screams of the the natural world coursing through the air. The nexus of this painting and the sentiments behind it to me seem an apt metaphor for the current state we find ourselves in. Both we and the natural world around us are screaming.

 

 I am always excited when I get something published because it means that some people think it is at least legible, and others may read it. I am a little put off by the opacity of the process of submitting things for publication though. It is a process where you send items into a dark hole from which they may or may not emerge. It isn't like the caricature of writers in films where they have a dialogue with an editor or publisher who helps them adjust their work, but more like blank nothingness, and suddenly something gets published or doesn't. In the tradition of Cory Doctorow who shares his works freely while also selling physical copies, I am glad people have the chance to read it online for free. Unlike this blog, which nobody reads and I write mostly for myself, getting published in something like Northern Narratives means that just possibly, someone might read it.

 

If you want to read my story, The Machine And The Grove, it can be read online here. It is a multilayered story with a surface layer and a symbolic layer. 

 

The surface layer is based on experiences and reflections of life experience growing up on a farm, being a farm worker and "hired man," an avid hunter and hiker seeking out such places, and a keen observer of the decayed and disused agrarian landscape. The layer expresses the sacrifice of the local for the global with the loss of small farms in favor of big industrial operations. It also expresses it in the process of replacing farms as semi-subsistence symbiotic spaces, where a variety of foods supported a local community, to vast fields growing commodities to be shipped far away, sacrificing everything locally in favor of the global. A vibrant rural community erased and replaced with a sterile landscape with only machines and vast, endless fields of commodities. That same process is a metaphor for what is happening in our larger world where everything, even our thoughts and daily activities, are now a commodities sold as what Shoshana Zuboff calls: "behavioral surplus".

The surface layer is also a lament for the ongoing erasure of the natural and built cultural landscapes of the settler colonialist past. Settler colonialism, built on a foundation of lies about land that pushed aside indigenous peoples, was still made up of good people who created something they thought would last. I have personally witnessed so many farmsteads and groves erased to make way for crops, that it is more the norm than the exception. I argue that the groves are especially important as islands that contain remnants of that culture and sometimes lost remnants of the original prairie. There have been numerous laments of lost farmsteads, but where are the cries for the groves of trees that are just as much a part of the cultural landscape?

 

The second layer is an allegory of our treatment of the world where the Grove symbolizes the natural world and the Machine our lost connection to it. As humans, for most of our history, we lived close to the earth and were intertwined with its processes until fuels and machines allowed us to live apart from it. That of course has good along with bad, but the bad parts are now destroying us. 

 

The Grove symbolizes that symbiotic connection to the earth and the Machine our intertwining with it. The Machine represents all the myriad traditional and ancient ways we connected to the world around us before the machine age. These things- everything from traditional ecological knowledge to languages, ancient skills and seeds are all being lost in the headlong homogenization of everyone and everything by consumerist civilization.

 

The "machines" represent the complex system of interactions that are currently consuming the earth in what some have called the "Great Acceleration" of the Anthropocene, where we are in what others term "Overshoot" of the ability of the planet to handle the way we are treating it. The "human" of course is simultaneously sustained by and trapped within the machine that makes its comfortable modern life possible, while also constricting its (our) ability to save ourselves without shutting down the machine.

As I sit, stuck inside, as a small cog enabling the vast Machine that is destroying the earth, I hear the screaming of Munch's anthropomorphized Nature and am screaming in unison at my helplessness.