Alright, so many friends of mine irl will have heard me offhandedly remark “That’s Scavenger Politics!” in some conversations. When asked, I’ll probably have said roughly what it is and that I’ve been working on a longer essay about it. Well, that work has ballooned into a very long essay that still isn’t finished, but I wanted to get some of these ideas out there anyway, so here’s a quick breakdown and a manifesto (?) of sorts. In discussions about topics such as climate resilience, collapse, and enabling new freedoms of remaining, one of the frequent hurdles I’ve found that keeps people from engaging with these ideas in an earnest and practical way is that they run so squarely counter to the prevailing ideas of human and societal progress that many find it hard to let go of these structuring narratives. In an attempt to forge new ways of thinking about how we engage with the world as its inhabitants, I propose the figure of the scavenger as programmatic for life upon this gentle, damaged, and hurtling planet. This figure can hopefully bridge the gap between collapse oriented climate doom and new ways of coexisting with one another in the world. The scavenger puts into question many relations we see as fixed and rigid, it pops up throughout history and throughout the natural world as a mode of living that enables new life, but that also enables itself. This is a piece of the puzzle toward developing a theory of what I’ve called “The Mycelial Society” in the front of this blog. It’s just a sketch for now. There’s more to come but for now I humbly offer this salvage.
Here’s a poem for you about trying to find the language to talk about the world we live in and if that is even possible or worthwhile. In the face of climate disasters, fascism, surveillance Capitalism, ongoing genocide, and indifference in the imperial core, we cannot lose sight of what we are fighting, and how to fight it.
“There will be no need to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons.” -Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze
Another poem for y’all. This one is from the start of this year when I was homeless for a few months and couchsurfed at different friends’ houses. There are a few of these where I’m not quite sure into what project they fit. For now I’ll share them with you here.
In a Home Not Yours
If you consider the floorboards
you tread on in a stranger’s home
as yours for just a second
and feel the push of them
on the pads of your feet
the splinters dig themselves
into your callouses like
the pinprick of a unforgotten
memory digs itself out of your
mindgrave.
Unearthed layers of skin
thick ridged scar tissue
with furrowed landscapes
in the lines.
Here’s a poem for today. I wrote this for a woman I met last year and tried to help who was stuck in the endless limbo and uncertainty of the asylum system. I don’t know where she is now, her situation was very precarious and communication with her never easy. But I hope she’s okay.
And let me be clear on one thing: Borders kill people and destroy families and lives. Tear them all down, set their bureaucracies on fire. Every checkpoint and every guard is an affront to life itself.