A couple of recent conversations led me promisingly to Caitlin DeSilvey’s work from around 2017 related to her book, Curated Decay: Inevitable Loss and Other Opportunities. Although the book itself hasn’t arrived yet, I’ve learned from reviews and by watching Desilvey’s 2018 Handbury Historic Preservation lecture at UVa that historic preservation scholars consider her work postpreservationist, in that it keys on the cyclical generativity hinging decay to renewal and renewals again to unavoidable decay. I especially appreciate about Desilvey’s research that it accords with gone-noting as I have been studying and otherwise coming to terms with it in recent years, and so I thought I would highlight just a few more points from the lecture and consider their implicit connections to more than aging structures and their contents (e.g., sheds pulled to leaning and their rusty, or dusty inventories).

At one point DeSilvey says, “There is always a politics to loss.” I remember vividly a question posed to me after a talk I gave a few years ago that suggested gone-noting should strive for more causal and jurisdictional attribution. In other words, when a journal, listserv, conference, publisher, or other so-called structure of disciplinary participation lapses, gone-noting its lapse and marking it for possible renewal or repair is sort of like again and again bowing to “graceless turnover” (North) but without bringing us up close to root causes. Certainly politics play a part in loss, though such politics are not neatly codified nor attributable to individual actors. These do not tend to be a megaphonic politics of campaign texts, candidate yard signs, or bumper stickers. The discontinuation of EM-Journal years ago at EMU may serve as one simple example. Although its short run was successful if judged by its accomplishments, like 1) publishing period issues of student writing from first-year writing and across the disciplines; 2) featuring writing from selected senior capstones in economics and anthropology, which in turn were used instructionally, and 3) apprenticing graduate and undergraduate students to developmental, technical, and copy editing and related publishing workflows, it could not gain even modest support from administration. We had included a sunset clause in the charter (owing, notably, to advice I’d once heard Bill Hart-Davidson give), declaring an end if after three years it did not have modest support, and in 2014, the journal shuttered, lights out. To return to the point about the politics in any loss, it would be challenging to locate tangibly the executors of those politics. Tempting as it might be to link them to individual decision-makers, in retrospect I see it more as a case of running decisions through the befuzzed filters of austerity and agentic shift, with the agentic shift pointing to managerial spreadsheets and the budgets sort of articulated therein. In far too many cases, considering the ends of writing program related things (albeit in my limited experience), the politics of loss owe to an lossy economic surrounds. With this example, I am led again to a scale question I have not resolved just yet, about the scales of gone-noting, about big gones and little gones, or perhaps about gones whose discontinuation affects the polis within the political as distinct from the oikos/house within the economic. Some gones are planets; other gones are lint.

This all leads to another keen turn of phrase in DeSilvey’s presentation, “continued ruination as management.” The phrase strikes me as worthy of return, especially given the repeated pattern of how we (in public systems) frequently aw-shucks in the faculty lounge about declining state appropriations, longing for creative and resourceful workarounds, commiserating about how tough it is to do the same (sometimes, more) with less. We do not as of yet have in higher education Officers of Continued Ruination any more than Officers of the Encouraged Parrhesiast. Change takes time; titles don’t always keep pace, and the regents know we cannot afford more administrators but perhaps we can do with just one more fiscal bard whose song sings of infocratic spreadsheets. Formula fed, resulting tabulations are never enough due to new construction and despite gainful investment profiles, stacked endowments, cheddared hedge funds, and superlative credit ratings.

DeSilvey turns to personal stories to contextualize the permission she extends to using palliative metaphors for buildings (around the 25 minute mark of the lecture, specifically). In a few cases, I have noticed others commenting on academic programs, departments, colleges, and even entire university systems using palliative metaphors, implicitly extending care ethics and related public health, healing, and medicinal ethics to institutional entities. The same for the field: a journal on its last breath, an unwell conference or organization, a hypersomniacal listserv. I take from DeSilvey’s go-ahead that the palliative predicts a gone-going arc, that it scores pronoiacally an alignment of setups more aptly figured as breakdowns. The use of palliative metaphors notes a decay path. I can’t quite come up with the right word for this. It’s not the same as a chreod, or canalized path, but it does seem linked to -hodos, or pathing. Rot, decomposition, half lives: these terminologies name something similar, yet I would like to have a term that is chreod-like while denoting decay curation. For now, composting will do, I guess, though compost hearkens to organic breakdown. In the context of a budget committee I have served on, I once heard an institutional/organizational variation of this called “reduction exercise.” I’m going to hold this detail open, wait on the word, and imagine that doing so will bring along a name for ‘chreod gone to decay.’ Possibly ‘atropheod,’ for wasting path.

My last highlight, for now, from the lecture holds onto the notion of ruderality, or the plant species who root first and participate in the reclamation of disturbance zones. Ruderality (from rudur, Latin for “rubble”) considers what grows amidst interruption, what roots within-across entropic landscapes. In the previous EWM entry, I mentioned the Spanish needles showing up with yellow-flowered force all along the embankments where I live here in SW Virginia. Their seeds attach to everything, and evidently, this assures for them a formidable expansion, especially in places subjected to bulldozing within the past decade. I wonder, too, about the interruptive landscapes that are not terrestrial/biospheric but that instead track toward what Han calls the psychospere. When attention structures are bulldozed, as can be and oftentimes is the entropic case with streaming media, social media, and especially email, what grows there, what reading and writing are possible, what roots relational and holds, substantive enough to accrue memory or meaning. I suspect I’ll be holding onto ruderality as a model for thinking about aftermaths and what rustles hopeful in anything noted as gone.