Decay Curators

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash.

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.

Mow-Noting

Spanish needles (Bidens bipinnata) thriving all along the banks at Wonder Hollow.

Not sure whether I will have to mow it one more time, but since today is autumn equinox, I guess this afternoon’s buzz around the holler counts as the last official cut of Summer 2024. It had been a few weeks, maybe three?, since I had carried the weed eater to the raised beds garden, to the micropark, or to the unevennesses immediately behind the front shed. Hardest of the weed eating is at the micropark because it is mucky in places, extra uneven, and prone to kicking up mud if the machine’s angles are off by even 10 degrees for a tenth of a second. A muck misstep means ankle deep in glop. Easy to do, despite the handfuls and handfuls of rocks I have carried and planted so dutifully to bolster the creeksides. When weed eating, eye protection takes the brunt of the mud, although that brunt today included a cord-kicked hunk of dolomite from where the gravel road meets the grass; it deflected audibly clonk! from the left side of the eyewear. In moments like these I feel relief from the close call and congratulate myself for taking every precaution to buffer my eyes and ears from the worst of it.

Today’s weed eating stirred an underground hive adjacent to the first of the five tiger grass tufts, the one nearest to the stump that housed for the past few months a thriving pair of orange marigolds and sage. When I transplanted the sage in May I was worried for a couple of dry, hot weeks that it wouldn’t take, that the relocation shock combined with the harsh midday heat would prove too much to withstand, but then it showed me I was wrong and went on flourishing. Possibly it was the hardiest of any of the curated plants around the holler this summer, though the volunteer morning glories, which started on their own but later were sent spreading up a twine path (thus becoming curated, sort of), have a strong case. They are their own trophies, so congratulations one and all is the spirit. I don’t know what exactly were the stinging insects living it up in the underground hive. The few that scouted me as a threat-nonthreat were mild mannered, appearing to be fogged by the change of seasons and not so keen on having a serious and stinging chase-off. I was able to finish the trim around the tiger grasses after a few minutes and didn’t get stung even once, thankfully.

Three summers of this have taught me the subtler features of the chthonic many who burrow into the mud around this time of year. Can’t see their houses, but their doorways give away which is a snake, which is a frog, which is a turtle, and which is a crawdad. Neighborhood is sort of frog frog crawdad crawdad crawdad snake and then turtle, with snake and turtle being far fewer in number than the rest. The crawdad doorways are the littlest, and the turtles are the biggest, as far as I can tell. Banks are lined with various doorways this time of year, which makes me wonder whether they have subterranean encounters with one another, whether their soupy abodes abide a sharing ethic or a competing ethic. Maybe some of both. The water lettuce atop the pond has split and doubled half a dozen times. There isn’t any fruit to speak of but the stems are thick, almost thick enough to harvest for a cooking experiment except that the advice on water lettuce edibility is mixed. The creekside weed eating sends up strong perfumes, too, as the watercress and mint are abundant and hearty this time of year. I leave most of it alone; both plant types have recently bolted and late season pollinators do well to have a few more dabs at floral pollen. Careful as I am it is impossible to be surgical about the edges, and so there is an occasional spray of aromatic plant pulp. Or fungus. Thursday’s heavy downpour queued more mushrooms than I could count near the long-piled stack of wet wood in the micropark. There, too, I tend to leave well enough alone, as the edge of the woods there not far from where Bitumen, Fluffy Foot, and Cinnabon were killed at the end of June hugs a sharp embankment with quite a bit of poison ivy vining across it.

With the weed eating done, I switched to the Gravely for mowing the terraced paths, the upper holler and the strip above the ledge. The strip is just four widths of the mower, twice down and back, quick. All of the rider mowing took me maybe two hours, give or take. I carry short and long handled clippers and a handsaw on the mower because the edges are prone to thorny shoots, and so maybe ten or twelve times along the perimeter I stop the mower and clip the sharp appendage of a wineberry or whatever. If I left them to growing–and especially sunlight seeking–wherever they wanted, I would get slashed upon riding by. Maybe from the heavy rain the other day, but a lot of the megaweeds are tilting, buckling under their own late season weight, surrendering, giving back to the holler’s soil course. Several milkweed plants near the phone of the wind were giving over to gravity, but it’s late enough in the season that I didn’t have to maneuver around them all that much. Figure it’s fine to mow and mulch them. I do wish I had a better option for one of noxious plants I haven’t identified1Stepped outside to get a photo and run it through the plant identifier app. It’s Spanish needles, aka beggarticks.. It is run amok along the unmowed banks. As its season ends, it shares with the world a small yellow flower followed by a starburst of seeds, which, by late fall will spring onto clothing and stick like velcro to anything it touches. Earlier in the summer I felt hope in thinking there weren’t too many of them returning, but now, today, I see there are hundreds. The solution, I think, is to avoid them. Hope they don’t burr up in Feta’s fur. They’re unmanageable otherwise. As I mowed, I kept thinking about ruderality, or those plants (and more?) that thrive in disturbance zones. I need to lookup the plant one of these days, but by numbers and by observable health, it is home here on this small corner of Appalachia, home here at the end of Rosemary Road.

Notes

  • 1
    Stepped outside to get a photo and run it through the plant identifier app. It’s Spanish needles, aka beggarticks.