Our Skin, Impermeable As Anything

Dark Mountain 11 came at a time of endings, or revelations. On the heels of the shocks that were the Brexit vote and the first election of Donald Trump, the introduction to that issue put forth that ‘…borders, powerful though they seem, are only one way of seeing the world; like so many human inventions, they are better understood not as facts, but stories.’ Borders and divisions are once again central to the recent political upheavals here in the US, and in the last eight years a stronger countervailing story has not emerged on the national stage. This begs the question: how are we to respond now, as artists and writers, as citizens, as living animal bodies? What stories can we bring to life?

The work included in Dark Mountain 11 seems all the more relevant to that question now. No less Rachel Economy’s two poems from the issue, which offer the reader the surreal feeling of stepping out of a conventional stance constrained by artificial borders, an embodied sense of our essential permeability.

In ‘where the wound is’ a site of pain and damage becomes an opening, a place where inside and out intermingle, where our bodies become ‘confused’ with other bodies, not separate from fishing poles, tomato plants, mountain ranges. The rivers become the flows of our own blood.

Here she demonstrates how intimate poetry can be. Each contact with a poem is highly precise to the reader’s interiority, the imagery and sensations crossing the boundaries of the psyche to call up a felt experience within the landscape of the body. The poet and reader connect with a physicality that intellectual conversation rarely admits to.

Meanwhile ‘The Explosive Borders Manifesto’ moves outward to respond to the divisive nationalist story with an alternative image, one where the walls and guns become trellises covered with the vines of plentiful gardens. The wound from the earlier poem is transformed into ground for growth and life, the edifices of division composted into a fecund humus.

There could be a criticism of this approach as utopian or merely wishful. Surely we must take action, actively resist. What form that resistance takes can be felt in poems like these, what world we are working for can be sensed in this embodied art. It feeds a part of ourselves that needs nurturing if we are to travel through this hard passage of history. (NI)

where the wound is

where the wound is you can see map lines if you look close. where the wound
is rivers leak out. where the wound is, I place bundles of chewed plantain, stem
the outpour, check dams made to keep the streams from gobbling out their own
flesh banks. where the wound is I scrub salt so forgetting won’t come.
often I confuse my body with a mountain range. often I confuse you with a
fishing pole, pellet gun, the tines of a fork. it is always more dangerous to paint
the gaps, gaping, to call out with the mouth of a cut thigh or elbow, to say I
need, I need, look hear the anger and the haemoglobin howl.
where the wound is, it is clear: the world ails so body ails too. our skin is only
as impermeable as anything else: soil, leaves, sky. all things move into each
other, this is called the atom, this is called your pulmonary system, this is called
shit, this is called tomatoes, this is called the San Andreas, this is called cells, this
is called morgues and mountains I –
– confuse my body with a mountain range. where the wound is, if you look real
gentle, you can see map lines to the next world. they are fragmented, broken
and quiet, dangerous thing: to say I need, I need, I bleed.

The Explosive Borders Manifesto

On Sunday all the borders
exploded suddenly into tangled
triumphant corridors of
scarlet runner beans, pumpkin
vines, purple
corn.
No one knows
how it happened, who
planted seeds so strong they
strangled a spiked fence the
size of nations
until it was nothing more
than a fallen, twisted
trellis
for the green to climb across.
The world is suddenly strewn
with confused cookouts, harvest
parties, well-fed
arguments, vined
tendrils bending
guns into stakes for
tenacious tomatoes, farmers
kept from families for ages
finally able to meet
on the bloody crossing ground of loss.
They declare this a riot
of abundance, a warning
of what happens to land laced
with hatred and iron walls.
The border guards and presidents
sit at the edges of the barbecues
salivating and afraid
unsure if they will be offered
food or
swallowed by the roots
of the fast-growing fruit trees.
We do not know yet
what will happen in this wall-less place
once everyone has eaten their fill
what reparations could possibly be made for
choking the land, for
shooting down the bodies tending it, moving
loving and alert
across its ridges and spine.
We do not know but
the dancing has started
it is loud danger
joyous, a wail
furious and full of finallys.
The whole earth shakes with it
and the corn
waves and glints in the sun.

IMAGE:

Christos Galanis
The Time I Shot the Iliad (2 of 5)
New Mexico, USA
The Time I Shot the Iliad is part of a series of ‘shot books’ I created in the deserts of New Mexico that began as both an interrogation of US gun culture, and the role of books in the development and dominance of civilisation. These dusty discarded books – mined from charity shops – eventually became sites for re-inscribing contemporary narratives of contraction and loss. Their desecrated pages are perhaps the visceral embodiment of a more faithful articulation of the arc of time we are living through.

Christos Galanis is a Canadian/Greek artist, researcher and teacher who enjoys migration. Currently a PhD candidate in Human Geography at Edinburgh University, he is researching practices of walking/belonging within the Scottish Highlands. He holds an MFA in Art & Ecology (University of New Mexico), where he practised inter-species research-collaboration with his donkey Fairuz.