Bugs 2: Adventures in Distributive Agency

In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the dream of a Runa woman in the Ecuadorian rainforest, a dream of an encounter with a deer.  The next day, this dream played out in a hunting scene (as she expected), in which the woman and one doe became aware of each other, while the buck and her husband (with the gun) remained oblivious.  Here, Kohn points to a situation in which "agency becomes distributed over different selves," while "some of these selves can lose agency in the process" (116-7).  He adds, that "Under certain circumstances, we are all forced to recognize the other kinds of minds, persona, or selves that inhabit the cosmos"; further, "selves must recognize the soul-stuff of other selves in order to interact with them" (117).  

Eduardo Kohn, "Thinking with a Forest's Thoughts"

I'll have some trouble, eventually, elsewhere, with the term "self," but here, lets pair Kohn with Donna Haraway, who in When Species Meet uses the terms "instrumental relations" and, better, "knot" (69-70), to describe a similar process of agency.  She labels this "a ramifying tapestry of shared being/becoming among critters (including humans)" who engage in "ontologically multiple instrumental relationships...in an irreducible world of embodied and lived partial differences" (72).  I'm taking this shamefully out of context, but well, go read her book for yourself if you want the straight story.

I'm here to tell you one of the comic sagas of my recent life. Comic, in that there are painful pratfalls, weird critters across scales of many orders of difference, unlikely associations, and more than a few swell dogs.  So, let's begin, in medias res, for this mock epic.  It's last Monday, and I'm ready to join Soren at the Berg that afternoon to talk about Jamie Lorimer's great essay, "Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene" (2012), and I get an email from Soren saying he's "caught a little bit of a stomach bug."  (See, this is Bugs 2!).  Suddenly, the time-space of my whole afternoon opens up, and there are choices--go to the Berg anyway, drink by myself, work on the silly blog...or, call Ann, and see if she wants to go to McGinty's, where I noticed that have a new local blackberry cider, which I think she'll like (she hates 95% of the world's beer, as we've verified in country after country, a deep character flaw, and more grievous, she also dislikes red wine, and Ann, after all, had refused McGinty's last week, claiming she had life-stuff to do)...or, go to the gym, be responsible working off my encroaching belly-beer-fat...or, go to Wal-mart for the goldfish, and/or, work on projects at home.  For no clear, nor, as it turns out, fortunate reason, I chose the not-drinking options, and instead, did all the rest. Moderation is not my strong suit.  How did Blake say it?  "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough," and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Words to live by, and suffer by.  No clue I could take from the context, that these lines are from Blake's Proverbs of Hell.

So, off to the gym, for a newly-intense back and bicep and ab workout.  Newly, because some of these exercises I hadn't done for 8 or 9 months, last September having fallen from a top step, a rain-wet step, off-balance with a heavy backpack, and the new, bouncy, Great Pyrenees puppy running between my legs, helping me to slam hard and injure my shoulder.  Not having time, I hadn't gone to the doctor till, well, this June, and verified some rotator cuff damage.  And that had thrown off the gym visits quite a bit. Anyway, Monday, with my new meds, feeling grand, with no other obligations, I got in a good, thorough workout.  

Then to Wal-mart for the goldfish.  And the male betta.

Why suddenly fish, and why would they matter?  It's summer.  Oh. That's not enough link?  It's summer, and there are mosquitoes. Yes, you say, get on with it.  Mosquitoes, which breed in all the rainwater I harvest at home. 

For dogs, for tomatoes, for washing my hands outside, all that stuff. And not just in buckets set out under the sky, but from the torrents off the broken gutter or the front, torn-off porch edge. I have one of those plastic, toddler pools full of rainwater.  Which all the critters use, which I keep filled from buckets.  And which the mosquitoes love.  There is, finally this year, a frog in there, but still a lot of wriggly larvae as well.  So, the fish need to live in the pool and eat the larvae, so that the mosquitoes don't as much eat me. 

How does this get up to the "painful pratfall" promised above?  I'm getting there, in my usual direct fashion.  Because Cybele, the younger puppy, Golden Retriever,

loves to jump in any water at all, scummy pond, mud-broth ditch, hopeful puddle, and that rainwater pool, I needed to move a cement cinder block from the fence bottom into the pool, so the fish would have some sturdy shelter from the furry apocalypse splashing in....Ok, and in looking at the fence in the front, I'd found a place where the dogs had been pushing out under the fence, evidenced by tufts of gold fur caught in the chainlink edges in the warped bottom edge....So (you seem to need an awful lot of explanation, for things so obvious), I went to that scrap-pile I'd noticed by the field of day lilies, near the dead-end sidewalk, and "harvested" a number of large chunks of concrete to use to block up the dogs' nights out.

And, since it has been raining non-stop for weeks, in a way that would have played right into Nicholaus' scam in The Miller's Tale (sure, my first thought goes to Chaucer!), I also, soberly, decided to move those paving stones up to some muddy spots in the path at home, juggling them back and forth as the dogs knock against my legs, in endless affection.  

And since it was still in the 90s, temp and humidity, that Missouri special combo, I eventually decided to go to D & D for a beer, but really for the AC, which I consider eco-sinful for individuals, but ok in public settings, there to work a bit online as the apologetic academic outsider at a redneck country bar, take some swell notes, work on that book of flash-fiction-quantum/object-ontology tales, blog-brainstorming on technology and on course-proposals for Scotland study abroad next year, meditations of rural identity formation, all that normal stuff.  Of course, with me not blending in, laptop and legal pad at the bar, a former Columbia College teacher recognized me, and we wound up talking, and it turns out he has a travel agency, and could probably set up our study abroad trips without those mega-companies, who now charge at least 4000$ for any trip, anywhere.  "Those companies, they just rape you," I believe he said.  A new contact, new options, new ideas. All good.  And I stayed long enough, that I realized I needed a photo of a Prairie Fire, for the integrity of this blog, the curiously named Geography102b, and so...I stayed longer than I intended, and didn't really sleep all that well, something of a trend lately.

Tuesday.  This is Act III, if we're following Shakespeare's structure for crowd-pleasing comedy (the subject of my online students' research paper this week), up for slow breakfast, watched Perry Mason (you can get whole episodes on YouTube!), walked the dogs, headed to the Jeep with my backpack, and crunch.  There in the road, suddenly I couldn't hold the backpack, and couldn't stand up.  Back pain, that switch where you don't see outward, just monitor the internal system, and I sank to the ground.  Huh, that's strange, I thought, between cries of pain, which only the ditch-weeds noticed.  Got to the Jeep, went to town for coffee, the rational course of action, though I parked on Cherry Street instead of in my regular parking garage, to save 2 blocks of walking (I was suspicious of this new development) and started off for Lakota, with just my journal and laptop and a few folders.  A little crash on the corner, an agonizing few moments leaning on a trash bin, then started across the street.  I collapsed in the middle of 10th Street, and the nearby homeless guy on the bike started yelling, "Call 9-1-1," and the lady in the car at the red light looked ready to do that, as well as relieved that I wasn't directly in front of her, and she had the option to drive away with the light change, but I called out, "no, just my back!"  Just.  Hmm...  

Got across the street and managed to sit on that embankment, still there because the apartment construction mania had hit a metaphoric brick wall (real ones they demolish, all over town) in that this was a historic landmark, where Mark Twain had once spent the night.  Thanks, Mark!  20 minutes breathing, accompanied by that same bike-guy, who never quite got the back part, and kept telling me about his lower-leg brace, and about the woman who paid him 20$ for sex, and how he smelled later, not recognizing that the beer smell was about all he put off, and eventually, I said I needed to get moving.  

And I did.  Half a block farther, and I collapsed on the same embankment, but in shade.  There by that vandalized No Parking sign along the alley.  And couldn't walk for 30 minutes.  But 9-1-1 seemed too dramatic and expensive an option, and having a phone even that no one will answer is a great solace, so I eventually got to Lakota, had some swell coffee, and reached Ann after her math class, and she came to rescue me.  Though I collapsed again in Lakota, and two guys had to semi-carry me to Ann's car.  

Act IV, probably--she persuaded me that just going to school to teach my class, still 4 hours away, wasn't the best idea, and we went toward Urgent Care.  Which is no longer on Hitt Street, the parking valet there telling us it is on South Providence, across from Rock Bridge High School.  Good to know.  There, Ann went in and got a wheelchair, and so, 

I spent my first afternoon in a wheelchair.  Nothing really happened at Urgent Care, except for the X-ray, and I decided not to think about the uncomfortable moment taking off my pants to keep the zipper from making X-ray art, the screaming getting on the table, and a long, long wait, till the doctor came in and told me to just take more of the muscle relaxants I already had for my shoulder.

Alas, Ann didn't get to go home and mow her lawn.  She did wheel me back to her car, got me to my Jeep (oh, no problem driving a stick shift, only trying to get my legs up into the Jeep without the screaming drawing too much public scrutiny.  Road safety?  Pffft!), and though I'd had Ann stop and refill the meter before we left for Urgent Care, I still got a parking ticket... Sigh.  Then to the better classroom Ann arranged on the phone, where I could pull up only a 20-foot stagger away, and avoid the stairs.  Class went fine, if not quite without a drug and pain haze, and appropriately, we read "Ode to a Nightingale," which I translated into Missouri-speak, and the students were nice, and semi-carried me back to the Jeep.  A pleasant drive home, then 20 minutes making the 2 minute walk from the driveway to the house, urging the dogs to not be quite so happy to see me.  Dogs are necessary, but not good nurses. 

And the rest is just a drug-induced, foggy dream, 30 hours of sleep, dogs deciding they needed to walk themselves, making a new hole in the backyard fence, my grim trip to town Thursday to teach class, which fortunately was mostly just showing the already-in-the-syllabus movie, The Importance of Being Ernest, which contains gems of Wilde-wisdom, such as:

Lady Bracknell: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delecate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did it would prove a serious threat to the upper classes, and probably lead ot acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.    (Much more at imdb...)

It's Sunday again, I've patched the new exit point in the back fence twice, managed to daylight walk the dogs a bit, once with the raccoon stick as a staff (very Gandalf in the evening light), and I can more or less walk without planning every step.  All a happy ending, though the doctor tomorrow morning will probably be stern with me, and feel like he needs to do some sort of test.  Eh.  I have a lot of pills left.

But back to that academic framework we started with, so many thousands of words above--distributed agency.  Not at all, who should I blame, but looking at the ways different agencies asserted themselves.  Family and work pulled Ann into their knots on Monday, and those "bugs," this virus or that, incorporated Soren into their living realm.  My own excesses played in, yes, linked to demands from my imagined audience that I not lapse into late-middle-aged fat, and body urges to claim a lost potency.  Maya, the Great Pyrenees, helped me injury myself last fall in her enthusiasm for the outside.  More my exuberance coming home drunk the week before, lifting the now 120-pound ball of white fluff and spinning her around the muddy yard.  Happy dance.  Buckets of rainwater, full of mosquito-larvae, living their lives, that needed to be lifted off the porch and dumped in the pool, to feed the frog, to feed the fish.  And there's the dogs, needing me to keep patching one fence after another, although we were going on three walks everyday already.  The rain and flagstones, chunks of concrete, mosquitoes and fish and buckets and that cinder block, ambitious sex last week, the gym, job stress, bad sleep...

Cause?  Effect?  That doesn't seem quite the right mode, nor does reducing all this to medical diagnosis.  So many agents playing their hands, and fins, and wings, and paws.  Such a detailed tapestry that wove itself into the strained fibers of my back.

later, bob