John Kinsella - Temporariness

RWP

Atomic Swans, Neckar River, Germany

River rising out of Black Forest is the river

you walked past and will walk past again, again,

Neckar rising and falling all the way to the Rhine

at industrial Mannheim, flowing with swan

families keeping zones, maintaining half lives

in the dip of seasonal sheddings and re-applications,

wingspread to hold warmth, to harbour

the cores of their legacies, codes we stumble

around, taking photos. And then, downriver

from Tübingen, on a train to Stuttgart,

later approaching Kirchheim, across

the waters, hook of the river, swans familiar

but different, chain of being, or reaction

against corruption of fundamentals.

Across there, summer family, Schwäne,

Gemeinschaftskernkraftwerk, GK N2

with its hybrid cooling tower suppressed

volcano eruptive as the Börse Frankfurt

doesn’t want to be, steady steady

goes the hebephrenic—broody reactor

in its oven nest reminds you of Frost’s

‘American’ ovenbird, but this can’t be enclosed

in a sonnet reactor vessel, can’t be shielded

against its wild prosody when life goes on

and on all around, cheap land for wealthier than-

usual families who don’t maintain

anxious states, who let the becquerels

wash over them in health denial.

The big flood of extra warm water

in 2004, the heating river with happy

expanding fish, the Simpsons laugh-off

at mutating presence, those drones

out of Stuttgart, the ongoing states

of warfare. Wonder if the mines in Western

Australia on stolen land stealing spirits

and unbalancing will feed its last years,

the swans’ white labours in the wastes,

the ‘historic hiking path’, the respect

a Mayor has for tradition and rites

of way, trek on to Heidelberg escorted

through the plant by ‘guard and German

shepherd’. Matrix of traversal. Swan spectres.

Wondering how people could live within

a few hundred metres of the plant, of Unit 2

itself, how? Benign as ‘Wouldn’t know anyway’,

and ‘Better dying first than lingering longer

being further away’. Quid pro quo choice

exchange not likely to rouse as much interest

as Boris Becker’s financial solvency or Bernard

Tomic’s ‘un-Australian’ statement of fact: ‘little bit bored’,

shattering a sponsor’s illusions of a too busy to

notice enculturation. Radiation gets places,

works its way in, speaks its mind. And white swans

mute and full of voice, the songs of culture pledge

benefits of plant, and company’s people-skills,

localising instillation. Benefits. Privileges.

Of ‘German Engineering’. Safe as houses.

But what do flight and song and Hölderlin

have to do with violence of matter, of a split

in the forest’s fabric, the potatoes bulging

in the fields right up to the ramparts,

tours through a ‘sterile’ environment:

clean is unseen. So who’s to watch CNN

on atomic television, or atomic rail past steam

rising or the quiet hum of plant transpiration?

These networks of empowerment, these liberations

of carbon futures, carbon credit slaughterhouse?

Incongruous change of tone, shiftback phonemes,

almost passive observation recollection

data collation—stay safe within the poem.

All these voices that make schematics, make

policy for energy to cloak the wor(l)d, to screensave

and dilate our spectres. Late day travelling

past, even in summer light with the risk

of a shower, your swans show the way,

cygnets trailing, blazing a generational

pathway; for no Reactor Birds are alone

for long, and even diminishing, register

strong—what does it mean outside

the ancient sources, the languages

that have gone into making up the grid?

And to cap it off, waste from elsewhere

arrived on a barge, a ghost-train passes

on the other side, on the far bank, shielding you?

Or—later, later—on the intercity express from Mannheim

to Frankfurt, the ball in play, everything in motion,

the Rhine enabling Biblis plant, the Rhine in role

of co-dependent , the Rhine regurgitating loops leaks

breaks quad cooling tower symmetry to placate

Unit A and Unit B pressurised water reactors,

gloriously twinned with Balakovo’s pride,

ovens warming to swan silhouettes, a Lotte

Reiniger manic design Ordnung, the Neckar

warm water merged with the Rhine warm water

fed as wedding party bliss! O, but stymied with decommission,

that slow trek towards non-existence as if it never was,

wish-fulfilment a trace in cabbage fields. But good ol’ GKN2

back up the tributary will stay hot under its collar!

True, true... Neckarwestheim is not on the railway

but from across the river you join its pseudo

symbiosis with plant, with the history

of atomic birds: Höckerschwan, Graureiher,

Bussard, Kohlmeise, Gartenbaumläufer,

and with lists keening through glass

you absorb becquerels to add to your stockpile,

weaponised psyche to expand human

consciousness, ingenuity of refusal and acceptance

gathering as the train slows at Kirchheim,

Neckar still rising out of the Black Forest far back,

as you always travel facing forward if given a choice.

These zero-sum gains in which spectral swans

are winners averting glances, GPS propositions.

JK

The residues of the military trying to keep a firm footing on ground they’ve disturbed, disrupted, brutalised, are a reminder and an affirmation of their failure to hold what they’ve appropriated, no matter how ‘resilient’ their technology. The ‘essential’ nature of manganese for not only anti-rust qualities, but also its qualities of shock reduction on steel, made it a deeply desired commodity in World War II, and the desire lines lead to the ‘neutrality’ of Sweden (Swedish ships carried and protected German ore shipments during the war) and, say, the Artillery Mountains in Arizona. Manganese mines, like all mines, are places of great natural and cultural disturbance. The exploitation—new waves of colonisation—of African ‘resources’, including manganese, developed multifold during World War II. All intermediaries between the earth and our feet, between the earth and objects of human design—the ‘conductive superhighways’ of the false anthropology—create a buffer that can only be permeable. A common sight in rural areas around the world is the degraded macadam that has been defeated by ‘weeds’ and tree saplings, breaking through, remaking habitat. The reclamation of steel matting of many wars and false wars, a reclaiming into the domestic porousness of forest not as monopolised capitalist-military resource, but as a place of nature in which humans are also nature, is a pragmatic dissolution of the vicariousness of conflict and violence, of the sundering of earth to conductivity. All wars are won or lost depending on lines of supply and communication. The matting allows vehicles to move where they couldn’t move of their own volition, or where they would be impaired in the usual movement. Tracked vehicles incorporate their own ‘matting’, of course, but even these sometimes require the extra ‘footing’ matting provides. And now the matting that fitted together so readily and efficiently is moving as if compelled by itself, and not by the military. A life, maybe, outside conflict—an absorbing of the less destructible into the forest, into the dwelling of ‘hippies’, into the liminal spaces of the forest-edge dwellers. In the personal essay we are often ‘reminded of’ and draw analogies because we wish to frame the run of words and yet make it porous enough for ‘us’ to dip out and re-enter at will. This matting is necessary for the act of reading to ‘walk’ over the textual roadway laid down to enable the journey we think we require when beginning a text and imagining its possible ends. And in this spirit, yet another ploy, I am reminded of living in ‘the shack’ in the cow paddocks on the edge of the creek deep in the southwest of Australia, a few kms outside Bridgetown, with marri forest edging nearby, and a giant colonial walnut in the vicinity of the shack. And mud. In winter, it rains heavily and gets muddy. And in the same way turbulence is on the increase due to climate change, and aviation thinkers are trying to out-think the conundrum of flying through what is increasingly difficult to fly through, their machines contributing strongly to the cause of the effect, so too the erratic weather patterns over the southwest produce erratic dries and wets, and the earth underfoot behaves in unpredictable ways. But when I/ we lived there, it was muddy in ‘winter’ and we laid hessian sacks on the ground outside the front porch (an unlockable ‘front door’, and no back door at all), to relieve the abjection and to make passage to the vegetable garden more practical, and to the toilet which consisted of a steel drum of high manganese content with a wooden seat above it so you’d hover over a pit of excrement, to be covered in lime after heavy usage. The sacks had been used for ASW wheat, which wasn’t grown in any quantity around there, but was grown to the northwest of the district in vast amounts over vast areas—areas I was more familiar with. The sacks had been acquired elsewhere and brought in, though we had no car and only walked places or hitchhiked. I cannot recall how we got the sacks there, so the designed usage was consigned to the temporary, and a pragmatic reinvention of use put into action. But more planned than one might think. I’d seen the sacks used for this up around farms throughout my childhood. The sacks were a little resistant to mud, but not particularly—the fibre grew sodden. Eventually the mud soaked through, to join deposits from our feet, to fuse. Walking the forest around the Wankheimer Täle with Russell, I was fascinated by the residues of an old stone road he showed me. We took many photos of the stones, our own feet, the dry mud around them. I didn’t find it abject, but my feet were well shod. The stones were fixed, and had likely been so for hundreds of years, but they were intrusions likely of the place into the place, a looping intervention but also continuity. Walking, we might wonder a-priori and know they must appear where the track becomes difficult, where it descends from field to forest. These objects with human defintion calling up experience. A complex array of presence and habitat. A challenge to the temporary, in the way all ‘time’ is inevitable and terminal and will demand its end (and, for that matter, all time is present in the moment, the singularity—ends and beginnings are relative terms). But this is really a rhetorical ploy, because in the spatial maze there are only dead ends (which become a propaganda of ‘beginnings’), and not a ‘solution’ encompasses reaching an emanating, enlightening ‘centre’ (which merely tells you that you have been on a journey). And the journey is as continuous as time which is contained within the singularity of the moment—a drawn point containing many if not all points. Thus our compulsion to make narratives of journeys, of a walk from a to b. It is a story of all time and no time, of a very specific (if meandering) route, and all space (the infinite numbers of points between points).The matting is a paradox. The matting will always move, and, indeed, it was designed to do just that. But it also moves against its design purpose, and in doing so mocks the violence and industry that prompted its creation. Conservative ‘red pill/blue pill’ Matrix binaries are served by the matting—we can seek knowledge and its consequences, or remain blissfully ignorant. But bliss and knowledge are so intimately connected that the binary is rendered absurd before it is made. The matting is not a binary, or even part of a binary, but a recognition that even the most violent human constructs are subject to the ‘inevitable temporality’ of ‘nature’, that the materials of its making are the material it is deployed to control. An absurdity. A theatre of self-loathing. The discursive essay has to break down into ramblings and let the mud through while retaining its trajectory, its ability to move through and over rough terrain, contrive its narratives of self-preservation. Or as the rhetorical ‘or does it?’ transports us rhizomically and atmospherically over the same land without damage. Termites scaffold their food externally and internally—and they feed the earth as they eat a tree’s deadwood. The tunnels in a termite mound, the tunnels of digested material through the dead centre of the log, are the matting created and possessed without war being enacted. The termites’ is an essay as form without violence.