To Pass Back Through

If I am building a chain, what's the final loop?

The last loop is the edge of the swamp. The swamp was a recurring image in this thesis, used to describe my own process, whose methods include listening, doing things messily, being open to ghosts and to collaboration. Kindness and care.

I am drawn to the swamp in part because of having grown up on the edge of the Canadian prairies. It is very dry there: semi-arid, an almost-desert. Mostly it has been converted to farmland, for its flatness. Mostly people think of this area as a sparseness, as a kind of nothing.

I love this landscape more than almost anything.

In the parts that have not been converted, saved mostly by ranchers whose cattle have replaced bison in the ecosystem, there is a subtle diversity that you need to move through slowly to see. It is low to the ground, softly coloured. There are things there that sound made-up: bee flies that are golden fluff balls, that hover around you in the sunshine. Who feed on flowers. Low valleys that look like shallow crackling from the sky, where millions of years have been compressed into meter-high layers. Where if you wander, you can find fossils and dinosaur bones and rocks rent from lava. Air full of the scent of heated sage.

A human figure in the badlands 1 & 2

drawn and coloured from memory, 2018

I suppose I feel an affinity for any landscape that is easily overlooked, that doesn’t serve the apparatuses of neo-liberalism or pose easily consumable reasons for protection. No dramatics or quick beauty. I identified with the swamp because it felt similar in some way, in the Finnish context. There are so many beautiful lakes and forests that people talk about with such glowing affinity. As if they are a part of their identity. I have never heard this about a swamp, though I have heard of them being drained, often for the creation of farmland. A swamp is something that you walk around. The moose seem to like it there, as do the mosquitoes and the cloudberries. A swamp grass grows on the edges that is said to be an aphrodisiac. In the autumn it has fluffy seed pods that stand out like little flames at dusk, in the winter their stalks stick up above the snow, still showing the swamp-way.

Why am I telling you about this, why now?

In my research, I discovered that the fertile crescent was a swamp. The fertile crescent is often talked about in eco-criticism as the beginning of the ecological crisis, the point where progress overtook and self-destruction became the end game. I don’t know where to go with this, except to say that the tarot card that I keep pulling is Temperance: an image of a state of ongoing abundance wrought through self restraint. I don’t think all the world’s problems can be traced to one point in history (a linear take, a progress-tale), but I do think it is worthwhile to love a place in a way that favours its continuation.

This thesis is about relation. I don’t think that there can be relation without place. I made a metaphorical swamp the place, but looking back I fear I wrote about these things as if they were floating in a void. In some ways, in Finland, I feel like I am floating, on a spaceship.

I am telling you this now, about the badlands, and about the swamp, about the floating, as the thing I maybe overlooked in all of this, that also underlies it. Not as a way forward, but as a little hole, looping back towards itself. A circle and a space.

I draw a circle from that space.