1 Catkin Carpet

Abandoning progress rhythms to watch polyphonic assemblages is not a matter of virtuous desire. Progress felt great; there was always something better ahead. Progress gave us the ‘progressive’ political causes with which I grew up. I hardly know how to think about justice without progress. The problem is that progress stopped making sense. More and more of us looked up one day and realized that the emperor had no clothes. It is in this dilemma that new tools for noticing seem so important. Indeed, life on earth seems at stake.

— Anna Tsing (2014, p. 24)

Each year in early March the wintery frost begins to disappear; the days instead slowly warming, bringing with them the promise of spring. Daffodils bloom and the flamingo willow turns a buttery pink, as tufts of green peak amongst the paving slabs. A great emergence happens in our garden in March; the symphony of colours marking the end of a long voyage of dismal days, offering a relief with a magnitude comparable to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic adventures.

The indulgence of petals, blossoms and the chatter of sunlight continues for a few weeks, washings finally hung outside, and coffees drank on the doorstep.

But every year, without fail, the joy of spring in the garden is bought to a grinding halt. Sitting snuggly along the fence line, our neighbours Aspen looms tall with its dangling branches and silvery trunk. In the third week of March, give or take a few days, it begins to develop these greyish fury entities, that hang precariously from above. They are long and thin, with a feather like texture; wriggling in the wind, my brothers and I used to call them the ‘slugs of the sky.’ These curious things are catkins; ‘a branch with leaves and flowers, that have been condensed down into a small flexible dangling branch, a perfectly adapted way of getting pollen into the wind. Without the need to attract insects or other animals, they are devoid of bright petals, nectar and scent, insignificant and plain (Thomas, 2014, p. 168).

As the catkins form, numbers build on the branches and the tree becomes enveloped in a fury skin. My mother used to stand at the back of the house, scowling at the tree, remarking on their hideous character, threatening to chop the Aspen down, for the sight is so ghastly each year. With a few gusts of wind, the catkins made their way onto the ground, falling gracefully as they twirled with their grey wings. Landing on the lawn, a catkin carpet forms.

In my mother’s eyes, the catkins sit low in the garden hierarchy… even perhaps on the same level as the pests of nature; the pigeons, squirrels, ravens, and foxes. Unlike a rose or a tulip, the catkin can’t offer beauty or a sweet scent; they have no sensory pleasure and litter the garden grey. Yet, the catkins are really no different to any other flower, they follow the same structure, just condensed into a small flexible dangling branch. The Aspen catkin is ‘made up of s series of scales or bracts below which nestle tree flowers, each with two deeply divided stamens. The remains of the perianth are there but very small and insignificant’ (Thomas, 2014, p. 168). As wind pollinators, Aspen’s are much more efficient than insect pollinating plants, the pollen able to travel wider without the restriction of relying on another species for transit. The pollen is smaller than insect pollinated plants, helping it to travel through the air – ‘the pollen grains start with a negative charge on the anther but acquire a strong positive charge as they fly though the air, and the female flowers have a negative charge, which helps pluck pollen electrostatically from the streamlining air.’ (Thomas, 2014, p. 178).

The complexities of the catkin and their essential role in the

10 Composting is so hot growth of new trees, which ultimately produces the oxygen we need to breathe, are undermined, and diminished to the level of a nuisance, as we see them so singularly as an unattractive weed-like plant. In a world constructed under capitalism, to the human, the catkin has no value (Tsing, 2015, p. 23). They do not offer an opportunity for progress, they cannot make the economy grow or make us more productive, they won’t advance technology or enable faster communication – the catkin cannot be sold or traded, for they are not beautiful enough to sit in a garden centre nor permanent enough to be handed out like seeds.

In her book ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ Anna Tsing (2015) attempts to position the reader to imagine a world outside the structures of capitalism, in which the ‘driving beat of progress’ is taken away. If we were to really look, listen, smell, and touch the catkin, we might notice its intricacies and intrinsic importance to the world it sits within; beyond the need of it having ‘economic value.’ Tsing (2015, p. 21) says:

Progress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns and geographies of expansion. Within a given species too, there are multiple time-making projects as organism enlist each other and coordinate time-making landscapes.

As the Aspen catkins fall to the ground each spring, it is a silent reminder of the yearly cycle of regrowth, pollination, and seasonal shifts, marking a cyclical rhythm outside of the standard acceleration forwards; the work of the tree and all the actors involved are unveiled; the sun, the rain, the soil, the fertilising plants, the insects and animals. Anna Tsing (2015, p. 75) tells us that rather than seeing these non-human things as isolated elements, we must instead understand them as assemblages; since everything, human and non-human, is wholly interconnected forming the complex and fragile ‘web of life.’ These assemblages could be conceived as polyphonic assemblages, comparable to the dense and complex music of the baroque.

Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine…. when I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage.

(Tsing, 2015, p. 23)

The catkin is a part of a large polyphonic assemblage of all the things that let it grow, and all the things it pollinates as it drifts in the wind, away from our garden. Despite my mother labelling the catkins as ugly nuisances and capitalism telling us they have no monetary value; the role the catkin plays in the balance of the ecological system is as important as the flute in a baroque polyphony. The catkin is perhaps a lesson in engaging in the ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 18) as a way to counter and reconstruct the constant drive for progress that is thrust upon us; a way to re-situate ourselves as a part of nature, opposed to separate from it. The catkin tells us that nature does not need to be beautiful or productive because nature is simply not here to serve us; it is a part of us and we are a part of it.

12 Composting is so hot

Buildings and Permanence

The mound builds up precisely because the material of which it is made is continually falling down.

— Tim Ingold (2013, p75) past decisions in today’s world maquina do mundo

Hill House, Helensburgh was designed and built by Charles and Margaret Mackintosh in 1902. It now stands superseded by another building, a waterproof box which allows the perishing external finish to dry out gradually.

A potter’s gardening shed on the Isles of Scilly comprises the layering of material and forms designed over decades of alteration. It stands now as a glass box resting on a stone plinth, repaired in places with damaged concrete.

Buildings loom over and persist beyond us. They have the perfect memory of materiality. When we deal with buildings we deal with decisions taken long ago for remote reasons. We argue with anonymous predecessors and lose. The best we can hope for is compromise with the fait accompli of the building. The whole idea of architecture is permanence (Brand, 1994, p. 2).

In Laura Vinci’s artwork, ‘Maquina do Mundo’ (‘The Machine of the World,’ Vinci, L., 2005) a conveyor belt moves ground white marble between two heaps. Two representative monuments are created, on the one hand typical of the lavish material she chooses, but also similar to those we consider far more ephemeral. The movement of grains on the surface of each mound is seen at a close scale, but invisible a few steps back. Observing steadiness at a distance, closer inspection reveals the reality - constant alteration.

Buildings do nothing but change. Yet, we have developed a perception towards these monuments which embodies permanence and an attitude to building which demands a corresponding approach. In 1994, Stewart Brand documented our losing battle with the temporality of our own architectures and two years later, Pallasmaa (1996) refuted further the ‘ageless perfection’ (p. 34) that he saw manifest in modernism.

The relative insignificance of our built environment has also been observed by numerous authors (Koolhaas, 1995; Krier, 2009), who ask questions around the relation to its dwarfing environmental context. Do these monuments of which it comprises really change? These layered artefacts developing at a rate intangible to us have been rendered our most protective invention. Immediately ineffected by the weathering of our time, they surely endure a far greater permanence than the shifting mounds in Laura Vinci’s ‘Maquina do Mundo’ . We are aware of ongoing alteration in the design of our buildings, but a comparison to these ephemeral artefacts appears incompatible. Might examining their existence in the world of an alternative ‘us’ reveal a condition which could alter this perception?

the artificial and perception: learning from ants

In ‘Making’ (2013), Tim Ingold refers to a nest made by forest ants, using it to illustrate that ‘the earth is not the solid and pre-existing substrate that the edifice builder takes it to be.’ (p. 77)

Confining us firmly to our own biosemiotic realm, Ingold appropriates the ant’s nest as an extension of the earth, and it is

14 Composting is so hot our temporal perception of stability and endurance that is the cause of this appropriation. To us, built up of only weakly bound soil compressed only by its own weight, the small mound could be kicked down in one movement. For an ant, months, even years, of work culminate to produce a nest that houses hundreds of thousands.

To an ant, irrespective of the duration of their ‘moment’ (Uexkull, 1957), their perception of the nest is fundamentally different. Whilst no investigation has determined the comparative motor processes of ants, the ability of ants to conduct their domestic activities within an area equal to the size of a laptop track pad, accurately adjusting their speed between the limits of 0.0001 mms-1 and 5mms-1 (Gallotti, R., Chialvo, D. R., 2018), is evidence enough that their visual receptor (and therefore other sense modalities (Uexkull, 1957, p. 29)) reach far beyond the resolution of ours.

Where we see an ants nest as an extension of the earth, ants percieve their artificial. But, to refute their status as natural, and establish them ‘artificial’ (as Ingold does not) is a rewarding provocation. Is our perception of the artificial limited to the products of our own species’ input? If we approach this problem from an etymological perspective, an investigation into our own term ‘artificial’ provides an interesting result.

The earliest recorded use of the word refers to our appropriation of half the diurnal cycle into a whole human ‘day,’ the ‘artificial day.’ Important in this case is our perceptual imposition of the ‘day’ onto a phenomena that already exists as ‘the diurnal cycle.’ To render this artifical, therefore, is not to change the substance of the thing, but to alter the perception it. If, however, we accept our biosemiotic fate and designate the products of all other living beings ‘artificial’ (the ants nest becomes ‘the pile of earth’ for example, appropriating their nest into an insignificant function of our being), the result is not what we might imagine.

If we can percieve/confuse so readily the products of other species’ as a function of our world, how might our labours appear in the worlds of others?

16 Composting is so hot

In the explanation of his biosemiotic theory, Jakob von Uexküll utilises numerous case studies of creatures which, due to the time intervals of their motor processes, experience a different ‘Umwelt’ to the one that we as humans do. ‘In the snail’s world [for example,] a rod that oscillates four times per second has become stationary’ (Uexkull, 1957, p. 31). To enter an Umwelt that renders our monuments closer to piles of shifting marble we only have to imagine the world of the snail, a creature for which the speed of its motor processes is more than four times slower than our own. What creature would it take, then, amongst the steady mass of our built environment, to perceive our most permanent architectures the way we might see a potters shed? Certainly one that is present in our world.

To experience other Umwelts is made difficult by the constraints of our own motor processes, and imagining the full connotations of their differences is impossible. Exploring the implications of an alternative perceptual realm, however, is a grounding exercise. Do our most monumental buildings really stand more firmly than the potter’s shed? How much does the changing mass of our urban environment really differ from the shifting surfaces of Laura Vinci’s ‘Maquina do Mundo?’

Deliberately striking the heart of our most sentimental architectures, the mounds of white marble ask questions around the condition of these ‘permanent’ monuments. Some buildings outlive us as human individuals, but it is these very facts, consolidated by our anthropocentric guise that render this perception our reality.

But what else do we have? Should we look to supposed other worlds to base our worldly activities? Which Umwelt should we imagine to assume best practice for the activities of our being? Our world contains many other Umwelts after all.