Spectral Sites

By Teagan Dorsch

The Department of Unknowable Gestures

The Spectral Gesture Part I

“We let the dead veteran season for a year in the sun it could no longer use, and then on a crisp winter’s day we laid a newly filed saw to its bastioned base.

Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the saw cut, and accumulated on the snow before each kneeling sawyer. We sensed that these two piles of sawdust were something more than wood: that they were the integrated transect of a century; that our saw was biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.”

- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

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Consider the Middle. The middle of time, The middle of this book, the middling of spatiality.

The act of Middl(ing) our relationship with veteran trees. A multiplicity of middles reacting to a singlecenter - Veteran Tree ecologies in Abney Park. If we turn our heads and look behind us, we see into the past. The history of Abney is curated into marks, traces, and memories archived by the trees and land.

Looking forward we see future events that haven’t unfolded yet - lined up to fall like dominoes – but how this tragedy ends is determined by our actions now, written like a play. The future is populated by unmade specters - offering judgment and requesting justice from the middle. The past is filled with spectral events that have written the start of this drama. The stage has been built and the actors and artifacts are already in motion. The final act is already written decomposition and an earthly return will befall the veteran trees - allowing the cycle of life and death to continue. But how the flora and fauna get there and the rate at which Abney decays and is reborn is 20

affected by our actions leading up to this final act.

For this reason, our department joins this play from the middle – present-day Abney – surrounded by phantoms on all sides. We choose to conjure these phantoms, to converse with them, as a model of ecological notation - or through the science of gestural diagrammatology5 – to help us learn our role, as actors, we are in this tragedy.

Like with other actors we will require consultants to help us prepare for the role. The Departments’s first consultant is Dr. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy - who offers us succinct entry into thinking through the diagrammatic qualities of ecological notation that the specters are applied to. We then will pick up advice from Jaques Derrida who guides us in the art of spectral conversations and provide a history of spectrality. Other consultants will pop in and out – dis-jointed from linear time – becoming spectral footnotes building out our diagram of ecological notation.

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Dr. Mellamphy proposes an idea of ecological notation through her analysis of Dune - the science fiction series by Frank Herbert. She firstly describes the method of a planetary ecology as being the tracking of movement, material, and others, across landscapes – this means that planetary ecology is not only a logical and grammatical science; but a diagrammatical science aimed at charting these movements through the landscape6. What is necessary then is adjusting the scalar component of planetary thinking to apply it to the worlds of veteran trees of Abney.

By doing so the concept of ‘planetary’ becomes radically localized when positioning our role concerning the perspectives of the wholly other actors and specters of the tree. Take for exam-ple the ‘world’ to a brown-lipped snail found on a tree in Abney. It is radically different from the ‘world’ of the human – both pre- and post-globalization of material, travel, and infor-mation. The brown-lipped snail may spend its life cycle within Abney Park, or a relatively local area. This re-localization of the concepts of ‘world’ proposes a gesture of micro-movement within our budding diagram of ecological notation. It proposes 22

a vernacularization of the phan-toms we speak with ecologically and of our theatrical emoting for our part in this drama.

“The gestural framework of [an] ecological notation—its ‘hook-like’ mechanism—is what enables this science to track (i.e. localize), translate (i.e. decompose) components, so as to identify and manipulate mechanisms of activity and transcribe movement across landscapes. “Ecological notation” or gestural diagrammatology thus becomes an interventionist science as well as the normative basis for the cultural transmission of “ecological literacy” […]”7

This gestural diagram becomes the internal notes we develop that influence how we understand making decisions that will alter the immediate ecology and subsequent trajectory of the future ecological system. The goal of this growing ecological notation, rooted in spectrality, is to explore the complex relationships, respect, and justice that need to be considered as we make ecologically influencing 23

decisions. In speaking with the futures that are unmade and pasts that haunt the site we develop greater responsibility with the other and their actions.

But who are the other actors in the production? Who, or what, are the specters that we all share this stage with?

It becomes necessary to situate the specter in and of themselves, before applying them to our ecological notation. This investigation of the persistent presence of past events as ghosts and hauntings found its rebirth in the humanities and cultural theory work of the early 1990’s – notably through Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx and in the psychoanalytical work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The cultural relevance of ghosts has a long-standing tradition in the works from the London Gothic to the rise in popularity of ghosts stories to Séance.

Our interest, however, is specifically in a reading of spectrality and ghosts as a palimpsest of past and future events entangling the present that refuses to stay isolated and rooted in time, offering ethical agency, and demanding responsible engagement.

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“It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.”8

The specters themselves create zones of relationships and references that our diagram of ecological notation becomes built within. In speaking with the absolute alterity, the phantom is a presence that watches us without us being able to meet its gaze.

Derrida termed this the ‘visor effect’ of the specters.

The visor effect presents the visible invisibility of the specters whose absolute inspection is felt without reciprocity back from us being watched.

“Let’s say that our relation to … the gaze of the other, implies a kind of spectrality. Respect for the alterity of the other dictates respect for the ghost and, therefore, for the non-living, for what it’s possible is 25

not alive. Not dead, but not living.”9

The specter, dis-jointed from time, marks its presence through its absence in advance . The mourning of subjects not made yet, or one already lost, brings in its absence a mode of ecological logic over the present.

By examining spectral event, or event that results in a trajectory shift of the ecological system, an eco(logic) al notation that, inherent to itself, ask for justice and respect for the other develops. Differentiating itself from the mark or trace doesn’t inherently lead to a gestural change. Deep reading of spectral events and 26

an ecological notation may present us with a logic to localize the trajectory of our actions and the justice deserved for the present and not present others.

At this point in our preparation for our role, we should turn our focus back into the past and unlock what the archival gesture of Abney Park can offer. It is time to visit the stage and explore its construction.

Investigating the geological makeup and spatial and ecological instability of this tragedy of (terra)Abney.

Existing not only as a ghost of the past, uprooted from time. It is time to investigate what led to the trajectory of the opening.

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The Geological Gesture Part II

“Just because the dead no longer exist does not mean that we are done with specters. On the contrary.

Mourning and haunting are unleashed at this moment. They are unleashed before death itself, out of the mere possibility of death, that is to say, of the trace, which comes into being as immediate survival – and as “televised.””

- Jacques Derrida, Spectrographies

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We may just be joining in the middle of the tragedy, but Abney Park has been in flux for years before our understanding of it. The stage has been set and the play in motion for some time now. Let us pause for a moment to converse with the historic phantoms that develop the stage that this performance plays out - looking deeper into the situations that previously occupied the site and the original actors that began this play. In doing so the historic spectral gesture will start to bring depth to the soil of our ecological notation. Depth that we hope to understand a future 6

of just acts through.

To look backwards, we start by peering downwards. Digging into the archive that envelops this tragedy, but we also will dig through the geological layers of the earth that formed this site. Digging through (terra)Abney, the Abney Park before human intervention. (terra)Abney’s soil is a special archive made of a rich past that was the perfect make-up to support the imported flora and material matter later brought to Abney.

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The boring machine whirls up beginning to drill into the ground just outside the border of Abney.

It’s late April. A cool morning dew envelops London as the equipment begins to drive through the earth. The first three meters pass – taking us from today through layers of made ground from the previous century of construction. These layers of brown clay and occasional rubble contain the history of development in Stoke Newington - pierced through in mere hours.

The workers continue to unspool cable as the chisel cuts through the years. Now cutting through epochs – through the Holocene, the Pliocene, and into the Eocene.

The dirt around the hole begins to fill with layers of brown and grey London clay formed during the Eocene. As the machine continues to bore down, it cuts through tropical flora remains1 petrified out of time. Crystallized from a millennium ago these specters bring us into the lost ecologies that dominated this part of the earth.

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A circle is made on the ground near Abney.

But in those 150 millimeters, roughly 50 million years of geological history explodes outwards.

Just 15 meters down and the machine has reached the end of its testing depth for this site. The equipment whines as it is thrown into reverse and the chisel jumps forward in time before it is pulled from the hole, checked for repairs, and taken to its next site.

While the surface appears unchanged the spectral layers conjured by this sample have awoken a previous drama with different actors, artifacts, and stages. An ecological notation of plants untouched by human actions.2 Inscribed deep under the surface.

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Exploring specifically the spatial flux of Abney Park, the archive awakens several persistent phantoms that continue to influence our tragedy. Abney first began separated, divided, into two estates – Fleetwood and Abney. Two distinct estates found commonality through Dr. Isaac Watts. Working as a private tutor at the Fleetwood House Dr. Watts would come to live in, and later die, in Abney Hall. His spectral presence continues to stroll the Great and Little Elm Walks that direct the main axis of the burial chapel.

Abney Park was legally combined in 1827 and by the 1840s became designated as one of the seven new private cemeteries within London designed to help with overcrowding of other burial grounds.

Becoming Abney Park Cemetery.

Abney Park Cemetery became the foremost 10

burial site for non-conformists - with Isaac Watts’ association as a notable non-conformist, and the constitution of the Abney Park Cemetery Company that had no special Act of Parliament and no Episcopal consecration of the burial grounds3. As a gathering space of non-conformists - including many artists, abolitionists, and writers – many spectral images of Abney are recalled through its numerous representations within the literature that have been created.

Continuing to develop our role in this tragedy it is no surprise that we are not the main actor, but rather it’s a shared stage with countless important players. The story arc of this drama is driven by the interplay between these different actors. Each new improvisation and the unforeseen meeting between 11

the actors shift the tone and trajectory of the play. The entire first and second acts of our veteran trees have been written by phantoms we haven’t met. How will we help to write the end?

The transition of Abney Cemetery into a protected nature reserve in recent years, filled with diverse ecologically important species, remains influenced by its spectral past as an arboretum and natural education space. The original scheme for Abney’s flora contained 2,500 varieties – proposed by the horticultural establishment of the Loddiges family - would’ve finished in the 1840s with the cemetery’s opening.

Due to numerous fires and neglect over the years few trees originally planted by the Loddiges nursery remain. Even the veteran trees we speak with now were rooted years after the Loddiges nursery’s influence.

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‘Tree’ 1890’s, the year our narrators moved into Abney Park. Planted as a sapling or older the trees already recorded years of the world around them.

A Populus x canadensis Serotina bore witness to the derelict and mistreatment of Abney Park's ecology.

Recording in their wood low points in environmental history and air quality across London.

1960’s, Only one species of lichen remains in the trees of London. Suffocated out by rising pollution.

Vegetal canaries sounding the alarm of an ecological collapse. Their absence was written into the bark of trees.

But what is the archive of a tree?

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The botanical definition of ‘tree’ is “a plant with a more or less permanent shoot system that is supported by a single trunk of wood”4. The 'tree' understood as a biological plant. A simplified definition that does not interrogate the spectral gestures of a tree. The phenomenal and non-phenomenal diagrams also attribute to the meaning of a tree. A deep reading of ‘tree’.

The Ivy that blankets Abney only sees a tree as a structure that supports its upward climb. A vertical force for it to grow closer to the sun.

Whereas the animals and insects find a home in the old cracked tree. Habitat and shelter, providing safety from predators and weather.

And the veteran tree, the tree may reflect on itself as the witness of the land. Standing guard. Recording storms in its broken branches, fires and lightning strikes in its charred bark, and seasonal rain archived in its growth rings. A storyteller of time.

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The spatial and ecological transition of (terra)Abney into its calculated and present form speaks to a series of decisions continually made in the past. Decisions that continue to haunt the present conditions of Abney. Decisions that ask for justice and respect to their spectral presence; need to be conjured 16

and conversed with, in the ecological notation of Abney Park, to figure out our role in the tragedy of this play. In the opening acts of the veteran trees, a clear problem emerges. The problem of a species, a new actor, that does not know how to act or make choices, as ecologically influencing creatures.

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Gestures of Veteran Status Part III

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past ... The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise ... The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward [...]”

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History IX

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Looking forward from the middle specters populate the unmade futures of Abney. We have worked to understand the specters of the history and first few acts of this drama. And now we must look ahead of us and begin to grow our ecological notation of the current and future phantoms we are sharing this out stage with. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History – as much as we would hope to turn around and fix the wreckage of the past, we are propelled forward and so we must work to limit the scale of this tragedy by engaging with the specters now.

As we have understood from historic specters, the past transition of (terra)Abney into Abney Park Cemetery is filled with consistent decisions made that radically reoriented the ecologies present in Abney.

Decisions made by visitors unaware of their power in changing ecological systems. These actions are what have brought us and these veteran trees together in the middle. And while there is no benefit in hoping to change, or exorcise, the past phantoms they should be spoken with alongside the unborn phantoms of the future. In this, the development of an ecological 30

notation grounded by the specters can hope to bring justice and respect to the phantoms that haunt the veteran trees of Abney.

Joining this drama in the middle of the play, as we have, the veteran trees have already recorded over a century of phenomena that have altered them and Abney Park. These trees are full of marks, traces, and spectral events to be read from different ecological interventions. Some interventions are by natural processes, and others by our hands – whether intentional or not. Each of these spectral events becomes a remnant that speaks of alterations to the ecological system with and around the veteran tree.

There are different gestures of trajectory shifts that become apparent on the surface of the trees.

Fire has held a big role in this drama of our veteran tree’s life. Fire and wind have scorched some of Abney multiples times - radically reorienting the shape and ecology present in the trees' layer of bark. While wind has ripped the branches from other trees, leaving scars through their absence.

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“The only way that the solid can initialize its architectonic and compositional activities (pro-cesses for survival, development, etc.) is by letting-in the void. The dynamic traits of solid can only be actuated when the solid is eaten, convoluted and messed-up by the void.”

Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia

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A bright flash of white…

Boom!

A fire has started in Abney Park. A strike of lightning will come to engulf the tree and nearby chapel. As the storm rages on the fires eventually go out. Leaving behind charred bark that will eventually scar over inviting new insects and animals to inhabit the tree.

Life begins anew.

A group gathers in Abney Cemetery, A fire is lit in hopes to stay warm behind the chapel.

A fire started against a tree for warmth and light, grows out of control in Abney. The same tree that was once ravaged by lightning becomes charred again. New wounds open, that will re-main in remembrance of this evening. As time passes those wounds become homes. As those homes are occupied, new ecologies become supported by this tree. This veteran tree.

Life begins anew.

A storm sits over Abney.

Crack!

Wind rushes through the branches. Snagging on some and taking them with it as it marches across Abney. Larges limbs splinter and fall to the ground with a crash. Fresh wood is exposed in the void of a tree. As the winds subside and time passes that cavity becomes a home. Filled with passing birds and squirrels.

Life begins anew.

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Not every specter that is rapidly populating Abney right now is the result of damage. Other actions happen in the immediate future that is set to reorient the ecological system of the veteran trees. These are gestures of maintenance that offer a model of care for our ex-panding ecological notation.

Maintenance is carried throughout Abney Park Nature Reserve - especially on veteran trees based on practices that are thought, at this moment in ecological research, to prolong and improve the flora and fauna of Abney. Large joint acts of maintenance are done in Abney, such as targeted removal of invasive non-native plants. Other actions are targeted to specific trees; wood chips have been introduced into the soil encasing the roots to encourage worms to aerate the soil under veteran trees improving the health of the root system.

A different forestry practice is commonly altering the tree crowns is the act of pollarding.

Pollarding is a form of forestry management that removes the top of the tree stem, several meters above the ground, to encourage multiple new top shoots and an expanded tree crown.10 Other veteran trees 36

in Abney have been pollarded to reduce the weight on the aging trunk, or from fire damage, to prevent a collapse.

The ecological notation of conjuring specters that result from damage and maintenance intervention develops a notation of material instability. But instability, that when it is altered by storms or acts of care, does not destroy the ecological system; but reorients the ecology into new forms of life and growth. Creating adaptable ecological instability. This is the current trajectory of our actions as ecologically acting humans in the tragedy within Abney Park.

As we, in The Department of Unknowable Gestures, continue to look forward – peering into possible stories and events leading into the final act of the veteran trees– we must begin to consider the specters that populate unmade futures. The phantoms of those that are not yet born or events that have not happened yet.

Our actions, in recording and representing these two veteran trees, have brought forth and conjured their phantoms of eventual death and decomposition at the end of their lifecycle.

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“Furthermore, because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here.”11

It is important that when we speak with and consider the gestures of death and decomposition, we do not mourn the loss of these trees but rather mourn the actions that brought this state of non-life in disastrous ways. The act of death and the state of dead and decaying wood are important acts in this tragedy.

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As I grow weary of sunlight and rain I will pass peacefully In Abney, I can rest; My wood, Continues to support new life In Abney, I can rest;

The fungi will return me to the earth An explosion of growth awaits In Abney, I can rest;

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In speaking with these gestures of death and decay we must also speak with the phantoms that haunt Abney from a tragic future. An unmade trajectory in which no mode of care was brought into how we acted as an ecologically influencing species.

We then look towards Lukáš Likačvan’s concept of ‘Spectral Earth’12 to frame this responsibility to the past and the not yet made futures more darkly.

Spectral Earth conceives of environmental mourning 42

as a tool to grasp the extent of a possible biodiversity collapse. “The spectres of extinct species populate at increasing rates the shadow realm of Spectral Earth, the world of lost species. This work of mourning can resemble care for those passing away […]”13 This spectral earth offers a mode of environmental mourning that is not rooted to the human but conceives of a mode of mourning the other.

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This scale of mourning the non-present living and non-living others, in relation to the specters of damage and maintenance must be engaged with to situate the trajectory of our actions and the justice deserved for the other in a deeper context. The ecological notation of material instability and ecological reorientation presents a diagram of how ecologies fluctuate in response to outside stimuli – whether it is a new ecology that regrows after a fire or growth of a tree after it has been pollarded.

The thought experiment of spectrality, the act of speaking to and with the vernacular phantoms of a particular site and its events, presents a novel mode of ecological notation that begins to incorporate the particularities of 44

how events influence, destabilize, and reorient ecological systems through this focus of veteran trees. It is necessary to address how our actions alter ecologies through this form of ecological notation. This formation of heightened ecological literacy asks for justice and respect of the other by speaking to the wake of specters that are populating around us in place of attempting to exorcise them and blindly continue the path of wreckage. The spectral eco-notation asks for a slowing down and consideration of localizing our environmental actions disjointed from time but in a deeper vernacular context.

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Endnotes

1 “London’s Geology,” London Geodiversity Partnership, http://londongeopartnership.org. uk/londons-geology/.

2 “Page 2: Borehole TQ38NW523: Borehole Logs,” Page 2 | Borehole TQ38NW523 | Borehole Logs, http://scans.bgs.ac.uk/sobi_scans/ boreholes/846297/images/12520385.html.

3 Paul Joyce, A Guide to Abney Park Cemetery (London: Abney Park Cemetery Trust, 1994), 39.

4 “Tree Biology,” Royal Forestry Society, March 31, 2021, https://rfs.org.uk/learning/colleges-anduniversities/fkh/tree-biology/.

5 Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Terra-&Terror Ecology: Secrets from The Arrakeen Underground,” Design Ecologies 3, no. 1 (January 2013): pp. 66-91, https://doi.org/10.1386/ des.3.1.66_1, 74.

6 Mellamphy, Terra-&-Terror Ecology, 70 7 Mellamphy, Terra-&-Terror Ecology, 74

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Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 2011), xviii.

9 Jaques Derrida del et al., “The Spectral Turn,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 37-51, 42.

10 “Pollarding,” Pollarding, https://www. heritagearboriculture.co.uk/tree-pruning/ pollarding/.

11 Jaques Derrida del et al., “The Spectral Turn,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 37-51, 38.

12 Lukáš Likavčan credits its inspiration loosely around Quenntin Meillassoux’s Spectral Dilemma and Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet.

13 Lukáš Likavčan, 2019, Introduction to Comparative Planetology. Strelka Press, 87.

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Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge, 2011.

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Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas. “Terra-&-Terror Ecology: Secrets from The Arrakeen Underground.” Design Ecologies 3, no. 1 (2013): 66–91. https://doi.org/10.1386/des.3.1.66_1.

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Page 2 | Borehole TQ38NW523 | Borehole Logs. http://scans.bgs.ac.uk/sobi_scans/ boreholes/846297/images/12520385.html.

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Pollarding. https://www.heritagearboriculture.co.uk/ tree-pruning/pollarding/.

“Tree Biology.” Royal Forestry Society, March 31, 2021. https://rfs.org.uk/learning/colleges-anduniversities/fkh/tree-biology/.

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Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous 50

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