Flood, But Joy

For my birthday, my studio neighbors wrote me poems. Here are two:

1
Neighbor, neighbor yes
swim across refuse ocean
to give me a hug.


2
though I joke and kid
constant-fucking-ly
I admire your perspective
what IS happening?
Go the long distance
Push through the manufactured
lime green gelatin
Go on, fight your past
recycle recyling
Bust on the bougie
Or wrestle schrageese
collect your feces
stick'm in a jar
or whatever you do do
and stick it to the earth
oh yeah, don't forget
senior project april 12th
first things first of course




The building flooded saturday while I was in the city. I packed up fast and took the next train back. For three hours, in the car, on the train, at the station, a car again, the shuttle home, I shook and waited as my friends called with updates.
the main room is covered. we're going to get sand bags,
our studios are flooded, we want to keep yours dry.
we're building a damn to protect your newspaper
we've made a holding structure so the wall won't fall if it gets wet
can we use all your old clothing to mop up water?
It looks bad, we've done the best we can do.
we're leaving, they say its dangerous
don't come here alone...the electricity...its dangerous.
don't bother coming back, if you've left yet. whats done is done.

I felt, at the time, like this happened because I left it. If this space is my fears and thinking made physical, than I am not allowed to leave it, now, until it is complete. I felt pulled back here, on the train up the hudson, holding back tears.
When I finally got home I curled up on my bed and sobbed. I could not articulate what for. I return here with a sense of finality- this is the final month, the final moment of intensity. Today I look around and I kind of hate it in here, and yet I'm stuck with what I'm doing. I feel so engulfed. The flooding, of course, is not an event outside the projects, the flood is the project. It is a stress that affects my and my peer's work here logistically and emotionally, but that only exists as a physical reality within this building.

The flood affected me so deeply because I am committed to this room with the full intensity of my fears for my planet. This is not a logical transfer. Valuing this art project so highly makes me disconnect from the rest of reality. I'm kind of a zombie, lately; I answer 'how are you?' with 'my project is great'. Rather than be an actor in the world, I am mostly retreated in to internal battles. This experience is a privilege I doubt I would see myself as entitled to, had I any way to assess such things. No, I am not contributing to solutions for the world or coming up with a plan of action for myself to do within it, but I am testing the approaches I have already invented, cultivating intensity, building a lump in my stomach that will stay forever, I think- certainly will stay once I take this room apart. I believe this lump is valuable, even though it exists because of gross privilege. For now, it is the best I can do.

Like this project, the flood is ecologicaly caused and symbolically loaded. Why does a building flood? Because of how it is built, where it stands, how the town is layed out; the roads, the pavement, the run-off, the plumbing and the slowly growing chance of heavy rains as the planet warms. Our building is in a valley. The assisted living complex built next door this summer was propped up on artificially high grounds so that it would not flood. This must mean more water comes here. They have parking lots, meaning more nearby land that does not absorb rain. Was the sewage system around here expanded to accommidate this new run-off? Where does water from this town go? There is a cement loading dock, much like a half-sunk swimming pool, right next to our studio building. Both times it has flooded here (last time, my studio stayed dry, and so, like any selfish person, I was not shaken up that it had happened) , the pool has filled up and water has come in. There is a drain in front of the building, and the studios flooded so badly this week because there was a tree trunk stuck in the drain. Accidents happen in man-made spaces because we design them as if they are not a part of nature. My studio flooded because this building, this town, towns everywhere, are not in compliance with the eco-system they sit within.

But indicative of the whole project, the trauma that comes out of this flood is a highly privileged one. I can choose to to feel ripped apart by the thought of water toppling my newspaper wall because I could get that call on my cell phone, could ask my parents for cash so I could run right to the train, could go curl up in my warm (unflooded) bed and indulge in despair despite the fact that I am amidst an embarrassment of riches. When I arrived home I was greeted by my three housemates and a warm meal. Even though I piss them off with this self-obsessed project, they are devoted friends, all empathy and their presence unclenches my stomach enough to go to sleep.

In the studio the next morning, things looked more normal than I had expected. There were some puddles but much more remained untouched. I cringed as, inspecting the building, my mind turned to new orleans. I thought about how, gutting houses after the flood, things only sometimes looked as damaged as they were. Water immediately ruins some things, damaged others only when left to soack and mold for months (as was often the case in new orleans), and sometimes has very little effect at all. Here, without the problem of mold, objects were alternately destroyed or fine...within a few hours we could pile up the destroyed things and carry on, stepping over the puddles that were too small to bother pumping out.

How fucked up that that disaster can be, for me, a character building volunteer trip that I instinctivly evoke when I experience water damage. How do I apply my understanding of real and terrible as a hurricane in to something as ultimately trivial as my sculpture project? This is exactly why my senior project is symbolically complicated. I convince myself that this is okay, at least for the year, because I believe that making art is an act of self-education, and that because of this project I will be better equipt emotionally, intellectually, physically, creativy for a world in which I believe real trauma (that does not end when the drain is unclogged) is everywhere, and will get worse in my lifetime.

Because of the damn my studio mates built out of my old clothing, the parts of my studio that would have really suffered from flooding stayed entirely dry. I took all the clothing to the laundrimat and so now, two days later, everything is back to normal in here. This would seem to symbolize that technical know-how, ingunuity co-operation and a little hard work will pull us through ecological crisis without much pain. As Global Warming increasingly becomes a buzz word in the media and politics, more and more people are banking on this to be true, and using Faith in Human Ingenuity as a rational to stay calm about global warming. I have major doubts, but I hope they're right. Applying this logic to my experience with our little flood, the fact that it all worked out okay would be evidence that there is no need to get so freaked out in the future, and that maybe I should have stayed in the city and dealt with the flood when I returned. The dominant wisdom in civilization is that events like floods are 'accidents' that we recover from and then return to our normal goings on. Ecological crisis is starting to factor in to our conception of every day life, but in a very calm fashion. Still we understand disaster and all the sadness that comes with it as outside of ecology, because once we accept that all disasters are ecological we'll have to start seeing our every day lives as a disaster, and our calm, rational, secular society is not emotionally equipt to do this.

If this year's work is an act of self-education for ecological crisis, then part of my work is transitioning to the mindset it requires- which means, understanding all of daily life as a crisis and not being afraid to feel this situation intensely.
Because this is a chosen intensity, it is awkward to negotiate- I end up prioritizing dumb stuff that's part of "the project" over important stuff thats not. My mother read this blog and told me she was worried. She recognized in my writing my obsessive tendencies (which is definitely a huge part of how I've ended up embracing an environmentalist mentality- I just have the personality for it) and asked me to assure her that I was still having fun, that parts of my life are still light-hearted, that I write only when I'm in a particularly worked up mood. And yes, this is true, mom...I still like, make jokes and take breaks and stuff.

However, I do not believe that reacting to the world with deliberate intensity is antithetical to feeling joy. The experiences of the flood and my friend's birthday poems affirm this. The damn they built means so much to me because of how physical my reaction was to not being there when the flood was happening. Their poems about me made me feel some success in my work- that they, like me, see our friendship, like everything, as all tangled up in the fear and problems we are facing as young people. Pushing through the manufactured lime green gelatin together, hugging across the ocean of refuse. I have the space and comfort in my life right now to make art that is exhausting, and I feel good about taking this experience as far as it will go. In more intensity there is more learning, and from learning comes joy.