Mud Canción

Mud Canción

Published in Gulf Coast (30.2)
Summer/Fall 2018
www.gulfcoastmag.org

Full text here.

(excerpt)

Let us imagine, for a moment, that two geographies that seem to have very little in common, can be linked by physical matter. That, despite their differences in latitude and longitude, in political history and language, that they might be bound (at least for an imagined instant) by something as subtle as the seasonal pattern of rain, as insidious as the unplanned sprawl of urban development, or as seemingly unremarkable as mud.

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We often describe the complexity of a political moment as a landscape. With this metaphor, we compare the act of surveying the many events and effects of politics to the act of overlooking a field or lake, of trying to make sense of the parameters of the earth that surrounds us. Indeed, in many cases, our uses of metaphor place the human body as the central object in an assessment of something ostensibly unrelated to (or at the very least outside of) our bodies. That is, in order to understand scale or movement or significance, we foreground the body, even in our imaginative linguistic structures. A political landscape is often described as being shaped, as shifting, or as being confronted, but in any case, it is often understood as a relationship between a body and a ground. Body and ground are, simultaneously, two of the most embattled sites in the current political landscape of the United States. The legislation of health care, the deportation of people, and the widespread effects of climate change made body and ground seem newly vulnerable in 2017. Hurricane Harvey only briefly registered in a news cycle of environmental disasters and human rights abuses. As Houston filled with water, the president of the United States pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff convicted for criminal contempt after refusing to cease his targeted detentions of Latinos. At the same time, the Mexican government organized trucks of food and supplies to be sent across the border to Houston. At the same time, "Dreamer" Alonso Guillen drove 100 miles to Houston with a boat to help with the rescue efforts; he and a friend drowned in the rapidly rising flood waters. These are political landscapes.

Let us extend the metaphor of the political landscape--the centering of body and ground--to one relationship, that characterized by ambiguity and dissolution and unknowing and antagonism, one perhaps best described by mud. An actual matter--mud is essentially broken-down stone or organic matter mixed with liquid--mud is also one of our most potent metaphors in English. When a relationship or concept is unclear, it is described as muddy. When angry language is used to hurt or to destroy someone's livelihood or reputation, it is called mud-slinging. When something is difficult or impossible to understand, we describe it as being clear as mud. Each of these metaphors take the body's physical relationship to mud--how it feels under our feet, in our hands, smeared across us--as a familiar category of experience.

Perhaps because we understand mud's ambiguous and often-changing material properties through touch, the matter often appears in creation narratives. Mud's thick relationship to life, its smell of death, its rich organic matter makes it a living material: humans shaped from clay come alive, and mud is the bed from which plant growth emerges. And yet, before we ascribe too much static strength to mud, remember that it also is endlessly unpredictable, moving, dissolving, drying out. The Maya K'iche origin tale, the Popol Vuh, tells the story of the gods unsuccessfully building a human from mud: "Thus there was another attempt to frame and shape man by the Framer and the Shaper... Of earth and mud was its flesh composed. But they saw that it was still not good. It merely came undone and crumbled. It merely became sodden and mushy. It merely fell apart and dissolved. Its head was not set apart properly. Its face could only look in one direction. Its face was hidden. Neither could it look about. At first it spoke, but without knowledge. Straightaway it would merely dissolve in water, for it was not strong." An experiment in building a human, the muddy prototype washes away in the rain, and so the shapers try wood and iron, before eventually developing a prototype from corn. This parable is especially interesting not because it describes the use of mud to make a living being, but also because mud fails. Its propensity for dissolution becomes a problem. The human made of mud comes undone, crumbles, is mushy.

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After the hurricane, we walk through Shreeve's home together. We talk about allowing a loved one to die, about sitting with a loved one as she passes away, of holding the house's hand, in a manner of speaking, as it transitions from its former life. We believe the house to be a living thing. We bring the house flowers and incense that I've carried with me from Guatemala. While we walk through the house, we find an old Polaroid photograph of Shreeve's daughter, the image buried in the bare floorboards, past and present dissolved in the stripped-down and saturated bones of the house. "She was so beautiful," Shreeve breathes, and she could be talking about her daughter or her house.

After the hurricane, I return to my family's century farm in rural Kansas, to make peace with the empty farmhouse and its memories and to drive through the familiar landscapes of the Middle West, the first time I have done so since the passing of my grandfather who farmed that land for over 70 years and passed away in March of last year. Driving those rolling fields with my grandfather, checking irrigation systems, watching wheat stubble burn, collecting ears of corn from the field near his house, these are the happiest memories I possess. I have deep, bodily-borne memories of the smell of earth after rain, the sting of rinsing ash out of my ears, the pungent scent of fertilizer raining over the fields, the sound of the CB radio communicating the delicate choreographies of harvest. I can imagine his face at seeing the precarious plots of corn growing along impossible volcanic mountainsides in rural Guatemala, and I ache for his earth-borne wisdom. In Guatemala, corn is also intimately tied to language and craft, is considered a living member of the family, lest you think it has nothing to do with the serious business of art writing, lest you think it remote from the concerns of art, lest you think these places irrelevantly unconnected. If we take mud, if we take corn, if we take our bodies and the earth as our subject for a critical writing practice about art, what might they allow--nay, encourage--us to say?

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This song is mostly about Houston and Guatemala City, but it touches on New Orleans and Los Angeles and rural Georgia and deep Kansas, and it moves across temporalities, from now to the 1970s and back again. It is anachronistic and amorphous and metaphoric and personal and a little bit hard to hold onto, a little bit musical, even if it jars.

This song is about mud and its afterlives, both material and metaphoric. It sings that mud reflects how we live alongside one another, even as it becomes unclear, even as our narratives unravel and we find ourselves in that in-between place, between life and work, between function and form, between landscapes of disaster and moments of despair, between institutionally accepted norms, between countries and communities and histories, however deeply intertwined they might be.

This song is about mud as disintegration, as a building material, as something that dissolves. It is about close personal contact, about shared living structures. It imagines an art and politics premised on touch, about bringing unlike things in contact with each other.

This song is an apologia for the fact that the personal is still, more than ever, political, critical, relevant, and inseparable from work. Its chorus is, unequivocally, that work is about bodies and earth. This song says: we inhabit specific political landscapes, and we do so together. This song is a wonky, cacophonous symphony of voices, and nothing is clear, and that is as it should be, and that is like life.

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