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ESSAYS January 27, 2016January 27, 2016

The Biography of Mount Hood

The Biography of Mount Hood, by Obi Kaufmann, published in Interact Magazine by Juniper Ridge >>> Click each image to enlarge

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OBI KAUFMANN
P.O. Box 3170
Oakland, CA 94609
1-925-951-7501
email: coyoteandthunder@gmail.com
@coyotethunder
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@coyotethunder
All living networks share the same adaptive cycle regardless of scale. New growth always evolves into mature forms of conservation within the system-body. This inevitably leads to the release of stored energy at the opposite side of the diagram from the generation of it. The decimation releases resources that makes way for the reorganization of those structures that define the function of the system itself and extend through time to both the beginning and the end of terrestrial life.
I was invited back to my high school today. After 27 years, I was surprised at how I vividly remembered every crease of the campus topography. I love that place (called the Athenian school, at the base of Mount Diablo, 30 miles east of San Francisco) and this experience was as transformative as it was surreal. I was invited to speak to two class: Environmental Science and Environmental Literature. Making a day of it, I lastly presented to the whole school assembled in the gym - the gym I played basketball in when I was twelve. Here is an edited piece of the presentation's introduction: "…Yesterday, I was you and tomorrow, you will be me. This place, you people, are in me and of me. We are connected by tissue perhaps now too subtle to grossly trace with our instruments of thumbs and ambition. I see in you a mirror. I see in you myself transformed. I see in you a better edition of me, upgraded and ready, able and prepared… Beyond lily pads where we once stood in mud and now before full bridges, ready to accept your weight and anticipate future roads. You are in that beautiful floating moment that I remember so clearly in all its grotesque wonder and its baroque fascination - the best time to grow, to think, to transform and to become something totally unknown. So now let me tell you about where I went with this thing - this gold I found everywhere - Let me tell you about the California Field Atlas…” I'll publish the rest soon enough. Thank you for the warm welcome, my dear school. I will see you again soon.
I have triangles piled on top of triangles that spiral down into functions that I am sure work into larger ecological models of how you and I should work to become and express our better selves in light and love, experiencing every corner of all this grand, living diversity in all its dimensions. And yet, all I ever had was one second to say I love you and you’re going to be ok.
The owl in roses. The petals in wine that fall from the wounds, kissed by bird-faced angels and blessed in the forest prince’s spring before dawn, each a word, a song-form whispered from the first days when all life’s systems were simple shadows of their present-day convolutions. Sour tonic, this memory of untouched circles in twilight before my claws. My renderings in sand shoveled into piles behind my heart, to protect and keep me young. No delicate wonder to precious to pass. The predator, free now, has always roosted at garden’s edge, watching us nap while we dream of the coming dirty flood followed by the clean fire.
Love sick since I was born into this green world, traded my blood for flowers and the vase-pump broken, spilled into the sea. Living ghosts prop up my stilted light-heart in the old-growth, leaving only my fingers working to stitch together the feathers before the frost stills them. The rivers of perfume trace maps back always to my mother’s eyes, and her mothers’ before that. My senses, the cutlery at this garden feast. Every morning, I wake at dawn in the Ice-age and in the evening, die in the lonely human-age.
Both beneath and above our stymied bookshelf of color perceptivity are deep systems of networked gardens where infinite ecologies spiral. In my science games, I employ data to feed the imagining of better aesthetic technologies of cartography and conservation; to see heaven-across-earth through the human din, restored. Knowing the butterfly sees the chemical paint on every flower petal, and that we share the same creative world is the fresh water I need to continue my work. (Photo of my paint box by @thisismaiphotography for @clutchmagazinejapan)
Color rules my work less and less. Not the vibrancy of it, but the tyranny of my own culture-based presumptions in its rendering. All life moves through a system of veiled rainbows and the pin holes I’m forced to push my experience of reality through, are woefully inadequate to catch its spectral, prismatic grace.
My study has always been love. Press me and I begin to murmur things like how my work is not science, but the subject of my work is data-driven biodiversity. I study patterns of habitat. To be more specific, I am a student of the beauty and history of biological evolution in morphological architecture and its application to fitness strategy across living systems. In my art and writing about ecology, I am more satisfied with the exploration of the best. most simple and elegant question than I am with any righteous, vocational answer. Where the #californiafieldatlas was a love story, these next books are becoming family albums.
We have to yell over the crashing waves. Everything is revealed forever along the cracked coast where we all live, under the lense of the sky, in the mirror of media we build around the noble gnarlage of our own, shared and liked condor faces. Resonant echoes in the seafoam space, this insta-reality between my darting, hungry eyes; even the incessant erosion is always beautiful, as are you. The subtle science of this system - between the eusociality of our hive-like, largely-altruistic mind and the longing in my heart to see your natural world, then working to reconcile the two, brings me here today. I trust that your courage and your love is all this world has ever needed.
It might be that the Field Atlas’ greatest success its singular presentation of California as the subject, perhaps even a symbolic metaphor, of and about my love for the natural world, and the blending of that effort with one that is at its core, data-driven. The Field Atlas works to integrate the humanities and the sciences on a geographic scale and that is the philosophical sphere of meaning. One of the most notable features of the Field Atlas is what it doesn’t feature: Humanity. There are towns and the occasional border, road, facility, et al. but they are mostly there for orientation, not for context. Humanity is a secondary character, analogous to a fire or a flood – a maker of scars that will heal across the land-body once the source of the infliction moves on. #californiafieldatlas
As I am now in the mad throws of writing my next books (you ain't seen nothing yet), I am always returning to the creative core of how the CALIFORNIA FIELD ATLAS works the way it does. From my latest essay on www.coyoteandthunder.com: "The Field Atlas cannot be separated from its art. If it were it would not be the Field Atlas. Ultimately, this work is literary contrivance, not a scientific one and there are two, primary reasons for this: one is the nature of consensus, and the other is the nature of invention. Where it might seem that an editor is like a peer-review, they are not. Scientists do not have the luxury of creative license. On a pure level, the scientist can only react to measured data, while the artist (or the Field Atlas author more specifically) is shielded by vocation to extrapolate whatever derivations work toward the harmonious execution of the piece."
Tomorrow, Friday afternoon, I’m being interviewed live at 2pm PST at KPFA.org by the Sierra Club’s Jason Mark on the show Terra Verde. Then, it’s off to Santa Rosa where I’ll be signing copies of the California Field Atlas at Copperfield’s Books. After a day of talking about where my art meets restoration ecology, I’ll be then looking for at least a couple of beers. Join me. @kpfaradio @sierraclub @copperfieldssantarosa #californiafieldatlas photo by @thisismaiphotography for @clutchmagazinejapan
The California Field Atlas has won the 2018 Gold Medal for Notable Contribution to Publishing by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. I am so proud and grateful to receive and share this award with my excellent publisher, HEYDAY BOOKS. My great hope is that this book stands with the larger vanguard of inspired voices rising across California and beyond, that share a vision for an emergent culture built on values of ecological restoration over reclamation and resource replenishment over endless extraction. United, we can usher in a new age of greater abundance while preserving the superlative portfolio of biodiversity that California enjoys for generations to come. @heydaybooks
In my studio, shot by @thisismaiphotography for @clutchmagazinejapan. Friday evening, May 11th, 7pm I’ll be presenting the #califirniafieldatlas @copperfieldssantarosa. Tomorrow morning, Thursday at 8:08am, my interview with @kpfaradio will air, and then on Friday I will be interviewed live on #KPFA for the @sierraclub and their show #terraverde. Please tune in.
Can we dig into nature with out the everywhere handprint of mankind? How ingenuous the word, pristine! Everywhere trammeled, now only undeveloped. There is memory in wilderness and in memory, meaning. I don’t find meaning in these new human place-facsimiles. Sterile all, and full of emptiness. Give me community. Give me my family of life. Only biodiversity can give my heart its home. #siskiyoumountainssalamander #plethodonstormi
A generalized but complete representation of major riparian and aquatic habitat around my home state. The capillaries that deliver life are rather idealized at this scale, although the analogy of a lung is not inaccurate. This map will appear in my next book -THE STATE OF WATER, a Field Atlas to the Conservation of California's Most Precious Resource, which will be published by @heydaybooks next spring. #californiafieldatlas
All I paint are spirals between the stars and their root-light feeding the big trees. Between you and the diamond veil is a single beat of the hummingbird’s tiny heart spread like thunder down into the river canyon. Nature has one seamless memory of itself. The algorithm at the unifying border is as shocking in its resiliency as its elegant simplicity. All the forms of sex and death are found on this side of the creek, in the forest at dawn.
Laughing in centuries of shadow, the racing, clean light offers its sugar to the eldest in this unbroken forest. When does second growth begin to exhibit old growth characteristics? The redwood is the first to come, with height and habitat to then provide architecture for the future understory and the myriad bits that structure the canopy. However the amount, time is keenly the function in this recreation. Now is the clock rundown, the race between habitat replenishment and biodiversity’s disappearance. What a new conundrum, the living world has set up in us, now on the scene, questioning every answer we think we have. With the capable function of both the provider and the denier, we start and we stall between our restorative potential and our stalemated bureaucracy. Whatever the outcome, the wave of rewilding across California continues forever on, and far from a slipping towards entropy, is a building always towards a continuous circuit.
One of those mornings when infinity seems to race out in all directions from one spot. The honey lace on the ocean mist traces glimpses on the sun that taste as strong as my good coffee. The dune-side city of lilies and slugs is packed with more life in a spoon than most, less green corners of this world. A hundred million years of forest breathing through this gate and in my happy lung, the most elegant cabin on the coast, I breath it all in and call it love. @humboldtbaysocialclub
Just under the eyelid of heaven in the sweetest, dreamiest corner of Northern California, between the Redwood curtain and the lonely sea is the great big little city of Eureka. I’m meeting with my editor tomorrow morning and then headed into the old growth for some deep reconnection, and then I suppose it’s margaritas at Eureka Books. In the meantime, I’m staying at my favorite place out on the spit in Humboldt Bay @humboldtbaysocialclub, stuffing my head with @humboldtbayprovisions oysters and Pinot noir. It seems to have all come together tonight in the dark, cool silence, broken only by moments of unbridled laughter. @eurekabooks
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