Slippage / Revolution
So, this month's update, March, is a few days late. It's characteristic of the mood of the month, really. Recently it's felt like my grip on life has been slipping a little. Deadlines are tighter, more of them are being missed than usual, and I've had to work harder and longer to make sure I'm covering all my responsibilities. At the same time, I feel like I'm falling out of some of my social worlds, spending less time with people who are important to me. I'm very stressed, and very busy, and hoping things will get easier soon...
Yesterday was the first full moon after the equinox. The significance of this is that it is the first abundance after crossing a threshold of transformation. The wheel of the year is turning, pushed and pulled just over the cusp into spring, and the moon is overflowing with light. Despite the difficulties of the month, yesterday was very generative, just as the sun and moon intended.
I've been thinking about the concept of salvage as a method for dealing with empire. By "empire" I don't just mean the historical and continuing empires of nation-states such as the UK, US, Israel, and so on. I am also referring to the interlocking sets of components which constitute empires, the systems of government and governmentality as elucidated by Foucault. Empire is not just war, a 'defence industry', a physical prison. Empire is how people talk to their children, how they cut down cherry trees to make new carports, how you keep calmly waking up and going to work and eating your dinner and getting into bed when there are four genocides going on right now, ~57% of non-human mammals by biomass are livestock, and a global billionaire pedophile cabal are trying to kill every last trans, Black, and disabled person in order to prevent the apocalypse.
To salvage is to save something. So can we use salvage as an approach for dealing with empire, the materials of empire, for taking what we can from something that is falling apart and must be abandoned, as it has abandoned everything but itself? What I refer to as salvage is about saving things from empire. It is about lifting things out of the worlds we can no longer inhabit, and bringing them into worlds we can inhabit.
Salvage thus requires a pre-existing prefigurative way of being. It is about taking a different way of perceiving things from our other world back into empire, to move through empire as a visitor. And this seems impossible until we realise that there are anti-imperial worlds all around us. Out foraging with my sister and we found wild garlic. We stop and watch the plants first, observe how older leaves cover the younger ones underneath. We give thanks before we take the old leaves, taking care to pluck them cleanly from the plant. This way of life still involves violence. It is not possible to be a living thing on this planet without killing and eating something else. But this is not the same thing as an institutionalised machinery which abstracts and ignores that violence. Good foraging understands what it is doing and strives for mutuality, whereas the imperial solution to the problem of food is production, and that is the sole consideration. Salvage is taking those ways of being into other areas of our lives, and the development of that attitude into methods for destabilising empire.
That's all for this month. Maybe next month I'll talk more about salvage methodologies ☺️ If you're interested in these ideas, maybe sign up for next month's newsletter and send me an email!