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Sowing Worlds: a Seedbag for Terraforming with Earth Others

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Sowing Worlds: a Seedbag for Terraforming with Earth Others SOWING WORLDS A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others DONNA HARAWAY “Do you realize, the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, “that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?” And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” The political slogan I wore in the Reagan star wars era of the 1980s read, Cyborgs for Earthly Survival! The terrifying times of George H. W. Bush and the secondary Bushes made me switch to slogans purloined from tough Schutzhund dog trainers, Run Fast, Bite Hard! and Shut Up and Train! Today, my slogan reads, Stay with the Trouble! But in all these knots—and especially now, wherewhenever that potent and capacious placetime is—we need a hardy, soiled kind of wisdom. Instructed by companion species of the myriad terran kingdoms in all their placetimes, we need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in order to flourish—again or maybe just for the first time—on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered.1 We need not just reseeding but also reinoculating with all the fermenting, fomenting, and nutrient-fixing associates seeds need to thrive. Recuperation is still possible, but only in multispecies alliance, across the killing divisions of nature, culture, and technology and of organism, language, and machine.2 The feminist cyborg taught me that; the humanimal worlds of dogs, chickens, turtles, and wolves taught me that; and, in fugal, microbial, symbiogenetic counterpoint, the acacia trees of Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, with their congeries of associates reaching across taxa, teach me that. Sowing worlds is about opening up the story of companion species to more of its relentless diversity and urgent trouble. To study the kind of situated, mortal, germinal wisdom we need, I turn to Ursula K. Le Guin (1972, 1987) and Octavia Butler (1993, 1998). It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. It matters wherehow Uroboros swallows its tale again. That’s how worlding gets © Grebowicz, Margret; Merrick, Helen, Jul 02, 2013, Beyond the Cyborg : Adventures with Donna Haraway Columbia University Press, New York, ISBN: 9780231520737 on with itself in dragon time. These are such simple and difficult koans; let us see what kind of get they spawn. A careful student of dragons, Le Guin taught me the carrier bag theory of fiction and of naturalcultural history.3 Her theories, her stories, are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. “A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient” (Le Guin 1987:166). So much of earth history has been told in the thrall of the fantasy of the first beautiful words and weapons, of the first beautiful weapons as words and vice versa. Tool, weapon, word: that is the word made flesh in the image of the sky god. In a tragic story with only one real actor—one real world maker, the hero—this is the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty. This is the cutting, sharp, combative tale of action that defers the suffering of glutinous, earth-rotted passivity beyond bearing. All others in the prick tale are props, ground, plot space, or prey. They don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter. The last thing the hero wants to know is that his beautiful words and weapons will be worthless without a bag, a container, a net. Nonetheless, no adventurer should leave home without a sack. How did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get in the story? How do such lowly things keep the story going? Or, maybe even worse for the hero, how do those concave, hollowed out things, those holes in Being from the get-go, generate richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories, stories with room for the hunter, but that weren’t and aren’t about him, the self-making Human, the human-making machine of history. The slight curve of the shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give away and to receive, suggests stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying, the worlding. With a shell and a net, becoming human, becoming humus, becoming terran, has another shape—i.e., the side-winding snaky shape of becoming with. Le Guin quickly assures all of us who are wary of evasive, sentimental holisms and organicisms: “Not, let it be said at once, [am I] an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off.… It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories” (1989:169). There is room for conflict in Le Guin’s story, but her carrier bag narratives are full of much else in wonderful, messy tales to use for retelling or reseeding, possibilities for getting on now as well as in deep earth history. “It sometimes seems that that [heroic] story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished.... Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story” (169). Octavia Butler knows all about the untold stories, the ones that need a restitched © Grebowicz, Margret; Merrick, Helen, Jul 02, 2013, Beyond the Cyborg : Adventures with Donna Haraway Columbia University Press, New York, ISBN: 9780231520737 seedbag and a traveling sower to hollow out a place to flourish after the catastrophes of that Sharp Story. In Parable of the Sower, the U.S. teenage hyperempath Lauren Oya Olamina grew up in a gated community in Los Angeles. Important in New World Santeria and in Catholic cults of the Virgin Mary, in Yoruba Oya, mother of nine, is the Orisha of the Niger River, with its nine tributaries. Wind, creation, and death are her attributes and powers for worlding. Olamina’s gift and curse was her inescapable ability to feel the pain of all living beings, a result of a drug taken by her addicted mother during pregnancy. After the murder of her family, the young woman traveled from a devastated and dying society with a motley of survivors to sow a new community rooted in a religion called Earthseed. In the story arc of what was to be a trilogy (Parable of the Trickster was not completed before her death), Butler’s SF worlding imagined Earthseed ultimately flourishing on a new home world among the stars. But Olamina started the first Earthseed community in Northern California, and it is there and at other sites on Terra where my own explorations for reseeding our home world must stay. This home is where Butler’s lessons apply with special ferocity. In the Parable novels, “God is change,” and Earthseed teaches that the seeds of life on earth can be transplanted and can adapt and flourish in all sorts of unexpected and always dangerous places and times. Note “can,” not necessarily “may” or “should.” Butler’s entire work as an SF writer is riveted on the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing—not simply survival—in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation—the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too. It is not a burden that stops with settlement. In the SF mode,4 my own writing works and plays only on earth, in the mud of cyborgs, dogs, acacia trees, ants, microbes, and all their kin and get. With the twist in the belly that etymology brings, I remember too that kin, with the g-k exchange of Indo-European cousins, becomes gen on the way to get. Terran spawn all, we are side-winding as well as arboreal kindred—blown get—in infected and seedy generation after generation, blowsy kind after blowsy kind. Planting seeds requires medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother. These words interest me greatly for and in the SF terraforming mode of attention. In the feminist SF mode, matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed; rather, mixed in terra’s carrier bag, kin and get have a much richer congress for worlding. Matter is a powerful, mindfully bodied word, the matrix and generatrix of things, kin to the riverine generatrix Oya. It doesn’t take much digging or swimming to get to matter as source, ground, flux, reason, and consequential stuff—the matter of the thing, the generatrix that is simultaneously fluid and solid, mathematical and fleshly—and by that etymological route to one tone of matter as timber, as hard inner wood (in Portuguese madeira). Matter as timber brings me to Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, published in 1976 as part of her Hainish fabulations for dispersed native and colonial beings locked in struggle over imperialist exploitation and the chances for multispecies flourishing.
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