t h r e e
m a k e h a s t e
debra goldman, 2021
"We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched
by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with
its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with exploseive
breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is
more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."
- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto del Futurismo, 1909
“All haste comes from the devil, as an old saying goes, which
psychologically means that one’s devil is to be found in one’s indigestion,
in one’s having more events than are experienced. What we do
experience by putting events through an imaginative process is
taken off the streets of time and out of the ignorant sea of my
mental turbulence. We beat the devil simply by standing still.”
- James Hillman
Le Figaro 1909
and back to Marinetti,
who knew very well
that speed and violence
are joined at the hilt.
Less a manifesto
than a torrid,
florid elucidation
of the path we have been
walking, jogging, sprinting
since the days of Nod.
"Tell me who your friends are..."
the saying goes.
The turning point of the story
occurs when we joined up
with fast company,
broke with the canopy,
and made
common cause
with an upstart
spring.
Was it happenstance
that the sons and daughters
of the forest discovered
a quicker return
on investment
in the edge zones,
bet farm futures
on pulse
and grass?
Upon tasting the fruit
of disruption, we
became and remain
committed disruptors,
rendering the earth
asunder.
Forests fall,
replaced by
galvanized
walls, siloed
temples to the high
empty heavens.
Le Figaro 1909: Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" was published on the front page of the French newspaper, Le Figaro in the twilight of the Belle Èpoque. It begins: "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness." The sentiment and aesthetic of Futurism influenced the rise of fascism in Italy.
since the days of Nod: Following the killing of his brother Abel, Yahweh curses Cain and sends him to wander as a fugitive east of Eden in the land of Nod ("wandering"). Here, Cain and his wife found the first city, Enoch. Mythologically, Cain initiates two fundamental shifts in humanity's relationship with the land and with the means of sustenance: agriculture and urbanization.
"Tell me who your friends are": In this sense, "who are the members of your ecological niche?" With which species is your fate most inextricably intertwined?
the fruit of disruption: The annual grasses that produce cereal grain (cereal is etymologically derived from Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest). Annual plants, which complete their entire life cycle from seed to seed within one calendar year, are often found in edge zones and areas of disruption. Their competitive advantage against perennial plants diminishes as the surrounding ecology restabilizes.
siloed temples: A 2015 article in Nature estimates that forty-six percent world's trees have been felled since human beings began cutting down forests. In the midwestern United States, where my fathers family farmed for four generations, grain silos are often the tallest, most prominent features of the landscape.