By Louise Akers

PART 4: ABSENCE MANAGEMENT


With days left in the semester, the realization that I’ve never consciously been in the presence of an American Chestnut Tree becomes a physical sensation. To my surprise, I feel myself succumb to an urgent longing to see one, be present to and with the tree in a way I find almost embarrassing; the tree and I seem, from this distance, vulnerable to one another in such a way attendance might take advantage of, make worse.

I type “presence” into the inauspicious Thesaurus app on my MacBook desktop and come up with a few dozen hits. I don’t look any further; association finds priority over precision. I cherry pick the ones I like:

1. presence of a train on a section of track was indicated electrically: existence, being there. ANTONYMS absence

2. I would like to request the presence of an adjudicator: attendance, attending, appearance, residence, occupancy; company, companionship; informal turning up, showing, showing up. ANTONYMS absence

5. she felt a presence in the castle: ghost, spirit, specter, phantom, vision, wraith, shadow, poltergeist, manifestation, apparition, supernatural being.[9]

Anyway, this year, presence has been catastrophic. Life-saving absence giving way to life-attenuating apprehension. A city is itself until it isn’t, just like I’m myself until I’m simply not. Maybe I’m apprehensive about what a blight-likely sapling will look like after a year of avoiding inflection myself. Maybe I’m scared I won’t recognize it at all. Either way I pick a day and tell my girlfriend I’m going to Prospect Park in the hopes that the dependable pressure of witness will provide real incentive.

The weather is sensational. My dog Hank cries if I don’t let the window down low enough to stick her long face out into the breeze. She’s a terrible companion for a contemplative journey, but with fresh stitches in her side from her latest tumble, I don’t have the option of leaving her alone.

I arrive at the LeFrak entrance and have no idea what to look for. It’s busy with strangers and Hank quivers, pulls on the leash when they pass close to us.

Hito Steyerl writes: “The idea of presence invokes the promise of unmediated communication, the glow of uninhibited existence, a seemingly unalienated experience and authentic encounter between humans...Presence stands for allegedly real discussion, exchange, communication: the happening, the event, liveness, the real thing––you get the idea.”[10] Presence is irreducible to the present, as a tense. In fact, it has more to do with the conditional hospitality of a moment, explosive with histories and antihistories, hostile to no futurity and any future. In “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field,” Steyerl argues that in the age of reproducibility inaugurated by the ubiquity of technologies of mediation, “presence is...an asset with inbuilt scarcity.”[11] Rather than a single moment of shared physical space, it becomes a mode of relation, a “reserved element for potential engagement” that establishes a method of temporal investment.[12] The demand for presence denotes an investment in an epistemological inheritance that presupposes the ability to produce a moment as nominative, a single object that can be co-inhabited, whose hospitality can be shared or coerced. If my body and the tree’s body touch, do we co-create a single, occupiable moment? Or does an infinite set of relations continue to unfold for and in spite of us?

Hank’s apprehension gives way to squirrel hunting; mine seems to escalate as I continue my own search. I pass trees of varying ages and emergent foliage; I try to consult my phone for clarity or directions, but Hank’s prey drive demands more of my attention than the quiet trees. It occurs to me, the trees are here, somewhere, and through my wavering intention to find them, the American Chestnut Tree and I are somehow linked. Beyond Hank-management and Google Maps pins, a sliver of my attention is devoted to the same present as the trees.

Barad argues against a geometric understanding of the present, i.e., a now is not a sliver or “slice,” but rather “an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime.” This move, from geometry to physics, gets us away from objects and into their relations, away from nouns and into verbs. What began as a simple subject (Louise) searches (predicate) for tree(direct object) (with Hank(prepositional phrase)), transforms into an infinite temporal field of dynamics between searching, growing, smelling, seeing, and dying. For me, the tree becomes study, curiosity, and self-admonishment for not coming sooner. For Hank, it’s inaccess, squirrel-flight. For the squirrels, it’s escape, home.

I think I find a tree, and my friend Jeff finds me. He’s just been playing basketball with his buddy and is sweaty and happy to take Hank’s leash for a while so I can draw. He asks me if I think two dudes playing basketball could be queer or a queering of the sport in some way, even if they’re straight, because what they really want is contact. Distracted, I channel Sara Ahmed and counter: why do straight people always want to sever orientation from the object of desire? He laughs and Hank lunges, almost dislocating Jeff’s shoulder. “Fair enough,” he says, and we stay quiet for a while.

Sitting in the park, Hank-time and tree-time cleaving my presence, diverting my imperative: to look, find—I wonder how I am oriented around the American Chestnut Tree? How do I orient myself to it? For Ahmed, orientations “are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places.”[13] They are as much about identifying the familiar, the beloved, as they are with “finding our way” to them. When we think of bodies as subject to, rather than subjects of, relations that move them towards and away from one another, orientation becomes a set, or history of responses that assume a temporal dimension. When I orient myself to the Chestnut Tree, my body facing its, and I respond to its girth, its apparent robustness that a better trained eye might identify as fraying or even fictive. I respond to the possibility of that fictional health as well: the blight I know through study, the awareness of what Ahmed calls a “background”—the “conditions of emergence of the object...[and] also the act of perceiving the object.”[14] A product of arrival and response, the “toward” of orientation also demands a tense in excess of the present.

As I attempt to map my orientation toward the tree, I find myself slipping, again, away from it. A tree is not abstract; it is a haptic, living knowledge. It waits, spreads, succumbs, or thrives independent of my feeble attempts to map discursively the wax and wane of intimacy and alienation with and from one another. My desire to be present with the tree, to be in its presence is, as Steyerl suggests, a consequence of not in opposition to a semester of mediating technology orienting me toward it. She writes, “the point is that technology gives you tools that allow for remote and delayed presence, so that physical presence becomes the scarcest option among a range of alternatives.”[15] The Chestnuts of the archive, my Google pin, the ether of our course’s conversations produce an urgency to be, to have been present to and with it.

If I’m being honest, the overwhelming sensation of the tree’s presence is my gratitude for Jeff’s. Not simply because he freed up my hands and attention, absorbing the greater impact of Hank-time, but because his arrival mediated my presence with the tree, tempered its absence once we turned and walked away.

I realize the drawing I’ve finished of the Chestnut is actually of a photograph I found on the internet. The bark is smooth with a ridge like lips across the center, dark gray like graphite. I think, momentarily, I should go back to Prospect Park alone. I don’t. I imagine I will always be oriented toward the tree, and always turning away. The American Chestnut and I exercise our practices of absent/ce management.


PART 5: PHANTOM


With the right experience, you can look at a tree and tell if it’s doomed. This projection of futurity, certain death by blight, can either appear as an acceleration of a linear timeline, or McSweeney’s “dynamic challenge to continuity.”[16] The haunt is full, the blight is present. Both operate according to their own design; there is no reason the blight should function differently.

Before the blight, Susan Freinkel reminds us of those who really loved the tree, who suffered heartbreak at its disappearance. “Those who did bear witness to the tree’s disappearance... were the rural poor, people whose stories were passed down through oral rather than written accounts.”[17]

Elided into this broad category of “rural poor” with “oral traditions” is the indigenous population of the Northeastern region of the continent. Among many tribes in the Northeast of the continent, the Indigenous word for chestnut was similar: chinkapin, chinquapin, chincapin, chincopin, and chechinquamin, as they were translated into a European alphabet.[18] This brings me back, finally, to Neil Patterson’s revelatory question. What is the word that will get us closest to the tree? I emphasize “closest” to exaggerate the sense of positionality and directional movement Patterson’s language implies. The word “transgenic” inscribes a cosmology of tree-ness under human mastery, unnatural origin. Walter Benjamin, in “The Task of the Translator,” writes:

Translation is a form. To understand it as such means going back to the original. Because the original, in its translatability, contains the laws that governs the translation. The question of a word’s “translatability” is two-fold. It can mean: will the work ever find its proper translator among all its possible readers; or—and more to the point—does it, by its nature, permit translations and therefore, given the significance of the form, demand it?[19]

What is the condition of the form when an “original” describes a modified genome? Is it the signifier of the scientific methodology or the way that method affects or works upon a body that demands translation, here? Given the divisiveness of transgenic trees’ contested presence, who is the proper translator? If the language we produce to describe our material reality does not follow, but cocreates the objects that inhabit it, then this project of translation is tantamount to an embrace or interdiction of the new American Chestnut by the human beings implicated in its presence.

We can understand this process of translation as a movement from Western ontological categories to non-Western epistemological relations. Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh write: “A world-sense that privileges relations cannot be understood ontologically because relations are not entities (they are relations among entities). To name ontology a world-sense constituted by relations and not by entities (objects) is a Western misnomer equivalent to Hernán Cortés naming “Mosques” the buildings where the Aztec carry out their rituals.”[20] Such a world sense demands a different set of conjugations to accommodate its verbs.

According to Neil Patterson Jr. of the SUNY Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, the Tuscarora language has five verbs for every noun. The proper names for things are typically assemblages of the things’ relation with its surroundings. There are 54 pronouns, denoting not only gender but temporality. “There is a “we” he says, “for the us here, now; a “we” for the generation that will live out the present we’s decisions, the “we” who determined our origins hundreds of years ago. Tenses shift from fixed categories to generational approaches and removes. “Instructional moments” serve as nodes in a moving historical assemblage, one in which mourning, condolence, grief and response are in constant elastic negotiation. Our job at present is not to rewrite histories but to “requicken our minds out of loss.” Generational rather than historical knowledge provides a method of epistemological map expansion that, rather than de-linking relational epistemologies from harmful ontological consequences, recognizes that those links represent incomplete chains that can not only be expanded upon but pulled across temporal fields in new directions.

Rey Chow conceives of the imposition of the colonizer’s language at the loss of the language of the colonized as an introduction of a kind of prosthesis.[21] This sets up an optimistic, if mournful tension between the new limb and the original. What becomes of the original for those whose bios and mythos are sustained by it? Who benefits from the interventionist attempt to recuperate the American Chestnut’s biocultural genealogy? How do we mourn that which is forcibly replaced? Can the production of a new word begin to enact the kind of new science Aimé Césaire believes will fulfill us where we have been starved?

Castanea dentata translates vaguely to “toothy chestnut,” referring to the spikey husks that surround the seeds. The blight has a Latin name, too: Cryphonectria parasitica, an airborne canker pathogen capable of colonizing any open wound suffered by the tree from animal, human, or environmental intervention. Language is as foreign an object to the tree as the Cryphonectria parasitica. Aphasia thus becomes a mode of revelation. The quiet of the tree translates into a demand to listen to futures beyond the human or human-made.

I return here to the etiolated wild, the American Chestnut as stump, persisting in its perennial experiments in regrowth despite the near certainty of failure. This Chestnut stump allows us to conceive of the mature wild Chestnut as a phantom limb within the forestland. What does not grow is felt in the space between the high canopy and indeterminate undergrowth. Karen Barad writes: “the indeterminacy of time-being, and this gives rise to the fact that nothingness is not empty, but on the contrary, it is flush with the dynamism of the in/determinacy of time-being, the play of the non/presence of non/existence.”[22] The half-illuminated space of the absent tree itself evinces every temporality it’s lived and given way to; it is “in contact with the infinite alterity that it is.”[23] Thus it exceeds its human-made future in its forest memory, inviting us to listen to the now it will have been and may never be.

Mapping a discursive web between my ‘experimental criticism’ and Bob Powell’s transgenic experiments, I feel, again strangely abashed. But then I think, who are the real experimentalists? The scholars and geneticists, or the trees themselves. The refusers of Enlightened notions of innovation and origin in favor of light, blight, and shit, the wild trees stake their loamy claims and fail and fail again, without deterrence or regret.

But a transgenic tree is not a zombie, but an imperative futuring—what will have survived, what will have been resurrected, what will have flowered. The subjunctive of etiolation is superseded by the imperative of genetic determination; risk is managed, temporalities prescribed. If we could hear the silent frequencies of the wild and transgenic chestnuts, would they be different? How would we respond?


PART 6: OUTFUTURING


When the tree died the moth died, too.

I take the train from Queens back to Prospect Park alone and walk without looking. Or maybe I should say, without searching. I think about sedimentary logic that displaced whole histories, the multidimensional fields in which those histories persist.

The question of futurity is inextricable from the historical impact of extraction. The American Chestnut Tree has transformed from a natural phenomenon into a locus of national and scientific identities; stripped of its original modes of production, it becomes a sieve-like repository of discursive and metaphorical wealth.

In her groundbreaking 1987 essay, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Hortense Spillers exposes the “capture” of the Black feminine in a web of “overdetermined nominative properties.”[24] This accrual of nouns with attenuated meanings and mythologies threaten to suffocate the body they purport to define. To extract the self out from under the layers of nominatives, a verb must appear, armed with tenses resistant to the deafening clatter of mythos being shed. The event of this clattering is always, urgently occurring now, which denotes a moment hospitable to every articulation of itself, elastically capacious to ‘when’ and ‘was’ and ‘still’ and ‘soon.’

Tina Campt expands on this notion of ‘now’-ness in her articulation of Black feminist futurity. She evokes the future perfect tense, “it will have been” in its real condition “it will have had to be.”[25]

Campt demands the immanence of a Black feminist futurity by using the imperative mood, the mood of “must,” “should,” and “let it be.” Of course, it is impossible and counterproductive to try to graft Black feminist thought onto morphologies of the nonhuman, but I take my cue from her movement away from “hope” into “tense,” and her proposition of a “grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future.”[26]

Campt demands a now that furnishes itself with the inevitable flourishing of the future. Where Campt calls for this move from hoping to tensing future self-determination through the imperative, I return to the subjunctive of etiolation.

The imperative is bright clear, “real condition,” shoring up survival by setting its protocols and parameters in advance. The subjunctive leaves endless room for error, contradiction, outright lies. It demands an altogether radical shift in our understanding of survivance of organisms that undermines imperatives by loosing imaginations. Compost becomes as seductive an archive as a photograph, genres of being become unsturdy and disposable, futurity sinks deeper into the muck of indeterminacy. “No longer an independent parameter relentlessly marching forward into the future,” Barad writes, “time is neither a continuum nor a series of discrete moments that follow in succession. Time is diffracted, imploded/exploded in on itself: each moment made up of a superimposition of all moments (differently weighted and combined in their specific material entanglement). And directly linked to this indeterminacy of time is a shift in the nature of being and nothingness.”[27] The will-ful imperative to outfuture the Chestnut trees, to ensure through coercion the hospitality of their hosts, to sediment the grammar of its temporal ontology becomes inoperable in the face of such indeterminacy. Where we think we are outfuturing the nonhuman with our narrow imperative gaze, we are in fact outfutured by its subjunctive eternities.

Works cited:

Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4. (2006): pp. 543-574

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Durham: Duke University Press. 2006.

Barad, Karen. “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice.” Theory & Event 22, no. 3, (July 2019): 524-550. (Johns Hopkins University Press)

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn; ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968), pp.69-82.

Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. 2017.

Césaire, Aimé, translated by A. James Arnold. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. (The University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville). 1990.

Chow, Rey. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Farmer, Sarah. “When American Chestnuts Return to the Wild: Seedling size and breeding affect blight resistance.” USDA Southern Research Station CompassLive. May 10, 2016. Accessed May 19, 2021. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/49856

Freinkel, Susan. American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Hale, Dan. “Indigenous Habitat /Ecosystem/Conservation: The American Chestnut Tree.” A.T. Journeys. (Winter 2021): 48-50.

McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2015.

Mignolo, Walter. “The Conceptual Triad: Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality.” On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke UP, 2018.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64-81.

Steyerl, Hito. “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field.” Dis Magazine. Accessed May 19, 2021. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/78352/the-terror-of-total-dasein-hito-steyerl/

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4. (2006): 387-409.

[1] Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4. (2006): 387.

[2] Césaire, Aimé, translated by A. James Arnold. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. (The University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville). 1990: 43.

[3] McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2015: 41.

[4] Ibid, 43.

[5] Farmer, Sarah. “When American Chestnuts Return to the Wild: Seedling size and breeding affect blight resistance.” USDA Southern Research Station CompassLive. May 10, 2016. Accessed May 19, 2021. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/49856

[6]Barad, Karen. “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice.” Theory & Event 22, no. 3, (July 2019): pp. 535.

[7] Ibid, 536.

[8] Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. p. 14.

[9] New Oxford American Dictionary (Second Edition)

[10] Steyerl, Hito. “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field.” Dis Magazine. Accessed May 19, 2021.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomonology. Durham: Duke UP: 8.

[14] Ahmed, Sara. “Orientation: Toward a Queer Phenomonology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4. (2006): 546.

[15] Steyerl.

[16] McSweeney: 41.

[17] Freinkel, Susan. American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 3.

[18] Hale, Dan. “Indigenous Habitat /Ecosystem/Conservation: The American Chestnut Tree.” A.T. Journeys. Winter 2021. pp. 48

[19] Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn; ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968): 69.

[20] Mignolo, Walter. “The Conceptual Triad: Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality.” On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke UP, 2018:135.

[21] Chow, Rey. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014: 17.

[22] Barad: 528. [23] Barad, 531.

[24] Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65.

[25] Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. 2017: 17. [26] Ibid.