For this edition of the monthly miscellany (combining June and July, and near the end of the latter I realize!): i.) updates on the home-front, between despair and hope, ii.) on a community food forest project iii.) on Fr. Jacob Netsvetov, iv.) new reading and working groups in history, and other matters v.) music and a poem. Book reviews will return in next month’s newsletter.
i. on the home-front
Every few days lately the slopes of nearby Lookout Mountain have been obscured to some degree or another with the smoke from the vast Canadian wildfires that have raged all summer and which are showing no signs of letting up. The regular pulses of continent-spanning smoke have been for me and no doubt for many others—though perhaps not enough others—a visceral reminder of what we collectively as fossil-fuel addicted humans have now wrought, and what is coming. It’s easy to stare down—or up, as the case may be—into the abyss, to contemplate the sheer scale and weight of what we are up against, and to give up, to despair. Perhaps that is the more rational decision—spend more than a minute or two thinking about the basic infrastructure of human life on earth today and it can seem completely impossible to change any of it, it feels as if we are trapped in a great hungry prison of our own appetites and misdirected cleverness. And yet.
It’s been a little over year since we moved into our house on the lower flank of Mission Ridge and set to work transforming the place. I wrote some in May’s installation about how things are going, so I’ll keep it to a quick update. I’ve expanded the native plant bed section in front of our house, and will soon have reached the goal of eliminating all but two strips of conventional lawn—one along the edge of the road, and one between the main front garden and the house-fronting beds. Our main garden is producing beautifully, a mosaic of experimental beds that started out slow but erupted into tangles of vegetables and fruits, mixed in with some more orderly beds, clusters of volunteer tomatoes and bush beans, and scatterings of sunflowers and other blooms. Whatever plans I had at the start of spring have mostly gone by the wayside, but that’s alright. The biggest challenge right now is keeping up with the harvest, a good problem to have.
It’s hard to believe that the living landscape spread out over our property is only a year old—visitors often comment that it looks like it’s been there for a decade. Is it a lot of work? Relative to the lushness and productivity, not really. Certainly nothing outside the range of the average able-bodied adult. It is a constant reward, not just aesthetic, but in realizing just how much life is thriving in this space where once there was nothing but close-cropped grass. Now there are probably hundreds of species of plants, some deliberate inclusions, others volunteers, with a truly staggering plethora of insects and other small organisms constantly at move among them, species some of which I have never seen in my life before. As insect populations the world over continue to decline and even collapse, we’ve forged a little hold-out, which if nothing else feels like a small victory, and can perhaps become something larger in time.
Just a few days ago we added a small flock of chickens to the mix, having finally completed our small coop and run (and only after I broke down and solicited our far more competent in carpentry matters neighbor for help!). They’re absolutely delightful, not old enough yet to begin laying, but already helping with disposing of garden pests, with the invasive and obnoxious (if beautifully colored) Japanese beetle a particular treat as far as they are concerned. Somehow picking off these pests is more enjoyable (if that’s the right word!) if they can go to some use. In time we’ll range our birds in temporary fenced enclosures, hoping in particular that they’ll be able to help fertilize the slope on which most of our fruit trees are planted, the soil of which is quite poor. Vera in particular loves the chickens, and they have warmed to her as well—they really do have their own personalities, intelligence, and sociability.
ii. towards a community food forest project
While it’s probably a sign of over-confidence in my still pretty meager skills and knowledge-base, lately I’ve begun very tentatively formulating a new project that will unfold outside the confines of our own little property. I’ve been really taken—like a lot of other folks in the circles I frequent, I think—with the idea of the ‘food forest,’ and have started incorporating some such ideas in my own plantings and landscaping, though I have a long ways to go on that front. But what really seems promising to me is the idea of a community or even municipal food forest, a sort of cross between a nature park and an urban farm or community garden, offering food for human consumption while also offering refuge for all manner of living things, tended and enjoyed by the people who live close by. At present there is very little of the sort in or near Chattanooga, even as we have ample space and certainly ample need on many levels. Fortunately there is an emergent and increasingly robust urban agriculture scene, as well as folks working on permaculture and related projects, so my hope is that the support is there and that we can marshal our collective expertise, resources, and the like into something durable and (literally!) productive.
I’ve started work on a document describing the idea, which I encourage my readers to check out and upon which to comment, and hope to move towards some real organizing and ground-work laying in the coming weeks and months, about which I will have more to say here as that work proceeds. I have become more and more convinced that it is only through public projects and restructurings of basic infrastructure that we are going to truly confront the various crises of our time, and not just climatic and ecological. There is no sharp division between body and spirit: what we eat, the landscapes and places we inhabit, the media we consume, the spaces which contain us, these are all in feedback relationships with our whole person, with our deepest identities, with soul and spirit.
I’m really hoping this project will come to some real fruition (literally in this case!), and will write more about it more here pending either success or failure.
iii. another America
Yesterday was the commemoration of the first indigenous Orthodox saint of North America, Fr. Jacob Netsvetov of Alaska; his life is a remarkable one, spanning two continents and two cultural spheres, the Russian and the Alaskan indigenous (his father was Russian, his mother Aleut—mestizo in the parlance of Latin America). His service to the diverse indigenous peoples of Alaska took him from his native Aleutian Islands to all across Alaska and the Yukon, learning new languages and cultures along the way as he introduced the Orthodox faith in the tongues of the native peoples of these lands. He continued to practice traditional forms of subsistence, while also sending specimens for study to researchers in natural history in Russia. The sheer physical labor of his work is staggering—he traveled alone by qayaq at times, overland through the wilderness at others, hauling a large collapsible tent church for services, sometimes finding himself reconciling feuding groups and communities, navigating the considerable cultural and linguistic diversity of the northern lands all the while.
His life, and the life of other American saints in our church and in other Christian communions in this land, is I think in some ways an alternative history that was in fact realized, that continues to exist, of what America could have been, what it in fact was, albeit in an often hidden and marginalized way, and what it could still become.
iv. assorted announcements and updates
On other fronts: in addition to resuming our Islamicate textual technologies working and reading group this fall, this year with a very strongly manuscript focus, I'm also going to put together a new online reading group, something quite unlike anything I’ve tried to do before, looking at what I’m calling “radical agrarianism and rural history,” though both terms are really too restrictive. Here are the first few books I’d like to include, for more see the page I put together; if these sound interesting to you drop me a line in any of the usual places and I’ll get you in the loop:
Carriker, Robert M. Urban Farming in the West: A New Deal Experiment in Subsistence Homesteads. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.
Dove, Michael. The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Holt-gimenez, Eric. Campesino A Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture. Oakland, Calif. : New York: Food First Books, 2006.
Kreiner, Jamie. Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
Manget, Luke. Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2022.
My “day job” lately has been occupied with, among other things, teaching digital Islamicate paleography and codicology, which has been honestly a blast, with a wonderful set of students who are very invested in the material. To be honest most of this is relatively new to me, and I continue to find new avenues of both thought and practice, some of which I’ll be sharing here eventually, beginning with picking back up some autobiographical reflections on textual technologies in my own life. Much of my working day involves working with medieval and early modern manuscripts (albeit in digitized form, not, alas, the originals), and via that work reflections on the long history of textuality and of just human communication in general.
v. music and a poem
For this installment I’d like to feature an entire record label, the absolutely wonderful Antonovka Records, which features a gold mine of traditional music from, primarily, the former Soviet lands, with excursions elsewhere in Afro-Eurasia; here’s a single sampling of an album I have particularly been enjoying:
Finally, enjoy- if that’s the right word, it feels a bit too shallow in this case- this poem by contemporary poet Melissa Range:
And not just those disciples whom he loved, and not just his mother; for all creation was his mother, if he shared his cells with worms and ferns and whales, silt and spiderweb, with the very walls of his crypt. Of all creation, only he slept, the rest awake and rapt with grief when love’s captain leapt onto the cross, into an abyss the weather hadn’t dreamt. Hero mine the beloved, cried snowflakes, cried the moons of unknown planets, cried the thorns in his garland, the nails bashed through his bones, the spikes of dry grass on the hillside, dotted with water and with blood—real tears, and not a trick of rain-light blinked and blurred onto a tree so that the tree seems wound in gold. It was not wound in gold or rain but in a rapture of salt, the wood splintering as he splintered when he wept over Lazarus, over Jerusalem, until his sorrow became his action, his grief his victory— until his tears became a rupture in nature, all creation discipled to his suffering on the gilded gallows-tree, the wood which broke beneath the weight of love, though it had no ears to hear him cry out, and no eyes to see.