revisiting the reclaiming

I've written about this car before, a long while ago (see October 9, 2006) but I feel compelled to post about it again... I recently re-photographed it, and was then further inspired to re-blog by this artwork, by Tin Can Forest (who I wrote about rather recently -- see March 13, 2009). A work like Autopust: Farewell to Cars (on the right is Nabozhnik), with forest spirits reveling & wrecking, sets my heart fluttering... An end to the personal motor vehicle! Tak!

And so this is a gentler reclamation of my mother's first car. Can't remember why she stopped driving it, I think my cousin drove it after her, finally it rolled to a stop out back on the acreage by the treehouse... and the hood came off, the engine was removed, and three, four, five persistent aspen sprouted up through the rusting cavity.

It's one of my favourite reminders that everything belongs to the earth. No matter how we change, shape, adulterate, mould, alter the materials we have -- even the most built, the most manufactured things the earth takes back eventually, slowly deconstructing. Held in place by the tangled fingers of vetch twisting about the disintegrating metal, this car waits to become rusted ashes. Chewed up by the silver lichen teeth, slowly engulfed in moss and leaves, the shadows of the growing trees.

At a recent seminar in my department, the head of the school here discussed his dreams for the future of anthropology and archaeology. Among many things, he called for a re-envisioning of time scales, of what it means to create, be created, to be & become. He wanted us to look beyond the conventionally given dates & times of when things came into existence, & to focus on the process of becoming, not of Aristotelian mixing of form+substance=conception, a single moment of creation. Nothing is fixed, everything is fluid & changing even as there is some underlying stability, recognizability. Rain, waves, rocks, humans, all like this.

So things are always becoming; everything is a process. There is a past-ness ever carrying on into the present & looking to the future -- what is a desk, he said, but perhaps a phase in the life of an oak tree? & so a car might be a phase in the life of metal, a phase in the life of rock, mineral, dust.

(& if I'd had a sword with me that day, (& a steadier tripod-like surface), I most definitely would've re-enacted this.)