2. Introducci´ on a los sistemas din´ amicos discretos
2.6. Funciones Tienda y Log´ıstica
In this chapter I have demonstrated that arts-based creative culture is a process of shaping the world through creative practice. A creative practitioner’s creative field is the chosen medium through which they operate – and the scope through which they imagine that professional creative practice. I have used three creative fields – poetry, dance and architecture – to illuminate the role of creativity in shaping the parameters of human culture. Creative practice is a key mechanism in the capacity to access betweenness. Creative practice has at its very heart the practitioner’s quest to occupy the realm of the as yet unknown and the yet to be. Dancing at the edge (LeGuin 1989) is to bring betweenness into the world. This is what creative practice strives to achieve. In that space, that fractal moment of engaging with a work of creative practice – that uh-ha moment of cognitive or visceral recognition – miraculous transformations become possible.
In the following chapter I will introduce the data component of the research and further coax forth betweenness as it might be given presence.
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Interlude: Animalia
It’s late, but I don’t feel tired. It’s a clear night; the moon is a bit over half full. I cleared the roads this morning, and yesterday – and there were only two possums and a wallaby. I don’t like to stop in the night, unless I really have to. Stella died more than ten years ago, but I still worry about her worrying about me driving at night. How funny, she could do just about anything, but she never got comfortable either with cars or with young women being out alone at night.
It is interesting that this road and I have intersected. It is interesting that the road has resonated with stories and people in my family line. Mostly, it makes me think of my grandmother, Stella. Her story was interesting – well, moving. When she was 17, at the end of the First World War, Stella was married to a fellow called Jack Smith. He was a much older man than Stella, probably due to the shortage of men after the war. Jack owned land (a long, long way from Stella’s home) somewhere out bush. The nearest neighbour turned out to be two days’ ride by buggy, a bit less by horseback. It wasn’t that life in the country town where she had grown up was particularly social, but there were stores, churches and police stations and several families had a motorcar. Living in the bush, though, was isolated and lonely and it meant endless hard physical work. It made her tough; not like ‘prison’ tough, more like ‘leather’ tough. She sometimes talked about the things she did like trapping, skinning and preparing native animals for food. I think because of her time out there, she learned to grow vegetables and fruit with quite extraordinary commitment and skill. She lived for a long time out there; she had four babies and as far as I can tell, it was more that she survived than thrived.
After Jack died, it was my father, then 15, who made two trips in the old truck to get the family and their belongings to their new life in different, more fertile country to the south. First he and his brothers raised dairy cows and sold milk by horse and cart and then went back to logging – cedar, woolly butt, stringy bark and iron bark – when the truck became affordable. Timber was in high demand with new people in
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the area and new homes being built. One log at a time came out for milling, and he built a bush-pole shed to mill them himself. He augmented the logging work with the making of fire trails into the bush and managed to take the trees out without clearing much land. He picked up bits of land and sold them on a bit later. I was always amazed, and I think he was too, that he still had all his fingers, because none of the machines had any guards or safety switches. On the couple of times I went there it was always very loud in a brittle kind of way and considering the conditions he probably wasn’t as deaf as he should have been. The mixed smell of cedar sawdust, sweat and tobacco have been etched into my memory.
When I got to know Stella, it was about the little things she did that registered most strongly. When I was a teenager I remember getting really frustrated at her for eating jam off a butter knife, straight from the jar – many times. I caught her once cutting her toenails with a big blue-blade butcher’s knife. She wrote lots of letters and loved to tuck things away. She could make anything grow, anywhere, and never really embraced the fridge. In one endearing manoeuvre she unknowingly gave my sister, roughly folded into brown paper, a necklace. In a twist of serendipity, my sister regained the special necklace she had worn to Christmas day the year before – and lost climbing the orange tree in the front vegetable garden. Stella gave me the bottle of 4711 perfume someone had once given her, that she had used many times. It was different, she was different, and on the long drive home my sister and I shook our heads at the wonder of it. It was curious, and we were curious; and with all of her oddities, it was kind of sad, but we didn’t really love her for it.
When she died, thin and pale, I cried and cried. She left her golden watch with the tiny face, old and fragile; a few black and white photographs and several newspaper cuttings that she had held close. I still have her old nightie – partly for the careful mending and re-mending she had done, but partly for the reminder. There were a few stories, but not a lot – stories about dirt floors, trapping possums, the many diseases, the tragic accidents and beloved cousins; she liked to hear them as well as tell them and seemed to prefer the extraordinary to the ordinary.
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When I started driving this road, drawing this line, it was Stella who came to mind. I think it was the animals. I imagined touching these dead forms, but it was her hands that I imagined at the ends of my arms. I came to understand that people simply drive over them, around them. At first I had to force myself to blur my eyes – it was too difficult, too shocking and even nauseating to let myself focus. It’s always a gamble; you want to see, but sometimes what you see is terribly confronting. After a time, my constitution must have toughened – at least a little, as I was able to look. I think I wanted to feel; I wanted to know what it felt like to see. Slowly I came to understand the processes of decay. It was the smell, certainly in summer, and the maggots. In winter it was slower; it can take months for a body to turn to dust – a dust that blows in the wind or washes with the rain.
The practice of looking at the animals allowed me to see elements of my own humanity in our shared animalia. From my windscreen I could see bones and intestines and blood; if I really looked, I could see eyes and tongues; injuries and fear. After a while I couldn’t help but look; I couldn’t help but see. There was something curious about the process of being killed and then left to dissolve – in full view and on an impermeable surface. It struck me as like a war zone where the casualties are left in ‘no man’s land’ or simply marched over. I wondered how people could do this every day – to drive over and over the same animal. At that point I made a decision; I chose to participate in the animals’ decay. I chose to be ‘The Keeper of the Roads’. I craved a relationship with the animals – something that recognised and illuminated my grandmother’s connection with animals and the land. I craved a connection with her way of being in the world, her way of being where she was. I, like her, was somewhere too, and while life had guided me in particular directions and paths, I couldn’t resign from my ability to choose. People make choices every day to drive over and around dead animals. I chose not to.
The first time I stopped the car, I was terrified. It made me realise the security I had come to understand – the security found on the inside of my car. At once the car was my armour, my cave, my weapon, my power. Opening the door was like entering a new world. Stopping the car shifted my gaze, not only in what I was seeing, but how I
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was experiencing these animals. Approaching an animal on the road was confronting on many levels. Being in the middle of the road where an animal has been recently killed is a dangerous place to be. Such situations absorb your
concentration and I had to constantly remind myself to stay acutely alert to the sound of approaching cars.
Being ‘The Keeper of the Road’, I vowed that I would be responsible for every animal that died on my line. I made a commitment to move every road-killed animal onto the ground; the earth; the soil. It tripled my travelling time and significantly increased my risk; I learned to wear a fluorescent vest, I carried a shovel and gloves. I took photographs to memorialise their death and a GPS recording of the place on the road where they were hit. I was ‘The Keeper of the Road’ – and it felt good.
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