my grandfather, Ernest S avoided contact with the Oil-fiend for some time. Ghoul-e Naft had stalked the deserted plains of Arabia in old Arab and Farsi fictions and folklore long before it was found wandering The Prairies, as my other grandfather, Derwood C always called that whole flat territory (RN)    Oil has been seeping out of the rocks and soil for millenia. Dan T Boyd of the Oklahoma Geological Survey reports that || oil seeps were recognized || in Oklahoma long before the arrival of European settlers. In 1879 oil was discovered by accident drilling for salt in Salina in Mayes County. In the same year somebody else drilled a well in an area of seeps near Chelsea in Rogers County. The well produced half a barrel of oil a day. It was used as cattle dip against ticks. In 1896 they drilled the Nellie Johnstone No 1 near Bartlesville in Washington County, which led to the discovery of the giant Bartlesville-Dewey Field. At 3 p.m.on 15 april 1897, George Keeler's stepdaughter, Miss Jenni Cass, instructed by expert 'shooter' G M Perry, dropped a 'go devil' detonating device down the well bore to set off the waiting nitroglycerin.   The explosion caused Nellie Johnstone No.1 to blow in as a gusher     Watching the action from their barbershop in Bartlesville were the Phillips brothers     The Nellie Johnstone's output quickly swamped the local market, and there was no available means for shipping the crude to the nearest refinery at Neodesha, Kansas. As a result, the well was capped. Because the Nellie Johnstone had not been properly sealed, a series of leaks developed. A trickle of oil eventually collected in the sump and then overflowed in a small rivulet into the Caney River. Later, a group of children was ice-skating on the river and built a bonfire to keep warm. Flames ignited the rivulet of oil and spread to the Nellie Johnstone, destroying it. Production there and in other areas rose rapidly thereafter, Boyd remarks, adding much impetus towards the granting of Statehood in 1907, establising Oklahoma as the largest oil producing entity in the world.   The Mid-continent Oil Field area was to produce more oil than any other area in the United States. Until the discovery of oil in the Middle East, it was the largest known oil reserve in the world.   'I call petroleum the devil's excrement' (J P J Alfonso).   Those who sneer, writes Alvin O Turner, should be required to drive through the countryside around Lehigh or Okmulgee .. the trip should end in the Tar Creek area: I parked in the middle of the road, and stepping nervously out of my truck, I stood with mouth open, head dizzy. This place didn't make any sense. Gray mountains of crushed ore stretching skyward, a hungry, brown sinkhole crawling toward my front bumper. I was standing on ground zero of the biggest environmental disaster in the country, 25 miles from my front porch. And I had never heard about it. This is where the story began for me (Matt Myers) Less conspicuous .. are countless oil storage pits and salt deposits.. It is still possible to find abandoned wells from the territorial period that were never properly plugged      My grandfather Ernest S grew up on a farm in Arkansas, famously setting and running traps on his way to and from school. His mother, _________, taught the children feathers were dangerous. She used to scatter them around where she didn't want them to go [link]. My grandmother, Von Ceil, told my father that Ernest's mother was simple. We went to see Ernest's cousins on a farm in the Arkansas hills. They sat around the room talking about hunting skunks. Ernest's family had moved from the farm to the small town of _______, where they ran a general store. Ernest worked in the store and played baseball. His baseball playing took him briefly to OK, where he met my grandmother Von Ceil Awalt.   The Great Depression   Charlie Awalt had a Valve, supposedly. In [such and such a date] Sun Oil Company/ Sun Company/Sunoco flew Charlie Awalt and his son in law Ernest S into the Tulsa Refinery, supposedly to get access to his Valve, clearly to break a strike. My grandfather regretted being a strike breaker and a scab. As far as I know he e only mentioned that once, at least to his family, and that was many years later. If narrative development, the unfolding of events in a narration, implies the progression of chronological time, for contemporary planetary formations, history and its progression is determined by the influx and outflow of petroleum (RN 26) In fact there is a series of narrative devices operating in those emerging United States of America, which can be indicated approximately, and which very broadly came to be imposed on that space or spaces. If there was an approximately cyclical set of beliefs and practices living out in those vast spaces, the newcomer, the Stranger Guest (Mgeni) came with a different idea: an idea based on displacement deracination and sublimation: a deep history of displacement in the Old Country gave way to a group of Pioneers fuelled by profound experiences of expulsion. Deeply aware of their capacity for malice and vandalism, coming on the back of this traumatic history to the New World, a place, we could say: of possibilities - they enter literally bristling with weapons: arriving as a war machine and projecting a freewheeling compulsion for ruthless aggession onto that New World, they swiftly destabilise those broadly cyclical patterns, wiping out much of that human ecology with a few broad interventions, swatting and smashing.       Memories of the soil continue. Farmers speak together. Good soil (udongo safi) is a subject of good talk among farmers. Good soil struggles between the object of good talk and the object of violent expropriation. The Settlers move into the River Bottoms, where you used to sit with a gun across your knee waiting for squirrels. That's where the good soil is. Pa didn't like it where there were too many people. Pa was out cutting down trees. You all nearly died of malaria but the soil was good in the River Bottoms thereabouts (kule).   Farmers versus hunter gatherers; farmers versus herdsmen. Cowboys vs Indians. Pastoralists vs Neolithic Peoples. Cowboys vs Farmers. Lines vs cycles. Narrative vs Lyric. Sheep Farmers vs Cowboys. Trains vs drovers. Compost vs Fertilizer. Boomers vs Busters. Buffalo vs Cattle. Horses vs Oxen. Wheat vs Prairie. Soil versus oil. S OIL Set it up as a table.   The narratives of expansion and conquest are contested by the forces of protest and solidarity. Petroleum lubricates the narratives of Technocapitalism, projecting them into hyperviolent drives. Go back a little. Within the scope of these pictures, which we know from The Great Fire of London encompass the effective limit of known history - [ expand ] - we can see the History of Oil in Oklahoma - and thereby the timeline of petroleum in the known world. We can go back to those initial insertions. The idea of the Seeps intrigues us. And we can easily imagine the smell and perhaps the appearance of those places where the Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice (RN) oozes to the surface of the earth, the smell of the asphalt in the heat of Summer on those in fact baking prairies, in the heat haze. The Prairie Hen ran across those grasslands in great numbers, fat for the pot. Periodically, at the time of the migrations, the sky was darkened by overflight of || Passenger Pigeons ||, passing to their roosts in the South in those great Cotton Trees [ fluvia ] [ strange fruit ] Lacking, perhaps, traditional, moral, or superstitious checks on their natural infantile curiosity, somebody decided to do some drilling. This initial puncture in the upper layers of the earth's crust, corresponding to the punctum in this earliest photograph, it marks a decisive shift. [The history of mining should not be discounted in any way - that long history of excavation and extraction] However the moment of insertion of the first drilling tip for the extraction of oil, the poising of that bit over the prairie surface should be held here out as a point of reference the unfolding of the rostrum is a point of reference, in the bee - cp and ct the hairy footed flower bee [only man | and the ant | can't let the | flower be - don van vliet] in the case of the drilling rig, which can be taken to be lubricated in the first instance by whale blubber - that is to say we need to take in that slaughter as a precursor to the sinking of that first well for cattle dip, for a tick treatment, not to speak of the later Nellie Johnstone No 1 - in that case, dangling like a mosquito mouth parts over the crust of that bright red soil in Chelsea, in Chelsea - it's a question of an exploratory penetration anticipating the welling up of juice - as my grandfather Ernest S referred to gasoline - the reciprocal self lubricating production of Gaia's aromatic juice, RN, that is decisive -   the term well (kisima) points to a profound reconfiguration, a profound toying, we can say, with the necessities of life, what makes a place a place a nice place   pahali pazuri a place to settle, the substitution of one fluid by another that requires, we can say, an intense justificatory apparatus, a massive lego-philosophical rig-up to normalize such a transposition - 'a whole new language?' at the time, to get from water to oil, a person requires physical induction into the smells and textures of new substances [cp and ct gas - gesi - the discursive enabling field of so called natural gas] The attraction / threat posed by the intensive application of lube oil is the subject of a show by the Brighton based Beatabet collective, in which the viewer can insert their head up through holes in the floor of the performance space, placing them in the midst of preparations for some kind of orgiastic event, involving the intense oiling up of half stripped performers, so that the hot air is thick with the smell of baby oil   The first pictures of those early drillers, the innocence of the first barely transgressive explorations, along with the accompanying filth, establishes a thematic for all later explorations, gives way to the pictures of half stripped men, slathered in oil and grime, and the whole machinery of lubircation. Lubrication purports to prolong and intensify contact, the life of equipment (vyombo), limit friction, enhance sensation, increase the depth and scope of petrocapitalish penetrations. The show takes place on a perforated platform, where the viewer is aware not only of their own head, but the heads of others being alternately poked up through a variety of holes into the midst of this would be heavy scene being simultaneously streamed to multiple monitors - in fact a line develops, with would be viewers waiting, crouched under the viewing layer, in varying degrees of excitement, for an opportunity - there is time to think; and / so the extent of our curious complicity with the spectacle on this something stage is of course not lost - also that sharp smell makes an impression   not overtly distressed, but we are tired   childhood   is really far away     Sometimes we drove across the flat dry landscape between Tulsa and Oklahoma city, Oklahoma city was characterized by   Large pockets of high-pressure natural gas and huge oil production..   One well, the Number One McBeth, had a daily flow of 101,002 barrels of oil. When gas pockets were unexpectedly encountered, the result was a runaway gusher that often sprayed entire neighborhoods before the crew controlled the well. The most famous of these was the Wild Mary Sudik. For ten days between March 26 and April 4, 1930, the Wild Mary threw 20,000 barrels of oil and 200,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas into the air daily as workmen struggled to cap the well. A film of the black stuff settled on Norman, eleven miles to the south, and then when the wind shifted, the mist fell on Nicoma Park, eleven miles to the north.   at the tail end of the third and most recent drilling boom, triggered by oil prices rising from with political tensions in the 'Middle East,' we would be driving from Tulsa to Grand Lake o' the Cherokees, by Wagoner. As we drove in that old pickup truck my grandfather, Ernest S and I would point out Grease Holes still pumping here and there by the road

|| a person who has seen the soil blow away literally || from around them is shocked. such a person is traumatized by that experience. || a farmer, who has been farming the soil || who then sees the soil blow away: the conversion of fertile soil into dust and conversion of plains to a bowl of dust: this person is now seen leading their child by the hand. what do you say to that child, as your house is engulfed in dust? undoubtedly this is one of those moments like on safari: Bruno Latour advises us to slow down, focus on what is before us; we need to pass beyond the surface of the image, which undoubtedly has become a cliche; it's become trite. even the photographs of walker evans have become cliches: cliches of modern alienation; cliches of poverty and deprivation. we need to return the contingency to those images: it is not that these people are simply without: without the means of subsistence; without the social capital to fend with the turbulent changes of the past century. these people who famously stare at us like Wamaasai have been actively disposessed; their capital is literally blowing from around their feet: their bare feet and their feet in broken boots. the feet and especially the soles of the feet of the actors of these pictures are acutely significant: the sole is from seuil the threshold, where the foot is placed, from solum ground: the attempt to find a ground is embodied in these feet which stand, messing, in the case of some boy, with a toe in the dust: the foot is placed on the soil as a base, there a person is grounded; even as late as my father's generation a person such as my father was being complemented on his large feet, on the basis this would be a good grounding: the feet planted on the ground would be the basis of the work, hence the grounded life: at the same time as the ungrounding of that territory was already so advanced and we can practically say: complete: so that at the same time as they valued large flat feet people spoke with derision of a dirt farmer. they were nothing but dirt farmers, they would say. that extreme lack of confidence in the agricultural process, completely inverting a whole scheme of value, can be seen to occur before the opening of the narratives associated with petrocapitalism and the consumer society of the post Depression century. if the people of Oklahoma were uniquely prepared to submit to those narratives, it was because the underpinnings of a previous way of life had been drastically pulled from under them in the form of the actual topsoil, at the same time as the surface of the ground had been radically holed and shattered in violent experimental incursions into the deeper earth, as documented by Reza Negarestani in such uncompromising terms for the Middle East. the question we would want to look at would be: what was the effect of this double catastrophe on the minds of the inhabitants of those places? of course we know, as it were superficially, about the kind of frenzy created by the discovery or possible discovery or possibility of discovery of oil in a person's back yard, sometimes in their actual back yard; more often in an agricultural field of which the fertility was precisely already exhausted, more often than not following wholesale deportation of the top soil by wind. we know that and something about the so called boom and bust mentality that ushered in. but what about taking a step back and to try to think about what it means to make the conversion from land which is cultivated to the depth of a couple of spits, where the aim traditionally is the promotion of soil fertility: the enrichment and enhancement of the living layer of the soil, a complex region described elsewhere; to the abandonment of that project, on the back of a radical disillusionment, following the collapse of agriculture as proposed by the agrochemical companies and the agroindustrial companies (John Deere): so that the soil was entirely rapidly exhausted, ceased cohering, and blew away, accompanied by violent storms of dust, leaving the farmers of Oklahoma without their only asset. the conversion then of this catastrophe in the upper layers of the regolith into something quite different: the proposal that the surface of the ground is itself underlain by liquid, which can be obtained by piercing the immediate top layer and drilling to depth, in the way an abscess is drawn off by lancing. it is also clear that the environment immediately around the well head is not a place for crops. oil is a much dirtier substance than substances known previously; hence the huge increase in demand for soap in the twentieth century. soap is barely necessary for dealing with so to speak naturally occurring dirt: water is fine to wash off most of that dirt; vegetable oils are also readily removed by warm water. petroleum oils on the other hand are difficult to remove without special solvents, which typically dry and damage the upper layers of the skin, requiring moisturisation and barrier creams and gels - or proprietary products like GOJO - to prevent severe damage to people working routinely with petroleum oils. the area around the well head - thinking of the small well head in somebody's field or lot, with a single greasehole pumping a few barrels or a few hundred barrels a day, this area is likely to be an area of hard standing or compacted soil, with periodic spillages of oil; this is not a place for plant cultivation. in fact we know that the extraction process was often extemely messy, with flows and mists of oil running and being sprayed and blown over wider areas, as we are aware from the similar later exploitation in the Ogoni Delta and elsewhere, and from the iconic images of firefighters and oil workers struggling to contain oil wells in Kuwait in the first US war against Iraq. I personally have had some experience working in marine oil support, and I can give general assurances that the work of oil and the oil industry is not work that accommodates itself much to the work of planting and growing. it's a quite differenct kind of work; its chemical and material bases are different and its conceptual bases are quite different; the oil industry does not tend to engage, historically, in environmental projects; it tends to give to the Houston Ballet or the Dallas Museum of Art or the Tulsa Opera - it has a natural, we can say, affinity with military hardware, and of course many overlapping personnel with military work. the purported greening of a company such as British Petroleum is of course a development we watch with fascination and horror. we understand that much of the oil and dispersant from the Deep Water Horizon disaster, far from being supposedly cleaned up by the healing capacities of Mother Nature (La Madre Tierra), has settled and continues to settle on the seabed in a toxic sludge loaded with dead microorganisms, according to latest reports from Naomi Klein aboard the survey ship ______________. we are bound to speculate that the radical ungrounding of the surface of the earth, its conversion to dust and dispersal, followed by its mechanical penetration and ensuing extraction of fossilized liquids from beneath the surface - that these repeated incursions into the underlying earth had profound effects on the minds and bodies of the inhabitants of those oil rich areas, for whom the whole configuration of the land was drastically altered. much of the focus on the experiences of trauma in the past 20th century and beyond has been of course on the destruction of homes. in addition to the wholesale killing of people in war zones, there has of course been far greater destruction to people and property outside of war zones, and much of the focus on that has been on the destruction of the physical fabric of people's homes, which are routinely razed in the course of conflicts, typically being pulverised and or incinerated with their living human contents or in some cases after the decanting of their inhabitants. the shock and trauma written so to speak on the faces of the inhabitants of those dwellings, especially the children who once lived there, is so common a feature of conflict and so cliched and trite an image that we need to slow down once more to remember the extent of the trauma involved. far less well documented are the attacks on the soil of these regions. we know about the mining with land mines of productive agricultural land in order to render it impossible or impossibily dangerous to cultivate. we also know from the literature about the loss of livelihoods as a result of soil erosion; we may even have access to algorithms allowing us to plot relationships between certain intensities of rainfall on bare soil and the consequent tonnage of topsoil carried away, with the consequent reduction in crop bearing capacity of the test site, and consequent impact on livelihood of those people dependent on that piece of ground. we have also seen many pictures of farmers in the Ogoni Delta and elsewhere where their crops have been drowned and sprayed in oil for which they have not received compensation. similary in the case of the so called Okie migrants from Oklahoma documented by Walker and told by Steinbeck, we know of the consequent material hardships and the pains of discrimination and displacement. but I want to direct attention to the so to speak psychological and cultural repercussions of having the soil blown away from under you. we know that that soil was carried East and ended up in the Atlantic. those people standing on the original site were undoubtedly profoundly affected by that experience, whereby the living and productive outer skin of the land was physically removed. in some cases, like those of my grandfathers Ernest S and Derwood C, they became obsessed, in their different ways with soil fertility, devoting huge energies to maintaining the organic fraction of the soil. of course it was impossible to remain there. they were the last of the reluctant pioneers, everybody left, families straggling back across the United States and Europe, fatally ungrounded and lopped off at the root, infected like everybody else by the narrative lubes, played with and driven across the surface of the earth as the playthings of those forces: silent and troubled over the miles of ground. so that the history of oklahoma has to be written in a semi derelict housing experiment in a scrap of wood in central london. the disturbance of those times around the oil economy and the hole based and transgressive nature of oil extraction, and the intrinsically anxious and anxiety provoking dependence on a volatile liquid of unfixed price and unknown extent, together with the whole equipment and apparatus of drilling and extraction, as well the envirionmental destruction requiring repression - these must all be linked to the account of fears of anal and other penetrations associated with psychotic and neurotic obsessions with membranes and membranous perforations, as displayed in the homophobic and mysoginistic and fecalogical discourses of young white male oil marine support workers from Oklahoma, Texas and the Gulf States, and as articulated by Antonin Artaud in To Be Done with The Judgement of God, performed under the Flaying of Marsyas by Anish Kapoor during the first US war against Iraq [INSERT]

strangely enough, we saw more birds in that little || bird reserve in oklahoma city || - Martin Park Nature Center at 5000 West Memorial Road - really at that time it was on the edge of the city - than everywhere else in oklahoma put together     and that was without trying too hard    list of some birds we say [sic] there    rufous sided towhee    list of some woodpeckers we saw there    hairy woodpecker downy woodpecker yellow bellied sapsucker redheaded woodpecker    Martin Park Nature Center is in far northwest Oklahoma City at 5000 West Memorial Road, on the south side of Memorial between N MacArthur Boulevard and N Meridian Avenue    just west of Mercy Hospital    Since Martin Park is a protected wildlife sanctuary, pets, fishing, hunting, bicycles, swimming, camp fires and other activities that might be destructive to the habitat are not allowed.   we saw a big flock of waxwings feeding in the trees   [my dad and I did]   I remember it clearly now some 30 years later   and we saw prairie dogs out on the flat red field of brush   we looked down into the red muddy river and along its banks but we never saw a beaver.    I guess that reserve was and I guess it still is a phenomenal effort and act of conservation       in the sense that the creation of a place is an act of thought - the physical embodiment of a thinking which is an acting out - and so forth - by some people, in that sense I think we should see the martin park nature center as an attempt to think oklahoma collectively from the inside out    martin park nature center consequently serves - you can feel this when you are there - both when you are in the nature center and when you are elsewhere in oklahoma city and you can say you are trapped - this nature center serves, in that situation, both as what was called a place of repair but also as a place or point of leverage: it potentially gives a purchase on that whole territory    and I think it is actually fascinating the extent of the conceptual leverage it does afford: the extent is disproportionate to the size of the place and even perhaps the impact of the place, taken in parts: visual, aural, who knows - however: it has such a distinctive and different valency from its surrounding areas that, even in attempting to describe or take stock of its value, as such, its distinction, its valency, however we talk about it, what we find we are talking about, we feel and in fact are thinking, is a new economy    that is as far as we have been able to go with this material until now