notes
25-10-29
s oil is about the hollowing out of life by techno capitalism, efforts to escape it, and the horror of finding yourself again in contact with the slippery business and substances of oil. during time spent in Mtwara, southern Tanzania, seeming in some ways far from home, when natural gas was found off the coast of Msimbati, it turned out the project was led by Anadarko Petroleum. Anadarko is a town in Olahoma. you can remember the word being pronounced in your grandparents' house in Tulsa, not your home but still a place of live childhood memories as well as particular histories and politics. how does writing, as a 'weak practice' (Sasha Baraitser Smith) form in response to such materials, with patterns and habits which continue to the present and stretch into distant areas of the earth. how can soil (its making, persistence, slow formation, contamination, remediation) be a counterpoint, a counter material, a counter practice, with its own needs, temporalities and textures. with its literal and figurative possibilities to (re)ground.

a person who has seen the soil blow away from around them is ungrounded. a farmer who has been working the soil, who witnesses the conversion of soil into dust and the conversion of plains into a bowl of dust – that person is with 2 children, one beside, one behind. what is there to say to that child, those children, as the(ir) house is buried in dust. slow. sink in. beyond the surface of the image. from which the protagonists stare back out at the camera. or slit their eyes. shield their face against grit in the air. the dispossessed. their capital is blowing around their feet: their bare feet and their feet in broken boots. the feet and especially the soles of the feet. from seuil the threshold, where the foot is placed, from solum ground. if a loss of ground is embodied in these feet which stand, messing, in the case of a child, with a toe in the dust. the foot which is placed on the soil as a base. there a person is grounded. my father was still being complemented on his large feet. 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 it was practically complete. 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. having lost all confidence in agriculture as a means of livelihood. a technic. a knowing. a way of living. in that. values inverted. if that occurs before the petro narratives open. the consumer stories. the post Depression. if people in that territory were uniquely prepared to submit to those narratives, because they had already suffered a disaster. suffered or brought about. a double disaster or a double dispossession. act of dispossession. whereby land was seized. then rendered uninhabitable. in a short space of time a wide variety of ways of life were eradicated. to the point that the topsoil of those areas was turned to dust and blew away. preparing the way for, or running parallel with holing and shattering of the earth's surface, with innovative violent incursions into the deeper earth, as documented by Reza Negarestani in Iran.

Dan T Boyd of the Oklahoma Geological Survey reports that oil seeps were recognized in Oklahoma long before the arrival of European settlers. European settlers found oil by accident while drilling for salt in 1897. In the same year, a well was drilled in an area of seeps in Rogers County, which produced half a barrel of oil a day, used as cattle dip. In 1896 the drilling of the Nellie Johnstone No 1 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Johnstone_No._1] led to the discovery of the Bartlesville-Dewey Field. When Oklahoma was declared a state in 1907, 'it was the largest oil producing entity in the world'. At 3pm on 15 april 1897, wrote Boyd, 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 [later of Phillips Petroleum]     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. It was repaired and continued to produce oil until 1964. Once 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 opening of oil fields in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, in the Middle East, it was the largest known oil reserve in the world.  

[D]rive through the countryside around Lehigh or Okmulgee.. the trip should end in the Tar Creek area, site of the US's largest environmental disaster [Alvin O Turner] 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. (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

something about the way the expulsions and enclosure of land, the racialised disposesssions of land, the destruction of prairies then of grazing and agricultural land, followed by the inception of the petro chemical industry along the same plane or skin of that same land – how that came about quite quickly and at quite small scale. quite intimate scales. a folding of catastrophes together. so the contamination of the source of livelihoods in the land comes to be latched onto the hope. the possibility. of riches. to discover oil. to be rich. you can remember people talking about such and such a person who discovered oil in their back yard; or in a nearby field. that field which was of no value whatsoever one day, becoming a gold mine the next. becoming an oil well. how a boom and bust mindset came out of that. how. for whom. what it means to pass from gardening, from land which is cultivated to the depth of a couple of spits, where the aim traditionally is the promotion of soil fertility for food growing. the living layer of the soil, a complex region described elsewhere. from that to the abandonment of that project. radical disillusionment with that project, following the collapse of agriculture as proposed by the agro industry. how with mechanisation that happened in the space of a lifetime.   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 different. a reformulation of what it means to be on the earth: to be floating on a skin over a subterranean pool of liquid.

If narrative, 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)

A series of narrative devices operating in the emerging United States both anticipate and, later, fuse with those technolubes, imposed together on those territories, framed as speculative spaces. If there were roughly cyclical cultural practices of different kinds lived out there over long periods of time, the settlers arrived with linear ideas. coming from deep experiences of displacement / deracination / expulsion, invested in domination, armed, arriving as a war machine, armed, they brought a freewheeling compulsion for ruthless aggession onto that New World, swiftly wrecking those cyclical patterns, wiping out the social ecologies they subsisted in, untangling, wracking, lining them up. that work, you can say, was under way, when it came under the influence of petrochemicals, with their particular properties: to lubricate, to volatilise, to coat. to accelerate. it happens in oklahoma. in anadarko. then it dives into a seam and it bursts out everywhere. much later you re in Mtwara, s Tanzania, and you see it surface there. the west indian ocean looping in and out. the appearance off the coast, in the town of Mtwara of that same thing. its methods. mores. priorities. 'we are pollution listening to pollution' ( ). hearing yourself back with horror. with delay. to be a contaminant on the face of the earth. that.

The figure shows the cities of Tulsa and Oklahoma City sitting above the Cherokee shelf over the Anadarko geologic basin.

We used to drive from Tulsa to Oklahoma City and back to visit family. As you drive from Tulsa to Oklahoma City you can see a lot of red tailed hawks on the fences. At some point the soil turns red. In those days the speed limit was 60mph. Driving at sixty miles per hour in those big quiet cars, everthing passed in slow motion - a slow motion of the memories of those times, which combines with the dream like sense of cities floating on an inland sea of oil.

At the time another person was splashing in the sea, you were in the middle of the United States of America, far from the sea, in a water scarce region. The pumping engines could be seen working, the grease holes, as your grandfather called them, as he pointed them out: those pumps dotted the landscape during the last boom, moving even more slowly than the cars. Their design recalled the early industrial revolution, || the beam engines || of the Cornish mines, now preserved in heritage installations on the sea cliffs, and they looked like those sipping ducks people had then for toys. But their heads made them look like dinosaurs and connected with the fossilised materials under extraction and the sense of a relentless activity continuing night and day. Your grandfather Ernest S worked in the refinery at Tulsa, after leaving the hills of Arkansas. Your other grandfather, Derwood C, taught English first in Henrietta then in Oklahoma City, after leaving Western Oklahoma in the Depression.

The table summarizes some of their interests.

Ernest S		Derwood C
crops food fishing hunting carpentry pickling and preserving baseball		soil fertility English and American Literatures history of the Prairies organic vegetable growing pickling and preserving the weather

the poor soil. begin there. 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 Evans 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

lube 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 event, involving the oiling up of half stripped performers, so that the heated air smells thick

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 workers, slathered in oil and grime, evoking a sensational lexicon of grease, denim, gojo, grit. if lubrication proposes to prolong and intensify contact, the life of equipment (vyombo), limit friction, enhance sensation, increase the depth and scope of petrocapitalist incursions being simultaneously streamed to multiple monitors around the space under london bridge station

you are tired   childhood, you say strangely   is far away

Sometimes you drove across the flat dry landscape between Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

Under Oklahoma city were
large pockets of high-pressure natural gas and huge subterranean oil pools

One well, the Number One McBeth, had a daily flow of 101,002 barrels of oil. When gas pockets were.. encountered, oil sprayed entire neighborhoods.. [B]etween March 26 and April 4 1930, 20,000 barrels of oil and 200,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas were expelled into the air by a single well (the 'Wild Mary Sudik'). 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, was coated ina black film and Nicoma Park, eleven miles to the north, was covered by an oil mist [ref].

at the tail end of the third and most recent drilling boom, some time around the 1980s, re-animated by a logic of oil prices linked to geopolitics of the Arabian Gulf region, you and your grandfather would be driving from Tulsa to Grand Lake by Wagoner. slowly driving in that old pickup truck, the two of you would point out Grease Holes – beam pumps still slowly tilting back and forth not far from the road

from those initial insertions. seeps. the smells and perhaps sounds of those places where hydrocarbon corpse juice (Reza Negarastani) is oozing to the surface of the earth. the smell of asphalt in the heat haze of summer on those prairies. prairie hens ran across there in great numbers. at migrations, the sky was darkened by flights of Passenger pigeons, up to miles long, going north or south [     ]

drilling then as a kind of idle probing, perhaps. Creating an initial puncture in the upper layers of the earth's crust, corresponding to the photographic punctum, which marks a break.

but anticipated, underlain and sustained by older deeper histories of mining. excavation. extraction. history as mining. as extraction.

 



sounds of the prairie



before the mechanisation of extraction. construction of transport infrastructures. transportation of equipment. insertion of drilling bits. injection of lubes. coolants. pumps.

 

tanks. tankers.

 

how to start with, a drilling rig would be lubricated by whale oil.

Whale oil is oil obtained from the blubber of whales.[1] Oil from the bowhead whale was sometimes known as train-oil, which comes from the Dutch word traan ("tear drop"). Whale oil was also used to make soap. In the 20th century it was made into margarine. The development of petroleum accelerated the whaling industry,[6] which peaked in the 1960s. Whale oil was obtained by boiling strips of blubber harvested from whales.[9] The removal is known as flensing and the boiling process was called trying out.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_oil]

is there no end. you say. is there no start.

that organised seasonal slaughter. those technical arrangements (of equipment. of discourse). as a precursor to the sinking of that well for cattle dip, to kill ticks. for the hell of it. the Nellie Johnstone No 1. those names. of one of the oil developer's children. who obtained access to the land by marrying an indigenous person. whose collaborator married another indigenous person. how that was put together. all of it. those names. those bits. over the crust of that bright red soil in _____. how they dug and dug. drilled and drilled down. how costs accumulated. how they did or did not strike / hit / discover. Gaia's aromatic corpse juice [RN].

the proposal that the surface of the ground overlies liquid which can be accessed by piercing. as with an airport, the surrounding environment is not a place for living or growing food. oil is a dirtier substance than substances known before. it brings a demand for soap. vegetable oils are removable with warm water. petroleum oils are difficult to remove without special solvents and require moisturisers, barrier creams and gels, GOJO – to limit damage to workers' skin. thinking of the small grease hole in somebody's field or lot, pumping a few barrels a day, surrounded by hard standing or compacted soil, with periodic spillages. moving to larger scale scenes of contamination, with flows and mists of oil running, spraying and being blown over wider areas, as in the Ogoni Delta and elsewhere. images of firefighters and oil workers struggling to contain wells damaged by bombed in the first US war against Iraq. the overall intensity of oil production marks a split from traditional work. chemical material epistemic.

[all the time ecological collapse is occurring, giving way to petroleum exploration, a kind of re-calibration is also occurring, it seems. spending time with those novel substances, learning their smells and lubricating and wearable properties is also to prepare for agriculture itself to be re-configured. within two decades from the Arkansas floods and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to the agricultural revolutions of the 1950s, the figure of the poor farmer has taken on an archaic feel. the dirt farm can be distinguised from a financialised farm which is closely integrated with the petrochemical industry, to the extent that without fertilizer and biocides it is unimaginable. a different kind of field aesthetic emerges, linked to habits and products of personal hygiene. children are told what is dirty. in the second half of the 20th century, only areas of unrest and / or subject to exceptional circumstances or chance resist consolidation into large uniform holdings.]

kisima [swahili: well] points to a profound reconfiguration, a profound toying, you could say, with the necessities of life, what makes a place a place a good place   pahali pazuri a lovely place, a place to stay. to settle. that switch. the substitution of one fluid by another that requires, you can say, an intense justificatory apparatus, a heavy discursive rig-up to normalize a deep transgression. a whole new ball game. at the time, to get from water to oil, a person requires cultural induction into the smells and textures of new substances [cp and ct gas - gesi - the discursive enabling field of 'natural gas' as clean and light]

strangely enough, we saw more birds in that small   reserve in oklahoma city   – Martin Park Nature Center at 5000 West Memorial Road – at that time it was on the edge of the city – than everywhere else in oklahoma put together

rufous sided towhee
list of woodpeckers
hairy woodpecker
downy woodpecker
yellow bellied sapsucker
redheaded woodpecker

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   [you and your dad did]

  remembering it clearly now about 30 years later
prairie dogs out on the flat red field of brush
you looked down into the red muddy river and along its banks but never saw a beaver.

thinking that reserve was and is still an extraordinary act of imagination and protection

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 – by some people. in that sense, thinking to see the martin park nature center as an attempt to think oklahoma collectively from the inside out    entirely against the grain of its dominant histories

in the way your grandfather derwood c tried, in writing a book on composting, and a book on organic gardening in oklahoma

so that martin park nature center 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 a place of repair and also as a place or point of leverage: it potentially gives a purchase on that whole territory

thinking in that sense it is actually fascinating the extent of the conceptual leverage it does afford: the work it does: an extent entirely disproportionate to the size of the place and perhaps also the impact of the place, taken out of context. its visual. aural. impacts. its perceived forms. and yet. in the way it has such a distinctive and different valency from its surrounding areas, even in attempting to describe or take stock of its value, as such, its distinction, its register, however it can be talk about, you find you are talking, you are feeling and thinking, in a wholly new way

that is as far as you ve been able to get until now