Subject to object. Called.
Out. To each. Others. Marking. Ways beneath.1
Nine of the 34 species on this list are freshwater mussels.
flat pigtoe, southern acornshell, stirrupshell, upland combshell, green blossom pearly mussel tubercled blossom pearly mussel, turgid blossom pearly mussel, yellow blossom pearly mussel, sampson’s pearly mussel
It was this group of species/subspecies that brough me to a halt in September 2021. I was trying to get a sense of the entities that were part of the proposed delisting rule. And I reached these mussels and realized I could not contain them within my own creative work.
But everything had changed. I can’t tell this story without crying.2
So I invited in other artists. And some of those artists are holding these mussels in attention, in relation. They are: Eli Nixon, Mita Mahato, Woogee Bae, Madhur Anand, Megan Kaminski, Madeline Bassnett, Mandy Suzanne Wong, Janice Lee, Summer J. Hart, Brenda Iijima, and Victoria Vesna
Because this is a 11+ month-long emergent, anti-capitalist relational project, there are no “deliverables.” Only relation.
I am not a museum, institution or publisher, although I will bring a text with imprints of this project out into the world in the future, with help from a publisher.
And I am clearing the way for the artists to co-create within institutions, museums and those other structures of colonial/modernity.
I do know some ways the artists are encountering their more than human others.
The yellow blossom pearly mussel comes into Summer J. Hart’s mind daily now, and Janice Lee brings the turgid blossom pearly mussel into prayers and rituals. Madeline Bassnett is gathering resources for collaborating with the green blossom pearly mussel and Mandy Suzanne Wong is gathering collaborators to help build the Tubercled Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope. These ways of being with the species are so much in concert with what I know of these artists’ work and the reason I asked them to be a part of this project.
Also—what I’d hoped from bringing these artists in to caretake is happening for me. I have been able to start to draw in close to these creatures.
An Invitation: Come Into Engagement with Us
You can read the next bit as a way to learn about these creatures. But I invite you to do more than that.
To Prepare
1. Grab a piece of paper or two, and pencils, pens, crayons etc. to write with.
2. Also, find something to ground and resource yourself, stones for example, or something someone you love made for you.
3. Bring somatic practices into this if possible because this is about bodies. I link here to a description of a couple of practices so you have something to play with. (I am not a somatic facilitator and recommend working with facilitators).
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Freshwater mussels live in the waters across the U.S. south and midwest. They are among the most endangered species of animals in the world. Just imagine what it means to be a mussel body in the freshwaters of the U.S. and that precarity will start to make sense to you.
Their history here is deep, as they’ve been on this continent in some form since the Mesozoic (252-66 million years ago). During the Eocene (55.8 to 33.9 million years ago, their modern North American forms emerged.
Mussels and apes (including us) are animals. But our lineage diverged from the freshwater mussels around 670 million years. Before then we were contained in the body of a common ancestor.3 Then there was an enormous developmental split between protostomes and deuterostomes, and our ancestors were not longer in the same bodies.4
Relation is found, and freed, in the moments when it is most evasive5
Take a minute and notice feelings, emotions, sensations, images, words that are coming up for you now. Write, draw or otherwise record them.
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We are each
other's memory of the
future forty years from
here.6
You have assumptions about strangeness. At least I imagine you do because I do.
There is a wealth in this encounter. So move slowly if it is new for you and attend to your reaction.
Before you read the next bit, pause. Make sure you can feel your toes and your heart and your fingers.
Write down some things you imagine about freshwater mussels:
How might they move?
How might they interact with other species?
How many years do you imagine a mussel might live?
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Ok. Now read:
We actually do not know how long these mussels can live. We do not know how old those that are harvested, whose shell “rings” are counted, are—are they a creature that is 30 years old because there are 30 “rings” or are they 90 years old because counting “rings” may only roughly establish their age and they are likely three or more times older than the rings suggest. There may be elders of these species that are centuries old.
Pause. Note what you experience. Maybe use a somatic tool or two, or connect with a resource.
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Now read:
Many of these mussel-others are sexually fluid and many spend part of their larval life stages attached to the gills of host fish.
There are videos of some species of freshwater mussel parents depositing the larvae, glochidia, onto fish, although I’ve found no videos for the Delisted 2023 creatures.
I recommend watching these videos with the sound off so your experience is not mediated by narration. For example, see the multiple videos embedded in this article or follow this link: https://tinyurl.com/5yumaxmy
Take 15 minutes to write, draw etc. a response to one or more of these videos. You can pick one of these prompts:
· Make a list of words and phrases to fill in the blanks: I thought the mussels were ____ but they are _____
· When you remember the mussels, what do you feel, what images appear, what sensations, what do you want?
· How far do you feel from the mussels?
Write about time Write from your senses: e.g sight, sound, taste, touch, hearing, your physical sensations: e.g. heavy, light, cold, nausea, your emotional sensations: e.g. joy, grief, horror. Write a story, write a series of directions. Write what you wish or hope. There is no such thing as fiction or nonfiction in this. No such thing as grammar. Maybe you need to draw too.
Thank you
Let me know what came up for you or if you have questions, or just want to connect. I am so glad you are here.
—jen
Carlos Sirah, The High Alive
Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, Before Dispossession, Or Surviving It, Liminalities: a Journal of Performance Studies 12 (2016)
One such ancestor is known as the Urbilaterian
A note re: natural history and evolutionary context. I am hyperaware of where the information comes from, the assumptions behind the information and its documentation etc and I will post at some point about the structure of western science and the structure of colonial law as it intersects, impacts and constrains relation in this project.
Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself
Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain