Slochteren grief diary
Writing is time travel and communion
Dear ones,
This site-specific text that I wrote in September 2023 (when I thought to become pregnant) was commissioned by Het Resort and later published in print by them in October 2024 (when I was seven months pregnant) on the occasion of s06e01: green fields | subsurface with artists Alec Mateo, Artun Alaska Arasli, and Noa-Marthe. Slochteren grief diary was thoughtfully translated in Dutch by (and imbued with the touch of) Flora Valeska Woudstra. Reach out if you’d like to read the translation.
I’d like to share this work now (while I am ten months post-birth) so more of you have access to it. My sharing it is also a personal exercise in reflection: Joan is the same time outside of my body as she was inside, and I’ve experienced an enormous amount of activity across mind, body, and spirit these past three years. The intensity of my personal transformation is intertwined with witnessing the horrors of genocide in Gaza since October 2023. In the text, I refer to Édouard Glissant’s “trembling thinking” and it’s been a companion to me ever since, helping me bear my/our reality.
Your friend in grief,
Staci
Slochteren grief diary
A passivity that refuses participation
Beyond the minimum effort remaining present
For our end approaching far in the distance
Aware that what we’re waiting for
Is simply us
– Joey Yearous–Algozin, A Feeling Called Heaven1
When glass shatters, we sweep it up. When a gadget breaks or malfunctions beyond repair, we find a way to get rid of it, or it accumulates in a bin of old tech. We haul what we dispose of to the mystifying pit of the trash and recycle center. For a while now I’ve been interested in how we are accountable for messes and what we do when things break. Each situation is unique but a general ethos emerges from how we deal with harm or loss, because even if complicated, it is not abstract. Accountability and ambivalence are expressed through action, labor and materiality across institutional, ideological, interpersonal and internalized realms. Taking care of the cracks and faults in our daily life is necessary maintenance. Avoiding a large mess may have grave repercussions. The difference lies in whether we make the mess or the mess is made for us. Sometimes we have to patch the hole in the tire for a puncture we didn’t seek, but sometimes the tire is threadbare. Or how after a while, the shared kitchen becomes filled with dishes. Somebody has to clean it up. Some don’t want to clean the mess of another but sometimes we must.
With a broken relationship, we cut ties and perhaps dispose and replace too, but it’s possible to resolve into something new as hearts mend. A real apology can soften harm done, but for some violences there is nothing that could be said or done to repair its damage. Reparations for former colonies and lineages of colonized or enslaved people is one way to deal with the irreconcilable past in the present, but it’s difficult to put a price on pain. The point is, all of this is ongoing and not a single event. The past and the future are in the present. What to do, or how to be, when the mess won’t get cleaned up by those who either caused the mess or are the nearest to help? As it seems our contemporary condition is filled with great paradoxes, locating one's capacity for change can be challenging. The nexus of the climate crisis, the State, and capitalism, which perpetuates the climate crisis, is one of the wildest predicaments we’re in. We have a long list of what we can’t bear to lose and a much shorter list for what we’re going to do about it. I often think about what we can do—and I like taking action—but mostly I think about what it means to sit with irresolution. Between velocities of urgent action and careful reflection, there is no simple panacea for our kaleidoscope of predicaments
I.
I visited Slochteren for the first time at the tail end of summer. I was fresh in the wake of recovery from my first covid infection. The first five days were brutal. I was feverish and deeply fatigued. I was getting better with the change of each day but was met with lingering sleep trouble and a racing heart. I found it surprising I still hadn’t had covid yet, despite three years of the virus’s endemic spread. On numerous occasions I thought, “this is it, this is when I will be infected,” but all those times I slipped between someone’s breath and surfaces of contagion. Coming to the party late is not as arbitrary as it may sound. I have been vigilant about risk reduction already since I am part of and love many within disability communities (whether self-identified or not, living with some chronic condition). Since my partner Lotte has long covid and I visit a hospice weekly for volunteer work, my vigilance has remained despite multiple, melancholic chapters of the waning pandemic, declared as over. I still wear a mask in public transport and in crowded spaces. I must continue to minimize risk, but like others my will to live pushes me to keep going. After a ten day period of isolation and two negative self-tests across 48 hours, feeling well enough, I traveled by train from Utrecht to Groningen accompanied by my dog, Lou. My muscles felt sour and my lungs strained to get enough breath. I moved very slowly. In the bus along the highway to Slochteren I passed a rusted steel sculpture, a large surface featuring a jagged fracture. A few kilometers in another direction there is another highway sculpture, a large molecule memorializing where natural gas was first found in 1959. This area in the north of the Netherlands is shaped by decades of gas drilling, earthquakes, emotional turmoil and financial repercussions.
I texted with Noa-Marthe Prins on the way, bumped into Alec Mateo on the bus from the central station to Slochteren, and was welcomed by Artun Alaska Arasli inside of ‘t Olderloug, an antikraak building which was formerly a nursing home, where the three of them were all staying during their residency with het resort. I joined them there for a couple of days. These are the artists with whom I would come to understand different ways of responding to the effects of gas mining in this region as well as aesthetic sensibilities for reflecting on this situation and dealing in the irresolvable.
The entrance to the former nursing home led to several common areas and residence rooms lined along three halls that split from the entrance area. I imagined the building from an aerial view and it might look like a hand holding up three spread fingers. Many people lived and worked here, remnants of this were scattered around; furniture and other materials from the time when it was a nursing home. One noticeable and central object was a large standing clock in the middle of the stairway that didn’t tell the correct time. Artun led me to my room and after I settled in, we met back up in the kitchen to talk about his experience in the residency so far and about the work he is making. The three artists met with numerous constituents: a professor specialized in risk, activist groups, a former De NAM (Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij) employee, a city official, farmers, and local residents—characters in the dramaturgy of this ongoing event—to help acquaint the artists with this situation. It is a lot to process, and each artist sought to grasp it through the grammar of their practices, focusing on what resonated most for each of them. Artun followed intuitive associations that he made to the situation in Slochteren and was working on an essay that loosely tied them together. He took more of an airy, above ground perspective: his interests drew him to land artist Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash while surveying a potential area for an artwork, as well as to the godwit birds who pause for rest in the Groningen area during their migration south, something learned rather than innate. What stays with me is his ambivalence about land ownership and reclamation in The Netherlands, since the Dutch have played with and manipulated land for centuries. He referenced the saying from Descartes, “God created the world but the Dutch created the Netherlands.” Touching on the complexity of industrialized agriculture in relation to land, he also expressed formal interests in old farming tools like a pitchfork, rake, and scythe. He had welded some together to make sculptures from this visual language, and I got to see some photos on his phone. While I went out to get groceries, Artun watched my Lou and they even took a nap together.
That night, while laying in bed, Lou sleeping between my legs, of course I thought about how many people have likely died in this place. But more so I thought about the incalculable acts of care and dependency that have occurred here: lifts and transfers from beds to chairs, assistance with washing and bathing, conversations over preparing food, instances of being held at the threshold of intimacy and necessity. As I tried to fall back asleep, engaging in breath work, which is four seconds inhale, hold, seven seconds exhale, hold, I thought about my recovering respiration and my balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Oxygen is loaded onto my red blood cells while carbon dioxide is unloaded from them into the air, and my heart delivers oxygen throughout my body. I gazed at the ceiling above me and thought about this view from a bed, how this ceiling has been surveyed before me by another pair of eyes that traced the lines and corners where wall and ceiling meet, and another pair before that. This room houses an unseen collection of once beating hearts and that makes it sacred. My friend Maike and I had been messaging about ropes and knots related to her recent body of work, a way of thinking about collaboration and connection. Knots don’t tie themselves, we tie and untie the knot. An accidental knot only happens when the rope is so entangled through excessive jostling that it takes time and patience to untie it. Have you ever studied such an entangled knot in a cord or necklace and committed to untying it, even when you wanted to stop? Commitment is that deep, resettling sigh after recognizing that you’ve been holding your breath in order to focus. Untangling tends to take longer than anticipated. It’s this sort of fraught thing that I contend with.
Our relationship to land is also fraught, to say the least. The Eurocentric worldview and system is fundamentally obsessed with ownership over relationship—be it land, other people, or nonhuman life. It is an integral facet of the historic and ongoing currents of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. Ownership, and the management of it, is so deeply ingrained culturally that it plays out in seemingly innocent ways. Think even the recent advertisement campaign of the Dutch bank ING which proclaims individual ownership through the slogan “do your thing.” Natural resources like gas become commodities in the long arch of rigorous consumption of the planet that we see in the past centuries. We regard owning and using the earth to support a certain human-centered yet excessive mode of living as normal practices and behavior. It takes a lifetime to unlearn (or untie) and recognize new relationships. Considering the colonial assimilative enterprise, there’s a stark difference between forceful removal and relocation of people from their land (you may call to mind many imperialist nations, not only in the West but around the world, who have done and continue to do this) and the power dynamics happening in the fortress itself, where injustice and dispossession may be more opaque. The situation of natural gas in Groningen is an example of the latter: decades of natural gas extraction under one of the world’s largest natural gas fields has led to revenues that spurred and fortified postwar development in The Netherlands along with earthquakes that have caused devastation to houses and increasing disappointment and distrust in a growing neoliberal government. The intangible nature of gas, as het resort describes it in the project description for this residency, is made tangible when it is consumed for profit and when its extraction leads to damaging effects, producing new industries of risk management. It’s intangible again when responsibility for its effects is evaded, and grief and fear of loss manifest as anxiety about whether or not another earthquake will happen again.
It is immensely helpful and restorative when we learn from indigenous thinkers and communities about different, more than human, and life and death affirming ways of living with land. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer details through relational and scientific encounters to describe reciprocity with the natural world, an “understanding that we are not alone, that the Earth is populated by non-human persons, wise and inventive beings deserving of our respect.”2 This means you leave more than you take, and even though we are showered with gifts from the Earth, these are not meant to be kept (owned) but that these gifts should be passed along. I often think about how she describes talking with local indigenous hunters during hunting season about some of these principles. A hunter waits in the woods patiently with a single bullet. He does not shoot just any deer that he sees, even if an easy target. Instead the hunter waits with respect for the deer who will make eye contact with him. In this moment, the deer recognizes its fate and offers itself up. If you are going to take life to nourish your own, at least have the courage to look that life in the eyes and acknowledge this fact with every gram of your gratitude. It is possible to learn from this culture of gratitude and reciprocity without appropriation.
Now decades since the first earthquake in 1991, (there was an earthquake in 1986 but nearby, in Assen) the government has had a very slow response towards damage settlements. Now even some people who do not have damage from the earthquakes also are seeking settlements in the churning up of all of this. At some point, you feel scammed and start scamming back. And many landowners are angry that their property has lost value, which is also understandable when you’re having to be a player in this game of investment and return. In some ways this is all simple—the government should be accountable (see the Parliamentary committee report “Groningers boven gas” on the clear outcomes of this), and the fossil fuel corporations too, which knowingly harms over profit. It’s after demonstrating recognition and understanding of damage that something else can begin to transform from the physiological, psychic and social pain by inhabitants of this area. But it’s never simple like this. We all tell ourselves stories to make sense of things. It also helps us to sleep at night. Regardless of reasoning, we each have a hand in the contouring of durational life. We have been taught human supremacy, for example, or that those with the most money are the most valuable. We are inseparably part of an ecology of life and death, a node in a shifting web of power relations. There’s no escaping this, but a path forward that truly values life would, at all costs, commit to the minimization of harm and suffering. To engage the feelings stirred up from this trail of thought, two questions come to mind as a litmus test for emotional maturity: do you reflectively understand your capacity to do and be in the wrong? And do you recognize the power that you have to do something about it?
II.
Systemic transformation is deeply personal.
– Christiana Figueres, Ecological Hope, and Spiritual Evolution3
The following day I met Alec in the kitchen and learned about his perspectives. I remember his gentle hesitation to claim understanding of the Groningen gas affairs but that he was concerned for the local people’s sovereignty in this powerless situation. Working in music and performance, he created a score using measurements of seismic activity and intended on mashing this with the song Jij was de zee by Ede Staal, a beloved musician in this area during the 1970s, a prosperous time for the Dutch welfare state. Alec wanted to create a sonic atmosphere where visitors could get a little lost in the melodrama of folk music for much needed catharsis. We talked about how the listening space would be inside an old camper van, lined with fake grass carpet.
Lastly I met with Marthe, whom I’ve known for a couple of years. In fact, last year Marthe watched Lou when I went to Crete with my partner’s family, so the two of them were happy to reunite. Already familiar with Marthe’s performance sensibility, wielding language and dramatized affect, I was excited to learn that she was researching early advertisements for cheap gas in the 1960s to touch on gendered and racialized tropes. One commercial featured a nagging wife, another about how not using gas is “primitive.” Marthe wanted to employ a savage aesthetic and address the “green” obsession. She was also working on building a structure which related to some of the earthquake-prone vernacular of this area: exterior wooden beams that support houses in order to offset damage from earthquakes. In our conversation we talked about feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on complaints in institutions, how they illuminate power relations and what we can learn from those who complain about abuses of power. The nagging wife desirous of warm creature comforts in winter is easy to appease and even tempting, while the grievances made by locals about earthquake damages are a thorn in the side.
That evening, Marthe and I shared some soup that I made: chopped tomatoes (to stretch the last days of summer) with white beans, small noodles and a lot of garlic, basil and olive oil. Alec met with us later and we all talked until the sun was setting. We moved from topics like living with and caring for someone with dementia to what constitutes romantic friendships. Both subjects prove to be complex and seem to shake the structures we find ourselves within, whether about infrastructures of care and support or compulsory monogamy. Care and love, both alive and messy, are always relationally specific.
On a walk with Lou, I was particularly sensitive to my bodily vantage point. I thought about how the gas is extracted from 3000 m below, so deeply profound how much energy is down there, and the ground is charged with it (see “earthing,” which my mom advises I try every other phone call), producing many sub or imperceptible tremors. There is always a lot more going on than we know. Can we be humbled by this, instead of embarking on the urgent quest to accumulate more knowledge? There was a stark difference to the stillness above ground, though there is just as much activity there. The air was light and gentle on my healing lungs, and the neighborhood area was very quiet with only a few cars here and there. It was warm and I could feel that it wasn’t going to rain anytime soon. As I appreciate taking full stock of a situation, I’ve been practicing what Jay Drinkall calls “weather watching,” noticing details with my senses and how weather feels in my body (another planet) and collecting data to feel more intune with the changing weather. He describes how by inhabiting weather moments, through the act of witnessing, we can round out the sense of ecological grief that many of us feel. Like our mortality, there is much which is out of our control. That part doesn’t need fixing. But what can we do while we are here? A lot, actually. The question begs methods for how to be with loss, and how we continue to live on and love through the changes we don’t choose.
Philosopher Édouard Glissant talks about how it’s impossible to escape the inextricability of the world:4
“Consider, in the seventeenth century, the tremblement de terre de Lisbon, the great earthquake of Lisbon, nobody knew about it. Nobody knew until Voltaire wrote poetry about it. But if there is a flood in China today, we know about it immediately. We are immediately in the flood. If there is a typhoon, we know it immediately. We see the typhoon coming, coming, and coming, and coming to Haiti, to Jamaica, to Florida, to Louisiana, and we are in it.”
We cannot be in touch with the world thinking we have a single identity or one system of thought. Glissant knows that we can change without diluting ourselves in renunciation. What we need is “trembling thinking,” “the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought.” We need this “because the world trembles, and our sensibility, our affect trembles.” Tremblement is “neither incertitude nor fear. It is not what paralyzes us.” Instead, it is active searching and wandering toward the woeful verities of life with the poetics of trembling, a way of being in real connection to people and the world. This means not escaping the mess, but building our capacity to coexist with pain, struggle and uncertainty as everything continues to change. Being tied to the rigidity and dominance of any one system of thinking does not help us bear change and complexity (the reality of the living) like trembling thinking could, and we need ways to deal with and to look at the world in different terms. Consider how the various meanings of “tremble” also alert us to reality: a body shakes involuntarily from anxiety, excitement, or frailty; a voice sounds unsteady or hesitant; an area of land quivers and quakes. I wonder what trembling thinking could mean in relation to the truths of the Groningen area, in the wake of closing down the gas mines in October 2023, 64 years since it was found, 32 years since the first earthquake. I wonder how trembling thinking can help us be in the mess, who can afford trembling thinking in this situation, and how those in positions of power—the ability to influence structural changes—can somehow get the memo.
And what might trembling thinking feel like in the body? Its physical match might be found in communal grief-letting. Communal grieving inspires a kind of healing that is unique in comparison to the individual experience of grief. To be acknowledged, validated and witnessed in the externalization of feelings related to grief is a special kind of recognition. To shake and sob and blubber into incoherence without anyone trying to change you. It might be the last thing one might imagine to do in this instance. Even if welcomed and safe, falling apart with another is already a vulnerable act, let alone for those harmed in such a large situation of an explicit power imbalance and lack of accountability. Slow healing finds equivalence in slow violence, and it’s rare to find healing with perpetrators of harm. Plus, governing forces and institutions have become massive and their inner workings inaccessible. Even interpersonally, most of the time we have to heal on our own in situations of harm but it is also not possible to do so by ourselves—we need each other. When speaking about village spiritual traditions of old Europe, now so far away due to centuries of incongruency with Christianity, Martín Prechtel in The Smell of Rain on Dust writes how grief’s poem and specific sound, “no matter how messy, inappropriate, amateurish, or loud” must be heard.5
In a distressing situation, it makes sense that we want it fixed and done with so we’re free to move on. I also believe that the people harmed in an issue should be the ones to decide what happens, but external support is momentous in efforts to get there. As an outsider, I am far from calling for any solution but I do feel I am a stitch in our collective fabric. In my distance I allow myself to fantasize catharsis, with as much care and grace as I can bewitch. Imagine there’s a large ceremonial gathering in Slochteren. The highway is shut off, and all those who have impacted and been impacted by gas mining in the area gather to reconcile grief with the land that has been extracted. Important governmental officials, for-profit gas mining representatives, area locals and their lineages affected by the earthquakes assemble at the molecule memorial where natural gas was first found. Together they commence this moment with a ceremony leader and multiple support persons by recognizing each of their positions in the situation, whether directly or indirectly, and they have to witness each other in their raw expressions of what this means. It is thoughtfully and fiercely mediated. The entire community is there to support and be part of this transformation themselves; even if not explicitly implicated, they love someone who is. From every side there are moments of frustrated yelling, wailing sobs, and surreal silence. Ways in which this will be stewarded moving forward are proclaimed with sincerity. There is eye contact. Feelings are owned and they are also distributed. Tears and perceptions are shed, everyone is exhausted. Financial reparations are distributed through large cardboard checks as seen in game shows and tournaments. Everyone must eat. There is copious amounts of food and drink and people leave full, tired and feeling very real. It doesn’t mean that all is done and healed, but a collective shift could occur, and perhaps with a feeling of getting one’s life back. Actions informed by the true valuing of life show that transformation is not insurmountable. A rumble, tangle or fracture itself does not exist to be absolved, but instead invites us to learn how to live responsibly and in alignment with change. And healing recognition means not looking away from the pain.
*
1 Joey Yearous–Algozin, A Feeling Called Heaven, Nightboat Books, 2021
2 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013
3 On Being with Krista Tippett, “Christiana Figueres – Ecological Hope, and Spiritual Evolution, 9 November 2023
4 Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulricht Obrist, The Archipelago Conversations, ISOLARII, 2021
5 Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, North Atlantic Books, 2015