coe013_cultures-of-energy-5_POLISHED.mp3 NOTES [00:01:05] Senses should be census? TRANSCRIPT Dominic Boyer: [00:00:26] Ok, folks, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We are back in our native studio again, we are back underground where we belong instead of being shipwrecked in a closet. Welcome Cymene Howe. Cymene Howe: [00:00:40] Yes, thank you very much, Dominic Boyer. Happy to be back. Dominic Boyer: [00:00:44] So we have had quite a week. Last week we had flooding in Houston, which we've already reported on briefly. And then we had our senses Fifth Annual Spring Research Symposium, which we called Cultures of Energy five. And it's kind of hard to imagine it's been five years. We've been doing this. Cymene Howe: [00:01:05] Every spring all these researchers have been coming together from the humanities and the social sciences Dominic Boyer: [00:01:11] And the arts and architecture. Cymene Howe: [00:01:12] And architecture, and getting together in big groups and little clusters and talking and eating and hanging out and sharing ideas. And in general, every every spring symposium that we've had, at least as as participants have self-reported it in person has been really, really positive and generative. And this was a super excellent one as well. Dominic Boyer: [00:01:36] I mean, they have to they have to be nice because we've just invited them out and given them an honorarium and everything. But I do think sincerely, folks had a great time. I know I had a great time. So what we did, what we've done for the past few years and we did again this year is when people g et here, the first thing we do is we take them on a boat tour of Houston Ship Channel, and this year was very exciting. So the ship channel, for those of you who don't know, is the pretty much the densest concentration of fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere in the world. It's 50 miles of refineries and petrochemical complexes and, you know, supertankers and every other imaginable thing. This year we went out and we got about halfway through the trip and this massive storm system came through. So you had these images, which were kind of aesthetically perfect of all these refineries with massive storm clouds behind them and even lightning and then a massive wave of rain came over us. And to the extent that actually the highways were flooding, then when we were driving back in our little Rice University bus and I was pointing to people out the window as the bus was, you know, almost became a duck boat or something like that, and people were definitely came away with that. You know, I said, you know, perfectly curated. You've got the two halves of Houston's Anthropocene right there. You've got the you got the what's making it happen, all that fossil fuel infrastructure. And then you have the massive storm clouds, the sea level rise, the storm surges, everything else materialized for you there. So I think even though unplanned, it came off pretty well. Cymene Howe: [00:03:08] And then during the tour itself, as the captain was giving his scripted and I'm sure, you know, very well practiced tour of the ship channel and pointing out all of the sort of patriotic infrastructure that everyone's really thrilled to see. And apparently there are actually tourists who go on this tour of the ship channel. Oh, yeah, there people who love it, I think it'd be fascinating just to talk to those people, just to know who they are. I mean, I guess there's some military folk who go because this is an important site of security, right? This is national security kind of location that needs to be protected because it's a vulnerable and potentially dangerous infrastructure in place. But then, you know, as the captain is pointing out, all of these things, Roy Scranton is out on there on the deck with the cultures of energy crew, right? Telling the counter-narrative and the the alt history right and alt future of this ship channel. Because, you know, as the captain saying, you know, here's this refinery. Roy's looked at some of the statistics and some of the reports that show, you know, if there were a tidal surge to occur, that that refinery would basically be bleeding out and leaking into the ship channel and out into the Gulf almost immediately. Dominic Boyer: [00:04:17] And because because as he was pointing out, there are these tens of thousands of containers, essentially big containers of petroleum products and byproducts that are lining along the ship channel. And as you go down there, you see how many of them look rusted, which is really concerning, and they're just a few feet above sea level to the to the eye. And if the 20 foot storm surge that had accompanied, that was supposed to come up the ship channel had actually happened with Hurricane Ike, as was projected, but it veered away at the last minute. If that storm surge had come up, there were predictions of like anywhere from like, you know, a quarter to maybe a half of those could have failed. They could have been carried off or imploded somehow. And then you can just imagine it would have been like, you know, an Exxon Valdez level, you know, environmental disaster as well as quite possibly having washed up into the city. And, you know, just it's really frightening. And yeah, that's not the narrative they're telling on the boat tour or the official tours all about jobs. And it's great. And, you know, think of how big this is for the economy. And it's and that's one thing that everyone comes away with. It's just big. It's massive infrastructure. The scale of it is sublime, almost. And I think people process that than the rest of the symposium. Cymene Howe: [00:05:28] Yeah, we actually had a paper that was really on target that was done by Fiona Pollock, who's a Newfoundland. Dominic Boyer: [00:05:34] Yeah. And Memorial U Cymene Howe: [00:05:36] At Memorial University. And she did her entire paper about sort of, you know, searching through the archives and looking at this documentation of offshore oil disasters where there's been a lot of human life lost and just contamination from from oil spills. So that matched up and a kind of macabre way with that ship channel tour. But we had a lot of super inspiring papers and from all kinds of different disciplines. And, you know, looking at sort of Liberate Tate activism and you know, what is the audience for thinking through new futures of oil, looking at the history of oil, looking at the way in which fuel and energy have been represented in fictional forms, looking at the history of thermodynamics not just as an energy system, but as a kind of ideological, political and economic system. Yeah, a wonderful kind of closer presentation by our own Albert Pope, who we're going to have on the podcast again soon. Who's doing? I don't want to spoil it, but he's doing really interesting work in terms of imagining a vertical spiny habitational future. And, you know, just the kind of possibilities in terms of changing how we live was actually quite inspiring. Maybe he's not the most optimistic guy in the world, but the talk was, Dominic Boyer: [00:07:01] Yeah, it's smart in the work is incredible, and we will definitely have him on the podcast. Yeah, there were so many good moments and it's it all washes over you and we're still processing it all. I think because it just ended on Saturday and on the end part of the trip, we then take them to the Menil Collection, which is the other side of the sublime, this beautiful, this beautiful museum collection, which includes, I think, one of the most dramatic and amazing spaces in all of Houston, which is, of course, the Rothko Chapel. And you sort of go there to clear your head and clear your spirit out a little bit, but also to remember that the Menil Collection itself was funded through oil, oil philanthropy, essentially through the Schlumberger Fortune. So there's no getting away from it here in Houston. But I thought one of the the nice, there were many nice moments. One of the ones that I just wanted to capture here before I forget about it was in our final sort of plenary session. We were all talking about why energy humanities matters and all the different ways the things we can offer. And I did, you know, like this idea of of energy humanities as a kind of form of artificial intelligence or alien intelligence that can inhabit the petro cultural system, right? And kind of convert it from within. And I do think that's a kind of a nice metaphor for for what we're trying to do, what we're aspiring to do here. And then, OK, we should also mention what it will in fact comprise the remainder of the content of this episode, which is that Cymene had a chance to chat one on one with several of our distinguished visitors. Cymene Howe: [00:08:38] Wasn't even chat really, though it was like riffing because they're short, you know, their five minute pieces and they're based on a key word of their of their choosing. And we got a good collection of people from different disciplines, artists and other academic folks all riffing on pretty different words. And this was based on a project that we've done through the journal on the journal website called Lexicon for an Anthropocene, Dominic Boyer: [00:09:07] A better name that journal for those who don't know. Cymene Howe: [00:09:08] unseen. The journal is called Cultural Anthropology, and the website is the Cultural Anthropology Journal website. And there's a section there called field sites, so you dig down into field sites and then you get to theorizing the contemporary. There's a lot of tabs you have to get through. Dominic Boyer: [00:09:23] We'll put the direct link on the. Cymene Howe: [00:09:25] OK. Anyway, so it's but what it is, is it's, you know, it's based out of a conference and people's writing, you know, kind of short riffs, thousand word pieces based on a keyword or amused word on the Anthropocene. So this was the same idea, except live live riffing in podcast form. Dominic Boyer: [00:09:44] And people didn't have a lot of time to prepare because we kind of sprung Cymene Howe: [00:09:47] It on basically zero. Dominic Boyer: [00:09:49] But but in a way, the spontaneity of it is what what makes it nice, I think, and those were very honest and just sort of spur of the moment reflections on things often motivated by something that had been said in the conference or something that had just occurred to someone so right. That's nice. And they were recorded in in a in a particularly luxe space, which was this weird, cramped closet in the back of the the the hall, the meetings, Cymene Howe: [00:10:15] Yeah, with a bunch of sort of disabled chairs and cracked pleather everything and a secret spiral staircase in the back that you couldn't even approach because there were so many chalkboards and other bits of educational detritus in the way Dominic Boyer: [00:10:29] This this room, I should say, which is called the founders room at Rice University. It's one of our nicer rooms, but it has this really peculiar history. It was built to house the 16th G7 Summit meeting in 1990, which sounds, you know, like it's really impressive. And I guess in a way it is like. But of all the things that were happening in 1990, you know, Cold War is coming to an end. Russia's is in a beginning its process of transformation. And you know, if you go to the Wikipedia page, which I did to see what happened at the G7 meeting, there is as in terms of outcomes, there's one sentence and I will paraphrase that I think more or less correctly, which was that, you know, the the members of the, you know, the the meeting declared that they would like to try to plant more trees to forest more area. I kid you not to force more areas of the world and to try to to try to roll back deforestation elsewhere and then period pause. There's little evidence to show that this actually happened. So in a sense, this is like a meeting whose only outcome was a tentative effort towards some kind of environmental improvement. Cymene Howe: [00:11:38] Let's pretend we're tree huggers for a minute. Dominic Boyer: [00:11:40] And yet they failed at even that right. So I think we did better than that. I think at cultures of energy five, a little better, Cymene Howe: [00:11:47] That's the best they could have come up with. Well, if it had been the G8, maybe it would have been totally different. Dominic Boyer: [00:11:52] My question is, what are they going to put in the Wikipedia page for cultures of energy five in terms of its outcomes? Cymene Howe: [00:11:56] Well, first, there has to be a Wikipedia page. That's the beginning part. Dominic Boyer: [00:11:59] Well, so people out there in our listenership, that's a cue to you to form a Wikipedia page. Cymene Howe: [00:12:05] My favorite moment was during the discussion of multi-species ethnography and sort of cohabitation of life between humans and non-human life forms. And somehow we started talking about labor and work and all those different effects and then pleasure came to the table. And then someone said, you know, it's not always pleasurable cohabitating with these other species. And then she told a story of a very aggressive and portly squirrel that was attacking her out on the out on the lawn while she was trying to eat her lunch. That's like a multi species engagement that you know no one really wants to admit to. But we do have a really, you know, wily squirrels here at Rice and they're massive, Texas style. Dominic Boyer: [00:12:50] That's a hyper subject. And I think it's, you know, one that we could learn something from. It's just getting in our face. It's saying, you know, look at me. Deal with me. You know, right? You've got me all fat now. You have to keep feeding me. Cymene Howe: [00:13:01] Right? I'm a I'm a resource fiend, Dominic Boyer: [00:13:04] A resource fiend squirrel. Or it's just like you can just fill in your favorite like Texas joke there, too. Even the squirrels are portly, whatever and demanding and in it for themselves. But that's not our spirit. So with that, shall we turn to these pieces? And I think what we're going to do is just run them without introduction one by one in a row, so you get to hear from several of our colleagues who identify themselves and introduce themselves, and we'll look for more deal details and links to their websites on the blog post. Cymene Howe: [00:13:34] Mm hmm. Sounds like a plan. Dominic Boyer: [00:13:35] Ok, here you go. Cultures of energy five keywords for the Anthropocene. Cara Daggett: [00:13:50] This is Cara Daggett from Johns Hopkins University, and my word is work. My research is doing a genealogy of energy and trying to think about how he came to understand energy as fuel. So it takes me back to the middle of the 19th century and the emergence of energy as we know it in modern life, and this was with the discovery of thermodynamics. Through thermodynamics, energy came to be interpreted or known as primarily the ability to do work, and this knowledge came through experiments with steam engines. So with some of the first most successful fossil fueled machines. And in this sense, energy was a knowledge very much of the Anthropocene, because in working with the fossil fuel machines in the 19th century, scientists were trying to respond to some of the challenges that came along with industrialization. Cara Daggett: [00:15:02] And this was not only the very material challenges of pollution and rapid urbanization in northern Europe, but also the challenge of just figuring out how coal did work, how a heat engine worked and why it was irreversible, which challenged a lot of Newtonian science. So the main goal of thermodynamics, then, was to make steam engines more efficient to make them do more work. And this corresponded to the ethos of thermodynamics. It very much had an ethic, and it corresponded to an existing Protestant work ethic. So the ethic was the maximization of work and the minimization of waste. And after exploring how energy emerges at this time, I then look at how it propagates through the politics of energy in the 19th century. But I also observe that this work based reading of energy remains dominant today. The association between energy, its consumption and the way that we tend to value work, especially in the global north, as necessary to human well-being and to citizenship. And so in conclusion, I'm thinking about how in order to challenge fossil fuel systems, we can think about partnership between post-carbon movements and post-work movements, and I think this has some real advantages for energy politics because when we remain tied to a work ethic, any decrease in energy consumption feels very anemic and it feels like sacrifice. Whereas when we combine that with a critique of work, it opens up new ways to talk about pleasure and desire in connection with more sustainable energy systems. So, for example if we talk about instead of energy efficiency or limiting energy consumption, we can think about energy freedom. How do we free more time and more energy from modern systems of work? Andre Osman: [00:17:47] Yeah, my name is Andre Osman. I'm here from Lund University in Sweden, which uses my keyboard resistance. I think it's important to realize that the predicament we're in now has not come about through any concerted action by the human species as a sort of monolithic entity. I think it's important to keep in mind and remember all the struggles that have been fought and the largely unsuccessful resistance that has been waged against fossil fuel extraction and combustion on a large scale over the past two centuries across the globe. And as Benjamin said, the the enemy has never ceased to be victorious. That's why we're in the state that we're in. But the enemy has always been challenged and I think it's important to draw on that tradition and be inspired to fight, perhaps more desperately than before, given the emergency that we're facing. And I'm thinking of campaigns such as break free from fossil fuels that will occur in a few weeks time with the actions against fossil fuel extraction across the globe. In my case, I would go to Germany and participate in the end of Glenda actions against the lignite coal mines that are now in the process of being sold by the Swedish corporation Vattenfall, owned by the Swedish state. But I'm very keen on making money from those lignite coal mines by selling them rather than shutting them down. So they're in the process of sending them to new proprietors, will go into the mines and try to shut them down and remind the new owners that they will face. Andre Osman: [00:19:32] Consistent resistance against any attempt to dig out more of this extremely dirty fuel. Possibly the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. And I think as as the world warms up and the the scale of the dislocations of climate change becomes clearer to people, I think resistance will accelerate and it should intensify. And we're already in an extremely dire situation, so it's not like resistance is going to solve everything immediately and we're going to get rid of all sorts of climate change impacts. Obviously not. But I think resistance is still the necessary path if we want to reduce the scale of the catastrophe that we're facing if we want to, well, perhaps not stabilize climate, but minimize the damage of global warming resistance against the vested interests in the fossil economy or what one could call fossil capital is, I think, absolutely imperative because it's clear by now that those interests, the people that profit from extracting and burning fossil fuels will not give up voluntarily. They will fight with all the resources at their disposal to keep business as usual going for as long as possible and take up as much coal and oil and natural gas out of the ground and burn it as they possibly can, because that's what makes money for them. Andre Osman: [00:21:01] The CEO of Exxon Mobile put this, uh, pretty eloquently the other year when it said, My philosophy is to make money. If I'm going to, if I can dig and make money, then that's what I'm going to do. And that's the kind of mindset that we're up against and that needs to be resisted and that is resisted across the globe. Another case is the protest against new coal fired power plants in Bangladesh, and just a few weeks ago, four farmers were killed by the police and protests against those coal fired power plants. So the the escalation of business as usual is not something that the human species is producing in harmony or without antagonism. It's being challenged all the time. The task is to coordinate those local struggles and elevate them, enhance them to to a higher level and try to get the movement snowballing as quickly as possible in the little time that we have left to make a real difference. But I think that resistance is a term that people in the environmental humanities, energy humanities should, should focus on. Perhaps more than is the case now, and there are lots of resources to draw on, traditions of resistance against fossil fuels in the past and in the present. And I think I think it's it's it's a key activity that our research needs to be connected to, so. Lynne Bhatia: [00:22:50] So my name is Lynne Bahtia from the University of Alberta, and my keyword is free. So in my work, when I think about this term, I generally think about it in relation to energy. So specifically how people have thought about energy sources as free or unlimited or inexhaustible, for example, fusion technologies or solar energy. And even at certain moments in the 20th century, how the oil supply has been sort of imagined as limitless. And so when we think about energy in these terms, we're often thinking about it, you know, as free of costs or limits or labor, environmental impacts or other kinds of material economies. But this also applies to other technologies that we've kind of championed in the Anthropocene. So 3D printing or lab grown meat, how these have kind of circulated with the cultural understanding of having of being free in relation to costs or impacts. So when I think about that, I think about how those costs or impacts have often just been obscured or displaced or translated or sent offshore and in one way or another. So for example, with 3D printing, we can think about how those materials are, what are what are the materials that are feeding 3-D printers? Who is producing the technologies and where? What is the lifecycle of the products themselves? What energy is running the printers? So to really try to complicate and think about what the term free means in these new in relation to these these kinds of technologies that are that are that often circulate with an understanding of of being free in one way or another, without cost, without cost or impact or, you know, having a new, you know, having a kind of a cultural significance of being championed in this way. So. Graeme MacDonald: [00:24:51] My name is Graeme MacDonald and I am an associate professor at the University of Warwick and the UK. And my key word is something I'm holding in my hand, passport. It says on the front of it that I am a citizen of the European Union, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and yet I find myself not there. I find myself in the US and Houston. At a conference on the energy humanities. So I have been asked to think about whether or not I have a keyword for the Anthropocene. And at the same time, I was asked the question, I was nervously fumbling in my bag to work out where my passport was. Hence, the random nature of my keyword. However, this thing got me thinking. What is it about identity, citizenship or police and possession in the world? The political culture that we inhabit as global citizens of the Anthropocene or global citizens of nation states? And what's the relationship between the two? The passport is actually an interesting little pedagogical tracking device, I think to make us think about common goals that we have to try and deal with the problem, if you like that, the Anthropocene has thrown up to us. And at the same time, also a blockage. So it's an interesting, contradictory material signifier for me. And I guess that's why I'm fascinated by it, because of course, it literally prevents us from speaking to other people if we have the wrong one or if we have a false one. It can get us greater access to smarter people if we have the right one and make us much more aware of the sense of privilege that we have as citizens within a world system that has to deal with, collectively, the problem that you might see the interstate system of competition has got us into in the first place. So the passport is an interesting way to historically root ourselves, identify ourselves with states on a hierarchical system of states that were involved initially during the great period of nation building and industrial competition. And let's drill all the way back to what that industrial competition might mean. It also means pollution on a grand scale, pollution, of course, which we know as unevenly toxic across the world system, and that my passport identifies me with in accordance with what state I come from, geographically proximate to pollution or otherwise. That makes sense? So I'm fascinated by the way that I can a small material object of identification can actually provide us with some large organ like GPS system for us to think about or possession of citizens and subjects of the climate, rather than the world system of statehood, right of geopolitics and whatever. The two, of course, are interrelated. But everywhere I go with this little burgundy book, it's burgundy US citizens, mine is burgundy. I am automatically identified with a state that's semi peripheral, but also, to a certain degree, relatively powerful and solving the problems of cooperation that are obviously required in order to reduce carbon levels to overcome problems that the Anthropocene has thrown up. But at the same time, I'm also reminded of my privilege as a citizen of a state that can afford resilience to that system, push other people out to escape its responsibilities. That has, of course, historically created towards, for example, other citizens in much harsher conditions of crisis that my northern industrial estate, a sorry state, has caused. So the passport allows a readable kind of like way back to thinking about the whole history of the Anthropocene and how we collectively unite and cooperate as planetary citizens beyond the limits that the little burgundy book throws up to us. Jamie Kruse: [00:29:59] So I'm Jamie Kruse, one half of sponge studio based in New York. Liz Ellsworth: [00:30:04] I'm Liz Ellsworth, the other half of Smudge Studio based in New York, teaching at the New School in Media Studies. Jamie Kruse: [00:30:11] And I, Jamie, teach at Parsons and the word we like to talk about is EPO, and it's actually something we'd repeat three times. So EPO, EPO, EPO and it's a Japanese word that means one step. Liz Ellsworth: [00:30:27] And we discovered this word by watching a film called Land of Hope, in which the characters return to the tsunami site, looking for their homes that have been destroyed and looking for their traces of their families, and they encounter or are approached by two ghost children who walk up to them and mysteriously say that they're looking for some things that were lost in the debris. And the main character responds by saying, Well, let me help you look for these. Well, let's go look up here. And she says, hop, skip, jump as she jumps up the tsunami debris pile. Jamie Kruse: [00:31:09] And this is in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. So what's interesting about Land of Hope is it's the first fictional film made after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the earthquake and the tsunami. So it's almost as though you're watching a documentary. So it feels as though you're watching something that's about a reality that's unfolding concurrently inside and outside of the film. So the hop skip jump is translated, and the ghost children correct the woman walking up the debris pile and says, We're not going to no longer going to walk in that showy way. We're going to go EPO, EPO, EPO one step at a time, which felt as though a really important insight for us, as viewers and as people inhabiting a planet that's actually living out these realities not just in Fukushima, but in the face of climate change and other challenges such as plastic tires and fracking. Yeah. And so there's a reality to the materials of what it means to walk step by step. Mm-hmm. Liz Ellsworth: [00:32:19] And there's a rhythm to it as well. Like the young ghost children say, this is how we're going to walk from now on as Japanese people, we're going to walk EPO, EPO, EPO. And we don't take that as being static. We don't take that as being stopping and not doing. Instead, it's a way of conducting our doing. It's like an energetics of doing. It's a specific way of conducting the heat and the motion of our life force on the planet. And that specific way is the way we're interpreting it and inspired by it. That specific way is that we insert ourselves as these moving bodies that expend energy and create energy. We exert, we insert ourselves into the midst of the unfolding disaster or catastrophe that we could call climate change that we are of and that we are deeply embedded in and we walk within it in a way that somehow responds contemporaneously to the challenges and to the opportunities of each and every moment. And one of the the reasons to perhaps consider that way of moving was laid out, we thought, kind of eloquently in just the last few days by a meteorologist who pointed out that basically the Earth knowledge that we have been basing our hop skip jump one to three movements so far, or at least, you know, in the last 200 years as humans, those that Earth knowledge that we've been basing the our ability to predict and kind of know what's going to come after step one and after step two and after step three. That Earth knowledge is rapidly becoming obsolete because the new patterns and cycles that are emerging in the climate and in human activities like migration. These new realities are changing over so fast and in such a big way that the new patterns have not been able to emerge yet. And he says they're not probably going to emerge for decades. So we're in the midst of this huge kind of phase shift of human knowing and not knowing on a scale and with consequences that we have never had to to address before and in kind of our search as artists for how to move forward as artists and not be paralyzed by fear or despair or pessimism is to look to the very some of the very people on the planet who are literally living this day out on a daily basis for inspiration and that small little clip of that film from Land of Hope actually feels like it's just the inspiration we needed as artists right now for our projects to imagine ways. Forward and how to move his artists in the world. So we're like kind of embracing EPO, EPO, EPO as a metaphor, but also kind of as a literal, like, body movement, a dance, a kind of dance to use to create our work as artists. Jamie Kruse: [00:35:45] Yes, I'll just add at the end that we really see it as like a matter of conduct, like there's an intentionality to the EPO, EPO, EPO. So we sort of see it resonating with ideas around like ritual or intentionality that there's this performativity to pausing and stepping and not presuming to know beyond one step that it doesn't exclude anything. You take everything with you as you go. It doesn't have a mapping or like a trajectory, necessarily, but it's really a different way of conducting oneself in the midst of things as they unfold. So we're finding a lot of inspiration in that. Matther Henderson: [00:36:30] I'm Matthew Henderson, and these are poems from my book, The Lease. The ranch. You sleep on stacked mattresses and mice run the floor biting at toes. You wake set traps and stack the mattresses higher still. This is old Sask. summer flax and mustard paint the horizon, the bright yellow color of sun you find in children's pictures, and always the sky is just another dead prairie above you. Everything you remember lives inside the chicken farm homestead with its back broken frame, and that reek of old water sitting still. At night, the House breathes with open windows, swells at the seams. At Sunrise, the that exhales the dust so fine, you think of bull hearts, dried and ground. When it's gutted of furniture, you find imprints in the carpet. Four beds, two dressers, a shelf. And from those years when no one kept it, from before the oil and the oilmen came, the mark where the deer walked in, lay down and died. Under air. All men must be clean shaven. The small mustache is acceptable, but the rubber has to seal. Here, your pale boy face is a virtue. The men dull 10 razors a month. You're lazy. Don't lift much and can barely hammer, but you can stay under air for hours. The steady in and out sound of oxygen rushing your face through its tubes. That urgency of gases forever escaping itself. Even sour gas heavier than air hurries to the Earth. Your soup watches you 30 feet away waiting for you to drop and you think of how the gas can kill your lungs, your brain. But yours, they're fine, your fingers fine. And could it get into your coveralls? Sneak up inside your ass. Finish you that way. Incident report. Fatality. Worker dies from H2S anus contact. All employees must wear latex underwear. Bums must be clean shaven. A little hair is acceptable, but the rubber has to seal. Remember Charlie? In the back room of the shop, you spend a day with Winnis and Piper Alpha in the videotape of Charlie burned up. When some day you want to roll up the sleeves of your coveralls, let your wrists touch the breeze, risk the gas in the air. They want you to remember him, how he pulls his red sweater up his arms and how you will always see his pale skin as darker and redder than the yawning mouths of the dogs who terrorized your youth. The video finishes, the VCR gears click, the tape rewinds for the next guy and you start guessing at appearance fees, video royalties. Later, you and the boys were bargain in skin percentage, trade burns or breaks. Folks sell fingers for a better deal. You all figure you'd cook half your body, the lower half, for an even million. When Joel's wife shows up for his paycheck a few weeks later, and when you watch the half circle bear alleged nub of his wrist forget itself and grasp for a beer, you find yourself tuned to every clash of steel on steel. You see snakes shedding skin in hospital beds. You remember Charlie and you begin to wait. You ask your father what a lease is. And he tells you about the geese beyond the aqueduct, how they turned the sky gray, how as a teen he never put his gun away dirty. You remember the blue steel cleaner, the sound of a rag drawn through a barrel, and still you catch the scent of solvent rising from buried cells that ruled you as a boy. The lease is meaningless, a square paced first by seismic workers and then your father, and then by every other man you know. But you've always pulled meaning from nothing. And when he leads you to an empty field, you tear grass and fistfuls,read the roots like a will. Thanks.