Palliative care for the planet

JAAH 5 (2) pp. 281-292 In te lle c t L im ited 2014

Journal o f Applied Arts & Health Volume 5 Number 2

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Miscellaneous. English language, doi: io.i386/jaah.s.2.28i_i

DEBBIE HORSFALL AND SHERIDAN LINNELLUniversity of Western Sydney

ROBYNE LATHAM AND JEAN RUMBOLDLaTrobe University

Palliative care for the planet

ABSTRACT KEYWORDSThis article weaves together our responses, as three visitors and one Indigenous owner of this land, to the impending end of life, at least human life, on this planet. What we make of this almost impossible theme and what it makes of us are enacted through art, poetry, reverie, analysis and storytelling. We write in ways that are personal, lateral and yet collective, experimenting with how the tensions and connections between different art forms, methodologies and theories might contribute to an emergent ethic o f ‘palliative care for the planet'.

collaborative enquiry arts-based research climate change Indigenous/non-

indigenous ways of knowing deep listening

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Debbie Horsfall | Sheridan Linnell...

It was warm that afternoon as we sat under a tree talking of 'palliative care for the planet'. Drawn by that phrase, as participants in the Bendigo arts and health search conference, we gathered to contemplate forms of action. We spoke about the earth as Gaia (Lovelock 2000), a living planet that we are with/within not separate from. We brought our knowledges and feelings about the impending planetary crisis: air and water pollution, peak oil, food, fuel and water scarcity. Climate change is bringing widespread degradation of the environment, loss of biodiversity, increasing extreme weather events, rising ocean levels, mass extinctions (Espinosa and Walker 2011; Christoff 2014; IPCC 2014); large-scale displacement of 'climate refugees' and an exponential increase in disease, social breakdown and violence (Petheram et al. 2010; McMichael et al. 2012; World Health Organisation (WHO) 2013). Technological fixes may buy time, but the earth's bottom-line accounting cannot be evaded for long (Petheram et al. 2010; McMichael et al. 2012). We are at a crisis point in determining the state of the planet for future generations (Hamilton 2013; Climate Commission 2013; IPCC 2014).

We sat under the tree in heart-felt grief for what is lost and will be lost. The facts are unequivocal but often met with scepticism and denial. What other forms of evidence might move us to action?

Arts-based methods are moving in from the margins (Knowles and Cole 2008; Liamputtong and Rumbold 2008; McNiff 2013). Previous contributors to this journal have applied them to health (Allen 2012; McNiff 2012; Rumbold et al. 2012; Prior 2013). Could the arts help us to respond to planetary crisis in a more life-affirming way?

As the conversation under the tree ended, four of us offered to take these questions further. We began modestly and locally, attending to our experience in this moment and this place, Australia. We decided to stay with the potentially enabling metaphor that had brought us together: palliative care. Our collaborative enquiry (Heron 1996), across two states and between people partly unknown to each other, would explore what came to light as we 'contemplated our mortality and hoped for our survival' (reviewer's comment 2014).

We sought creative and analytic practices that inhabit a paradoxical space in-between life and death; affirming life through acceptance that it is changing, probably ending (Australia Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) 2012; WHO 2014). We co-created a methodological bricolage (Kincheloe 2005); each of us drawing on what came to hand from our various fields. We each began with an arts-based response, then analysed these separately and together. The process was engaging, surprising, challenging and pleasurable. We see the '(representations' that follow as forms of knowing (Heron and Reason 1997) that hold a central place in our enquiry.

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OUR REPRESENTATIONS

l . The uninvited: Sheridan

Figure 1: The uninvited (Perry et al. 2013), photograph by Olga Nebot.1

When the uninvited come to the party the real guestsdo not notice. They might pull a pashminaover a bare shoulder, loosen a knotted tielean into the circle. Go on talkingarts health raising funds writing for journals climatechange the increasing frequency of extremeweather. That kind of conversationis very absorbing. Death of a species tippingpoints the edge of the city on fire how we are burningthe geological past how we are flushingaway the future. The uninvited move closer.A heart attack for the planet, someone says, isn't this hollowing out and sense of impending doom a clinical symptom of distress?Her companion holds the glass up to the light turns it around before tasting then spits out the excess.

l. Included with permission of the artists.

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2. Curtains: Jean

Figure 2: Curtains, digital photograph by Jean Rumbold.

From my hospital bed, the world outside could look mercilessly bright and harsh.I had a heart attack while preparing the arts and health search conference.

This seems no way to demonstrate the beneficial impact of the arts on health, but in fact it did give me a vivid experience of art-making as a survival strategy. Taking photos let me escape the patient role. Having friends and family take and send photos connected me to life beyond the hospital and the hope of returning to it.

Now I find I am drawn to this image from that time to represent the way I experience our topic, palliative care for the planet. Perhaps it speaks to me of a sense of fragility, of warding off an environment that is too challenging. Our ecosystem increasingly seems a less hospitable environment for us - too wild and windy, too fiery, so often flooding or freezing or burning us up. Some of us I think feel this more than others, those of us who are frailer physically, or more sensitive emotionally or mentally. There's a sense that we will be the first to be flung off as the planet seeks a new equilibrium without this species who exploit, enhance and damage, but who may not adapt quickly enough to survive.

I notice that I am separated from this too harsh world by the illusory protection of the curtain. It reminds me of interviews after the Black Saturday bushfires, here in Victoria, with people who had been comfortably ensconced inside in air conditioning, blinds closed, watching television while the bushfires bore down on them unheeded. I can't help contrasting this image with one I have seen in Robyne's work of a figure (herseli) in the landscape with the smoke from a smoking ceremony drifting across her. There is something here for me to learn, and the images lead me to enquire further.

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Pallia tive care fo r th e p lane t

3. Ubirr: DebbieI couldn't settle on the edge of the East Alligator River, tidal boundary to Arnhem Land. I missed the red dirt and silvery greens of Spinifex country. My friend had said 'the country there sings you if you let it'. I missed being sung.

We didn't take the camera the day we visited Ubirr, home to the Bininj. Rock outcrops and overhangs on the edge of the Nadab floodplain. I didn't want the mediation of the lens, or to carry the damn thing, or to carry images away. We arrived early to a car park full of coaches, caravans and four wheel drives; grey nomads, overseas tourists, family groups all carrying plastic water- filled bottles. It was hot, still and humid by 8 a.m. Trying not to be irritated by the crowds, we began the trek through the site.

A ranger spoke about the mischievous Mimi spirits in one of the smaller overhangs. He explained how the works were painted over and over, as the stories, country, warnings or life changed. I hadn 't thought about it like that before. Artwork as dynamic, purposeful, living. Constantly re-inscribed. Despite the crowds the paintings were beginning to get through to me.

We sat and waited. In the desert, sitting quietly takes time. If you sit a while, quite a long while, the birds come, little lizards pop their heads out from below that stone you didn't see before, shadows shift and the wind begins to whisper. If you just sit a while, a long while ... The bench grows hot beneath our bottoms. Silica speckled dust glistens in the sunlight. I fall into and out of myself. I grow beyond my skin.

We walk to the top of Ubirr. I stop to read the sign: an elder speaks of working together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to save the land, the paintings, Country. Feeling winded I sit on a pink rock looking over the flood- plains, breath and anger spent. And I weep. I weep for the beauty and for the words and for Country. For its loss of people who lived it, breathed it, painted it, swam it, walked it, laughed it, cried it, storied it, sung it, burnt it, ate it. Who does it sing now? Are there enough to keep its heart full and its voice more than a lament?

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4. The tre e y a rn : Robyne

Figure 3: The tree yam, collaged digital image, photographer Robyne Latham.

I later reflected on the afternoon, thinking of where we sat, under the tree, shaded, yam'n about so many thoughts. Fragments of thoughts remained suspended in the atmosphere, some settled, some morphed into another thought. Stitched seamlessly by the song of a bird, time stretched from the ancient to the present, to the future. I listened; we all listened. I tried to listen/feel to the patterns that connect. All were strangers to me, and I to them, yet sitting under the tree defined us as a group. A group with a common thread, that of 'palliative care for the planet'. I wondered what the old folk would have thought. I felt and indeed was child-like, with an elder's responsibility.

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P allia tive care fo r th e p lane t

OUR MEANING-MAKING PROCESSESAs bricoleurs (Kincheloe 2005), we each used different but complementary processes to make sense of the data (images, poems and stories). Jean started us off using a form of thematic analysis that Van Manen (1990) would call selective. She used a variant of the Listening Guide method (Gilligan et al. 2006) that calls for a series of readings: the first for plot (here understood as themes clearly related to our topic); the second producing iPoems from the two representations that contained I/we statements; the third looking for contrapuntal voices.

Then Debbie took up the meaning-making, working closely with the images to see what might be illuminated through heuristic and analytic processes that we more often apply to words:

Immersion, quietly looking - first at the whole image then the details within, then back to the whole, recording what was noticed.

Description, not worrying about what the image meant, or what the image-maker was saying/doing/trying to do (bracketing the image- maker out of the picture).

Looking fo r similarities and differences, patterns and connections across and within the words and the images.

Sheridan followed with a haiku series that resonated with our creative works. Moved by Derrida's (2004) ethic of living fina lly and Karen Barad's 'passionate yearning for an appreciation of, attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world' (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 70), Sheridan also responded to the initial analyses, deepening the first take.

Robyne, as artist and Aboriginal woman, cradled an awareness of the complex risks of misinterpretation involved in being a cultural bridge. Encouraged by meeting (over coffee) with Jean and the latter's 'contrapuntal voices', guided by Joseph Beuy's belief that 'intuition is the higher form of reason', Robyne waited to hear back from the other three women. She absorbed their writings and allowed her intuitive response to surface as the joyful concluding poem, 'Without music life would be a mistake'.

OUR UNDERSTANDINGS FROM THIS ENQUIRY

[Sjurvival is not just what remains, it is the most intense life possible.(Derrida 2004)

PALLIATIVE HAIKU

'first to be flung off' the spinning hospital room harsh light on the sill

your poinsettias petals of blood hovering on another plane

waking up i find underneath the paper words my brother's dead wife

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yarning and mourning under this tree or that tree i can't say goodbye

missing spinifex forgetting the camera she waits with pure eyes

(Sheridan)

Jean offers contrapuntal insights, slivers of light, a photographer's eye and philosopher's soul. Her suffering becomes a launching pad rather than point of entry into self. Debbie lingers with each image as with the rock paintings, enacting her deep sense of social inclusion and justice through this specificity of attention. Nothing known is uninvited and the unknown is beckoned in. The margin becomes our horizon as we walk towards it across plains of remembered spinifex. The marginal becomes central to our enquiry and a different horizon awaits us.

Notions of connection-disconnection flow strongly throughout our work. Despite raging fires and burning cities, people 'go on talking) or listening to the tour guide as they drink water from plastic bottles. Drawing on collaborative performance, Sheridan brings the uninvited to the 'party7: abjected subjects, overwhelming feelings and unpalatable truths that hover at the edges, troubling this White middle-class myopia.

There is however, another understanding of 'the uninvited': Australia was founded on Europeans invading and usurping Aboriginal lands. Robyne asks how this uncomfortable truth seeps into collective unconsciousness when those not invited to this land are in the majority. Bringing these two senses of 'the uninvited' together creates a productive tension, exposing how invasion and genocide are denied through violent exclusions yet come back uninvited to haunt us.

In 'working the hyphens' Michele Fine (1998) articulated how we construct the 'other' by strengthening our own identities, creating separation or disconnection, a tool of domination. When 'othering' the nonhuman we see ourselves as autonomous beings unaffected by the system we live within. '[We] tend to see ourselves as subjects and address the planet as object' (Neville 2012: iii). Asking what we might mean by palliative care - for the planet-and-ourselves - has disrupted this binary, bringing together rather than slashing apart. We feel more keenly the pain of disconnection and the beginnings of our own demise. We see that as a species it is we who need palliation: relieving this pain sufficiently to be able to think-feel-act. Creative works also work the hyphens by showing multiple meanings and realities, helping us move from either/or to both/ and. We glimpse how it may be possible to inhabit liminal spaces between life and death, non-human and human, consciousness and denial, rationality and emotion.

The seen and not-quite-seen: the deliberately and almost hidden. Things masked, veiled, behind a curtain. Not quite understanding what is being seen- and-not-seen. What would happen if we look/find out? The planet can throw us off. Feeling our vulnerability, truly understanding that we risk being flung off, we risk hearing the earth's lament.

Did our creative work and analysis enable us to look behind the curtain, at least glimpse the direction we might take? We all found the enquiry powerful

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Pallia tive care fo r th e p lanet

and moving; disturbing and disquieting as well as beautiful: "This iPoem holds such helplessness and separation, existential isolation'. 'Art-making as a survival strategy' struck us deeply. Knowing that to be is to be related, Jean stayed in relationship with the world outside the hospital by sending photographs. Perhaps at the margins, we are most able to listen and hear; to speak the unspoken or unsayable? To sense the power of a detail to become a turning point in the midst of crisis.

Light/sunlight A smoky figure A pink rock.

As land and life changes, works are painted over, and over. Robyne's painting layers us into the land, patterning it and, perhaps, giving it human meaning: worn, textured and battered, but surviving. The circle of human connection is delicate, transitory and difficult to decipher, yet sings to us of community and the sustenance it gives. What is required of us to reconnect to the land and listen and learn from its traditional custodians? As Indigenous and non- Indigenous people work together to listen to the song of the land, 'othering7 is diminished: Indigenous/non-Indigenous; white/black; country/human. To hear the song of the land, to live it, breathe it, paint it, to build community, we need to practice Dadirri: inner, deep, respectful listening and quiet, still awareness; the deep spring inside us all. We call on it and it calls to us, the gift that Australia is thirsting for (Ungunmerr-Baumann 2010).

(One does though, have to be unencumbered to hear the land sing, 'we didn't take the camera').

WITHOUT MUSIC, LIFE WOULD BE A MISTAKE (NIETZSCHE 1998; 9)

What indeed do we mean by palliative care for the planet?Maybe 'we' just don't hold that much sway.The I, the us, and the weGaia theory does not abdicate us from responsibility But it does check the ego

The I, the us, and the weThe other. The other side. Beyond the ego self.Smoky gossamer defines and separates worldsThere the land's song-breath vibrates contrapuntal melodies.Derrida. Dadirri. Dadirri. Derrida.

The masked and uninvited.The I, the us, and the weDistrust of the unconscious ones hoversFor they are masked even to themselves,They are unpredictable, dangerous

Reconciliation is a pursuit for The I, the us, and the weThe 'other7, unencumbered can hear the land's song-breath and There the illusion of separation dissolves?

And the land is always singing.(Robyne)

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SUGGESTED CITATION

Horsfall, D., Linnell, S., Latham, R. and Rumbold, J. (2014), 'Palliative care for the planet', Journal of Applied Arts & Health 5: 2, pp. 281-292, doi: 10.1386/ jaah.5.2.281_l

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Debbie Horsfall is a passionate leader of inclusive, creative, qualitative research. Her transformative agenda privileges people's voices during challenging life events, including 'dying at home'. She also teaches sustainable futures.

Contact: School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Penrith NSW 2751, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

Sheridan Linnell is an arts therapy educator, researcher and poet. She investigates subjectivity, power and relationship through arts-based and writing methodologies, drawing on feminist, post-structural, posthumanist and post- colonial theory.

Contact: School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Penrith NSW 2751, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

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Debbie H orsfall | Sheridan L in n e ll...

Robyne Latham is a Melbourne-based Yamtaji woman from Western Australia who is both academic researcher and exhibiting artist. Her practice traverses mediums, emphasizing the object in (meta)physical space.

Contact: Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] Web address: www.r0 b3melatham.com

Jean Rumbold supervises doctoral research and has worked in education, therapy, leadership development and now public health. Her research and publications focus on arts and health, and arts-based and cooperative enquiry.

Contact: Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

Debbie Horsfall, Sheridan Linnell, Robyne Latham and Jean Rumbold have asserted their right under the Cop^ight, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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Palliative care for the planet