Metal

In the Part IV shift back towards a more active collaboration of the human with the more-than-human, we ponder what “meddles”—interruptions carried out both “on” us and “by” us. The metal that mediates mettle. And the meddling that conduces to muck. Chapter 8 goes to the kernel of the question of large-scale spiritual mediations—literally! Earth is animated by an iron core—hard in innermost composition, churning and “generating” in its outer configuration—granting to the entire planet a multi-layered electro-magnetic enwomb-ment (between ten and two hundred times the Earth’s radii depending on the direction) that alone protects it from plasma bombardment from the sun that would otherwise strip air and life from the surface (Parks, 1991). Iron and copper in particular—as indeed the entire range of metallic elements cooked up in the planet’s macro-forging volcanism and chemistry—beg a mythology and ritual-honoring at once worthy of their gifts and relativizing their “blacksmithing” enslavements as tool and weapon and infrastructure. Industrialization represents a whole new level of incarceration of the more-than-human world that has not been dealt with in most contemporary treatments of spirituality. Indigenous approaches to smelting across the globe, on the other hand, have typically surrounded such high-intensity “coercions” with rigorous mythic “recognition” and ritualized care-taking that today offer perhaps the most mind-blowing spiritual challenge imaginable to modernity’s predatory self-certainty and invasive strategies. But the historical and social contrast between ritual and instrumental dispositions towards metallurgy exactly demarcate the “underground” mandate of climate change that we find more comprehensible in above-ground idioms such as air-quality and water-purity concerns. How such might be so and might thus warrant spiritual uptake in tutelage to more indigenous habit and wisdom is the subject of the chapter, with a special impetus supplied by the author’s on-going intent to learn to hallow “dwelling in place” in an industrial epicenter like Detroit.