Muck

Chapter 9 tracks a different kind of metal-ling (meddling). An honoring of what might be (loosely) ciphered as muck. The indigenous teacher frequented by my wife and me for more than a decade now, insists continuously that the prime modality of genuine spirituality today is something like “compost”—the need to learn how to “cook up” waste and brokenness into a matrix of possibility and fecundity. This foray rehearses what such might look like in tacking back and forth between first century Palestinian “vision-questing” on the part of stone-mason Jesus, re-learning Transjordanian scree as vocational spirit-agents, and an inner-city Detroit version of shamanic alchemy, transfiguring junk-yard waste such as car-hoods into images of divinity and shared humanity by way of “spirited” scavenging and bright-color splashing, uplifting debris into epiphany. Thus, we move from earth detritus to the industrial version. The re-schooling of the Nazarene is directed by the Water Maverick, Baptizer John, himself apparently “retooled” at the hands of East Bank-dwelling bedouin, bringing Israel’s pastoral nomad origins and wisdom back into the West Bank mix. Going back through the waters under such hands, Jesus finds himself “scanned” by a Rock-Presence full of voice and test and finally “revelation.” In juxtaposition to such, the Detroit installation-initiative—a scant mile from the author’s home of 23 years—discloses a resurrection of Black urban struggle as a fragile-but-durable “spirit-sally” against the decimations of white-flight abandonment, animated by listening to and re-purposing (largely) white waste. Though immersed in global capital’s “fly-dumping” discards, the Heidelberg Project (named for its settler colonial street of origin) exhibits a “spirituality of monstrosity” kindred to the quest of this writing, re-purposing the natural “creatures” (wood, iron, algae/zooplankton remade as plastic, plant fiber as canvas, etc.) enslaved, maimed, re-engineered, and dispossessed by market and consumption, into a vocation of revelation and offering—in keeping with the best of gospel music’s sonic innovation, transmuting ugliness and depression into beauty and inspiration.