In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Miranda Mellis’s novel Crocosmia is a surreal political novel as thought-provoking as it is inventive.
Eugene Lim wrote of the book:
“A novel of revolutionary transition that achieves the impossible: not only charting the transformation of the mechanics of society, but the liberation of consciousness itself. Sentence by sentence, and in the impossible and enthralling architectures of each page, Miranda Mellis’s Crocosmia is a treasure.”
In her own words, here is Miranda Mellis’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Crocosmia:
DUST BOWL REFUGEE, WOODY GUTHRIE
We are ramblers, so they say / We are only here today / Then we travel with the seasons /We’re the dust bowl refugees / From the south land and the drought land / Come the wife and kids and me / And this old world is a hard world / For a dust bowl refugee / Yes, we ramble and we roam / And the highway that’s our home / It’s a never-ending highway / For a dust bowl refugee / Yes, we wander and we work / In your crops and in your fruit / Like the whirlwinds on the desert /That’s the dust bowl refugees
This song, written in 1938, is about our time too, of drought and desertification, of fire and flood, where climate migrants are forced to wander and take the highway as home. What John Steinbeck wrote in Grapes of Wrath, the year after Dust Bowl Refugee was written, describes today, as adults and children striving to escape drought and violence are deported, detained, incarcerated: “They streamed over the mountains, hungry . . . to find work to do . . . to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut . . . anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live . . .”.
Because social life is structured for capital accumulation, “surplus populations” and poverty are a constant. People who defend or assume the necessity of capitalism may not quite realize that its history (including present history) is full of the most atrocious dispossession, violence, and robbery. Whether expropriating people to the point that they have no way to survive except by trying to sell their labor, imposing colonial borders that rupture relationships to life giving practices, meanings, and interactions in relation to seasons and watersheds, or “asset trading”, colonialism and capitalism have never been separate. Frederic Jameson said, famously, that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” He also called for the writing of utopias. In the imaginary of Crocosmia capitalism comes to an end, so that the world can stop ending.
MOSS, CAROLINE SHAW / ATTACCA QUARTET
Having lived most of my life in cities, I now live in a forest. Learning its rhythms has taken time. Crocosmia reflects this process of attunement to more-than-human kin. The novel is coming from a place of veneration for forest communities, including mosses, mycelia, rain. The forest is not a collection of objects for extraction, or a backdrop, but a living community, a fabric of intelligence of astounding brilliance. This Caroline Shaw record, Evergreen, has an image of mosses growing on a rock on the cover. The music is immersive in the way that a forest is, an ecological liturgy. In this religion biota are worshipped and the whole living earth is sacred.
Crocosmia is about changing our ways so that the biospheric symbiotic communities who we are not separate from, who we are intertwined with in every way, can heal and thrive. Here is a lyrical segment of the book, a reflection of the way the forest draws out perception, the style with which it enfolds and intertwines sensoria:
Maya woke to a crash and felt the earth shake. The rain had stopped, and the sun was out. She went to investigate and found an enormous moss-covered limb from the largest of the big leaf maples had crashed down, opening a new part of the ravine below the house to the sky. She examined a frilled turkey tail fluttering out from the stump of a tree, like an ear or a skirt. The morning light haloed the farther woods as the sun rose. Branches moved in every possible direction, up, out, sideways, downward, crisscrossing, fallen, just beginning, looking, seeking, moving everywhere to find space for proliferating tiny needles, flat and hand-like if cedar, chaotic like a broken thumb piano if hemlock. A cedar branch leaned over her like a concerned friend. The dogwood in flower was cognizant, as was the Douglas fir, hemlock, cedar, Pacific yew, big leaf maple, alder, huckleberry, vine maple, and so many kinds of lichen, fungi, and moss she wouldn’t know where to begin. They worked to respond to changes moment after moment that used to happen over entire seasons. The light spread and moved across the forest, then withdrew as clouds passed. Alternation is the meaning of pattern. It’s cold when the sun withdraws, leaves are laced with shadow where the sun is indirect, lighter, and warmer where it bejewels. Where the rays don’t penetrate, an evenness, the broad, ordinary, unspecified light of a regular day. Then, the specificity of piercing, gleaming panes of cleaving light, glamorous patches of gold and white in the understory of shadow. We are in their company, the ancients, we are their people, being mortal. We’re in their company, that of the stars and of the ancestors, and that of dogs, bats, and butterflies who never did dwell in an “animal kingdom,” who, folded into a flowering underworld, wear green capes of moss and lichen, have minds of soil crowned with bones and memories, rocks and fossils, species’ debris. One pocket of soil home to millions of organisms. Where we do not see them there are the animalcules, repairing invisibly in opaque boiling vents of the world-garden. All forms are linked. A knee is like a muscled bend in a hillside. A tightness in the bone grown brittle is like a branch on its way to being a stick, everything aging together, all the time. The ravine’s erosion mirrored the decay of her own memories.
REDEMPTION SONG, BOB MARLEY
In the Biblical and anticolonial sense, redemption means being free from bondage, healing the scars of slavery, reclaiming what had been lost: language, culture, identity. In Crocosmia there is a passage about a character named Enid, a psychoanalyst of Caribbean ancestry and a member of a commune called the Anarchstery. She is linked, through her parents, to Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidalectics’:
Enid’s parents had been anti-colonial poets of the “tidalectic.” “It is as if the body leaps across the world, from one definition to the next,” Enid said, “stranding us together.” The strands of diasporic heritages intertwined and pulsed in blooded and oil-slicked currents that drifted this way and that.
Brathwaite describes tidalectics as an island epistemology, island music of “the ripple and the two tide movement.” The sound-poetry of tidalectics emanates from Caribbean African-diasporic syntactical formations that make up Reggae and Rasta idioms. Marley sings of the transatlantic slave trade: Old pirates, yes, they rob I / Sold I to the merchant ships. He quotes Marcus Garvey: Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds. This is the ‘two tide movement’ of the tidalectic, that decoloniality is both internal and external, spiritual and structural, of changing material conditions and consciousness at once. “Satta Massagana” by The Abyssinians is also relevant here. There is a land, far far away . . . Grounded in Amharic (the language of Ethiopia) and Rastafarian theology, this song constellates with Brathwaite’s spiritual resistance, his inventive, hybrid, forms of linguistic play, including uses of language and chant to resist colonial English as well as his concept of Nation Language, which celebrates creole and Africanized forms of Caribbean English rooted in Reggae’s use of Jamaican patois and Rastafari language.
WETLAND, HIROSHI YOSHIMURA
This album is a love letter to all that flows, is fluid, moves, releases, rests, softens, receives, allows. Water is our dearest and closest friend, water is medicine, water is life. In Crocosmia water is detoxified and abundant:
Water, soft as breath. Water above, clear and delicious, water below, millions of years old, thousands of feet underground, had the texture of maple sap and turned orange when exposed to oxygen. No one would have predicted, in her childhood, that, as before the industrialization of the elements, they would be able to rely, once again, on water’s abundance. By the time she was born human beings had taken so much groundwater that the very axis of the earth had been altered. Now good water flowed once more through the winding arteries of the living earth.
BREAD AND ROSES, MIMI FARIÑA
Give us bread / but give us roses. This song has a long history beginning in political speech and poetry, then set to music, spoken and sung in relation to labor and civil rights movements throughout the 20th century beginning in 1911 when it was first uttered in a speech by suffrage activist Helen Todd. In Crocosmia protest songs and liberation prayers are described as longings and arguments: “Class and category-scarring legacies of slave states, alienated labor, industry and Cartesian duality mixed contingently with organized and spontaneous forms of resistance, pained liberation prayers, and songs that argued and longed for justice.” Again, we have the doubleness of liberation praxis, the ‘two tide movement’ because internal and external change are imbricated, mind and history are inseparable. Transformation as Möbius loop.
BIG YELLOW TAXI, JONI MITCHELL
They paved paradise / put up a parking lot. Joni Mitchell’s song jauntily describes what is considered the worst form of ecological “disturbance”, worse than fire or flood, which is pavement: “impervious surface” as it is called in the parlance, which is so telling. Imperviousness leads to the paving of living earth; creating impervious surfaces leads to flooding–where can water go? Root systems, on the other hand, absorb water, if they are allowed to give their support, if they have not been decimated. Paving is the worst disturbance because things can grow back after fire and flood, or even displacement, but not after concrete. In the novel it is the same imperviousness, ignorance, and exploitative rapaciousness suffocating the earth that also proletarianizes animals. We address it by ending the exploitative modes of industry that lead to ecological degradation:
Communities organized to halt productivism and consumerism, to stop accepting the unacceptable, to shed that fearful, hoarding instinct that sunk all things to the lowest common denominator, “bottom line,” to de-create capitalist empire and its car-serving ontology of pavements, “impervious surfaces” which caused flooding and killed soil, pavement that promised to keep people going to work forever, a commutation of the commute, the very death drive itself. What was once considered unexceptional shown in all its aberrance: that soil should be entombed; that rivers should be straightened to make fish swim faster to their slaughter.
MERCY MERCY ME (THE ECOLOGY), MARVIN GAYE
Where did all the blue skies go? / Poison is the wind that blows. Marvin Gaye’s ethical heartfelt elegy calls us to mourning and collective ecological stewardship. What if we could be guided by such songs? The sensory architecture of Crocosmia prefigures music as central to ecological remediation and social repair. In fact, sound healing is a deeply efficacious element central to the 5,000-year-old science of Ayurvedic medicine. Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary writes about how sound is translated from acoustic vibration to meaningful neurological impulses in her book Sound Medicine.In Crocosmia shape-note singing, as a form of musical notation that facilitates social singing, collective singing, is imagined as a method of ecological sound healing:
Like the first nuclear weapon, the universe had been determined to be a dodecahedron by the wavelength of microwave radiation’s harmonics which, like any musical note, reflect the shape of the object in which it is generated. The knowledge that energy into shape equals function was used to create shape-note songs that, sometimes very slowly, sometimes instantaneously, rendered harmless the molecular composition of toxics. With others, Jane learned to detoxify and contain the toxic waste, and passed down the knowledge of how to do it.
UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS, ALICE COLTRANE
In many communities and places, people have not yet altogether lost the pleasure of intergenerational, autonomous music-making for ritual and pleasure to a ‘music industry’. This form of life, this public exchange of ideas, this social composition of generalized musicianship, makes for a thrumming, inclusive, and convivial all-ages sociality. In Crocosmia music is like this in a near future after the end of the patriarchal domination and industrialization devastation:
The café was full of old musicians who no longer had the strength for earth work. They had plenty of other ways to live and contribute. They worked on strategies and plans, played music, practiced the domestic arts, cooked, taught, danced, wrote, argued, traveled, and studied. Mostly, though, they played music. Everywhere you went elders could be found playing music of every kind, recovering time’s plenty, tempo overflowing its banks. Maya listened to one old timer playing piano while another drummed elliptically. As it always had, sound evoked color. She heard silkily threaded, intricate coalescences of bright green notes, call and response between silver and black, flashing silver dotted staccatos followed by winding blue spirals, then a sudden plunge down and level out into scattered flickering stars, finally a rising unity, a coordinated, single red flame of sound. She heard loud laughter from the kitchen, saw a burst of yellow confetti.
SYMPHONY NO. 10 IN E MINOR, SHOSTAKOVICH
Music is imagined in Crocosmia as a source for ecological and social remediation. Here Enid plays music for an oil executive as part of an accountability process that uses psychoanalytic techniques (Exxon put huge resources towards misinforming the public about climate change):
Enid wrote: “Some of them talk of a sick, poisoned feeling they have always had. They talk of feeling nothing for years on end but clammy fear, licking them under their skin, and of the sadness they felt about their children’s despair, their inability to focus or sleep without drugs.” Enid played Shostakovich’s tenth symphony for the former Exxon executive, a favorite of his. They talked of how the composer had made beauty out of fear in a state of creative terror. “Your propaganda has caused exponentially more death than Stalin did,” she commented. He began to shake uncontrollably.”
THE HEART SUTRA, PRAÑĀPĀRAMITĀ SUTRAS
Form is no other than emptiness, Emptiness no other than form. Form is only emptiness, Emptiness only form. In Crocosmia there is a tension between a mother and a daughter, the former a character of action who lives for political liberation, the latter a character of contemplation who seeks spiritual liberation. For the character of contemplation, self-dissolution comes with solitude and grief, a cessation of any separation between subject and object–nonduality. There are different kinds of liberation to be concerned with and they all matter.
THE HARDER THEY COME, JIMMY CLIFF
I heard this record so many times as a child, it played so often, that I know all the songs by heart. The title, like so many Reggae songs is both a revolutionary formulation and proverbial: pride goes before fall. In the context of 1970s Jamaica and global Black liberation struggles, the title is a prophecy of the collapse of the colonial state, the capitalist system, the racist order. The harder they come with all their violence and domination, the harder they fall under the pressure of resistance. Chants open the chance to change. This song came to mind as well because in Crocosmia there is a hard fall. Even the powerful are returned to the soil. Everything cycles. Everything can be transformed.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Miranda Mellis’s and Katie Aymar’s playlists for the poetry collection Demystifications
Miranda Mellis’s playlist for her novella The Spokes
Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (2021); The Instead; The Spokes (2012); None of This Is Real (2012); The Revisionist (2007). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Colony. She received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael S. Harper Praxis Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington.