Codie Condos Distratis: 21 - 31 October, 2024

Codie Condos Distratis is a PhD candidate in philosophy (UQ) living and working on Turrbal/Yuggera land in Meanjin/Magandjin/Brisbane. While on her residency at Plumwood Mountain, Codie continued research towards her doctoral thesis which focusses on the themes of life, death, love and loss as they arise in the works of Val Plumwood.

Codie Condos Distratis at Plumwood Mountain (Clancy Walker, 2024)

Plumwood Mountain, and Challenging the Master Narrative

I’m sifting through heavy boxes of papered material while sitting at a desk that the caretakers, Ruby and Clancy, tell me is “Val’s desk.” After spending the week beforehand at the archive housing some of Val Plumwood’s material at ANU, just under two hour’s drive from the living archive of Plumwood Mountain, my mind seems to resemble a patchwork of stories (some showing their interconnectivities and interdependencies).

A thought comes to mind—the physical documents tell one story about the transience of Plumwood’s life; some pieces don’t stay but offer a different sense of continuing on; Plumwood is never fully known, just as you can never fully ‘know’ the other. In this lack of transparency I find mud gluing together pieces of the ANU archive, a silverfish carefully preserved between pages, and winding patterns of insect bites in books, this time from the stone house’s vast library, whose covers have been moulded by human hands. Thoughts appear in margins; disorderly drafts populate notebooks, ones that won’t make it to published works.

Turning to Plumwood’s published papers, there is an underscoring or framing story of life and death: “At the individual level death confirms transience, but on the level of the ecological community, it can affirm an enduring, resilient cycle or process” (Plumwood 2007, 67). And another of the role of the forest’s agency in Plumwood’s thinking: “the forest is a far better philosopher than any on my bookshelves. I know this with certainty and with joy, and open myself to receive its daily dose of wisdom tonic” (Plumwood 1999, 67).

In her activist and philosophical work, Plumwood sets out to challenge the “master narrative” of the western philosophical tradition, where a radical split or dualism has become the dominant mode of relation (Plumwood 1993). Dualism centres an omnipotent master identity who is predominantly masculine, white, wealthy and colonising, and conceives of his other (whose difference has been defined in terms of lack or of what he is not) as an inferior ‘Other’. The master identity denies relationality, he denies dependency on the Other and their agency. Alongside intersecting systems of oppressions, Plumwood is especially concerned with how this set of denials involves various illusions about human exceptionalism in regard to our relationship with nature. To suggest that the forest is a philosopher is, I think, one important sense in which Plumwood aims to challenge human exceptionalism and its accompanying set of life-denying beliefs, including the dualistic splitting of nature/culture, mind/body, reason/emotion, human/nonhuman, and many more.

From the vantage point of Plumwood’s desk is her carefully tended-to garden, including her beloved waratahs; other flowers such as hydrangeas and irises spring to life in the area around the garden. Her grave isn’t visible from this window, but I know it sits close-by.

At the time of her burial Plumwood’s body was lowered into a shallow crater of the earth, allowing minimal to no separation from other species who would find food and nourishment from her decaying body. I keep her death story in mind as Ruby and I set out to bury a poor joey Ruby found lying dead one afternoon while on our walk to the Plumwood grove. As we are digging, I notice the shape that forms in the bed of earth: it resembles a jelly bean or womb. A thick tree root curves into the hole and poses limits on how far we’re able to dig on one side (a sign of mutuality). After placing the joey inside, we replace a mound of earth over the hole and lay down stones to reinforce the shape, as well as flowers picked from Plumwood’s garden, with a small hope that this will promote the kind of embedded continuity Plumwood attempts to enact through her death and argues for in her writings.