Early Release of Mongstad 2.0
So uhhh, I like the old netbook and it has been reliable for me previously. HOWEVER, Haiku has decided to not like USB sticks all of a sudden. This is a problem since I was continuing writing my draft on Mongstad which I intend to send to Undring. Just putting it on the website and copying from there seems like one of the easiest solutions I have available to me rn. (I shoulda seen this coming). This is not finished.
Mongstad
By Knut-Johan Farestveit
“There is no alternative”
Looking over from the waters of Fjǫrn, at first people forget to notice Mongstad. Much of the area has on first viewing not been visibly damaged by the Anthropocene. Plants and fungi here connect together in underground connections: an organ here, an organ there. Moss, bilberries, oaks, mushrooms, and the unspeakable magnitude hidden in an “etc” all make up Fjǫrn's historical facade. To the north-east; hills lure on the horizon, from this distance they seem deceptively small. The lowlands surrounding the immediate waters are at once both open, yet inviting. Even the name of "Fensfjord" invites for speculation, as the “Fen” part of it is reconstructed in the old tounge of insular North-Germanic as "Fjǫrn" (or "Fjarn"), with its pre-germanic origin unknown. There's a high chance it's not from a known language, harkening to a neolithic culture beyond that which is known in written historical records; away from the certainties that modern industry demands. Such unknown names, even though they are made by the same species that can produce texts about Fjǫrn, point to prior visions which the written word – and thus contemporary sapiens – cannot access. In the same vein – going to the lived and thus easily forgotten history of Fjǫrn – formerly the air would’ve been crisp and clean, like a familiar greeting that has been stripped of all its obligations to partake in inauthentic social pleasantries. Then there are the birds. Seagulls can be annoying at times, over the fjord of Fjǫrn they cry and cry and cry and cry, each repetition a little different. How easy it is to get annoyed at a bird, to advocate for your local government to destroy its nesting grounds, to believe there is such a thing as a "right" of imposition on nature. There is no mistaking Mongstad.
Across Mongstad’s barren desert of asphalted surface large metallic structures are visible. There is a constant whirring in the compound, non-organic components move in and out as necessary. Wounds upon the flesh of the earth flow out of the facility to the surrounding area functioning similar to veins being patrolled by anti-body-vehicles. Pipes nearing the height of low towers dot the horizon, some breathe smoke and fire into the air. Moving in and out of Fjǫrn, water-vessels act out predetermined functions primarily within the transportation of raw-material. Each building, each vehicle, each machine, is clearly meticulously made. This place wasn’t conceived of as social bildung, blueprints with meticulous standards that don’t care for the humanities were the ideal of those who made this place. The creators imposed their vision upon both the building-material they could get a hold of and their historicity. Even in the organic that may be found in the facility, such as the bodies of flesh that intermittently become visible, are obscured through specialised clothing and an organised “work”-day. The bodies of Mongstad are manufactured, made, something that didn’t come of their own.
One of these bodies – a worker – lights a cigarette. Looking at his surroundings, he notes to himself how he could've had his break inside. He wanted to feel fresh air even if the rancid quality Mongstad's air is well known to him. “It's better than nothing”, he thinks. He’s on the evening shift today. He’s been trying to avoid his turn in the barrel for as long as possible, but his friend got sick and he’s covering for him. He’s trying to enjoy the air but the summer heat makes it difficult. He remembers looking at the news earlier: the state-weather-forecaster has predicted that there’s going to be intense rainfall with a short duration in about 2 hours. The worker decides to believe this, as even though the air is saturated by summer-heat and the chemical smell of Mongstad is as present as ever, a hint of petrichor is noticable. It’s unbearable, like having to go into a sauna and knowing you’re going to be stuck there for hours. In the sauna you’d risk dying, here you only get the feeling of risking your life without any of the thrill in actually risking it. Pain without adrennaline, a break without respite. He looks ahead from the railing he's standing by, over to in front of one of the warehouses. There he sees weeds growing by the stairwell. It's not technically against company regulations, but the minister is due to arrive later that month, or at least that's what his bosses know. The worker himself doesn’t know this. All the worker knows, is that it seems unseemly, "someone should do something about that" he thinks to himself. One of his bosses earlier that day was making an inspection of the facility and noticed the same weeds. They’re due to be removed now; because it’s not as if his bosses’ masters ever take a break even if their mortal bodies do. Their bodies are everywhere you could say, they’re always active, always on the move, always producing, always reducing friction, always fighting friction, always hating friction, always evangelising against friction, always prepared to do the deed they judge necessary in the middle of the night even if it means that their human face must come off. Smoke churns out from Mongstad tonight.
Inside the compound, a black ooze is refined. A quarter of a continent away, in the middle of Morimaru, that "Dead Sea" which has been known to the Germanic tribes who migrated to Mongstad as "Nordsjøen", a scene plays out. Any sapian-sailor that encountered Morimaru in previous eras would be frequented with her wrath as she hides many secrets under her waters. She’s feeling pent-up today, her waves don’t give up because the storms built from the environmental ingredients of the Mexican Gulf hit Morimaru first before they encounter Fennoscandia. Between the edge of the sky and the surface of Morimaru, a seagull meets with her. As of writing, no seagull has reached the edges of the sky, and none have reached the bottom of the abyss. Seagulls have vision, and thus can share a world together with Morimaru. It’s as if the’ve always known each other, both the seagull and Morimaru knowing the deepest and unspeakable parts of one another. The seagull sees a structure, an intruder on her. Towers the size of low-skyscrapers do the horizon, spewing smoke and illegal fire. Some of them even reach lengths higher than skyscrapers, if their subaquatic properties are to be included within analysis. Cables the length of mountains penetrate down into Morimaru. Plankton, algae, and other sets of organisms were entrapped in the darkness of her ancestors. In most circumstances where life perishes, it can be used as the seeds for new organisms to grow, yet in the abyss of the continental crust something else happened. With a lack of oxygen and buried beneath layers of dead skin and sand, the abyss robbed them off their promised decomposition and made them into fuel. Previous organs the creatures might have had before were compressed together, liquefied in a sense. Life alive cannot be said to be unified or whole, from the most complex of being to the lowest of life-forms there will always be uncooperative parts that might even cause what you could say is “harm” to the whole. Wherever it will go, its fate will follow. She had tried her very best to protect her world from this prisoner, she didn’t want her seagulls to encounter the viscous tar that death had made. But Morimaru is no more, only the Nordsjø remains. A tower dove into her, and that which remains is the Nordsjø. A manager on the platform receives an order from Mongstad.
Back at Mongstad the worker sighs, he’s on his shift and he’s still thinking of the air. He looks forward to the respite the evening will provide away from the oriental weather. He thinks to his home in Austrheim and how he’ll enjoy the smell of home-smoked salmon. He always loved making a small Strilian Koldtbord for his wife and daugher, though his daughter has stopped eating fish recently. As he daydreams they sit by their veranda looking over the fjord, he’ll think to himself how wonderful the breeze is. It washes over them, yet the air has changed in their lifetime. Not fast enough that they would notice by themselves, but such information is not unreachable either. They just know they like the air by their veranda, and the worker knows he doesn’t enjoy the air which Mongstad provides. There are many interconnecting pipes at Mongstad, but not all connections are made. Daydreaming besides, he finds a spot of down-time and pulls up his phone. His feed oscillates chaotically: at one moment it will bring him pictures of puppies, at other times it will bring him an unhinged rant about immigrants who receive hunting and weapons-training in Oppland. It will show him his Niece’s wedding, and images of Gaza next. A heartfelt thanks to all the support his cancer-stricken uncle has gotten will appear next to an article from the state broadcaster about teenagers learning rocket-science at the high school in Andøya. One post catches his fancy: a rant against seagulls. He clicks on it.
It’s a declaration, an unstated manifesto. “Seagull are creatures of evil intent” it states, “they wish destruction upon you” it states. It fantasises about government-officials being bullied by environmental activists into limiting human activity around seagulls. The seagulls steal your food, it says. “The seagulls resent you” it says. They eat, they heat, they shit and fuck. They cry and cry and cry and cry. What a mistake to have ever said the enemy. Everywhere they are enemies that can be everywhere and nowhere, that can couple themselves to anything and everything. The seagull that the post talks about is an idea-of-seagull has appeared in similar feeds before.
In a close past: a member of the petty bourgeoisie had a bad experience with a seagulls, one of them even stealing a fry. He constantly chases them out, but thinks they keep coming to him. They won’t stop crying. A fact: he doesn’t own the land which his restaurant is on. Another fact: he’s late on the rent. His wife cried last night, she doesn’t know how they'll manage to pay down their loans even if the planned expansion goes well. Right before that conversation he remembered a seagull that flew in his face. Earlier that month he had to go out of his office at the premises after much prodding from the staff, one of the servers had been shouted and catcalled at. It’s worth noting is that the customer in question had bought a bottle of wine, an expensive one. The server was unerved, she was hesitant after facing the scorn this master. The owner came, got her out, and served his fellow member of the petty bourgeoisie to perfection. He wanted to scream down at his servant, but an argument with the union isn’t worth it when he knows he’s in the wrong.
He went outside for a smoke and a seagull was sitting there right on the pavement. Attacking it wasn’t an option, throwing a chair wasn’t on the table. The seagull was something he couldn’t touch, out of his grasp, it would fly if provoked. The seagull was something beyond him, something he couldn’t force his will upon, something external which engaged with the process of friction in his sensory-experience and reminded him that not everything was his. “If only the father was here” his subconsious might think. It was direct evidence of his powerlessness, the previous essence here reveals itself as resentment. Resentment is the modus operandi for the ever stable yet perilous nature that the petty bourgeoisie find themselves in, always looking for stable unchanging elements that they can attach themselves onto as explanations and guides for the structure of the market-economic world. In this context resentment becomes a starting-point for a charged emotion coupled with the idea-of-seagull. With his one belief that seagulls can be harmful, coupled with a negative-orientation to them when consulting with his belief-network, it allows for the production of several different combined beliefs to surface. In meeting with social media, the owner was faced with all the other things that seagulls could possibly be responsible for, and that there was a “they” in the “other” that was responsible for it. The seagull could combine with the government, with the political left, with pesky environmentalists: the constructions effortlessly combined with oh so many enemies. The constructed seagull – or the simulacra of a seagull – had all of these characteristics, yet a seagull that's alive wouldn't be available for comment as it can't fight for its own footing in the rules governing the belief-networks that encompass it. For the owner the seagulls are at once an enemy that has to be fought with the utmost religious zealotry and something that is beneath them. If it were only removed, no problems would be there, he’d think. Its evil character is its weakness in this system. The idea-of-seagull is an idea of evil. His daughter showed him an image of a seagull drenched in the Nordsjø’s deep sea fluid poison, air was pushed through his nose instantly and a small, involuntary, smile crept on his face before he realised his company-issued mask should stay on. A seagull overlooks Mongstad.
The weather forecasts about Mongstad were right, after intense rainfall the smell of petrichor mixed together with the usual chemical smell. Thanks to the schizophrenic nature of Fjǫrn’s summer-weather, the clouds have flown away revealing the clear sky as the sun begins to set. The ground is drenched, filled with puddles that give of small reflections of the industrial city-scape of Mongstad. Small streaks of industrial smoke peer out of pipes in these reflection, mixing together with the timid orange of the sunset. The worker has just stepped out again as his shift is over. No longer merely defined by his moniker as a worker, he begins to think of himself in his Germanic name that was given to him by his Mother. He’s back in his civilian clothing topped with the worn-down and dirty statoil-jacket that his wife has been trying to get him to throw out for the past 10 years. He looks over to the Fjǫrn as he walks through the cybernetic landscape, small streaks of Fjǫrn’s waters are visible as the pipes transporting material all across the facility obstruct his view. The little he sees is beautiful in all the ways that the sea’s deep billberry-tinted colour mixed with the warm tones can be as the beginning of the evening set in. He goes to his car.
After driving home through the evening, he comes home to family. He kisses his wife and they exchange quaint reports about their work-days. She's made dinner, and they're ready to eat. She’s made komla with kolerabistappe, potatoes, and sausages a family-friend made. He loves komla, but gets annoyed every time when someone calls them “raspeball” or something really stupid like “kombe”. He overheard a tourist once that even called it a dumpling, where they get ideas like this he thinks to himself is madness. He shares his field-observations to his family. The post about the seagull pops up, and he starts talking about it. He doesn’t notice, but his daughter is rolling her eyes, she quite likes seagull actually. Or more like she doesn’t actively hate them. He talks a bit, but doesn’t care to mention the comments underneath that connected it to the Others, it’s a bit embarrassing. He then made a mistake. He told his family that he once saw a photo of a seagull drenched in oil and that it made him laugh a bit. His daughter said it’s not funny, his wife tries to change the subject.
UNFINISHED his daughter talks about what she's been doing tonight. She talked about how they learned about climate science and [INSERT LONG DIALOUGE WHERE THE TONE GETS MORE AND MORE HEATED UNTIL]
, she told him that he was partly destroying the earth. He asked her, translated from the local insular north-Germanic language, "what the fuck are you talking about? You're naive if you think we can live without oil". The daughter responded, and there was something within her response that frightened the subconscious of capital, reminding capital through the worker that it cannot go impose itself on the world in totality. The daughter had the audacity to remind him of the prophecy that the-idea-of-oil was faced with 50 years prior, that it would destroy itself though the destruction of the world. Every force that was speaking through the worker, the genealogy of the idea of oil, contained a conclusion: that which does not belong must be formed into the ideal simulacra. Non-intended weeds must be removed so that the facility can be presented to the minister. With a final act of destruction, capital had finally realised the true potential of the utterance "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" by encouraging Arild Leknes to slap his daughter Nora Leknes. Arild snapped out, but his world with Nora was ended.
It refines, it liquifies, it heats, it shits. What a mistake to have ever said the capital. It works in hits and fits, navigating through territories as it destablises the signal it comes into contact with. Every capitalistic signal, as divided as they are, contain the same impulse for replication of its ideal simulations into the world. Pipes, trucks, and fork-lifts accelerate through Mongstad. The capitals communicate together in signal-chains, not ones necessarily accessible to all visions of the world. A worker falls down stairs at Mongstad. One by one, it seeps through what it can connect to. A post on facebook calls for the rape a teenager from the Green Youth. Those who believe, through careful analysis of its semiotic chains, that capital will develop itself in a more advance direction are correct. But capitalism can never stop imposing itself, it's frantic in its paranoid attempts to remove all that which can challenge it. It will destroy all of the world which its vision can connect to.
But it can never fully conquer the seagull, even if it tries to study it. The lived history of Fjǫrn, its waters, its neolithic ancestors, they all remain hidden to it.
The idea of oil as a created collective hyperstition about what oil is. In a network, the idea of oil connects itself to other concepts, becoming an empty beacon that can take on good coupling after good coupling with very few conditions. Some of those conditions are that the idea must glorify its referent, which doesn’t have to be limited to oil itself, only to all the infrastructure which we link to oil in real life.