Newton Harrison and the Trial by Fire

Newton Harrison and I had been collaborators and friends for 12 years, but for the past two years we met every Sunday to engage in rigorous conversation with one another. These conversations regarded our practices both as independent people and as collaborators on how to generate art practices grounded on a wounded planet. The conversations centered around the life web and being careful listeners to it. Newton prioritized the healing of the earth above the ethos of art for art’s sake and his commitment to the life web was a decadeslong joint effort between Newton and his late wife, Helen Mayer Harrison.Together, as “The Harrison Studio,” they accomplished a multitude of works that have inspired many of us to follow the path they trailblazed. Newton and Helen encouraged the many around them to build research-based art practices from ennobling problems. These projects would advocate for the commons of the world’s oceans, topsoil, atmosphere, and forests. In my case specifically, Newton assigned entropy mitigation. The Harrisons would offer proxy ennobling problems to solve until we could find our own. As systems thinkers, they had the unique ability to approach impossible challenges with great articulation.In one of my last conversations with Newton, he shared with me that he had been in dialogue with the life web in his waking dreams: “‘Watershed, watershed, what now? What now, web of life?’ And the web of life said, ‘human human, I am in the process of expelling you’” [1]. The life web was expelling Newton because he was dying, but what he also meant by this was that the life web was expelling all of us, all human life. This was a sentiment he had shared with me many times before. Newton believed that the expulsion of humans from the life web was part of its system performing a natural function of self-defense.Systems thinking inclined Newton towards the complexity of the whole: the processes and patterns that govern life. The concept of entropy and thermodynamics was an important piece of the puzzle for Newton: “The laws of the conservation of energy say: you can’t make it and you can’t destroy it, but you can change it. That is to say, you can change an atom into a bomb, in the extreme [sense]. If you change energy from one source to another, there is a net loss. In a system, if you take enough energy out and change it into something else, the system becomes immobile. When it becomes immobile, that is called entropy” [2]. Capitalism has led to entropy because “when you create capital you have already shifted energy from one form to another. The actual creation of capital is a decrease of energy. The only reason why we got away with it for so long is that the life web made gigantic abundance” [3].Although the life web makes abundance, this does not negate the entropy that takes place under the practice of capitalism. The net loss has reached an extreme peak, and “in the laws of physics, when a force emerges, a counter force comes to meet it. We were the force that emerged and the dying back of the life web is the counter force that meets us” [4]. Newton called the force that meets us the “trial by fire,” which is a series of shocks sent out by the life web. In his words: “[the life web’s] big message is 100-degree temperature at the North Pole, and its little message is coronavirus and [fertility rates]” [5]. Although Newton understood the earth to be expelling us, he believed there was hope. As the life web expels us “a new teacher has emerged and the new teacher that has emerged is called the ‘trial by fire.’. . . We have invented a trial by fire and now we have to cope. And I think as the fire gets worse, coping mechanisms will be part of everyday subject matter. And as that happens, I think at least some part of the population’s empathy will grow. . . . I do believe that” [6]. Empathy is the key here. For Newton, empathy “is hardwired to us genetically, is survival based, and our contemporary culture has dismantled it and has made it almost impossible to happen” [7].Newton saw empathy as an integral part of that which governs the greater flow of life. But just as the laws of thermodynamics have been ignored by capitalism, the culture of capitalism leaves no room for empathy. This is precisely because capitalism is invested in nonlife, it is nonlife, and empathy is a vital life force. Newton believed that “if [empathy] evokes you hard enough, it evokes a kind of opening of your hands so that you give everything you’ve got, everything that you have in you to help or engage or do. [Empathy] is about the only thing that does that. It belongs to a specialized subset of what one would call ‘love’” [8].Towards the end of his life, Newton began to advocate for a new culture. We must “invent a new culture that can survive under these conditions if enough of us don’t die. If enough is left, what will the new culture look like? . . . A whole new culture has to happen, and it’s a culture of abundance, and it comes from overproduction of the life web itself” [9]. To argue for a new culture in some ways appears absurd. For one, Indigenous people have had cultures for decades that center around the life web. Secondly, it is hard to imagine culture being invented like some kind of experiment in a lab; culture seems to invent itself. But I think this is what Newton was saying—that a new culture will invent itself. If humans live on, a new culture must emerge. If humans live on, it will be after great strife in the form of the trial by fire because of entropy of the life web at the hand of capitalism. If humans live on, it will be precisely because of the inherent generosity and overabundance of the life web. And we belong to the life web, we are part of it. What survival entails is us opening ourselves to the abundance and empathy that lies within, that tethers us to the life web, so that we can give back to the earth and thus ourselves. Newton, just as the trial by fire will be, was a fierce teacher and a powerful friend.

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