Note on a grant app to WWOOFUSA

Casa Goofy International is about community. 

 

It’s about art and humor as bridges between ego and reality.

 

And about art and humor as bridges and interfaces between human communities, and between the human and the natural community.  Bridges and interfaces that we need because?

 

Because the natural community is the enduring community and we’re just transients, just passing through, packing up and moving on (at least since we got here).  

 

Because OUTWARD is the primary principle of the universe and the intelligence of nature (at least since the Big Bang & possibly even earlier).

 

And when we invest in that enduring community we can endure all the losses of ego that flesh is heir to, because all flesh is grass and all grass is dirt. And therefore art is dirt.

 

And so the emphasis on Art-In-Nature.   

 

And so the emphasis on crossing borders to build the real community, the invisible community of those who care about the earth but who may never see each other

 

It’s about creating interfaces between the human and the natural communities through art, art-in-nature and intensive gardening methods, interfaces, (art and culture and gardening methods) which can give people in cramped apartments in cities, and even the homeless, the same sense of entitlement to the community of nature as those who have inherited farms and ranches. 

 

And so we’re about creating a third world gallery circuit with an emphasis on art-in-nature____________because there is a need there for recognition that art becomes most real when it pauses and then begins again like a child, improvising, working beyond the illusions and stresses of recognition, the structures and anxieties of traditional esthetics and their abstract commodity and speculative and investment based systems of value that flock around people and things that are “special” like teenagers on Facebook. 

 

Au contraire we’re about community  and investing in community that recognizes no such mandate in anybody to be judge and jury over the ultimate value of any being, any work.  We’re about seeking and building community that cares about essences instead of appearances. 

 

Therefore we’re about reinventing the old International Arts Center that used to be here in the old Y before the gentrification steamroller smashed it down under the inevitable injustice of money (because money is an abstraction).  We’re about reinventing it as an investment in community and common ground instead of big buildings with money targets on their butts.

 

How would that work?  It would work like student exchange, and Couchsurfing and WWOOF USA only it would be an international exchange of art and artists who are like those hardy souls above, born to look and move OUTWARD because they were born knowing that we are community before we are individuals, that we are the earth beneath our feet so we can never be lost, and the common man, the common person is common to us. 

 

I enjoy having a house I built beside the road, I enjoy hosting and being a friend to these transient people and I enjoy being part of a larger conversation than what occurs in board rooms and university seminars, a conversation made of dirt and rocks and plants and written on the living air between us.  I have been overwhelmed by the largesse of those who have nothing, and underwhelmed by the betrayals of big shots who have enough to worry themselves to death with the fear of losing it.

 

Physicists are now telling us reality is just information, and law books are telling us truth is just an arbitration.  Dude like whatever floats your ego, I’m just glad to be a nobody in nowhere representing the little guy, not with much hope that any of us can survive the feedback loops of global warming, but with a grain of faith the size of a mustard seed that shitty as life with others gets sometimes, this much is given to us, that we can hold dirt and water and seeds in our hands and look up at the stars.

 

And once we get to a place that’s not a place but a process, a process that’s real made of things and dirt and rocks and plants, we have nothing to fear except those constructs of mind divorced from nature, those things that aren’t things at all, those things that like money and drones can kill without conscience or feelings, those things which we call abstractions because they are abstracted, i.e. taken from something more basic and real.  But all  language is an abstraction, every word is a leap of faith, so?

 

So ya gotta have a sense of humor.  And therefore:  Casa GOOFY International. 

 

But what are we about in more concrete terms?  We’re a program under the non-profit, Artfare with six ponds and six greenhouses almost at the point of being an off grid aquaculture system, a sculpture garden, 17 units of housing about 25 percent converted to artists’ live/work spaces with workshop/studio/greenhouses attached. Two units of free bunkhouse housing for volunteers onsite, two units of offsite bunkhouse housing for volunteers (and maybe, just maybe an atrium gallery as one station in a Third World Gallery Circuit)  at the Artfare Hotel in the hotly contested and not quite totally broken heart of downtown Tucson.  (But keep trying Centurions, et. al., once you get the riff raff and the city bus center and a certain historic hotel block out of the way, downtown will be totally revitalized and sterilized.)  And we’re supporters of Los Amigos Childcare.

 

We bring the music and art and gardening (natural science) hour to children of low income families Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 p.m. (or times like this when the funding is low, WHEN WE CAN) right after their naps, so they’re not totally cranky and impossible to control.  We’re pursuing solar water heating, solar electric generation, waste veggie oil processing, biodigestion for methane and fertilizer, parking shades with unisolar roll out photovoltaic film, and all other mechanical sustainable permaculture contrivances that might help our cause without costing too much money during the start up chaos with the inevitable 98 percent failure rate for most inventions.

 

And what in particular will we do with two thousand dollars if and when we get it?  The West side of the pond/greenhouse complex is finally ready to rumble with solar charged Caterpillar batteries running pumps that circulate water between all the ponds and from the lowest to the highest pond.  The water then flows down through siphons back to the middle and then the lowest pond.  That’s the basic pond system.  Here’s how we add the greenhouse system to the pond system:

 

A pair of larger solar powered pumps pump a greater volume of water to the top pond where it comes down through a larger siphon into a hydraulic ram pump made from common plumbing parts which uses only the energy of a large volume of falling water to pump a small volume of water, 30 feet, three times as high as the fall, to the top of the highest greenhouse where it will trickle down through troughs made from salvage sheet metal duct and eventually arrive back at the lower pond.   

 

In these troughs are “grow boxes” made from junk food coolers with slots in them so plants can grow out the sides as well as the tops.  The food coolers have wicks in them which wick up the pond water into the soil so the plants can use just as much as they need with minimal loss to evaporation and so that no soil goes back into the ponds.

 

Meanwhile heavy duty steel shelving frames over the top ponds repeat this kind of cycle for outdoor planting and some of the lower shelves in these frames have vermiculture tubs in them where kitchen scraps are used to feed worms for the fertilizer. 

 

In the back of the greenhouses where there’s less sunlight are mushroom beds and storage of gardening supplies.    

 

Two thousand dollars would buy us enough supplies, expertise and skilled labor to repeat the hydraulic ram pump application on the East side of the pond/greenhouse system.

 

This completed system with the addition of living fences made from recycled pallets, intensive raised bed gardens,  a stock of fingerling Bass, Tilapia, and Catfish, a stock of small livestock and birds will turn us from an experiment into a working farm and art-in-nature laboratory for international exchange artists to use and for children from Los Amigos Childcare and children of all ages to tour under shade cloth and tree shade to protect them from the merciless Southern Arizona Sun that’s soon to get more merciless under the stresses of global warming. 

 

But more importantly are we having fun yet?  Are we there yet?  How will we know when we get there? 

 

We’ll know when we complete the giant turtle out of shade cloth stretched between poles which can be seen from GOOGLE EARTH, just to tell those illegal aliens from outer space to come on down, but just be aware that we don’t care....

 

....WHAT some silly bunch of intergalactic bureaucrats think our purpose here on earth is, we’re all about the native Americans’ concept of America as “TURTLE ISLAND”.   Aliens, (illegal schmegal) global warming?  (Charming.)  Can’t scare us.  You guys are visitors here. You can’t actually arrive until you know you’re nothing.