She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17–28)
The speed of time’s arrow—against the wind-down of entropy—increases towards stage left. Can it find its mark? Meh. It’s not a good metaphor to encapsulate the flow of the temporal within the imagination of mind. Maybe tomorrow I’ll come up with a better one.
I set off with a sigh. Above me the entire sky had opened. What a few hours earlier had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscape-like formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and as hard as rock, while the huge surfaces illuminated by the sunset did not shine or gleam or have a reddish glow, as they could, rather they seemed as if they had been dipped in some liquid. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads?
However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. And why should we? If the various formations had had some meaning, if, for example, there had been concealed signs and messages for us which it was important we decode correctly, unceasing attention to what was happening would have been inescapable and understandable. But this was not the case of course, the various cloud shapes and hues meant nothing, what they looked like at any given juncture was based on chance, so if there was anything the clouds suggested it was meaninglessness in its purest form.
Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Translated by Don Bartlett. 1st Archipelago books edition. Vol. 1. 6 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012.
The photos were made around the same time Karl Ove was living in Bergen: I was teaching at KHiB (now the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen). Probably no need to explain the resonance of this particular passage to other entries on this blog.
14 September 1944, Thursday afternoon: In the evening, without having heard or read the reports herself, Eva came home with the [contents of] the latest bulletins: In the German military bulletin: English attack on Aachen; in the English one: in the course of the attack on Trier, the German frontier crossed on a 22-mile front. A new offensive is also said to be under way in the East. — The fact that the enemy is on German soil will make a tremendous impression. … In the cellar, Neumark had an old copy of the DAZ, which he had found by chance and which included a page summarizing the events of 1943.
In February 1943, the fall of Stalingrad; in the spring, the Führer holds discussions with the King of Bulgaria, with Antonescu—Count Ciano is appointed Italian ambassador to the Vatican… What an impression it all made on us! Ciano shot, Bulgaria and Romania changing sides, Stalingrad as remote as a fairy tale… But something else made a greater impression on us—it was the same for both Neumark and myself: the impotence of memory to fix all that we had so painfully experienced in time.
When—insofar as we remembered it at all—had this or that happened, when had it been? Only a few facts stick in the mind, dates not at all. One is overwhelmed by the present, time is not divided up, everything is infinitely long ago, everything is infinitely long in coming; there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only an eternity. And that is yet another reason one knows nothing of the history one has experienced: The sense of time has been abolished; one is at once too blunted and too overexcited, one is crammed full of the present. The chain of disappointments also unfolded in front of me again.
[…] Ever since Stalingrad, since the beginning of ’43 therefore, I have been waiting for the end. I remember asking Eva at the time: Do you think it is a defeat, or do you consider it to be the defeat, the catastrophe? That was in February ’43. Then I had not yet done any factory duty. After that, I was a factory slave for fourteen months. And now it is almost three months since I was released, three months in which I find it ever more difficult to wrest useful work from my so-called free days.
African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana) grandmother, newborn calf, and family. Photo credit: Phyllis C. Lee, Amboseli Trust for Elephants.
Earth’s old animals are in decline. Despite this, emerging research is revealing the vital contributions of older individuals to cultural transmission, population dynamics, and ecosystem processes and services. Often the largest and most experienced, old individuals are most valued by humans and make important contributions to reproduction, information acquisition and cultural transmission, trophic dynamics, and resistance and resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbance. These observations contrast with the senescence-focused paradigm of old age that has dominated the literature for more than a century yet are consistent with findings from behavioral ecology and life history theory. In this work, we review why the global loss of old individuals can be particularly detrimental to long-lived animals with indeterminate growth; those with increasing reproductive output with age; and those dependent on migration, sociality, and cultural transmission for survival. Longevity conservation is needed to protect the important ecological roles and ecosystem services provided by old animals.
Kopf, R. Keller, Sam Banks, Lauren J. N. Brent, Paul Humphries, Chris J. Jolly, Phyllis C. Lee, Osmar J. Luiz, Dale Nimmo, and Kirk O. Winemiller. “Loss of Earth’s Old, Wise, and Large Animals.” Science 387, no. 6729 (January 3, 2025): eado2705.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.
The whole of Walden is relevant to Life, such as it has come to be in this, the Age of Oligarchs and Desperation.
Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing,
And the sun came out to dry me.
The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the Windigo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as “quality of life” but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.
Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law, and yet a leading economist like Lawrence Summers, of Harvard, the World Bank, and the U.S. National Economic Council, issues such statements as, “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.” Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct. Windigo thinking.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. New York: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
where is meaning in a system so completely out of balance?
speed of adjustment too slow,
gyroscopic inertia too high,
center of gravity external,
lightening world spinning, all in a cosmos of dark energies and dark matters: occultation.
at once, briefly, looking up, with the eyes of god: plasma of blood reading plasma of star.
and then, exsanguination and final uplift into the approaching Void
hypostatic inversion, return return return
acceleration. what does this look like? bodycage pressing seat of heart, spine once shattered, now in tensile repair. static, greymetal frames cage neuronal pathways. acceleration of bodily demise is not motion, it is stasis.
it is time.
to make do. quickly. traverse no zenith. accelerate.
Long life is one of the greatest Blessings that we Mortals can enjoy; it being what all Men naturally desire and wish for. Nay, when Men are come to the longest Date, they desire yet to live a little longer. But, however, Health is that which sweetens all our other Enjoyments, without which the longest Life would be no more than a living Death, and render us burdensome to our selves, and troublesome to all about us.
But though Life be so desirous, and Health so great a Blessing, yet how much is both the one and the other undervalued, by the greatest Part of Mankind? Whatever they may think or say of the inestimableness of those precious Jewels, yet ’tis plain, by their Practice, that they put the Slight upon, and despise them both; and the most Man are hardly sensible of the worth of Health, ’till they come in good Earnest to be deprived of it.
How many Men do we daily see, by their Intemperance and Excess, to lay the Seeds of future Distempers, which either carry them off in the flower of their Age, which is the Case of most or else render their Old Age, if they do arrive to it, uneasy and uncomfortable? And though we see others daily drop into the Grave before us, and are very apt with Justice to ascribe the Loss of our Friends, to their living too fast, yet we cannot forbear treading in the same Steps, and following the same Courses, ’till at last, by a violent and unnatural Death, we are hurried off the Stage of Life after them.
What the Noble Cornaro observes of the Italians of his Time, may very well be applied to this Nation at present, viz. “That we are not contented with a plain Bill of Fare; that we ransack the Elements of Earth, Air, and Water, for all sorts of Creatures to gratify our wanton and luxurious Appetites: That as if our Tables were too narrow and short to hold our Provisions, we heap them up upon one another. And lastly, That to create a false Appetite, we rack our Cook’s inventions for new Sauces and Provocations to make the superfluous Morsel go down with the greatest Gust.”
This is not any groundless Observation, but it carries an Experimental Conviction along with it. Look into all our publick Entertainments and Feasts, and see whether Luxury and Intemperance be not too predominant in them. Men, upon such Occasions, think it justifiable to give themselves the Loose, to eat heartily, and to drink deeply; and many think themselves not welcome, or well entertained, if the Master of the Feast be so wise as not to not give them an Occasion of losing the MAN, and assuming the BEAST.
We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime … So, in essence, the world that your reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and defend … from now on you should let yourself perceive whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will.
Castaneda, Carlos. Tales of Power. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1974.
To every form of being is assigned
An active principle:—howe’er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures: in the stars
Of azure Heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters and the invisible air.
Whate’er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed:
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds.
Consider the sum of all life, the heaped arrays of adaptations flung one after the next into the abundance of forms, each possessing codes pertaining only to its ancestors and its immediate predecessors, teeming organisms hefting around history in their cells, a library of each quirk and evolutionary indecision of the past 3.5 billion years, but only a record in each species of its single divergence from the source, with no register of errors or chance events gone awry because those were discarded to extinction, leaving a peculiar animal honed to a perfect set of symbols and codices, down to the Sonoran topminnow (Poeciliopsis occidentalis), perhaps soon to be vanquished from the planet. Protecting species is the same intrinsic gesture as preserving the original documents and constitutions of an entire civilization, or the love letters of grandparents.
Childs, Craig Leland. The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert. 1st paperback ed. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 2001.
When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. Random House, Inc., 2002 ed. New York, NY: Random House, 2002.
Somewhat innocent optimism on Sagan’s part, as the book is only one particular mechanism for the externalization of memory: there are costs across all means. ‘Social’ media as a prime example. The wholesale off-shoring of memory to external devices renders the embodied meat-space imprint of memory obsolete, while at the same time, allowing ubiquitous (and ultimately dangerous!) manipulation of what were once considered ‘my’ memories. Parsing of trillions of individual memories into commerce-driven meme-streams is a fundamental corruption of the internal and very-much embodied life of the individual.
Dark magic has arrived in this time: “Jesus wept.”
Any landscape is so dense with evidence and so complex and cryptic that we can never be assured that we have read it all or read it aright. The landscape lies all around us, ever accessible and inexhaustible. Anyone can look, but we all need to see that it is at once a panorama, a composition, a palimpsest, a microcosm; that in every prospect there can be more and more that meets the eye.
James Miller‘s concept of “living systems” emphasizes that all such systems—from cells to landscapes to societies—share common scale-independent patterns of organization and processes as well as divergent features. As initially articulated in an editorial by Miller in 1956 in the then-new journal Behavorial Science:
Our present thinking-which may alter with time-is that a general theory will deal with structural and behavioral properties of systems. The diversity of systems is great. The molecule, the cell, the organ, the individual, the group, the society are all examples of systems. Besides differing in the level of organization, systems differ in many other crucial respects. They may he living, nonliving, or mixed; material or conceptual; and so forth.
In the context of landscapes, this approach aligns with systems thinking by focusing on how ecosystems, organisms, and human activities interact within larger networks, and are themselves comprised of smaller and smaller networks. A landscape may be seen as a living system with a complex of nested subsystems, where elements like nutrient cycles, energy flows, and information exchanges are interconnected. These interactions contribute to emergent properties and systemic behaviors, underscoring the need to consider the whole landscape when analyzing environmental changes and implementing management strategies. Augmenting or supplanting those more empirical methods, we believe that artistic, creative, imaginative, embodied, and other refined sensory-based processes can very effectively address and engage not only the astounding complexity, but the raw and inspiring beauty of these systems. Key to what may be a singular holistic ‘understanding’ of a landscape is focused and sustained observation that is aware of the scalar similarities and differences.
Hayden recognized the profound value of William Henry Holmes‘ drawings, though he did not formally recognize the other artists who produced documentary drawings on the expeditions, He reserved most of his praise for William Henry Jackson, the photographer who documented so expansively the landscapes of the American West setting the creative precedent for the likes of Ansel Adams, Richard Misrach, Robert Adams, Willy Sutton, and the many others who followed.
Our death is our wedding with eternity.
What is the secret? “God is One.”
The sunlight splits when entering the windows of the house.
This multiplicity exists in the cluster of grapes;
It is not in the juice made from the grapes.
For he who is living in the Light of God,
The death of the carnal soul is a blessing.
Regarding him, say neither bad nor good,
For he is gone beyond the good and the bad.
Fix your eyes on God and do not talk about what is invisible,
So that he may place another look in your eyes.
It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?
Although all lights emanate from the Divine Light
Don’t call all these lights “the Light of God”;
It is the eternal light which is the Light of God,
The ephemeral light is an attribute of the body and the flesh.
…Oh God who gives the grace of vision!
The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire.
Vitray-Meyerovitch, Eva de. Rûmî and Sufism. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1987.
The English translation of this is Nobody Swallows the Sun, and it’s the title of a release of a couple of sound-art compositions by my friend, Icelandic artist, Magnús Pálsson. Adam Buffington started the label Mumbling Eye in 2021 featuring some of Magnus’ work: check out Enginn Gleypir Sólina on Bandcamp along with a second release, Gapassipi. And, back when I made a couple documentations of both he and Rod prepping in Maastricht for a performance in Berlin: a remix of that complexity.
(18:59, stereo audio, 46.3 mb)
The next step is for art to become mere smell or sound, phenomena which are visible or visual within the mind all the same. In this way, sound has a form and is an image. – Magnús Pálsson
Now a month after leaving the ‘regular’ job, conversations ensue within the personal network—Athens, Weimar, Helsinki, Vihti, Benin, Catania, Reykjavík, Forsbach, Bremen, Kiel, Maastricht, Salmon Arms, Vancouver, Boulder, Durango, Santa Fe, Denver—old friends, collaborators, former students, family. I am a bit surprised—and humbled—at how easy the dialogues pick up and seamlessly continue with the strong energies that they were long-rooted in from other times and places. It is deeply gratifying to have a confirmation of network dynamics as demonstrated by these wonderful Others: many more dialogues to come. Already learning much, and catching up on lives.
— an aside from the NY Times: the Anthropocene will remain an unofficial tag on our short-lived and messy presence: the geoscience community voted it down (more details in an article in Nature). In many ways it seemed to be yet another human conceit, naming an epoch after us, but, this is certainly not the end of the term in the popular hive-mind.
— and, finally, a bird’s drone’s eye view on location after one of the few Light snowfalls this winter. The smooth areas are the result of many days of weed-whacking throughout last year’s long and prolific weed-growing season. That’s the one advantage of drought, even the weeds are handicapped. Last year’s relatively heavy precipitation brought a profusion of chest-high invasives across the entire 13+ acre property that I could not successfully battle without access to full-on farming equipment. That level of capital I don’t have, I subsequently gave up.
I had this lined up as part of a draft for Rocktalk, but with only a week left at the j-o-b, I’ll use it here:
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent …. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.
The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men [Vol. 4] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882., Emerson, Edward Waldo, 1844-1930.
The infinitely flat earth, lake of mud, river,
waveless sea, sky, sky of earth, blazing grasslands,
road, grey asphalt road for cars to drive along.
Rooted.
Immovable.
There is just a single cry.
What does it say?
It says
I AM ALIVE
I AM
That’s what it says. Faced with the immensity of time, with lake of
mud, river, sky, road, always the same cry
and it is not easy to hear what it is saying:
And it is not TO LIVE!TO LIVE! but perhaps TO LOVE! or TO DIE!
From deep in the throat.
Faced with indifference, pool of dead water amid
impassive vegetation, cold body between the sheets
refusing with closed mouth and eyes
It hurls itself forward
Smashing its way
It is yet another cry
It says: Slut! Filth! Trash!
Disgrace!
In the stifling black night, forests of sounds, vain
dreams, world turned upside down preposterous
shadow of the intelligible, mane growing inwards,
hairs that have already invaded throat and belly,
There is a light
the tip of a cigarette
the reflection from a storm-lantern
the eye of a cat
Straight rigid cry, hit, cat’s eye, gleam, droplet,
point, hole, tower, stone, word, noise, taste, skin,
being, being,
tigers, tigers,
ticks that I let loose upon you
demons that are my sentence of extermination
for me, for you, for all,
to burst through the sky, the skin, indifference. Ho! Ho! Houa! Houa!
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave. War. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York, NY: Atheneum, 1973.
I first stumbled on the work of future Nobel Literature Prize winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, way back in 1986 or so, whilst cruising the voluminous stacks at CU’s Norlin Library, back when there were stacks, and back when I was moderately well-read in French literature—Duras, Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre, Barthes, Ellul, Weil, Breton, Baudelaire, along with the Situationists, etc., mostly in translation. Despite my familiarity with French literary landscapes and my extended experiences traversing France, Le Clézio’s language style posed a challenge to my modest proficiency level. Aside from Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) for which he was awarded the Prix Renaudot, the CU library fortuitously had copies of all his early works in translation including Le Déluge (1966) – The Flood, trans. Peter Green (1967); Terra Amata (1967) – Terra Amata, trans. Barbara Bray (1967); Le Livre des fuites (1969) – The Book of Flights (1971); La Guerre (1970) – War (1973); Les Géants (1973) – The Giants, all trans. Simon Watson-Taylor (1975); Voyages de l’autre côté (1975); and Désert (1980). The impact of Le Clézio’s narratives, reminiscent of my earlier literary revelation with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, was profound. Through immersive storytelling, he masterfully captures intricate and hallucinogenic details of diverse settings, unfolding psychospiritual voyages through the perspectives of rootless characters perpetually grasping at ever elusive meaning. Regardless of the particular protagonist, all Le Clézio’s works offer a highly recommended exploration of the human experience.
After meeting my future ex-wife for the first time in Köln, Germany in June of 1988, I somewhat reluctantly headed to Arles to attend the Rencontres internationales de la photographie. But first, I spent some days in Paris at pre-arranged meetings with folks at the [now defunct] Centre national de la photographie, the Bibliothèque nationale, and several other rendez-vous. While in Paris, still deeply ensorceled by Le Clézio’s work, I went to his publisher, Gallimard‘s office/bookstore where I bought a couple of his books. They had a binder of press clippings and critical reviews of his work that I mulled over for a time. After some mental practice runs, in my terrible French, I ventured to explain to a couple of the salesladies how much I appreciated his writing, and politely inquired if they could give me his postal address. L’un d’eux a passé quelques appels téléphoniques, faisant descendre une jeune femme extrêmement jolie des bureaux du dessus. Cela a fait tomber mon français primitif dans les toilettes. She said they couldn’t share the address (Je comprends, bien sûr!), but she did make a gracious show of taking the letter I had brought with me and said she absolument would forward it to him. Who knows. That era in Paris, no one willingly spoke English which was quite okay, but I was at more than one embarrassing disadvantage because my lousy French was spoken in a decidedly parler lyonnais, from the hinterlands, down south, mixed with a shifty accent américain: folks were at first confused, then clearly amusé at my miserable diction!
That accent was imprinted on my primitive linguistic neurons back in the third grade in rural Maryland, following the lead of Madame Moon, who taught French to a small group of us after school a couple days a week. A petite and severe silver-coiffed native of Lyon, Mme. Moon held us in a régime ancien of holy terror: if any of us got just a bit obstreperous, she would threaten to come over and sit on us! This provoked an existential fear that I never fully recovered from. We followed every lesson closely, not realizing our French discourse would be marked forevermore: indicated most overtly by our learning the Lyonnaise oui (pronounced as a slack and breathy “whey”) rather than the ‘proper’ Parisienne oui (pronounced as a clipped “we”). C’est comme ça!
Quand même, back to M. Le Clézio, I highly recommend any of his work that is now, since the Nobel in 2008, all in fresh English translation. Better still if you can manage en français, although again, his vocabulary and usage makes for a challenging stretch.
Around when M. Le Clézio received his Nobel, and I was about to undertake my PhD in Australia, I discovered that he had been teaching one semester a year at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sadly, it never worked out for me to get through there after I returned to the US from Oz. And now, as he’s quite elderly, he’s no longer doing those gigs.
Je lève mon verre pour porter un toast à l’un de mes écrivains préférés!
Otherwise, thank god for those library stacks—a place for enLightened literary (and sometimes other!) encounters that has unfortunately met the same end as telephone books, logarithm tables, paper maps, and French teachers who were at liberty to punish children by sitting on them!
“A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.” ― David Abram
The question: what is the lineage of what is now called a story (a fiction, a documentary, a novel, a reportage …)? Where does this symbol-laden, semiotic act come from?
When many tell the same one, or when I tell one to myself, in a dream: these are different instances, very much so, than One telling a story—the story—to many. Numbers.
When the story is a deliberate inhalation and exhalation, the warmth of breath, vital, embodied, incarnate, voice: hypostasis.
Before writing, before the interpolation of symbolic systems, the story was the body: the body, a story.
What is at the core of the desperate need to tell stories in this moment, in this cosmos? What is the psychology of storytelling? Everyone has a story, but the embodied, singular telling is suppressed in the noise of the technosocial now.
And when is enough of this telling? word dialogue Light revolution action. When does telling change to listening, and when do words transform into actions?
I force myself to write something, anything, letters on a screen, filling line-by-line. Though there is little to be said and much to be done. A hollow emptiness that has overtaken days and days. Cosmological movement becomes the singular touchstone that allows demarcated time. The horizon, and zenith, the ecliptic and azimuth. Where is the sun, the moon, Andromeda, Orion, Sirius, and the Milky Way? The temporal where of heavenly transit becomes the story.
I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in one’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
Buber, quoted in Aubrey Hodes’ Martin Buber; an Intimate Portrait. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1971.
Yet another example of cooperation between kingdoms of life is found on acacia trees. These trees sometimes develop galls on their bark: woody chambers that are ideal homes for certain ants. The ants colonize the galls, and when a browsing giraffe approaches the tree to gorge on its tender leaves, the tenant invertebrates rush to the scene to defend their landlord, squirting acid at the giraffe until it is discouraged.
Interspecies communication is an integral feature of life on Earth and has been around for Billions of years. All these mutualistic symbioses have one thing in common: They are held together by signals. A growing fungus will send out special feelers called hyphae and produce mucus to sense the signaling molecules on potential algae teammates, in order to size them up with a view to making a lichen together. The honeyguide bird sings a special song to the honey badger to get its attention, then flies ahead to lead it to the beehive. A foraging shrimp will keep one of its long antennae resting on its goby pal’s tail so that if the eagle-eyed fish spots danger, it will signal to its myopic friend by waggling its tail and both will scuttle to safety. An acacia tree will release chemical signals (hormones) that alert its resident ants to a munching herbivore and tell them where to come to help. Living things survive by signaling to other life-forms, within and across the species boundaries. This includes both whales and humans.
Mustill, Tom. How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication. London, UK: William Collins, 2022.
Tom authored an easy read across a relevant subject: the whole effort initiated after a humpback whale breached over the sea-kayak he was whale-watching from: the energized and auspicious start of a personal search.
I kept getting the feeling that much of the theoretical and applied research—as articulated by the scientists he interviews—is (still!) mired in the most mechanistic of physical worlds, though. Oblivious of the concept that sound—in its spectral complexity—is merely one of a plenitude of energy-exchange, energy-transmission pathways. This, between and among the plenitude of species (who are themselves merely varying configurations of life-energy flow).
The flows are there, we are immersed and part of them. An individual of a species will use the embodied pathways of energy expression available to it. Transmission, signals. Others of its species have resonant energy receptors, communication; other species sometimes have overlapping receptors as well:
In the pasture of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull.
Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains,
My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.
I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest at night.
Comment: The bull never has been lost. What need is there to search? Only because of separation from my true nature, I fail to find him. In the confusion of the senses I lose even his tracks. Far from home, I see many crossroads, but which way is the right one I know not. Greed and fear, good and bad, entangle me.
Climate change is hard to think about not only because it’s complex and politically contentious, not only because it’s cognitively almost impossible to keep in mind the intricate relationships that tie together an oil well in Venezuela, Siberian permafrost, Saudi F-15s bombing a Yemeni wedding, subsidence along the Jersey Shore, albedo effect near Kangerlussuaq, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the polar vortex, shampoo, California cattle, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, leukemia, plastic, paper, the Sixth Extinction, Zika, and the basic decisions we make every day, are forced to make every day, in a world we didn’t choose but were thrown into. No, it’s not just because it’s mind-bendingly difficult to connect the dots. Climate change is hard to think about because it’s depressing and scary.
Thinking seriously about climate change forces us to face the fact that nobody’s driving the car, nobody’s in charge, nobody knows how to “fix it.” And even if we had a driver, there’s a bigger problem: no car. There’s no mechanism for uniting the entire human species to move together in one direction. There are more than seven billion of us, and we divide into almost two hundred nations, thousands of smaller sub-national states, territories, counties, and municipalities, and an unimaginable multitude of corporations, community organizations, neighborhoods, religious sects, ethnic identities, clans, tribes, gangs, clubs, and families, each of which faces its own internal conflicts, disunion, and strife, all the way down to the individual human soul in conflict with itself, torn between fear and desire, hard sacrifice and easy cruelty, all of us improvising day by day, moment by moment, making decisions based on best guesses, gut hunches, comforting illusions, and too little data.
But that’s the human way: reactive, ad hoc, improvised. Our ability to reconfigure our collective existence in response to changing environmental conditions has been our greatest adaptive trait. Unfortunately for us, we’re still not very good at controlling the future. What we’re good at is telling ourselves the stories we want to hear, the stories that help us cope with existence in an wild, unpredictable world.
Scranton, Roy. We’re Doomed, Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change. New York, NY: Soho, 2018.
… There is a door that opens to a room and in that room is a table, a round table, and at that table sits power. The head of the table belongs to the fist or paw or talon that grabs power. I want to go through that door and get in that room and sit at that table with that power and the wolf should be there, the elk also, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, the serpents and monsters of the deep, and this time when the waters come there will be no Noah and no rainbow, God help us, no rainbow. — Charles Bowden
A conclusion that is, as sometimes said, a long stretch in coming: a mental model, compiled over this writer’s lifetime, long in developing: it arrives to confront my understanding of the nature of reality. That is, to emphasize, *my* understanding, of whatever I have done whilst on the planet, there will be no trace in one hundred years. With resource capacities stretched by too many bodies on the planet, many using too much, there simply isn’t enough to maintain any of what we have here, now.
Mangled language cannot substitute for the actions necessary to cause change. Change in human behavior will not happen, except when forced by changes in resource scarcity (or abundance), or environmental extremity.
Ça suffit! It’s all too much. But still, to speak, to write, to express. The mad tension between the two: to relinquish, to give up (að gefast upp), to capitulate, surrender :: to continue, to strive, to push forward, upward, exert, to fight. To use life-limited energy or not. To be alive is to use energy, to use energy is to re-express life.
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? — Audre Lorde
The silences — the un-expressed dark energies of living, the inversions of life — they re-arrive now, replete and unheard.
Timely advice, as I contemplate the next step away from the constrictions, and the flaccid and unimaginative management of the CGS — a small echo of how work-life went at UNOCAL all those years ago. Maybe this is how organizations fail. Or that the internal release to real life is beginning. (Can the fear be assuaged? Yes.) Lifetime is better spent in other ways. Because the spending is limited and slipping away.
Conversations with Volker expand to some of the practicalities of .de/.pt residency along with the contingencies of what is possible on a return to Europe. Reactivating human connections with UdK-Berlin, Uni-Bremen, Muthesius Kunst Hochschule, Aalto University, LHÍ, and the wider cultural sphere, yes.
But you have so generously and openly desired that I will divide my griefs with you, that I cannot hide what it has now become my duty to explain. My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explored too narrowly, might hurt my pecuniary circumstances; as my dependence is on engraving at present, and particularly on the engravings I have in hand for Mr. Hayley: and I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live. This has always pursued me. You will understand by this the source of all my uneasiness. This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. H. will bring me back again. For that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my mind. And why this should be made an objection to me, while drunkenness, lewdness, gluttony, and even idleness itself, do not hurt other men, let Satan himself explain. The thing I have most at heart — more than life, or all that seems to make life comfortable without — is the interest of true religion and science. And whenever anything appears to affect that interest … it gives me the greatest of torments. I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what ought to be told: that I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly. But the nature of such things is not, as some suppose, without trouble or care. Temptations are on the right hand and on the left. Behind, the sea of time and space roars and follows swiftly. He who keeps not right onwards is lost; and if our footsteps slide in clay, how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble? But I should not have troubled you with this account of my spiritual state, unless it had been necessary in explaining the actual cause of my uneasiness, into which you are so kind as to inquire; for I never obtrude such things on others unless questioned, and then I never disguise the truth. But if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears or natural desires, who can describe the dismal torments of such a state! I too well remember the threats I heard! — “If you, who are organized by Divine Providence for spiritual communion, refuse, and bury your talent in the earth, even though you should want natural bread, sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity. Everyone in eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was crowned with glory and honour by his brethren, and betrayed their cause to their enemies. You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend!” Such words would make any stout man tremble, and how then could I be at ease? But I am now no longer in that state, and now go on again with my task, fearless, though my path is difficult. I have no fear of stumbling while I keep it.
Be Pro-Active: Take the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.
Begin With an End in Mind: Start with a clear destination to understand where you are now, where you’re going, and what you value most.
Put First Things First: Manage yourself. Organize and execute around priorities.
Think Win/Win: See life as a cooperative, not a competitive arena where success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others.
Seek First to Understand: Understand then be understood to build the skills of empathic listening that inspires openness and trust,
Synergize: Apply the principles of cooperative creativity and value differences.
Renewal: Preserving and enhancing your greatest asset, yourself, by renewing the physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional dimensions of your nature.
Covey. Stephen R. 1989. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Everything you see has its roots
in the Unseen world.
The forms may change,
yet the essence remains the same.
Every wondrous sight will vanish,
Every sweet word will fade.
But do not be disheartened,
The Source they come from is eternal –
Growing, branching out,
giving new life and new joy.
Dinner with Adrianne Wortzel. Long day today. I stopped by early to pick up the Noun portfolio that I have kept at Stefan and Ellen’s and delivered it to Kathy for her to have on hand at this new photography space. It does seem that the long doldrum in art photography sales is lifting. I am hoping to take advantage of that development. In two months the print sales business has eclipsed sales in her custom black&white photographic printing business! I then went right over to artnetweb to meet with Remo who is encouraging me to turn in a proposal for the internet exhibition called port: navigating digital culture coming up in February at the List Gallery (and online) at MIT that he is curating. The main premise of the exhibition is art-as-communication utilizing the possibilities of the net. Following that meeting, I went over to Alec’s place in Brooklyn, across the hall from Vito Acconci’s apartment. I first met Alec a few years back — we had a mutual friend that I had gone to grad school with, Chuck, who Alec had met when both of them were living in Denmark. Once, when Alec was passing through Iceland, he stayed at our place. From that visit I learned about the concept of negative space as the tracing of edges of fore-grounded things and back-grounded things. He had a nice way of thinking/seeing in his drawings that reflected an intense focus on edges — which are singular lines of fractal complexity and no real substance, only an indication of difference.
Other performers and performative works include: John Hopkins, photographer and writer, reinvents the artist as theory activist/active theorist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented—creating an empty space between one participant and the other, which in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art. — Adrianne Wortzel
