Books 📚

Deborah Levy’s Real Estate is the book being enjoyed in snatches at the moment.

Other than that, I’ve dipped into the following in the past week:

• Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of Co-Becoming. Bing Song · Yiwen Zhan (eds.) … Open Access Text, link available via this article
• Ecocene Politics, Mihnea Tanacescu
• The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds Gagliano, Ryan, Vieira.
• Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction, Kate Rigby

😍

“symbiosis” in life sciences has been translated as gong-sheng in Chinese and kyōsei in Japanese, share the same two characters (kanji) “共生”. The first character “gong” (or “kyo”) 共 means commonality, sharing and togetherness, whereas “sheng” (or “sei”) 生 means growth, production, thriving, living and emergence. Both characters date back to more than 3000 years ago, and each has been used in ancient classics, poems and literatures (Bing Song, 7)

Notes & Quotes 💬

Serendipitous co-arising pieces on music 🎼

• 🎶 A Gray Area podcast, on music and mysticism. I’m drawn to the idea of “improv. as meditation” 👀

• 🎸 A rich Perspectiva essay on Music, Metacrisis & Metanoia by Michael Bready. Well-worth a read and think. It includes

three different conceptions of music that reveal how it can illuminate the nature of reality (enlighten), support personal transformation (ensoul), and take us into direct contact with the sacred (enchant). These three conceptions are, respectively: music as metaphor, music as spiritual practice, and music as realisation.

Small talk in the past week about the weather includes the lovely, poetic 菜種梅雨 (なたねづゆ) … What ripens in this rain?

A film review by Rupert Read in Dark Mountain notes:

Knowingness is a disease of our civilisation

Possibilities for response include cultural and existential deep adaptation as well as transformative adaptation. Essentially, it echoes the call of Donna Haraway to “Stay With the Trouble” and not to turn away from the mess, but to do the work that is before us.

I worry, as a teacher, about the memory of the young, what they call “shifting baselines”, a phrase that

describes the difficulty for humans to describe normalcy or the status quo of, for instance, fishing grounds before human exploitation: The next generation will take the new situation for granted and be unable to see changes taking place over periods of time that exceed a single life span or other human means of experiencing time. – (See Roman Bartosch’s essay on Educational Ecologies, 6.)

In light of this, we can cultivate ‘deep time negative capability’ via literary modes, say, where individual memory is supplanted by cultural memory?

“Negative capability” is, as Keats suggested, the capability of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.’

It’s the Elders who dwell in loss, not the young (as much?) How do we deal (consciously, justly) with it while not stealing hope from the young?

On war’s ‘interregnum’, this:

“I don’t know if we will ever get out of this,” Arendt writes to Karl Jaspers in 1946, about the powerlessness and political extremes of their time. It is tempting to feel similarly in 2024. Theirs was a generation who lived through the war, moving from pre–war to post–war in a single lifetime. Last month, the UK defence secretary Grant Shapps suggested that we are moving again from “a post war to a pre–war world,” and the cycle continues.

Is this a connection worth making? 🔗 ⬇️ The Men’s Shed Movement - a beautiful practice of hospitality I’d never heard of.

Hannah Arendt noted: ‘We Are Free to Change the World’. I want to think about/learn more about what ‘free’ means, here . . .

This, by Ilia Delio, was stimulating. It find it vivifying to imagine the Christian Trinity as a kind of contact zone, an estuary! 🦅

We are at an entirely new level of life today in a much larger and expansive universe. We know so much more about matter and mind, and we now have an opportunity to change the course of history by bringing the Christian mutation into alignment with modern science and cosmology. Unless we do so, we face dire consequences up ahead. As long as the human psyche remains evicted from its natural home in divinity, we are empty human shells seeking our deepest ground of meaning. **It is time to recognize the transcendent divine ground within us and undergo the mutation that can lead to a richer reality of planetary life, fully alive in the glory of God. **

Science offers a MAP, but that is not the TERRITORY (for that we need the arts and humanities. Alan Jacobs wrote a small parable.)

Podcasts 🫛

🎧

• Krista Tippett interviews Christiana Figueres On Being. Christiana radiates energy, a ball of enthusiasm and, like Joanna Macy, with conviction, says:

  “What a marvellous time to be alive!”

Krista, like me, wobbles on this, wanting to believe. Are we really not too far gone? Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will?

Poetry 💘

• Your mystical powers by Alfred K LaMotte
• The Wild Iris (audio) by Louise Glück … by way of an essay in The Language of Plants by John Charles Ryan entitled “In the Key of Green? The Silent Voices of Plants in Poetry”

Questions & Open Tabs 🔖

🤔

• Voices crying in the wilderness describe corporations as parasitical, ‘brain fungus among us’ here. This reminded me of Sohrab Amari’s Tyranny, here and an interview & transcript here on the same topic. Not all that edifying . . . 😞

• What tools can you use? Lovely essay on craft and working with the hands

Wood makes demands that have to be met if you are going to produce anything worthwhile, imposing a kind of natural discipline that comes not from some authority figure but from the physical world itself. The digital world is binary, you either know the right clicks to make, the right options to pick on a drop-down menu, or you don’t. In contrast, hand-crafts are essentially qualitative.

• And on my spring ‘hand-craft’ project . . . Progress on the tying of knots is slow but steady (the buds opening are quicker than I am knotting!) I’ve got 3 steps down and am carrying two tails of differently coloured cords in my pocket and practicing in my mind things I want my body to do without thinking.

  Donna Harraway, she of the Cat’s Cradle for Speculative Fabulations and other SFs, writes that ‘the world is a knot in motion.’ Her antipodean sister-explorer, Deborah Bird Rose, declared: ‘Our flesh is inscribed with a multispecies history of becoming-with in “embodied knots of multispecies time.”’ 🤔 🍇

Noticing Something New 🎁

🆕

• Now for a change of cord …John Cage’s 639 year long musical composition had a recent Chord change

• This looks like a Cool Tool if you’re online and like a keyboard for your notes: Digital Library Cards … www.blyberg.net/card-gene…

• A winter cyclamen gifted to me in 2022 which kept me company at the sink through 2023 is coming around again and has 6 hot pink blossoms opening. I am delighted by them!