#I deeply desire a more living ecology

[lightthewaybackhome]

When I was a kid, we moved from Los Angeles to Yellville, AR. It was an absolute culture shock for my parents, but me and my siblings had the run of 80 acres of my Grandma's land. It was grazing pasture but had lots of little woods on it and around it, plus ponds.

We went from pigeons and seagulls to almost every bird in the bird book. We went from roaches and crickets to almost every bug in the bug book. We learned what plants and mushrooms we could eat and not eat. We heated with wood, milked goats, gathered eggs from our chickes, and grew lots of produce. It was idyllic on some levels and bloody and harsh on others, but either way it was very alive.

There are days I look at my urban backyard, and sense to my very core is lifelessness despite the green grass, and I loathe it. I'm very thankful for God's kind provision. I have food, shelter, and clothing in abundance, but I also feel cut off from so much of His creation, so much of the magnificence I could be a part of. I'm content on one hand and so ready to go feral in the other.

Nature is healing.

I burned the Meadow a couple weeks ago. At first it looked like nothing but charred ashes and dirt, with a few scorched green patches, and I was afraid I'd done something terrible. But then the sprouts emerged. Tender new leaves swarming the soil.

My brother and I were outside after dark the other day, to see if any lightning bugs would emerge yet. We had been working on digging the pond. That old soggy spot in the middle of the yard that we called "poor drainage," that always splattered mud over our legs when we ran across it as children—it isn't a failed lawn, and it never was.

Oh, we tried to fill in the mud puddles, even rented heavy machinery and graded the whole thing out, but the little wetland still remembered. God bless those indomitable puddles and wetlands and weeds, that in spite of our efforts to flatten out the differences that make each square meter of land unique from another, still declare themselves over and over to be what they are.

So we've been digging a hole. A wide, shallow hole, with an island in the middle.

And steadily, I've been transplanting in vegetation. At school there is a soggy field that sadly is mowed like any old field. The only pools where a frog could lay eggs are tire ruts. From this field I dig up big clumps of rushes and sedges, and nobody pays me any mind when I smuggle them home.

I pulled a little stick of shrubby willow from some cracked pavement near a creek, and planted it nearby. From a ditch on the side of the road beside a corn field, I dug up cattail rhizomes. Everywhere, tiny bits of wilderness, holding on.

I gathered up rotting logs small enough to carry and made a log pile beside the pond. At another corner is a rock pile. I planted some old branches upright in the ground to make a good place for birds and dragonflies to perch.

And there are so many birds! Mourning doves, robins, cardinals and grackles come here in much bigger numbers, and many, many finches and sparrows. I always hear woodpeckers, even a Pileated Woodpecker here and there. A pair of bluebirds lives here. There are three tree swallows, a barn swallow also, tons of chickadees, and there's always six or seven blue jays screaming and making a commotion. And the goldfinches! Yesterday I watched three brilliant yellow males frolic among the tall dandelions. They would hover above the grass and then drop down. One landed on a dandelion stem and it flopped over. There are several bright orange birds too. I think a couple of them are orioles, but there's definitely also a Summer Tanager. There's a pair of Canada Geese that always fly by overhead around the same time in the evening. It's like their daily commute.

The other day, as I watched, I saw a Cooper's Hawk swoop down and carry off a robin. This was horrifying news for the robin individually, but great news for the ecosystem. The food chain can support more links now.

There are two garter snakes instead of one, both of them fat from being good at snaking. I wonder if there will be babies?

But the biggest change this year is the bugs. It's too early for the lightning bugs, but all the same the yard is full of life.

It's like remembering something I didn't know I forgot. Oh. This is how it's supposed to be. I can't glance in any direction without seeing the movement of bugs. Fat crickets and earwigs scuttle underneath my rock piles, wasps flit about and visit the pond's shore, an unbelievable variety of flies and bees visit the flowers, millipedes and centipedes hide under the logs. Butterflies, moths, and beetles big and small are everywhere.

I can't even describe it in terms of individual encounters; they're just everywhere, hopping and fluttering away with every step. There are so many kinds of ants. I sometimes stare really closely at the ground to watch the activities of the ants. Sometimes they are in long lines, with two lanes of ants going back and forth, touching antennae whenever two ants traveling in opposite directions meet. Sometimes I see ants fighting each other, as though ant war is happening. Sometimes the ants are carrying the curled-up bodies of dead ants—their fallen comrades?

My neighbor gave me all of their fallen leaves (twelve bags!) and it turns out that piling leaves on top of a rock and log pile in a wet area summons an unbelievable amount of snails.

I always heard of snails as pests, but I have learned better. Snails move calcium through the food chain. Birds eat snails and use the calcium in their shells to make egg shells. In this way, snails lead to baby birds. I never would have known this if I hadn't set out to learn about snails.

In the golden hour of evening, bugs drift across the sky like golden motes of dust, whirling and dancing together in the grand dramas of their tiny lives. I think about how complicated their worlds are. After interacting with bees and wasps so much for so long, I'm amazed by how intelligent and polite they are. Bumble bees will hover in front of me, swaying side to side, or circle slowly around me several times, clearly perceiving some kind of information...but what? It seems like bees and wasps can figure out if you are a threat, or if you are peaceful, and act accordingly.

I came to a realization about wasps: when they dart at your head so you hear them buzzing close by your ears, they're announcing their presence. The proper response is to freeze and duck down a bit. It seems like wasps can recognize if you're being polite; for what it's worth, I've never been stung by a wasp.

As night falls, bats emerge and start looping and darting around in the sky above. If the yard seems full of bugs in the day, it is nothing compared to the night.

I'm aware that what I'm about to describe, to an entomophobe, sounds like a horror movie: when i walk to the back yard, the trees are audibly crackling and whirring with the activity of insects. Beetles hover among the branches of the trees. When we look up at the sky, moths of all sizes are flying hither and thither across it. A large, very striking white moth flies past low to the ground.

Last year, seeing a moth against the darkening sky was only occasional. Now there's so many of them.

I consider it in my mind:

When roads and houses are built and land is turned over to various human uses, potentially hundreds of native plant species are extirpated from that small area. But all of the Eastern USA has been heavily altered and destroyed.

Some plants come back easily, like wild blackberry, daisy fleabane, and common violets. But many of them do not. Some plants need fire to sprout, some need Bison or large birds to spread them, some need humans to harvest and care for them, some live in habitats that are frequently treated with contempt, some cannot bear to be grazed by cattle, some are suffocated beneath invasive Tall Fescue, Kentucky bluegrass, honeysuckle or Bradford pears, and some don't like being mowed or bushhogged.

Look at the landscape...hundreds and hundreds of acres of suburbs, pastures, corn fields, pavement, mowed verges and edges of roads.

Yes, you see milkweed now and then, a few plants on the edge of the road, but when you consider the total area of space covered by milkweed, it is so little it is nearly negligible. Imagine how many milkweed plants could grow in a single acre that was caretaken for their prosperity—enough to equal fifty roadsides put together!

Then I consider how many bugs are specialists, that can only feed upon a particular plant. Every kind of plant has its own bugs. When plant diversity is replaced by Plant Sameness, the bug population decreases dramatically.

Plant sameness has taken over the world, and the insect apocalypse is a result.

But in this one small spot, nature is healing...

[exhaled-spirals]

« To mention the global loss of biodiversity, that is to say, the disappearance of life on our planet, as one of our problems, along with air pollution or ocean acidification, is absurd—like a doctor listing the death of his patient as one symptom among others.

The ecological catastrophe cannot be reduced to the climate crisis. We must think about the disappearance of life in a global way. About two-thirds of insects, wild mammals and trees disappeared in a few years, a few decades and a few millennia, respectively. This mass extinction is not mainly caused by rising temperatures, but by the devastation of natural habitats.

Suppose we managed to invent clean and unlimited energy. This technological feat would be feted by the vast majority of scientists, synonymous in their eyes with a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions. In my opinion, it would lead to an even worse disaster. I am deeply convinced that, given the current state of our appetites and values, this energy would be used to intensify our gigantic project of systemic destruction of planetary life. Isn't that what we've set out to do—replace forests with supermarket parking lots, turn the planet into a landfill? What if, to cap it all, energy was free?

[...C]limate change has emerged as our most important ecological battle [...] because it is one that can perpetuate the delusional idea that we are faced with an engineering problem, in need of technological solutions. At the heart of current political and economic thought lies the idea that an ideal world would be a world in which we could continue to live in the same way, with fewer negative externalities. This is insane on several levels. Firstly because it is impossible. We can't have infinite growth in a finite world. We won't. But also, and more importantly, it is not desirable. Even if it were sustainable, the reality we construct is hell. [...]

It is often said that our Western world is desacralised. In reality, our civilisation treats the technosphere with almost devout reverence. And that's worse. We perceive the totality of reality through the prism of a hegemonic science, convinced that it “says” the only truth.

The problem is that technology is based on a very strange principle, so deeply ingrained in us that it remains unexpressed: no brakes are acceptable, what can be done must be done. We don't even bother to seriously and collectively debate the advisability of such "advances". We are under a spell. And we are avoiding the essential question: is this world in the making, standardised and computed, overbuilt and predictable, stripped of stars and birds, desirable?

To confine science to the search for "solutions" so we can continue down the same path is to lack both imagination and ambition. Because the “problem” we face doesn't seem to me, at this point, to be understood. No hope is possible if we don't start by questioning our assumptions, our values, our appetites, our symbols... [...] Let's stop pretending that the numerous and diverse human societies that have populated this planet did not exist. Certainly, some of them have taken the wrong route. But ours is the first to forge ahead towards guaranteed failure. »

— Aurélien Barrau, particle physicist and philosopher, in an interview in Télérama about his book L'Hypothèse K

[junniewong313131]

week3

Shibori artwork

During the production process, my first choice of fabric was a white cotton T-shirt. Secondly, I used purple and green in dye color. The two colors represent different meanings, and purple can be understood as the color of growth and bravery. And green I want to express the natural resources and ecological environment. First, I laid the T-shirt flat on the ground and created the pattern in a rotating way. Then take a rubber band to hold it in place, put in dye and ice, and wait for the ice to slowly melt. I was very surprised by the finished product. The natural pattern on the T-shirt is like brilliant fireworks, and the collision of purple and green makes the overall tone more sublime. In my narrative, Shibori's artwork serves as an important medium for connecting my personal experiences with a broader reflection on society and the environment. Its importance can be summarized in the following key aspects: reflection of personal growth: Shibori's intricate process - each fold and twist creates a unique pattern - symbolizes my childhood struggles and journey of self-discovery. Shibori's imperfections and unpredictability reflect the ups and downs of life, teaching me to embrace resilience and find beauty in imperfection. A connection to Nature: Shibori's use of natural materials and sustainable technologies aligns with the environmental themes in my stories. It reflects my belief that humanity's relationship with nature must shift from exploitation to respect. By creating Shibori, I emphasized the importance of living in harmony with the natural world, a lesson deeply rooted in my reflections and the theme of Spirited Away. A symbol of balance and responsibility: Shibori's organic patterns represent the interconnectedness of man and nature. Just as Shibori requires patience and focus, it reminds us of the need to balance our personal desires with our social and environmental responsibilities.

[homeamy]

I am cool, I am interesting, I have to love and value myself more.

I know how to make cakes.

I enjoy reading.

I have a desire to learn ceramics and really want to make my own.

I really want to be a doctor.

I am someone with simple goals, I think.

I am focused.

I am outgoing.

I am captivating.

I speak very well.

I am interested in ecology.

I am interested in the human body.

In how things work.

I am curious.

I like playing The Sims.

I am a kind person.

Strong-willed.

I am beautiful.

I am welcoming.

I like to compliment.

A strong personality, difficult even for myself to handle sometimes.

I am not fake.

I try not to gossip, lol.

I am innocent.

I have good taste.

I dress well.

I have an aesthetic vision of things.

I speak from my heart.

I don't know how to hide my feelings.

I am genuine.

I truly love living.

I like making soup and I do it very well.

I find it easy to make friends.

I have a desire to live.

I enjoy planning things.

I am a worrier.

I am jealous.

I suffer a lot when I lose relationships and people don't realize how much.

I see myself with affection.

I have beautiful eyes.

A beautiful chest.

I deeply love my mother, more than anything, and it's the most pure and beautiful feeling I have because it's forever.

I like reciprocity.

I overthink.

I talk a lot.

I like to communicate.

I enjoy watching series and experiencing strong emotions while watching.

I like romance movies, both silly and serious ones.

I love learning.

I fall in love with everything.

I am silly and like vampires.

I am imaginative.

I am good at drawing.

I am good at writing.

I like to truly express myself.

I enjoy watching silly internet videos.

I've wanted to roller skate for a long time.

I am a great actress.

And I can lie well.

I handle sales well.

I like buying clothes.

I have good taste in makeup and products in general.

I like motorcycles.

And riding motorcycles makes me feel free and useful to myself.

I like taking baths.

And smelling good.

I have good taste in perfumes.

I like round cars and retro things.

I am independent, I don't depend on anyone.

I am hardworking.

I have good taste in music.

I am interested in studying languages, especially French because of the culture.

I am a smart and nice person, I can't forget that, I am important to many people, I am loved, I can contribute to the world, I can offer love, I'm a difficult person, I know, we know, but I'm true, and I don't want to lie to myself. I will go through all these situations and I will be fine in the end. I deserve this. I owe it to myself. And it will be alright. Soon I'll be ready for the next one.

07/09/23

[biglisbonnews]

The Artisans Behind India's Living Root Bridges In the dawn of times, there were sixteen primordial tribes who lived with their creator in their heavenly abode, the kingdom of clouds. One fine day, one of these men looked down and discovered a lush paradise, filled with mesmerizing waterfalls, luxurious jungle, and abundant food. He asked the creator to conceive the jingkiengjriksiar, a mythical “golden bridge” formed by a majestic tree which connected the two worlds, and moved with some human settlers into this idyllic land. This is the kind of story that Hally War heard while growing up in northeastern India, cuddled with his siblings around the fire during the long, cold nights. War, now a 68-year-old farmer from Siej village, belongs to the Khasi tribe for whom the concept of a tree bridge is far more than just a foundational legend. For hundreds of years, his people have been not building bridges, but growing them. The jingkieng jri, as the living root bridges are locally known, seem to have sprung directly out of Tolkien's imagination. The interwoven aerial roots create a pervading fairy-tale atmosphere, appearing to connect myth and reality and the past and the future rather than the two sides of the river. Initially, the bridges were created for pragmatic reasons, as a strategy of adaptation to the harsh environment. The southern Khasi hills, in the Indian state of Meghalaya, experience the heaviest rainfall in the world for more than six months annually. A conventional bamboo or wood bridge would be very quickly washed away. “The indigenous builders then turned to their natural environment for harnessing the raw materials and started building structures and bridges across the streams and inhospitable terrain,” writes Ian Lyngdoh, author of the book Ficus Khasiana. The Khasi people invented the art of weaving the roots of ficus elastica, a species of fig tree, until together they become strong enough to form a bridge. “They were great innovators with a practical outlook, and they created a culture which was unique, sustainable and ecofriendly. Inheriting a culture deeply rooted in the environment, the people developed a living architecture that was found nowhere else in terms of its application and philosophy,” Lyngdoh says. These bridges grow stronger each year for as long as the tree is alive; some bridges are estimated to be more than 500 years old and can hold up to 50 people. Realizing how extraordinary this example of tribal botanical architecture is, India submitted a proposal in 2022 for the inclusion of the bridges among UNESCO’s World Heritage sites. The country hopes that such a designation would help to protect 72 different living bridges and other similar structures across Meghalaya. The applicants describe each living root structure as a “distinct ethno-botanical journey rooted in profound culture-nature reciprocity and synthesis,” “an apogee of human-plant relationship” and “a remarkable breakthrough in nature-based design and engineering” while also “contributing to the ecology through forest and riparian restoration." War started to learn how to grow a bridge at a very early age. “I was about nine years old when my grandfather showed me a living root bridge that he was growing across the Ummunoi river,” he says. Noticing the child’s interest, his grandfather, Iang Rapthap, began to share with him the secrets of his work. The old man taught War how to take advantage of the natural characteristics of the pliable aerial roots, showing him their tendency to anchor themselves to other objects and their propensity to combine with each other. The young boy learned how to channel the tiny roots through bamboo, wood, or hollowed-out palm trunks, and to arrange them into the desired architectural feature; how to support the most fragile sections of the bridge with bamboo poles until these were strong enough to hold on by themselves; and so much more. War's grandfather intertwined the lessons with stories from Khasi oral tradition, a fundamental tool that the Khasi people used to instruct their children about their environment and the laws of nature. “The oral tradition meant that there were no written formulas nor documentation on the science of making bridges; it was a skill, a craft, an art, a behavior pattern and an experience that was inherited, passed on from one generation to another,” says Lyngdoh. While entwining the roots, War also learned about the visible and hidden forces surrounding him: he realized which fruits and mushrooms were deadly, which plant leaves he could collect in order to prevent malaria, which ones he should harvest to treat kidney stones, and so on. The most important lesson he learned from his grandfather, though, was the art of patience. Year after year, he watched the roots becoming bigger and stronger, as he himself was slowly growing from a small child to a young man. War understood how the diengjri—as the Khasi call the ficus elastica—was growing in a different time than his own; even if its growth was slower, it would outlast his own existence. He started to recognize the respect his people had for this tree. “The diengjri in some villages is sacred and certain rites and rituals are performed in and around the Ficus tree. It is regarded as the saviour and protector of the forest by the inhabitants,” writes Lyngdoh. For the priests of the traditional religion, “both the ficus elastica and the jingkiengjriksiar [the mythical “golden bridge”] connect the physical and spiritual world and are accorded a sacred character in the culture of the native inhabitants of the region…The imaginary umbilical cord has reincarnated itself in the Ficus tree and in the living bridges of the people.” War’s grandfather emphasized the tree’s transcendental attributes while he was instructing him about the very first step in the process of creating a bridge: planting the seed of the diengjri near the river bank. There was a sort of taboo connected to it. “Only old men were allowed to plant this type of tree. It was believed that the roots would drain away the vital force of the young men and their possibility of generating offspring,” War recalls. This meant that the elder who planted the tree did so as a gesture towards the future generations; he would die long before the tree would be ready to be transformed into a bridge. Fortunately, War's forefathers had foresight. His grandfather showed him the place where a member of the family had planted a seed years earlier. Once a young sapling, it was now a vigorous tree with the perfect attributes to be turned into a bridge. So War enthusiastically began what would become his life’s work, the Umkar living root bridge. He still preserves his grandfather’s bridge, located a few miles away; but he has dedicated most of his spare time to his personal project, patiently weaving and directing the aerial roots across the river. “It took me 50 years of work to establish the first stage,” War says, “and for the last 17 years I have also been working on a second deck,” specifying that he has been developing both levels simultaneously. With time and experience, War grew even bolder. He decided to try to weave a staircase and a viewing deck directly over the small waterfall beneath. “I am even planning to add a third platform,” he says. The bridge is still under construction, but it is already possible to carefully cross a part of it. The structure demonstrated its resilience in 2011 when a tempestuous monsoon washed away the bamboo bridge standing next to War's creation. His bridge stood, surviving the calamity without significant damage. His work involves several challenges. “Most of the time I work alone, and I need to carry the bamboo poles from long distances, which is quite hard during the slippery rainy season,” he explains; the entire community gathers to combine their efforts only in some specific stages of the bridge’s growth. Another problem is the damage inflicted to the structure by people who stand on fragile portions of the bridge, damaging parts which are still too tender. The biggest threat to the existence of these structures, though, is not careless people but the passage of time. The art of weaving and preserving the living root bridges is slowly fading away. “The simplest way of looking at the cause of the disappearance of Meghalaya’s botanical architecture is to examine its primary liability, which is that it takes a very long time to become functional and safe to use,” says Patrick Rogers, founder of the Living Root Bridge project. “Even if a steel or concrete bridge is more expensive and doesn’t have the environmental benefits and longevity of a living root bridge, it will be usable much sooner.” Outside of tourist areas, the villagers often don’t see any practical reason to make the intergenerational investment in such structures, and they are abandoning the construction and maintenance of these bridges altogether. Recently, a few individuals and organizations have started to promote the task of propagation and conservation of the living root bridges. But War began this mission long ago: “This bridge is my life’s purpose. I dream about it day and night; it has become a part of me. I will keep working on this bridge for as long as I can stand, and I will keep teaching my sons and grandsons so they can continue my work once I am gone. And I will plant a seed of the diengjri myself, so that one day someone from my offspring may grow a bridge when the time is ripe.” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/living-root-bridges-india

[fatehbaz]

Hannah and Chris: [...] Proprietary relations can thus be situated at the heart of the violence exacted on humans, non-humans and land. In Policing Black Lives, notions of property also play a crucial role in the history of Black life in Canada. [...] Robyn describes the ways in which enslaved Black people have continuously resisted their designation as property. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne writes about the relationships of deep reciprocity, interconnection and interdependency [...] emerging from Nishnaabeg thought and practices. Even within radical movements we often see struggles over ownership [...] creep back into the structures, disabling relations of commonality and solidarity. How can we more deeply/generatively refuse to be – or escape the desire to be – owners of others, the world, the self, and instead develop relations of reciprocity when always confronted with, and to some extent living within (or alongside of), societies built on dispossession and continuous propertisation? [...]

Robyn: A political choice has been made and remade, at the level of political leaders [...], to serve the interests of protecting and expanding private property. The logics of accumulation at any cost have come at great expense to human, animal, and other forms of ecological life. [...] [I]t’s crucial, I think, that we remember that regimes of private property – and, crucially, the carceral state that entrenches them – are continually being contested, have never been written in stone, and are far from inevitable or permanent fixtures of planetary and earthly life.

Our cities, the places that we collectively reside in, are also battlegrounds upon which we are trying, continually, to forward new ways to order life. I think one of the starkest examples we can see of this is the struggles being waged over tent encampments inhabited by homeless communities, who in Canada are largely but not solely Black and Indigenous.

In Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park, riot police, drones and air support, in addition to hundreds of regular police and private security and city bylaw officers, were all deployed to “clear-out” the makeshift homes and communities that people had built in in an attempt to eke out safer living during the pandemic and the housing crisis. The cost of this is enormous: the eviction and “remediation” of just three encampments cost over $1.6 million! Elected officials chose, and choose every day, to spend millions of public dollars on criminalizing homelessness rather than address its root causes: the unaffordability of a city caused by the unchecked powers of developers and the mass abandonment of Black, Indigenous, disabled peoples, and people living with mental health issues. This represents the protection of neighborhood property values over the lives of neighborhood encampment residents, and demonstrates the everyday legal violence [...].

But new visions for living are forwarded every day in tent encampments across the country.

Mutual aid encampment support projects like the Encampment Support Networks in Toronto and Hamilton, the Freedom Camp organized outside of City Hall [...], and BLM-Edmonton’s Camp Pekiwewin. As I am writing this our comrades in Halifax are supporting encampment residents against city evictions, ensuring food, water, and medical services where their city has failed to do so. These are all part of a struggle for housing, of course, but they are also struggles over governance, over whether to value human life or the bottom-line of developers and property owners. In city parks across the country, large numbers of people are demanding that we value human life over capitalist accumulation. Here I’d like to bring in the words of Gachi Issa [...], describing the two-week Freedom Camp that she took part in organizing, and the longer-term encampment support organizing that came out of it:

That is one of the most revolutionary things: to build community with people who our government and our society tells us not to: Black, Brown and houseless people standing side by side, to re-imagine what the world could look like.

---

All text above are the words of Robyn Maynard. From: Robyn Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Hannah Voegele, and Christopher Griffin. “Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World: An Interview with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.” Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics. 19 November 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[flo-nelja]

20 days shoujo challenge, day 3

Day 03: Favorite Underrated Shoujo

Two answers again! Because I can’t choose! Two mangas whose official translation had started in my country, and stopped, because they weren’t selling enough, while they were incredibly good.

Hyakki Yakoushou / Le cortège des 100 démons (Ima Ichiko)

It’s so underrated that I can’t even find complete scantrads. All the fics on ao3 are by me.

Ritsu, the main character, can see youkai. Could see them since he was a kid. His grandfather could too, was known as a famous horror writer, and feeling his death was close he contracted a powerful youkai, Aoarashi, to protect his grandkid. Aoarashi has to protect him, no to obey him, as he insists regularly (it involves lying to him to “protect” him, if needed)

The main family is Ritsu, his grandmother and mother who can’t see youkai (or can they?) but are financially and emotionally the family pillars, Aoarashi who’s living in the body of his dead (presumed amnesiac) father, and his cousin who can see youkai but is in deep denial about it.

The individual chapter are so, so good ghost stories. Atmospheric, well plotted, emotionally deep, all the youkai and other spirits have an inhuman strangeness. Just a bit of horror, never any gore. Give it a chance!

(Warnings: lots of death and murder of one-shot characters, supernatural and mundane. Twisted family dynamics. Ghost stories-type horror - the one with the puppets was especially scary to me)

~~~~~

7 Seeds (Tamura Yumi)

(Sorry team Autumn, I couldn’t find a good pic for you)

This one is a bit less underrated: full scantrads, a Netflix show (not very good, by what I have heard. Seriously, 15 volumes in 13 episodes, cutting all the evolutionary biology/geography/literature nerdiness and part of the character introspection and backstory to keep only the plot? If anything, it’s more underrated since there’s an anime)

It’s post-apocalyptic. An asteroid was going to hit the earth. The Japanese administration knew and created a program to keep a limited number of young people in deep hibernation. When they automatically wake up, the atmosphere and climate are habitable. But they’re habitable for a lot of dangerous creatures too. With all the ecological niches empty after a mass extinction event, evolution worked fast.

It’s not my type of story (I read very little post-apo). I almost abandoned it at the beginning because too many giant insects for me (this is a warning, though they aren’t in all the manga, ecosystems are deeply different from each other in all of the Japan islands). But the characters are so good, their evolution is too, also the complicated character dynamics. The plot is gripping and impressively well done (mixing survival adventure with learning more about each other and how the selection happened in the first place), the emotions are deep (it’s a shoujo, a good one). I also really love the science. When often in science-fiction I must just forget about it to enjoy the story.

The themes are interesting too, about what gives you the desire to keep living, what you can forgive and what you can’t. I recommend it to every one (except if you really don’t want giant insects. These things are creepy)

(Warnings: post-apocalypse, death, attempted rape, giant bugs and giant spiders) 

[queer-and-dear-books]

Title: The Professor’s Green Card Marriage

Author: Heidi Cullinan

Genre: Adult Fiction | Romance | Drama | LGBTQ+

Content Warnings: (Brief) Homophobia | Explicit Sex Scenes

Overall Rating: 10/10

Personal Opinion: In my personal opinion, this is the sexiest romance novel in existence. With the way Peter and Val do everything to protect each other, you’ll find yourself rooting for them at every turn. You want them to work out, to fall in love, to be together for the rest of their lives. The only thing stopping them is the office of immigration trying to send Valya back to Ukraine where war is lurking just around the corner. It’s unfortunately rather timely but this book is not about that. It’s about the love between Peter Grunberg and Valentyn Shevchenko.

Couple Classification: Peter Grunberg X Valentyn Shevchenko = Nerd X Nerd

Do I Own This Book? No, but it’s definitely on my Christmas wish list.

Spoilers Below For My Likes & Dislikes:

Likes:

- First and foremost, holy shit, the sex is hot. Val also calls Peter “koshenya” which means “kitten” and that is hot. Like, I can hear it in my head, and it sends shivers up my spine. He talks dirty in two whole languages about how he wants to plow Peter until he cannot walk. And apparently, his dick is huge according to Peter. As if that’s not enough, the first time they fucked was in a cafe after closing. A public place! And then we have Valya teasing Peter in public outside, brazenly fondling him inside of a glass gondola and even in the shopping district. He gave all these dominant orders to Peter and had him finger and edge himself while he made dinner. Like, Val is a sex dream come to life. And he has a lot of experience with making love too and somehow that makes it hotter. Yowza!

- Can we talk about diversity too? Peter is neurodivergent, afflicted with selective mutism (SM) that can render him just immobile. He also gets panic attacks. But he overcame it as much as he could for Valya. His desire and yearning for this man pushed him to propose as their first interaction and then as he became more open to Valya, he was able to say so much and express his love in such deeply romantic ways. I was already in love with Valya, but by the time they actually got married, I was in love with them as a couple because Val was so accommodating for his beloved’s disability and Peter, in turn, was so understanding of Valya’s inability to be public with his love because of his trauma from living under the intense roof of homophobia that is known as Russia. 

- I got sidetracked, but yes, the diversity. Racially speaking, it’s not much but I don’t expect too much from Colorado. We still have Dennis who is Latino and apparently he and his wife are swingers. He’s had sex with Valya too so he might be bi. I also just find him hilarious. He got a kick out of Valentyn getting possessive of Peter when he asked if Peter swung. And then he cracked up when Peter whispered to Valya to tell Dennis that they couldn’t fuck anymore. And Valya blushed too and it was so cute! Dennis is also a bomb best friend too, willing to marry Val to get his green card without hesitation. Even though he was already married, lmao.

- Have I mentioned how good Peter and Val are together? I simply adore them. The way they protect one another like how Valya spoke in Peter’s stead to his intense mother when he noticed him shutting down. And Peter got Valentyn to smoke and drink less over the course of their six years together by the time we got to the epilogue and even got him to go to therapy to get through his trauma. Like, that is just so amazing! 

- They both care about the environment so much that their jobs even involve it. I respect that so much! And the fact that they get each other gifts based on that mutual love of ecology is so adorable! Planting trees, a bracelet made from plastic ocean waste, a composter, it’s so precious! They’re both so immensely passionate in bed and about preservation efforts that I can’t help but adore the two of them.

- The emails were so much fun to read. And such a great way for Peter to communicate. He spoke so much and expressed so many of his desires and his insecurities and forewarned his husband-to-be about all of his parents and their situations. It was sometimes a lot to take in but they had to rush into this relationship so I understood. It was also so helpful for both the reader and Valya to relate to and sympathize with Peter so much quicker. Same for Valya too when he was undergoing his periods of self-loathing.

- Kevin is the best. Finally, good representation for someone with my name! Kevin is Valya’s immigration lawyer who stuck up for Peter during his marriage interview and convinced the paramedics to take Valentyn with them. He sent a complaint to the very top of the immigration office to reschedule an interview and have the asshole that had caused Peter’s panic attack to be thoroughly punished for not being more accommodating. Kevin is truly a king. But I never doubted the way Cullinan depicted the lawyers in her books. Kevin and Rebecca should team up to take down every corrupt official ever.

- I also love all the educational stuff. Learning more about how SM works, at least, for this one person. I loved seeing the way Peter progressed as he fell in love with Valya. I loved that bit of Sliding In when he was with his aunt and talking with her about Val. And how he bent his own rules or made new ones for Valya. Or how exhausted he became after expressing himself a lot. And then there’s also Valya’s Ukrainian youth. I never knew that Chernobyl had happened in Ukraine. I didn’t even know it left the Soviet Union only in 1991. I knew it wasn’t safe to be gay there but wow, it’s no wonder Valentyn ended up the way he did. But I am so glad that he was able to meet Peter because they are truly one of my OTPs.

Dislikes: 

- My one complaint was that Val didn’t have any facial hair like he does on the cover. Older men that are clean shaven do not do it for me. But then, in the epilogue, we learn he’s 45 now and has a salt-and-pepper beard! Not to mention fit from all of the walking and gardening he’s doing so that means Valentyn’s a hung, middle-aged, scruffy, fit, graying daddy and that is exactly my type holy shit. Peter hit the jackpot. My jackpot.

- Also Peter arguing with trolls and ignoramuses online was a bit of a curveball for me. I respect him and all but where does he find the time and energy? Not to mention, engaging with stupid people online just sounds like a bad idea all round. He probably doesn’t do it as much though as he’s become invested in Valya and their life together.

[laurelnose]

monster! parasites!

you know how a few days ago i said we weren’t going to talk about monster parasites? that was a fucking lie.

the basis of my monster parasite thoughts are: every organism comes with its own internal ecosystem that goes with them everywhere. it’s like having built-in friends! ergo, when monsters crossed over to the witcher dimension during the Conjunction of Spheres they must have brought many new and delightful parasites with them. you know what fiend manes are full of? MITES. you know what drowners got on their skin? COPEPODS. what can we do with this information? anything we want.

i promise there are no pictures below the cut. i have tried to put warnings on all my sources but click any of the links below at your own risk. warning for internal and external parasites of animals, monsters, humans, and witchers; parasites altering the behavior of their hosts; and probably general body horror. if you read the eating-liver-flukes post that’s probably a decent baseline for how revolting you will find this post. 

also, super obvious bias towards aquatic parasites as referents. my degree is fisheries science not terrestrial ecology so that’s primarily what i’m drawing on even though nearly all of the witcher monsters are terrestrial. there is a TON i’m missing here bc of that bias! specifically i really wish i could talk about how parasites of invasive species often act as co-invaders with their hosts and monsters definitely count as invasive species and would have majorly reshaped ecological interactions on the Continent but i don’t know enough about terrestrial ecosystems to speculate properly. (ETA: while i still think monsters would have majorly reshaped ecological interactions on the Continent, I don’t actually think they’re invasive species anymore!) hopefully you enjoy it anyways!

it is, hilariously, canon that parasites are used for alchemy. according to The Last Wish, the Temple of Melitele’s grotto grows a bunch of different “rare specimens—those which made up the ingredients of a witcher’s medicines and elixirs, magical philters and a sorcerer’s decoctions” and some of those specimens are, uh, “clusters of nematodes.” nematodes being parasitic roundworms. this is really funny because it’s so fucking weird. also everything else in this description is a plant or a fungus and nematodes are definitely animals? i choose to believe the world makes sense and nematodes aren’t plants in the witcherverse. therefore parasites are alchemical ingredients, it’s canon, give me more witchers digging through monster intestines in search of worms and put a nematode colony in the basement of corvo bianco please and thank you

this actually leads right into my personal favorite drowner headcanon (hello yes i’m tumblr user Socks Laurelnose and i am always thinking about drowners)—you know those bits where drowners kind of have red blotches in their skin? those are nematodes, actually, because i said so. the reference is Clavinema mariae, a nematode that infests English sole. the worms are basically harmless but they’re dark red and you can see them through the skin. it freaks people out and makes it hard to sell sole. (IMAGE WARNING: a picture of an infected flatfish. it looks mostly normal but there’s a dark red lesion near the fin.) said lesion is probably a coiled-up Clavinema. sole have so many of these, it’s not even funny (PDF article link, IMAGE WARNING for worms visible underneath skin of flatfishes. relevant images pointing out exactly how many worms on page 5). “but the red parts of drowners could just be flushed from blood”—no. worms. 

okay that was my main specific-parasite-for-specific-monster headcanon (except also succubi probably have a unique species of lice for their hairy legs. but that’s barely even a headcanon, basically all terrestrial vertebrates have a unique species of lice.) i wanted to start with it because i think that everyone should feel free to arbitrarily assign a totally benign but conceptually gross worm to their favorite monsters. why not, yanno? also it probably sets the tone for the rest of this post. 

carrying on: “what monsters might have nematodes, besides drowners,” you may be wondering? probably all of them! all of them are full of nematodes. nematodes are fucking everywhere. allow me to share a deeply unsettling quote from nematologist Nathan Cobb: 

“In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable since, for every massing of human beings, there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”

jesus christ! thanks nathan, I hate it. nematodes are usually both benign and microscopic, but we’re talking witchers, we want some parasites we can fuckin get our hands on. sperm whale placentas are sometimes infested with nematodes up to 28 feet long but only a centimeter in diameter (Wikipedia link, no images). like an incredibly awful spaghetti! we don’t really seem to know if this bothers the sperm whales. also, i unfortunately do not know enough about the size of whale organs to tell you how big the placenta is in relation to this worm. the point is: real big monster? REAL BIG NEMATODES.

moving on from nematodes—okay, you know, since i mentioned eating deer liver flukes at the start of this post, let’s just go there. real life flukes max out at about 3 inches long, but hypothetical monster flukes could be much bigger and equally edible if desired. (if you’re wondering what a liver fluke would taste like: the flukes feed on the liver and they have very few organs of their own, so they would taste basically just like liver, just also long and flat like a fruit roll-up. if you’re going there, a witcher should not eat any flatworm live. if they’re digging them out of cockatrice livers or whatnot they should kill them before munching or save to cook later. it would probably be safe to eat one live, but you know that cliche “their tongues battled for dominance”? handling a live flatworm is like a handling very strong and energetic tongue complete with slime, okay, it wouldn’t be nice.)

parasites often need more than one host to complete the life cycle—for instance, Leucochloridium paradoxum (VIDEO WARNING: you may have seen this, it’s the one that makes snail eyes pulsating & green) has a bird stage and a snail stage, and it makes the snails look and act really weird in order to attract the birds. parasites altering host behavior to attract the next host in the life cycle is pretty well-documented; for instance, there’s an eye fluke that can make fish swim near the surface where predators can eat them (New Scientist article link, images of a microscope slide & a normal-looking fish) and a tapeworm that does the same and makes the dark silver fish turn white (JSTOR article, no images). i posit that at least some monsters are accompanied by “ill omens” of animals looking or acting strangely because they become infected with a stage of one of the monster’s parasites—usually, the mechanism is that internal parasites lay eggs that are passed in feces & transmitted that way. witchers who are up on their parasite ecology might be able to identify what monster is hanging around by observing exactly what kind of freaky-looking animals or animal behavior is going on around the area!

(if geralt is involved you may desire to have him explain this totally non-supernatural mechanism for abrupt animal appearance or behavioral changes at excruciating length to the chagrin of all present. or maybe that’s just what i desire. it would be funny okay)

potentially even more hyperspecific application of dual-stage parasites: there’s a dinoflagellate parasite that, when it infects crabs, makes the meat chalky and bitter like aspirin (Smithsonian link, images of healthy crab and microscope slide). geralt hunts down dinner, digs in, and immediately sighs and grabs jaskier’s portion away from him to the poet’s complete bafflement before going to get his swords because judging by the flavor there’s definitely a shishiga nest in this forest. 

like. parasites are one of THE most hyperspecific things in biology. the majority of them have very specific hosts and life cycles, many of them are completely unique to a species, if you think a fictional parasite is too specific to be plausible you’re probably wrong, make it even more specific. “the witcher monster lore is so hyperspecific lol” IT AIN’T TRULY HYPERSPECIFIC UNTIL YOU CAN IDENTIFY EACH MONSTER SPECIES BY ITS UNIQUE PARASITIC LOAD, OKAY.

and, with regards to behavior-affecting parasites, before anyone brings up Cordyceps (Ophiocordyceps, as of 2008): yeah that sure is a thing! if you weren’t aware, just a couple of years ago we found out it actually is not a mind control fungus!! it bypasses the brain entirely and affects the muscles (Arstechnica article, Atlantic article—photos of fuzzy ants and electron microscope pictures of fungi). or as Ed Yong puts it, “The ant ends its life as a prisoner in its own body. Its brain is still in the driver's seat, but the fungus has the wheel.” which is. significantly worse than the brain thing. awesome!! i bet there would absolutely be similar fungal parasites of endrega and arachasae. real Ophiocordyceps still very much does not affect humans, but you know what, if plants can be cursed into becoming archespores and cultivated by mages i see no reason why mages could not also curse endrega fungus to affect humans, just saying

aaaand quickly back to hyperspecificity: monsters in different geographical areas having different abilities because of their symbionts. forktails in vicovaro acquire a bioluminescent symbiont in their diet that forktails in other parts of the continent can’t get, and they can create flashes of light? that’s sure gonna fuck a witcher on Cat up when he comes in the cave expecting a normal forktail. (geographic location affecting bioluminescence is a thing that actually happens in midshipman fish—Wikipedia link, no parasites.) geographically-dependent symbionts can also produce different toxins and such for their hosts! this isn’t exactly a parasitism thing per se (although parasites are also symbionts because ‘symbiosis’ refers to two organisms in close association not two organisms in positive association) but like. it’s cool okay ecology is so cool

writing fic and tired of all these same-old monsters-of-the-week? quick and easy way to spice up either the horror factor or just make the hunt stand out slightly: just add parasites!! i know i’ve read fics where monsters were described with distinguishing old wounds. you can do the same with parasites! i would fucking swoon over a detail like an ancient water hag’s eyes glowing in the dark, one of them marred by a dangling parasite—geralt notes the blind spot and presses his advantage. (Wikipedia link, no images: this one is referencing an aquatic copepod called Ommatokoita.) also, please put barnacles on skelliger drowners, i want it so badly. just—some percentage of monsters should be Extra Grody on the inside and/or the outside, that’s how nature works. spicing up a mundane hunt by making the monster a little extra gross for its species is Valid, is what I’m saying.

also, every single time frozen specimens with obvious fungal/ectoparasite infections come into the lab we absolutely always take extra close-up pictures of those suckers and make sure everyone else gets to see them. witchers bringing field sketches and notes of the weirdest shit they found on the path back for winter. lambert declares they’ll never know if this alleged fiend tumor was a fungus or mange because geralt sucks at drawing. eskel, the man who hauled a katakan corpse all the way up the mountain so he could dissect it, produces actual skin samples of his own encounters for examination, possibly in the middle of dinner. this elicits mixed reactions.

quick detour into preservation, since I went there—witchers are probably immune to parasites that infect humans by virtue of having pretty different biology to begin with, and probably immune to parasitic infections from other sources by virtue of superhumanly boosted immune systems and all the poison they put into their bodies on a regular basis. picking up a monster parasite would probably not be a big deal for witchers, either in that they have total immunity or that they would only be minimally and briefly affected, but the field of monster biology is likely such that they probably just don’t actually know what would happen to them in the majority of cases. this has potential as a source of battle stories and/or stories intended to freak out trainees, i think. therefore, out of caution, a witcher harvesting/preparing parts for alchemy might want to be sure to treat them first. personally i think all monster parts should be preserved immediately anyways to avoid attracting necrophages, and given that alchemical concoctions in witcherverse are alcohol-based, preservation in strong alcohol is probably the best way to maintain potency and kill basically everything. (cons: alcohol is SUPER heavy and jars are fragile. tissues or organs which are thicker than perhaps half an inch or an inch require additional preparation for the alcohol to penetrate properly. other preservation methods are more efficient for travel. depends on how soon your witcher intends to use or offload their stash.)

also, here’s an absolutely wild marine parasite that would make it worth a witcher’s while to make certain everything was dead! pearlfishes are long eel-like fishes that live inside the anus and respiratory organs (which are attached to the anus) of sea cucumbers, and they have pretty nasty teeth (PDF article link, IMAGE WARNING: dissected sea cucumbers literally stuffed to the gills with pearlfish). the highest number of pearlfish discovered in a single sea cucumber was sixteen (ResearchGate article, free PDF; no images). a different fact: we discovered tiger sharks eat each other in the womb because a researcher got bitten by a fetal tiger shark while he was dissecting the mother (NYT link, no images or parasites). what i’m saying is: parasites are often very small relative to the host and usually harmless to things rummaging around inside, but what if the monster’s parasites were also monstrous. give me a monster that has to be very dead or when you start rummaging around for alchemy ingredients the things in its intestines will lunge out and bite you. 

what happens if a human becomes infected with a monster parasite? bad things, probably, i mentioned before that parasites in the wrong host, if they don’t just die, often super fuck things up internally (if you get tapeworms outside of the intestine where they’re supposed to be... it’s not good y’all. CDC link, no images). host-jumping for parasites is actually fairly rare since most of them are highly specialized for their hosts, but it does happen. humans are very not my strong suit so i’m not going to dwell on this but it is entirely possible that something like necrophage infestations or monster-contaminated water sources or just being a little too involved on a witcher’s monster hunt could produce strange parasitic diseases in humans. up to you how well-known and/or how clouded in superstition these effects might be! opportunities for hideous whump? gross body horror? messy and horrifying parasite-driven behavioral changes? terrifying and potentially prolonged uncertainty over what the issue actually is because of minimal information about parasites? the decision whether or not to dose with a witcher potion? excellent possibilities.

okay last one, just because i think it would be fun: myxosporeans and sirens. Myxos are a parasitic relative of jellyfish that produce whirling disease in baby salmon. whirling disease causes neurological and skeletal damage and has a pretty high mortality rate, but it also makes infected fish do this, well, whirling behavior and it’s honestly fascinating. (video link: a pretty normal-looking young trout spinning like a fuckin top). imagine a siren doing that in the sky. i just think myxos are neat!

tl;dr: extra grody hyperspecific biology of monsters!!!

[alwaysalreadyangry]

most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?

so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS              Jan  3, 2020                    BY PHOEBE CHEN

EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.

This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.

Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.

Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).

Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.

WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.

But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.

In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.

Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”

Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 405

GENETIC ENGINEERING: QUO VADIS?: Part 1

It was only after Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park had become the most watched movie of all time that we have started to consider how genetic engineering is moving from science fiction to science-fact. Spielberg’s film is Michael Crichton’s adaptation of his own novel and it concerns cloned dinosaurs running wild in a theme park. First the movie and then the novel attracted staggering media attention and the film has been variously described as ‘a movie in love with technology’ and ‘about all the complexities of fabricating entertainment in the microchip age’.

The movie might be a fad, or a nine days’ wonder, simply another Spielberg special, like Jaws or E.T. However, this time the messages that the movie addresses have far-reaching consequences for mankind.

Thanks to Jurassic Park, our attention has been drawn to the recent achievements made in molecular biology and we have the opportunity to ponder how genetic engineering, in the hands of scientists who are apparently unrestrained by moral and ethical values, could threaten the ecological equilibrium of the planet and our very survival.

Let us consider the scientific advantages and ethical disadvantages of the advance of genetic engineering, by taking a look at the various applications of this knowledge in the modern world.

In Jurassic Park, John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough, inspired by motives of forwarding the causes of science and making a profit, undertakes a scheme to clone living copies of dinosaurs from DNA extracted from fossilised, blood-sucking insects, preserved in amber. The origin of this idea was first proposed by George Poinar and his team at California University, Berkeley. In the last twenty years there have been many scientists working on the extraction of DNA from fossilized remains and the notion of obtaining dinosaur DNA in this way became feasible. Ironically, on the eve of the release of Jurassic Park, Poinar announced that his group had, in fact, extracted the first samples of genetic material from the age of the dinosaur. Using liquid nitrogen to crack open a sample of amber, DNA had been obtained from a weevil trapped 120 million years ago. Using gene-amplifying techniques, scientists are now able to make billions of copies of any piece of DNA.

I would like to draw your attention to two aspects of these scientific endeavors; firstly to the religious dimension and secondly to the wider ethical considerations of genetic engineering.

We must first ponder the notion that if it is possible for mortal human beings to produce synthetic RNA, one of the master-molecules in the nuclei of all cells, or to reproduce extinct animals by the retrieval of their DNA, surely it is possible for God, the All-Mighty, to recreate us from our bones on the Day of the Resurrection.

There are, of course, more secular ethical considerations in the application of genetic engineering. Today, scientists are experimenting with gene sequences and seem to have the ability to switch particular genetic codes on and off. By this means, science is on the brink of producing hybrid organisms in vitro. One recent experiment reported in The Economist (18th September 1993: pp.119-20) described how scientists were able to change the function of developing organs in four-hour-old fly embryos. One claim made recently is that the difference between man and chimpanzees is a few critical genes affecting intelligence. Are we to allow scientists, once these genes have been isolated, to create a hybrid intelligence? Are we ready to have these hybrid creatures living in our midst?

Will the Beast (Dabbah) mentioned in the Qur’an (al Naml, 27.82) be the result of such unrestrained scientific enquiry? What are the moral, ethical and religious implications of these advances?

When recent experiments on human cloning were publicized people seemed to worry, and worry deeply, about the horrific implications of duplicating a human embryo. This experiment is not the Jurassic Park-type cloning many might imagine. The worrying thing is that such technology really could pave the road to embryo factories to selling foetuses, freezing cloned foetuses for ‘spare organs’ that might be needed, or to be giving birth to genetically the same child at intervals, even to ‘maturing’ a twin cloned and stored for later use. According to Time’s survey 63% of people asked said human cloning is against God’s will; 90% of women stated that they would not be interested in cloning an embryo: a 58% said it is morally wrong (Time, 8 November 1993, pp.63-8).

In Jurassic Park, chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, insists that what God has put asunder, no man should join together. Man should not interfere with the order of nature ordained by God and Malcolm says: ‘God created dinosaurs, God destroyed dinosaurs. God created Man, Man created dinosaurs’. Viewed in this perspective, can we foresee the consequences of interfering with this divine order, created by Allah in perfect balance? (al-Rahman, 55.8).

Today, genetic engineering is becoming a commercial enterprise in the hands of avaricious entrepreneurs and ethical considerations are being subverted by the desire for profit. The same technology is also being investigated to make tailor-made human organs, for transplantation into human patients. The specificity of these engineered organs would, in principle, avoid problems of rejection, as well as the practical and moral problems associated with human donors. This sounds good, but are we allowing ourselves, unhampered by moral considerations, to pave the way to a greater calamity?

[nicklloydnow]

"In 1910, the last year of his life and only a few years before World War I put an end to the long European peace, William James wrote a pamphlet for the Association for International Conciliation, one of the many pacifist groups whose prominence in that period convinced many people that war between nations, being so obviously irrational, was therefore impossible. James’s essay, titled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” is a work of supreme pathos and wisdom. James himself was a pacifist, a founding member of the Anti-Imperialist League, a group formed to protest America’s military interventions in Cuba, Haiti, and the Philippines, and one of the most humane and generous spirits America or any other nation has ever produced.

James understood perfectly the folly—the “monstrosity,” as he called it—of war, even in those comparatively innocent, pre-nuclear days. But he also acknowledged the place of the martial virtues in a healthy character. “We inherit the warlike type,” he pointed out, “and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank [our bloody] history.” “The martial virtues,” he continued, “although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods.... Militarism is the supreme theater of strenuousness, the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood; and human life with no use for strenuousness and hardihood would be contemptible.” “We pacifists,” he wrote with characteristic intellectual generosity, “ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetic and ethical point of view of our opponents.” To militarists, a world without war is “a sheep’s paradise,” flat and insipid. “No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more!” he imagines them saying indignantly. “Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!” This, remember, was the era of Teddy Roosevelt, preacher of the strenuous life and instigator of splendid little wars. James’s pacifism may be common sense to you and me, but when he wrote, the common sense of Americans was mostly on Roosevelt’s side.

How to nourish the martial virtues without war? James resolved this apparent dilemma with a suggestion many decades ahead of its time: universal national service, every youth to be conscripted for several years of hard and socially necessary physical work, with no exceptions and no class or educational discrimination. This army without weapons would be the moral equivalent of war, breeding, James argued, some of the virtues essential to democracy: “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command.” I am sure James would have agreed that these are not the only virtues essential to democracy—he himself, with his anti-imperialist activism, exemplified an equally essential skepticism and resistance to authority. But I wonder if our contemporaries, who mostly need no convincing about the necessity of skepticism and resistance to authority, would also agree with James about the importance of valor, strenuousness, and self-sacrifice.

James wrote in America before World War I, a situation of almost idyllic innocence compared with that of the next writer I want to cite, D. H. Lawrence. The Great War, as contemporaries called it, was a soul-shattering experience for English writers. The complacent stupidity with which Europe’s governing classes initiated, conducted, and concluded that war, the chauvinism and bloodlust with which ordinary people welcomed it, and above all, the mindless, mechanical grinding up of millions of lives by a war machine that seemed to go of itself—these things infuriated Lawrence almost to madness. Like many others, Lawrence saw the facelessness, the impersonality, the almost bureaucratic character of this mass violence as something new and horrifying in human history. But more than all others in the twentieth century, Lawrence was the champion of the body and the instincts against the abstract, impersonal forces of modernity. Like Nietzsche, he marshaled torrents of impassioned prose against the apparently inexorable encroachments of progress. Here is a passage from “Education of the People,” published posthumously in the two volumes of Phoenix.

We are all fighters. Let us fight. Has it come down to chasing a poor fox and kicking a leather ball? Heavens, what a spectacle we should be to the ancient Greek. Rouse the old male spirit again. The male is always a fighter. The human male is a superb and god-like fighter, unless he is contravened in his own nature. In fighting to the death, he has one great crisis of his being.     

What is the fight? It is a primary, physical thing. It is not a horrible, obscene, abstract business, like our last war. It is not a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines, and men into cannon-fodder. Away with such war. A million times away with such obscenity. Let the desire of it die out of mankind.... Let us beat our plowshares into swords, if we will. But let us blow all guns and explosives and poison-gases sky-high. Let us shoot every man who makes one more grain of gunpowder, with his own powder.     

And then let us be soldiers, hand-to-hand soldiers. Lord, but it is a bitter thing to be born at the end of a rotten, idea-ridden machine civilization. Think what we’ve missed: the glorious bright passion of anger and pride, reckless and dauntless.

(...)

Modernity imperils another set of virtues, which are a little harder to characterize than the martial virtues, but are even more important. I don’t mean the bourgeois virtues, though there’s some overlap. I suppose I’d call them the yeoman virtues. I have in mind the qualities we associate with life in the early American republic—the positive qualities, of course, not the qualities that enabled slavery and genocide. In 1820, 80 percent of the American population was self-employed. Protestant Christianity, local self-government, and agrarian and artisanal producerism fostered a culture of self-control, self-reliance, integrity, diligence, and neighborliness—the American ethos that Tocqueville praised and that Lincoln argued was incompatible with large-scale slave-owning. Today that ethos survives only in political speeches and Hollywood movies. In a society based on precarious employment and feverish consumption, on debt, financial trickery, endless manipulation, and incessant distraction, such a sensibility seems archaic.

According to the late Christopher Lasch, the advent of mass production and the new relations of authority it introduced in every sphere of social life wrought a fateful change in the prevailing American character. Psychological maturation—as Lasch, relying on Freud, explicated it—depended crucially on face-to-face relations, on a rhythm and a scale that industrialism disrupted. The result was a weakened, malleable self, more easily regimented than its pre-industrial forebear, less able to withstand conformist pressures and bureaucratic manipulation—the antithesis of the rugged individualism that had undergirded the republican virtues.In an important recent book, The Age of Acquiescence, the historian Steve Fraser deploys a similar argument to explain why, in contrast with the first Gilded Age, when America was wracked by furious anti-capitalist resistance, popular response in our time to the depredations of capitalism has been so feeble. Here is Fraser’s thesis:

During the first Gilded Age the work ethic constituted the nuclear core of American cultural belief and practice. That era’s emphasis on capital accumulation presumed frugality, saving, and delayed gratification as well as disciplined, methodical labor. That ethos frowned on self-indulgence, was wary of debt, denounced wealth not transparently connected to useful, tangible outputs, and feared libidinal excess, whether that took the form of gambling, sumptuary displays, leisured indolence, or uninhibited sexuality.     

How at odds that all is with the moral and psychic economy of our own second Gilded Age. An economy kept aloft by finance and mass consumption has for a long time rested on an ethos of immediate gratification, enjoyed a love affair with debt, speculation, and risk, erased the distinction between productive labor and pursuits once upon a time judged parasitic, and become endlessly inventive about ways to supercharge with libido even the homeliest of household wares. 

Can these two diverging political economies—one resting on industry, the other on finance—and these two polarized sensibilities—one fearing God, the other living in an impromptu moment to moment—explain the Great Noise of the first Gilded Age and the Great Silence of the second? Is it possible that people still attached by custom and belief to ways of subsisting that had originated outside the orbit of capital accumulation were for that very reason both psychologically and politically more existentially desperate, more capable, and more audacious in envisioning a non-capitalist future than those who have come of age knowing nothing else?

If this argument is true—and I find it painfully plausible—where does that leave us? An individual’s or a society’s character cannot be willed into or out of existence. Lost virtues and solidarities cannot be regained overnight, or even, perhaps, in a generation. Even our ideologies of liberation may have to be rethought. A transvaluation of values may be in order: faster, easier, and more may have to give way to slower, harder, and less—not only for ecological reasons but also for reasons of mental and moral hygiene. And even if we decide, as a society, to spit out the poisoned apple of consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path back—or forward, for that matter? If individual self-sufficiency and local self-government are prerequisites for human flourishing, then maybe it is too late.

(...)

Do my apparently disparate-sounding worries have anything in common? Possibly this: they all result from one or another move on the part of the culture away from the immediate, the instinctual, the face-to-face. We are embodied beings, gradually adapted over millions of years to thrive on a certain scale, our metabolisms a delicate orchestration of innumerable biological and geophysical rhythms. The culture of modernity has thrust upon us, sometimes with traumatic abruptness, experiences, relationships, and powers for which we may not yet be ready—to which we may need more time to adapt.

But time is short. “All that is solid melts into air”—Marx meant the crust of tradition, dissolving in the acid bath of global capitalism. Now, however, the earth itself is melting. Marx’s great metaphor has acquired a terrifying second meaning."And so has Nietzsche’s. If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities—even the potentially liberating ones—the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many more generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive."

[spacecrone]

Sorry, Cassandra.

So, it's definite then

It's written in the stars, darlings

Everything must come to an end - Susanne Sundfør

I first learned about the climate crisis in 2008, as an undergrad at Hunter College, in a class called The History and Science of Climate Change. For the next decade I would struggle with how to process and act on the scientific paradigm shift climate change required: that human activity could disrupt the climate system and create a planetary ecosystem shift making Earth uninhabitable to human life. I became a climate justice activist and attempted to work directly on The Problem which was actually, as philosopher Timothy Morton writes, a hyperobject, something so systemic and enormous in size and scope as to be almost unintelligible to human awareness. I’ve cycled through probably every single response a person could have to this knowledge, despair, ecstasy, rage, hope. I’ve landed somewhere close to what I might call engaged bewilderment. For me, his particular locale has a soundtrack, and it’s Susanne Sundfør’s cinematic dance dystopia Ten Love Songs, an album that tells a story of love and loss in the Anthropocene. Sundfør is a sonic death doula for the Neoliberal project, with a uniquely Scandinavian version of bleak optimism. To truly grapple with this time of escalating transition, we need to really face what is, not what we hope or fear will be, but what is actually happening. A throbbing beat with shimmering synths around which to orient your dancing mortal envelope can’t hurt.

Susanne Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs was released a few days after Valentine’s Day in February of 2015, six months after I had been organizing Buddhists and meditators for the Peoples Climate March.  I was already a fan, having first heard her voice as part of her collaboration with dreamy synth-pop outfit m83 on the Oblivion soundtrack. Oblivion was visually striking but felt like a long music video. The soaring synths and Sundfør’s powerful voice drove the plot more than the acting, though I loved how Andrea Riseborough played the tragic character Vika, whose story could have been more central to the plot but was sidelined for a traditional Tom Cruise romantic centerpiece. But since the movie was almost proud of its style over investment in substance, the music stood out. The soundscapes were as expansive as the green-screened vistas of 2077  in the movie. It was just nostalgic enough while also feeling totally new, a paradox encapsulated in the name of m83’s similarly wistful and sweeping Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.  I am not exempt from taking comfort in style that signifies a previous era, and I am also not alone in it. It’s a huge industry, and while the MAGA-style yearning for a previous era is one manifestation, maybe there are ways to acknowledge culture as cyclical in a way that doesn’t sacrifice traditional knowledge to some imagined myth of perpetual progress.

When Ten Love Songs came out the following year, I listened to it on repeat for days.  Sundfør seemed to have absorbed the music-driven sci-fi into a concept album, with m83 providing her with a whole new panopoly of sounds at her disposal. Like Oblivion,  Ten Love Songs told the story of a future dystopia with high speed chases, nihilistic pleasure-seeking and operatic decadence against a backdrop of technocratic inequality. It mixed electro-pop with chamber music and I listened to it on a Greyhound ride to Atlantic City in the middle of snowy February. I hadn’t felt like this since high school, that a full album was a sort of soundtrack to my own life, which I could experience as cinematic in some way while the music was playing. This situated me in my own story, of studying climate change as an undergrad and graduating into a financial collapse, working as a personal assistant to an author writing about ecological collapse and ritual use of psychedelics, to joining a Buddhist community and organizing spiritual activists around climate justice. 

Ten Love Songs is a breakup album, with lyrics telling of endings and running out of time. But it didn’t read to me as an album about a single human romantic relationship coming to an end. It felt like a series of vignettes about the planet and its ecosphere breaking up with us, all of us. People. Some songs like Accelerate, one of the album’s singles, throb in an anthem to nihilistic numbness and speeding up into a catastrophe that feels inevitable. Fade Away is a bit lighter, tonally and lyrically, (and if you listen, please note the exquisitely perfect placement of what sounds like a toaster “ding!”), but is still about fading away, falling apart. The way the songs seem to drive a narrative of anthropocenic collapse built on science fiction film scores, the combination of orchestra and techno-pop, absolutely draws on Sundfør’s experience collaborating with m83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which itself combined Anthony Gonzalez’s love for the adult-scripted teen dramas of his own 80’s adolescence. In Ten Love Songs, Sundfør takes what she learned from this collaboration and scores not a movie but a life experience of living through ecological collapse and all of the heartbreak and desire that erupts in a time when everything seems so close to the knife’s edge.

I am reminded of another Scandinavian dance album that was extremely danceable yet harbored within it a sense of foreboding. The Visitors, ABBA’s eighth studio album, was considered their venture into more mature and complex music. The two couples who comprised the band had divorced the year before it was released, and the entire atmosphere of the album is paranoid, gloomy, and tense. The cover shows the four musicians, on opposite sides of a dark room, ignoring each other. Each song is melancholy and strange in its own way, unique for a pop ensemble like Abba. One song in particular showcases their ability to use an archetype of narrative tragedy and prophesy to tell the story of regret. Cassandra is sung from the perspective of those who didn’t heed the woman cursed by Zeus to foretell the future but never be believed. 

I have always considered myself a pretty big Abba fan, something my high school choir instructor thought was riotously funny. I was born in the 80’s and nobody in my family liked disco, so I seemed like something of an anachronism. But pop music, especially synth-oriented pop, has always felt like a brain massage to me. It could get my inner motor moving when I felt utterly collapsed in resignation to the scary chaos of my early life. But I only discovered the song Cassandra in 2017, while giving The Visitors a full listen. It felt like I had never heard the song before, though, as a fan I must have. But something about 2015 made the song stand out more. It starts with piano, soft tambourine, and the ambient sound of a harbor. It has a coastal Mediterranean vibe, as some Abba songs do, foreshadowing Cassandra’s removal from her home city, an event she foretold but could not get anyone to believe. It’s a farewell song of regret, echoing the regret the members of Abba felt about their own breakups. 

We feel so full of promise at the dawn of a new relationship. Only after the split can we look back and say we saw the fissures in the bond. The signs were there. Why did we ignore them? This happens on an individual level but the Cassandra paradox is an archetype that climate scientists and journalists are very familiar with. This particular Abba song, and the Visitors album overall, uses this archetype to tell the story of a breakup in retrospect. With climate change, the warnings have been there, even before science discovered the rising carbon in the atmosphere. Indigenous peoples have been warning of ecological collapse since colonization began. Because of white supremacy and an unwavering belief in “progress,” perpetual economic and technological development and growth, warnings from any source but especially marginalized sources have been noise to those who benefit from that perpetual growth model and from white supremacy itself. Is there a way to undo the Cassandra curse and render warnings signal BEFORE some major event turns us all into the chorus from Abba’s song, singing “some of us wanted- but none of us could--  listen to words of warning?” Composer Pauline Oliveros called listening a radical act. It is especially so when we listen actively to the sounds and signals of those we would otherwise overlook.

When I look back at my life in the time that Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs and m83’s movie music seems nostalgic for, the late 1980’s in New Jersey,  I was a child with deeply dissociative and escapist tendencies, which helped me survive unresolved grief, loss, and chaos. I recognize my love for Abba’s hypnotic synth music as a surrendering to the precise and driving rhythm of an all-encompassing sound experience. I also see how my early life prepared me to be sensitized to the story climate science was telling when I finally discovered it in 2008. I had already grown up with Save the Whales assemblies and poster-making contests, with a heavy emphasis on cutting six-pack rings so that sea life would not be strangled to death. I knew what it was like to see something terrible happening all around you and to feel powerless to stop it, because of the way my parents seemed incapable of and unsupported in their acting out their own traumatic dysregulation. Wounds, unable to heal, sucking other people into the abyss. I escaped through reading science fiction, listening to music like Abba and Aphex Twin loud enough to rattle my bones. I wanted to overwhelm my own dysregulated nervous system. I dreamed of solitude on other planets, sweeping grey vistas, being the  protagonist of my own story where nothing ever hurt because ice ran through my veins and the fjords around me. My home planet was dying, and nobody could hear those of us screaming into the wind about it.

Ten Love Songs woke up that lost cosmic child who had banished herself to another solar system. Songs of decadence, songs of endings, songs of loss. Though that album was not overtly about climate change, Sundfør did talk about ecological collapse in interviews for her radically different follow-up album Music For People In Trouble. After the success of Ten Love Songs, Sundfør chose to travel to places that she said “might not be around much longer” in order to chronicle the loss of the biosphere for her new album. It is more expressly and urgently about the current global political moment, but the seeds for those themes were present and in my opinion much more potent in the poppier album. But maybe that’s the escapist in me.

The old forms that brought us to this point are in need of end-of-life care. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal theocratic nationalism, neoliberalism, they all need death doulas. Escapism makes sense in response to traumatic stimulus, and for many of us it may have helped us survive difficult circumstances. But if we are to face what it means to be alive on this planet at this moment, we might be here to be present to and help facilitate and ease the process of putting these systems to rest. And maybe this work is not at odds with a dance party. The ability to be visionary about shared alternatives to these dying systems is not inherently escapist, when we are willing to take the steps together to live into those new stories. What would happen if cursed Cassandras, instead of pleading with existing power structures to heed warnings that sound like noise to them, turned to each other to restore the civic body through listening, through bearing witness to each others unacknowledged and thwarted grief over losses unacknowledged by those same systems of coercive power?

Engaged bewilderment means my version of hope, informed by Rebecca Solnit’s work on the topic, comes from the acceptance that things will happen that I could never have imagined possible. Climate change is happening and there are certain scientific certainties built into that trajectory. Some of it is written in the stars. But as with any dynamic system change, we do not know exactly how it will all shake out. These unknowns can be sources of fear and despair, but there is also the possibility for agency, choice and experimentation. The trajectory of my individual life was always going to end in death. Does that make it a failure? Or does it render each choice and engagement of movement towards the unknown an ecstatic act? As the old forms collapse, no need to apologize to the oracles. At this point they are dancing, and hope you’ll join.

[mimosita]

Could you recommend some authors?

What all of these authors have in commun is their commitment to a just society. Their work is not merely done on a desk, but also alongside communities. They involve themselves with political causes, putting their knowledge at the service of oppressed groups. Praxis and theory are indissociable and they are living proof of that. It is not enough to write and theorise, we must go out and fight. 

Mara Viveros: Her work on masculinity helps us better understand how privileges and oppressions step on each other. In her studies, she links race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality to have a better comprehension of racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and other oppressive systems.

Rita Segato: She has worked on violence on women. Through her analysis, we understand that gender violence is not about sexuality or desire, but about power. She delves into coloniality and capitalism as patriarchal systems.

Ochy Curiel: One of the most rigorous feminist I have read. Her work explores the imbrications of gender, sexuality, race and class from a decolonial point of view. She challenges hegemonic theories proving they obey liberal politics and capital interests.

Arturo Escobar: He works on political ecology, social movements, Colombian conflict, and mostly, on the creation of ‘Third World’ countries to serve geopolitical  and economic interests.

Orlando Fals Borda: He is one of the founders of Participatory Action Research. He is very important for social sciences because he stated that academic/intellectual work must be linked with political praxis. Also, he made an emphasis on the creation of knowledge from the periphery.

Paulo Freire: He changed forever the education field. He wrote extensively on critical pedagogy and stated that teaching is a moral and political practice and that it goes way beyond the classroom. 

Estanislao Zuleta: His conferences on philosophy, economy, psychoanalysis and education helped us better understand Colombian conflict and Latin America politics in a more profound way, exploring more than just class struggle.

Aníbal Quijano: His work is central to decolonial thought and to the critical analysis of modernity. Studying coloniality of power, he proves colonial dynamics never ended. He explored the consequences of coloniality and how it is deeply ingrained in our way of conceptualising our reality.

María Lugones: She studied the relation between gender and coloniality, proving gender as a strictly binary concept comes from colonial practices and stating it is an imposition from the modern project of society.

Camilo Torres: A central figure to liberation theology. His work on marxism and catholicism shaped a whole generation of religious people around the world stating that fighting for equity and social justice is an obligation of every Christian. He is one of the most important icons in the resistance movement in Colombia.

Enrique Dussel: He has an extensive intellectual production on ethics, philosophy, economy, theology, and so much more. He is the founder of the philosophy of liberation, and is a huge critic of eurocentrism, occidentalism, and imperialism. A key figure in decolonial thought.

Adriana Guzmán: Her work on communitarian feminism has confront white, liberal feminism, talking from an indigenous point of view. Her voice is crucial not only for feminism but for every social movement as she teaches how to give a fight that includes every oppressed group, without prioritising or dividing struggles. 

Alfredo Molano: His narrative work gave us a huge look at the roots and causes of Colombian conflict. Also, he showed us that narrative texts can be a powerful sociological tool.

Read Cuban revolutionaries too!

[harrytreily]

parc central residence location

The Great Plaza is the picture postcard face of Tikal, cleared of jungle and rebuilt. Two enormous pyramids, monuments and tombs of dead kings, climb 44 meters to stretch their roof combs above the surrounding canopy. Smaller complexes that were once administrative centers and residences surround them. Carved stone stelae in the plaza preserve stories of royal deeds.

Pathways hacked through the jungle link the Great Plaza to the other ruins. I avoided the tourist guides, the angry sun-pinked skin, the flapping Hawaiian shirts and the baggy Bermuda shorts. I bought a map and chose a lesser-traveled route. I walked quietly and breathed deeply. Birds called in the verdant green canopy and spider monkeys chattered in the distance. Smells of humid earth and decaying vegetation filled my nose. The intense heat of the flatlands wrapped me in cloying humidity.

The outer ruins lay as they were found. Stones crumbled under probing and strangling roots. Whole buildings slept undisturbed beneath a living blanket of tangled growth. The earth was reclaiming the city, digesting it. The corroding stones radiated mystery and silence, a hint of stories long forgotten and of huge tracts of time.

The Mayan world occupied the upper third of Central America, from the baking jungle flatlands of the Yucatan parc central residence location  Peninsula (present day Mexico, Belize and the Guatemalan Petén) to volcanic highlands stretching as far south as Copan in Honduras.

Mayan civilization was not an empire, but a loose collection of entities that shared a common cultural background. Large centers of power like Tikal, Copan or Chichen Itza were comparable to the city states of ancient Greece, and these great agricultural centers were the focal points of Mayan culture.

At its zenith, the Mayan civilization represented one of the most densely populated and dynamic societies in the world. The Mayans were responsible for the only fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, and they continue to fascinate us with their art and monumental architecture, as well as their sophisticated systems of mathematics and astronomy.

But nothing fascinates us more than their demise. What accounted for the stunning collapse of their civilization? Was it an ecological disaster, a catastrophic event, the collapse of trade routes, or a peasant revolt? Many theories exist; none has been conclusively proven.

Though their society collapsed, the Maya did not entirely vanish into the mists of time. Mayan peoples and their descendants remain to form sizable populations in contemporary Mesoamerican societies, and Mayan languages continue to be spoken. In mountain villages and flatland jungle towns throughout northern Central America a slender, fragile thread of life still stretches back through time, providing a blood red connection to the monument builders of old.

Exploring those Mayan worlds was a bit of a pilgrimage for me. As a child I haunted library books with cutaway illustrations of castles and pyramids. I became obsessed with Easter Island. I didn't care for dinosaurs; I needed something with a dream attached, the echo of someone's all-consuming desire. I gloated over the unexplainable. I sought not theories, but mystery. Dark corridors. Ancient stones hewn carefully by hand. The musty smell of centuries. But my country had none of that. Those places where stories were contained in crumbling stones were entire continents away. Perhaps that's why I yearned for them. I've always dreamed of the inaccessible. In time. In place. In love.

[deeptimesjournal]

We Are the Great Turning

by Jesse Serrante

Future beings have been visiting me in my dreams. Each night as I sleep, I find myself traveling to a campfire, a spot in a forest with the same soft mossy ground and smell of pine in the air as the woods I have loved and visited since I was a child.

In this forest, there is a place for me by the fire where I can sit in the night as people have for all of human existence, to talk with this group of future beings about our lives and the world.

My sense of their world is warm and blurry, as the places we travel to in our sleep tend to be when we wake, but I remember this: they tell me that the world they live in is my own world, one hundred and forty years from now. They tell me that their numbers are small, their world much less populated than my own, and that they live in communities of reciprocity and balance with Earth. As I meet these people and hear their stories, I rest easy in their answer to a question that I have spent my life asking: Will humanity survive this time of great destruction and separation? Or will we drive ourselves to extinction? They assure me. We have made it. We are still busy with the work of healing ourselves and our land from generations of destruction, but we have made it. Our non human sisters and brothers are healing too, and it is beautiful here.

Last night, as we sat together again around the glowing, warm fire, I shared the deepest fears that I live with in my own life: That I may be among the last human beings to experience the stunning beauty of planet Earth. That I am too small and weak to transform our world from the racism, inequality, and ecological destruction that I inherited. That we are destined to destroy each other and the world around us, and I am powerless to change any of it.

As I poured out my fears, they listened lovingly, and a child spoke from her spot on the ground between her mother’s feet and said “Your world is so scary and uncertain! We are here now, but in your time, you don’t know that we will be. How do you keep going? You say it seems impossible at times… how do you keep from giving up?”

As I answered, my own inner voice of wisdom, imbued with the wisdom of my ancestors, came through, clear like a mindfulness bell:

In my time, we live amid so much destruction. The earth is warming rapidly and unpredictably bringing on rising seas and storms that are destroying our beloved homes. Our waters are poisoned and many are dying of disease and starvation while others live in opulence and ignorance of those who suffer. Two people in the same city can be living two distinctly different lives: one of oppression and poverty and the other of freedom and wealth.  Our people are so divided from one another that coming together often feels impossible. We watch ourselves and others and especially those in power act in ways that seem unfathomable. We act out the selfishness that is bred of fear that there will not be enough, and the hatred of others that is born of not knowing that we are enough. Our culture has forgotten how to live in the abundant and ancient flow of life, and our short-sighted actions reflect that disconnection.

Our culture normalizes this dominance and selfishness, and we are told that this way of being is as natural as the ocean tides. Many of us, however, know that this can not be true and that there is another way we desire to live.  To create this other way, we are beginning to reimagine our culture's ways of seeing ourselves. We are imagining a world where humans live in reciprocity with Earth and where everyone’s needs are met, with no one left out. We are piecing together this vision with memories and knowledge from the precious few of us that still remember how to live this way, as our ancestors did. We are falling deeply in love with this vision, and sharing it bravely, tending to it like a seed, small and precious, that will someday multiply into a great harvest.

We call our journey into this new way of being “The Great Turning”. Many who hear that this Great Turning is underway find inspiration in it, while others question whether it is truly possible. Cynics call us dreamers, naive and even dangerous terrorists.

The tentacles of the culture of dominance are wrapped around everything and seem to thwart our efforts at every turn. We are cultivating a new culture of collaboration and trust that is taking root, but the work is tireless and the dominance culture is fiercely defended by doubters and cynics. Sometimes our task leaves us so heartbroken and wounded that we start to believe them, but we support one another to remain resilient in our mission to live the collaboration and trust we dream of now. Like farmers in slow motion, we are planting the seeds of this culture that we dream of and we are tending to them. We trust that they will grow, even though the great harvest will likely come long after we are gone.

To tend to these seeds, we have to remember who we are. We have to remember ourselves despite what our culture tells us. We come from those who knew how to live in reciprocity with the earth. We already have within us all of the brilliance, power and beauty needed to restore our world. We are whole and complete, not broken as the dominance culture tells us. We deserve dignity and respect. Our yearning to make a difference in the world is good and right. We have to remember this, even when our own minds and the world around us tell us that it is not true. We are learning to remember this about ourselves and to help one another to remember it as well. This is our first step: to remember that we are the ones we have been waiting for all along. The ones who are planting the seeds of a beautiful, restored world.

The stories of the dominance culture are deeply rooted and powerful, so we have to be tough and imaginative to remember that the world we are building together does not only live in our imaginations, but it is growing more real every day. The economy of reciprocity and the culture of collaboration are slowly coming into being through us carrying it, piece by piece, from the world of our dreams into the physical world. Even while we are slowly and steadily succeeding at building new ways of living, people tell us that what we are doing is impossible. At the beginning of this Great Turning, it is hard work to remember that our lives are the very real foundation of a future world, your world, that we will never get to see.

You asked how we keep going, and the answer is that we have already chosen to live in your world even while it is being built. When we treat our vision for the world as a fantasy, we stay separate from it and we can also be tricked into believing that it is foolish of us to want it. To maintain our strength and carry on with the work of building and creating, it is imperative for us to cultivate a kind of mental toughness-- to be so in love with your world, which we dreamed up and are tending to, that even amid that disorienting cynicism we can chose to live in it ourselves. We know that the Great Turning is not a fantasy.  It’s not something that we are waiting for. It lives in us and it is occurring through us. We choose not to wait for a savior or a miracle...we choose to live in it now. We are the Great Turning, and in our minds, harvest time has already come.

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(fragments and pieces to maybe hold on to…)

We had to learn to grieve. Witnessing the destruction of our world was, as you know, very painful to bear. We had to allow our hearts to break over and over, trusting that our mourning would become our armor, making us unstoppable in the face of what pained us. We knew that when we wailed out our despair and our fear, that it could no longer stop us from acting. But if we kept it in, as so many in our time chose to do, that we would stay numb and unable to be builders of another world. ________________________________________________________________ Jess Serrante, 32, is a Brooklyn based Life and Leadership Coach for builders of the Great Turning and Co-Founder of the Radical Support Collective. Her mission (and RSC’s) is to support changemakers to be nourished by their life and work rather than burning out and do work that truly lights them up. She is a climate activist, trainer and facilitator with a decade of experience leading and supporting activists. She is a professionally certified coach with over 600 hours of experience and a student and facilitator of the WTR.This fall, Jess is offering a 3 month immersive program also called “We Are The Great Turning” that will blend the  personalized support of group coaching with the regenerative practices of WTR to support you to embody the Great Turning in your own life and actions.⁠ Learn more at radicalsupport.org/greatturningFollow Jess + RSC @radicalsupportcollective + radicalsupport.org