A novel, where a character dies and revives — listening to voices no one else can hear. Where another is a parpalegic who spends his life coding and living in a cyber dream world, and yet another is married to silence at the death of his family. There is one on the autistic spectrum, who spends his life studying why people do what they do, and a scientist who is almost deaf, who goes years before anyone hears what she has learned. Yet another, felled by a stroke, who can manage only a slngle word at a time–and those, mostly unintelligible.
Whether fiction, or philosophy–or work of art–the one question that links auther, thinker, artist– to their work, the question that hovers over the work, informs everything else one might ask about it:
why did they do this?
What was the unspeakable, imageless, aporia of thought that formed the need and provocation to make this thing?
On p. 383, Ray–the character who has been stroked speechless–is thinking –while his wife reads to him from Anna Karenina:
<To be human is to confiuse a satifying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compleeing as the struggles between a few lost people. >
Try again. Fail again. Fail better
Category: Climate change
The End IS coming…
If some great flash of understanding were to come over the whole population of the earth — if however billion humans there are on the planet now–were suddenly to see as clearly as Greta Thunberg what we are facing in the not at all distant future–hundreds of millions would drop what they were doing, leave their jobs, leave their studies and schools, abandon their cars, take up crutches and walkers and stream out of hospitals and nursing homes… take to the streets–not to demonstrate, but to charge the corporate masters–the climate deniers, their political servants– accepting whatever horrendous losses their defenders might unleash, swarming over them, destroying them utterly… in the slim hope that a remnant might survive to begin again…
… it would be their rule and custom, if they should succeed, that anyone who mentioned the word ‘profit,’ who ever again should seek to gain advantage over their neighbor, they would be set upon and torn to pieces and fed to rats as a warning.
That’s what I imagine, when I try to think what a just response to this crisis would look like.
That would be a just end to capitalism.
Now. This is not the future. This is now
We are entering… have already entered, the last years of human life on this planet.
Go to around the 28 minute mark to see what we must do–but watch it all.
This is more than climate change. This is now.
I hope that you will share this.
Nothing lasts but change
For generations, artists in the Euro-American traditions, like ancient Greek heroes, accepted the idea of posterity–the hope for an enduring place in history and myth, that they, and their work, might defy mutability–hope for a kind secular immortality; artists and poets might die, but art and poetry was forever. On the brink of collective human suicide–and even if we should survive our human-made catastrophes, it will be but for a blink of the universal eye–who can believe in such a thing, now?
I’ve been thinking about this for some time. My work will never achieve an enduring status, and even if it did–what posterity…? when, in a few generations, there will no humans left on the planet? And in the immensity of time, before the sun consumes the inner planets as a red giant, who can maintain the illusion of a lasting memory, of a lasting anything? What then, can take the place of that old fantasy–dead as the gods who belonged to that vanished world? What, but change itself? Like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Seed. Rather than imagining, how works of art might endure, think of them in terms of what they do, as themselves, agents of change–which they are. As works of art and poetry have always been… done?
Lubricants to slide us another step into a future we can only know when we get there. The only past worth saving, is what will remain as we break the chains that bind us to it, the past that will survive, because it changes with us in a future we create together.
The Coming Human Extinction
I seriously ask myself, why do I bother to make art when there will be no humans on this planet in another generation?
New York Magazine
This is the world, our only home
Refugees Don’t Need Your Pity
In a world where 1 in 7 people are displaced, your kindness is just condescension.
Dispossessed is an identity of disempowerment, but it is a powerful identity. Borders may temporarily hold back the flow of humans adrift, but in a world where we are so tightly and dizzyingly interwoven, physical boundaries are far less obstructive than the lasting confinement of imposed narratives. Such is the double-edged power of stories: They can hold us together — and they can distort, isolate, and divide. The dispossessed: The tag’s impediment persists even after the bearer has crossed a border or town limits, settled in, become a neighborhood cop, a high school teacher, a daughter’s girlfriend, or a boat captain living next door. Unless the world finds compassion for this new communality, learns to make sense of one another’s voices, its humanity will perish.
Fight Climate Change!
Support the Experimental Farm Network!
The Experimental Farm Network (EFN) aims to fight global climate change and ensure food security far into the future by facilitating collaboration on plant breeding and other agricultural research.
Founded in 2013 by Nate Kleinman & Dusty Hinz, the EFN is presently composed of over 200 participants: farmers and gardeners, plant breeders and researchers, amateurs and professionals alike. The network is not-for-profit, based on open-source principles, and dedicated to social justice.
All are welcome and encouraged to join. Read more, and learn how you can donate! HERE
EFN exists because our agricultural system is broken. As a society, we no longer grow crops primarily for human consumption, but as commodities. We don’t farm in harmony with the environment, but in ways that harm it. We’ve stopped breeding plants for resilience, taste, and nutritional value: instead we genetically engineer and patent them to maximize corporate profits.
To take back our food system, we’ll need to marshall an army of volunteers to counter the power of the multinational corporations. We’ll need to develop more agricultural cooperatives and strong regional economies like those that thrived before industrialization. And we’ll need to develop carbon-sequestering perennial staple crops (including grains and oilseeds) and more sustainable growing systems & practices in harmony with the natural world.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 