How myopic is the notion that a form is the principle of individuation, or that a substance occupying a place to the exclusion of other substances makes an individual, or that the inner organization, or the self-positing identity of a subject is an entity’s principle of individuation! A season, a summer wind, a fog, a swarm, an intensity of white at high noon have perfect individuality, though they are neither substances nor subjects. The climate, the wind, a season have a nature and an individuality no different from the bodies that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken in them.

A pack of wolves, a cacophonous assemblage of starlings in a maple tree when evening falls, a marsh throbbing with frogs, a whole night fizzling with fireflies exert a primal fascination on us. What is fascinated is the multiplicity in us — the human form and the nonhuman, vertebrate and invertebrates, animal and vegetable, the conscious and unconscious movements and intensities in us. Aliens on other planets, galaxies churning out trillions of stars, drops of water showing, under the microscope, billions of squiggling protozoa — these are mesmerizing. What is mesmerized in us are the pulses of solar energy momentarily held and refracted in our crystalline cells, the microorganic movements and intensities in the currents of our inner coral reefs.

Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

daydreaming about all I am as movement from food to shit, moving words from a page, filtering it through some interpretive apparatus, just more reorienting, and vomited out through my fingers into MS word, moving my body from shower to library to the place where food becomes shit and back again — the only effective change a newly acquired skill, a new analytical tool, to incorporate into (my) movement, new movements.

and it is this kind of mental meandering that has me picking at the most BORING quotes from an otherwise illuminating text, from Paul Bains’s The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations

Only logically is being prior to and presupposed by action: existentially, a being is only so long as and through the actions (and resulting relationships) it entertains, both actively and passively, with its surroundings, whether objective or physical. Hence also only logically do structures ‘exist’ apart from actions. They exist only as virtualities of the action itself which sustains being, and — especially — as the pattern of relations resulting from those virtualities of sustenative (Deely 1994c, 1)

taking a break from making posters to put up around every sixth form college in the borough (repping lewisham SE fam) looking for 16 - 19 year old heartbreakers, I heard a child outside making primitive squeals (I lurk the nursery, it’s next to the anthro dept) and I’m reminded of what alphonso lingis said about infantile fantasy, mud memories, and that scene from attenberg with marina and her father on the bed. mention of david attenborough and the dog star keep cropping up.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnn
itskillingme
sugarplumsaysomething

some people paint for their lovers, write songs, choreograph a dance. I don’t have any of those talents really (well I can make shoddy paper-crafts) — my talent is reading a bunch, scribbling notes, asking heaps of simple questions in repeat. So when I curb my research interests to reflect my love life (or the absence of it, old flames, as is the case right now), instead of it being flattering and bittersweet like a painting or song, lovers just feel violated and creeped out. Should have been an architect, I would have built our desert palace.

In the Amazon, the wisest men and women are called vegetalistas; plant experts steeped in forest knowledge. But there’s more – people don’t just learn about plants, they learn from certain plants called “plant teachers” or doctores which teach people medicine. These plants are sacred, honoured and stolen, patented by pharmaceutical companies.

Forest lore and shamanic knowledge is an entire way of knowing, as beautiful and profound as any in the West. A curandero is a qualified doctor, a shaman is a professor, a grove a university library. The Amazon has its artists, musicians and poets, its John Clares, and its Mozarts, its Platos, Debussys and Ovids. Everywhere a depth of art and curing, music, metaphor and mind. The Amazon is a forest of knowing. But the fundamentalist sects, together with the corporations and States, are deforesting the human mind.

A woodland is a way of knowing, a medicine cabinet and a library, a store of metaphor and a guide to life.  So if people are forced off their land, they lose far more than the physical place, whether that is the Clearances of Scotland or the land thefts in the Amazon.  To lose your land is to lose your language, and to lose your language is to lose your culture and maybe even your mind

- Extracts from a presentation Jay Griffiths gave to the Sacred Arts Festival in India, 2009.