Little Piece of Dirt Freakout

I played Lou Reed's "Beginning of a Great Adventure" before class, brought a glittering pipe cleaner "sparklesaurus" as today's mascot, and drew a circle with a dot in the middle of it on the board.  Here are the various quotes:

Inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the neologism “ecology” in the late 1860s, defining it as
the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature – the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact – in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence (in McIntosh 1985: 7-8).
Ecology did not, however, emerge as a fully-formed counterpart to laboratory-based physiology until the 1890s, and only began to achieve the widespread interest it has today with the environmentalist movement of the 1960s.  Indeed, ecology – this “household knowledge” – is not only the science of the relations between organisms and their environments, it is also – in the words of prominent ecologist Paul B. Sears – a “subversive subject”, subversive for its implication that human people are not apart from but are instead a part of the limitations and laws of the world (McIntosh 1985: 1).  In other words, ecology looks at how critters like ourselves get along in the world, and even more so, how we form each other's world. 

Copernicus
Darwin
Freud

“This experience of constant de-centered de-centeredness, each de-centering on a vaster and vaster scale, has a venerable name among people who talk about science fiction: 'sencs of wonder'.” - Delany from Empire intro, cited in Bukatman 165 

Ingold's “Against Space”:
“How have we arrived at such an abstract and rarefied concept to describe the world in which we live? My contention is that it results from the operation of a particular logic that has a central place in the structure of modern thought. I call this the logic of inversion. What it does, in a nutshell, is to turn the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is enclosed. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things that occupy the world but which do not, strictly speaking, inhabit it.  A world that is occupied but not inhabited, that is filled with existing things rather than woven from the strands of their coming-into-being, is a world of space” (2009: 29). 

“Against Human Nature” – Tim Ingold; published in N. Gontier, J. P. van Bendegem and D. Aerts (ed), Evolutionary epistemology, language and culture (Dordrecht : Springer, 2006), pp 259-281. 

“Genes consist of sections of an immensely long molecule called DNA, which is found in the nucleus of every cell in the body. Of this genetic material, about 80 per cent—socalled ‘junk DNA’—is entirely inconsequential. The genes comprising the remaining 20 per cent, however, play a crucial role in regulating the manufacture of proteins, which are the principal materials from which organisms are made. What these genes do not do, however, is contain a programme or blueprint for building an organism of a certain kind. The notion of the genetic blueprint is fundamentally misleading, for the simple reason that organisms are not built like machines, on the basis of pre-existing design specifications. Rather they grow, a process technically known as ontogenetic development. This applies as well to human beings as to organisms of any other species. Thus you cannot simply point to the DNA in the cell nucleus and say: ‘There is a capacity for such-and-such’. It is make-believe to think that lengths of DNA can turn themselves into ‘innate capacities’, whether of body or mind, before this process has even got underway. Whatever capacities people might have, in the form of skills, motivations, dispositions and sensibilities, they are generated in the course of development. And at whatever stage in the life-cycle we may choose to identify a particular capacity—even at birth—a history of development already lies behind it.” (270-271) 

Bruno Latour on “irreduction”:
Irreduction: Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.
Translation:  Since one entity is never reducible to another, and never entirely contained inside another, actual work is needed to show the ways in which entities partly influence one another while remaining partly shielded from such influence.

Writing

“A sentence does not hold together because it is true, but because it holds together we say that it is ‘true’. What does it hold on to? Many things. Why? Because it has tied its fate to anything at hand that is more solid than itself. As a result, no one can shake it loose without shaking everything else” (Latour 1988: 185-186) 

Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, Uncivilization: A Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009)
“It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own—a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare—might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation—and us—into perspective. Writing that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing. Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this may prove.” (13)

Sparklesaurus: The Beginning of a Scandalous Ecological Adventure

Audio recording of a poem written 27 July 2022 on the occasion of my mothers' wedding.

LaBare - We Are Together And It's Only Gonna Get Better

May 11, 2010: Two days after Orion's birth, I briefly capture the sonic environment of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where we will spend another four weeks.

Orion NICU

Sounds from Thursday evening

Noodle, Bus, Uh-oh

Attempts to carve a pumpkin together end in histrionics and failure.

Orion don't want carve pumpkin

Halfway through one of Orion's narratives - including "That's Mama?" interruption at the end.

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