declaration of consciousness
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dwellings: a spiritual history of the living world, linda hogan, 1995
the world, all the beings among and above and around and through and of it, they are not props on a stage for human existential dramas to play out on. the earth is the matter, the material matter of up up up from which everything will rise rise rise and turn turn turn round and return in in into. it is all we have got. how do you speak to it, think of it, every single particulate, no matter how distanced, plastic-ed, petrified, cemented, stagnant, permanent beyond our comprehension, no matter how stretched to the brink from its form as taken under forces of this reality - as in weather, as in atmosphere, as in physical natural laws, as in the patterns of time and revolution of celestial bodies which cannot be dictated by human want.
power of gentleness : meditations of the risk of living, anne dufourmantelle, 2013 / 2018
all the shapes all the bodies are of it, this material. filled out with life that maybe comes from somewhere else, that reaches over everything to vast to need to grasp in the box of logic but easily understood by witnessing the font of the heart, the endless horizon of the ocean. does it matter where or if it ends?
set aside a moment the notion of consciousness; this self-granted, self-regulated human conception. if we expect/ experience/ extend compassion, gentleness, respect, reciprocity of care to everything - no matter scale, physiology, utility, animation, autonomy, complexity - then one's humanity gets back all of the energy spent reconfiguring and calibrating a balanced justification for cruelty, violence, disregard, and/ or ambivalence, all the resources spent on reasoning punishment. then too all of this energy, resource given to N news, O objectivity, and P philosophy, to Q questioning, R religion, to S science, to T tech, is freed to move toward possibility, imagination, toward making happen all the things that seem impossible when the resource of focus, repetition, generation, curiosity, and matter are diverted
it has something to do with the internal and proximal adjustment of ourselves from and to another / the other / others / in proportion, relation, to perceived similarities and differences between the self and all which we as contained and boundaried-by-body individuals encounter, constantly.
what is me and what is not me and how does - through experience/ observation and conditioning/ assumption - a gradient and system of levels form between the two. containing the human passage of life here into a webbed, series of one-to-one dynamics. ever always the self and other is an interesting consideration that is definitely not how people exist: decontextualized from memory - lived, dreamed, inherited - and may in fact be completely against notions of survival instinct.
inscribing, maintaining patterns on a physiological level is absolute to existence, to retaining consistent embodiment, any sense of maintaining form, shape, the holding of reality down into and of the atom means some rhythm is kept, a surrounding pulse or sustained note regulates. perhaps, it is binding by way of attraction. what ever the reason - and they are big and they are small and there are reasons for the reasons - a pattern is a repetition of a happening which allows for consistency, predictability, and facilitates the kind of change, variation, dependent upon slowness, slightness of shift. it is an essential way of embodied learning, knowing for oneself. and yet, intimate (meaning direct, meaning one-to-one) encounters quickly change the state of matter of such knowing. until it includes oneself or until one finds themselves in direct contact with a person who they had simply considered only as social pattern, it remains abstract as all numbers are, until their quantity is physically manifested.
what would happen, how would reality be, though, were we, were someone, to meet every sensorial (thus relational) as fresh. i am describing the ways of a baby. the ways "growing up" has become committed to leaving behind, naturally because they become dysfunctional for the expectations of adults and because we cannot ignore those experiences we have gleaned information from previously. it is how one comes to awareness around the feeling of an experience and how one then makes choices around what experiences they would like to pursue and those they would like to avoid, based on those feelings. this is an act of coming-into-being, of evolution, within the micro sphere of ones own timeline of life.
thus, at first glance the notion of arriving fresh to every encounter seems naive, risky, and regressive; because it is an ideal, an aspiration, something to reach for. and as all ideals it requires a resistance to the authority of any particular truth over another, requires holding two competing realities for long enough that the reflection of one in the other can be discerned and the edges of their forms begin to bleed.
dwellings: a spiritual history of the living world, linda hogan, 1995
i am trying to get underneath it. to the issue at hand that lies in the heads and hearts of humans. this justification for differentiation. this need to proclaim suddenly the changing of some rank in the value system of life. what is it. why does it matter. used simply as a tool for an individual or group to get what they want, to have what someone else has and not have to compromise, or share. and it seems to me that there is a general acceptance of a certain level of
last night i had a dream i was smashing wasps on a ceiling, they left this yellow goo. in waking life i make an effort to remove all insects from my house life-intact, even those that speak to some deep pit of aversion in me the waters that well up from it turning swiftly into the kind of fear that makes your eyes into those very same pits that has you gagging and some being at the bottom screaming up to infinity, a fear that crawls across your skull (for me this is those little silver fish, i think because i once as a child got lice from a birthday party and they are common household insects that move and look the most like lice...i literally have to scratch my head just when i think of it.) *and here is an example of that embodied memory turned aversion, a feeling associated that if i let take over inside of a situation that appears parallel, similar to another that i have already been through, i will act from the pursuit of ending the feeling as soon as possible without ever considering alternatives* i make an effort to retain the life of even those that could harm me *which here, is the thought of what do we do with a parasite, one that lives off another life, the lice, the mosquito, the tick...life forms that attach to others and transmit even smaller iterations of cellular replication* those but in the dream i thought "i am making no effort." it is not an answer, and i am not sure it is moral either, it is experimenting with what it means to try to move through life and consider everything moving, vibrating, flying, reproducing, eating, shedding, following instinct or knowing toward a destination as having a right to do so, since it is the life it was given. most science is done by experimenting on those lives as a form of donation to a greater knowledge, a sacrifice for revelation of truths humans are seeking. what about a non-invasive scientific method, what about science that does not sacrifice singular for something bigger, that simply watches, listens, tracks when the opportunity presents itself.
for a long time i have been thinking about the porousness of the body: our cells are constantly falling away from us into our surroundings, how we are absorbing from and releasing into ~ from our atmosphere; internal metabolic and catabolic biological systems. and how this materialized experience branches, as a wishbone - that frail little slingshot of calcified tissue that sits right above a birds heart, holding in the center the two halves of its chest, broken to bestow some good luck.
one divergence is an understanding of boundaries: the edge where one feels comfortable stopping or, perhaps more significantly, the line from which one feels uncomfortable continuing - this happens, as everything in this reality, in both the tangible, somatic sphere of experience and in the internal, cerebral and affectual spheres of experience. and as always it is the task of recognizing each as itself then aligning and synthesizing them. this branch opens up to the notion of the motivation of boundary, which i will pursue somewhere else, or not somewhere else, but for now say that it has to do with where consciousness meets choosing and the moral reactionary stance that boundaries are limiting and that limitations are wrong when imposed on the social collective but necessary when imposed on the individual. that is how it seems, anyway. maybe?
the other branch i cannot access at the moment because i stopped abruptly writing that paragraph in the middle of a sentence and did not return for several weeks, as is the way i function. so hopefully ill find it again in the future.
but i do know i was going towards this notion of abstaining that is some kind of essential element a current running parallel to this life that almost cannot be observed unless one turns their head over and looks at the underside of the moment. what is handed to you is so obvious, so apparent, it is that which asserts, which is. deep presence is required to consider what is not or what the potential of turning away from the manifest could be.
in the spring of 2022 i went to the Kansas City Zoo. zoo from the Greek zoion "a living being." i had not been to a zoo in my adult life, accidentally as in they are easy to avoid, intentionally as in i was avoiding them, easily.
though the otters seemed stoked - truly the enthusiasm was that of a surfer to a wave - to slide on their bellies down the rocks to meet us at the glass wall of the entrance, none of the enclosed environments seemed to suffice. the very existence of wall, glass, fence, of enclosure, of separation from expanse, from other species, denotes control, control denotes simulation.
everyone had enough for their body but not enough for their soul. because the idea is not to own but to experience. all they could do was pace.
but it was of course the orangutang who my heart shattered in front of. and what right did i have to be heartbroken? can your heart break under the weight of shame and embarrassment? i think so. he knew everything i knew about the material and spiritual conditions of our respective positions. what each side of the glass meant. the way he was turned towards and yet deliberately did not look at me. the way i hoped he would not look at me. the speed at which i fled the situation. the way i stop breathing when i get near the mere memory of it.
i had to stop listening to this science podcast because i realized all of these studies conducted by humans to get answers about ourselves were done using the bodies and capacities of animals. i mean, i knew, but i didn't always let myself know. that this constant search for self-realization and understanding, attempts to speak to "our" "true" "nature" to get answers to why humans are the way they are, or if it is how we are or how we have been forced to become, so that we can either keep going to stop forcing or start changing, and in what direction, for what purpose, all of that should take place. that we are literally digging, manipulating, the bodies of the earth and all the forms life takes there upon and within, in the search for our own truth. willing to dispose of others to find out some grand or trivial truth about the human self.
five kingdoms: an illustrated guide to the phyla of life on earth, lynn margulis and michael chapman, 1998
i will set it here, for now, at this edge that frays into these tangled strands
of choice, of the rights to protect the self, of the realities of the porousness of bodies and stability, flourishing of life that comes from hygiene, of the fundamental recycling and regeneration of life and energy in this closed system through the metabolic and catabolic stages of consumption, of the difference between rocks and trees and fleshy bodies. all of that is present. a dilemma in some ways, but not one that necessitates violence and desiccation and vigilance but maybe only balance, reciprocity.
