Recently I was provided the opportunity to smoke DMT, one of the most confounding & intense experiences of my life. It is difficult to reconcile the out of body, death-like experience with the simplicity of this ubiquitous compound, found in mammal brains & numerous plants, including acacia. I felt death. On coming out of the …
This week I have been reading a not-so well-known book of philosophy by the British philosopher Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons. Parfit is flagged up in Tim Morton's Hyperobjects, in which Morton comments on Parfit's challenging of 'long-held prejudices about utility and ethics from within utilitarianism itself.' that, 'Parfit showed that no self-interest ethical …
I think this is one of only a handful of poems I have written since moving to Exeter, to study. Somewhat influenced by Camus, his persuasive Absurdism, which to me has always been a methodology to encourage an acceptance of life as ultimately meaningless; this isn't something to despair over. It is only meaningless in …
I was browsing through the 30 or so poems I wrote—& agonized over the quality of—on my return to England & this one feels cogent to the circumstances we currently find ourselves groaning under. I have been writing about access to futures through the lens of queer theory and ecology. They share a common problem: …
Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) challenges commonly held considerations towards what objects are and how they (inter)act in the world. Ecology, science, economics, art, architecture, and programming are core disciplines OOO utilizes. In OOO we encounter objects not only in rendered, physical, tactile modes, but in addition, processual, agentive & eventful modes. Human, a priori encounters …
Peering through a lens at the fluid, substratum scale Covid-19 moves through, I can’t help note their physical body’s semblance to World War 2 naval mines, drifting in swells of ocean current. But Covid-19 doesn’t drift, it has agency. It isn’t conscious, doesn’t think, but it does have agency to perform one function: propagate. In …
(This is arguably too long for a blog post, but I wrote it in Word & it was honestly just easier due to time constraints to dump it in one, especially owing to the footnotes. I think the ideas in here, if a little dense, are worth bearing with & attempting to absorb. I have …
An object oriented poem with a little savoury biology. We eat, mashing the meat of the matter with calcium evolved enough to cope with it. Flesh of its flesh become flesh of our flesh. Nothing, not even death can be inert. The meat of it never thought, despite the organisms nattering via calendar & root, …
Thanks to David Cooke for taking these two very different, very new poems; one written in December while I was in Brixham over Christmas & the other written only a week or so ago. Accompanying the poems are a few hundred words of explanatory prose on the hyperobject, a term I use in the poem …
(More untidy, preliminary insights from reading Heidegger. ) Taking a thing for granted is complex. There is an art to not taking something for granted. Being in the world is firmly established, as we interact with other things, tools or technologies, in order to provide the balance needed to be alive, we don’t exactly sense …
Continue reading "Learning the art of not-taking-for-granted"
