It is not a gift given. It is not support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse.
The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it. The past and the future are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded, and simultaneously difficult to untangle one from another.
It is not immutable or passive. It does not refer to a fixed substance; not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. It gets absorbed into the biome for recycling as new flora and fauna.
Decentered being humiliated by ecology - material entanglements enfolded and threaded through. It deserves our imaginative capacities and transcends iconography. Reconfigured and sent out into the world again, it does not require the mark of a force like culture or history to complete it.
In the boat moved by magic over the great deep, the traveller lay looking up into the dark. All her life she had looked into the dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean.
We look back, we go behind; we conjure what is missing from the face. This backward glance also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind us.
Within the framework of one’s journey, the primary unit of currency is an experience. And under the experience economy the most valuable form of capital is a transformational experience: a genuine refactoring of the perception of the self and the world around it, typically rooted in a profound experience of the oneness of being and/or limitless potential of the self.
Queer ecology requires a vocabulary envisioning this liquid lie.
In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any one can bear.
She did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. I awoke to darkness. I was hungry—starving!—and I was in pain. There was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other people, no other time, no other feelings. I was lying on something hard and uneven, and it hurt me. One side of me was hot, burning. I tried to drag myself away from the heat source, whatever it was, moving slowly, feeling my way until I found coolness, smoothness, less pain. And I was so HUNGRY. The hunger was a violent twisting inside me. I curled my empty, wounded body tightly, knees against chest, and whimpered in pain. I clutched at whatever I was lying on. After a time, I came to understand, to remember, that what I was lying on should have been a bed. I remembered little by little what a bed was. My hands were grasping not at a mattress, not at pillows, sheets, or blankets, but at things that I didn’t recognize, at first. Hardness, powder, something light and brittle. Gradually, I understood that I must be lying on the ground—on stone, earth, and perhaps dry leaves. There was a stream where I had been fetching water. A flow station was built nearby and now the stream was rank and filthy, with an oily film that reflected rainbows. The air left your skin dirty and smelled like something preparing to die. It hurt to move. It hurt even to breathe. My head pounded and throbbed, and I held it between my hands, whimpering. The sound of my voice, even the touch of my hands seemed to make the pain worse. In two places my head felt crusty and lumpy and ... almost soft. The most pointed paradoxes of our era is precisely the tension between the urgency of finding new and alternative modes of political and ethical agency for our technologically mediated world and the inertia of established mental habits on the other. Every imaginable, and many unimaginable, technologies and strategic measures are being pursued by all the big global players to extract every last calorie of fossil carbon, at whatever depth and in whatever formations of sand, mud, or rock, and with whatever horrors of travel to distribution and use points, to burn before someone else gets at that calorie and burns it first in the great prick story of the first and the last beautiful words and weapons. In what he calls the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas, even clarity about impending doom is a commoditized privilege. Slowly, gradually, yet startling her, a light dawned like a small moonrise in the blackness before her; the wizardly light that came at her command. She is here to witness a new kind of fire, which threatens witnessing itself: its intensity, she’s told, is unprecedented, requiring a new language—firenadoes, pyro-cumulus clouds, weather-producing infernos that spread violence at eighty football fields per minute, giving terminal velocity another meaning. An explosive lethality. The massive loss of life, homes, and habitats, the financial costs and lives ruined, all inconceivable. A world-ending event, on many scales at once.
Meshed together by YGRG using quotes from The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics by T. J. Demos, Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway, Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, The Weird and The Eerie by Mark Fisher, The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin, Queer Ecology by Timothy Morton, Nature’s Queer Performativity by Karen Barad, The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, etc.
Strange strangers are uncanny, familiar and strange simultaneously. Their familiarity is strange, their strangeness familiar. They cannot be thought as part of a series without violence.
I propose that life forms constitute a mesh, a non totalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and conound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment. Visualizing the mesh is difficult. It isn’t soft and squishy like many of the organic metaphors favored by environmentalism or by postmodern theories of “arborescent” forms. Queer textual form can offer “an open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances”. Organic palpability has so often been adapted to authoritarian masculinism that queer ecology must thoroughly interrogate organicism and its ideological effects. Cells reproduce asexually, like their single- celled ancestors and the blastocyst attached to the uterus wall at the start of pregnancy. Plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual.
— Dorota Gawęda, Eglė Kulbokaitė
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