David Abram: “Becoming Animal”

“Darwin had rediscovered the deep truth of totemism – the animistic assumption, common to countless indigenous cultures but long banished from polite society, that human beings are closely kindred to other creatures, and indeed have various other animals as our direct ancestors.  Here was a form of totemism transposed into the modern world – the totemic insight now translated into the language of “descent by natural selection from a common ancestor.”  This modern version no longer saw different persons as descendants of different totemic animals, but recognized all humankind as derived from a common lineage of creatures.  In the wake of Darwin’s bold insights, we have learned to consider all humans as members of a common family.  But the wild, animistic implication of Darwin’s insight has taken much longer to surface in our collective awareness, no doubt because it greatly threatens our cherished belief in human transcendence.  Nonetheless, it is an inescapable implication of the evolutionary insight: we humans are corporeally related, by direct and indirect webs of evolutionary affiliation, to every other organism that we encounter.“

Richard Manning: “Against The Grain”

“America’s Northeast was once U.S. agriculture’s major force, with farms supplying the country’s densest clusters of population.  The Northeast now does very little farming, and most of the agricultural lands have gone back to forest or suburbs, an odd transition in that these are in some ways the nation’s best agricultural lands.  Unlike the western grasslands, the Northeast gets enough rain to grow crops.  The decline came as a result of a particular form of subsidy: federal irrigation projects.  Beginning at the height of the progressive era, the nation set to work on making the western deserts bloom, investing billions in dams, canals, tunnels, and drains to bring nine million additional acres under cultivation.  The historian Donald Worster has shown that this figure exactly parallels the acreage of abandoned farms in the Northeast – land that already had water – during the same period.  What industrial agriculture abandons is opportunity.”

“the ‘WHY CHEAP ART?’ manifesto”

PEOPLE have been THINKING too long that

ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS & the

RICH.  ART IS NOT BUSINESS !

It does not belong to banks & fancy investors

ART IS FOOD .  You cant EAT it BUT it FEEDS

You.  ART has to be CHEAP & available to

EVERYBODY.  It needs to be EVERYWHERE

Because it is the INSIDE of the

WORLD .

ART SOOTHES PAIN !

ART WAKES UP SLEEPERS !

ART FIGHTS AGAINST WAR & STUPIDITY !

ART SINGS HALLELUJA !

ART IS FOR KITCHENS !

ART IS LIKE GOOD BREAD !

ART IS LIKE GREEN TREES !

ART IS LIKE WHITE CLOUDS IN THE BLUE SKY !

ART IS CHEAP !

HURRAH !

      – Bread & Puppet, Glover, Vermont 1984

David Abram, “Becoming Animal”

“One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat.  Suppose however, that a bumblebee is making its way from a clutch of clover blossoms on one side of the road to another cluster of blooms in an overgrown weedlot across the street, and that as it does so the bee happens to pass between me and the flat shape that my body casts upon the pavement.  The sunlit bee buzzes toward me, streaking like an erratic, drunken comet against the asphalt sky, and then it crosses an unseen boundary in the air: instantly its glow dims, the sun is no longer upon it – it has moved into a precisely bounded zone of darkness that floats between my opaque flesh and that vaguely humanoid silhouette laid out upon the pavement…  That silhouette is only my shadow’s outermost surface.  The actual shadow does not reside primarily on the ground; it is a voluminous being of thickness and depth, a mostly unseen presence that dwells in the air between my body and that ground.  This living shadow is born afresh every dawn, or rather, the shadow is what remains of the night as the night’s gloom flees the advance of the rising sun.”

John Ruskin

“Industry without art is brutality”