13 thoughts on the so-called environment

1. We have this word we use, 'environment'. I think we shouldn't use it, or at least that we should put ironic quotes around it when we do, like I just did.

2. The word divides the world into two parts. All 'environment' means is the bit that isn't you, or us.

3. Once you use the word, you think of yourself and your 'environment' like they're things, as a couple of options amongst all the things there can be. And you regard this 'environment' like you regard other things, as a potential object of interest or not. “John is interested in cakes. Miranda is interested in cars. Ralph is interested in the environment.”

4. Once you've decided there's these two things in the world, us and our 'environment', the only way you could look after this so-called environment is by being a good person, by being altruistic. Rather than just looking after yourself, you will be a good person and look after this thing that is not you.

5. The Deep Ecology movement calls the altruistic ecology, the one that divides the world into us and not-us and then says we should be nice people and look after the not-us bit, 'shallow ecology'. They also regard it as doomed, because most of us can't sustain selflessness for long.

6. They say what we need is not a more altruistic way to be a self, but a more realistic sense of what a self is.

7. Because the self that's created when we believe in words like 'environment' in anything other than an ironic or pragmatic sense is pretty much bullshit. There is no environment, and there is no us. All there is is an ecology, a mesh of stuff interacting, eating each other and shitting each other and fucking each other and giving birth to each other. We're just the bit of it that has the capacity for abstraction, and therefore the capacity for forgetting.

8. We're like almond blossoms forgetting we're part of the tree, or people on TV thinking they'll persist when the screen is turned off. All they are is a pattern, a configuration of the screen's radiance. When the radiance fades, so do they.

9. How to remember? They say logical argument won't work. That to remember what you are, that you're a fold, a twist, a knot in a sticky inescapable web, a knot with the capacity to forget but still just a local tying-together of much longer threads, takes something else, something that operates on your little heart-of-hearts. Because in your little heart-of-hearts you think you're something else. But your little heart-of-hearts is full of shit on this one and so is mine.

10. Woundedness is part of it, I think. To remember your knottedness in a world that forgets is to walk through a world of people who keep self-harming, punching themselves in the face and hacking at their limbs and putting out their eyes. It's an experience full of tenderness.

11. It's also to be part of a vast lineage: the lineage of life and of survival. We are the direct descendents of everyone and everything in history that managed to stay alive. Did you know that millenia ago the dominant form of life on earth shat oxygen? That's why we have so much of it. But they were so good at it that they threatened to wipe themselves out, to drown the world and themselves in their own shit.

12. What happened? They - our ancestors - evolved into something that ate oxygen. We are here because our ancestors learned to eat their own shit.

13. That's funny and disgusting and mysterious, and that might be the third thing. Our embeddedness and knottedness runs deeper than logic or language. We're made of it and it's hard to talk about. But one thing we can say about it is survival is fundamental to this funny mysterious disgusting lineage. Our ancestors are the survivors, the ones who didn't get voted off the island and so, potentially, are we. If we can remember who we are.

carp libraries

she said 'you look different'
i said 'well, i guess'
- bob dylan

1. carp
I WAS AT university. i walked to the library. the floor just outside the library was some kind of shiny linoleum. it reflected the fluorescent lights above it, turning them into hazy white carp somewhere far underfoot.

university libraries like this one are information ecologies. there are supplies of information of different kinds and different species which have learned to feed on them.


2. sorry, did you say 'information ecologies'?
YEAH.. SOME FOLKS use the term 'information ecology' as a nicer, more touchy-feely term than 'information economy'. they forget that in ecologies things actually eat each other quite a lot of the time.* an ecology, while it may be prettier than an economy, is no friendlier a place to be. there are far fewer ways to interact in an ecology without eating other occupants or being eaten by them than there are in an economy. in an ecology you either ignore other occupants, eat them, or try and stop them eating you. in an economy it's possible to sit down over coffee.

ok: it's time to go back to the library, if that's quite fucking alright with you.

what most folks are looking for here are not specific pieces of information but rather flows of information they can direct at will. this means not books but internet connections. the library is a bitch like this, a bitch with many teats. there are always more puppies here than teats though, puppies wandering around looking for somewhere to latch on to the flow, the milk of late modernity.

if you can find one of these you can direct it to supply you with whatever you want, pretty much. it's like a genie or a very capable butler:

'i wish to look upon angelina jolie! this instant, i say!'

'very good, sir.'

(enter ANGELINA JOLIE. she has enormous lips.)

..if you can find a terminal, that is. it's hard. but if you have a laptop you can just feed on the wireless signal suffusing the air: it's the tesla-esque alternative to the supply of information along wires.

anyway:


3. love, maybe
I SAW A young woman. she was sitting in a quiet corner, feeding on the wireless signal. she was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, talking and laughing quietly in what sounded like french. her laptop sat on the floor in front of her. from it came a voice and maybe pictures too, i couldn't see: the voice of some kind of love who was not nearby, maybe.

maybe love and the marks we know it by - words and smiles and tones of voice - were being translated into more mobile kinds of information and sent great distances and then turned back into the marks of love.

she looked a little wistful but more than this she was smiling. there was a gold ring or a red flower sitting on the mousepad too and i can't remember which. i've tried the memory both ways and each way makes sense and outside the hazy white carp still swam slow and ghostly: untouchable behind the floor's shiny interface.

xxxx

* fools!