02022-12-21 | Book, Environment, Reading
Still reading Ways of Being, by James Bridle. My copy of the book is already full of sentences and paragraphs I highlighted. Sometimes I am only able to read a single page because I need to reflect on the information I just received. I need to let it ferment a little before I can go on. Those are my favorite books. :-)
I learned that The Wood Wide Web was the headline on the cover of the August, 1997, issue of Nature magazine.
Network Theory, which followed right on the heals of the invention of the World Wide Web, enabled us to SEE such networks in nature. We humans use a model through which we view the world. If our model doesn’t acknowledge something we will not see that thing. It will remain in our blind spot. Once we had the World Wide Web and Network Theory, we were able to see similar networks all around us, such as forests and the fungal strands, the mycelium, that connect the trees in a symbiotic relationship.
Remarkable, but not surprising, that we needed to invent a technology in order to see and understand the same principle at work in nature.
Ways of Being is a great book for anyone who enjoyed The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben or The Overstory, by Richard Powers. A great trilogy.
I can get behind this.
02022-12-16 | Book, Environment, Podcast, Reading
This week the Interdependence Podcast was recommended to me. I looked at the list of episodes and one, with artist and author James Bridle, appealed to me right away:
Other intelligences and prepping for utopia with James Bridle | Interdependence:
Thrilled to host James Bridle to discuss his recent book on ecologies of non-human intelligence “Ways of Being”, animal sensing and co-operation, deliberative democracy, the singing origins of language, cybernetics, and a great deal more. Few have such an encyclopedic and generous grasp of this field and it was a real treat.
You should check it out, it will be an hour well spent. Link to James Bridle’s website. He also has a blog – link.
After listening to the podcast I decided to buy the book Ways of Being.
Here is a review of the book:
In this book, Bridle has created a new way of thinking about our world, about being. How would we live our lives and change our world if we embraced this thinking? If we did not place ourselves at the center of everything? Please read this important book. Read it twice. Talk about it. Tell everyone you know.
Link to the Washington Post.
I started reading the book yesterday. Much to contemplate and many highlights to revisit. Here is something I read last night:
In 2014, two biologists at the University of Missouri recorded the sound of cabbage white caterpillars feeding on a cress plant. (Arabidopsis thaliana, rock cress, is the macaque of the botanical sciences, the most popular plant for biological experiments, and it has taught us many things about plant growth and genetics. It was the first flowering plant to have its genome sequenced and its DNA cloned, and it has even gone to the moon.) Having left the caterpillars to munch away for some time, the scientists then removed them and played the sound of their approach back to the plants. Immediately, the plants flooded their leaves with chemical defences intended to ward off predators: they responded to the sound as they would to the actual caterpillars. They heard them coming. Crucially, they didn’t respond in the same way when other sounds – of the wind or of different insects – were played to them. They were able to distinguish between the different sounds, and act appropriately.
That was an excerpt From Ways of Being by James Bridle. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
My mother had a beautiful collection of plants growing in the windows of our apartment in Kóln. Among these plants were a couple of cacti. They grew to be quite large and often bloomed more than once a year. One afternoon a boy, who lived in the neighborhood, came by to ask her about her plant care. He told her that he loved cacti but, although he constantly checked the PH level of the dirt and gave the plants exactly what he had learned from books in the library, they had never bloomed. I remember his dumbfounded look when my mom told him she just gave them water when it seemed like they needed some and she often sang to them. Not a scientific experiment at all, but it taught me at an early age that for plants there is more to thriving than living in the proper dirt.
We are surrounded by intelligence. Much of it we haven’t learned to decode yet. That’s not the fault of fauna and flora… it’s our shortcoming. We are learning about it slowly. Anyway, read James Bridle’s book and you will be able to see what a possible future might look like, if we learn to interact with other intelligences. The book is not a dry scientific text. Bridle serves up plenty of great anecdotes that keep you interested. Perhaps you should start by listening to the podcast – it will give you a good entry into the book.
02022-11-26 | Environment, Reading, World
“Soil is crammed with bacteria. Its earthy scent is the smell of the chemicals they produce. Petrichor, the smell released by dry ground when it is first touched by rain, is caused in large part by an order of bacteria called the Actinomycetes. The reason that no two soils smell the same is that no two soils have the same bacterial community. Each, so to speak, has its own terroir.”
From “Regenesis” by George Monbiot
02022-10-17 | Food, Reading
In an appearance on the new Alo Yoga podcast Alo Mind Full, Kanye West said that he hasn’t read “any book” and compared reading to eating brussel sprouts.
No wonder that I don’t understand the man. I love books AND Brussels sprouts. I should take a dish of Brussels sprouts to eat at the local library to celebrate both.
02022-08-07 | Reading
Who in the world wouldn’t want to stroll along Vico Amandorla? It’s a name that smells like a promise, as soft as marzipan, as mature as liquor in forgotten casks, in the cellar of a faraway monastery where the last monk died twenty years ago one afternoon with an innocent child’s prayer on his lips in the cloister gardens, in the shadow of an almond tree, as happy as a man after a rich dinner with dear friends. Say the name quietly if you are afraid and you won’t be afraid anymore: Vico Amandorla.
— from “La Superba” by Ilya Leonard Pfeijffer
That middle sentence! Mr. Pfeijffer has won best sentence in the Dutch language twice.
02022-07-14 | Art, Music, Reading
Ai Weiwei unveils cage-like Arch installation in Stockholm:
Appearing to break through the steel bars that surround them, these characters represent the “free passage of all populations, and appealing for a world without borders,” said creative foundation Brilliant Minds, which organized the installation.
This is a beautiful sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The foundation Brilliant Minds was created by the man who became unfathomably rich by founding first Pirate Bay and later Spotify. Someone should put a sticker on the Arch that says paid for by musicians everywhere.
I am reading Ai’s book “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows”. For me the book became really interesting after he arrived in New York, in February of 1981.
There were tens of thousands of artists in New York, but only a few dozen who were making money. For a certain subset, art had become a
target of speculation and just part of the race to find the next new thing.
Art had long been a consumption commodity, a decoration catering to the
tastes of the rich, and under commercial pressures it was bound
degenerate. As artworks rise in monetary value, their spiritual dimension
declines, and art is reduced to little more than an investment asset, a
financial product.
and
Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover. If they were not going to behanging on someone else’s wall, they didn’t count as anything at all.
I highly recommend the book.
