Pushing Rocks
Inexorable Hope
As the holidays approach, my mind is on what I can be grateful for. In the image for this weeks blog I consider what the original Ghost Nets site looked like as the town dump when I purchased it in 1990, taken from a 1930 image from the Vinalhaven Historical Society http://www.vinalhavenhistoricalsociety.org.
Silencing Calisto
The image shown is a remarkable detail from Titian's Diana and Callisto in which Callisto is stripped to reveal her pregnancy as the result of Jupiter’s rape. What is astonishing to me in this vignette is the depth of Titian’s cold eye on the status quo of women’s sexual enslavement shown in the cruel expressions in the women’s faces and bodies- calm, relaxed imposition of the status quo. Cruel for how impassive they are.
The Essential Question
The essential question on display as we all watch the COP repeat empty promises for too little too late that many have now is how to we prepare the young for the apparently inevitable collapse of civilization in the face of an absence of adequate political will, for whatever reason it is absent.
This is the heart question. And before we prepare anyone else, it might be prudent to prepare ourselves.
On Time, Timing and Deadlines
We are well into Glasgow’s COP26 https://ukcop26.org/and governmental officials are making promises about what measures will materialize by 2030. Neither Russia nor China deigned to attend. Deforestation, a major source of climate change was discussed. Previous commitments about deforestation were mouthed and ignored in previous COPs.
So how should the ordinary concerned citizen regard this disregard?
On Writing
I am not a writer. I write, read and admire people who are real writers, such as all the writers in the recent New York Times celebration of 125 years of the Book Review https://www.nytimes.com/series/book-review-anniversary. I mostly read either science or science fiction and have no patience for bad writing in the former. I define bad writing as shallow characters, lack of narrative tension, too much sex & violence, absence of any compelling question, like, what if dogs ruled the planet and humans chased balls? But in the process of writing two books recently, one of my own and another a co-edited anthology, I have learned a lot about writing.
Going to Glasgow
I think this is our last year to have a hope of surviving climate change, and even many, many of us are already casualties, as are so many other species.
Everyone I know has the COP26 Glasgow on their minds, even though the consensus is that fossil fuel corporations have a stranglehold on governmental outcomes which could reverse or even halt the worst of the ecological damage and therefore little will come of the meeting.
Indigenous Peoples Day and the Italian Medici Family
The night before Indigenous Peoples Day, I reflected on what was evoked for me. Indigenous People’s Day, formally recognized by President Biden also happened to be the last day of the Medici Portraits and Politics 1312-1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I went and continued my reflections.
Nibbling On Hope at the Edge
My story in the work memoir, “Divining Chaos,” ends just before the 2020 election and won’t launch until June 2022. I am now making final copy edits. That means I can’t add anything substantive but I can review what the publisher’s editor suggests and consider a word change here or there. So in my epilogue, I can’t write about the Biden presidency, the insurrection, or global wildfires. I have to raise any issues I've considered since November 2020,…
Guest Blog by Deanna Pindell: Ecoart Strategies for Engaging with the More-than-Human Lifeworld
Not even four centuries of the Cartesian split have passed, and look where we are: Westerners seem to have forgotten how to exist. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; we’ve created our very own existential crisis. We refer to that crisis as Progress. Quantum physicist and queer feminism scholar Karen Barad…
On Joy at the Edges
Despair is a difficult position. Besides an untenable accommodation to misery, it requires considering what we hope for: an end to: war? Saving beautiful species? Saving ourselves? A next date or a meal? How much can we grieve the mistakes of the Industrial revolution paradigm or the ubiquitous patriarchal system or routine, casual cruelties?