## Metadata - Author: [[Bayo Akomolafe]] - Full Title: These Wilds Beyond Our Fences - Category: #books ## Highlights - But I know my father will live forever—and this is not a love-struck son’s fantasy. He will live in the father-shaped hole carved out of my body, with nothing but the remaining sinewy threads of hammered flesh left to my claims of embodiment. ([Location 554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=554)) - Though I know why I have come here, I do not have the words to dance out the wordless gyrations of memory and pain and hope, the undecipherable grumbling of a heartache so fragile, and the feeling that all is askew and that something needs be done about that. It is an itch somewhere down my back that my fingers cannot reach. There’s so much to say. So much to feel. Feelings that are not mine, but emerge from the material grounds—the killing fields, the sites of charged yearnings and gravid voids—that make me possible. ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=567)) - When you meet something fierce, too strong to overcome, too high to climb, too eminent to sidestep, too dark to enlighten, don’t take it too personally—you have merely met an antibody, whose sacred task is to challenge you, discombobulate you, disfigure you, and introduce “you” to the strange vastness of your family. A larger commonwealth of becoming. Just as soils chastise seeds, and cocoons imprison caterpillars, obstacles are the universe’s hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control. ([Location 2451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2451)) - Mandel’s experiment is one out of many that sides with Bohr: ontology is nonessential. It’s very strange, actually: “things” only emerge in the context of intra-acting relationships. This fact is demonstrably compelling for very little things, but it queers the line that supposedly locks away this strangeness to the quantum world, for if everything spills through, if bodies are not stoic mannequins with glossy exteriors and hard ontologies, then everything is entangled. Man and woman. Tree and mountain. The chemical secretions of a virus and the market price fluctuations of a commodity. The particular biological (and ghostly) incarnations of dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida and the fishing economy of an eastern American coastal town. The world is a mangle of streams, a constantly unceasing, unfolding flow of co-emergent practices and co-enactments that does not privilege ontology over epistemology or the other way around. It is only by virtue of intra-acting focal practices (which are not necessarily human) that things gain resolution and definition. We therefore cannot define a thing apart from the relationships it is part of, and to attempt to extricate a thing, to find its essence apart from the processes that make it, is merely to introduce different processes. Nothing emerges as a “thing” except within the stream of becoming. ([Location 2602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2602)) - This is a defining feature of Bohr’s principle of complementarity as well: things do not come preinstalled with meaning. The meaning of a thing or its intelligibility is also constituted diffractively to the exclusion of other possible meanings. Computers, consumers, and capitalism only make sense because of the particular social-political-scientific-ethical-material circumstances that render them intelligible. ([Location 2613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2613)) - Barad’s exposé on queer matter disturbs our commonsense accounts of reality, and speaks of the world as a gushing series of intersecting practices that spill into the supposedly “other,” a breaching of boundaries … a world that strays from the Cartesian logic of quid pro quo causality. A world where relata (or “things”) and their properties emerge from relationships, and not the other way round. A world of co-becomings so penetratingly deep that it leaves in tatters the Newtonian myth of independent objects, and the myth that proclaims humans to be ontologically unique, separate from animals and environment, and in control. ([Location 2629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2629)) - Depth after enthralling depth, we would not have “arrived” at the heart of the matter, that fabled “fountain” of truth—for reality is a hesitant allegory, a precocious child beholden to no particular tune, and with no final lessons. Even the manic search for meaning is itself a clever ruse, and the finding … a fool’s convenience. ([Location 2633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2633)) - What tugs at our strings is a reimagination of things, not as objects, but as participants. And what goes along with this resacralization of things is a redescription of the “human” as a “becoming,” not a final product. A doing, not a noun. An embodied gerund in a sentence of gerunds whose final meaning is always yet to come. As such, we do not have language (language is not a property); we do not think except with others (intra-thinking!); memory is not a mysterious effluvium floating somewhere in the brain. Old scientific efforts to locate essential human attributes and functions within the “human person” fail to account for the incredible complexity and influence of what we like to call “the environment.” ([Location 2638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2638)) - Where does being human stop and being animal begin? What impenetrable cosmic barrier prohibits one from the other? Where does the “self” stop and the environment begin? When does a man become machine or a cyborg? ([Location 2653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2653)) - Again the world isn’t a container of objects, but a differential flow of performative becomings. A stone has no “essence”; it is as much a doing as is a “human being”—a doing that tugs at the whole web. ([Location 2664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2664)) - Where Descartes cut cleanly through things, thus essentializing separation, we come to notice a lot more happening than empty gaps should permit. ([Location 2669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2669)) - What new materialisms point to, then, is a different understanding of matter. A dynamic, vital, agential notion of matter that is far from the clockwork dormancy of Cartesian matter. ([Location 2671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2671)) - That matter turns, beats, moves, wrestles, swaggers, resists, intends, persists, writhes, experiments, and summons might be a shocking thing to accept to the modern mind—because this suggests, rather rudely, that matter isn’t as mindless or as banal as we think. As we need to think. ([Location 2686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2686)) - the world is queer, a mangled, cat-cradling field of ongoing entanglements. There are no easy “causes” or definitive “effects”; the line does not proceed unambiguously from point A to point B. Strayings, hidden plots, and spooky actions from a distance (in the words of Einstein) are part and parcel of this world. Not that there are normal things and queer things, but that all “things” are already queer, so that I wouldn’t be incorrect to insist that the world is made of surprise. ([Location 2714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2714)) - The closer we look, the more we find that we never act alone: every small gesture is a generation of the collective. Every small gesture is already cooked in a cauldron of many spoons, stirred by things whose names we can pronounce, and other things that are not quite nameable. Every small gesture is already a compost heap of a million critters. Little wonder some advocate that the humanities be renamed as the “humusities”—from “humus” (meaning “earth” or “ground”). ([Location 2721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2721)) - This is the world we live in—a carnival of the unexpected, of the irregular, the grotesque, or monstrous bodies—where the hard and cold lines that distinguish you from me, us from trees, trees from economics, and economics from whale shit are blurry, leaky, and wet. Our own bodies are populated by trillions of other bacterial cells in their own becomings, but these cells do not live “on” you, or with you, or through you. They are you: they are necessary to your body’s ongoing survival. ([Location 2728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2728)) - Brian Onishi concedes that “reason and science have done as much to conceal our relation to nature as provide insight into the working of nature.” ([Location 2736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2736)) - Agency is acting. Agency is effects. The baker kneads the dough, but the dough organizes the baker’s posture, disciplines his approach, conditions his body, and resists his advances. Where do we allocate agency, then? Who acts and who is acted upon? In the coordinates of humanism, agency is intrinsically a property of the human—the rest of the world is just mechanics. We attribute agency to human beings because we suppose we have curious things called “intentions” which precede action. However, this easy causality equation that traces out a firm trajectory from human intentions to concrete realities does not account for human porosity and immersion in a nonhuman world of multiple vitalities that also have effects. In the case of the baker and his dough, both act upon each other—in the same way today’s smartphones are not just tools, but users. Neither needs intentionality to explain its effects. Our own bodies do astonishing things that do not fall within the domain of our control: we blink, break wind, burp, get tired, and feel a spectrum of affective states very often without intending them. It seems our bodies have minds of their own, and “we” are only along for the ride. ([Location 2746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2746)) - We live in, and are produced by, a celebratory, orgiastic, festive, teenage, promiscuous, and downright perverse world that offers no safe grounds for those that propose an essentialized nature as their ultimate reason for lording it over others. ([Location 2767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2767)) - Other feminist materialist scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Hekman, Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth Grosz, Myra Hird, and Stacy Alaimo contribute various ways to rehabilitate our notions of matter—effectively decentering humanist notions. But what does any of what they say mean for my mother, mean for your mother? Mean for you? How does this address the initiating question of home and place? I think the grander message is that the world is now open for play, and yet closed off seductively … and that in this playground there are mysteries and beings and other presences (and absences) that totally recalibrate the logic of our quests so that the questions to ask about the future, about our lives, about living well, might not even be here yet for the asking. There are hints of an invitation here in this ecstatic redescription of feminism: to stand still in the face of a monster, warts and all, and recognize ourselves. ([Location 2772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2772)) - In this sense, we couldn’t even say that the flower is “part” of the environment—that is admissible, but it seems clunky and mechanical, and more importantly, it lacks aesthetic appeal. We need a different metaphor. Perhaps we could say that the flower is the environment itself in rapturous dance; that the flower is a symptom of its ecosystem, or that the environment “flowers” (treating the noun as a verb—as surely Mr. Watts would have delightedly approved of). And all we would be hinting at is a “new” paradigm of thought—one that inaudibly recognizes how everything is connected; how nouns are “verbs in masquerade”; how the “other,” the “strange,” and the “alien” are a sibling emanation of the “same” process constantly exfoliating from the ineffable; how truth is impossible, and sincerity, insincere; and how what we “really” are defies notions of size, hues, grades of quality, origin, and destiny. ([Location 2838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2838)) - the world seems to be replete with things that stray away from fixed categories, things that appear to go contra naturam, defying the supposedly immutable laws of reality. ([Location 2865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2865)) - But even more scandalous than the fact that we are vectors for the monstrous is the observation that monsters are not occasional anomalies that appear when the moon is blood-red, or when a crazy scientist retreats into his fusty enclave to debauch the holy order of nature. Something deep and troubling is happening at the very “heart” of the world. Something that is not merely occasional or frequent. Monsters keep the world fresh; to the one who supposes that things are settled, that forms are given, that the road is clear, monsters spring a surprise—opening the new in the belly of the old. ([Location 2883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2883)) - Home lies in the direction that strays away from the logic of fixed answers. ([Location 2890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2890)) - Monsters are reminders of particularities—children of a world too complex to be spoken of in terms of the universal. They can be mediums of democratic expansion and forbears of new cultural modes of relationality. They can be creatures of reenchantment (I consider the effects of transgender politics on our sterilized and binary notions of gender). ([Location 2936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2936)) - Why would anyone seek out an ancient monster, talk less of the mother of monsters? It is perhaps no coincidence that Lilith is at once a goddess of fertility as well as a monstrous entity. Maybe we can infer that the monstrous is prolific, or that fertility is a matter of embracing monsters. That nature itself—the appropriate order of things that God and his righteous angels seek to preserve—is not a stable location, neat, neutral, or without controversy. That the generativity of the world is premised on its deep-seated monstrosity. That the closer we lean into the world, the more we are inspired to sympathize with Lilith and her abandonment of things-as-they-should-be. That in the grotesque, in the anomalous, in the scandalous, we glimpse not a fall from grace but a deepening of its work. ([Location 2958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2958)) - You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. ([Location 2971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2971)) - Perhaps to stay with this trouble, to pray to her, to hug this monster, is to learn—very faintly—that what stands in our way is also part of the way home. ([Location 2977](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=2977)) - But I suspect that whatever world you live in can only be a bit more mature to the extent it has learned how to honor even hate, how to hold space for its passing, how to hold the urgency of its yearning without dumbing it down under the Band-Aids of forced positivity—a ([Location 3540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3540)) - For healing to happen to both white and black, to address white supremacy, a new ethos is demanded. A quantum leap from keeping the other at bay to noticing we are already the “others,” already entangled in palimpsests of trauma and possibility and co-becoming. New concepts disturb the rigidity of “identity” and help us see how already entangled we are. How prolific, promiscuous, porous, and potent our becoming is. And how this can inspire a different ethos of responsivity. ([Location 3607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3607)) - In many African cosmologies, a call-response dynamic is built into the ways we see the world.20 In Yoruba music, for instance, you are very likely to hear the singer only within the ecology of many other voices, who seem to attend to his or her singing, answer his questions, or emphasize a strain or lyric the singer seeks to expound upon. It is something different from the dependent relationship a band has with its lead singer. The act is premised on this in-betweenness, as is more apparent in juju music and highlife. Sometimes the background even comes to the foreground, switching places in a fluid rejection of static roles. Such is the rhythm that imbues our world. ([Location 3611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3611)) - asé is the sound of the euphoric “participatoriness” of all things. The tonality of the gathering. The premise of change and the signature of hope. It is the cosmology of middles, one that hints that power is not contained in this or that, hidden away in a trope, or found at the distance. The divine is sprinkled in everything. Asé might very well be aligned with the performativity of dust. ([Location 3633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3633)) - Matter-mind … reality … every “thing” is already a quilt whose sewers, human and nonhuman, are scattered across space-time—every object a node in the cosmopolitical, material-discursive traffic of things crisscrossing, cross-hatching, crossing-out, bleeding-in each other. ([Location 3683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3683)) - Note: Makes me think of Indra's net as described in Jeremy Lent's Web of Meaning - I even imagine days of jubilee in which white allies are allowed to open that hydraulically sealed capsule, survey its vexed and contemptuous content—the slur “nigger” or its rehabilitated variation “nigga”—and compost it by saying it in a multiracial ritual that allows intergenerational trauma and ghosts to roam free, if only to redeem the word and reclaim it for less divisive connotations. ([Location 3953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3953)) - Do I dare consider transracialities that invite us to live intersectionally? Do I dare dream of a decolonial politics that allows us to confront these troubling ties we have with the supposed Others? One that frames engagement not merely in terms of reconciliation or equality among races—since equal opportunity within a structure reinforces the structure—but in terms of seeking out crossroads, and pouring libations in the places our bodies intersect with the many others that are already and already yet to be part of us? ([Location 3964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=3964)) - To a student who asked me what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to achieve, I responded in writing: “a shamanic affinity with my changing ‘world’; a magical consciousness—which for me indicates some liberation from the shackles of patriarchal godhood stories; some freedom to subversively negotiate my origins and destiny; a small life of joyfully intense intimacy with those that I ‘love and care for’; an ebullient sense of undying adventure and wonder; a restrainedly rapturous and liberating culture of insignificance—a life looking down on the wall clock, not up to it. Most of all, I long for a soft, poetic sense of serenity—a life mindfully improvised.” ([Location 4118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4118)) - the atomization of shared livelihoods into the Americanized industrial model of a father, mother, and two blond (and freckled) children does not leave room for the many fluent means by which we fashion kinship with others and the planet. ([Location 4300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4300)) - We—the consumers of modern tinkering—expect things to work for us, and become furious when they don’t. We are like the poor shoemaker in the fable of the Brothers Grimm, who goes to bed and wakes up in the morning to find that the cut leather and nails of the night before have become shoes of great workmanship ready for the sale. We could care less if there were actual elves flying our planes, bearing signals with their mouths from computer to computer, or ensuring that trains arrive on time. ([Location 4339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4339)) - Crowfoot, the nineteenth-century chief of the Siksika First Nation in what is now known as Canada, wrote: “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” ([Location 4358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4358)) - Walking the streets of Enugu, up and down Chime Avenue in New Haven, branching off into streets the names of which I need not remember nor burden you with if I could, brought me to wonder about the modern conditions that constitute us. The covering up, the asphalt, the rationalization of social being, the frenzy of catching up with time, the denial of competing agencies and their constitutive claims on human personhood, the metaphysics of completeness and wholly separate others, the myth of individuality, the circumcision of life’s sensuousness, and the exclusivity of light and shadow. We often speak about getting lost in the dark, but it is also possible to get lost in the light. In fact, a consequence of high definition visuals is that it cuts away the generativity and creativity of an image; once things are so fixed, we become blind to their inexhaustibility. Name the color, blind the eye. ([Location 4363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4363)) - Thoughts don’t come from “within”; neither do they come from “without.” They emerge “between.” It’s the same with feelings. I like to think that the gentle dipping of a leaf under the weight of a dewdrop can set off a series of events that flow through us as (what we call) “depression”; and, that the molten formation of a rock, through the intra-activity of weather and technology and story, is experienced “joy” in a specific moment. I like to imagine that when a seed falls into the earth, it experiences grief, and its grief is met by the loamy femininity of the soil, and that is how trees sprout out with joy. Perhaps those moments of unspeakable silence, when depths churn and sides groan, when words escape you, when a pill or a diagnosis doesn’t add up to much, when all you want to do is squeeze yourself into the tiniest place in the universe, it is because you—for all intents and purposes—are co-performing the disintegration of imaginal cells within a cocoon, and knowing the pain of becoming a moth. Perhaps this is the next frontier: not outer space or inner space, but the spaces between. No more jumping to conclusions—no more leaping from already-formed “heres” to “theres” while avoiding the performance of the middle! The world is not composed of things, but flowing, half-uttered sayings, never congealing into an independent wholeness long enough to be considered separate, and always part of a traffic of intra-bodies. ([Location 4492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4492)) - It took the implosion of that lone sun in my psychic and intellectual life—Truth with a capital T—for me to notice, in little drops of insight, that “making it” was more often than not an empty phrase for clinging to the rules of life-denying pyramids of social ascendancy. ([Location 4697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4697)) - The ego is not the problem; the problem is maybe the paradigm that amputates it, treats it as diseased and alien, cut off from the rest of the world, out of touch. The “solution” is not to empty ourselves of it, but to notice the umbilical cords that still tether us to a festival of vitality. ([Location 4723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=4723)) - As incredibly pressing as it may sound, the story of humans going out to fix the world that they are destroying still feeds a politics of binaries and tells a story of nature being the vassal of culture, of mind preceding matter, of “thought” being an alien brooding over the deep, and of man rearranging the whole world with language. This isn’t to deny what we feel in our bones to be urgent: the need to address poverty, to create governments that truly exist for people (and not for big corporations), or enact radically different political imaginaries that sidestep the biased distribution of suffering made possible in nation-states. The “problem” is that thinking in terms of agential loneliness, or thinking of the human as a homogeneous block of agency, has powerful material effects, and—in my reading—often leads to more sameness and disenchantment. Until we see activism as a politics of encountering the unsaid, of meeting the abject “other,” of sticking with trouble, of noticing how entangled we are with a world which the language of fixture and solutionism presumes is external to us—until we see difference-making as a becoming-with, instead of a coming-through, the violence and rudeness of the familiar will hinder us from the bold and risky “newness” that lingers on the edges of awareness. ([Location 5045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5045)) - “saving the world” is sweet tongue for sidestepping not only the troubling discernment that the world is more complex than language or thought or story (and therefore, “solutions”), but the confounding realization that the world is not a dormant palette for our most austere dreams or best intentions. ([Location 5055](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5055)) - From SDGs to carbon emissions trading and microfinance as a way of tackling poverty, our globalizing crisis-response imaginary has at its core the sticky idea that we can—if we put our backs into it—rise above the fray and create the world we want. ([Location 5059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5059)) - the world is too preposterous to be decided in one neat framework. ([Location 5064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5064)) - The figure of the tinkering human, cleanly abstracted from his environment, with power of foresight and the agency to marshal the world to his beckoning, still casts its shadow across our landscapes. It is the archetype of the one who must find his way—who must brave strong winds to find sanctuary. The prospects of arriving, of coming to definite solutions, are central to this myth of the sole human agent. This “human” has consciousness inside with which he can change the world outside. Like Le Guin’s wretched child, what is excluded in this framework is not only the idea that the world outside is doing something and is not “outside” at all, but that what we do on our own is actually what the rest of the material world is doing. If our assumption of a “reality of continuously intermingling, flowing strands of unfolding, agential activity”9 is correct, then journeys are not dead things you travel. They shape you just as much as you shape them. ([Location 5069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5069)) - Journeys are not the tame servants that bear you from one point to another. Journeys are how things become different. How things, like wispy trails of fairy dust, touch themselves in ecstatic delight and explode into unsayable colors. Every mooring spot, every banal point, is a thought experiment, replete with monsters and tricksters and halos and sphinxes and riddles and puzzles and strange dalliances. Every truth is a dare. To travel is therefore not merely to move through space and time, it is to be reconfigured, it is to bend space-time, it is to revoke the past and remember the future. It is to be changed. No one arrives intact. We have our life and derive our being from a flow of activity. The continuity between the human and the nonhuman asserts our more humble place in a never-ending tide of entanglement. To “sever ourselves” from this flow (which is to deny its significance) is to lose our porosity and thus adopt “one-size-fits-all conventional meanings” that reinforce the same realities we try to escape. In this sense, how we are already responding to crisis is part of the crisis. It is not a case of something yet to be done (as contemporary narratives about the benefits of constant innovation indicate). ([Location 5077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5077)) - The problem with accuracy, however, is that it comes with costs. Scientific accuracy isn’t about how well the world “out there” is represented, it is about how well other possibilities and accounts about the world are excluded from mattering or hardwired out of view. Remember waves and particles? Don’t fret, I won’t go there. Just keep them in mind! Especially the idea that the world is an ongoing series of co-becomings that matter in terms of what is cut out simultaneously. ([Location 5147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5147)) - New materialisms challenge the constancy of time, showing it to be out of whack, queering befores and afters, sprouting more tentacles than thin linear progression allows—hence its “thickness.” Time and bodies and poxes do not have any independent reality of their own; it is only within the porous relationships they are already part of that their materiality/meaning becomes evident. Our conventions of speaking find it difficult to express the idea that the operations of pox on your body were not in time; instead, your body intra-actively produces time with the pox. A firmer collaboration is made—there is no “before” to return to, since an entirely new history is produced in the collaborative intra-mingling of pox and body, or pox-body. As such, the pox did not cause the rash on your body, the rash-itchy-body is a co-emergent phenomenon, a “new” ontology altogether that seemingly makes it seem that has always been the state of affairs. ([Location 5183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5183)) - Note: Makes me think of Ernst Mach's ideas about time and gravity, vs Einstein and Newton. Einstein was still working within the absolutism of Newton. - the contemporary patterning of responsivity to climate change (within the frame of sustainability) seeks to assert our control over the elements and invests in scale, repeatability, standardization, and climate apocalypse narratives to the exclusion of a different ethos of responsivity. Because we see climate as something outside, something foreign, we have mounted this luxurious and exhausting framework—the elaborate maintenance of which calls on an ethics of big funds, lone interacting actors, money shots, and political promises. Not that there is a “better” way, a deeper layer of action that can resolve this crisis.13 What we are in effect attempting to do is to control temporality, which is a monumentally tasking project of maintaining our autonomy in the world. In time. In weather. ([Location 5191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5191)) - it was Newton who conceived time as an absolute linearity, a straight line dotted with moments. The consequence of this spatialization of time is that we see ourselves as within time, or time as exterior to us. We have to be in time much in the same way we have to catch a train. However, what this throws out is that there are multiple temporalities, that bodies secrete and reconfigure time in every gesture, movement, and act. The temporalities created by lava condensing into rock are different from those that are summoned in the blooming gesture of yawning garden phlox. ([Location 5199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5199)) - Because we imagine ourselves autonomous, we act in ontological tension with massive time, and because we see the world as a linear series of cause spilling into effect ad infinitum, we want to time-travel to a human future by time-freezing ourselves in the present (hence, the paradigm of “sustain-ability”) and removing the extraneous variables of competing causes crowding our performances of permanence. It’s an expensive endeavor. ([Location 5213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5213)) - We cannot stop climate change, or control it according to predetermined plans. Does this mean we shouldn’t care about global warming? I would argue that moving outside the framework of progress expands the space of caring and being accountable, and opens up a space where new patterns are possible for being responsive to the myriad ways weathering bodies are co-enacting the ground beneath, the sky around, and the spaces between us. ([Location 5232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5232)) - The gluey metaphysics of progress—the suggestion that we are here to stay and that the world owes this to us—spins the clay pot so exclusively that those of us immured with modernity find it difficult imagining other ways to live. What if our human civilization and our experiences were structured by and oriented toward the delightful exploration of the finer details of ecstasy? What if carbon reductionism was not the only way of understanding climate change? What if, when we met, we exchanged singing seeds, shared stories of psychedelic expeditions through the portals of normal wakeful states, and swapped wisdoms and rituals on navigating the ambivalence of life? What if we weren’t so addicted to growth, progress, consumption, and independence? What if we befriended dying? What would life look like? I have often asked these questions in company of colleagues, who look at me quizzically, wondering if I’d gone mad. Why would anyone question progress or sustainable development? Progress is the name we give to the curious idea that it is more important to compete in an abstracted space with faceless disembodied avatars, to sit at a cubicle-contained desk punching numbers into a computer in return for figures, to climb up an imagined ladder where real worth awaits, and to run a race whose winner is its ultimate victim—than it is to attend to the riddling yelps of a young child, to acquaint oneself with the shape-shifting mysteries of play, and to lose oneself over and over again in the swirling eddies of love. In a culture that largely defines worthiness, sanity, and success in terms of how distant we are from our feelings, how far and fast we run away from our roots, how numb we are to the fluency of our bodies, daring to slow down … daring to be still is the most damning act of rebellion. ([Location 5236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5236)) - Humans are neither predetermined nor free disembodied creatures: we are betweening-bodies in an ongoing reconfiguration of “space-timethics.” This does not mean we cannot act or be creative or be directional or organize; but it does mean that we never act unilaterally. We act in murmuration. ([Location 5270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5270)) - In spite of the many negative connotations attached to the idea of being awkward, awkwardness is a profusion of grace, and not the absence of it. When we don’t know what to say or what to do or where to go, it is often because many paths are open to us, many possibilities are known, and many agencies are making themselves heard. ([Location 5306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5306)) - This is what we have to consider: that the straight and narrow road that begins where we are—in the doldrums of modern life that denies us community, on the wrong side of colonial history, in the pit of dark places—and purportedly terminates at the place we want to be—a better world, an economically just arrangement, a race-celebratory society—is not always the road to take. Indeed, there is no such road. The world is thick. Bent out of shape. Out of whack. The square-jawed causalities Enlightenment sustained, this vocation to unhook ourselves from the umbilical connections to our bodies and their queernesses, promise us a justice it cannot deliver. ([Location 5310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5310)) - outer space is not as external or as distant as billions of dollars and millions of miles might suggest. We are entangled with those radical extraterrestrial others, with those endless miles, each mediating morsel of which is itself a destination of intersecting stardust, meeting in a trellised orchestra of music that plays unendingly in the formation and destruction of homes. Indeed, we are already a part of a cosmo-poietic unfurling of skin and form—our lives intra-acting with orbiting bodies, our individual destinies often tracked by the measured astrological positions of worlds we do not know, our telluric surfaces riddled with invading rocks small enough to never be noticed and large enough to make the headlines. In a sense, outer space is here, deep undercover, on the inside of things. And we are already where no man has gone before. ([Location 5534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5534)) - we may be finding that new homes are produced by new ways of coming in touch. New geometries of touch. ([Location 5557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5557)) - You might not find any of these projects in the news, but they are there all right. With little or no funding, in humble and modest earth practices of partial recuperation, a subculture of adventurers is meeting the universe halfway, building space stations to travel to the spaces between. They are not “good” or “awakened” people; they are not holy or special. And I do not want to write about “them” for fear I might help create a separate class of people. But it is important to note that a particular kind of work is being done—one which might be understood as a response to the call of compost. The call to take seriously the generative implications of living with a world, instead of on it or in it. ([Location 5559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5559)) - There are aspects to hope that are haunted, dark, and shadowy. In a sense, to entertain hope is not merely to give in to a linear unfolding of events; it is to allow oneself to be touched. It is to recognize that there are other possibilities—wild possibilities—and that these possibilities will not leave us intact. To meet hope open-faced is to surrender to a logic that is beyond our ken. It is to come to an arcana of many agencies. We never begin at the beginning. We always begin at a place already massaged by footfalls aplenty, by sighs embedded in loamy layers of earth, by nightly negotiations and strange rituals and spilled blood and muffled sounds and startling textures and painful interpellations and the budding promise of continuity. ([Location 5603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5603)) - taking seriously the idea of co-becoming allows for other practices of economy. ([Location 5615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5615)) - I remember distinctly thinking there were other ways to be human my body had not yet known as I moved in sync with many others. ([Location 5617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5617)) - “Shop of the Open Heart” ([Location 5624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5624)) - this practice of nonownership opened up other geometries of touch. ([Location 5635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5635)) - Life is not a ladder, whose topmost rung is more valuable than the ones before it; life is not a race to see who crosses the finish line first; life is not a circle with a discernible center or a proscribed circumference. The language of deficit drops you on a linear path, where you are never enough, where what you do doesn’t count in the larger scheme of things, where you feel guilt for not doing enough to save the planet, or where you do not always rise to your cherished shibboleths and values. Your job in this framework is to rack up achievements, faster than others, sooner than most. But what if life is a fractal with interlocking images, with parts reflecting the whole? What if life is a web, where past and present and future melt into a rapturous immediacy, glimpses of which we perceive in heightened moments? What if you don’t have to beat yourself into shape? What if there is no outside force to which you must measure yourself? What if your questions, your imbroglios, and tooth-chips are just as sacred as “having it all together”? What if you are in the most interesting place you can be in now? This home that is a dance with exile? ([Location 5647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5647)) - This realization that there is no permanent home, no permanent ground, just rupturing places and condensing fields of welcome—only for a while—drives us to find new kin in plants and mountains and human others. As your mum and I are deepening our accountability to you, we meet the many others who are your parents as well—the cow down the street, the wet anointing she spills on everything, the moon that nods as we stroll by. ([Location 5656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5656)) - We are learning to see that we are in this together—and nobler words could not be spoken at this time of vexed exclusions, legitimized exterminations, and weaponized boundaries. This is a time to linger at the edges, to lean into the troubling intersection points where the differences between me and you, us and them, queer and straight, nature and culture, living and nonliving, man and world, are not given and done, but still in the making. This is a time to stay with the trouble of knowing that there is no becoming that is not a becoming-together. The things that stand in the way are “aspects” of our ongoing reconfiguration. Enemies, bottlenecks, seething memories, gnarling fetishes, haunting creeds, howling specters, grumbling boogeymen, careening splinters, frowning clouds, green giants, gaping holes, chuckling forests. The challenge is not to go “through” them and come out unscathed on the other side. The invitation is to know them, to stop for a drink, to resist… ([Location 5659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5659)) - In small ways, we are coming to see that the things we name as obstacles are invitations to shapeshift—to reconsider the genealogy of the forms that we have assumed, and to work with others to see what we might become. If you are looking for the path that’s most promising, look for the one with the dead end. The unmapped one haunted by swirling ambiguities and moaning ghosts and… ([Location 5669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5669)) - Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness, without maps and without answers, we will have to improvise if the sun is to shine on us tomorrow. The world needs you to fly, to rush into virgin fields and, with hands outstretched, pollinate the flowers; to walk out on that career path that everyone feels is so important to have and spend time listening to the throbbing melodies of your own heart; to witness the sun rising as if for the first time; to experience unbridled fear at the precipice of life and realize you’ve been anointed; to hug a confused stranger whose brisk steps on the concrete pavements of our civilization are his only claim to meaning; to wait for guidance from a tree; to protest carbon markets and the extinction of our earth-siblings by standing still in the rain; to do something preposterous; and to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen. These are the days of ritual, of changing parameters, of paradox, and of humble courage. These are the days of… ([Location 5673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06X3TLQWJ&location=5673))