Adulthood Rites - Octavia E. Butler 1988

 

[Here I learn about human contradiction and what makes us human. And about how open I am to change that redefines who I am.]

[quotes] The Anthropocene Reviewed - John Green 2021

 

[this book was gifted to me a good friend of mine. I've been going through a pretty nihilistic period in life - my work doesn't seem to have a point. Even worse, no work seems to have any point. Thus, I really appreciated the chapter "Sycamore Tree". Maybe the point really is to just witness - even it is to witness the destruction we are causing and the brief bursts of joy at the attempts of making things better. Going through my quotes again I am in awe at how John Green can hold so much witness and sorrow and hope at the same time. And I think that's a lesson I need to learn to live into.]

"From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires."

"And yet I feel as if I'm committing a sin whenever I drink Diet Dr Pepper. Nothing that sweet can be truly virtuous. But it's an exceptionally minor vice, and for whatever reason, I've always felt like I need a vice. I don't know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit."

"So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose."

"I wonder if you have people like that in your life, people whose love keeps you going even though they are distant now because of time and geography and everything else that comes between us. Todd and I have both floated down through the decades - he's a doctor now - but the courses of our lives were shaped by those moments we shared upstream."

"Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together."

"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass."

"I am thoughtful - full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless - acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine."

"Now, like all places that survive on nostalgia, it is mostly a memory of itself."

"When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you're just kidding. It's so easy to take refuge in the 'just' of just kidding. It's just a joke. We're just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruelty."

"I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them - and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."

"We live in hope - that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we're here because we're here because we're here."

"The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefitted from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life... But if I don't grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I'll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity."

"I don't believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go. This mountain will mean God, and that precipitation will mean trouble. The vacuum of space will mean emptiness, and the groundhog will mean nature's scorn for human absurdity. We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn't a choice, the kind of meaning can be."

"But for now I'm just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that's the point."

"I feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth."

"'I smell the wound and it smells like me,' Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth."

"What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth."

Dawn - Octavia E. Butler 1987

 

[I was consumed by this book on a vacation and didn't note any quotes. A lot of similarities with the plot from Parable of the Sower. From this book I learn to learn and to observe how I can be more like the other living things I am surrounded by. I wonder how Lauren would feel if about the trade with the Oankali to achieve the destiny to take root among the stars.]

[quotes] The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015

 

[I first heard about this book when listening to Ross Gay's interview in the podcast VS. There is so much to learn about the world through careful observation. The mushroom teaches me to tend to my connections, to grow my tendrils, to find nourishment and possibility where I can.] 

"Making world is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone's world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making."

"Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any 'one' involved. No self-contained individuals or groups assure their self-interests oblivious to the encounter. Without algorithms based on self-containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake."

"Scalability requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounters; that's how they allow smooth expansion. Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things."

"Capitalism is a system for concentrating wealth, which makes possible new investments, which further concentrate wealth. This process is accumulation. Classic models take us to the factory: factory owners concentrate wealth by paying workers less than the value of the goods that the workers produce each day. Owners 'accumulate' investment assets from this extra value."

"Wal-Mart pioneered the required use of universal product codes (UPCs), the black-and-white bars that allow computers to know these products as inventory. The legibility of inventory, in turn, means that Wal-Mart is able to ignore the labor and environmental conditions through which its products are made: pericapitalist methods, including theft and violence, may be part of the production process."

"But Open Ticket's buying competition has the explicit goal of raising prices. Everyone says so: pickers, buyers, bulkers. The purpose of playing with prices is to see if the price can be increased, so that everyone in Open Ticket benefits. Many seem to think that there is an ever-flowing spring of money in Japan, and the goal of competitive theater is to force open the pipes so that the money will flow to Open Ticket."

"When they came back after the war, most had lost access to their possessions and their families. (Juliana Hu Pegues notes that the same year Japanese American farmers were sent away to camps, the United States opened the Bracero program to bring Mexican farm laborers.) They were treated with suspicion. In response, they did their best to become model Americans."

"Thus, too, matsutake is an ideal gift to give to someone with whom one needs a long-term relationship. Suppliers give matsutake to the firms that give them business.One grocer commented that religious converts had begun to purchase matsutake for presentation to their spiritual leaders. Matsutake signals a serious commitment."

"Accrumulation is important because it converts ownership into power. Those with capital can overturn communities and ecologies. Meanwhile, because capitalism is a system of commesuration, capitalist value forms flourish even across great circuits of difference. Money becomes investment capital, which can produce more money. Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of livelihoods, human and not human."

"Fungi break them down into nutrients that can be recycled into new life. Fungi are thus world builders, shaping environments for themselves and others."

"Meanwhile, fungi are famous for their symbiotic attachments. Lichen are fungi living with algae and cyanobacteria. I have been discussing fungal collaborations with plants, but fungi live with animals as well."

"Indeed, one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other's world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape's ecosystem. but none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design."

"If you ever wanted to be impressed by the historical force of plants, you might do well to start with pines. Pines are among the most active trees on earth. If you bulldoze a road through a forest, pine seedlings will likely spring up on its raw shoulders. If you abandon a field, pines will be the first to colonize it. When a volcano erupts, or a glacier moves back, or the wind and sea pile sand, pines may be among the first to find a foothold."

"Although historians rush to differentiate the modernization achieved by Japan's Meiji Restoration and the failures of China's Great Leap Forward, from the perspective of a tree, there may not be much difference. If peasant forests are viewed differently in each context, it may be in part be contrast between close and distant, and forward- and backward-looking views."

"In a bureaucracy that sees only trees, a mushroom companion has made a splash appearance. Mistakes were made... and mushrooms popped up."

"'In 1944, as fears of Japanese fire bombs over Oregon forests circulate, Smokey Bear becomes a symbol of fire protection as homeland security.'"

"The effects of industrial ruins on living things depends on which living things we follow. For some insects and parasites, ruined industrial forests proved a bonanza. For other species, the rationalization of the forest itself - before ruination - proved disastrous. Somewhere between these extremes lie the world-building proclivities of matsutake."

"The singularity of interspecies gatherings matters; that's why the world remains ecologically heterogenous despite globe-spanning powers. The intricacies of global coordination also matter; not all connections have the same effects. To write a history of ruin, we need to follow broken bits of many stories and to move in and out of many patches. In the play of global power, indeterminate encounters are still important."

"One Pacific Northwest researcher told me that Japanese studies are not very useful because they are 'descriptive.' In untangling what 'descriptive' might mean, and what is wrong with it, the cultural and historical specificity of U.S. forestry research comes into focus. Descriptive means site-specific, that is, attuned to indeterminate encounters and thus nonscalable. U.S. forestry researchers are under pressure to develop analyses compatible with the scalable management of timber trees. This requires that matsutake studies scale up to timber. Site selection in Japanese research follows patches of fungal growth, not timber grids."

"Furthermore, Japanese science explores how humans can manage forests to increase the yield of matsutake mushrooms. In contract, Americans explore how the mushroom harvest should be regulated to keep harvesters from destroying their resource. Japanese forest management promises more mushrooms for the market; American science promises fewer."

"Yet, one Crusader admitted to me, matsutake might not appear in his lifetime. The best he can do is disturb the forest - and hope the matsutake come."

"Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It's not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive autumn aroma."