Author Archives: d.perry
The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.
from “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me” by Delmore Schwartz
Wilfred Pelletier’s comment:
“For everything you do you must end up fighting–fighting for your rights, good against evil, war against poverty, the fight for peace. The whole base of the western culture has an enemy concept. What would happen if you remove the enemy? How then do you defeat somebody who is on your side? I suspect that if you remove the enemy the culture might collapse.”
“My body a dwelling between colonized and colonizer, I once carried a shame of my brownness. It was as though my whiteness wanted to purge my mother’s blood from me; I would even pray that I would wake up to find myself not only entirely white, but entirely a “real boy,” because even then, I already knew I didn’t fit in with the gender assigned to me. Contact with my Bolivian/indigenous heritage — whether that was through music, language, food, or literally touching the ground of La Paz — was crucial to undoing this mental fixation, this internalized hatred.
…
My encountering with landscape, my reaching out to it, gave clarity to concepts still difficult to put into/retain with languages. In Mexico, the rules were different: as a child, I could ride deep into the countryside, unsupervised. I became aware of my own longing, isolation, hysterical positioning, while at the same time uncovering a new relationship with (and very disanthropocentric companion in) landscape. It was by this encountering that I found god, godness — this thing in me that was also an excess, indifferent yet total grace, this thing that embraces, hides, moves through what I am, surviving what I am, yet always dying in order to be new (its newness is ancient).”
“In an experiment conducted by Haggard and colleagues in 2002, participants pressed a button that triggered a flash of light at a distance, after a slight delay of 100 milliseconds. By repeatedly engaging in this act, participants had adapted to the delay (i.e., they experienced a gradual shortening in the perceived time interval between pressing the button and seeing the flash of light). The experimenters then showed the flash of light instantly after the button was pressed. In response, subjects often thought that the flash (the effect) had occurred before the button was pressed (the cause). Additionally, when the experimenters slightly reduced the delay, and shortened the spatial distance between the button and the flash of light, participants had often claimed again to have experienced the effect before the cause.”
“Real Power is our relationship with the earth. We are the earth… [human.beings]…are just different shapes and forms of the life of the earth,…no more or less than the trees …[and]… stones…human physical, being spirit. Authority is not power. Authority is something man creates. All authority is usually based upon aggression or implied aggression. Whoever has the most money has the ability to [buy] authority, but that is not power. The industrial technological authoritarian political system that we live under, has developed a way to mine the human spirit just as it mines all natural resources. We are being mined in the same way that [oil] is mined, out of the earth. The pollution of the air, of the water, …of the environment …comes from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. Every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads,—that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit …by the confusions that are in our minds. There is no existing cure to the problem, the disease, than the one we create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can. Either we know or we don’t know. Our ancestors are our power connection to knowledge. Real Power is what we come from. It is part of the natural order of the universe. Real Power has no limitations. Real Power cannot be removed from us, it is a natural part of us. Any relationship we will ever have to Real Power is our relationship to the earth. [We must re-establish]…our connection to that basic reality, we must take care of the earth.”
(Excerpted from the spoken words of John Trudell at the memorial for Earth First activist Judi Bari, April 26, 1997.)
e. crampton
‘…heal the wounds that colonialism had inflicted on me my whole life — wounds I previously lacked the capacity to see.
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A press release once defined her style as “an adoption of sonic dialects across the Americas [that] shape the way different communities hear not just sounds but frequencies.
…
As Nishnaabeg academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2014), indigenous people don’t relate to the land by possession or control over it, but through connection; “a generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship” with the land (Simpson, 2019) is exactly what Crampton has been investigating in American Drift. As she remarked in an interview in 032c last year, “The notion of stone is something that is prevalent in our daily lives because of geography and praxis, becoming part of the languages we signal — chemical, tactile, textual, textilic, iconographic, oral, etc. That affiliation with stone, with all of its becoming, all of its generativity — all of these things come into play and that’s a long history that also created me. The stones are my family and my ancestors, a shared becoming, a shared story.”’
‘After leaving Harvard in 1668, John Wompas became a sailor, one of the earliest American Indians known to participate in the transatlantic trade. This decision probably also made him one of the most highly educated common sailors in the Atlantic World, one “who could recite and read Latin and Greek, along with a smattering of Syrian, Chaldaic, and Hebrew.”‘
“As shown by the writings of Increase Mather, the colonists attributed the decimation of the Native Americans to God’s providence in clearing the new lands for settlement.”