Author Archives: d.perry

Excerpt (from https://exweb.gearjunkie.com/top-expeditions-1970-2020-6-gasherbrum-ivs-shining-wall/)

“Out of fuel, they couldn’t melt snow for water and had no food left, either. McDonald describes how a hallucinating Schauer believed that there was a third member of the team, determined to kill them by pushing them into the void. The Austrian climber later recalled that he saw himself transformed into a raven, looking at his own corpse from above. Kurtyka himself went in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he focused on his imminent death, which he accepted with dignity and calm.

…

Halfway down, hallucinations overtook them both: Kurtyka also felt, rather than saw, the ghostly third man on the team. It required nearly a miracle of human endurance to reach a food cache that they had left at 7,100m during the acclimatization phase. When they finally stumbled into Base Camp, they just collapsed.”

‘In common with mystery religions, there were secret teachings, and not all texts were intended to be read by uninitiated people. The text appears to have been written for a higher level of initiate who was part of the way through since it states, “Now behold! I will reveal to you my mysteries, since you are my fellow brethren, and you shall know them all”,[2] but tantalizingly, the next five lines are missing and followed by “I told all of them about my mysteries”.[3] Some speculation has considered the possibility that the missing five lines were always missing and had never originally existed, their absence itself being a teaching of the text.’

It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up — living smaller, staying closer, having less — especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

…

LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.”

Excerpts (from https://www.fastcompany.com/3062246/an-exclusive-look-at-airbnbs-first-foray-into-urban-planning)

Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.

…

Meanwhile, International Airbnb Style continues to reproduce, sometimes by outright appropriation. Zoé de Las Cases and Benjamin Dewé, a French interior designer couple, were shocked when they discovered that Airbnb had replicated the design of an apartment that they listed on the platform for a meeting room in the company’s San Francisco corporate office, down to a trio of faux-industrial pendant lights, a twee chalkboard, and a floating shelf full of almost identical art objects (in 2012 Airbnb itself had rented Las Cases and Dewé’s space to host a party). The couple sued Airbnb in late 2015. “They are branding their company with our life,” Dewé told BuzzFeed. In making the replica rooms, company designers would “reproduce the exact sofa, as close as they could to the exact chair,” recalls Lisa Bottom, a design director at Gensler, the architecture firm that designed the office in 2014.

Bottom says the meeting rooms were the brainchild of Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, the RISD graduates. Gensler arranged the company’s meeting rooms around an atrium so that, “when you looked up through the atrium space, it was like looking at little snapshots of various cities,” Bottom says. All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to the headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to find yourself — at home.

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Schwarzmann critiqued the lack of locality in generic places, but Haid’s company suggests a different, paradoxical definition of locality: desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily — equal parts authentic and expendable. In his 1992 book Non-Places, Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, wrote that with the emergence of such identity-less space, “people are always, and never, at home.”

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Yet the AirSpace aesthetic that Airbnb has contributed to, and the geography it creates, limits experiences of difference in the service of comforting a particular demographic (“the vanilla tourist”) falsely defined as the norm. It is a “hallucination of the normal,” as Koolhaas writes. This is the harmful illusion that so much technology, and technological culture, perpetuates: if you do not fit within its predefined structures as an effective user, you must be doing something wrong.

…

Kanyi Maqubela, the Roam investor, sees meaning in the generic from an unexpected source. “If you go to Catholic church in most parts of the world, the mass is going to feel like the mass. There is still a sense of unity,” he says. “We’re starting to enter the world where these private companies have some of that magic to them, the notion of feeling at home across time zones in any country.”

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We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds.

Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

“…her contact hurt me as one is hurt by touching iron on a winter day: you do not know whether the pain comes from heat or cold”

The Old Chevalier, Isak Dinesen

Excerpts (from https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-ecology-of-perception/)

Well, one of the most common misreadings of my work and of my research has been to say, “Oh, Abram is suggesting that writing is bad and that the alphabet is the cause of all our problems.” This is a terrible misreading, because I’m a writer and I love the written word and I love to read, and I’m deeply given to the exquisite power of the written word to open wonders. I’m not at all claiming—and this is quite important—I’m not at all suggesting that writing is bad, but, rather, that writing is magic, and that the alphabet is a very potent form of magic, a very concentrated form of animism.

For our Indigenous ancestors, one could be wandering through the terrain and have one’s attention snagged by a boulder with patches of crinkly black and red lichen spreading on their surface, and you would focus your eyes on a patch of lichen and abruptly hear the rock speaking to you. Well, that’s not so different from us waking up in the morning, walking to the kitchen, opening up the paper, and focusing our eyes on a few bits of ink on the page, and suddenly we hear voices and we see visions of events happening in the White House or in Iraq.

We focus our eyes on these ostensibly inanimate bits of ink on the page and we hear voices, conversations unfolding between people on the far side of the world. This is animism, folks. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism, but it’s animism, nonetheless; as outrageous as a talking stone. We just do it with our own scratches and scripts. Our oral ancestors were doing the same thing with bent twigs, tree forms, leaves, cloud shapes, animal tracks — everything in the surrounding terrain was speaking to us. But this new, very concentrated form of animism only speaks with a human voice, and the words that we experience as we read are human words.

So, again, the alphabet closes us into a space of exclusively human meaning and verbiage, while the wider, more-than-human terrain doesn’t seem to speak at all. And in that sense, this new, very concentrated form of magic that we call the alphabet makes possible the forgetting of the lives and perspectives of all the other animals, of the plants, of the mountains and rivers. It doesn’t force us to forget these other beings, but it makes possible that we begin to neglect them.

So, I’m not saying writing is bad. I’m saying writing is a magic, and only when we recognize it as such can we use it responsibly. If we don’t recognize writing as a very potent magic—that is, as something that has much more than rational effects upon our experience—if we don’t recognize it as a magic, we tend to fall under its spell. The word “spell” has that double meaning, both to cast a magic within the world and also simply to arrange the letters. But those two meanings were once one and the same, because to learn to read with this new magic was to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses.

…

I’m not in any way trying to reduce the mystery of spirit to the wind, but rather to expand our sense of the wind and the breath and the air as something irreducibly weird and richly mysterious and deeply magical and filled with meaning: this meaning-filled plenum in which we find ourselves bodily immersed, from which we drink steadily to fire our hearts and our awareness. It does seem to me that one very interesting way of looking at climate change is to recognize that climate change is the simple consequence of forgetting the holiness of the invisible medium and beginning to treat it as just empty space.

‘“Utopia” comes from the Greek “ou-topos,” or “no-place.” It promises a paradise lost, defined by nonexistence. Many of the people Field photographed emphasized the temporary nature of living in this way, the gift of transience hemmed by the threat of eviction. Mobility, which is something like freedom, allows the construction of ephemeral utopias, no-places, gone by morning.’

Malamatiyya

“Al-Sulami praises the Malamati wariness of hypocrisy saying that “no man can attain the rank of these people unless he regards all his actions as hypocrisy (riya’) and all his spiritual states are presumptuous pretense (da’awa)

Consequently, the Malamatiyyas believed that the only way to rid oneself of ego was to practice asceticism secretly and publicly act unlawfully in order to humiliate the nafs from all angles, from both external agents and from the Malamati himself.[20] To illustrate such a practice it is said that a saint “was hailed by a large crowd when he entered a town; they tried to accompany the great saint; but on the road he publicly started urinating in an unlawful way so that all of them left him and no longer believed in his high spiritual rank.[21] According to the Malamati, this saint was virtuous in his unlawfulness.

The Malamatiyya school of thought deemed that adherents should not take help unless it is humiliating.”

Asked in 1969 why he doesn’t play “serious” music, Persson replied: “Well, I’d say we’re more serious [than professional musicians]… You have to realize that people exist. They don’t think of the people, they only think of their culture, a culture that no longer exists in a way that’s relatable… The purpose of that culture is to impose some kind of oppression.” The broader social implications of this perspective are quite clear. An inclusive music not only challenges the economics of pop culture, it does so by employing an aesthetic approach that incorporates the methods of that pop culture. Another band member put it this way: “If not everyone can join in and play, then it’s the music itself that is at fault.”

“In this example, the adept must surrender all, including the guidance of his Holy Guardian Angel, and leap into the Abyss. If his accumulated Karma is sufficient, and if he has been utterly thorough in his own self-destruction, he becomes a “babe of the abyss”, arising as a Star“