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.”
e. crampton
‘…heal the wounds that colonialism had inflicted on me my whole life — wounds I previously lacked the capacity to see.
…
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.”’
Excerpt from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light.
“It exists. It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I—I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding—this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain. . . . If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could . . . get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality—the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. IF you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”
“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”
Bedap shook his head. “No. Shev’s right,” he said. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”
The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently. “But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing.”
“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”
. . . Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die?” he asked the others. Most of them had, in a domicile or on volunteer hospital duty. All but one had helped at one time or another to bury the dead.
“There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. I don’t think he knew the rest of his body was all charred, he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw . . . you see . . . I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”
“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried.
“No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”
“Then where does it end?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”
https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/we-alaskans/2016/08/14/the-man-who-collects-sounds/
Click to access Knut%20Aufermann%20MA%20Sonic%20Arts.pdf
http://mentholmountains.blogspot.com/2011/06/jk-galbraith-essay.html?m=1
Click to access the_time_of_roland_kayns_cybernetic_music.pdf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaean_Painting_of_the_Buddha_Jesus
‘When we look at ourselves in relation to the geological, you see how enmeshed and tied up we are with the inorganic,” she explains, using the pigment granules that make her skin brown as an example, or the way stone and skeleton are comprised of the same minerals.
…
cleaned up, well-produced electronic music often reproduces white privilege & the hierarchical lies of the expert-making university complex’
-Elysia Crampton
You shall not go down twice the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves.
If the interior Indian is male
then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man.
…
In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,
all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.
-Sherman Alexie