“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, December 30, 2010

Neolithic

Graham Harman talks about his trip to the Masai Mara:

Even the geography really resonated with us. The human species did originate around there, after all, and some psychologists claim that people in every country spontaneously rank savanna scenes as the most beautiful of all possible landscapes when presented with a choice– as if the African savanna is still burned deep into all of our ancestral memories as Home, given how long we were there before leaving. And why leave such a mild and beautiful place anyway? We should all still be living in African savanna instead of in frozen Northlands. It’s what we were designed for in the first place, so no wonder it’s a happy thing to spend time there.


Think about how much of our bodies and minds have archaeological traces within them from hundreds of thousands, and millions, of years ago. Think about how some objects—some grasses, some trees, the gaze of watching lifeforms, the open sky—conditioned our bodies and minds.

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