“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


Saturday, April 16, 2011

Bamboo Forest


As a fan of Heidegger's idea that you never hear the wind, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees, it was astonishing today to hear the wind in a bamboo forest, clicking like glass. It was most like one of Jarrod Fowler's pieces, strangely. I got video, which I'll upload as soon as I can here.

Also astonishing: how when walking at 10 000 feet you can go from one ecosystem to another in about five minutes. From bamboo prairie to bamboo forest, to windswept peak.

You can also see how Taoism is one of the best human things on the planet. And how some things about Chinese etc. art are translations of nonhuman objects. Meaning that some of the things orientalism takes to be expressive of some kind of nebulous Asianness is actually a faithful translation of objects such as trees into smooth tables that keep some of the tree's form.

I also learned some things about kitsch, an interest of mine since kitsch is often thought as the disgusting pleasure of the other. I now think that it's a resistance to our own weakness that spurs this thought.

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