“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


Monday, June 13, 2011

Great Q&A Today

Now that was an example of Skype working really well. Somehow the whole thing gelled and there were great questions. It was nice to see Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge in the audience and their questions were superb. We must stop meeting like this! Thanks to Adeline Johns-Putra for putting this on.

In particular, there was a question about the role of hesitation and openness, and I was able to answer well, though it was only 7am my time. The point is, ecological awareness means we have tremendous cognitive vertigo and openness at the same time as we're getting on with things. We're saving the boy from the onrushing truck, but at the same time, we are saying to ourselves “This is not my beautiful boy, this is not my beautiful house...” pace David Byrne.

2 comments:

Le vent fripon said...

i think the original quote is "this is not my beautiful wife, this is not my beautiful house." am i right that it's from the Talking Heads or were they quoting someone else? you've done some spring cleaning on it, anyway.

Timothy Morton said...

Quite so--hence the "pace."