“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


Friday, September 14, 2012

A Cloud No Bigger than the Fist of a Man

I know what Dark Ecology will be. I figured it out in Australia, and it was confirmed in France. I'm not telling. Dipesh is into it, for sure.

I know it will be this cloud, rather than that cloud. I've written the first and last words of it. Finally it feels right. I've written it twice already!

I tend to work in a somewhat intuitive way. And I tend not to want to repeat myself, either in form or in content. The most important wish is not to repeat form.

I've realized that from Dark Ecology's point of view, the first two books were the outer and inner parts of a series of concentric circles, the innermost of which is Dark Ecology. For a while I thought of Dark Ecology as part 2, where The Ecological Thought was the prequel and Ecology without Nature was part 1.  I thought it was simply going to take the ideas of the first two books out for a spin in culture at large. But no.

The concentric model is much more satisfying, from this moment's standpoint.

One thing: it will have loads and loads of pictures. Maybe even an accompanying CD.

2 comments:

Henry Warwick said...

I've been saying for a while that your "Dark Ecology" *is* what is going on. And it is implacable. It is one of the cornerstones of my present calculus:

In short:

1. We are well and truly fucked.
2. There can be no "restoration".
3. There is only mitigation (of what we can control) and management (of the collapse). *that's it*. That's what we have available to us.

Where I differ from most people is I see this as a good thing.

Anonymous said...

Sounds great, Tim!

Been working through The Ecological Thought. I like the way you have cesuras, small gaps between thoughts, rather than great chunks... easy to read, and yet a depth that spawns dreams....