“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


Sunday, February 25, 2024

...yet I Did Get Carried Away into Aggression at Syracuse

 ...I'm really examining the micro actions, including speech, right now. I'm noticing how a strong desire to impress people led me to a cheap place, once, in my lecture at Syracuse. I talked about killing people, with relish. Something compelled me to go beyond what I was saying, which was about nonviolence. 

I am struck by how Gandhi says, you have to be ready to kill in order to be nonviolent, otherwise you're a coward. That was the context. Then I got carried away. 

There is a very seductive language of violence, for instance when it comes to ecological action. I was speaking out against blowing up a pipeline--it would only hurt nonwhite people, and nonhuman beings, and so on. But I felt I needed to prove that I was equally capable of imagining violence. 

I'm very grateful to my hosts, because this new project is bigger than Hyperobjects, and I truly need to gig it and road test it before I've really "thought" it, which his how that book became so incredibly great. 

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