May 11
Every day I go to the park I touch the trunk of the large plane tree standing just inside the entry gates. I believe the tree is over 300 years old because it's big enough to sense by the girth -- perhaps 20 or more average sized adult humans can fit within the column of the trunk -- and maybe I even read somewhere that it is that old. By placing my palms on this tree I am connecting not only with the tree but with the cosmos. The tree is like a medium. I connect to the cosmos via the tree as a ritual confirmation that goes in two directions. Of remembering and forgetting. My need to re-connect is a an act of anamnesis. My amnesia stems from the fact that while I am away from this tree (or any tree, since I dwell in a brick apartment building) I forget my connection to the wider universe as I become concerned with all those details that cluster around my life and cling to this part of my consciousness associated with my individuality, namely my ego. During my daily and nightly life my consciousness steadily drifts away, forgets the cosmic tree that links me to my actual ancestry among all beings living and even those who seem non-living and motionless or whose motion is not apparent to only 5 senses although I have witnessed in extraordinary moments that rocks do breath and participate in some cosmic intimacy I need other mediums to allow me to access. By touching the tree at least, I recover momentarily what gradually gets lost on my journey back to the building and up the stairs into the room with the table, books, instruments and computers. This writing is a special moment where the tree is commemorated because while the internet can take me many places the cosmic tree becomes tacit and/or I do not heed it directly. Even if that tree is taller than any buildings. The tree builds the air along with the oceans. The tree generates its own sky, its layered spheres and surrounds itself with its own canopy, its own dome, its heaven. It maintains its quiet conversation with its sacred extended family and is perhaps unforgetting and at least for this moment unforgotten.
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| Light sculpts the day before eyes |
May 10
music has always been about listening
and maybe not wanting to hear yourself think
a living suspension of disbelief in the platonic ego
even aristotle came closer to spirit through phusis
and embodied idea now come to us as vibration
and the serpents -- but whatever comes through
human language now is suspicious
our systems have been tainted and compromised
it's poetry not god that died
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| Portrait of the Heron's Eye |
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"If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these. More precisely, the forests around Ávila are animate. That is, these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think. It is to an examination of such thoughts that this anthropology beyond the human now turns
-- Eduardo Kohn 
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