Speaker 1: Blackness wasn't blackness until it met a white modernity, and
Speaker 1: he needed to stake its claims to equal rights, to
Speaker 1: equal values, to equal worth, all of that. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the one you feed. Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized
Speaker 1: the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking
Speaker 1: our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is bio Ocoma Lafe. He's
Speaker 1: a widely celebrated international speaker, post humanist thinker, poet, teacher,
Speaker 1: public intellectual essayist, and the author of two books, one
Speaker 1: of which Bio and Eric discuss here, called These Wilds
Speaker 1: Beyond Our Fences Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search
Speaker 1: for Home. Hi Bio, welcome to the show. Good to
Speaker 1: see your brother. I am doing very good. We're going
Speaker 1: to be discussing your book called These Wilds Beyond Our
Speaker 1: Fences Letters to My Daughter on humanity Search for Home.
Speaker 1: But before we do that, we'll start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's
Speaker 1: talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: looks up at their grandparents as well. Which one wins,
Speaker 1: and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to know what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life and in the work that you do. I
Speaker 1: know that parable, at least an iteration of it, a variant,
Speaker 1: and it came to me through the interlocking walls and
Speaker 1: sieves and borders and boundaries of my faith. It was
Speaker 1: highly Christianized version, basically saying the premise of course, is
Speaker 1: that we're all born to the sinful nature, original sin
Speaker 1: lurking somewhere within us. Your choice determines if you're holy
Speaker 1: slash righteous, or you end up in eternal damnation. So basically,
Speaker 1: I learned the story of the Two Wolves in terms
Speaker 1: of sinful nature and the crystological selvific work of the Christ.
Speaker 1: I no longer see the world in those binarizing ways,
Speaker 1: so I don't think we're locked in some civilizational or
Speaker 1: spiritual eternal battle between good and evil. But that story
Speaker 1: still makes some sense in terms of an invitation to
Speaker 1: pay attention to the world around us, the intelligences around us.
Speaker 1: And I love the maturiality, the humble gesture feeding something, right,
Speaker 1: it's service, but it's also a way of decentering us
Speaker 1: as humans. Right. So I like the idea of feeding
Speaker 1: and nurturing something other than ourselves. Right. So I hear
Speaker 1: this story right now, responding spontaneously because you've asked me to.
Speaker 1: I hear it as an ecological invitation to pay attention
Speaker 1: in different ways to those things that exceed us, and
Speaker 1: I'll vaunted centrality as the species of note on this planet.
Speaker 1: That's how I respond. Thank you. So I want to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you a question that comes from
Speaker 1: your work, and I don't I don't quite recall where
Speaker 1: I found it in your work, but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I do so much research for a guest. By the
Speaker 1: time I get here, I'm like, I don't remember where
Speaker 1: I saw this, but it was a question I believe
Speaker 1: you were asking. So I want to ask it to you,
Speaker 1: and it is, what is the most beautiful thing in
Speaker 1: the world for you right now? I cannot help with
Speaker 1: smile because I ask the same question to a mentor, friend,
Speaker 1: colleague a couple of years ago, what is the most
Speaker 1: beautiful thing to you right now? And I think I
Speaker 1: will respond the way she responded this moment because it's
Speaker 1: connected to all other moments. We may not feel like
Speaker 1: the contemporaneous, populated by threats of World War three, or
Speaker 1: by the threat of climate collapse, or by the terrible
Speaker 1: stories of racial injustice, we may not feel that this
Speaker 1: is a beautiful moment. But I don't think beauty is
Speaker 1: necessarily that which is harmonious. I think the sacred is
Speaker 1: that which invites us to worship, that which invites us
Speaker 1: to long after something else, So that beauty becomes a doing.
Speaker 1: To do beauty, in the words of Tony Morrison, is
Speaker 1: to meet the world in ways that appreciates our humble
Speaker 1: space in its promiscuous worlding of itself. So this moment
Speaker 1: is connected to all other moments. It's processoral, it's entangled.
Speaker 1: It's the working out of something so miraculous that words
Speaker 1: cannot capture it. This moment is the most beautiful. That
Speaker 1: makes me think of an idea I've often sort of
Speaker 1: thought about, which is, if every moment is sacred, and
Speaker 1: everything is sacred, then it's inverse would be no moment
Speaker 1: or nothing is more sacred than any other moment. And
Speaker 1: that used to disturb me, and that actually used to
Speaker 1: trouble me. It somehow seems correct to me now in
Speaker 1: some way it feels like, yes, everything is just kind
Speaker 1: of what it is, and and what we imbue it
Speaker 1: with is so critical. But I'm kind of curious just
Speaker 1: how you would reflect on that. Well, I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: the umbrella concept of everything, and I'm thinking of how
Speaker 1: how the world eases it's away from such categoricity like everything.
Speaker 1: I think that's a convenience of our language, the language
Speaker 1: were sharing right now, But when I think about a sacred,
Speaker 1: I think about how things spill. You know, how things
Speaker 1: call for excruciating specificity. You know, I often refer to
Speaker 1: my son, who is, in the parlance of dominant psychological
Speaker 1: paradigms on the autistic spectrum. If you told my son
Speaker 1: it's time for food, he's four years old, he would
Speaker 1: not like that you said that at all. But if
Speaker 1: you told him it's time to eat porridge, which he loves,
Speaker 1: he would say, ah ha, yes, I love some porridge.
Speaker 1: Food and porridge are not in the same schema. We
Speaker 1: organize the world in neat and convenient containers, burgers, rice, eba.
Speaker 1: Do do All of that is, you know, part of
Speaker 1: a schema that we call food. To him, porridge isn't food.
Speaker 1: You can't collapse things like that. The world is deeply
Speaker 1: specific to him. You can't gloss over things. I think
Speaker 1: the sacred is a realization, and maybe even more than
Speaker 1: a realization, that what philosophers might call thinginess or being
Speaker 1: is always a becoming right, that Eric is not quite
Speaker 1: as eric as he thinks he is, or as society
Speaker 1: might think he is. Eric is a nomadic spilling, a
Speaker 1: concept that is diasporic and yet to come, and that,
Speaker 1: for me causes me to gasp. Right, it's a realization
Speaker 1: that there's nothing we can do to pin this thing down,
Speaker 1: this thing that we rudely call reality or truth or whatever.
Speaker 1: There's nothing we can do to finalize it or capture it,
Speaker 1: because the moment to capture it, it's already gone, is
Speaker 1: doing something else. It's experimenting with possibility and impossibility. So
Speaker 1: it's not quite the case that we can come up
Speaker 1: with a heuristic and say everything is sacred and everything
Speaker 1: is equally sacred. I think that is a moral structure.
Speaker 1: I think there other ways to come eve of processual
Speaker 1: sacredness that does not need to be reduced to a
Speaker 1: notion of equality. I think we can say that spending
Speaker 1: time with our kids and protesting on the streets may
Speaker 1: not have equal importance to a moment what could be
Speaker 1: equally sacred? Right, we need to live in a world
Speaker 1: where things are worthier than others. If everything were equally worthy,
Speaker 1: then I don't think survival will be possible. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: it's that idea of what's most beautiful right now, right,
Speaker 1: And so to orient that way is to say, in essence,
Speaker 1: for at least this moment. For this orientation, I'm going
Speaker 1: to set aside that it should be this way, it
Speaker 1: should be that way, this should be happening, this shouldn't
Speaker 1: be happening. I set that aside, and I go, what's
Speaker 1: beautiful is here? However this all happened, which is countless
Speaker 1: causes and conditions tear, and it's beautiful. And then we
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, going between the absolute and the relative.
Speaker 1: You know, you're kind of going back and forth between
Speaker 1: these ideas of On one hand, some part of me
Speaker 1: in order to find the moment beautiful, has to drop
Speaker 1: into it exactly as it is. And there's also a
Speaker 1: part and a place that has to be, like you said,
Speaker 1: making decisions about what's more important. You know, all right, well,
Speaker 1: this moment is beautiful the way it is, but I
Speaker 1: probably should stop spending it on playing Candy Crush and
Speaker 1: go spend it my son, right, you know, Like, yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: that's a very worthy example right there. I don't want
Speaker 1: to wade too deep into this because I'm gonna show
Speaker 1: my catastrophic ignorance in this area. But I don't know autism. Well,
Speaker 1: but I'm curious if what you just said is true
Speaker 1: more broadly with autism is that categories don't exist in
Speaker 1: the way for an artistic person in the same way
Speaker 1: that they do for the rest of us, right, because
Speaker 1: we divide reality up into categories and concepts. I heard
Speaker 1: you on I think it was Rick Archer showed. I
Speaker 1: won't get the quote right, but the minute you name
Speaker 1: something blue, you've excluded everything else. Right, You've done violence
Speaker 1: to the landscape. In a sense, do artistic people have
Speaker 1: less of that? Categorization and conceptualization? Is that a signature
Speaker 1: of that. It's often pathologized as a failure to have
Speaker 1: a concept of mind, the very notion of autism. It's
Speaker 1: like an excruciating self involvement, which I don't agree with.
Speaker 1: Is like facing any words so much that you caught
Speaker 1: out from the senses of the world around you and
Speaker 1: thought as usual. Right, the normative, so called neuro typically
Speaker 1: have been in the world, right. I think that's why
Speaker 1: the literature emphasizes a spectrum. Yes, there's no such thing
Speaker 1: as a particular way that is universal for everyone who
Speaker 1: might identify with that spectrum. There is no one thing.
Speaker 1: So I want to stay with the specificity of my
Speaker 1: relationship with my son, and notice that he does something
Speaker 1: that I named today. I found the courage to name
Speaker 1: it today. Of course, every naming is a risk, but
Speaker 1: I did name it. I called it, you know, the
Speaker 1: Greek hero theseus um. And there's a philosophical riddle about
Speaker 1: the ship of Theseus that I don't want to get
Speaker 1: into right now. But it's about the metaphysics of identity,
Speaker 1: like where is the ship if you take pieces of
Speaker 1: the ship and you make those pieces another ship, which
Speaker 1: is the real ship? Or which is the original ship?
Speaker 1: Which is thesisist ship? So my son does something that
Speaker 1: I call tracing. He traces. He borrows things or features
Speaker 1: that should belong to other things, and he makes it
Speaker 1: is his own, like the other day as well as
Speaker 1: to day. He takes a little bit of blue from
Speaker 1: a blue book, rubs his hand over it. Of course
Speaker 1: it's not leaking in any way, but he rubs his
Speaker 1: hand over it, and it does this, What are you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm painting my face blue? Right? And then it takes white.
Speaker 1: It's like maybe to him, maybe to see through his
Speaker 1: eyes is to see how colors are dancing all over
Speaker 1: the place. Maybe things are not as neat and tidy
Speaker 1: and discrete as the way that I would see things.
Speaker 1: So I call it this use in tracing. He knows
Speaker 1: identity is spilling, he knows identity is not stable, and
Speaker 1: he's part of that composing of possibility by tracing things
Speaker 1: with each other. Maybe that's part of his architecture, the
Speaker 1: refusal to see things in such rigid categories. Again, I
Speaker 1: use this language very with great hesitation. We as neurotypicals,
Speaker 1: have learned to see the world. Get your hesitation on
Speaker 1: the word neurotypical, because in the same way that autism
Speaker 1: is on the spectrum, you certainly would say to label
Speaker 1: everyone else. There's huge variety within that. It does make
Speaker 1: me think about though, the idea that and I think
Speaker 1: you said this again on perhaps on Rick Archer's show,
Speaker 1: that in your indigenous Nigerian culture, that insanity was often
Speaker 1: seen as an opportunity for a breakthrough. Yes, who the
Speaker 1: europa people called baba laos, who are a group of
Speaker 1: pristly people who have adopted or have inherited some shamanic skills,
Speaker 1: ways of listening to plants, listening to the environment, healing arts,
Speaker 1: listening to them, studying with them. I learned fascinating things.
Speaker 1: Now these are people of my own culture. But I
Speaker 1: grew up again, like I've implied of stated explicitly, in
Speaker 1: a crystal centric subculture, and I learned quickly to demonize
Speaker 1: my own culture, to see it as inadequate because it
Speaker 1: wasn't quite up to par with what was received by
Speaker 1: our hitherto colonial masters. But then I went to them,
Speaker 1: I was driven to them. I had to sit with them,
Speaker 1: and I learned from them this idea that sanity, what
Speaker 1: we rudely call sanity, is not as complete or as
Speaker 1: close as we think it is right, that there are
Speaker 1: other ways of being in the world that have been
Speaker 1: pathologized or pathologizeable because we live in the city, and
Speaker 1: the city has its imperatives, and we have to get
Speaker 1: by and we have to be productive. And so we've
Speaker 1: inadvertently caught off our connections with ancestry with voices, with spirits,
Speaker 1: right because we've built a highway in the middle of
Speaker 1: the forest. And so I remember asking one of the
Speaker 1: bab Alaus, what if someone presents to you a potential
Speaker 1: client with what we Western trained psychologists call or dietree hallucination,
Speaker 1: hearing voices in your head, what do you do about it?
Speaker 1: And he was confused by my concern, like, why would
Speaker 1: you want to medicate that's possibly a gift right there.
Speaker 1: That could be your grandmother or someone whispering to you.
Speaker 1: So you guys have no conception of dreams. You guys
Speaker 1: have no conception of someone coming back and speaking to you.
Speaker 1: In other words, their ontology was full and robust, teeming
Speaker 1: with life, not this mercantile, rationalistic rectilinear arrangement that we
Speaker 1: call modernity. It was filled with animated animsis. So it
Speaker 1: is with that understanding that I make the claim that
Speaker 1: what we rudely call insanity here might to them be
Speaker 1: a gift and opening an invitation to listen more instead
Speaker 1: of a an invitation to put a band aid and
Speaker 1: get back to progress as quickly as possible. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: certainly been people who have suggested that the Biblical profits,
Speaker 1: were they around today, would probably be labeled schizophrenic and
Speaker 1: locked up. And yet we sort of have based, you know,
Speaker 1: two thousand years of culture upon them, you know, which
Speaker 1: raises all kinds of interesting questions. It makes me think
Speaker 1: of that classic Christian Murdy quote, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: it's no measure of health to be well adjusted to
Speaker 1: it profoundly to a profoundly sick society. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think these questions are really interesting and difficult ones,
Speaker 1: because if you are embedded in a profoundly sick society,
Speaker 1: you are still embedded in that society, and to not
Speaker 1: function in it can be a great suffering, you know. So,
Speaker 1: so you know, we see what schizophrenia does. It is not,
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases of benign condition for the
Speaker 1: people and the and the families who have it. And
Speaker 1: maybe in a world that was structured differently, we would
Speaker 1: be able to nurture those gifts in some way, and
Speaker 1: that doesn't appear to be the world we inhabit. So
Speaker 1: then that makes how do you deal with and treat that?
Speaker 1: I just to find it a really interesting question because
Speaker 1: on one hand, you're like, well, I want to honor
Speaker 1: the gifts this thing has and I want to explore
Speaker 1: it and see what's in it. And then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, you're like, and I can't separate this person
Speaker 1: from their culture that they're embedded in right now, in
Speaker 1: the society they live in, and so what is the
Speaker 1: best quote unquote healing for that person in this state?
Speaker 1: It's just very interesting thing to think about. This is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I'm highly suspicious of notions of
Speaker 1: healing that are popular today. Well, don't let me use
Speaker 1: the phrase highly suspicious, but cautious about the ways we
Speaker 1: use terms of wholeness and healing. And I don't think
Speaker 1: of any synonym. But but the idea of healing is
Speaker 1: often a power move, a way of tethering ourselves to
Speaker 1: the familiar. Right, it's a way of just like identity
Speaker 1: is a tracing, it's a snapshot of a moment. We
Speaker 1: only deploy identity paradigmse in a way to respond to
Speaker 1: an ecological constraint. Right, blackness wasn't blackness until it met
Speaker 1: a white modernity, and it needed to state its claims
Speaker 1: to equal rights, to equal values, to equal worth, all
Speaker 1: of that, and so it said, this is what I am.
Speaker 1: I will be seen as equal in the eyes of
Speaker 1: the state. But so identity is of course a power move,
Speaker 1: just as healing is. In a sense, it's a quest
Speaker 1: to be seen and recognized in particular ways. The thing
Speaker 1: is that that is dangerously potentially valuable for fascism and
Speaker 1: fascist interests, because once we think of ourselves as bodies
Speaker 1: within a containing environment, and we think of healing as
Speaker 1: adaptation to that environment. We could very well be adapting
Speaker 1: to circumstances that proliferate our incarceration in that environment. It's like,
Speaker 1: what if in some near future, to be well means
Speaker 1: to be well connected to a laptop, right, or some
Speaker 1: other device. But that device feeds on the environment. It's
Speaker 1: fieled by the demise the equal side, the death of
Speaker 1: other species. But to be well, we need to be
Speaker 1: we need to be connected to that system or device.
Speaker 1: Then we run into problems. Right. So I hear you
Speaker 1: when you say we need to live in this world.
Speaker 1: But I'm also not particularly given to the world as
Speaker 1: a world. I think there are worlds within worlds within
Speaker 1: worlds within worlds, right, and the world is a worlding right,
Speaker 1: And so this is probably what might be heard as
Speaker 1: the performative potential of a crack or an illness or
Speaker 1: a sickness. You know that something about that is refuses
Speaker 1: to give itself to the world as it is and
Speaker 1: potentially links us to other worlds. Now, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that it's romantic. I'm not saying that autism or just
Speaker 1: being autistic means that other worlds are immediately available. But
Speaker 1: I think that it's a line of flight. This is
Speaker 1: a Delusian concept from the French philosopher that autism seems
Speaker 1: to be like a break away from sanity, right from
Speaker 1: the rector linearism of sanity, and potentially leads to other
Speaker 1: ways of being and becoming with the world. I could
Speaker 1: tell you the story of a man called Fernand Delini,
Speaker 1: who was a French probably never described himself as a
Speaker 1: philosopher or an artist, who was a provocateur on some term,
Speaker 1: but he created this. He called it attempts or tentatives
Speaker 1: in French, you know, communities of interest, where he refused
Speaker 1: to pathologize autism, especially of the nonverbal kind, and decided
Speaker 1: to listen right to follow these children as avatars of
Speaker 1: the not yet glimpsed new, instead of trying to perpetuate
Speaker 1: an inclusionary politics by forcing them into what we already know,
Speaker 1: how about we co create a transgressive politics. And my brother,
Speaker 1: I think that is what we might need to start
Speaker 1: paying attention to today, because we're stuck and our sanity
Speaker 1: is getting us nowhere. I imagine then this is a
Speaker 1: question that you're living deeply into right now, which is
Speaker 1: if you have a son who is labeled as autistic, right,
Speaker 1: And I know you do that hesitatingly, but we've used
Speaker 1: that term. You've got to be wrestling with to what
Speaker 1: extent do I try and help him adjust to this
Speaker 1: world because it's our children, right, I mean, we have
Speaker 1: this thing that's like, we've got a whole another conversation
Speaker 1: about finding a home, right that your whole book is about.
Speaker 1: We haven't even gotten there yet, right, But but I
Speaker 1: know from reading you how deeply making sure that your
Speaker 1: children are okay and home in the world and supported
Speaker 1: in the world is so important to you. So you've
Speaker 1: got this desire to honor who your son is and
Speaker 1: what those gifts are and what that brings forward, and
Speaker 1: what that path of flight is for him, and a
Speaker 1: desire to say, oh, and I've also got to make
Speaker 1: sure that once we're not here, he's taken care of.
Speaker 1: You must really be deep in not just thinking about
Speaker 1: these questions but living them right now. It is paradoxical.
Speaker 1: It's not a contradiction, but the capacity to hold tensions right,
Speaker 1: noticing on one hand the risk of cure, the risk
Speaker 1: of a cure, right, Yeah, that when we speak about
Speaker 1: cures and restoration and justice, you risk perpetuating the known
Speaker 1: right were secured, you get away from your mutational possibility
Speaker 1: to get back to what we already know, the figure
Speaker 1: that we already know. And this plays out in many
Speaker 1: forms of so called pathologies, psychopathologies that we can name, species,
Speaker 1: uh disorder, and all of that. You know, you can
Speaker 1: name them. But on the other hand, you also want
Speaker 1: to to notice that no world sprouts intact from the previous,
Speaker 1: that every world is a local co performing of possibilities,
Speaker 1: like even capitalism. I do not think of capitalism as evil, right,
Speaker 1: or modernity as something to be banished, because modernity is
Speaker 1: not a pure concept, right, There's no thing called modernity.
Speaker 1: It's an analysis, that's right. It's speculative too as well,
Speaker 1: but embedded in every world holding process, every terror forming politics,
Speaker 1: is glimpses of what might yet be. So meeting my
Speaker 1: son is not about dragging him out pure and intact
Speaker 1: from the evil world that is, so that he can thrive,
Speaker 1: motionless and transcendent in the world that hasn't yet come.
Speaker 1: That's too puritanical for me. It's about meeting him halfway.
Speaker 1: For all the words of Karen barand meeting him halfway.
Speaker 1: So I really want to follow him. My wife and I,
Speaker 1: our family is built around following him, our son, you know,
Speaker 1: and his line of flight. That we also want to
Speaker 1: give him vitamin D yes right, Vitamin D and vitamin
Speaker 1: kay too, and fish oil so that his body and
Speaker 1: his gut can signed some comfort with the foods of
Speaker 1: this planet. Right. So there is no pure liberation. There
Speaker 1: is only a diffractive, middling process. Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 1: reason why some of our politics and its searched for
Speaker 1: purity to sterilize the others, tends to repeat and reproduce
Speaker 1: what it is trying to escape. Let's change direction a
Speaker 1: little bit. I want to come to the idea that
Speaker 1: was at the heart of your book, and it was
Speaker 1: really this idea of finding a home for your daughter.
Speaker 1: You say, I make a promise to give you a home,
Speaker 1: to work for your future, to love you with my darkness,
Speaker 1: to be the ground upon which you stand to greet
Speaker 1: a whole new world. I promised to be your father.
Speaker 1: He wrote a whole book about this, so me asking
Speaker 1: you to summarize this very quickly is unfair. But tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit about as you went deeper into this,
Speaker 1: how the word home changed for you or your idea
Speaker 1: of home changed for you. I will start off with
Speaker 1: the story the Euroba creation myth that the heavens populated
Speaker 1: by deities called Arisha's that at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: world filled with waters through and through no lands to
Speaker 1: be seen anywhere. A delegation of God's came down from
Speaker 1: heaven on the spider's web, the one that is called
Speaker 1: king with a calabash and filled with sand on one
Speaker 1: hand and a chicken on the other hand, and descended
Speaker 1: on the spider's web. Don't ask me how. And the
Speaker 1: first thing that was done was to spread the sand,
Speaker 1: the soil underwaters, and then to deploy this chicken to
Speaker 1: basically spread spread the sand. And that's how you have
Speaker 1: the United States of America in a nutshell. I think
Speaker 1: I refer to this story because it's quite meaningful to
Speaker 1: me now, the dustiness of home. I started out that
Speaker 1: writing project, this book, with an idea of home as
Speaker 1: a permanent form of arrival. Right. What instigated this was
Speaker 1: the loss of my father, and in my mind, he
Speaker 1: was perched somewhere in heaven right, at least in the
Speaker 1: ways that I was retrospectively analyzing it, that he was
Speaker 1: somewhere in heaven, and heaven represented a form of utopian arrival.
Speaker 1: In the by and by, I will arrive home. You
Speaker 1: know that song, there's world, There's not a home, moms
Speaker 1: the best American accent I can pull. But but yes,
Speaker 1: it was a rival. But by the end of the book,
Speaker 1: I was already failing at arriving. In a sense, the
Speaker 1: book is an ethnography of failure that even my promise
Speaker 1: to my daughter, he's already failed in a sense that
Speaker 1: I cannot provide her a final home. I cannot provide
Speaker 1: her absolute security. I cannot protect her from everything. Um,
Speaker 1: I cannot do all the things that I think I
Speaker 1: want to do as a father. In fact, I don't
Speaker 1: even know if I can term myself a father. I
Speaker 1: can barely call myself a father. Maybe I'm a becoming father.
Speaker 1: Because at the middle and at the end of the book,
Speaker 1: my conception of home was written as having shifted. Right,
Speaker 1: it had changed to become something else. Home no longer
Speaker 1: as what lies at the end of time, but home
Speaker 1: as the middling temporality, as the ongoing nous of being
Speaker 1: in the mess. Right that even our failure to make
Speaker 1: her home is some kind of homemaking practice that might
Speaker 1: remind us of a chicken surrounded by messy waters spreading
Speaker 1: sand everywhere in the hope of right. So it's it's
Speaker 1: like the book is about the failure to arrive because,
Speaker 1: as those who have read the book, the book ends
Speaker 1: with a plot twist. And I might just say it
Speaker 1: because I don't care at this point that the person
Speaker 1: who had been speaking and narrating the book me all
Speaker 1: this time was dead. Right, I'm dead, and I'm speaking
Speaker 1: to my daughter from the wind, and I never found
Speaker 1: the final material to make the ritual that will guarantee
Speaker 1: her home, just like Freya the goddess never really found
Speaker 1: everything to guarantee her son Balgoa's safety. Right, there was
Speaker 1: something missing, and in this book it ends with a crack.
Speaker 1: Something is missing, And that's home to me. Something is
Speaker 1: always going to be missing. Yeah, you have a line.
Speaker 1: Home is such a slippery concept. She misbehaves, she shrinks,
Speaker 1: and then vanishes in the tightening grip of your efforts
Speaker 1: to own her. You know, Yes, that's full grounding right there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is this idea of truly understanding the
Speaker 1: you know, the Buddhist term is impermanence, but that just
Speaker 1: makes it sound like, well, nothing really lasts, which is true.
Speaker 1: But the deeper understanding there is more of what we're
Speaker 1: speaking about here is that literally everything is becoming in
Speaker 1: every moment and you simply can't pin it down. I
Speaker 1: mean we try, and we think we have, but if
Speaker 1: we look a little bit more deeply, we're like, nope.
Speaker 1: You know. I love that metaphor. It's like a chicken
Speaker 1: spreading sand. I mean, it's just nothing to really grab on.
Speaker 1: And you talk a lot in the book about home.
Speaker 1: You also get into this idea and you've referenced it
Speaker 1: eight different ways in this conversation, and every time you
Speaker 1: use slightly different words, which I love. They're all very poetic.
Speaker 1: You say, the middle isn't the space between things, It
Speaker 1: is the world and it's ongoing practices of world in itself. Right,
Speaker 1: the middle is now? Yes, I use the middle a
Speaker 1: lot to signal not just the middle passage of the
Speaker 1: trans Atlantic slave trade, fame, um, but that we're all
Speaker 1: here and our ontologies that are anxious about where did
Speaker 1: we come from? As interesting as they are, right, how
Speaker 1: might things end? Finally? Like is it a big bang
Speaker 1: or a creation event? Or is it a big whimper,
Speaker 1: you know, at the end of time. And I think
Speaker 1: those questions are products. It's not to say that those
Speaker 1: things we should not give attention to, but to notice
Speaker 1: that they are co produced by and within the middle,
Speaker 1: which is where we are right That history is, the
Speaker 1: past is a production of the present and futural politics,
Speaker 1: and the future is always produced in the here and now,
Speaker 1: in the thick now, you know, to conceive of a
Speaker 1: politics that is dedicated not so much to the vanishing
Speaker 1: future as it seems. Modernity is an orientation to a
Speaker 1: singularity out there right Sometimes we might merge technology and
Speaker 1: flesh finally together, and then when I want to be happy,
Speaker 1: I could switch on my happy button right or something.
Speaker 1: I could feel a high just by punctioning some code.
Speaker 1: All of that is created here and now, and we
Speaker 1: need a politics that focuses on what we're missing right here,
Speaker 1: right now, that doesn't look so much into the transcendent,
Speaker 1: but focuses and appreciates the imminent, the imminence of time,
Speaker 1: the imminence of the sacred right now here. That God
Speaker 1: is here in a sense. And yeah, we should conference together.
Speaker 1: Your descriptions of yourself are fascinating and they seem to
Speaker 1: change from time to time. They do currently on Twitter.
Speaker 1: You've you've got a nice little list here. Some of
Speaker 1: them are pretty normal speaker, republican, or intellectual, professor, poet.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the last two that are listed right now, though,
Speaker 1: anything you want to say about them. One is recovering
Speaker 1: psychologist and the last one is fugitive. So I'm open
Speaker 1: to hearing about either of those or both. I mean,
Speaker 1: the way that I speak about recovering from my art
Speaker 1: from my science is mainly to recognize that psychology is
Speaker 1: the policeman of capitalism right. What it does well is
Speaker 1: to situate the individual, the fetish of the individual. What
Speaker 1: it wants to do is to build a society around
Speaker 1: the individual, the isolated, the asociate itself. And I, of
Speaker 1: course don't mean to subsume or collapse different ideas of
Speaker 1: psychology under the one notion of psychology. But it seems
Speaker 1: historically psychology and its gravity has lent itself to the
Speaker 1: perpetuation of the isolated self, the determined self, thought as usual,
Speaker 1: and that is pretty pretty a good deal for capitalism,
Speaker 1: which wants consumers isolated. You know, it needs a consumer society.
Speaker 1: Consumption eternal, and for that it needs isolated boundaries themselves.
Speaker 1: And so I describe myself politically as a recovering psychologist,
Speaker 1: not to dismiss the hard work and the contributions that
Speaker 1: are ongoing in that field, but to notice to bracket
Speaker 1: psychology as a colonial and colonizing concept, to say that
Speaker 1: it has boundaries that are always cross cultural or culturally
Speaker 1: closed rather, and that to think of the self as
Speaker 1: a universalizing truth is to miss out on all the
Speaker 1: things that are happening within the boundaries that we call selves. Right.
Speaker 1: And you can even listen to someone within the field
Speaker 1: who is often understood as the father of archetypal psychology,
Speaker 1: James Killman, that the psyche is not in the body,
Speaker 1: is not within the mind. Instead, the psyche exceeds the mind,
Speaker 1: It exceeds the body. What happens when we think about
Speaker 1: the world in that way, then then it means that
Speaker 1: we are in an alien situation. Brother, And to think
Speaker 1: of politics, economics, you know, spirituality as just what we're doing.
Speaker 1: We're missing out on all the fun and the terror. Right.
Speaker 1: So recovering psychologists means that I was trained in Western
Speaker 1: arts that may not be locally relevant to my people.
Speaker 1: It means that we need new psychologies, we need new
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about the self, especially in times when
Speaker 1: our our best efforts to produce results that meet our times,
Speaker 1: you know, only perpetuates it. And that also describes fugitivity,
Speaker 1: my escape or my attempts to escape the plantation and
Speaker 1: it's colonizing efforts. Let's go back to the psychology thing
Speaker 1: for a second, because there will be two ideas that
Speaker 1: came to mind as you were talking about that, and
Speaker 1: I suspect you mean both, but I'm gonna go a
Speaker 1: little deeper here. You talk about psychology being this focused
Speaker 1: on this isolated individual self, and I think there are
Speaker 1: two ways to interpret that, one being to take that
Speaker 1: self out of its greater context is going to harm it.
Speaker 1: It harms the organism to consider it on its own,
Speaker 1: not as part of its entire context ecosystem all that.
Speaker 1: So I think that's one. The other would be to
Speaker 1: say that it constitutes an idea interior wise of the
Speaker 1: self as a singular thing, when what the self actually
Speaker 1: might be is this multitude. The latter sense is about
Speaker 1: essentialism in a way. It's about the kernel of the
Speaker 1: self is within, it's the ghost in the show. It's
Speaker 1: the spirit and machine of the flesh. And the formal
Speaker 1: sense is that we are always making cuts. By cuts,
Speaker 1: I mean, in the words of a gential realism, we
Speaker 1: are always making performative distinctions between ourselves and the others
Speaker 1: and the environment. And we need the distinctions. I don't
Speaker 1: mean to perpetuate some nonsense that we need to live
Speaker 1: in entanglement. No, we need definitions and we need distinctions,
Speaker 1: but they always come at a risk. So where modernity defines,
Speaker 1: at least one strand of modernity might define, the self
Speaker 1: is at the tip of our fingers, right, This organic
Speaker 1: conglomeration of flesh is the self. And it is distinct
Speaker 1: from the ground I'm walking on. It is distinct from
Speaker 1: the chair that I'm sitting in, and that may be
Speaker 1: cross culturally different from a different, you know, way of
Speaker 1: seeing the world. That invites us to notice that furniture
Speaker 1: is part of what it means to be a self.
Speaker 1: That when you dream, for instance, your dream is not
Speaker 1: your own. It is part of some grazing collective conscious
Speaker 1: or unconscious that is enlisting your mind as part of
Speaker 1: its mattering. So there are different notions of where we
Speaker 1: draw a line but thenity just seems to draw a
Speaker 1: line at a particular place, and that's fine, except that
Speaker 1: it comes with risks. Now, because we've drawn a line
Speaker 1: between us and the cybernetic patterns in the environment, we
Speaker 1: now see the environment as instrumental to our goals, to
Speaker 1: our imperatives, and as a result, we are at the
Speaker 1: anthrople scene so called. So the thing then is the
Speaker 1: question of what can bodies do? To quote Baruch Spinoza
Speaker 1: and the age old philosophical dilemma of how do we
Speaker 1: identify herself? What does it mean to be a self? Right?
Speaker 1: So the question then is not how we leave our
Speaker 1: bodies behind and go into some misty modeled, undefined mess.
Speaker 1: We need new definitions, We need new lines, new cuts
Speaker 1: in the fabric of becoming. And until we learn to
Speaker 1: do that, until the prosthetic bursts into the thesis of
Speaker 1: our being, we will continue need to perpetuate paradigm of stockness.
Speaker 1: As we are in We're all of a sudden back
Speaker 1: to the ship of theseus a little bit right? Yes, yes, yes?
Speaker 1: What makes up me? And how much of me needs
Speaker 1: to change? You know, at what point do I cease
Speaker 1: to be me? Or you know, at what point am
Speaker 1: I more of me? And it gets back to this
Speaker 1: idea that to me, the clearest way to appreciate any
Speaker 1: of it is as this sense of this unfolding process.
Speaker 1: You know that we are far more complicated, both interior
Speaker 1: and our exterior dependencies than most of us ever realized. Yes,
Speaker 1: work with me a moment. If we are composed. I
Speaker 1: think I'm getting to numbers, right of thirty trillion cells,
Speaker 1: and we lose a day right here about. I think
Speaker 1: imagine that Eric is no longer a stable concept, right
Speaker 1: he never has been, never happen. I think lots of
Speaker 1: people would agree with that. But now I'm making a joke.
Speaker 1: I hear the double a thunder there that Eric is
Speaker 1: a fading away. Eric has always been a becoming other,
Speaker 1: becoming something else, a becoming tree, are becoming rock, yoursels
Speaker 1: are participating in things that you have no control over.
Speaker 1: Right now, the dust from your cells, your skin, nails,
Speaker 1: all of that becoming something else. What if I were
Speaker 1: to gather in seven years, hypothetically the dust of your
Speaker 1: becoming right, all these cells, and somehow, with some magic
Speaker 1: gizmo stuff, compose a new Eric right from the dust
Speaker 1: of your becoming, which would be the new Eric, or
Speaker 1: which would be Eric? Who is the real Eric? Then
Speaker 1: is it the one I've just composed all this. That's
Speaker 1: the thesis ship metaphor, Right, it's how do we allocate identity?
Speaker 1: I think that way of thinking about it is that
Speaker 1: processual becoming exceeds are identity. Once we start to speak
Speaker 1: about identity, we're always at a loss. Identity is only
Speaker 1: a snapshot or a trace of a murmuration of possibilities. Right,
Speaker 1: So the question is already inadequate. The question about identity
Speaker 1: is already missing something because of the inadequacy or the
Speaker 1: not the innaogously, the promiscuity of becoming always fading into
Speaker 1: something different. To circle back around to the term of healing,
Speaker 1: I think is interesting, right because healing or wholeness, we're
Speaker 1: going back to some state of where we weren't broken.
Speaker 1: And this makes a lot of sense in certain ways.
Speaker 1: If we take somebody who is, say, suffered a great trauma, right,
Speaker 1: we want to heal that person, but we have this
Speaker 1: tendency to say, it's this very interesting thing I noticed,
Speaker 1: which is that like, let's take somebody who suffered a
Speaker 1: great trauma, and they will look and they will go, well,
Speaker 1: there's some essential me that didn't have that trauma in it.
Speaker 1: And yes, there was a you before that trauma occurred.
Speaker 1: But to assume that we could just erase that part
Speaker 1: of you, it's like we often take the bad things
Speaker 1: that happened to us and we go, oh, we need
Speaker 1: to get rid of those pieces of us, without recognizing
Speaker 1: that the good things it all conditions who we are.
Speaker 1: There is no essential me that I just can pull
Speaker 1: these certain parts out of and get back to the
Speaker 1: more essential means. We're always this stew of infinite causes
Speaker 1: and conditions. And again this gets back to not being
Speaker 1: so binary in one way or the other, because we
Speaker 1: certainly would say, yes, if you've suffered a great trauma, like,
Speaker 1: let's work on healing, right, you know. So I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that that's not it, but I think it is
Speaker 1: also to recognize that at any moment in life, you
Speaker 1: are a sum of the causes and conditions that have
Speaker 1: been inside you and around you. When you talked about healing,
Speaker 1: you know, it made me think about returning somebody to
Speaker 1: the way they were, and it made me think about
Speaker 1: I'm a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict and there was
Speaker 1: an idea that a lot of people, I think they
Speaker 1: approached their recovery journey with like, let me just get
Speaker 1: this thing under control and behind me so I can
Speaker 1: get back to life as normal. I don't know why
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know the reasons, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: early on in that process, for me, I really saw
Speaker 1: that this was not me going back to who I
Speaker 1: was before. This recovery process was really launching me into
Speaker 1: on this path of flight. It was taking me to
Speaker 1: a new possibility for myself that had never been seen before.
Speaker 1: It's transmutational, right, It's how bodies become different. I was
Speaker 1: reading recently about how a certain species of monkey, I
Speaker 1: can't quite remember the species involved here que itself when
Speaker 1: it's wounded by rubbing the wound against some worms or
Speaker 1: something like that. It's hazy right now. I think I
Speaker 1: was reading it while sleeping or about to sleep. But
Speaker 1: that I year is what I would call the convexity
Speaker 1: of the wound, right. We often think about wounds as
Speaker 1: concave right. The concavity, it's a break into the individual.
Speaker 1: It's an invasion of the individual, and then the negative
Speaker 1: space that has been created is what needs to be
Speaker 1: quickly patched up, and then we imagine that the body
Speaker 1: does this on its own, preserving the selfhood of the self.
Speaker 1: But every wound, every opening, is already a political project,
Speaker 1: like like a monkey going on an ethnography or going
Speaker 1: on a cartography of healing by going to the same
Speaker 1: places right, going to worms or going to river or
Speaker 1: something like that. That every opening, every biological opening, is
Speaker 1: already a political possibility or recovery. And that helps me
Speaker 1: to understand that healing is not just a faith accompany.
Speaker 1: It is somehow co terminous with larger political realities and
Speaker 1: possibilities that sometimes might be so risky that they restore
Speaker 1: the familiar, because it's about the same way we approach ecology,
Speaker 1: the same way we approach the environment, and that restores
Speaker 1: the image that we're used to write speaking about the familiar.
Speaker 1: So the way of the monster comes in when we refuse,
Speaker 1: to some degree, not to patch things up, not to
Speaker 1: rush into a solution, right when we ask new questions
Speaker 1: that leads us off that trail, that well beaten track
Speaker 1: that may not be identified as healing to any degree,
Speaker 1: but takes us to a different path or possibility where
Speaker 1: that opening and the flesh can be tended to in
Speaker 1: a different way. For instance, instead of patching things up,
Speaker 1: it becomes a ritualized opening that becomes the possibility for
Speaker 1: different speciation, or different ways of meeting a tree, or
Speaker 1: different ways of meeting each other. Right, just in the
Speaker 1: same way of fungal pathogen became a delicacy in Mexico.
Speaker 1: Right with a disease, instead of healing it, it became food. Right,
Speaker 1: this is how the world differentiates itself. And I think
Speaker 1: that's the calling of our time, at least barely glimpsed
Speaker 1: and heard that. Don't rush back into healing, don't rush
Speaker 1: into the immurement of security. Maybe you might want to
Speaker 1: pay attention to what this pathogen is doing other than
Speaker 1: disturbing your convenient modernity. Maybe you want to listen deeper
Speaker 1: in a different way. How do we be with that
Speaker 1: uncertainty or indeterminacy like we talked about with you and
Speaker 1: your son, Right, you guys are in the midst of
Speaker 1: of some of that, Right, you're living in that question? Now,
Speaker 1: how do you do it? Maybe that's a better question
Speaker 1: than how do people do it? How do you do it?
Speaker 1: Fits and starts. You know, there's something the gogically compelling
Speaker 1: about this. I mean, the pedagogy of it is a
Speaker 1: question of our times, right, is subsidized by the movements today,
Speaker 1: by the impasses today, by the problems we have with cyclicity.
Speaker 1: Hence we start to think maybe the way to go
Speaker 1: is not the way to go, and so it becomes
Speaker 1: available to thought. They think about alternatives. Right, there's something
Speaker 1: pedagogically compelling about it. But there's also I think for me,
Speaker 1: a socio material force that makes some disabilities impossible to
Speaker 1: cure and demanding of a different kind of attention. Right,
Speaker 1: Like we've quickly put death in a family way. Death
Speaker 1: is this black box that we cannot cure, and so
Speaker 1: we've made it part of the furniture of our experiences.
Speaker 1: We have coffins and graveyards, right, So it's part of
Speaker 1: the furniture of modernity. I'm speaking about those moments when
Speaker 1: the furniture moves right, and we don't know what to
Speaker 1: do with it, we don't know how to think about it.
Speaker 1: I think in those explosive moments, different movements and engagements
Speaker 1: and modes of attention become possible. That's not to say
Speaker 1: they will succeed in their attending but it's a glimpse
Speaker 1: of the new. It's a glimpse of possibility. When the
Speaker 1: pandemic hit, a guy in Kerala here in India put
Speaker 1: up an altar and called it an altar to the
Speaker 1: Corona goddess, which the scientific authorities scorned, laughed at and said,
Speaker 1: this is rubbish, this is primitive. We shouldn't attend to
Speaker 1: this this way. What we should do is come up
Speaker 1: with a vaccine cure this issue. Right, But something about
Speaker 1: that was a Delusian flight away from the conventional. He
Speaker 1: was worshiping this virus as a goddess, as a possibility,
Speaker 1: as a divinity, as macanic and there's so many possibilities,
Speaker 1: and that I think he may have been pressured that
Speaker 1: he closed down the whole enterprise. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: that speaks to how the new and novelty happens. That
Speaker 1: in an exclusive emergence or eruption of new thinking, the
Speaker 1: familiar is resilient and will often do its best to
Speaker 1: put it back in the family way. Right, come back here,
Speaker 1: where are you going? Sure you aren't limb like? There
Speaker 1: are only two arms allowed here, whereas the third there's
Speaker 1: no space for a third arm, right or a third eye, right,
Speaker 1: so it does it's best to quarantine the monstrous, but
Speaker 1: sometimes the monstrous exceeds its cage. And those moments are
Speaker 1: what I would think of as a making sanctuary, attending
Speaker 1: to novelty. I think, what's interesting about this idea of
Speaker 1: an altar to something like coronavirus and let's just take
Speaker 1: out the specificity and say and alter to the new.
Speaker 1: And the difficult is that, you know, part of the
Speaker 1: reason we have an altar is that we keep showing
Speaker 1: up to it, right, we keep devoting ourselves to it.
Speaker 1: That's some of what we were just talking about about.
Speaker 1: How do you do this right? Is that you keep
Speaker 1: turning towards I just spent the weekend in Florida visiting
Speaker 1: my father who is declining quickly from Alzheimer's. And that's
Speaker 1: a disease that has been around my life, for my
Speaker 1: partner's mom. I've been around a lot of it lately.
Speaker 1: I have a desire to explain it, escape it, get
Speaker 1: away from it, you know. I mean you talk about
Speaker 1: questions of identity, right, you watch somebody with Alzheimer's. For me,
Speaker 1: I start to see like, well, okay, their familiar sense
Speaker 1: of who they are going away. Their familiar sense of
Speaker 1: what the world actually is and what's actually happening in
Speaker 1: the world is very, very different, you know. And for me,
Speaker 1: I watch it and I'm like, this is what our
Speaker 1: brains are doing. All the time. You'll see somebody with
Speaker 1: Alzheimer's just immediately, instant paneously spin a story about what
Speaker 1: just happened. And that story, from a rational perspective, you
Speaker 1: can look at and go, no, that's that's not correct,
Speaker 1: Like I just sat here and watched what happened, and
Speaker 1: that is not what happened. And but they construct the
Speaker 1: story instantly and they believe it completely. And I find
Speaker 1: it fascinating because I look at that and I go,
Speaker 1: that's what my brain is doing. It may be doing
Speaker 1: it slightly more quote unquote accurately at the moment, but
Speaker 1: that is absolutely what it's doing. It is drawing on
Speaker 1: its memories, its associations, whatever bubbles up into this, and
Speaker 1: it's creating a story out of it, and it's believing
Speaker 1: it completely. So my point with all this is this
Speaker 1: whole thing makes me decidedly uncomfortable, and I keep sort
Speaker 1: of trying to turn towards it as an altar in
Speaker 1: a way. To think about, like, what's here for me
Speaker 1: in this? You know, what is the piece of this
Speaker 1: that's giving me something. I don't like the word learn
Speaker 1: because it's deeper than that. But you get what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I do. I can't remember that anthropological accounts that described
Speaker 1: and tried to distinguish between altars and shrines. Shrines are
Speaker 1: always devoted to things that we already know, and altars
Speaker 1: are basically gifts to the unknown. Right to alter I
Speaker 1: hear myself speak about alterations that an altar is a
Speaker 1: mark to the difficult to mark too, the place where
Speaker 1: God has visited and in response to our prayers for blessing,
Speaker 1: he punched us in the face or smoked our thighs
Speaker 1: and dislodged its. Basically is that the right is that
Speaker 1: the direct passage of smite thighs smith and smite it smoked? Well?
Speaker 1: Is that biblical account of Jacob running away from his
Speaker 1: brother and he praised to God for a blessing, wrestling
Speaker 1: with God, and God smites is by smite specifically, doesn't
Speaker 1: just punch it, but smites the thing. And so I
Speaker 1: often say that Jacob walked in there with confident gait,
Speaker 1: but he left with a limp, right, and there's something
Speaker 1: about those broken edges that invites novelty, the new and
Speaker 1: different ways of paying attention. I would say, you know,
Speaker 1: in that regard that maybe the brokenness of Alzheimer's presents
Speaker 1: us with new names, new ways of naming things, new
Speaker 1: ways of meeting the transitory, transient, ephemeral nature of the world.
Speaker 1: And in spite of the fact that it registers to us,
Speaker 1: you know, in our convenient positioning as proper subjects as
Speaker 1: a pathology, that maybe there's something about it that might
Speaker 1: very well link up with what the colleague of mine,
Speaker 1: Lewis Lewis Holsman, calls the joy of Alzheimer's, right, that
Speaker 1: there's something that is available in that disabling moment, that
Speaker 1: crack in completeness, that invites an altar, an altar a
Speaker 1: place of falling apart, a place of humility. But your
Speaker 1: question really is how do we get there right? How
Speaker 1: do we alter things this way? How do we come
Speaker 1: to this moment? And I would say the answer is
Speaker 1: somewhere in everything I've said that the conditions are not
Speaker 1: always possible. We're dealing with territorial forces here, right. Novelty
Speaker 1: is the concatenation of multiple agencies, not human ones. Right.
Speaker 1: The new does not right in the back of our
Speaker 1: manifestoes or our genius. It comes indelible, sometimes inhabtant and
Speaker 1: unspeakable moments. It might come between other species entirely that
Speaker 1: have nothing to do with the human right. But we're
Speaker 1: dealing with principalities and paths in a sense. But there
Speaker 1: are sometimes, and I don't want to reduce everything to
Speaker 1: be intelligible, but there's sometimes when the world shifts in
Speaker 1: such a way that it gives us room to approach
Speaker 1: the altar, or to make an altar. And this is
Speaker 1: what I mean by making sanctuary. I'm using the physical
Speaker 1: dimensionality of the Middle Age sanctuary project, which is a
Speaker 1: way of tending to criminals by offering a sense of
Speaker 1: disruption in the landscape. A church became a home through
Speaker 1: a fugitive to the accused person, and if that accused
Speaker 1: person held a part of the church then and claim sanctuary,
Speaker 1: then they could be given some rest away from their accusers,
Speaker 1: and everyone who accused them was forbidden to enter into
Speaker 1: the place of the holy, into the sacred to drag
Speaker 1: them out. It sometimes happened, of course, but the idea
Speaker 1: was to claim sanctuary is to be immune for a while,
Speaker 1: is to be exiled from your condition, which means that
Speaker 1: the landscape was no longer flat. There was a bomb,
Speaker 1: you know, in the landscape that was over the modern right,
Speaker 1: we don't have claiming sanctuary products now. We have lawyers
Speaker 1: and courts and judges and prisons, you see. But I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about making sanctuary in these times. Now. Making sanctuary
Speaker 1: to me does not mean rushing to safety. It's about
Speaker 1: how do we, who are the church in this instance,
Speaker 1: the metaphorical church, the institution of bodies, of the known,
Speaker 1: of the familiar. When a fugitive rushes into our mist
Speaker 1: how do we cater to this fugitive? How do we
Speaker 1: cater to a virus? How do we cater to Alzheimer's?
Speaker 1: How do we cater to the middling monstrosity of a
Speaker 1: mental illness? So to speak? How do we stay with
Speaker 1: that moment? How do we wash the feet of the
Speaker 1: virus and listen to it as if it were an
Speaker 1: agent of change? And that's the politics of the moment.
Speaker 1: There's no answer to making sanctuary. There's only an invitation
Speaker 1: to convene around crack right to convene around Alzheimer's, to
Speaker 1: convene around the places that modernity has not finished with
Speaker 1: its closure, so that we might perhaps, perhaps, rather perhaps
Speaker 1: happen upon new worlds. Well, I think that is a
Speaker 1: beautiful place for us to wrap up, to perhaps find
Speaker 1: our way to the new world. I love it. Perhaps perhaps, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's a key word there. There's no guarantee or even partially,
Speaker 1: even partially, I mean everything shows up in parts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing right there, Bio. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad we got to do this. It's a pleasure,
Speaker 1: so nice to connect. And I appreciate you staying up
Speaker 1: late to do this because you're in India currently and
Speaker 1: it is late into the evening for you, so I
Speaker 1: appreciate your time. Thank you very much, brother for the conversation.
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