Existentially, style is adverbial

[evolveexistentially]

What Ira Glass Explains In 1 Minute Will Change Your Life Forever. Seriously.

He knows what he's talking about...

I mostly refute their power, but every now and then, a mini-sermon is a lovely thing. 

[evolveexistentially]

Winter 2016:  new philosophy course on race & epigenetics...   

[evolveexistentially]

What’s a Species, Anyways?

The search for the red wolf’s origins have led scientists to a new theory about how evolution actually works.

“... a whole new paradigm for the natural world: not a ‘tree of life,’ with its ever-multiplying and distinct branches, but a ‘web of life,’ with species continually diverging and recombining over time.... In this view, the red wolf need not be a paragon of genetic purity in order to deserve protection; it need only fill a niche in its ecosystem that no other animal does.”

[evolveexistentially]

For Whitehead...science must be understood as an adventure, and an adventure never enables us to draw a general lesson. When the adventurer is perplexed, when the adventure turns out badly, the question to ask is rather: 'what has happened to us?'

Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead (2011, 13)

[evolveexistentially]

Psychedelics can’t be tested using conventional clinical trials — Nicolas Langlitz — Aeon Opinions

Psychedelic research is back from underground laboratories to university hospitals. When LSD, mescaline and psilocybin were prohibited in 1970, all academic research on humans was abandoned for two decades. Now the return of psychedelic drugs to h...

“Two large clinical trials of psilocybin and MDMA (Ecstasy) are in the making. Should they show medical applications of these drugs to be effective, psychedelics would become part of our medicine cabinet. But there is a problem ahead. These odd substances might escape the current paradigm of pharmacology.... 

Being guided through your trip by a psychedelic veteran might not be the same as receiving the drug from your born-again oncologist in the Bible Belt.”

[evolveexistentially]

A Cross Stitched Solar System by Navid Baraty

Photographer Navid Baraty was looking for a new side project and decided to pickup up cross stitching. His current goal is to make the entire solar system with thread and he's already finished Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto (!), each of which requires anywhere from 20 to 35 different colors. If

I love this project:  stitching the solar system... 

[evolveexistentially]

I THINK OF the aphorism as a sympathetic form. The aphorism is succinct, correct. It slinks shut, sometimes with a little snap or tone. Its brevity is a performance and thus requires skill, also a source of its sympathy. Something (even a great deal of something) has been left out, but the...

... and the final paragraph speaks especial truth:  

“The trance state is one in which we are led; we slough off the limits of agency in favor of becoming not one, but n+1 (with apologies to the magazine, whom I don’t mean to invoke). Entranced, we are in the sway of some unknown — or, depending on the kind of trance, some known — other. Rimbaud, famously: “Je est un autre.” But Rimbaud was only drunk. The trance state is not a pronominal exchange; it’s an encounter, an ecstatic combination rather than a coma, renunciation, or switch. Speaking of the lyric, Koestenbaum asks, “Is Whitman pro-onanism / or anti-onanism?” He answers himself, “Obviously / both, Whitman is / pro-bowel.” One could call this a question of profundity, or one could read it as the announcement of a poetic mode that has always, for excellent reasons, been just a few steps ahead, as well as just out of reach, of the ideological quandaries Romanticism so agonizingly and so ecstatically thought to make us care about.”

[evolveexistentially]

No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. . . . America became white-- the people who, as they claim, 'settled' the country became white-- because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. . . .No community can be based on such a principle--or, in other words, no community can be based on so genocidal a lie. . . . This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all--privately, or publicly . . . . this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic. . . . this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history . . . . How did they get that way?  By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. However--! White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. . . . It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.

James Baldwin, “On Being White... and Other Lies”

[evolveexistentially]

White Debt

Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege.

“What my son was expressing — that he wants the comfort of what he has but that he is uncomfortable with how he came to have it — is one conundrum of whiteness. . . . I still want my son to know the difference between compliance and complicity.”

[evolveexistentially]

YAHDON ISRAEL is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at The New School and the creator of the #literaryswag movement. A way to think about literary and sartorial style together, #literaryswag is a social media hashtag, a community, and now, an in-person book club hosted at the storied New...

Fashion as embodied narrative:  I love this.  But also the embodied pleasures of *readerly* narratives, like in the wonderful final paragraph:  

“The people that work at the Strand know the books they sell you. It’s not just, “Oh that book is on the second floor”; it’s “Oh, let me take to it! I see you’re into Hilton Als, have you ever read Maggie Nelson?” It’s an experience. And it’s the same experience you get when you shop at a clothing boutique. Things are stylized, tailored damn near, to the person. Who wouldn’t want to be entrapped by that experience? It’s vindicating. That’s the irony of the name The Trap: you don’t go to Strand to get lost; you go, or I go, to be found; to be discovered; to be seen and ultimately to be vindicated.”

[evolveexistentially]

Satisfied with neither the theological nor the metaphysical polities, society has wavered between them, and the one tendency has served chiefly to counteract the other. Out of these oscillations a third school of political opinion, which we may call the 'stationary school,' has arisen. This school would fix society in a contradictory position between retrogression and progress, such as is seen in the parliamentary monarchy of England. This is a last phase of the metaphysical polity, and is only a kind of placebo

Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy (1830)

[evolveexistentially]

1 / We call change in a person the effect of time, witness my new dress, so short, / with buttons on the yoke shaped like swans.

The final lines of the poem:

Through this window, I take in a non-causative molecule to change myself, what a mother administers, placebo, the intent of a dress.

When you wear it for the first time, you're surprised by a rush of feeling for yourself.

[evolveexistentially]

There is a dramatic conflict in what is commonly called the human sciences.  Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an ever-changing light? . . . philosophy never saved anybody.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 6, 12)

[evolveexistentially]

Faggotry as it is today.

One of my best friends, a poet, suggested this poem by CAConrad for my new lesson plan on Viveiros de Castro, decolonizing art/theory and “perspectivism.”  

From the very end of the poem:  

Rituals can reconnect us to one another and the natural cycles of life and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

I completely believe in the strength of poetry.

And I have experienced how the rituals for creating poems has the power to change us in ways we have yet to fully explore.

[lifeinpoetry]

It’s easy to get sidetracked and difficult / to see farther than the skin houses we walk this earth in.

Joy Harjo, from “Hold Up,” How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002 (via lifeinpoetry)

[bitch-media]

What are the links between being Black in America and being Palestinian? This new video about Black-Palestinian solidarity draws comparisons between the two communities. From the video creators: “The onslaught on Black and Palestinian lives is rife with a discourse of victim-blaming that softens the edge of systematic violence and illuminates the dehumanization process. This video is a message to the world as much as it is a commitment among ourselves that we will struggle with and for one another.” 

[evolveexistentially]

Maybe What made me cry in class was how tired I was and how sad and hard It is, and how rare, to undertake an act That’s truly free, and not just a response To a confused surge of drives and fears.

Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion (91)