#andreas weber

[doestheoystersleep]

Love is not a feeling, but the characteristic of a productive relationship. Failing to understand this is our great error in a time when all of us are chasing love as a life goal, but finding only an extraordinary lack of love, for which we then blame ourselves. Our misunderstanding of love continues to make this situation worse. A world in which love exists in fantasies but has no actual potency loses the ability to facilitate fair negotiations, bestow meaning, or produce anything other than purely monetary wealth.

Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, by Andreas Weber

[old-flesh]

Hannah Close in conversation with Andreas Weber (2022)

[mezimraky]

— andreas weber, matter & desire

[nousrose]

Openness must always take on fear. Openness to the shadows, one's own and the world's. Openness means accepting the holes and tears without lamenting them. Having curiosity for what might come. Accepting that this world is a terrain of transformation, and that there is no transformation that does not also hurt. This pain is part of reality. Every experience is one of being wounded by reality, but also, unavoidably, one of being transformed by reality. And on the other hand, it transforms reality into something that is entirely one's own.

Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology

Andreas Weber

[astranemus]

Today I would say we’re individuals because we’re colonies. My teacher, Francisco Varela, coined this beautiful phrase. He said, ‘as organisms, we are a meshwork of selfless selves’. We’re ecosystems. This microbial ecosystem inside of you is in constant dialogue with the ecosystem(s) outside of you. Your gut biota are continuously replenished by the stuff you eat because it’s full of bacteria. Your skin microbiome deposits itself on everything you touch. If you touch somebody, you exchange microbiomes. You don’t have a border. To think so is another bourgeois Western illusion. In actuality, you’re constantly blurring with the animate world around you. This is the ‘conversational nature of reality’ the poet David Whyte talks about.

Do you know why you find this unnerving? Because it shows you that you’re really this world around you, and one day you will be again, only you’ll be an ecosystem without an individual. We go back to the soil from which we came – few living in modern cultures appreciate the extraordinary beauty of such a truth. It’s unnerving because it’s about losing control, and our civilisation is terrified of that. It’s also about paradox. You’re not allowed to decide if you’re a colony or an individual; you’re both. Isn’t that very much about being open to difference and otherness?

The Poetics of Ecology: A conversation with Andreas Weber

[farewell-to-lorien]

Today, we know that bees can feel euphoric or depressed and that fruit flies suffer with chronic pain if injured. We know that plants feel, too. If you feel what makes you thrive and what is better to avoid, you are a subject, an alive being whose sensitivity to the tactile world means everything to its existence. We are only human subjects because we are feeling biological selves entangled in a web of biotic relations. Our humanity connects us with life. It does not separate us, as is the mainstream belief. It’s worth mentioning that animism, which says that the world is peopled by persons or subjects with whom we share a basic level of embodied experience, is supported by this new biological research. This is fascinating, and deeply humbling.

​Andreas Weber, “The Poetics of Ecology”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Hockney (English, born 1937) "Garrowby Hill," 1998 Oil on canvas 60 x 76 in

* * * * *

To be in the center is to be alive. To be alive is to surrender to the reality of a bodily existence that is never truly at peace and that gives birth to poetry and beauty out of this uncertainty.

- Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

[beguines]

[soracities]

Want to share a line from a modern philosophy book I've been reading, the book has wonderful prose and ideas and I thought you'd love this:

"Thr emitted and exhaled carbon dioxide is not the exhaust of combusted fuel, as in a motor. The carbon atom does not come from the ingested nourishment. It comes from somewhere else, from the cell itself, from the cell's own body.

So metabolism means: I subsist on what becomes my body, and I exhale into the air what was my body. I am the grain of the field that died for me, and I die constantly and transform myself into what the plants inhale, such that my body becomes their new bodies."

-- Matter & Desire: an Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber

oh i do love this. i'm so touched you thought of me and shared this, thank you endlessly!