#markqet.design

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Enjoy my deranged Caribou edit (18min)

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Takk… (The Tape Variations)

Humbling to hear this so many years after 2005.

By the way, this is more than just a music blog. Although the complexity that will make that true will be spaced out. I'm not very productive, at least not for now (winter, hibernating, recovering, not burning out!)

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"On my seventh night, a plant spoke to me. It wasn't an ayahuasca plant. It was just a simple rose plant on the grounds of the center, near the medicine hut, a plant I liked. It appeared to me and it talked to me, with a mouth and everything. It explained to me that plants ran the world. They kept the Earth from blowing away, they kept the sea from rushing headlong over the Earth, they made things cool, they were food, plants were everything. You're not in charge, the plant said to me, as clearly as if it were a person. We are in charge. Your health is good or bad because of us. We are everything, and you are here as our guests.

...

I thought about how most of my experience of going to Peru to drink ayahuasca had been about working through the shame of having done such a thing in the first place. I spent half a month's salary and met some awful people and a few good ones to discover a fact that I disclose with not a little embarrassment: plants can communicate. Some people will think I'm a crazy asshole for saying so, but they never gave a plant money and had the plant tell them actual facts in return."

—Sarah Miller, "Pirates of the Ayahuasca," n+1, Number Fifty, 2025, pp. 72-73.

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I wrote a song on Eight Dollar Mountain in Oregon. I had the idea to make place-based music, so I went to a local scenic spot. In this case, looking out from where I sat on a picnic table at a pullout high on the slope, I looked to the more distant peaks and thought of my past. First, of climbing a 14,000ft peak in Colorado (I only drove my truck up $8 Mtn), then I waxed poetic about a lost love and letting go, and coming to terms with the confusion entailed in being anything at all. I recorded that song (Love All the Time) and a pair of cover songs with my mandolin and the company of an acquaintance from France who joined me for that day trip up the mountain. If you want to listen, the songs are on my Bandcamp page, linked here.

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I'm embarrassed to admit it, but my literacy declined over the past couple years. In what I feel economically-imposed social isolation, I found nowhere for my thinking to go - sharing online didn't feel real enough. I scrolled video after video for days on end. Last year I lived with someone who leans into their own isolation as a woodland hermit, and their way of thinking was surface level, and their time also heavily leaned into online video content, and their way of being rubbed off on me.

I fell into poor thinking from a spliced together web-based logic, and barely read anything apart from social media posts for a long time. I ran into a lot of cognitive hazards.

Today was a better day, as I reflect on these habits of consumption versus action. I began the day reading, I ate more, and better, and I listened to a talk on capitalist eternisation - or the sense that people fall into that there is no alternative to it.

What emerges, thinking of where my mind is now, is that I started to believe, automatically, in some external salvation, like a messiah of some sort that would transform mine and our collective lives. What I realize is that staying engaged in the moment and building the future is what makes things move. Yes, there are non-human forces in the world (the weather, the actions of plants and animals), no, there is no "knight in shining armor" coming to rescue me from isolation and poverty.

Instead of an infinite deferral of my own needs, I am absolving my guilt about past moping, allowing for error and nonlinear growth, and working to believe in myself as a social being. There are few free events where I live, but there are at least enough chances to interact that I feel a modicum of social liveliness.

I would like my learning habits to be daily, rather than weekly or semi-weekly, and I rouse myself some days earlier instead of hiding in bed. I don't want to name my experience as mental illness, but I do recognize that it can be detrimental to be so withdrawn.

My gripe with life is that I die and I do not accept any comforting lie about afterlife or reincarnation, even though I have heard many. I simply know what I get through perception, and I orient consciously toward the material. My dad always tells me to have purpose, but I tend to deny his advice because of a poisonous religious aspect to his thinking and action (which is, at a minimum, patriarchal and racist).

I am extricating purpose from that personal relationship; what I am adding now is a commitment to critical theory as a practice, my particular project which in effect stimulates liberation.

I have also found some web resources for adult literacy and basic learning, so that I have more than just a passing ability to use language and thought. It also gives me something simple but structured to focus on.

As a closing thought, I am grateful for the salmon I ate today, and for the avocado and spinach and bell pepper I was able to add to the grains and beans that are my staple. I am also grateful for the couple of friends I have - that they check in on me and socialize when me when we can arrange it.

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Caterpillar

A lot of stank face moments on Butterfly. Thanks for a good one, Dan / Daphni!!

(make sure your BASS is on for this)

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An interesting resource I came across recently, the Transnational Institute.

From their page:

Our vision is of an equitable, democratic and peaceful world in which all life may flourish.

Our mission is to serve as a knowledge resource for progressive social movements.

TNI is a value-driven and inclusive organisation that provides a collaborative space where we practice and promote social justice, and value each other as human and intellectual beings who operate with integrity and respect.

At TNI, the core values we share and uphold in our organisational practice and workplace are:

TNI believes in the equality of all people. We reject all forms of discrimination, including racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia. We value diversity in our organisation. For more information on this see the Gender Equity and Diversity Plan.

TNI believes that the people are sovereign in any society, and have equal rights to meaningfully determine how society is governed and resources are shared.

We believe a just society is one that shares the benefits and burdens equitably, promotes the well-being of all and allows people to pursue their common good. We stand in solidarity with those who suffer injustice – with the oppressed, exploited and marginalised people of the world.

TNI believes in mutually respectful, horizontal relationships of cooperation.

TNI believes in the collective responsibility to care for each other and for our ecosystems such that we can regenerate and flourish.

TNI believes in the importance of critical, independent and progressive thought consistent with the above values. We welcome a plurality of views as helping us to sharpen our thinking, and are not aligned with any particular political party or ideological tendency.

https://www.tni.org/en

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JL: In your critique of Arendt’s Darwinian-Hegelian reading of Marx (as well as in Chapter 5), you center the concept of species-being, insisting upon its continued significance to Marx’s mature body of work. Critically, you argue that it is through species-being that the economic and organizational dimension of the communist critique is united with its political dimension. If human social needs are historically constituted, the species-being concept in and of itself poses a normative critique: all forms of organized economic activity are ends that posit normative, historically specific social ontologies. What do you see as the political significance of reframing the species-being concept as an ethico-political question in our contemporary conjecture?

ML: This aspect of Marx’s thinking has not featured strongly in the most interesting, recent work on Capital and its philosophical elements. The hesitancy has been that any idea of social ontology must imply some sort of dubious, transhistorical argument that any form-specific discussion of value would have to abandon. I see this binary as a destructive one, not just because it becomes hard to read the passages in which Marx directly invokes ideas of species-being, which remains consistent in his work, but because it eschews attempts to provide an account of what Marx takes a human life to be and why he finds the specific form of life under capital to be deficient. There is a normative rejection of the way in which human life is dominated by the logic of capital, which prevents us from cultivating the potential for a rational form of life. Marx forms this view from a critique of the alienation of labor, which he considers to be life-activity, because in rationally making and remaking our lives together, we can be free.

Species-being is not a romantic concept calling for a return to some earlier essence, but rather the idea of what human life could be based on whatit is to be a rational being. Marx articulates his idea of life through the ways we are both rational and historical beings. Through all his work, Marx takes labor to be a social form of practice that shows our historical nature. But, crucially, we’re also rational beings in ways that make us distinct from other forms of animal life. On the basis of this capacity, we can critique this form of life and analyze alienation, taking the potentialities of human life as our standpoint. Furthermore, that our practices are normative has implications not just on the ways we live our lives, implicitly, but on the types of explicit questions we ask ourselves: whether it’s about how we decide to reproduce family life, who does the care work, but also, say, the workplace, questions of industrial matters, whether you will go on strike, and so on.

-- The Normativity of Marx’s Aristotelian-Hegelianism: An Interview with Michael Lazarus

found here:

The Normativity of Marx’s Aristotelian-Hegelianism: An Interview with Michael Lazarus

by Jackson Herndon