Now comes Karinne Keithley Syers, whose plays are marvelously impossible to pin down, with news of a forthcoming production of The Lydian Gale Parr:
Below, an illuminating missive sent to DP from the playwright, who longtime readers may remember as the Sorceress of the Mole Cabal:
DETAIL FROM THE POSTER, CREATED BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK
And finally, a synopsis of this extraordinary journey for which tickets (sure to sell out) are still available:
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Now comes artist Chavis Mármol with a collisionary assemblage that provides welcome insight into our fate as inverted Utopians.
“The Olmec head imposes itself before the technological object, it bursts and crushes it and in the end it is glorified before this object, which no matter how technological or how much it is an object of desire, in the end it is just that, just a product of a capitalist system, when In reality what matters is what we came from, what we are and what we have been generation after generation.”
“What do I feel when I see that? What does Tesla mean to me? What does it mean that it is installing a plant in Monterrey? What does Musk generate among us?”
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Now comes the always-stimulating poet-philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé with a recent manifesto, of sorts, from the fertile fungal carpets of the Emergence Network. The entire text is worthy of consideration; a brief excerpt below.
For an exploration of possible post-activist responses, carry on here.
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Now comes the invigorating voice of philosopher Costica Bradatan, author of In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, on order here at DP HQ. A recent interview in the LARB is worth close reading in its entirety; an excerpt below, with an image added by DP.
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On a day when the courageous voice of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has been silenced by “a small man in a bunker”, we offer a passage from his bold & lucid statement made during a court hearing in 2021:
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Now comes The Republic of Imagination, a fascinating exploration of American literature written by the distinguished Iranian American author Azar Nafisi, who was expelled from the University of Tehran in 1981 for refusing to wear the veil, an early post-revolutionary harbinger of more severe repression to come. Though dating from 2014, Nafisi’s words continue to resonate ever more strongly today.
A few salient paragraphs below, with an image added by DP: a spiral galaxy as observed through the Webb telescope.
FIRESTORM FOR THE IMAGINATION
We note Nafisi’s more recent book, Read Dangerously; on our list for 2024!
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Courtesy of a faithful DP correspondent aware of our keen interest in abandoning an entrenched ethos of Human Supremacism, now comes Geneen Marie Haugen, a guide to the experiential, intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche with the Animas Valley Institute.
ENTWINED MYSTERIES
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ADORATION OF THE MAGI circa1390
Above, as relayed from the Met Cloisters ; below, Philip Stopford’s glorious setting for There is No Rose of Such Virtue.
As the world’s hapless & increasingly irrelevant climocrats gather, in oil-stained Dubai of all places, to perform their annual COP Theatre of Blah Blah Blah, we bend an ear to the voice of philosopher and deep ecologist Roman Krznaric, via an interview earlier this year. Every word rings more loudly with each passing moon.
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Now comes the voice of novelist Lauren Groff, excerpted from an excellent recent Orion interview regarding her novel, The Vaster Wilds; immediately after reading her remarks, we placed an order for the book.
At the base of the story, even in its incredibly rudimentary earliest forms, there was always this push to slowly unveil the truth (one that we, in our hubris, tend to ignore) that humankind is a very short, bright thread in the enormous weave of the history of earthly life. It was urgent in this book to decenter human dominance and allow the rest of nature to take its proper place as equal to the human experience. As the girl in her flight goes deeper into her experience of being alone in the woods, as her body begins to suffer from the cold and exertion and hunger, the forest itself becomes a companion that allows her to see past the received ideas of civilization that had held her captive to that point, and in some ways becomes her solace.
One of the texts that I read while thinking through this book was Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” especially this part, which reverberates through my book:
“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
To which we respond: hear! hear!
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Desperado Philosophy 