Tag Archives: paul kingsnorth

Viral Revelations

Across the duration of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we have refrained from saying much about Queen Corona, once it became clear we would blithely ignore her deepest lesson, namely that we must change how we are living in relation to the web of life that sustains our earthly presence.

A recurring theme within DP for the past decade: we humans will do anything to avoid changing our basic behavior. Yet that avoidance, typically accomplished through various tech fixes and fetishes, always releases consequences unanticipated by the fixers; the social and political complexities of the inverted utopia in which we live makes it impossible for us to imagine the implications of our clever inventions. Through time, this predicament tends towards what Anders identified as a world in which “we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves.”

With this theme in mind, we bend an ear to a recent essay by Paul Kingsnorth, distinguished novelist and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. The entire essay is worthy of close reading; brief excerpts below, with images and captions added by DP.

 

PLAN FOR A FUTURE RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT

 

 

FROG SLOWLY BOILING WITHIN THE ALGORITHM

 

 

We strongly recommend this related interview, as well:

 

 

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The Essential Conversation

From the imperative of love springs the need to re-conceive and re-member that most essential conversation: the dialogue between humans and the rest of life.

Below, a few excerpts from a wide-ranging interview with Paul Kingsnorth, whose writing and philosophy revolves around the recuperation of stories and voices embedded within the natural world. Images represent different seasons in Natalie Jeremijenko’s MASS MOCA installation, Tree Logic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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More from the voice of Paul Kingsnorth, this time in a more recent essay relayed from his own website:

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And finally, linked through the below image, a VPRO documentary about Kingsnorth and his County Galway homestead, highly recommended for consideration:

 

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At the Heart of Things

Now comes the voice of Paul Kingsnorth, with an excerpt from an essay recently published in Orion magazine, The Axis and the Sycamore:

Paul Kingsnorth is a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, with its strong emphasis on conceiving new forms of storytelling as a way of reimagining the world, outside the toxic bubble of human supremacy. The word-coupling “dark mountain” descends from a Robinson Jeffers poem:

Man is not in the persons but in the 
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the 
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain