Civilization and Its Forgotten (and Suppressed) Possibilities

A heron glides across the wetlands off Coyote Hills Regional Park in the south bay, 2014.

“…were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.” —Herman Melville, 1846, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian […]

The World in the Whale

“Or, the Whale,” by Jos Sances, seen here at its Richmond Art Center debut in May 2019.

To belong to a charismatic species is to be a pack animal for human imagination.

from Fathoms: The world in the whale by Rebecca Giggs, Simon & Schuster, 2020, p. 129

I’ve been thinking and dreaming about whales […]

Brainless, Impersonal, Implacable

Dark clouds over the Caribbean, Chicxulub beach July 21, 2021

No common is possible unless we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others, unless we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them. Indeed, if commoning has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a […]