A quote from Novalis, referenced by Heidegger, which caught my eye:
“Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.”
From Brett Buchanan’s wonderful book: Onto-ethologies: The animal environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, (p.83)
As the world’s population reaches 7 billion sometime today, it’s worth remembering that while overpopulation is an important environmental issue that needs addressing, it is a vastly lesser problem that the consumption of the planet’s resources by the wealthy. I don’t know if there’s any kind of conversion mechanism on the internet, but the purchase of an SUV, the heated backyard swimming pool, and the transatlantic flight each cause tremendously more damage to the climate and to resource depletion than that family of 12 in Chad or Bangladesh. Westerners bemoaning population growth are usually shifting blame from their own responsibilities and blaming poor and brown people for our environmental crisis.
(Source: abbyjean)
“You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It’s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we’re all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is…”
- Henry Miller
From Wikipedia: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is a five-line poem by Randall Jarrell published in 1945. It is about the death of a gunner in a Sperry ball turret on a World War II American bomber aircraft. From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Force, provided the following explanatory note: “A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upsidedown in his little sphere. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.” Reviewer, Leven M. Dawson, says that “The theme of Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ is that institutionalized violence, or war, creates moral paradox, a condition in which acts repugnant to human nature become appropriate.”[1] Most commentators agree, calling the poem a condemnation of the dehumanizing powers of “the State”, which are most graphically exhibited by the violence of war.[2]
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
— Karl Marx, “Capital” Volume 1
You owe the companies nothing. You especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Banksy
