DEMURE

“The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.”

You know when you go to a museum with a friend and it’s understood that you don’t have to stand side by side in front of every canvas? You can move at different speeds, occupy different corners, get separated, and it’s fine and relaxing because somehow when it’s time to leave, you’ll find each other. My favorite type of writing is like that, where it drifts in and out of different rooms, and sometimes ideas get lost or sentences sort of wander or drop off and the meanings and senses of things get separated, but it doesn’t matter. Like how after the museum, you can walk for a few blocks with your friend in silence, not pressed to speak.

“You know when you go to a museum with a friend and it’s understood that you don’t have to stand side by side in front of every canvas? You can move at different speeds, occupy different corners, get separated, and it’s fine and relaxing because somehow when it’s time to leave, you’ll find each other. My favorite type of writing is like that, where it drifts in and out of different rooms, and sometimes ideas get lost or sentences sort of wander or drop off and the meanings and senses of things get separated, but it doesn’t matter. Like how after the museum, you can walk for a few blocks with your friend in silence, not pressed to speak.”

Today I would say we’re individuals because we’re colonies. My teacher, Francisco Varela, coined this beautiful phrase. He said, ‘as organisms, we are a meshwork of selfless selves’. We’re ecosystems. This microbial ecosystem inside of you is in constant dialogue with the ecosystem(s) outside of you. Your gut biota are continuously replenished by the stuff you eat because it’s full of bacteria. Your skin microbiome deposits itself on everything you touch. If you touch somebody, you exchange microbiomes. You don’t have a border. To think so is another bourgeois Western illusion. In actuality, you’re constantly blurring with the animate world around you. This is the ‘conversational nature of reality’ the poet David Whyte talks about.