#mentalities

Don't let hatred dominate your life

- Bruce Feiler, America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story.

I wanted to see how putting some old characters to the test on the tablet would work, and suffice to say, I’m pretty happy with it. These are some characters from my old comic, Planeswept, that I stopped updating around a year and a half ago due to technical issues. Then story issues. Then life getting to busy. But recently, a brother of mine stated how much he’d liked the series, and well... I’ve been thinking about it again recently. I’d need to start over though - a lot of it would remain the same, but a lot would need to change. We’ll see where it goes.

The Institution of the Mind.—The strangeness of visiting foreign places is the lingering strangeness of another civilization just beneath the superficial trappings of modernity, which any culture can adopt without being threatened in its essence, because its essence is untouched by the ephemeral borrowed achievements of technology and industry. This strangeness has as its counterpart the familiarity of even distant and elusive manifestations of the civilization from which we ourselves have descended. What the Annalistes called mentalities have a longue durée of their own, and these mentalities runs so deep that we have more of an affinity for the distant past of our own civilization than for the present iteration of some other civilization. Clive Bell made this argument in his Civilization: An Essay, when explaining his choice of paragons, all taken from the history of Western civilization. He was right to do so. Bell’s exemplars—“Fifth and fourth century Athens, then, Renaissance Italy, and France from Fronde to Revolution”—are all distant and unrecoverable for us, but they have left a permanent imprint on the world the we Westerners today accept as our own. Historians tell us how incomprehensible we today would find the world of ancient Greece, and they are right, but, for all its strangeness, it would not be as alien as India or China today, which one could visit, even immerse oneself in, but without comprehension beyond the most rudimentary activities that we would share with peoples before civilization, and even with other species. Our own history is intelligible to us, or can be made intelligible, but another tradition can, at best, be studied as one might study the structure of a flower—beautiful, fascinating in its own way, but not a part of ourselves.    

For a wider discussion of ecosophy see ‘The Ecosophic Object’ in Chaosmosis. While it shares with traditional ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere, ecosophy also recognizes ‘incorporeal species’ that are equally endangered, and an entire ‘mental ecology’ in crisis: ‘How do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity - if it ever had it - a sense of responsibility not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the Cosmos?’

View On WordPress

Things I Learned After Losing 80 Pounds And Keeping It Off