visitings : forest murmurs

visitings  : forest murmurs

I am currently making notes for a chapter on BodyWeather and what kind of culture and community are implicated by its methodologies and practices. These seem particularly resonant:

in the music of indigenous peoples Lingis observes is heard “ the animal, vegetable, mineral and demonic realms” and that it “is not an aesthetic production, that is, a creation of human subjectivities attempting to communicate immanent states like moods, feelings, values or messages to other human subjectivities. It is a prolongation of the forest murmurs, the whispering sands, and the hum of heavenly bodies.” (99)

“Beyond the communication with one another through signals, abstract entities, in the community allied against the rumble of the world, we make contact with inhuman things by embracing their forms and their matter. We also make contact with one another by contracting another’s form, by transubstantiating our own material state.” (12-3)

photo by Mel Shearsmith at hinterlands 3

from: Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, 1994.