I just had cataract surgery done on one eye. It brings up many practical and philosophical questions. Walking down my street in the now-bright, clear November air, the trees on the distant skyline stand out in sharp relief. The gravel under my feet appears in pixelated detail. The very words…
Category: Philosophy
Cowboy Country: Nature and Human Nature in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
When a fictional world is viewed through the Transparent Eyeball, the objective witness, the world appears as real as we can make out our own: in fact more real, free of our imported filters. Not only is the landscape described in full stark detail, but also the horse-roping, the sootstained…
Inside Nature
1. Mosquitoes: or, Lucifer in Disguise Nature, the missing connection. What does it mean, in this day and age? Beyond Walden, and even the Kootenay Cooperative Land Settlement Society (est. 1973). Or is there still that idyll of a pathway to survival, of whatever social formula or default (charter or hermitage)—connected to Nature? The aboriginal…
Binary and Beyond
“If you aren’t with us, you’re with the terrorists.” —President George Bush, Jr. I don’t know if language itself is the culprit, but humanity seems largely locked into a trap of binary thinking. Black versus White, Good versus Evil, Us versus Them, Fact versus Misinformation, Safety versus Freedom… Are…