Timothy Morton

That book is great, Against the Grain.

And it's obviously like... you know plaster all over zephyr with the whole like thing of like the salt states not being able to eat black zephyr and being malnourished and all that stuff yeah for sure and it's a pretty interesting topic I've been for the last few years I've been drawing just a whole lot from Tim Morton especially from Dark Ecology he cites a book that I've only read a bit, but it's quite interesting, called Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture.

It's basically like a thing, you know? Let's study the pathologies that just came about once this whole hoarding grain business started.

It's pretty cool.

Or another way to think of Vallis is as a hyper-object.

An idea from the contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton.

That our reality is penetrated by hyper-objects that we can't truly comprehend.

We certainly can't see them.

I mean, it's one of the big hopes of this philosophical movement.

People like the Americans, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton.

For the first time I heard about Timothy Morton, you were telling me about him.

Tristan Garcia is also a Frenchman working in a sort of similar vein.

So, yes, I'm riffing away here at some of the philosophical underpinnings of the discussion of perhaps of where you're evolving in a more poetic rather than essayistic sort of philosophical way.

That's probably how I think about them, rather than saying they mean X or they're communicating X or that they're indebted to one particular worldview or idea.

I'd also say, when you were talking about the objective world, I sort of feel like, at least in the way I write about it in poems, the objective world isn't really very objective.

It's weird and slippery and Timothy Morton would probably use a word like queer for it.

This has prompted a flurry of media reports, in nearly all of which journalists speak about nature as if we are over here and, capital N, nature is over there.

This reflects something that the philosopher Timothy Morton identified, quote, "...one of the things that modern society has damaged has been thinking." Unfortunately, one of the damaged ideas is that of nature itself.

How do we transition from seeing what we call nature as an object over there? And how do we avoid new and improved versions that end up doing much the same thing, just in a cooler, more sophisticated way? When you realise that everything is interconnected, you can't hold on to a concept of a single, solid, present-at-hand thing over there called nature.

Unquote.

I carried the book the whole way and didn't read it once.

Um, which I built, but I also build on other ecophenomenologists, mostly David Wood, Ted Toervine, and especially in the latter stages, uh, Tim Morton.

So, plexity.

Uh, the word plexity is used in David Wood's eco- uh, 2003 essay, What Is Ecophenomenology?, to encapsulate the temporal dimensions of the world, quote, "deeply complex and stratified." Uh, this explicitly includes rationalities of worldly engagements of both human and those of other creatures.

There's some interesting ideas and things, but ultimately, this whole you can't bridge the gap between objects is highly problematic in so many ways.

Anyway, but Timothy Morton, like his notion of hyper objects, I think is really useful because, you know, or just like kind of the core idea of, you know, we're living in a time where so many things feel so big that they just like confound our ability to make sense of them.

And that's because there are, you know, things like climate change, things like capitalism, things like, you know, like the big stuff that we're always worried about and are like, we must do something now to stop it.

They're made of so many little things that... that come from different times and different places and that are interacting in ways.

When you start raising questions of, you know, who we talk about, we talk about people along the equator near coastlines, or we're talking about whether they're on the income distribution.

I think the problem with climate, and this goes back to the idea of climate as the antithesis of news, is there's an academic, I think he's a climate academic, forgive me if I've got this wrong, but I just remembered, Timothy Morton, he has this notion of hyper-objects.

Yes, right.

There are certain things that are so big, they kind of defy explanation.