Further notes on Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennet. Bennet suggests ways of approaching our being in order to access, even slightly, the “vibrancy” of matter, this entanglement of things that surrounds and partakes us. In regards to the opposition of this enlightenment, what is the blinding string that gathers us into self? Perhaps it is our fear of death, becoming unwhole into the ground that moves beneath us, that keeps us desperately holding ourselves together. Perhaps the fear of death is not an intention but the intrinsic motive of the body. So life is a fleeting holding on, and the illusory idea of self motivates each step to eat, to love and to breathe!
It reminds me how the existential psychotherapists say that anxiety is inherent to the human condition, or how birds and squirrels look like they’re on amphetamines! Existential anxiety.
In it’s meta version, vibrant materialism is a gentleness, a gap of ease between the everyday harshness of survival.
I’d like to make a future installation that sounds our death. As a reminder that the only certainty in our future is our death. The Buddhas say it is a good thing to know our death. That’s when the shimmering beauty of life reveals itself.
Collapse is fatigue, depression, dysfunctional relationships, transport strikes, the malnourished fox. Collapse envisioned through micropolitical and microsocial events is more real than a story of “the end of the world”. Decay brings growth. Even a speck of algae bloom is a world of it’s own, and so the worlds continue to exist.