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a year of immanence

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The first anniversary of the launch of this blog passed quietly a couple of weeks ago. (The blog space existed as far back as May of 2008, but I didn’t put up my first substantive post until last December.) Since it’s coming around to the end of December and I’m about to take a holiday for a couple of weeks (though I might try to round up a guest blog or two), I thought it appropriate to provide some reflections on the first year of this blog, accompanied by some statistics about its growth and a thought or two about its future.

1) Blogging is enjoyable

So much should be obvious… Blogging provides the cheap and quick satisfaction of seeing one’s thinking materialized as an object out there in the public world of internet space. It’s a bit like having your own op-ed column, but with no restrictions on length, style, format, etc. And unlike other forms of publishing, there’s no need to send queries out to editors, wait days or months for feedback, revisions, and all the rest.

It also allows one’s thinking to take on multiple forms — textual and visual/graphic, conventional and experimental. It provides an easy forum for artistic expression, which can be as simple as the appearance of the blog, the choice of fonts, imagery, etc. Philosopher Graham Harman has kindly referred to this blog as “that visually soothing elvish forest of the blogosphere.” Providing a soothing elvish forest to anyone visiting is one of the best things I can hope to have done here. (Thanks for the kind words, Graham.)

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Bambi fights back

Kvond has a beautifully written post on James Cameron’s latest, Avatar: The Density of Being (you can tell he’s been reading Brian Massumi), to which I can only add my own quick thoughts after seeing the film this weekend.

1) New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.

2) It is James Cameron: with its rollercoaster-ride, shoot-em-up, special-FX thrills and chills (cf. Terminator, Aliens), it’s probably the most exorbitant and expensive such film in history. There’s cheesy dialogue (JC needs a scriptwriter) and gratuitous violence, with the never-say-die eternally recurrent monster, Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” in the form of the Dr. Strangelove-ish Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang). All put to the service of a fairy tale storyline (cf. Titanic, Terminator) of good guys and bad guys and class tension, with the white-boy hero as an intermediary caught between the two and becoming-heroic by siding with — and leading — the underdog. The broken-bodied (war-victimized) and misunderstood marine with a “good heart” is given a (genetically engineered) new body and falls in love with the dark girl — Pocahontas replayed for the millionth time. The good white boy messianically leads the natives in rebellion against their overlord invaders — which makes it Christmassy in more ways than Douthat’s Solstice-timed op-ed suggests. It is, after all, that Messiah story too (cf. Terminator 2, just no virgin in this version). (Cameron’s initials aren’t JC for nothing: the king of Hollywood born in a manger in Kapuskasing, Ontario.)

3) The Na’vi and their planet, Pandora (Pan-Thea, the tree-forest-rhizome-neural-network Goddess and World Soul, Pandora whose box, when opened, unleashed a million megatons of reality on humanity — it’s pagan mythology with a sledgehammer; gotta love it): They are beautiful — as all the reviews say, there are scenes that are among the most beautiful ever put to screen. Cutting-edge CGI in the service of animating and re-enchanting nature, the movie is a cine-kinetic fusion of Bambi, Terminator, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (and much else; see kvond).

There are strong resonances with Ursula LeGuin’s novella “The Word for World is Forest” (a Vietnam war-like attack on a beautiful planet and its indigenous inhabitants) and her utopian ethnographic-poetic-musical epic novel Always Coming Home, its future-primitive Pacific Coastal ‘Kesh’ people being a kind of west coast precursor to the Na’vi. The ethnographic theme — the translation/mediation between two opposed cultural worlds, science and anthropology’s dependence and ultimate answerability only to empire/colonialism/militarism, and the cultural intermediary’s desire to go native, is overly stereotypical but, for the Hollywood thriller format, not badly done. It will propagate the gone-to-Croatan meme for a new generation.

4) Ideology: Behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life, through the New Age science of neuro-energetics, gene-splicing, virtual-reality, and all the rest. ‘Jake Sully’ the Na’vi avatar (not the marine) is, after all, a zombie: his body is a remote-controlled, genetically-engineered robot. Are we really supposed to believe that this guy will save the universe and that Na’vi wouldn’t all choke to death laughing at the whole idea? There are resonant images here, but also an underlying subtext: what’s the balance between the two? (This repeats a friendly spat I’ve been having with Pat Brereton over his book Hollywood Utopia.)

Yes, it’s entertainment, and ideology, and religion, and politics… Happy Solstice to all.

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The interactive citation analysis tool Tenurometer has taken the measure of academics around the world and, according to their calculations, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu comes out on top, edging out Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, who pick up the silver and the bronze.

Well, not quite… That’s what appears in the “g-index” ratings, which give more weight to publications with many citations — though Bourdieu and Chomsky are running neck and neck. In the “h-index,” Bourdieu is well ahead of the rest of the pack. But certain key details — like describing Chomsky’s field as “religion,” a topic he pretty studiously avoids, or the fact that there’s a suspicious overrepresentation of computer scientists on the list, or that once I’ve conducted a search on someone, that name mysteriously appears in the top 50 list (with the disconcerting exceptions of Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx!), and if I search for the same person twice, I get different results — make it all a little less than convincing.

It seems that Tenurometer is still a work in progress, being both continually revised and continually added to, in Wikipedia fashion. As the FAQ page explains, “Tenurometer leverages the wisdom of the crowds to collect data about the various disciplines. The data will be made publicly available.” So in addition to the obvious incompleteness of the database, the disciplinary tags — which are used for the discipline-specific “h_f index,” will, for now at least, be particularly unreliable.

But this means that as of today, the top 50 G-list now includes David Harvey, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ehrlich, and a handful of others, only because I searched for them. (And it fails to include Foucault, as mentioned, or Malinowski, Marx, and Freud.) Over the same several minutes I’ve been at it, I’ve also noticed Humberto Maturana’s and J. J. Gibson’s names appear — so someone else searched for them. You can even follow the additions on Twitter.

So: here’s an invitation to readers to download Tenurometer to your browsers and start searching for your favorite authors, so that they can each get added to the database — and a warning to tenure review committees not to take this tool very seriously, at least until it gets filled in with a lot more detail. (I also haven’t looked into what information it collects from you once you download it, so download at your own discretion.)

For now, Bourdieu remains in the lead, in both the G and H races. For more info, see Inside Higher Ed‘s story on it.

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The responses to the final COP-15 “deal” from the environmental and social justice communities seem, at this point, to be largely negative. It’s a start, some acknowledge, but it’s pretty late to be starting, and it’s really pretty vacuous — a lost opportunity. (See, e.g., Bill McKibben’s deeply disappointed take on it, and other NGO leaders’ views.)

My last blog post tried to put a positive spin on things by arguing that the events in Copenhagen reflect the tension between two models of democracy, and that there is hope for the future in the very crystallization of the second model. Let me expand on that a little.

The first model is a democracy of representative institutions based in the modern system of (in theory) sovereign territorial states. Many of those states don’t pretend to be democratic themselves (think, for instance, of China), and the system as a whole is far from democratic, as anyone familiar with the UN Security Council or the actual workings of the World Trade Organization knows. But many of the states are built in part on democratic principles.

The main strength of this model of democracy (in quotation marks or not) is that it exists, and it has plenty of institutional power to get things done. The main weakness is that it has been thoroughly “captured,” at every level, by capitalism’s “preference for wealth.” In a capitalist economy, to the extent that economy and politics are intertwined (as they almost always are), wealth confers a certain amount of power. The relationship between wealth and power has, of course, been around for millennia, long predating capitalism itself, but only in the last century or two has it become a global and self-referential speculative system — that is, not one grounded in ecological realities, where the generation of wealth depends, in the last instance, on some set of material conditions, but one that is now primarily grounded in self-reference, where a system of policies and rules allow wealth to generate more wealth from nothing but the creation of other policies and rules (think: the “derivatives” that brought about last year’s Wall Street collapse).

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Also published at Indications.

It’ll take some time before the dust settles and we’ll be able to make sense of exactly what happened at the Copenhagen climate summit. But what’s becoming clear is that this may be a genuine turning point in the history of global politics.

The most remarkable thing that will come out of the meeting is not whatever set of policies will be agreed to tomorrow: this is because the key player, the president of the most powerful nation on Earth, is hamstrung by a conservatively poised party (his own Democrats) in power in the two houses in which he needs support in order to pass significant legislation. The most remarkable thing, rather, will be what happens to global civil society and its relationship to the structures of national and international power.

National governments, and none more so than that of the US, are deeply encumbered by the stranglehold of corporate lobbyists and other economic interests on their political systems — which is why nongovernmental and civil society groups are necessary to solve the issues that traditional political actors cannot. But while the NGOs and civil society groups speak of “democracy,” they are not elected and are, arguably, not representative in an obvious way. The democracy they speak of is of a different order than the one that’s doled out once every few years to the voting citizen of a given country.

What the activists mean by “democracy” is the activity and mobilization of citizens taking things into their own hands. And, unfortunately, that’s a kind of democracy that’s just as open to those on the right, from the Glenn Beck Tea Partiers and climate denialists in the US to racialist nationalists and religious fundamentalists around the world. So the lesson here, I think, is that we are now on a new and different political terrain — a terrain that is global and much more open than what we’re used to, and that really is a struggle for the hearts and minds of people around the world.

The climate justice activists in Copenhagen, fortunately, are sending a clear message to the rest of the world that there is a consensus emerging around basic matters of eco-social solidarity: that we are all in this together, and that the rich won’t get away with plunder any longer. As George Monbiot puts it, this is “a war between human decency and sheer bloody selfishness.”

A big piece of this message is that the industrial society that has grown over the last two centuries is hitting a wall, a limit point, beyond which something has to give way at a deep level. As David Loy argues, this limit point is forcing a test of people’s capacity to identify with humanity at the collective, global level and to internalize the lesson of interdependence. Assuming that the science is accurate — and science being what it is, we don’t and can’t know anything with 100% certainty, but we do know that the majority/consensus of climate scientists is strong in its conviction that anthropogenic climate change is most likely to be well on its way — then we are hitting a capacity limit that is comparable to the population density limits that triggered the shift from foraging societies to settled agriculture several thousand years ago.

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(I love this photograph, so here it is again…)

I think the idea and image of dark flow streaming out of our universe has also been resonating with me because of the work I’ve been doing using Vipassana teacher Shinzen Young’s system of mindfulness training. Young is one of the most erudite and intellectually rigorous teachers of Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, having synthesized decades of training in Zen, Theravadan, and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions along with what seems a voracious appetite for languages, into an “algorithmic system” that takes what, in other places, seems a morass of mutually incommensurable terms and makes it thoroughly coherent and applicable.

Many meditation teachers teach ways of developing clarity, concentration, and equanimity, but none of them — at least none of those I’ve come across currently living (and, of all places, just down the road from me, when he isn’t traveling) — draws in so many different traditions, East and West, into a system that is very approachable, practicable, and yet somehow thorough and complete. (See links at bottom to his talks and writings.) More than that, his system resonates with many of the ideas I’ve been exploring on this blog, including the process-relational and Naturphilosophical streams of Continental philosophy, and in some respects the Lacanian-psychoanalytical (as I’ll point out below), not to mention, of course, other Asian field-theories such as Daoism, western traditions of Hermetic philosophy and Christian negative theology, and the like.

Shinzen describes human subjective experience as phenomenologically distinguishable into three primary “fields,” “spaces” or “elements”: Feel, which are bodily sensations experienced as emotional; Image, which are internal forms of visual thinking; and Talk, which are internal forms of monologue/dialogue/talk or “auditory thinking.” The three subjective “spaces” in which these arise develop in sequence from infancy: first we learn to feel with our bodies, then we start to see things (once our eyes learn to focus on them) and “image” the world and its relationships through imaginal fantasy, and finally we learn the words and the linguistic-discursive constructs that come to shape both our subjectivity and our world for us. And over time the three kinds of elements (distilled, for simplicity’s and usability’s sake, from Buddhism’s “five aggregates”) become densely entangled and knotted into emotionally-laden force-fields.

In a very interesting sense, these three spaces correspond with Jacques Lacan’s tripartite analysis of the psyche into the Real, a kind of nondual state of nature from which we become separated as we take on the qualities of socially defined subjective experience; the Imaginary, the image-based world of self-other relations and fantasies that emerge through the “mirror phase,” when we learn to recognize the body that appears in a mirror as the same one that others see when they see “me”; and the Symbolic, which is the language- and narrative-based world that “interpellates” or “hails us” into being the kind of subject that would fit into the social world.

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Annie Leonard’s Free Range Studios, whose viral video The Story of Stuff made some waves a little while back, has now produced a critique of the Cap and Trade system, some version of which is the most likely outcome of negotiations taking place in Copenhagen over the coming days.

Over at Grist, David Roberts claims that the video misses its mark.

But what we really need is videos like this…

Thanks to Anthony at Mediacology for alerting me to both of these. See Climate Justice Now for more of the green left’s take on the topic, and WorldChanging for Bill McKibben’s.

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The image of dark flow, described as 1400 galaxy clusters streaming toward the edge of the universe at blistering speed in the ongoing “afterglow” of the big bang (or something like that), has haunted me ever since I read about it several days ago. Caused “shortly after the big bang by something no longer in the observable universe,” and possibly by “a force exerted by other universes squeez[ing] ours” (umm, a force… doing what?… I can imagine Jon Stewart’s face squinting after hearing that), I can’t help thinking that astrophysicists are arriving at the point where the known universe is being bounded and taking its place amidst a more mysterious space of otherness, where we have no clue (and can’t possibly have a clue) what goes on. So it becomes the realm of poetry, of dreams and nightmares, of haunted imaginings, like the deep sea, beyond the reach of sunlight, that still fascinates us, but even more deep, dark, vital.

Einstein had famously said that “as our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it”; and perhaps the current constellation of events — the economic crisis with its Ponzi schemes, bank machinations, and the West’s growing indebtedness to po-faced and unreadable China, the gradually accumulating reports about climate change, and films about forthcoming apocalypses (2012), zombies and vampires (Zombieland, Twilight Saga: The New Moon), and zombieless apocalypses (The Road) — are conspiring to make us all a little curious, and spooked, about what’s out there in the growing darkness… What god will put the squeeze on us next, and what’s to guarantee he or she will be benevolent?

I’m also recalling a recent set of exchanges between Ben Woodard, kvond, and others on dark vitalism, a thought-stream brewing out of the nature-philosophical wing of speculative realism that Ian Hamilton Grant helped unleash with his Philosophies of Nature After Schelling… which perhaps is a Zeitgeist thing.

Zizek’s account of the Robert Heinlein novel “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” includes a lovely passage where he equates the Lacanian Real, the unassimilable kernel around which subjectivity is formed, with the “grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life” that emerges at the boundary of the known world and the unknown, outside the traveling couple’s car window. The Lacanian spookiness is perhaps what’s missing from Buddhist accounts of emptiness (though it’s hardly foreign to the Tibetan tantrics, with their graveyard nightshift meditations), and, to the goth-loving nature hound, it’s a nice addition. The passage is worth reproducing in full:

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It’s interesting to watch a topic spin itself out rhizomically across the blogosphere. Picking up on Žižek’s ecological musings, Levi Bryant seems more or less in agreement with what I had argued here last week, as does Michael Austin, while Ben Woodard criticizes the narrowing of the “ecology of concepts of nature” (a point I had made, too) and the “ontological priviledge of the subject” that “remains a serious stumbling block for any approach to nature that is not too shallow or too obfuscated.” This latter point sounds to me like Quentin Meillassoux’s (fashionable, in Speculative Realist circles) argument against “correlationism,” i.e., the (post-Kantian) anchoring of philosophy in the human subject’s relationship with the world. While I haven’t read Meillassoux’s After Finitude, I share his critique of correlationism if it’s restricted to the human piece (since the world is made up of more than just human subjects) but not to the extent that it tries to decenter subjectivity in general. As I see it, subjectivity and objectivity are mutually co-constituted through the events (becomings, actual occasions) that make up the world, and this relationship ought to be central to a philosophically realist understanding of the world.

Žižek’s recent lecture on apocalyptic times is available here, his First as Tragedy book talk here, and his new blog can alert you about other things being churned out of the Ž factory. And see all the responses to Mikhail Emelianov’s short post about the first, and Arts & Ecology’s post about the second. What’s most interesting about the apocalypse talk is that Ž. doesn’t include eco-apocalypse in his three main kinds of apocalyptic thinking in popular culture. Has he really come around to seeing both the forest (of “nature”-as-idea) and the trees (the things themselves, including the effects we are having on them)?

Meanwhile, the (pseudo-) event of the hacked climate change e-mails continues to reverberate in the media, siphoning off energy from the rather more important work of preparing for the Copenhagen summit. Grist, Dot Earth, Climate & Capitalism, Arts & Ecology, and WorldChanging are some of the better sites for staying up to date on that topic.

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Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj Žižek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually “in power” — the current chair, former chair, and at least one other faculty member, plus an overflow audience composed primarily of undergrads providing pretty good evidence of this — and then by characterizing the world of Lacanian theory as a kind of widely but thinly spread diaspora, in which the Lacanian had to craftily pretend to go along with the powers-that-be until they got into a secure position at which point they could turn around and “shoot,” i.e. do the real (Lacanian) stuff.

It’s nice to have one’s university marked out as a unique place in this way, not necessarily because of the Lacanianism (though some would say for that, too) as because having Žižek’s imprimatur adds some always-welcome cachet to it. Compared to the talk Žižek gave in Montreal recently, where his topic had been theology and the death of God, he was more on home turf here, both in terms of having the sympathetic packed-hall audience and because his topic was the more familiar one (for his fans) of ideology, film, and Jacques Lacan.

As I’ve related here before (to some extent), I admire Žižek’s passion, am awed by his energy and prolificacy, and strongly sympathize with his overall project, which he has loosely characterized as waking people up from their ideologically induced slumber, where the ‘waking’ is part of a Lacanian unmasking of psychologically driven illusions, and the ‘ideology’ is the one propping up capitalist injustice. But when it comes to the details of his arguments, I don’t always find them as convincing as I would like.

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Back in the mid-1990s when I was researching my book Claiming Sacred Ground — on the ‘sacralization’ of space, place, and landscape, with a focus on two places where it’s been happening at a rapid clip over the last three or four decades (Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona, which has been in the news recently for the multiple sweat-lodge deaths associated with prosperity self-help guru James Arthur Ray) — I heard a lot about “prophecies” leading up to major earth-changing events in 2012. For believers, the Harmonic Convergence of August, 1987, heralded the beginning of the final quarter-century of the current era, affording us twenty-five years to get our acts (ax?) together, collectively and individually, before being ground up for cosmic compost.

There’s a lot of research on belief and the tremendous resilience of the human mind’s capacity to bounce back with creative reinterpretations when alleged prophecies fail to occur. I actually believe that “creative (re-)religioning” is one of the things that will help us get through the “earth changes” coming up in the near future, so it’s something we need to think about and get better at. But December 21, 2012, is not the date we need to fear (or hope for, if you’re apocalyptically inclined), as the changes facing us will more likely be a matter of creeping climate system effects, ecological breakdowns (probably starting with our oceans), the steady decline of cheap energy sources, and growing economic dislocation for millions, than any sudden cosmically induced calamity. Blogging Mayanist Johan Normark’s 2012 postings are an excellent place to start for more informed readings of the whole 2012 phenomenon. (And see also what Mayan elders say about the whole thing, and Gary Lachman’s piece on the groovy Reality Sandwich.) What we need is not a rapid spike in fear and fearmongering, but the cultivation of our collective capacities for adaptive resilience, creativity, and empathy — plus pressure on political actors for quick and radical policy measures when possible.

It’s understandable, though, that Hollywood and the pop-culture industry would shift into high gear over this opportunity to sell movie tickets ($225 million worldwide in its first weekend!), books (what an incredible list), survival gear, spiritual solace, and tickets on the next spaceship out of here, and that, in reply, even NASA would issue statements (see here and here) to calm the ill-informed and worried.

Just as we like, even need, to mark out particular spaces and places as sacred — they become emblems for more genuine “reality,” utopian kernels to which we can actually travel, in our hearts or in our bodies (a hermeneutically flat topography just doesn’t compare, and probably makes us sick) — we also like to do that with time. It allows us to plan and organize our lives, look forward to things, and give our present bearings the weightiness of meaning. By saying this, I don’t mean to suggest that our lives are meaningless to start with and that we do these things to give ourselves the illusion that they are not. Meaning is woven into our activities; it oozes out of everything we do, and what we do is oriented, from day one, at allowing its ooze to flow. The same goes for any living thing, though obviously we humans are a lot more obsessed with it, for various reasons (to do with our neotenous nature, our complex and highly neuroplastic brains, our utter dependence on language and narrative, and much else).

Cognitive sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel writes of the “sociomental topographies” that mark our understandings of space and of time, and the forms of “mnemonic socialization” by which we learn what the important dates, events, check-points, and cycles are in our collective identity worlds. We live, however, in a world transitioning to the global scale, one in which national memories and identities are weakening and in which ethnic and civilizational ones are filling in the void, but where, for many of us, the latter don’t do the trick very well any more. Many people look to the global scale for their collective identity bearings, but that scale remains a work in progress, a contested arena without clear and effective markers in place, with science being one (or more) of the contestants, but others readily spilling into the vacuum. The appeal of 2012 doomsters is therefore understandable.

There were things I liked about Emmerich’s previous mega-doom-pic The Day After Tomorrow (like the scenes of an ice-age Manhattan), and some research has shown that it played a role in catalyzing discussion about climate change (see Leiserowitz and Lowe et al). What the effects of the 2012 asteroid will be is anyone’s guess. But I’m willing to wager an awful lot of money that life will go on…

Henry’s long take

A beautiful piece by improvisational guitarist and deep-sea diver Henry Kaiser, shot somewhere off the coast of Antarctica. (He’s done similar scenes in a couple of Werner Herzog films, Encounters at the End of the World and the sci-fi docu-fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder.)

Somewhere around the 7-8 minute mark, I was so overcome with emotion I almost spilled out of my body, messing up the keyboard of my laptop and covering it with an organless goo as it tried to squeeze its way through the monitor to swim along with him. On a rainy day, I can imagine myself setting this on infinite-loop and bathing myself in it. The final violin lines glide into the skin of my brain like blades of gold. Where would we be without the Henry Kaisers of this world?

His Antarctica journals can be found here, and more underwater video clips here.

Thanks to Andrew Osborne at Total Assault on Culture for sharing this.

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