Back in the 1950s Aldous Huxley asked some prescient questions in The Human Situation in relation to the need for a mode of writing that can adequately account for ‘the human situation.’ He mourned the ‘geological force’ of Man to destroy the earth at such a rapid rate and argued that the main problem is the way we have perceived our relationality to the planet––insisting on this false notion that we are somehow separate from it. But of course many First peoples of the world have long understood the notion of non-hierarchical continuum across all species which assumes a commonality that is vital, albeit whilst simultaneously preserving difference. Similarly, Donna Haraway innovatively and expansively explores our collective coherence on this complex planetary system beyond Anthropos and the Capitaloscene. Surely at this moment of planetary crisis we must expediently recognise that: ‘…we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.’ And Haraway insightfully advocates the idea that ‘[c]ompanion species infect each other all the time’ (Haraway, 2016). Contagion is in fact our lingua franca: it is our interspecies mode of communication on planet earth. And as Jorie Graham tells the Paris Review: ‘I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion…’ (Graham, Spring 2003). In fact, it is Virginia Woolf who elaborates this reality so beguilingly in The Waves, ahead of Graham, albeit by liberating poetry from its formal constraints more so towards prose stylings. In The Waves Woolf describes in richly sensate language the orchestrations of humans in ceaseless divergent exchange with other humans and more-than-human worlds. The mind-wanderings of Woolf’s central protagonists in The Waves reflects these many excursions into doing poetic thought that we all undertake, ongoingly, and which has the capacity to liberate a planetary anti-logic of human experience. In this book I closely read Woolf’s The Waves, and off the back of her extraordinary modernist work, I advocate undertaking poetic prose writing experiments as a form of narrative therapy towards a radical shift in how we think and do human at the planetary turn, as well as demonstrate my own poetic writing experiment in a chapter addressed to my brother whose life attested to undergoing digression albeit towards a hope of connectivity with others. It is the First Nations custodians, the philosopher poets, the artists, the mentally divergent, the so-called sensitives, the fine nerve meters, like Artaud, like Woolf, like my brother, Brakhage, Basquiat, Emin, and many others besides, who have the greatest capacity to bring about a paradigmatic shift in how we think and do human. For it is they who are tuned into the nexus of planetary life. They demonstrate that we must urgently reauthor ourselves, map our psychic states in relation to human and more-than-human others, to ecological landscapes, to augur our connectedness. The reality is contagious.
Nothing But a Fine Nerve Meter; New Maps at the Planetary Turn
My new book, is forthcoming with Revolutionaries in 2025
Back in the 1950s Aldous Huxley asked some prescient questions in The Human Situation in relation to the need for a mode of writing that can adequately account for ‘the human situation.’ He mourned the ‘geological force’ of Man to destroy the earth at such a rapid rate and argued that the main problem is the way we have perceived our relationality to the planet––insisting on this false notion that we are somehow separate from it. But of course many First peoples of the world have long understood the notion of non-hierarchical continuum across all species which assumes a commonality that is vital, albeit whilst simultaneously preserving difference. Similarly, Donna Haraway innovatively and expansively explores our collective coherence on this complex planetary system beyond Anthropos and the Capitaloscene. Surely at this moment of planetary crisis we must expediently recognise that: ‘…we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.’ And Haraway insightfully advocates the idea that ‘[c]ompanion species infect each other all the time’ (Haraway, 2016). Contagion is in fact our lingua franca: it is our interspecies mode of communication on planet earth. And as Jorie Graham tells the Paris Review: ‘I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion…’ (Graham, Spring 2003). In fact, it is Virginia Woolf who elaborates this reality so beguilingly in The Waves, ahead of Graham, albeit by liberating poetry from its formal constraints more so towards prose stylings. In The Waves Woolf describes in richly sensate language the orchestrations of humans in ceaseless divergent exchange with other humans and more-than-human worlds. The mind-wanderings of Woolf’s central protagonists in The Waves reflects these many excursions into doing poetic thought that we all undertake, ongoingly, and which has the capacity to liberate a planetary anti-logic of human experience. In this book I closely read Woolf’s The Waves, and off the back of her extraordinary modernist work, I advocate undertaking poetic prose writing experiments as a form of narrative therapy towards a radical shift in how we think and do human at the planetary turn, as well as demonstrate my own poetic writing experiment in a chapter addressed to my brother whose life attested to undergoing digression albeit towards a hope of connectivity with others. It is the First Nations custodians, the philosopher poets, the artists, the mentally divergent, the so-called sensitives, the fine nerve meters, like Artaud, like Woolf, like my brother, Brakhage, Basquiat, Emin, and many others besides, who have the greatest capacity to bring about a paradigmatic shift in how we think and do human. For it is they who are tuned into the nexus of planetary life. They demonstrate that we must urgently reauthor ourselves, map our psychic states in relation to human and more-than-human others, to ecological landscapes, to augur our connectedness. The reality is contagious.