Primal Religions 2022

  If Oil Is Drilled in Bristol Bay BY  DG NANOUK OKPIK Why is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant hovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover   for a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind of spikelets biting the air? Dip one.   The lips of vanished flames in lava coals glow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two.   She/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three. While still in the embryo, separating the body   from death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range in unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely   stifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon minerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold.   Will they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea, ravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill.

  Galileo says qualities are not real only quantities  Descarte builds on this: rearranges the world into things that have a reality that does not change vs a reality that does change, we use our intellect to measure the world Contradiction? Celebrate intellect but tell us not to trust our sense because they are not quantitative, but our thought processes and intellect and being are heavily influenced by the qualitative things of the world 

 There are so many artists who have relied on substances for inspiration, lots of musical artists as well. I do not think that there is an inherent problem with this, but it so often leads to a heavy reliance and addiction because these substances are over used for inspiration. I think everything in moderation applies here. Many indigenous peoples use it as a way to connect with nature and the gods, or see spiritual visions, and I see no issue in that. The issue is when we seek out that altered world fueled by substances so often that we want to live there and be there instead of reality.

  Death BY  CRISOSTO APACHE For E.P. Kazhe/Botella The dread, however, was not of death’s agonies. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen it is prohibited to whisper the names of the dead, as it encourages them to linger at the doorstep, and she has already lingered, far too long

 " By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write ‘naturally’. Oral speech is fully natural to human beings in the sense that every human being in every culture who is not physiologically or psychologically impaired learns to talk” (pg 81). - Ong “...animism was never, in truth, left behind. The participatory proclivity of the senses was simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to the visible letters of the alphabet. Only by concentrating the synaesthetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters begin to come alive and to speak.” (pg 86) - Abram Two very different and contrasting ideas in these quotes

One of the first things we discussed was how we can become desensitized through the use of social media, I see it ever day. I myself doom scroll through instagram all of the time and the time will pass in the blink of an eye because I am losing myself to it. It really shows how enhancing technology and the printed age has lead to a huge reliance on sight, and a limited use of any and all other senses as we have moved into the contemporary era.