Nadia Khodasevich-Léger, Composition, 1969

Just about all societies that get called “indigenous,” “tribal,” or “hunter-gatherer” (terms that in these contexts tend to mean “not integrated into industrial capitalism”) manage (or used to manage) their natural environments so as to provide for themselves. We, in the midst of capitalism, might crave something we like to call the wild, but indigenous forms of knowledge as well as the historical and anthropological evidence show clearly that we and our genetic forebears have controlled our environments in order to provide for ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years. For the greater part of that time our main tool was fire. Bill Gammage has shown, for instance, that the national parks of modern Australia — those areas that civilization reserves for wilderness — are very different from the pre-colonial landscape. Australia’s indigenous people did not live in the “wild,” but in an environment that they had deliberately shaped to provide for themselves. It was a continent-wide land management system.

— Ben Etherington, The New Primitives

Man Ray, The Fifty faces of Juliet, 1941-1954.

When our imaginations meet a mind decidely not like ours, our own nature is suddenly called into question. Consciousness cannot be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness. The result is an intoxicating uncertainty. And that is a relief, is it not, to acknowledge that we do not after all know what a self is? A corrective to human arrogance, to the numbing certainty that puts the soul to sleep. It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak, and to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is.

— Mark Doty from The Art of Description: World into Word

Poster for a demonstration at the Belarus embassy in London on July 23, 2022, in support of the 'railway partisans', who disrupted the movement of Russian troops and armaments on their way to Ukraine.

Zarina Hashmi, Untitled, (ink on paper on paper), 2017

Productivist ethics assume that productivity is what defines and refines us, so that when human capacities for speech, intellect, thought, and fabrication are not directed to productive ends, they are reduced to mere idle talk, idle curiosity, idle thoughts, and idle hands, their noninstrumentality a shameful corruption of these human qualities. And what might be cause for ethical distaste in the case of the individual can, when compounded into a generalized indiscipline, become a threat to social order. This fear of free time, whether manifested as idleness or indiscipline, should not be underestimated.

Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work