00:02:50.140We need ways of dancing away or dancing to fugitive spaces, dancing to sanctuaries where we can shapeshift.
00:02:59.620And I think grieving, mourning, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm, which might sound like a very, very privileged thing to do, I know.
00:03:11.760And yet, you know, doing that, I think, might be productive in ways that I do not even want to talk about.
00:03:20.140Bio is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, and counterintuitive take
00:03:27.500on global crises, civic action, and social change. He is director and chief curator for
00:03:33.820the Emergence Network and a visiting professor at Middlebury College. Bio has also authored two
00:03:40.000books, We Will Tell Our Own Story, and These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Letters to My Daughter
00:03:46.620on humanity's search for home, and has penned forewords for many others.
00:03:56.940Welcome, Bayo. It is such a delight to have you on the show, and I feel so grateful to have you
00:04:04.560in this space today with us to explore some of the deep philosophical threads of this time
00:04:10.000we're living into, particularly as we step across the threshold of the new year.
00:04:41.580Well, first and foremost, I'm sitting here in Chennai, just to acknowledge my presence and my grounds.
00:04:50.060I'm sitting here in Chennai, India, where we spend perhaps half of our time in a year, six months in a year, in the other part in the United States.
00:05:01.540And I'm here because my children made it possible.
00:05:05.820My wife, EJ, our kids, Alethea and Kea, made it possible.
00:07:13.940So even though I say that I fell away from my faith, I can never say that I have abandoned it.
00:07:21.180I mean, not practice Christianity, but in a sense, we never abandon anything in the relational universe.
00:07:27.780So that I'm still entangled with the past that I think I've done this.
00:07:32.300There's no walking away from stuff like that.
00:07:34.960So I'm here because of this entangling chiasmus of mother and father and three sisters and beautiful Christianized settings with their shadows and troubles and meeting this beautiful, ravishingly beautiful Indian, African, Iranian woman, falling in love with her and becoming a father and becoming myself in small doses every day.
00:08:04.000Oh my goodness. Just the way you speak, your depth of love and your connection to your family is so, it's so beautiful. And it's, I think it speaks to a buried part in myself. And so when you speak, this unburiedness begins in me. And I just want to really thank you for that.
00:08:27.300Now, I know much of your writing circles around the many existential urgencies and processes of change that are rising up in this moment of planetary transformation.
00:08:39.760And in your essay, What Climate Collapse Asks of Us, you said a number of historical and contemporary articulations of climate change, from the early terminology of global warming to the tragedy of the commons to the Green New Deal.
00:08:54.760And despite the abundance of new models and vocabularies to deal with the climate collapse,
00:09:00.380however, you note that, quote, the current frameworks stretch and yawn, gasp and pant,
00:09:07.320choke and ache to name and localize a phenomenon that resists our taming, end quote.
00:09:14.240So I wonder if you could help orient us within this too small container we've imagined to hold
00:09:20.420the overflowing complexity of this time and lead us into some of the philosophical inquiries that
00:09:26.360you're exploring at the heart of our unwieldy ecological crisis. What does it mean for climate
00:09:32.920change to be unthinkable or incalculable? Beautiful. So one of the most persistent
00:09:43.340and sticky habits of perception that has possessed those of us gestating in modern civilizations is
00:09:53.360we tend to see things as separate from each other. The mic is separate from the one who speaks into
00:10:00.240the mic. The podcast is separate from the computer that broadcasts the podcast. Cars are separate
00:10:06.760from their drivers. We are supported from our technologies. We see things as boundaried and as
00:10:13.540atomized in some Newtonian, Cartesian sort of way. And it's a good strategy. It's a strategy
00:10:22.440that has produced a kind of world. I'm not in the habit of naming it as evil or bad, even though
00:10:30.040that's a strategy in itself too. But I see the strategy of separation is to create safety,
00:10:35.620permanence fixity for once and for all to name things in a final way that's the modern impulse
00:10:44.220i would say now you run into trouble when things like what's happening today start to crop up the
00:10:51.160first thing i'll say is that we are slowly coming to terms in a world that is more entangling
00:10:57.420and more relational and more processual than our modern habits of scene
00:16:32.800The habits of war are already being heard
00:16:36.160when we say things like we're going to fight climate change,
00:16:39.900we're going to defeat climate change and stuff like that.
00:16:42.800That's war lending itself again to how we're framing it.
00:16:46.660But these other teachings tell us to stay still, you know, to be perfectly still in the face of the storm.
00:16:54.600And it's from these that I was able to tease out this beautiful idea that the times are urgent.
00:17:00.520Let us slow down. Slowing down has been interpreted by many communities as basically doing what we're doing, but at slower speed.
00:17:09.840that is we're literally slowing down the pace of things we are not typing our memos as fast as we
00:17:18.140once were i literally had a german brother write to me and say that i'm you're slowing down
00:17:24.860invocation isn't working because my bosses are still on my neck slowing down to type a memo
00:17:31.160isn't really working and i responded by saying slowing down is not a function of speed it's a
00:17:36.120function of awareness. And I don't want to make awareness a mental construct. It's a function of
00:17:42.160presence. So when I invite slowing down, I'm inviting us to research, to perform research
00:17:49.240into the ancestral tentacularities that proceed from us. I'm asking us to touch our bodies and
00:17:56.960touch our colonial bubbles. I'm asking us to listen, as you say, to witness. No, not just
00:18:03.580to witness, to with-ness, to be with land and community and ancestor and progeny and children
00:18:11.840in a way that isn't instrumental. Activism is increasingly instrumental, so it's performing a
00:18:18.500form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo, which makes activism,
00:18:25.740even in a search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which makes hope and justice,
00:18:30.860as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we're trying to leave behind.
00:18:36.320So slowing down seems to be a hacking of the machine. It's like we're taking on other forms
00:18:41.260of body, of embodiment that allows us to penetrate into different kinds of realities,
00:18:47.540other worlds, if you will. Let me stop there for now. I could go on and on.
00:18:53.080Well, I do want to go on and I really do want to lean further into this topic.
00:18:57.580and I've been meditating on the real challenge and friction of slowing down. Now, Trisha Hersey
00:19:04.160of the Nat Ministry describes rest as a radical threat to the system that feeds on the grind of
00:19:09.960urgency, writing, quote, we are living and participating in violence via a machine level
00:19:16.400pace of functioning. Anyone who goes against this pace is living as an outlier and a risk taker.
00:19:23.280It is warrior-style resistance to push back and disrupt this reality, end quote.
00:19:29.360In context of so-called modern capitalist life, I find that rest can only be non-threatening insofar as it's carved out of the shadow of work, as say, consuming or vacationing rather than a generative expression and worthy endeavor in its own right.
00:19:47.020So how can we reorder this kind of dualistic thinking around work versus rest or progress versus stagnation and embody the power of a slow, humble pace?
00:19:59.380hmm i would think of rest let me apply fred motin's um let me do some wrapping here even
00:20:07.780though i don't wrap at all and stretch you know i think the the beautiful gift of wrapping is
00:20:14.440is to disrupt linearity and binaries is to tease out branches what the french philosopher
00:20:22.340what Deleuze will call deterritorialization, is to tease out branches from the singular,
00:20:28.780to tease out the many streams from the new stream. I would take that word rest and stretch it further.
00:20:34.860How about we think of rest as marionage? Marionage being the process of extricating
00:20:41.080oneself from slavery, and rest as fugitivity, that is, moving away from sites of productivity.
00:20:50.040That is, are there other ways we can be generative and productive without taking on the singular definitions of a capitalist neoliberal structure?
00:21:01.780Are there other ways that we can defy the centurion voice of progress?
00:21:07.480If we're not progressing, then there's something wrong with us as a community, as individuals.
00:21:13.260So if we're not producing, what if rest is, as I've said before, listening to one's elders, dreaming?
00:21:20.120What if that's a form of rest? What if working is play or what children do?
00:21:25.640You know, the university structure is one example of a colonial imposition that sees study and learning as only one thing.
00:21:35.600If you're not studying in some disciplinary manner, then you're not studying.
00:21:39.560That's not real learning. That's what the university will tell you.
00:21:42.220But what if having a conversation with a friend is a form of study? So, yes, I agree that rest is decolonial in its relational entanglements with a capitalist structure.
00:21:57.280Like you said, I don't want to see it as a binary thing, rest versus non-rest. I want to move outside of that binary altogether and create fugitive communities where rest takes on new meanings altogether.
00:22:07.060And I don't know what that is. Only in the performing of it can we speak about it. And that's just fine.
00:22:15.580It makes me think of an interview I did with a dear friend, Bronte Velez, where she speaks of Fred Moten.
00:22:38.760So within our connection to this dynamic, fluid universe, I'm also thinking about
00:22:45.900quietness as an elemental ingredient of relationships and enactment of reciprocity.
00:22:52.260how is cultivating a humble quietness imperative to creating alliances and collaborations with
00:22:58.580our beyond human relatives for our collective earthly survival and i want to just make a
00:23:05.000personal note on this since i've been living out in the forest i do realize that it isn't until
00:23:12.080i get quiet and i get humble that i'm able to listen and connect with the more than human world
00:23:19.760I realize that if I'm too busy or I'm too crowded with the distractions of modernity, the voices from the more than human world won't enter me.
00:23:32.040And so I really feel that my relationship with the forest and with the more than human world has come from me quieting down and really offering a lot of myself patience and trusting in this connection that will come if I'm just able to, like I said, kind of leave modernity at the door and walk away from it for a while.
00:23:59.160yeah um i'm happy for you sister not not many people have the the privilege the the space the
00:24:09.940opportunity to be in the space that you are in you know to to go to the forest to build a cabin
00:24:18.560and to live it's entirely unimaginable to do that in a place like Chennai for instance
00:24:26.840where there's hardly any green life here.
00:24:32.080It's almost entirely structures and asphalt and steel
00:24:54.840or a moment that is internal, like in one's subjectivity, in one's mind, but quietude
00:25:03.580as an enlistment of bodies, just like a wind rushing into a space and making everything
00:25:09.840shiver, like making the leaves rust to shudder and making the hollow spaces and the branches
00:25:18.220sing, just enlisting all these bodies to perform the world in a particular way.
00:25:23.600I want to think of quietude as an assemblage of bodies.
00:25:29.220And if I were to do that, I would be very much invited to notice that it can happen here.
00:25:35.440This space of slowing down, this space of achieving rest, this place of critiquing or diffracting modernity, right in the belly of modernity, right in the city.
00:25:47.540And I say this this way most of the time, that enchantment is never a short supply.
00:25:53.600most of us and and it's beautiful again what you're doing sister but i want to stress that
00:25:59.780most of us are caught in the in the habit of thinking of escape as a way towards the sacred
00:26:08.040that is the sacred lies in the distance if we can leave the mundane and the banner behind
00:26:15.020then we will find the sacred. But I think the sacred is more pervasive, more fugitive than
00:26:24.380just something that is exterior to the conditions we want to live behind. I think fugitive spaces,
00:26:30.200and I think they're very beautiful examples of a fugitive space. The Great Dismal Swamp is one
00:26:35.420example. That is, it's a swampy place. It's smaller now, but in the 17th century, when slavery was
00:26:43.180really beginning. It was this fugitive space between Virginia and North Carolina, where
00:26:50.840African-Americans, Maroons, they call them, built new communities in the swamp, basically.0.64
00:26:58.500And it was in the heart of empire they did this. It was right there in the heart of the
00:27:03.320slavery enterprise that they built their fugitive communities. So I feel invited, I feel led
00:27:09.700and inspired to ask if quietude, if rest, if fugitivity isn't a space of reckoning with
00:27:18.440the banner, isn't a space of teasing out the sacred from the mundane, isn't a space of
00:27:24.000actually noticing that being with one's computer can be a time of quietude, a time of ancestral
00:27:30.160connections, that our imaginations of what the sacred looks like often gets in the way
00:27:36.920of our transformation and that we can be enlisted in ways
00:27:40.960that are surprising and unexpected to slow down.
00:29:21.060wow bio that was really profound and i'm really glad that you spoke to
00:29:29.480how to find this quietness and rest beyond what many of us think we need in order to
00:29:39.120gain those perspectives and right i do feel the privilege of living in the forest and with that
00:29:49.280privilege for me has come this feeling of immense responsibility of how do i take this honoring of
00:29:58.460being in relationship with a land like this and support communities and support the land
00:30:04.380in their own survival. And so I think it's such a complex time to be alive and there's no
00:30:11.860one size fits all or blanket solution that everyone can achieve in the same way. So how do we
00:30:19.740challenge our assumptions of how to find self-care and find what we need in our particular circumstances?
00:30:28.460And now I'd really like to call the words of two thinkers that have helped me navigate the dark waters of extinction and the existential immensity of climate change, Deborah Bird Rose and Tom Van Duren.
00:30:43.260In Keeping Faith with the Dead, Mourning and De-Extinction, they write, quote,
00:30:48.360Mourning is a process of learning and transformation to accommodate a changed reality.
00:30:54.660Mourning is about dwelling with a loss, and so coming to appreciate what it means,
00:30:59.500how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships.
00:31:06.080Could you take us deeper into this notion of tending grief as an opportunity for transformation
00:31:11.800or rebirth? And within your answer, perhaps you could speak to your project,
00:31:17.240vulture courting the otherwise in a time of breakdown with the emergence network
00:31:23.340oh thank you sister those are powerful words um and mourning i know it in my bones not just
00:31:32.840in a poetic sense when my father died in in nigeria um we traveled to the village to bury him
00:31:39.740he was an important figure in the country's politics and governance we're approaching the0.81
00:31:45.480village in a convoy and i remember the uh the market women women i'd never seen before women0.96
00:31:51.900i'd never heard of before literally tearing their clothes you know as the cars approached and as his
00:31:58.320coffin was seen wailing by the side of the street crying shedding tears and then i felt in a moment
00:32:06.940annoyed because i felt they were taking my moment to to be to to cry like who are these guys who
00:32:14.700who are these people crying for daddy they didn't know daddy daddy didn't know them so who are these
00:32:21.560ones to be crying i felt it was it was a politics of scarcity like if if i cried and you shouldn't
00:32:29.440or if we cry at least acknowledge a hierarchy of of grief here i should be the one uh noticed here
00:32:38.320the son, the only son of my father. And then I learned again, as part of my decolonial journey
00:32:44.940about grief as ceremony, grieving as ceremony. That is when we, when we grieve, it's not
00:32:53.840instrumental to anything, but that it's an opening. It's an opening. It's an, it's a
00:32:59.400performance of indeterminacy that is somewhat stifled by the psychological, I should say the
00:33:07.760psychological military industrial complex an ironical potmantle of words yes but as a practicing
00:33:17.260or as a recovering psychologist i was taught to um to help the grieving subject recover
00:33:25.540to probably offer pills or something to help you get back in the game to get back into the cycle
00:33:33.400of productivity, you know, to pull yourself together, if you will. And this noticing is
00:33:40.400what has manifested in my writing as a need for us to find spaces where we can fall apart,
00:33:47.440which is what I call grieving. I think of grief as a falling apart, not as a falling apart in
00:33:53.300only human terms, but as a falling apart that is part of the motions, part of the processes
00:34:01.100that is stitched into the fabric of matter itself.
00:35:12.980What if that was actually an objective of UNESCO?
00:35:16.520You know, to gather people together and to just grieve.
00:35:20.740That doesn't seem instrumental to salvation or redemption,
00:35:24.400But it's a place of noticing that the world is shrewder, wiser, and more trickstery than our systems know how to appreciate. So there are other sites of power. The otherwise is shining, if you will. It's being illuminated by poetry today, and I'm still giving to it.
00:35:47.560My work with the Emeritus Network is, and some of our projects like Vulture, even Vunja, which is a festival we're holding in Brazil next year, is to notice these other many streams in between, these other multiple worlds between that lie between justice and failure, the worlds between victory and defeat, the worlds between the ones and the zeros, the space between the stories we tell.
00:36:13.320what if there were a climate saudade you know what if there were a climate
00:36:18.240ambido i'm using queer words you know a place of nostalgia what if there's a place of just
00:36:25.580sitting with the trouble of noticing that the things we've lost may never come back to us
00:36:31.140what if there's a place of just doing that that can be funded i guess most people who are hearing
00:36:37.720this right now would say what good does that do you know we need to save the world for our children
00:36:42.840We need to get into shape as quickly as possible. We need to call out the capitalist structures, the people, the enemies that knew about this shitstorm before it happened, before it began to spill through our doors.
00:36:59.200Yes, I think there's a space for that.
00:37:01.000But I think most of the time in doing that, in pursuing justice, we're reinforcing the
00:37:08.300In trying to climb out of the pits that we've dug for ourselves, the pit becomes resilient.
00:37:15.020In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form.
00:37:18.880So in a very critical sense, we're in a crisis of form.
00:37:24.340And this form is the indeterminacy of things.
00:37:28.080The background has crashed into the figure, into the foreground. And so sensemaking is at a crisis point now. We need trickster approaches. We need ways of dancing away or dancing to fugitive spaces, dancing to sanctuaries where we can shapeshift.
00:37:47.300And I think grieving, mourning, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm, which might sound like a very, very privileged thing to do, I know.
00:38:00.880And yet, you know, doing that, I think, might be productive in ways that I do not even want to talk about.
00:38:07.300I resonate really deeply with that bio and I have been sitting with this thought the last
00:38:17.900year year and a half or so with one of my mentors and I don't know if I'll say it super clearly at
00:38:25.460the moment but this question I'm asking myself of what would I do if I accepted that
00:38:33.600the anthropocene will not be stopped what would i do with my life who would i be how would i live
00:38:41.880and i don't mean that necessarily and where would i move to or what what would i do with my job so
00:38:48.820much it's more an internal questioning of how will i live in my in my body in my spirit if i'm not
00:38:57.240clinging on to the hope of solutions as a way to fix everything that's gone wrong what if things
00:39:04.580can't be fixed in the way that i hope they could be and i think this speaks to what you're saying
00:39:09.800what would happen if we sit in the grief of this and not grasp for a way out but rather just
00:39:19.320realize this is what's happening and and I I do struggle with feeling that there could be
00:39:28.800a type of deep connection on the other side of sitting in that I struggle between that and then
00:39:34.460this feeling that this feeling of duty this feeling of responsibility that I have to quote
00:39:42.140unquote fight or I have to figure quote unquote figure things out and I don't even like those
00:39:48.820words because i think that it's the terminology that has been used in the environmental movement
00:39:53.760climate change justice movements this uh power behind this urgency which and of course it also
00:40:01.440makes sense people are suffering we're all suffering in our own ways the planet is suffering
00:40:06.880i'm thinking about australia and all of the humans and more than humans that are
00:40:12.040burning right now and what do we do in the face of what feels like an apocalypse
00:40:20.360and i really appreciate it what you're saying and thinking about what you won't talk about
00:40:26.880in terms of what could be on the other side of this sitting with the grief sitting with the
00:40:33.400trouble reminds me of donna harroway and the interview we did with her so yeah i'm really
00:40:39.100i'm with you and i i wonder how we can not stop our work to to serve justice because i think
00:40:51.540serving justice is is an ethical way to live i think it's a moral way to connect with being
00:40:58.260alive is to see the injustices of our world and try to be strong figures or or at least figures
00:41:05.720that are standing and saying no but at the same time realizing that it is so complex the trouble
00:41:12.820that we're in and urgency and that type of mentality of of the fight may not be what quote
00:41:22.000unquote saves us or quote unquote saves the world whatever that means i really resonate with you so
00:41:28.060thank you bio i want to talk about one of your lectures and you share that the etymology of the
00:41:35.600word demise traces back to the transference of property. And if we hold this time as an expression
00:41:42.020of a greater collective demise, a system malfunction and, you know, the categorical
00:41:48.000collapse of the, quote, human, then I wonder how this could give a way to a radical recomposition
00:41:54.640of power. You know, how are the dominant logics of mastery and white supremacy swallowed up inside
00:42:01.060the compost pile of the Anthropocene? And how can our movements of justice actively tend decomposition?
00:42:09.560So many things swirling, and let me see if I can pick one strand. I got a question from a magazine
00:42:15.660recently. A German magazine asked me to answer a question like, what are the skills and capacities
00:42:25.800you think we need to develop in order to meet the anthropocene.
00:42:30.040And I wrote back and I said, I'm quite reluctant to name a skill,
00:42:35.380you know, to say, this is a skill without disparaging your question
00:50:23.520I call it post-activism, these thoughts.
00:50:26.580Not to signal a move away from contemporary activism, not to say we're the new guys on
00:50:31.660the block. Not to say there's a sacred kind of activism that is materialized by tethering
00:50:37.940contemporary activism to Eastern spiritualities. No, it's none of that. It's basically a way of
00:50:43.880asking, what if the ways we respond to crisis is part of the crisis? What if there are other
00:50:49.220spaces of power? And what if we could touch these spaces of power and be touched in return?
00:50:54.120what happens i would love to know what happens yeah i think what may happen is something that
00:51:02.360i certainly can't begin to comprehend and yes that feeds me that nourishes me in a way to
00:51:11.920think about the things that i cannot even begin to metabolize in my mind and i think when
00:51:20.020human supremacy white supremacy tell us that we can understand everything it's really detrimental
00:51:27.940to our own connection with ourselves and with the world yeah in preparation for this interview i
00:51:37.100was listening to a lecture you gave last year in victoria bc and i was really profoundly affected
00:51:43.160by the response you shared with an audience member on their question about allyship and you said
00:51:48.100quote, even our failure matters. A failed star shines brighter than a coherent one because a
00:51:55.440failed star has burst its guts into the universe and become stardust and come into our skin and
00:52:01.100made us human. It doesn't end with you. It doesn't end with me, end quote. And I'm just interested
00:52:10.260to hear what are we hospicing out of our movement cultures when we hold space for failure beyond the
00:52:16.640paradigm of good allyship. How does accountability and agency take shape differently in the shared
00:52:23.300process you call making sanctuary? It's always a good moment to be thankful to our white brothers0.97
00:52:30.900and sisters and fathers and mothers, if I could prostrate to them, even though it embarrasses
00:52:37.440some of them. People that I deeply respect, Karen Barad being one of them, Helena Noberg is one of
00:52:45.020Then the people who have touched my life and whose milk I suck and it nourishes my bones and my mind and my spirit, I would do that every day.
00:52:56.960So it's always a good moment to offer gratitude to allyship.
00:53:01.760It's from reading and struggling and wrestling with these revered ones that it is possible to notice that everything in the world, and it's not just white allyship, is, as it is dimensional, as it is three-dimensional, it is also fraught with tensions.
00:53:23.540And there isn't some kind of self-sufficient progress narrative that we can latch onto, like holding a basket to a butterfly catcher to a comet and zooming into another universe.
00:53:38.940There isn't a place of those that would ease away or release us from the trouble of just being alive.0.92
00:53:46.340But I will say this, that, and again, it's in response to what you notice about white allyship, that it's a beautiful thing. It's a struggling and a yearning to be present for suffering, to stay with suffering, to notice the ways that some bodies are privileged in a power structure to the detriment of other bodies.0.76
00:54:09.960and I've been so grateful and I've been so blessed in my own work everywhere I travel
00:54:16.100the people that come out to hear me speak the people that put me in their homes you know that's
00:54:21.760a form of allyship that we rarely talk about but it's I'm grateful for that at the same time sister
00:54:28.040it's I tend to think of white allyship in the same vein as the intersectional politics that
00:54:33.900i've just referenced because it it's still in centralizing the the body and the experiences
00:54:42.380of black women for instance it ironically creates a savior narrative for white people
00:54:50.540or for whiteness i as a yoruba person and dwelling with our cosmologies identity is not a stable
00:54:57.980thing for me. So I even hesitate to label people white or black. And I'm not colorblind either.
00:55:05.440It's a tension here. But yes, white allyship seems to be a creature of intersectional politics.0.59
00:55:13.580It's still tethered to that same place of power, kind of centered, paradoxically,
00:55:19.420re-centers, it makes possible a savior narrative that is problematic. And it incarcerates black0.92
00:55:26.760bodies into positions of eternal victimhood so that because this is your identity, we're going1.00
00:55:34.000to predispose you to behaving in this way. You're going to antagonize. You're going to be angry all
00:55:40.660the time. You're going to demand your own say. You're going to seek a seat at the table. And
00:55:46.720this is how you should be as a black body. And leftist politics has kind of embraced this0.92
00:55:52.340stratagem, this way of seeking and asking for a space. But a space in a pyramid or in a pyramid
00:56:02.320or a space in a prison cell isn't exactly an abundant space. It's still incarceration. It's
00:56:10.200still a loveless economy of bodies. It's still a loveless structure that we're, though we don't
00:56:16.040know what a wiser economy or wiser politics might look like, maybe we can gesture towards it.0.95
00:56:22.340And this is why I speak about failure, because white allyship comes with a righteousness model, a morality or ethical code that is just as binding and incarcerating as the politics it wants to liberate black bodies from.0.67
00:56:38.140Because it says if you're not a good white ally, then there's something wrong with you.0.56
00:56:44.080You know, if you need to be a good white ally, you need to do your work.0.65
00:56:48.500and all of that is important, very important. Yet at the same time I have to speak in a double0.67
00:56:56.840sense here and say that I also notice it is deeply flawed and problematic because you're trapped in
00:57:03.440an ethical code that doesn't allow you to spill, doesn't allow your body to move, doesn't allow us
00:57:09.500to notice the intergenerational dance of bodies that we sometimes glibly call failure or success.
00:57:18.500So I wonder if there aren't other ethical spaces where we can spill into each other
00:57:23.760that doesn't constitute a spiritual bypass, that doesn't dismiss identity politics as
00:57:30.420the rantings of the left, and also doesn't dismiss the conservatism, those MAGA hat
00:57:37.900wearing Trump tags, as a Twitterati would call them, that doesn't dismiss their concerns
00:57:45.220about identity politics, and also doesn't perform some kind of milquetoast reconciliation,
00:57:52.500but holds the tensions of these many worlds, the universe that exceeds all of them. So yes,
00:57:58.960my sister, failure, I've been learning about failure from the likes of Jack Halberstam,1.00
00:58:05.040the queer art of failure. Her book shook me and exploded my world. And I learned how even a0.99
00:58:12.980filled star shines brighter than a coherent one an integral one that is a world beyond wholeness
00:58:21.360and i learned when i listened to indian mythology and i learned about akilandeshwari the goddess
00:58:28.240who is never not broken this idea of brokenness is missing in our conversations because we're
00:58:35.160looking for wholeness righteousness we want to get it right we want to stick by the script
00:58:39.840And in doing so, we're becoming, ironically, brittle bodies, you know, breakable.
00:58:46.160We can't even have a conversation about mistakes anymore as a result of the operations performed on us by social networks.
00:58:58.280I'm wondering about the promises of monsters.
00:59:01.140I'm wondering about how brokenness can redeem us from the incarceration of wholeness.
00:59:05.680I'm wondering about other spaces of power that can help us perform spillages, a maroonage, a marooning body, runaway fugitives from ethical codes of righteousness.
01:00:35.680um i'm feeling inarticulate and speechless after what you just said because i was
01:01:04.060there's no way for us not to make mistakes there's no way for us to not fail
01:01:10.740the pressure of being a quote perfect human it feels fake it doesn't even it doesn't feel
01:01:16.200authentic and i think it completely severs our ability to connect with each other when one we
01:01:23.860put each other on these pedestals of perfection moral perfection activist ally perfect whatever
01:01:30.460we whatever tag we want to put on that or category and then I think it also makes us feel separate
01:01:36.800because yeah the pressure that we put on ourselves to not fail and the pressure we put on others to
01:01:42.200not fail and it's not even possible and so it is a type of prison and it doesn't allow for growth
01:01:50.120and it really it severs the future of what a deep relationship can be and I am thinking even about
01:01:58.220one of my dear friends who we got in a an argument or not an argument it was it was just
01:02:06.560a point of disconnection and it wasn't until we actually were able to come together and feel
01:02:13.820embarrassed or feel a little ashamed or guilty whatever it was that we actually were able to
01:02:19.300grow closer together we were able to grow closer through our imperfections through our mistakes
01:02:24.260And there's a world, a whole world of connection when we make a wrong step and then are able to sit with one another and learn from that. So, I mean, that's just one almost surface level example. But what social media has done to us, especially with call out culture, is insanity. It's insanity.
01:02:48.040And people are so afraid. I have so many people coming to me being afraid of being involved, because they're afraid they're going to do something wrong, or make a mistake and then be ousted from the community forever. And I think to myself, my goodness, our movement is already so small, we can't afford to lose people who are willing to give their hearts, souls, bodies, resources, whatever it is that they're offering.
01:03:14.400we don't have the luxury of just sending people away and so oh gosh anyway so many levels so many
01:03:22.200rabbit holes there but I do want to ask this next question because it's something that I feel
01:03:29.600you are so unique you're such a unique human with your intimate lens of fatherhood and
01:03:37.800and it's this this theme that comes up again and again in your work and I've been so touched by
01:03:44.060your invitation to quote treat our children as elders and you've also say quote children now come
01:03:51.640out of the earth dragging the textures of wisdoms gone before and bringing it up with them they're
01:03:57.540not tabula rasas they're not empty slates they're alive in the wisdom of ancestors that are still
01:04:04.020folded in the thick present pay homage to the multiple that is lingering within them end quote
01:04:10.580speaking from your experience as a father and a teacher how can we follow young people as
01:04:18.600ethnographic guides into the divine realm of imagination and what is important about this
01:04:25.680space of wonder bewilderment and vital curiosity
01:04:30.520yeah that's such a beautiful question i just wish i could just say good night and just go dream
01:06:25.860She has ideas about school, some of them imprinted by our own conversations.
01:06:32.840But by and large, she's a being in her own self.
01:06:38.100And the things she can do and the things she can say and the things she's permitted to say,
01:06:43.480the places she's already probing, you know, shocks even us, her parents.
01:06:50.220We're like, you never do that as children.
01:06:52.260And yes, maybe a general argument could be made that even schooled kids do that.
01:06:58.420But there's a sense in which we notice there's a difference here with what's happening with Aletheia.
01:07:05.520And I wonder if that isn't a sacred dance with wonder.
01:07:11.380There's something deeply political about what we're doing as well.
01:07:14.480It's not divorced from climate change or Trump or Bolsonaro or Modi here in India or the rise of ethno-nationalist fascism.
01:07:24.560What we're trying to do, and I think we'll tell ourselves this in many articulate moments, what we're trying to do is we're trying to twat the productivity of the status quo.
01:07:37.980We're trying to learn again how to play.
01:07:40.220Not that we believe that this is a fix-all, that unschooling is some kind of self-sufficient paradigm.
01:07:48.060And if you keep your child away from school, that is tantamount or equal to some kind of sacred activism.
01:09:49.240the prison of the dominant culture of capitalism imperialism colonialism and so on and so forth is
01:10:00.580having us believe that there isn't another way that there that there is this one way and that
01:10:07.620is the way it's the way of raising citizens it's the way of school it's the way of urgency it's
01:10:14.220the way of instant gratification so on and so forth and i think this dominant culture has
01:10:20.840come in and infiltrated our minds to have us believe that there aren't other options or
01:10:29.760not only either even tangible options but even options in our own imaginations and so when i
01:10:36.820imagine your daughter and the space you give her and her imagination to go beyond two plus two
01:10:46.040equals four i mean just that in and of itself is revolutionary that you are allowing her in
01:10:53.120in this timeframe, especially to question everything and not just feel like she has to
01:10:59.920believe what she's being given. And I think so many of us just don't even know that we can question
01:11:09.140what we're being really like forced down our throats. So now I'd really love to think more
01:11:17.720about the resilience held within the bonds of intergenerational lineages of struggle
01:11:22.880and resistance. And a few months ago, I came across the word Atavia, meaning great, great,
01:11:30.720great grandmother in Latin, and related to the word Atavism, which in biology refers to an
01:11:37.020ancestral trait that reappears in an individual after having been lost in previous generations
01:11:42.460through evolutionary change. So as I'm meditating on this word, my mind wanders to the hopeful
01:11:48.140reemergence and turning of worlds that we can't always see, worlds that camouflage in our DNA
01:11:55.380or hide in our bones, flow through our blood memory or unfurl as seeds. And I just think
01:12:03.040there is an immense resource of wisdom in life's ongoingness and thorny will to survive that
01:12:09.440is far beyond our capacity to understand or quantify and so i'm wondering how can we learn
01:12:16.500to place trust in these temporalities and how can we be partners to the mysterious and the unseen
01:12:23.240to healing a vibrant mythic cosmos that perhaps lives beyond our human perception
01:12:28.660and i know we've been touching on this thread a little bit as we've been speaking but i would
01:12:34.920really like to focus on this for a moment with you right right well i would say it's already
01:12:40.840happening sister it's um in many ways it's not something that we now have to do like let's put
01:12:47.860this in the plan now we know how to do it again agency is not a human property agency is is the
01:12:57.060movement of is the movement of material it's mattering is the becomingness of things
01:13:04.440so there isn't um the efforts you know we tend to speak about decoloniality as a human project
01:13:13.060when it's so anchored to humanism it it tends to um it tends to occlude the uh the work of the
01:13:21.280post-human it tends to occlude the as you beautifully say the turning of other worlds
01:13:27.240The ways that technology, the inhuman, the non-human, the modern human is also at work asking these questions, experimenting with the concepts and breaking through and writing into being as an example of some of the ways that we are beginning to notice the invisible, if you will.
01:13:52.900and this is another instance of irony is the development of the ancestry testing
01:14:00.520DNA testing technology if I were to ask you what is ancestry testing made of
01:14:08.880it's made of those biological instruments it's made of capitalist systems of profit
01:14:16.720and profit making is made up of the endless hours of servitude it's made of very problematic things
01:14:24.580and yet this very problematic thing we call ancestry testing is allowing us to you know is
01:14:33.560territorializing modernity that is it is hacking at the heart of modernity is the hacking of
01:14:43.240modernity just like quantum physics becomes this which is produced in modernity becomes this tool
01:14:50.460that disturbs and unfounds modernity unfurls modernity ancestry testing is allowing us to
01:14:58.480notice keener worlds that you know disturbs the story the dominant story of identity
01:15:05.760dominant story of identity is that our identities are more or less fixed
01:15:12.940take one box you're either white or you're black or you're brown or you're something else
01:15:20.520you always fall within a box the very conditions that make those boxes possible those categories
01:15:27.580possible are the same conditions that is producing these technologies that is allowing us to say
01:15:35.480for instance that i am not just white i am brown and green and yellow and the enemy of my ancestors
01:15:45.940also my ancestor as stephen jenkinson would say so that i am wide i am a multitude and i make no
01:15:54.500apologies for it i am so incoherent so chaotic that the project of identity making the identitarian
01:16:03.680dynamics of modern settlements and modern epistemologies break down in the face of what
01:16:10.180I am. In fact, I am is a rude remark to make in the face of what I am becoming. And language cannot
01:16:19.920bear hold the thing that is me. And so that is a noticing of worlds. That is made possible by
01:16:29.340That is made possible by the conditions around us. So it's not just something we must do to create space for. It is something that is happening around us. It's in art, it's in technology, it's in spiritual sensitivities and new movements in contemplation and the movements between contemplation and activism.
01:16:50.640it's a place of shape-shifting which brings me to the concept of sanctuary i think and talk about
01:16:59.060sanctuary reclaiming this medieval practice of allowing the fugitive a place of rest to escape
01:17:07.540the fugitive's accusers which was practiced in england but became wiped out when our juridical
01:17:16.300systems started to emerge, the systems of laws and legislation and judges and courts of law.
01:17:24.040Prior to all that, we had sanctuary. And sanctuary also being this pagan,
01:17:32.420I love the word pagan, pagan technology that the Christian establishment pilfered,
01:17:40.620you know, stole for themselves because it was such a powerful thing. I asked myself,
01:17:45.280where are the places of sanctuary today where do we run to with the anthropocene you know breathing
01:17:52.340down on us running away is not a function of escape for me i think of sanctuary as a place
01:17:59.980of the monster sanctuary as a place of shape-shifting because i noticed that in the in
01:18:06.560the architecture of those old sanctuaries the monster was always on the front door it always
01:18:12.180had this haggle day or a door knocker that was shaped in the ferocious figure of a gargoyle
01:18:19.960or some other monster, a lion or something. And I always ask myself, was this just a trend
01:18:25.680or why was the monster on the face of, on the door, the very first thing that welcomed you
01:18:32.160into sanctuary? And I think to myself that sanctuary is the place where we gain different
01:18:37.660shapes, because the monster is the dismissal or the diffraction of shape. And I feel that
01:18:44.020what we rudely call climate change and the Anthropocene is the de-territorialization of
01:18:51.660man, the figure of man, is the dismissal of man, is the problematization of man,
01:19:00.060the figure of man and the stability of man so sanctuary in the way i think and talk about it
01:19:09.100is this place where we gain different shapes where we lose shape where we compost and how do we do
01:19:14.500that we do it by listening we do it by by working together in ways that are probably fugitive and
01:19:25.540outside of the normative ways of producing food or money or stories.
01:19:34.260We do it by listening to our wounds, by sharing wounds,
01:19:38.960by sharing painful feelings, by sharing our jealousy and our grief.
01:19:44.860We do it by sitting with the trouble of being alive.
01:24:19.440so that's a little something to leave us with but uh can i just say something quickly and uh oh
01:24:28.320Oh, please. Yeah, please finish up in whatever way you feel called.
01:24:32.380Yes. There is a biblical passage, you know, that I've been returning to in these returnings. The old is never not new. It keeps coming back.
01:24:48.840And this story in the Christian text speaks about a figure called Job, who is a good man who has suffered and gained wealth.
01:25:03.840And one day his wealth is taken away from him by the devil, I think.
01:25:10.280He loses his cattle. He loses his gold. He loses his children, all of them in one day.
01:25:16.200and all his friends just basically there's this deep philosophical conversation that happens on
01:25:24.580the nature of suffering and pain and job is a very very central character in in many theological
01:25:32.220conversations about the nature of pain and suffering and all his friends just basically say
01:25:38.420curse god curse god and die and job is you know he's angry he's like i'm not going to do that
01:25:45.320and yet i have i need answers to my question why would a good person suffer like this why would i0.99
01:25:51.880keep all the commandments and do all the good stuff be a good white ally if you will and still
01:25:59.840experience the world this way and um shortly in the in the book god appears to job and job
01:26:09.240poses those questions to the divine, basically saying, answer me. I lived by the book. I did
01:26:17.180everything you told me to do. And yet here I am with sores on my body, no food in my barn.
01:26:24.660My children are no longer sleeping in their beds. My cattle no longer roaming in the fields.
01:26:30.960Why would you do this? Why would you allow this to happen to a good person?
01:26:34.200And the way that God responds to Job is very fascinating.