thinkingwith: writing strategies for reconnecting to earth

Note that these are meant as jumping off points, not traditional assignments. I try to provide a lot variety for you to have your own insights and experiences. Follow what pulls at you and what you can get to. Don’t feel the need to have to read everything now. You can always come back to it later.

First, find a non-human entity to thinkwith – a house plant, a pet, a haystack, a building, an intersection, or even a crystal. Don’t sweat what it is. Think of it like a first date – it’s likely not going to be perfect, but you may both get something out of it. That said, it should at least be something you can be in real physical space with.

Each day, spend some intentional time with this entity (even if it’s just 5-10 min). Journal through your experience, taking notes. Try to be thorough, and it’s ok to use sentence fragments and lists.

One way to start opening up your sensorium is to shift your attention to a particular sense. One day you might try to exhaust your visual sense of the thing. The next day, switch it up and try to hone in on what you hear, then feeling/touch, smell, taste, and so on. Try to push yourself beyond the basics. keep taking notes until you encounter a surprise. On Sunday, we can talk as a group about what you learned from your non-human collaborator.

Plant Intelligence Ch 4-5

and here’s some samples of different approaches to collage (read whatever draws you in)

Watch:

Michael Levin, All Intelligence Is Collective Intelligence

Annaka Harris on The Mystery of Consciousness

Rupert Sheldrake on Why the Mind Is Not the Brain

The Beauty of Bacteria | Discover The Microcosmos INSIDE You | FULL DOCUMENTARY

Listen:

Check out this episode of the LifeWorlds podcast with Paco Calvo, Spanish Philosopher and Scientist investigating Plant Intelligence

Write:

If we’re going to take thinkingwith and collaborating with nonhumans seriously, we have to start to make some space in our writing for the non-human to be able to contribute. As someone whose practiced astrology and forms of divination like Tarot and Bibliomancy (divining from books) for years, I can think of no better technique than collage to help do that. Collage, as a writing practice, works by cutting and pasting found text into a poem, story, etc. Since the found text is not one you composed, it can help you to distance yourself from the idea being expressed. For this exercise, try to spend some time each day with the non-human you observed last week.

This time, bring a book with you. Something completely random is best (so you are less tempted to manipulate what comes out). Start reading a portion of the text (you can begin at the beginning or pick a random starting point). When you encounter a statement or phrase that resonates with you, write it down. As you do that, pay attention to your own thoughts and observations. If your thoughts start to respond to or build on the quoted text, write that thought down as if you were having (or relaying for a reader) a dialogue. Keep moving through your text, collaging, and responding, until your session is up or you reach the end of the passage. This may seem rather odd, but what you’re doing is training your mind to listen to what signals may be coming in from whatever is around you instead of trying to control it with a metaphor or pre-packaged picture.

Recording: Audio Only  Video   Chat

Read: Week 4 Notes

Plant Intelligence Ch 6 & 7

and here’s some samples of poetry and prose that highlights the patterns that connect:

Allison Cobb: early version of Plastic: an autobiography

Erin Hobbie, The Orange (and the main source of quotes John McPhee’s Oranges)

Oni Buchanan, The Mandrake Vehicles

bp nichol, Zygal

Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars

Peter O’Leary, Phosphorescence of Thought (excerpt)

Juliana Spahr, “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” , an excerpt from The Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Watch:

Nora Bateson, An Ecology of the Mind (documentary on Gregory Bateson)

Listen:

Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music

Write:

Toward the end of The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe notes that the circularity of development and metamorphosis makes it impossible to describe the (Platonic) meta-form,

“the standard against which to compare the various manifestations of it’s form. For the present, however, we must be satisfied with learning to relate these manifestations both forward and backward. Thus we can say that a stamen is a contracted petal or, with equal justification, that a petal is a stamen in a state of expansion; that a sepal is a contracted stem leaf with a certain degree of refinement, or that a stem leaf is a sepal expanded by an influx of cruder juices.

We might likewise say of the stem that it is an expanded flower and fruit, just as we assumed that the flower and fruit are a contracted stem.”

If the Universe is indeed a series of nested self-regulating systems, than we should expect to see these types of metamorphic “backward and forward” types of relationships. so let’s look for them. Spend some time with your non-human subject/collaborator. Try to describe “it” the way Goethe suggests. Don’t isolate the parts (i.e. don’t verbally pull it apart to reverse engineer it), but focus on the chain of relationships – describe the leaf in terms of the stem and vice versa. Keep in mind that if you scale out or in you’ll start to see that those relationships extend beyond your pre-conceived subject and at some point include you as well. If you can follow the chain until you find yourself in it.

Recording: Audio Only  Video   Chat

Read: Week 5 Notes

Note that these are meant as jumping off points, not traditional assignments. I try to provide a lot variety for you to have your own insights and experiences. Follow what pulls at you and what you can get to. Don’t feel the need to have to read everything now. You can always come back to it later.

Plant Intelligence Ch 8 &9

and here’s some samples of poetry and prose that relate to Buhner’s concept of Nature’s baked in psychedelic functions:

Gabriel Gudding: The Rhode Island Notebook (excerpt).

Gabe wrote this book spontaneously by hand in his car driving back and forth between Rhode Island and Illinois

CA Conrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises (Course packet from upenn). These are great examples of creating ritualized experiences with things like a rose quartz or the color red and creating poems from the notes of the experience.

And on a stranger note, you might look at how the abstract language of science and philosophy distort our perception and how misapplying them can have a type of psychedelic effect. Will Alexander does this exquisitely. Check out Poetry Magazine’s November 2022 Dossier on Will: Poet as Spectrometer

Johannes Göransson, Introduction

Will Alexander

Gargantuan Origination: Inscription for the Collages of Dean Smith

A Blaze of Riddles

Peripheral Terminology

Fragment: Blaze as Unknowable Drift

Mantric Blizzard as Space

Ghostly Bonding by Kinetic

Living Detritus

Inner Palpability

And keeping in line with how Buhner discusses the role of fungi, check out this amazing book from contemporary Swedish Surrealist Aase Berg, who looks closely into the decomposition of living matter for it’s fecundities.

Aase Berg, With Deer

Watch:

Tyler Volk: Metapatterns: What is a Sphere? Water Lily & Wine Glass ABCDNAlphabets

1950s LSD Experiments with LSD:: Housewife interview Young Woman Interview CBS Special on Spring Grove Experiment Pt1 and Pt 2

If you have time and Netflix, check out Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (Docuseries)

Listen:

Life Worlds Podcast: The Ecology of Health Speculative Design & Embodied Imaginations

Write:

In in the preface to his book, Metapatterns, Tyler Volk writes:

Suppose you were asked to define a canoe. You describe a canoe’s shape, its dimensions, material, ever methods of construction as if preparing to build or at least to recognize one. In another type of answer you might describe what a canoe does, how it functions, namely, carrying a person across water. Perhaps in this case the listener might need to use the canoe.

There is yet a third way of responding, Rather than saying anything directly about the canoe, you describe the experience of being in a canoe, what can be seen while paddling around perhaps creeks tumbling from forested gorges into a secluded lake.

Try describing your non-human collaborator via your experience of it, much like Tyler Volk’s third way – by detailing your experiences from being around it/them.

Alternatively, you might try looking into other descriptions of your subject collaborator (like looking the plant up in a field guide, preferably some kind of scientific text. Use the language in that text to describe other things in the space, so as to see your nonhumans’ metapatterns all around you.