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Lab Notes

Week 5

 

And now we reach the end of the life cycle, where everything ultimate connects – the snake eating its own tail that is death.

Many prehistoric cultures, as far as can be gathered, held beliefs in the permanence and mutability (or transformative power) of the universe. The Jains in the Indus River basin detailed a philosophy as early as the 6th century BCE (and maybe much before that, but we can’t be certain) that the substance of the universe is permanent and what we we experience as creation and destruction are just modal changes of matter (like ice to water to vapor). There are similar concepts that trickle through into the earliest philosophical writings in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant (around the Mediterranean Sea). indeed it appears a central fascination of pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles, the fragments of whose (quite poetic) writing meditates on how the interaction of fundamental elements (earth, air, fire and water) constantly transform matter into a myriad of enigmatic shapes and behaviors. Ancient Chinese philosophy also espouse a similar view of matter as comprised of fundamental elements that energetically interact to produce, shift, transform, and repeat. In these cosmologies, death was not an end, but a tipping point of anagrammatic transformation into a new “revelation of content” to borrow from Denise Levertov’s organic poetics.

We still maintain a remnant of that belief today in what known as The Law of the Conservation of Matter, a foundational principal of modern chemistry. And while the mechanized, reductive Newtonian view of the world as a giant industrial machine (for mass production), Quantum physicists are coming back around this pre-Empedoclean understanding of elemental particles and geneticists are starting to find traces of proof that maybe archeologists like Marija Gimbutas were right about early societies in fact being fascinated with the matriarchal worship of the thin line between death and birth, a worship which resurfaced in Plato’s day in the form Orphic mystery school cults that practiced the rites of Demeter and Persephone and the cycle of life and (apparent) death of the vegetative world. The most famous of these, the Eleusianian Mysteries, was annual series of ceremonies held in secret that promised initiates insight into what is beyond death.

In the 1930s and 40’s, Swiss/German chemist, Albert Hoffman in search of a respirational and circulatory stimulant that did not harm the uterus, began looking to ancient medicinal plant medicine, in particular Meditaranean squill and the fungus ergot. What he developed by accident, was what he called “medicine for the soul” or LSD. Later in the 1970s, at the behest of his friend and ethnomycologist, R. Gordon Wasson, Hoffman began to look into whether the ergot fungi that inspired LSD might be connected to the Eleusianian Mystery rites, which, as detailed in their book with Psychedelic researcher Carl Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, Hoffman concludes was highly possible.

As Buhner points out, Fungi are nature’s dissemblers, breaking down solidified and formidable forms into pieces to be distributed and reassembled, which kind of reminds me of the collages and assemblages of Joe Brainard and Ray Johnson. The more I think about Buhner’s description of the role of psychedlics in nature, the more I think that this is what good art does – dissembling the detritus and lifeless waste of culture to rearrange the senses and de-objectify the world – it stimulates our senses and brings us closer and closer to the world we spring from.

For This Week

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.

Read:

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:

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

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:

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:

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.

Week 4

In his 1967 book, Constraints on Variables of Syntax, linguist J.R. Ross tells a story:

The following anecdote is told of William James. […] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady.

“Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it’s wrong. I’ve got a better theory,” said the little old lady.

“And what is that, madam?” inquired James politely.

“That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle.”

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

“If your theory is correct, madam,” he asked, “what does this turtle stand on?”

“You’re a very clever man, Mr. James, and that’s a very good question,” replied the little old lady, “but I have an answer to it. And it’s this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him.”

“But what does this second turtle stand on?” persisted James patiently.

To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,

“It’s no use, Mr. James—it’s turtles all the way down.”

Of course, while the faces and the names have changed, this is an old fable that been told numerous times (including by William James himself in his 1882 essay, “Rationality, Activity and Faith”). In fact the phrase “Turtles all the way down” has come to stand in for the concept of infinite regression, or, depending on who you talk to an example of the “fallacy” of circular reasoning.

But ancient texts are full of circles and loops of thought. Prior to Aristotle’s time, most if not all knowledge was passed along either orally or, if written down, in the form of poems or fables, because as Aristotle said of the Eleusinian Mystery rites “to experience is to learn” (παθεĩν μαθεĩν). You might note that the “philosophy” of Plato, Aristotle’s mentor, is written entirely in extended (and frequently nested) dialogues between philosophers, never directly from Plato himself.

Anthropologist and Cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, speaking to students at Naropa in 1977, begins a talk on “Metaphors and Parts” with a story of a man who built a computer. The man wanted to know if a computer could ever think like a human, so he programmed the computer in order to answer that question. The computer came back with an answer on a sheet of paper that said “That reminds me of a story.” Bateson used that little Cybernetic fable as a jumping off point to talk about the pivotal role of parables and story in epistemology, or how we come to know what we know (and his lectures and writings are littered with them).

But what is it about stories or fictions that is so important for knowing? For starters, we might recall Plato’s story from the Phaedrus I mentioned a couple weeks ago in which Socrates recounts a story he was told in Egypt about the dangers of written language (as an extension of memory) in that it makes people forgetful (or conceited). However, it is framed as a story within a story, and if we look at how Socrates responds to Phaedrus, we might get an idea of what’s going on:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

And that “as though they were alive”-ness is what I’m interested in at the moment, because it gets at the heart of what we’re doing when we read and write and think “about” the natural world. The problem with written language (and even more so with printed language) is that it can be tempting to assume that all knowledge is mental and detached, an abstraction from the living world. But that’s just what Alfred North Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness” or mistaking illusion for reality. And part of it is baked into the structure of language, which is inherently comparable, a type of a visual-sonic map of the territory, not to be confused with the territory itself.

In other words [Bateson’s from his book with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear ], the “logic” of metaphor is something very different from the logic of the verities of Augustine and Pythagoras. Not, you understand, “wrong,” but totally different. [It may be, however, that while particular metaphors are local, the process of making metaphor has some wider significance — may indeed be a basic characteristic of Creatura.]

Let me point up the contrast between the truths of metaphor and the truths that the mathematicians pursue by a rather violent and inappropriate trick. Let me spell out metaphor into syllogistic form: Classical logic named several varieties of syllogism, of which the best known is the “syllogism in Barbara.” It goes like this:

Men die; Socrates is a man; Socrates will die.

The basic structure of this little monster — its skeleton — is built upon classification. The predicate (“will die”) is attached to Socrates by identifying him as a member of a class whose members share that predicate.

The syllogisms of metaphor are quite different, and go like this:

Grass dies; Men die; Men are grass.

[In order to talk about this kind of syllogism and compare it to the “syllogism in Barbara,” we can nickname it the “syllogism in grass.”] I understand that teachers of classical logic strongly disapprove of this way of arguing and call it “affirming the consequent,” and, of course, this pedantic condemnation is justified if what they condemn is confusion between one type of syllogism and the other. But to try to fight all syllogisms in grass would be silly because these syllogisms are the very stuff of which natural history is made. When we look for regularities in the biological world, we meet them all the time.

In other, other words then, the “truth” of logic is a virtual way of knowing that relies on an identified class system (e.g. Socrates is a man) or an act of “selection” that differentiates subjects and predicates, instead of seeing the subject and predicate as a context-specific symbiotic relationship (i.e. how the activity or behavior of a subject is part of the meaning of the subject). Logic, or rational thinking (as opposed to say poetic thinking) then, relies on a comparison between some real “thing” that is variable because alive and a non-living or virtual concept that is not.

But that’s only possible because language displaces thought from the body. I mean, how do you convey without words what a dog is except to point to an endless chain of “dogs?” Humans did manage to build (albeit much smaller and geographically confined) civilizations and communities, agricultural systems, and even spiritual practices long before expressive utterances become little conceptual boxes some 5-10,000 years ago. And it seems clear that plants and animals do communicate (even across species and kingdoms), so not all thinking needs be so detached.

Again, Bateson points (via Goethe) toward how we can engage language more ecologically instead of endless dissecting living things into discrete subjects:

I think the first person who actually saw this clearly was Goethe, who noted that if you examine a cabbage and an oak tree, two rather different sorts of organisms but still both flowering plants, you would find that the way to talk about how they are put together is different from the way most people naturally talk. You see, we talk as if the Creatura were really Pleromatic: we talk about “things,” notably leaves or stems, and we try to determine what is what. Now Goethe discovered that a “leaf” is defined as that which grows on a stem and has a bud in its angle; what then comes out of that angle (out of that bud) is again a stem. The correct units of description are not leaf and stem but the relations between them.

These correspondences allow you to look at another flowering plant — a potato, for instance — and recognize that the part that you eat in fact corresponds to a stem.

In the same way, most of us were taught in school that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, but what we should have been taught is that a noun can stand in various kinds of relationship to other parts of the sentence, so that the whole of grammar could be defined as relationship and not in terms of things. This naming activity, which probably other organisms don’t indulge in, is in fact a sort of Pleromatizing of the living world. And observe that grammatical relationships are of the preverbal kind.

One way we might tap into that might be through poetry, which even though a verbal art, has tools to break through the virtualization of reason to see the pattern that connects. At the heart of poetry is the line, that verbal pause which Charles Olson urged should be an extension of the breath, which juxtaposes two utterances, bringing them more intimately together, creating a relationship that exceeds the sum of the parts, or a metaphor (literally a transference from one thing to another).

Unfortunately, most students in school learn to conflate metaphor with simile, which is just a pretty picture or illustration cordoned off by a “like” or “as” to keep ‘em separated and tame. While that tameness allows ideas a certain kind of stability, it’s only as stable as the context (hence why scientific experimentation occurs in highly sterilized, controlled – read virtual –environments). When the context destabilizes, as psychologist Adelbert Ames Jr discovered in the 1930’s and 40s when he conducted a series of experiments in which people were subjected to rooms that were purposely manipulated via parallax to create optical illusions, it can open one up to a state of paradox, or a type of psychological double-bind (a theory regarding schizophrenia that Bateson helped develop) that is common in “play, humor, poetry, ritual, and fiction.”

Which brings me back to poetry and metaphor and those infinitely regressing “turtles all the way down.” When we engage in the more-than-logical relationships that make up the natural world, we engage in contra-diction and parables (literally parallel stories) and paradoxes, which are truths that can be held in parallel. The metaphors keep shape-shifting, keep the whole shebang circulating, like an infinite feedback loop, which allows for things and us to adjust and change and be different until we can just make out the shell of that bigger turtle that’s been under us the whole time. Which is as good a definition for life as I can fathom.

FOR THIS WEEK

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.

Read:

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

Watch:

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

Listen:

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.

WEEK 3 

So far, we ‘ve engaged spontaneity(via automatic writing) and widened the doors of perception (via intentionally engaging our senses), but in order to push past the illusion that we are separate from the natural world, we still have to address another elephant in the room. The way in which we compose and talk about the composition process of (creative) texts is rarely collaborative. Writers often write (and publish) in solitude. MFA and BFA Creative Writing programs almost entirely frame the “craft” of writing as a form of expression of an individual personality or “voice.” Copywrite laws frame texts as “intellectual property,” and our culture has an almost vitriolic disdain for anything that even hints at obscuring or infringing said “property” (like in this cheeky instructional TED-Ed video; note that the comment section is priceless).

But if you’ve spent any serious time practicing meditation, or if you’ve gone through some form of mindfulness or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which you learn to de-identify with your thoughts, you may have noticed that thoughts seem to float into and out of the mind constantly without any effort. It’s as if the mind were some kind of radio-like receiver scanning various signals from an unseen source (and researchers have noticed something like this in the brains of mice). But Wherefrom? God? The Devil? The Borg? Maybe, ala mid-20th-century, Bay-area poet Jack Spicer, from the spooks or from Mars? Alice Bailey, a neo-Theosophist in the first of the 20th century who coined the term “New Age,” posited that consciousness is one of 7 energies that pervade the universe and that thought was really a type of collaboration with enlightened beings in other dimensional stages of evolution (most of her books she described as dictations from one such being she called “The Tibetan”).

While a lot of Bailey’s theory/theosophy gets bogged down in the technocratic language of her time (that of the technocratic or corporate state), she does talk about the evolution of humans not that differently than say Marshall McLuhan or Lynn Margulis in that she sees different species of humans (she calls them “races” which can create a lot of confusion in our current moment) that occur in bursts from the acquisition of body to that of emotion to that of mind. Now, Bailey wasn’t a trained scientist or a poet, so her description of this evolution does lack some rigor of detail. However, we may think of it in terms of symbiogenesis, in which organisms come together, forming a new organism with new extensive capabilities.

And this is related to the Cybernetic concept of Self-organizing systems in which order arises spontaneously from dynamic non-linear relationships that serve as feedback loops that trigger intelligent responses from the constituent parts and in turn keep the whole system from collapsing into entropy without hierarchical control mechanisms. What this has to do with thinking involves the relationship between the brain and the other systems and organs of the body, particularly the gut, which has the 2nd highest concentration of neurons in the body (and which is often called the 2nd brain).

Our gut, which is home to trillions of symbiotic bacteria, mitochondria, virus, and other microbes and is constantly sending chemical messages out to the brain via the Vagus Nerve, including neurotransmitters that regulate our emotions and cognitive functions.. And it seems that certain strands of bacteria may use combinatorial signals to communicate (similar to how languages work for humans and primates). If we think of ourselves as self-organized systems of symbiont microbes could our thoughts be an unconscious listening in to the consciousness of the many beings that constitute the self?

Of course, I’m merely speculating there, but that speculation may give us another avenue with which to envision thinkingwith the non-human world, because maybe we have been all along and we just haven’t noticed. The next time you engage in an automatic writing or any kind of brainstorming or freewriting process, lean in to the flow of thought, see if you might just be hearing the microbes talking through that, or maybe try an experiment in conscious engagement. Try eating different foods each day and journaling a couple hours after you eat. See if the food you has an effect on what you think.

For this week

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.

Read: Plant Intelligence Ch 4-5

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

Watch:

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.

Week Two

(Sunday, February 22, 2026, 3-5 pm PDT)

So, let’s start with a baby step – what exactly constitutes ThinkingWith the non-human world?

For starters, we might say that it’s something different than merely thinking “about” a plant, or a rock, or a scrap of plastic. When we say we think “about” something, we posit our thought as happening in isolation from some “thing,” which in turn is not the thing itself but is an abstraction, or a projection of the thing. The “With”, then, has some implications for the power dynamics between the mind and the world in that it suggests that the “what” we’re thinking with is either 1) something (or someone) we collaborate with that contributes to the end thought or 2) it is a cybernetic extension of us (like William Blake talked about looking “thro [our eye],not with it” ).

However, those may be two (of the many) ways of looking at at a blackbird. The point of the prepositional quibble is not mere semantics, but an adjustment of perspective. In 1961, William Burroughs imagined written language as a virus (“from outer space” as mutated by Laurie Anderson), which may sound a lot like Richard Dawkins’ meme, a cultural application of his Selfish Gene metaphor that’s turned out to be more Social-Darwinian than Darwin, but that would be just reading the surface. In The Ticket that Exploded, where Burroughs coined the phrase, what he actually said was,

“The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the ‘Other Half’ is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle…yes quite an angle it is the ‘Other Half’ worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus.

The “now” there is important, because it draws a line between language as a parasite and language as an organism in symbiosis. But what caused the shift? A decade later in The Electronic Revolution, Burroughs hones in on it as the written word, which is a nod back to (Plato’s dramatic personae) Socrates, who in the Phaedrus relates via a nested fable, the words of the Egyptian deity Thoth, that writing as an extension of the mind displaces the practice of memory from the body, causing an optical illusion in which readers mistake the image of the thing for the thing itself, like in the Cave allegory in The Republic (a text which might stand as a great example of the sage’s point). Plato/Socrates/Thoth posits this illusion leads to a culture with no practice of memory whose people “think” they are smart, but have no real experience of the ideas they espouse. Reminds me a lot like social media (or graduate school). Just thinking about it makes the hairs on my neck stand up, which reminds me of that scene in Annie Hall where Woodie Allen is irritated by a Media Studies professor pontificating about Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan and so Woodie Allen pulls in the real McLuhan to shut him up. As Woodie Allen quips at the end of the clip “If life were only like this.”

And speaking of McLuhan, in 1960, the year before Burrough’s Ticket novel came out, he published a report on New Media (television, film) for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters that articulated a similar idea about language. In that report, he posited that the technologies that mediate language and sense data to us become cybernetic extensions of us and that there is a reciprocal relationship between us and these tools. We make the tools, but are transformed by them. He followed that up more explicitly in 1962 with his book The Gutenberg Galaxy in which he looked at how the invention and the popularization of the printing press shifted the human sensorium away from the dominance of the aural (sound) sense toward the visual (sight).

I bring all this up to highlight the ways in which our symbiotic relationships with tools and language have had a profound impact on us as organisms and as a species (albeit not evenly across time), which all strikingly similar to evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’ theory of Darwinian evolution, called Symbiogenesis. In that theory, which she first outlined in a paper published in 1967, Margulis, building off the work of Soviet biologists (at the height of the Cold War nonetheless), looked at the evolutionary history of the emergence of novel species in the microbial world and found that in nearly every case novel species did not emerge gradually through random mutations and competition for resources, but instead through symbiotic relationships in which distinct organisms work together to provide resources for the whole. In in an interview in Discovery magazine in the 1990s, she described it in terms of the gestalt of Impressionist painting:

All visible organisms are products of symbiogenesis, without exception. The bacteria are the unit. The way I think about the whole world is that it’s like a pointillist painting. You get far away and it looks like Seurat’s famous painting of people in the park. Look closely: The points are living bodies—different distributions of bacteria. The living world thrived long before the origin of nucleated organisms [the eukaryotic cells, which have genetic material enclosed in well-defined membranes]. There were no animals, no plants, no fungi. It was an all-bacterial world—bacteria that have become very good at finding specialized niches. Symbiogenesis recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria.

And that Seurat reference, brings me back around to the idea of ThinkingWith and how we as writers and artists can begin to engage in this activity. In particular, I’m reminded of another impressionist painter, Claude Monet, who broke with the standard realistic practice of mimicry that used straight lines, contours and blended brush strokes that clarified the central picture and concealed the artisan nature of a painting (in writing we might think about Elizabeth Bishop meticulously editing a poem to perfect it). Instead, Monet opted for imprecision and juxtaposition of color and brush stroke that distorted the central clarity, but created an image by gestalt. He would often get out of his studio and paint outside, painting endless iterations of haystacks or the Rouen Cathedral where the point of the repetition wasn’t to perfect technique, but instead to let nature endlessly reveal itself.

It’s that vulnerability of letting go of mastery and creating space through continued engagement that strikes me as the best starting point for this venture. After all, showing up and being present and receptive is the best strategy for cultivating great relationships with each other, so why wouldn’t it work with non-humans too.

For this week

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.

Read:

Watch:

John Berger’s 1972 4-part BBC series Ways of Seeing

Listen:

Check out this Spotify Playlist Music for Plants

Write:

In discussing how to widen our sensory perception, Stephen Herrod Buhner notes that the most important step is merely being intentional, so that’s what we’ll do. We’ll also take some cues from Claude Monet and Clark Coolidge to treat this as an ongoing practice, not meant to self-improve or perfect a technique, but more like a spiritual practice.

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.

Week One

(Sunday, February 15, 2026, 3-5 pm PDT)

I don’t know about you, but my cortisol levels the past year must be through the roof. My news and social media feeds read like something out of a Nathaniel West novel or an apocalyptic satire. Most people I know are either gleefully cheering on a fascist “Golden Age” or are nearly paralyzed with anxiety about which rights and/or social safety nets they rely on may no longer be reliable. The number of ways in which our daily lives are under attack, it may seem like the height of decadence to spend the next 5 weeks trying to open ourselves up to plants and non-human life. As someone who’s been involved in union organizing and direct action, I am somewhat sympathetic to that impulse. AND YET, considering what many of our floral compatriots have endured without the option to up and move to – well, maybe Antarctica is the only place not experiencing a fascist moment right now– it might not be such a bad idea to try to ascertain what the trees might be trying to tell us (if we’ll ever bother to listen).

That said, the title for this 5-week poetics lab might be a little overly ambitious. If we can’t thinkwith people around us who act and communicate in the same language systems we do, how on earth (pun intended) are we ever going to come close to understanding, let alone collaborating with a philodendron or the bacteria in our gut? Well, maybe not in 5 weeks, but we can take baby steps in that direction. Besides, it may not be such a stretch, as we already have intuitive relationships with our pets. And with regard to bacteria, you may be unwittingly thinkingwith them already.

Over the next 5 weeks, we’ll dig into the first movement of Stephen Herrod Buhner’s Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, which lays out a great introduction to the biological connection we have with plant life and gives some suggestions for how we might open our senses and imagination to the verdant world around us. A lot of the ideas in his book come out the the field of cybernetics (notably anthropologist Gregory Bateson) and it’s application in the Gaia Hypothesis (a collaboration of chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lyn Margulis), which posits that Earth is a giant symbiotic, collaborative network, or a self-regulating system, and I’ll provide some introductory material for that context as well.

We’ll also look at some examples of creative writing that enacts some of the work that Harrod Buhner espouses in his book. We’ll take it all in small steps, each week reading a little bit and experimenting with writing. Unlike a class in school, the readings are provided more as jumping off points. If you don’t get to it all, no problem, but do at least try to start and see where it takes you. I’m a firm believer that we should always pay attention to what is alive for each of us, even if it’s not a prat of the reading. The in-class portion of the lab will consist of check-ins from each participant, and some brief notes and observations from me to prep you for the next week’s exercises. In my experience this provides for a very rich and open-ended discussion that germinate ideas (note how the botanical language pervades throughout the discourse of ideas and creativity; maybe we’re more plant than we’d like to admit).

For this week

Read what you can of:

  • the Prelude of Plant Intelligence (here’s a pdf in case you’re still waiting for your copy)

In the zoom, we’ll discuss each of your thoughts and ideas about plant intelligence, what landed for you in Buhner’s opening argument, and engage in a quick writing exercise to get us thinking outside ourselves.

And here’s some supplemental material to glance at (and maybe draw on for a future lab)

Watch:

The Secret Life of Plants, a mind-bending and beautiful documentary from the late 1970s

Listen:

 

 

Week Three

(Sunday, March 1, 2026, 3-5 pm PDT)

Posts on 2/22 at 6pm

Week Four

(Sunday, March 8, 2026, 3-5 pm PDT)

Posts on 3/1 at 6pm

 

Week Five

(Sunday, March 15, 2026, 3-5 pm PDT)

Posts on 3/8 at 6pm

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