jade cricket

From Barbara Kruger's book "We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture" (1983)

A few months ago, I wrote the following in commemoration of Mano Farm’s one-year anniversary:

Humans are intrinsically embedded in an environment of cycles: the waxing and waning of the moon, the growing and shortening day lengths, the turning of the seasons; the extremes and balances of everything. Humans, never separate from nature, are thus cyclical creatures. Yet because contemporary life is largely organized on the basis of alternative measurement systems  — e.g. clock time, the eight hour day, the seven day week — it is easy for us to forget we are profoundly influenced by more primal cycles. Agriculture is unique in that it privileges the earth-based over the arbitrary…

My present context presents a stark counterpoint to mid-July:

4:03 am in the morning. I spent a lot of the last month working toward finishing my thesis prospectus so it’s only in the last week that I’ve been able to “come up for air” (whatever that means living in NYC). Tonight I’m re-reading Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, specifically focusing on the sections where he discusses the relationship between sexuality and truth. Foucault is the most-cited philosopher I come across in what I read. Perhaps it’s my own limited scope of inquiry but I get this sense that there is no area of intellectual discourse he has not had an influenced. This is the century of Foucault. This would be annoying if his work were not erudite, lucid, humorous, and best of all useful. We all know the great books clarify either something about the world around us or our own vaguely intuitive thoughts we have about the world — or, in fact, altogether problematize the relationship between the two. The History of Sexuality is definitely one of those books. As I transcribed lengthy passages of the book — from which I’ll probably only cite a few sentences here and there for my thesis — I thought this would be my “desert island” book. Read more of this post