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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago

personhood is not limited to humans. when we make cartoons about animals, they are from the perspective of a person. they talk. when we write fiction, inevitably they are about persons, even if about objects. personhood is about exp and rship. personhood is how we tell stories https://t.co/lEp3d9m4w0

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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago

>a trust, that like with human persons, comes over time https://t.co/6knNbQT7xl

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

to animists, i.e., to people who do not exclusively relate to the world as consisting of lifeless dead things made of atoms that we owe nothing to, nature has personhood. a stream has personhood

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

the greeks would say, streams have nymphs. the nymph is the way the sunlight dances across the water. the nymph can take possession of you

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

not if you are a modern person on your phone, but if you are paying attention, if you are enraptured by senses, if you have a living, attentive relationship to the world, then careful… there are some nymphs that will enrapture, then rapture you

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

this is a story about experience. it is an exercise in storytelling. the animist greeks were not inventing a fiction about a being. they were telling a story about experience

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

the nymph was not a human person. but it may well have been a person. it was a person because from the perspective of the story, it had personhood: a story you can tell about its experience and relationality with the world

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

personhood is tangible. in fact, it's inescapable. you too, modern urban dweller, have once stood in front of a tree, and remarked "i wonder what things this tree must have seen!". that was personhood

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

in doing so, you reoriented to a sense of time, to a sense of place, of what happened in that place, via the tree you asked a question relevant to your life (maybe), of what happened in this place

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

now imagine using that way of thinking, reorienting to the world, all the time imagine that way of thinking being relevant to you

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

the same way our culture steeped us in the tradition of abstraction, so we can think with categories and numbers, and solve problems easily — not just easily, but consider the question natural, and relevant . . .

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

. . . this kind of thinking was deeply relevant, and becomes relevant again when we find ourselves interaction with bureaucracies, corporate ladders, schools, systems, theme parks, soirées, dinner parties, lost unable to tell a story of ourselves a story that might… unstick us

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

unable to tell stories or talk to or relate to as persons things besides the human unable to walk into the concrete jungle of a parking garage and talk to it unable to notice the energy of a city (the way we feel in it), and tell a story about it

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

unable to formulate the most simple statements, think in the most basic way, about our experience it hasn't been necessary, you see. instead, the times table was. 7 x 5

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

my interest in animacy is not a spiritually homeless love for an aesthetic of a bygone era i can romanticise without worrying i'll rudely bump into the realities of community life

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

my interest in animacy is a deep, eyes wide open, hungry love for what i see around me. my room. my friends. the suffering of technology. the gift of it i see, i touch. i sense. i formulate statements about my experience https://t.co/abWJeJbzYW

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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago

the number one rule of animism is start with what you can touch and see if you're not living by the ocean, don't... start with the ocean. start with the phone you can see

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

the world is alive. why? because my relationship to it is alive. and in relationship, there is a person on either end of it

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

yeah, IFS, parts work, etc. are ways of offering personhood to parts of our experience, so we can usefully relate to our experience https://t.co/Oi72TJeRB5

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

to write poetry with the moon, is to have a relationship with the quality of transformation to be in animacy with trees is to be witness to the ground as it transforms in animacy, these real and tangible qualities around us are a way of moving and navigating through reality

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

the secular, psychologised version of animism is the affordances of the moon, trees, river are all used as rich characters in our relationship to life. its what children do, before they join the "dead material"ists it's a nice place to start. not too controversial or unsettling

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

to recognise something with personhood, to be a person among persons, is also to recognise some inherent obligation to it https://t.co/ImGRg5gSh9 https://t.co/mzVu8hp9W5

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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• almost 2 years ago

just because we "bought" a dog, paid $500 for it to someone our current system recognises the dog as property of, doesn't mean we can do anything the dog we recognise we still have some obligation to the dog it's the same with objects. and fruits and vegetables

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12/9/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• over 1 year ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

https://t.co/0LphRZJbrf https://t.co/opRhEAKqhF

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12/11/2023
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yatharth in asheville@AskYatharth• over 1 year ago
Replying to @AskYatharth

"but is this true" idk. look at your experience. this whole thing is a re-gesture back at your experience away from the single, atomised, world-made-of-atoms physics homework mode https://t.co/vUo5nzUzGu

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Elena Lake 🌿@relic_radiation• over 1 year ago

I like this frame of a "type error" when asking "is this true" like, my relationship with the ocean has made me ~20% more grounded and better at meeting emotional tides. so asking "is the ocean a being u can relate to" is... not the domain of 'fact', but experience. type error https://t.co/Gz6HagqLMj

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12/26/2023