🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (22 tweets)

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

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

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

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 . . .

. . . 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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


"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

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