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my experience, when a guest speaker brings a song to share with the class, and we're listening to them sing, is that people are real there's a sense we are living in the real world. this is it. the moon is real. people are real. the world around us is real https://t.co/GOe86kGfFu
im in a class called "Tribal Food Systems", and honestly, for a class young STEM me would have dismissed, they intuitively and deeply get some of the things about relationality i would struggle to communicate to philosophers or psychologists over 5 years
it's an experience i also get working at my preschool. it becomes very obvious quickly this isn't academic. these relationships with different children are real. they're not substitutable for each other, they're not objects, they're not abstractions; they're real
and then there's this overwhelming feeling: everything around me, this is real. the people around me, they really are real. the building around me, they are real. the world is exactly how it is right now there's a feeling of "everything is relational." non-substitutable https://t.co/fAxP3gKfbR
and it's so foreign. so foreign to the culture in which i was steeped and trained. a culture in which abstraction was the great powerful tool i mastered. that was was the ability preserved as everything else evaporates https://t.co/A5t5juBb9y
… it’s a feeling i don't get in many of the modern contexts ive been in, american or indian here, when someone sings a song, it's entertainment. or maybe it's deeply moving, a personal story they're sharing, but even then— the exception kind of proves the rule
and even when that sense of real is encountered, it’s… how to say… contained. sidelined. fetishised. put on a box or a stage. the museums contain the performance and the art, because any sense of real outside that is too threatening https://t.co/MgpjNhaHQt
@jessicamalonso @vivekt17 reminds me of what you said about how people get on talk shows and let out a few sniffles and people remark on how emotional that is when that is about the least emotional you can be. the (displayed) emotion is fighting back the emotion
the art is consistently put in a box, because aliveness isn’t naturally woven into the culture; it’s terrifying outside the box https://t.co/Xn0IvKqYGA
(therapy btw? also in a box) https://t.co/8Z1BrHcgfC
it’s a role that exists within the culture, and so you can talk about these substances, while staying within the vocabulary and awareness of the culture you never have to leave the comfy, codependent feeling of having the awareness of the culture around you
you know what feels real? the way the guest speakers talk about the police disrupting their hunting or education these are real power battles, for a real objects of care. these are real, specific stakes, and it’s obvious when they talk to them, they matter to real communities
there’s a feeling of a reality outside the theatre of self https://t.co/IH37PGcjk9
this is perhaps why their peoples listen to the river. it does something to listen. it makes the thing and beings around you to real to you in a way it’s possible to go through all of modern society never quite experiencing other people as real https://t.co/JQQCoOpjsk
the indigenous women, they're just here listening to the water. they offer something to the land before taking something, as simple as a strand of hair or a drink of your water. they listen before they sing. there's an ease and animism i recognise https://t.co/5aJxaNh9vj
btw, it’s not the just song. it’s the whole presentation, their whole being, the whole project of their life it feels all intimately connected and woven through things known so deeply to be real, true, held in regard and cherished
oh, and that feeling? of encounter? that all this is real? it’s a feeling that makes me love them https://t.co/KeC4nGYQm5
i think this is why people listen. it does something to listen, and to feel part of the wider world, and to feel an allegiance to it. to instinctively begin moving in concert with it, and weighing its considerations in into yours this is an embodied ethics