Salman Ansari

On the extortion of sensitivity:

We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life — the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs — into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned with creation.

The only way I knew how to process being sick was to think about it in terms of a finished art project.

I have felt this compulsion, that my creativity of late has not channeled my true pain and truth. It has made me look at my own work with some disdain, because I am not being honest enough, or something. But I don’t want to share everything and every part of me. Alas, it’s a battle.

That’s one hell of an endorsement!

Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time. 

For me, The Little Prince has been one, and Leaves of Grass, and I Put a Spell on You, and Spiegel im Spiegel. Wilderness (public library) by the painter, printmaker, and philosopher Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) is another

A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:

There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.

and

Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature

We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature. But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet. 

Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature

I love the idea of being able to speak with animals. I am suspicious of the billionaire motive here.

The Earth Species Project has largely run on donations from billionaires, in part thanks to its cofounders’ roots in Silicon Valley. Raskin met Hoffman when he was working at Mozilla designing Firefox and Hoffman was on the board. He first floated the idea of the Earth Species Project to Hoffman in 2015. Hoffman is “fascinated by the philosophical implications of what happens when it’s not just humans that have culture and have language, and what that means for the shift in the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature,” Raskin says.