Sublime

There will be dust. There is always dust. By that I mean there is always time, and materiality, and decay. Decomposition and damage are inescapable. There is always the body, with its smears and secretions and messy flaking bits off. There is always waste and it always has to be dealt with, and shipping it out of sight overseas to the developing wo... See more

We rely on the existence of an “away,” where all this heat, waste, everything, goes to and stays in. But it never disappears – it comes back.

If I believe my inner world is an “ecology” and social media’s algorithms are “incursions” and “extractive”—then I have to think hard about my own part in sustaining the fragile space of my attention, a place I’ve been cultivating with great care all these years.

In an essay called “Weird Ecology,” the writer David Tompkins compares Area X to a “hyperobject,” a term philosopher Timothy Morton used “to describe events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on.” Global warming, black holes, and mass extinction are contemporary ex... See more