Collecting and organising

I've just started listening to Karen Bakker's The Sounds of Life (both listening and sound are of renewed interest to me as you will discover in coming posts).

I had to stop because so many things had struck me that I needed... well, let's say that I needed to make sure that I remembered them.

One was a comment from Little Bear who said that we are like radios dialed to one station and we believe that is all there is, when in fact there are countless, infinite, different stations. This point was made by Jakob von Uexkull regairding umwelten, and, for me, it can expand further - not just sound/hearing, not just the whole sensorium, but, with a wide interpretation of culture, a whole epistemology and a whole ontology (ways of knowing and ways of being).

Today, in a wood, I listened to blue tits chirping their contact calls as they foraged and I became so aware of the bright light, the brilliance of a consciousness both making sense of the world differently from my consciousness and being in the world differently from me. The affordances the world offers a tit and the threats it poses. The ability to use three rather than two spatial dimensions. The shorter lifespan. Hearing sounds with greater discrimination than I have. The bond to the mate. The awareness of seasons. The world has this particular look and feel that is seen and evperienced by a blue tit which would be wiped out were there no blue tits.I mean, blue tits have such and such a role in an ecosystem, a food web, whatever, but blue tits also are the only beings who experience the world as a blue tit, who see the world as a blue tit, who know the world as a blue tit.

Maybe you see this as me.. overstressing something insignificant. But I think you're wrong. I think this is something. Something. It's about complexity and systems. It's about diversity and... yes, VITALITY. This is what richness is.

Anyway. The next thing was a reference to the work of Marshal Mcluhan. He wrote about how the availability of print and our later reliance on it has changed us psychologically... so, vision has become of paramount importance. It supercedes the oral and the aural. Memory has declined because we can outsource memory to paper, to devices. We can afford to forget. The line that stopped me was something like this: the importance of recalling and remembering has decreased and with text we are now more concerned with collecting and organising.

Wow.

I had the experience of an electric shock. It felt like this is it! Instead of life being about experiencing and embodying and feeling and sensing, life is about collecting, curating, organising and filing.

I think of wildlife enthusiasts collecting data or photographs or species on a list when what matters is the relationship between things. Fuck counting animals and do the things that would allow animals to live. We know enough. We've always known enough. Or we used to know enough. Simple things like they need enough space and not to be overhunted. Pretty fucking simple. Oh, and no poisons either. But now the story and the data and the process of creating the story and the data have become more seemingly important than any action. Data collection metastacizes into an all-consuming self-expanding pursuit that essentially prevents anything happening.

And instead of living - experiencing and being - we are all focused on reifying everything. Turning life into text or photo or spreadsheet - in a way that is ultimately life-denying.