excuse you, do not pay such disrespect to our chosen leader, Firestar
Warrior Cats saved kids lit by being full of like ongoing murder and intrigue and weird cat love triangles. Do you know how many of these books I bought when I was 11? We have an entire shelf of these bad boys.
and where else would we get these lines??
what the fuck why were these cat books so intense like who hurt you kitty
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
Standing by the parking-ramp elevator
a week ago, sunk, stupid with sadness.
Black slush puddled on the cement floor,
the place painted a killer-pastel
as in an asylum.
A numeral 1, big as a person,
was stenciled on the cinderblock:
Remember your level.
The toneless bell sounded:
Doors opened, nobody inside.
Then, who knows why, a rod of light
at the base of my skull flashed
to every outpost of my far-flung body— I’ve got my life back.
It was nothing, just the present moment
occurring for the first time in months.
My head translated light,
my eyes spiked with tears.
The awful green walls, I could have stroked them.
The dirt, the moving cube I stepped into—
it was all beautiful,
everything that took me up
They can set you up, bust you, they can break your fingers, burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can’t walk, can’t remember. they can take away your children, wall up your lover; they can do anything you can’t stop them doing.
How can you stop them? Alone you can fight, you can refuse. You can take whatever revenge you can But they roll right over you. But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob a snake-dancing fire can break a cordon, termites can bring down a mansion
Two people can keep each other sane can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation a cell, a wedge. With four you can play games and start a collective. With six you can rent a whole house have pie for dinner with no seconds and make your own music.
Thirteen makes a circle, a hundred fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; ten thousand community and your own papers; a hundred thousand, a network of communities; a million our own world.
It goes one at a time. It starts when you care to act. It starts when you do it again after they say no. It starts when you say we and know who you mean; and each day you mean one more.
Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail, sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest man, decide they care enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
You were not the only deaf woman there.
Annie Cannon, too, was hard of hearing.
On the day of your death she wrote: Rainy day pouring at night.
Oh bright rain, brave clouds, oh stars,
oh stars.
Two thousand four hundred fires
and uncharted, unstudied,
the hours, the hours, the hours.
Body
The body is a computer.
The body has two eyes. For the body, the process of
triangulation is automatic. The body can see the red steeple of the
church beyond the trees. Blackbirds unfold as they grow nearer, like
messages.
The body never intended to be a secret.
The body was called a shining cloud, and then a galaxy. The
body comforted mariners, spilt milk in the southern sky. The body was
thought to be only 30,000 light years away.
The body is untrustworthy. It falls ill. The thought of uncompleted work, particularly of the Standard Magnitudes, is one I have had to avoid as much as possible, as it has had a bad effect nervously.
The body sits at a desk. A high collar, faint stripes in the
white blouse. In this rare photograph, the body is framed in light. The
gaze is turned down, the hand poised to make a mark. The body says:
“Take photographs, write poems. I will go on with my work.”
The body is not always the same, the body varies in
brightness, its true brightness may be ascertained from the rhythm of
its pulsing, the body is more remote than we imagined, it eats, it
walks, it traverses with terrible slowness the distance between
Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the body is stubborn, snowbound, the body
has disappeared, the body has left the country, the body has traveled to
Europe and will not say if it went there alone, the body is generous,
dedicated, seated again, reserved, exacting,
brushed and buttoned, smelling of healthy soap,
and not allowed to touch the telescope.
The body gives time away with both hands.
The body, when working, does not know that time has passed.
The body died in 1921.
The body’s edges are so far from one another that it is hardly
a body at all. We gather the stars, and we call them a body. Cygnus.
The Swan.
Introduction
Twelve o'clock.
My husband and children asleep.
To chart one more star, to go on working:
this is a way of keeping faith.
Draw me a map.
Show me how to read music.
Teach me to rise without standing,
to hold the galaxy’s calipers
with the earth at one gleaming tip,
to live vastly and with precision,
to travel
where distance is no longer measured in miles but in lifetimes,
in epochs, in breaths, in light years, in girl hours.
“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett
