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Metaphysically Blown Away: Torrey Peters on Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters | Reading Writers · The Nation Podcasts

0:11
[SPEAKER_02]: good afternoon, Joe.
0:14
[SPEAKER_04]: Good afternoon, Charlotte.
0:15
[SPEAKER_04]: How are you?
0:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm good.
0:18
[SPEAKER_02]: How are you?
0:20
[SPEAKER_04]: So good.
0:20
[SPEAKER_04]: So ready to hear what you've been reading lately.
0:23
[SPEAKER_04]: I think you have something I will leave.
0:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi.
0:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
0:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I read this novel My Dark Vanessa, which you have you read it.
0:35
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I've had a lot about it because it's been quite, I think people have really liked it.
0:39
[SPEAKER_04]: Is that right?
0:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't realize how big it had been because I think my introduction to it was that kind of like pre-publication argument.
0:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what to call it.
0:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I don't want a sensationalize that they don't want to downplay it.
0:58
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm just curious though because was it a plagiarism thing as I recall.
1:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, this is, it was early, when this is published, this is published in 2020, another author was concerned that their memoir was was essentially, yeah, being appropriated, plagiarized, ripped off, whatever.
1:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And because my dark Vanessa's daughter's novel, there was this sort of conversation about, I guess, like, white women poaching the ideas or experiences of women of color.
1:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it just, my impression is that it was a hugely unfortunate event for everyone involved.
1:42
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, I just looked this up and was reminded that, um,
1:49
[SPEAKER_04]: part of this blew up because it had been discussed by Roxanne Gay and other writers online.
1:56
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think that maybe this was around the time when, like Roxanne Gay was really, I don't, I think that she, the backlash case, there has been a little bit unfair, because I feel like there was a time where she was just like, would reply to someone's interesting tweet and be like, oh, what has happened from your point of view?
2:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And then it would become like a publishing scandal or something.
2:15
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's like, I seem to bit like one of those, like the poison chalice of literary influence.
2:22
[SPEAKER_02]: My impression in re-according myself with some of the details of it was just like, this is a nightmare.
2:28
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like no one involved benefited.
2:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone involved felt actually hurt and wrong.
2:35
[SPEAKER_02]: and then it just shouldn't have happened, like it's just a really unfortunate thing.
2:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, I read this book because my friend Jamie Hood had mentioned repeatedly that it was really good.
2:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know about you.
2:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm very curious to hear how you feel about this.
2:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I have in general like no interests.
2:57
[SPEAKER_02]: and novels about sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, and particularly in school and campus contacts, like in general, that topic, it repels me.
3:09
[SPEAKER_04]: Nothing's more overdone in that written time.
3:12
[SPEAKER_02]: It just feels like, why, like, look at this like, why, like, why do I, I have to read this to show, I care about the issue or something.
3:23
[SPEAKER_04]: I feel somewhat differently about some types of books.
3:27
[SPEAKER_04]: I, I, especially think the academic setting is like way.
3:30
[SPEAKER_04]: overplayed, right?
3:31
[SPEAKER_04]: Because I'm not least because professors are no longer the glamorous aspirational figures that maybe they was were in a different time in place.
3:39
[SPEAKER_04]: Then again, one of my favourite books I've reviewed was the Incess Dairy and I remember how crully that was reviewed in the New York Times by someone who said it was basically pornography for like pedos and
3:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I think that you're right and yet it's sort of like we're sick of the kind of writing that is commissioned and published.
4:03
[SPEAKER_04]: And then sometimes when somebody tries to do something else, people get really angry or something or they, I feel like the acceptable type of writing and about sexual abuse is very narrow.
4:20
[SPEAKER_04]: And so this book, right, it's sort of like a genuinely different angle it sounds like, which is one of the reasons that why people liked it.
4:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I adore the ancestors diary as well, and I do think that a critical response by and large.
4:35
[SPEAKER_02]: was appalling, like it let something crazy out of people.
4:39
[SPEAKER_02]: We're all of a sudden a demon exploded out of them.
4:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of, I think a lot of incest literature is like that when people encounter it, they do not know how to react, but they can't not react at the same time.
4:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Jamie.
4:54
[SPEAKER_02]: has written about this and her really incredible memoir trauma plot.
4:59
[SPEAKER_04]: Great book.
5:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I got to tell her that her book was great when I ran out to her at the coffee shop when she and I were both on our way to work on Monday and we'll have her cover on and we'll tell her again both of us.
5:09
[SPEAKER_02]: That's like I pulled her many times but not yet fabulous book.
5:13
[SPEAKER_02]: There is like this avalanche of memoir, right?
5:16
[SPEAKER_02]: memoir of sexual exploitation of rape of abuse.
5:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's something so dead and ing about that.
5:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And I feel like Jamie, the dress is that with the sense of like, God, why am I putting this out into the world?
5:31
[SPEAKER_02]: You had another recounting of mistreatment and violence.
5:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't want to like get to to braille into trying to articulate everything around it
5:42
[SPEAKER_04]: You're absolutely right.
5:43
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that the there is so much real complexity to this, but there's like a fake complexity over the top.
5:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
5:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I what I should say is that I can understand people experiencing a similar fatigue when they see my book and they feel like I don't want to read a memoir about sex work.
6:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I can completely understand anyway.
6:06
[SPEAKER_02]: My dark finessa is incredible.
6:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Her suit went to everything we've been saying.
6:13
[SPEAKER_02]: the author Kate Elizabeth Russell in a profile for the cut, I think, said that this manuscript was years and years and years in the making and she's a PhD in creative writing, not just the MAMFA, and professors would tell her stop turning this in, write something different, like this top, and I'm so glad she didn't, but this fatigue and
6:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Vanessa, the narrator, and the main character, is incredibly bright.
6:51
[SPEAKER_02]: She renders, she sorry, she the author, renders the transgressing teacher, so convincingly so perfectly.
7:02
[SPEAKER_02]: where he is meticulous about always kind of like you're in charge, you're the one deciding what we're going to do.
7:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, if there's any indication of anger on her part or something, it's like, I can't believe you wouldn't lie.
7:19
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like, I would do something to harm you.
7:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, do you know how much that hurts me?
7:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, were you not?
7:25
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't like that.
7:26
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.
7:30
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, no, it sounds excruciating, but I'd love to hear it.
7:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so this is him reassuring her that she can come over to his house.
7:43
[SPEAKER_02]: She's like 14.
7:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's she can come over to his house and not have to have sex with him.
7:48
[SPEAKER_02]: The teacher's name is Jacob Strain.
7:52
[SPEAKER_02]: He reaches for my hands.
7:53
[SPEAKER_02]: You're in charge here, Vanessa.
7:55
[SPEAKER_02]: You decide what we do.
7:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if he really believes that.
7:59
[SPEAKER_02]: He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss to me.
8:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Told me he loved me.
8:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Every first step was taken by him.
8:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn't the same as being in charge.
8:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But maybe he has to believe that.
8:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe there's a whole list of things he has to believe.
8:21
[SPEAKER_04]: I didn't realize she was so young.
8:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, she's brought to you when it starts.
8:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And then she maintains her relationship with him into her adulthood, sporadically, it's really fraught.
8:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But I liked that detail a lot too.
8:39
[SPEAKER_04]: What I really liked in the part that you just read is that she's the narrator is directly discussing her experience.
8:50
[SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of writing to start like sublimating everything into, you know, like, novelistic flourish.
8:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
8:56
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like talking about the curtains, whatever.
8:59
[SPEAKER_04]: And the weather and the blah, blah, blah.
9:01
[SPEAKER_04]: So I appreciate its matter of factness.
9:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I did not go through anything like this.
9:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I was young, I was in a relationship with a man who's much older than me, it was trace age.
9:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And he did a lot of things that I didn't think were great at the time.
9:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I've gotten older, they horrify me more.
9:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it actually hurts me more now than I'm older than it hurt me at the time.
9:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, the narrator is so smart and that's really advantageous because she takes angles that I'll read you this paragraph that I feel like I have thought this before to myself variations of it many times.
9:43
[SPEAKER_02]: It's perfectly fine, it's nothing, it's normal.
9:46
[SPEAKER_02]: All interesting women have older lovers when they were young, it's a right of passage.
9:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You go in a girl and come out not quite a woman, but closer, a girl more conscious of herself and her own power.
9:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Self-awareness is a good thing, it leads to confidence knowing one's place in the world.
10:02
[SPEAKER_02]: He made me see myself in a way of boy my own age never could.
10:06
[SPEAKER_02]: No one can convince me that I wouldn't have been better off if I'd been like the other girls at school.
10:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Giving blow jobs and hand jobs all that endless labor before being deemed a slut and thrown away.
10:18
[SPEAKER_02]: At least train loved me at least I knew how it felt to be worshiped.
10:25
[SPEAKER_04]: Whoa, it's just so good.
10:31
[SPEAKER_02]: full body I don't know I've written about it before we've talked about it by had a relationship with like an older professor at university that and that is like this uncanny it's so and I think that's an uncanny yeah yeah it's just like you know it doesn't feel like there is a route through girlhood that doesn't
11:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you sort of are exercising, you know, you're into wishing your own desire to try to navigate, to try to minimize the damage, maximize the rewards.
11:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and so you feel like your agency is active.
11:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's weird if someone says your agency is not active, that doesn't feel good, it never feels good.
11:23
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that sounds extremely well.
11:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I think the thing that for me, maybe feel like, oh, this is really a masterpiece.
11:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that as she Vanessa ages and goes into higher education, she has a professor who's younger, who is more attractive, although I think she makes the point to kind of say he's, he's not as attractive as his position makes him, and as his intellect makes him, and his curiosity, and all those, yeah.
11:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And, um,
11:55
[SPEAKER_02]: She just, she explores a lot there with that later in life, higher education experience.
12:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really, it's a, it's a, it's absolutely incredible novel.
12:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I give it my full recommendation.
12:08
[SPEAKER_04]: I will never read it and say, okay, I should be glad to have heard all of this about it.
12:12
[SPEAKER_04]: It sounds amazing.
12:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, this is a very distinct type of young person.
12:16
[SPEAKER_02]: We are intellectual capacity is really great.
12:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And you do have a very sharp and inquisitive curiosity, but you just, you just can't have the life experiences that, you know, help you in the world.
12:31
[SPEAKER_02]: because you're too young.
12:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not an intellectual capacity thing, but it's like a kid.
12:35
[SPEAKER_02]: You, you can't understand it and you don't believe it.
12:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And when people treat you like you don't have that capacity.
12:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, and raging at this.
12:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Jacob strain at some point is like, girls at this age are so interesting.
12:47
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like real people.
12:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And, and the boys around the market on the start becoming real people until they're, you know, and they're like 20s.
12:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
12:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's kind of like, well, you're right, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to sex with them, but.
13:01
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
13:01
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think I suppose one of and I guess one of the reasons for that is that sense of like responsibility that's like put on you once you become like sexy as a teenager, you know that like you have something that they want.
13:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's like an issue of loyalty.
13:18
[SPEAKER_04]: I felt like also it was like an
13:21
[SPEAKER_04]: my like gender and I had so many women in my life that I really, really resent.
13:25
[SPEAKER_04]: And that thing of being like, actually I have one, I have one thing.
13:30
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, and of course he would tell me, of course he would tell me that it's like immoral to use it and but everything else You say it doesn't make any sense about morality either So like her way you to tell me anything.
13:42
[SPEAKER_04]: I better go find out for myself It's true.
13:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like it's also hypocrites and Young people are so disenfranchised anyway, especially girls It's like you give someone a little bit of power and expect them to just like
13:56
[SPEAKER_04]: No, and for me, blue bearded, you know?
13:59
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
14:28
[SPEAKER_04]: hand-drawn comic was like an underground zine of the early 90s by Diana Dimassa who's a pretty incredible incredible artist the tagline to it is had pizan homicidal lesbian terrorist and basically it's just like this kind of skinny, scraggly person like with her little cat whose name is chicken and they're always like co-voting around in the apartment
14:54
[SPEAKER_04]: or going down the street and killing street harassers and rapists in all these different and creative ways.
15:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And sometimes she does just like chop their dicks off, which is kind of funny.
15:03
[SPEAKER_04]: I say this in the review, but like for something that is kind of an iconic, an icon of the lesbian underground of the 1990s, you know, it's really amazingly timeless.
15:14
[SPEAKER_04]: It's very
15:22
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, her head's kind of strung out and like angry, like very, very angry, obviously, as she has this older friend named Rose, who I think is blind.
15:30
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not sure who is like Zen scholar and convinces her to like stay in and drink some soup and like take a nap instead of.
15:42
[SPEAKER_04]: going out and like, skitting, so like, skitting people who's committed sexual assault.
15:49
[SPEAKER_04]: There are like, you know, there's like the odd clunky bit, but, you know, with our like, like, reading generously, it's a beautiful thing.
15:57
[SPEAKER_04]: And I got to look back into a few amazing old examples of what I kind of called the like, swash buckling, lesbian life writing, so,
16:10
[SPEAKER_04]: And I did not have a space to really explain this argument.
16:13
[SPEAKER_04]: I just sort of like said it as if everybody will get that it's true, which it is, but it's the fact it's like Stonebridge Blues is actually really funny.
16:21
[SPEAKER_04]: Like it's kind of a comedy.
16:23
[SPEAKER_04]: And there are other books like that, like the amazing Acrystall Diary by Frankie Huckland Boych.
16:31
[SPEAKER_04]: Right, Frankie Huckland Boych.
16:32
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a memoir about being really into like meth
16:40
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm kind of trying to make the point that there's this kind of genre of my dark life and all the adventures and scrapes I've got into, where yes, there are scenes about getting like
16:50
[SPEAKER_04]: beaten up by police and, you know, men wanting to kill you or rape you wherever, or like actually raping you while trying to kill you.
16:58
[SPEAKER_04]: But there's this kind of road runner, ask aspect to it, because it's like, I love to tell the tale.
17:05
[SPEAKER_04]: Very literally, I love to tell the tale.
17:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And I was kind of theorizing that it's because like,
17:12
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, there's always going to be people who are made really angry by the idea of like women having sex with each other and just quintess in general and that kind of lobby remains oddly influential in our world, which means that that's kind of why it's still cool to be gay.
17:28
[SPEAKER_04]: I think you know it's so much fun.
17:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Reminds me of, um, there's some
17:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh no, I've read a lot of her other stuff.
17:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Rangirl is so good, it's one of my favorite sex work memoirs, and it's just the most incredible book.
17:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I first read it, it really blew my mind, and I endured it, and I still adore it, and she's so funny.
17:51
[SPEAKER_04]: She's really good with the sensory, you know, actually all of these writers are great with the sensory stuff of having the substance issue.
17:58
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, stinky, white wine, hot in the bottom of a bottle in the sun.
18:03
[SPEAKER_04]: like, you know, I don't know, just the, frankly, Huxenbroich has this amazing scene about rocking this girl under a tree and about the soil and details and it's just, just, just great stuff.
18:36
[SPEAKER_02]: We are joined today by Tori Peters, who is the author of the novel D Transition Baby, which won the 2021 Penn Hemingway Award for debut fiction.
18:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And was named a best book of the century by the New York Times.
18:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Her second book, Stag Dance is a national bestseller.
18:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Tori is an amateur son of builder, a rising pink motorcycle.
18:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And is this podcast's most frequent guest, even though you've never heard her hair before?
19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so glad to be here again, you know, as a multiple secret, secret guest who, for your listeners who are confused about that, I have now been on the podcast and could not get my technology working and so ruined.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: a really lovely discussion by not recording my end, which is just like my way of getting to go on multiple media events.
19:35
[SPEAKER_02]: You're the inaugural member of the Second Timers Club.
19:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that's beautiful.
19:39
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes me feel really special.
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels good.
19:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels good to be such an important part of this podcast.
19:46
[SPEAKER_04]: I did think it would be funny to just put together like a three person conversation but just leaving silence for the third person, you know, like a ghost.
19:54
[SPEAKER_04]: Like as if the person's voice, like, couldn't be detected by, you know, like, and it would be a good movie plot, like a podcast or interview someone and then they're just not there on the tape, like a vampire in a mirror.
20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like experimental or maybe it's like even accusatory like, you know, when people don't show up to like things and they just take a microphone on the empty chair of whoever they're like Accusing for not showing up to to you know being interrogated or anything.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like yeah, it's my role.
20:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I just think I'd love that we have a lost episode now because our conversation was If I may say so I do think it was like spectacular.
20:30
[SPEAKER_04]: This is like the opposite of what like in the late night host here where you're supposed to come on and be like It's coming out the 27th the improvisatory nature of the podcast often stems from the fact that we don't know what books people bring in when they come on on that on that topic We have a surprise today, I think
20:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I surprised Joe, I did actually hint this a shout, but I surprised Joe by switching up books from the lost podcast episode to a new, so we're not like just repeating our best jokes from two weeks ago, and I'm going with the Lightiverse by Zoe Schlanger, which was one of
21:18
[SPEAKER_04]: Not only have I read it, now I'm off.
21:22
[SPEAKER_04]: I have been for a few years on the National Bookritic Circle and it was longlisted in my category which is nonfiction and I was totally delighted because it was one of my favorite books.
21:34
[SPEAKER_04]: I've given it as a gift to like three different people.
21:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I also sent it, so I handwritten note on a napkin as a way of letting, trying to communicate how sincerely I love this book, I hand wrote something and then took a photo of an email that to be like, this is how much I want you to know the chat GPT didn't write this comment.
21:59
[SPEAKER_04]: This book has a really explanatory subtitle, which I personally love.
22:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Love clarity in a subtitle.
22:05
[SPEAKER_04]: So maybe you could give that to the listeners now, get a sense.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: How the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth?
22:17
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a lot of info for a subtitle.
22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not really a project.
22:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to parse it because the thesis of this book,
22:26
[SPEAKER_00]: is actually controversial within the field.
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, I would say that the thesis of this book is that plants have consciousness or some degree of consciousness.
22:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: what consciousness is is contested.
22:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the question of like, is it plant behavior?
22:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And then does that like animal hay behavior, which leads to this first of our plant's making decisions?
22:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And does that constitute intelligence?
22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You learn as you read this book.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like hugely contested in the field of botany.
23:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what language you use and how you use it,
23:10
[SPEAKER_00]: you're picking a side and just saying it.
23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I imagine this subtitle is actually also like the why it's such a mouthful, is that it's trying to not alienate because it's unlike papers and nature magazine or whatever, it's trying to be popular science writing and not alienate people.
23:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So like it's sort of like we'll just
23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I would ton of qualifications before we even dive into what this we're trying to say.
23:41
[SPEAKER_04]: The subtitle describes a condition, sort of, you know, how something reveals something else, which is such an interesting abstract thing.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's very, it's become quite popular in the era of the internet, how the x of y does z. I think this book is like, it's one of, I wouldn't,
24:04
[SPEAKER_00]: the one that I enjoyed the most.
24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like the one that changed my world, the most in a series.
24:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's this like kind of revolution happening in science writing where these books are a series of books are basically taking on subjects that I've
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: We're previously kind of stayed and infusing on what's like maybe queer theory with non-human ways of thinking.
24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe they all sort of came after a braiding sweet grasp by Robin Walkenner, but there I would say stuff like entangled life by which is about sort of like what how much fungi ends up shaping
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and that the way the fungi want things and like isn't like a lot of them have to do with desire.
24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say I contain multitudes by ad yarn which is about how much our microbiome controls us rather than us controlling microbiome that like we're sort of shaped by biology to be a perfect primordial ooze to like host them and we're and everything we do from our health
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the other one I was thinking of in this and this is that the most recent is is a river alive by Robert McFarlane about like do we offer a personhood and agency to things that you that you would say are non-sentient and that they all these books seem to be merging into each other.
25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So like this is like our plants conscious.
25:45
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, and if they are conscious and they're talking to each other, how are they talking?
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're talking on like fungi networks, you know, and why do they, how are they doing things?
25:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It's with biology.
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the books are, we're with bacteria.
25:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So the books are all kind of like strangely,
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: talking to each other.
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Another one might be dispersal by Jessica Lee, like it has a collection about invasive species, but looking at invasive species from the idea of human immigration.
26:13
[SPEAKER_00]: If plants, if humans want to immigrate, and we are like, hey, we understand why people might want to cross borders.
26:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are we so against invasive species and making these distinctions and
26:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I basically feel like there's this moment where all these great botany or I'm not even sure what the biology ecology books are talking to each other someone implicitly and it's maybe a golden age of totally changing the way that one can be in the world so that you read the light leaders and you go to
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: that are totally aware of me, and they're like, and I'm like hanging out in a, I'm alone, and I'm at a party with my plants, friends, who would not metaphorically, but literally, no I'm here are reacting to me and are making choices around my presence.
27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the interesting thing about this book is that it kind of knows that that's like,
27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: a wild thing to say and that there's like a history of people making these unfounded claims around plants going back to this book called like the secret life of plants where that's where like people get the idea that you play Beethoven for plants, you know, and it was totally debunked and it was led all these people to be really skeptical of this stuff.
27:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But the book is so gentle because it slowly, it doesn't come right out and be like plants are conscious.
27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Plants know you're there.
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, hey, here's my idea and then it's
27:56
[SPEAKER_00]: all, like it's so well researched, all of this evidence beautifully told, beautifully written in which examples of what plants can do over basically like 10 steps in which at the end of the book you're like there's no way that plants aren't conscious.
28:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you're you're just stunned by it and your whole role changes.
28:18
[SPEAKER_04]: It's stunning in the role factor presents.
28:22
[SPEAKER_04]: It's also beautiful in the human
28:26
[SPEAKER_04]: One of my favorites is a portrait of a botanical, like conservationist who works in Hawaii, sitting at a bar with the last surviving example of the species that grows nowhere else in it.
28:40
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not dying at the speed with which we mourn a human death, or even an animal death, a heart doesn't stop.
28:48
[SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, it's sort of gradually fading away, and he perceives
28:52
[SPEAKER_04]: sufficient kind of selfhood in it that he has a really beautiful intimate farewell with it.
28:58
[SPEAKER_04]: And that was, I remember reading that thinking, this is the Banger.
29:04
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many stunning moments of, yeah, like human plan to interaction, plant animal interaction.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote down like that kind of arguments,
29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: that the book goes through just for people who haven't read it.
29:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically it's like the first thing she lays out is what is consciousness in the first place.
29:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And she goes back to like Aristotle basically being like there's a hierarchy in which humans at the top animals in the middle and plants are at the very bottom in terms of intelligence and reason.
29:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And that gave way to a sort of Western thing where you could harness anything below you and give rise to things like
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They've a section of dogs because people were like the dogs are just autumn Italians and they bark because their senses are triggered or whatever.
29:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But then you afraid of some of the same time basically being like all things that our live have desire and they're not and we actually have to find metaphors.
29:56
[SPEAKER_00]: to understand plants so the word heart would comes from him in like a tree because it's not exactly a heart but for us as humans to understand a tree we need a metaphor to basically do it and that's essentially what she's saying plant consciousness it's like that it's so different than us we can understand it but we need to go through that metaphor in in various ways and without trying to anthropomorphize too much and then.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she goes to these things about what plants can do at each chapter.
30:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first one's communication is so she's like, what is consciousness?
30:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Consciousness is like, you can sort of look at it in a material thing and be like, there's a brain or you can be like, look at consciousness from the outside and be like consciousness.
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You can tell us something is consciousness because it has a set of behaviors.
30:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And from that we infer that it's conscious.
30:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's like, here's what we think of consciousness in animals.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: or even in ourselves, she gives all these kind of fun animal things like cats have the same attachment style as toddlers, for instance, and bees, for instance, do little wiggle dances to communicate to each other like, hey, there's a flower, like this kind of flower, this far away, and you're like, well, if a bee is telling each other, it's aware of itself, and it's aware of an other, and it's giving
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so the first year I was in like communication clients communicate and they're like clearly communicate with some sort of intention.
31:25
[SPEAKER_04]: An example that I recall from the book is that plants will shade other types of plants, but not plants of their own species.
31:33
[SPEAKER_04]: So they, but how do they know that they're there?
31:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
31:35
[SPEAKER_04]: And the difference.
31:36
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the same angle.
31:37
[SPEAKER_04]: They've not got eyes will break.
31:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and then sort of things like they'll release fair amounts that are like caterpillars are attacking us, right?
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And and they're so that's funny.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really interesting, like this guy, he lost his, he was early on in this and he was basically like, he lost his job and died.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a very set of one of her very sad portraits.
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: This guy, he was like, trees are talking to each other.
32:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And people were like, you're a cook.
32:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And you lose your job and nobody will talk to you anymore.
32:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And it turns out he was right.
32:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That trees were warning each other.
32:14
[SPEAKER_00]: that like hey caterpillars are attacking and they're sending out this Fireman's other trees could pick up over distance.
32:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But not only that when they looked into it, they were like not only choose warning each other, they warn each other in different levels.
32:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So they looked at golden rods, the common golden rod that we find.
32:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And they found that golden rods basically
32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: have three different levels of communication.
32:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They have within their direct relations.
32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like siblings essentially as plants.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They have a really quiet almost like a whisper level of the community of sending out chemicals that only those ones are tuned to.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And they've got a larger one that's like,
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: all golden rods are gonna hear this one and then they've got a third one which is like all plants, you know, and that's like when you're like mo grass and you smell grass, that's the plant being like everybody knows this shit is going down.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So not only can they choose who they're talking to, but not but individual golden rods with in golden rods.
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: have personalities.
33:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not like if you caught a golden rod, each golden rod will do the same thing no matter what, different golden rods react differently.
33:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The same what and the example was like this is the same as chipmunks that there are certain chipmunks for instance that when they see you go they're freaking out and they're like oh my god they're new go and then making noise it's another chipmunks.
33:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's certain other chin mugs that don't care.
33:38
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like bad off.
33:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So like an evil thing can be shit.
33:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing is the other chin mugs will respond knowing the personalities of each other.
33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So if a chin mugs is like constantly being like Eagle Eagle Eagle the other chin mugs are like, yeah, that's like this shit monk who cried Eagle.
33:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, their all the chin mugs are like, yeah, that's Dan always fucking crying Eagle, but if I don't know Cynthia who is the badass
34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: says Eagle, the other child wants to like, oh shit, Stint Dia is doing it.
34:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And they run away, golden rods that are the same way.
34:13
[SPEAKER_00]: There's strong communicating golden rods and weak communicate.
34:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So okay, so there's communication.
34:19
[SPEAKER_00]: She does that and it's like, that's my have personalities, individual plants might have personalities.
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The next thing she talks about is electricity, which is like,
34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a crazy.
34:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They did all these things were like, they grafted a jellyfish, a jellyfish, gene into plants that lights up when calcium, when it detects calcium, which is similar to the way our nurse work, our long electricity.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So then they do these experiments where if you touch a plant in the dark, when it's grafted with a jellyfish gene in it,
34:58
[SPEAKER_00]: a wave of luminescence will cross the plant, which is to say that if you touch a plant, the plant knows that it has been touched and is communicating to the entire plant self that something has happened.
35:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, hey, we've been touched.
35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, our leaf has been cut.
35:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole plant has like, and we're not talking like slow.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking that this is happening over a matter of seconds.
35:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially, plants have nerves and things like that.
35:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That was crazy.
35:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So plants can feel that you just basically plants can hear, like pee plants when they do like a, they do this thing with a maze, where they had just the sound of water and a pea shoot growing a root.
35:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But hear the water in a maze that had a fork and it would choose to go towards the water.
35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Now if you say that consciousness is that you take in input
35:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And then make decisions based on that input.
35:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a bunch of different examples.
36:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The frequency of caterpillars eating, a lot of caterpillars in this more calm, so they then it gets into like, plants have memory that you can do things to plants and they will remember.
36:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So for instance, like, there's a flower that basically loads up a stem in full of pollen and,
36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: how quickly it loads it is dependent on how frequently bees come, but it will change how quickly it loads it depending on how frequently the bees come.
36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So what that means that it counts the bees that are coming, knows the timing.
36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, oh, this bees come every three minutes here.
36:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So we got to like start producing pollen every three minutes and have it like loaded up.
36:46
[SPEAKER_00]: or if the bees come every 15 minutes, it's going slower with that.
36:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So it remembers past things and changes it.
36:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can say that plants have a certain memory.
36:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There's like this crazy plant that maybe can see and mimic.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a community implant that that was the craziest one.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The book killer.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how to say it's a South American plant.
37:06
[SPEAKER_00]: They can see other plants and then
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: make itself look like the plants that are there and they have no idea how it can mimic other plants other than it must see them or maybe it's like sharing again this goes back to the other books like maybe sharing genetic information through back to here is so basically the two ideas is like this plant can either see the other plants and is imitating the plants that are around it because it can grow to look like
37:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And they can tell like when you have shade when they're shaded and things like that, these are the things that plants can do.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And then lastly, there's this like beautiful thing about plants have families and they actually take care of their kids.
37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's plants that will plant a seed of its stuff to take care of its kids, to take care of its kids, to do all these things.
37:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And once you go through this like 300 pages,
38:00
[SPEAKER_00]: of and so it's very circumstance but I'm not so like I read this and I was like at the end of these 300 pages with all these examples and all these things that plants are doing that are just like all these other
38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: That's very loud.
38:23
[SPEAKER_04]: Like you've never had a loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud
38:52
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, are there just types of communication that we don't conceive of, but like, where is this stuff stored?
38:58
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, is there, like, there's no cognitive center to the plant, like all of the parts of the plant that we know about are busy.
39:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, so where is it?
39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That was like the crazy.
39:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that was also the amazing thing is that we have like this like sort of Oh, it must be in the brain the brain is where a cognition happens and that this is why this stuff is so cool because it makes me think about other ways of that You know even computer science now.
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like can I just oh distributed systems there was a there was a story in the book about Darwin
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The Darwin was sure that the root tip, which was like making choices as a dog, because the root tip will be like, I don't want to go to where the rock is.
39:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to go where this is and is choosing how it's digging, that Darwin was like, I'm sure that the root tip is the brain of a plant.
39:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And the years of research with the sun being like, the root tip is the plant brain,
39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it was like, no, no, it's not really so much that that thing Darwin, not a hundred percent jackrocker and it's all up and fortunately.
40:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, that that was like kind of the amazing thing that like thinking about how all these nerves work or like how these decisions are being made in a in like a non.
40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Data center brain kind of way.
40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: was also super difficult for me as a human.
40:25
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's also not just like genetic.
40:28
[SPEAKER_04]: Was that word that's not obligation?
40:31
[SPEAKER_04]: It's imperative that the imperative of the genes to survive.
40:34
[SPEAKER_04]: It's more complicated than that.
40:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So obviously there's a really powerful critique of anthropocentricity in our conception of what the mind is, what communication is, all these things that we think of as either distinguishing what it means to be human or what it means to be alive, right?
40:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Plato and Aristotle's concept of a great chain of being from the universe's original, you know, seed of animus, sort of like spirit down to the God's little tiny bitor, but it's not just like a critique.
41:04
[SPEAKER_04]: If there is a strong critique in it, I think it must be in its portrait of the people who rejected the claims of people who studied plant and animal communication.
41:19
[SPEAKER_04]: The secret life of plants was very, very successful in the 70s.
41:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you have a listen to that album, Plantasia, it's like a plant conscious concept album.
41:27
[SPEAKER_04]: It is so good.
41:29
[SPEAKER_04]: So good.
41:30
[SPEAKER_04]: That that.
41:31
[SPEAKER_04]: The idea that because this became a trend associated with hippies, who are sloppy thinkers, that this subject bespeaks the perverted interests of these faculties youth, and they just weren't wrong.
41:48
[SPEAKER_04]: They overstated it a bit, and then people hated the way that their hair looks so much that it became a pariah field.
41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And there still is like a little bit of a stigma.
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like there's one of the, I'm not remembering every recent name in the book, but one of the researchers is someone who was really like, basically because plants behave, there is no like control.
42:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, basically once you once you understand the plants are constantly interacting with their environment, there's no like,
42:17
[SPEAKER_00]: This is plan set and neutral or something.
42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's they're always doing something that there's no laboratory is better than the field is better, you know, that was the one person, but then there was somebody in it also who was like, well, if that's the case, I'm just gonna work in the woods and then that person would start doing like Ayahuasca and all these, you know, I guess and totally is a very,
42:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, contested personality in the field, where some people is very popular with the public, because, and not at all, in serve the,
42:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Academy, which seems also like near what happened with mushrooms to Terrence McKenna and all these other people who were like Into the psychedelic aspects of mushrooms, but also they were right about you know, that's so much of entangled life what the mushrooms were doing and The way they were in everything and had desire
43:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And the washrooms do want things, you know, and that's, and they are telling you shit, you know, they are doing stuff and it's like, and they're like, you're not just hot, like that's happening, the washrooms are doing it because the backlash had obscured important knowledge and that's so interesting that the force of the normal.
43:38
[SPEAKER_04]: It's so powerful, you know, it's like water or something, like pressure.
43:42
[SPEAKER_04]: It's enough to delete whole areas of human inquiry and to stigmatize them.
43:48
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, I thought I thought was a really beautiful person.
43:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, it's, I think you're, I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, that one of the reasons I think the book is that I'm kind of awesome.
43:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that you also get a sense of how, how doggedly and like how rigorously the people who are like, I think that plants might be aware.
44:07
[SPEAKER_00]: or various whatever word you want, aren't just saying.
44:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like, you know, spending years look like one of my favorite ones.
44:18
[SPEAKER_00]: An example of it is so like I'm seeing as a Facebook
44:24
[SPEAKER_00]: His entire career was going and stroking plants.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the stroking's the shot to the plant.
44:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And his big finding were like, if you stroke the shaft of a plant, it will harden.
44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Like...
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That's 20 years of research, it's actually like, I mean, it actually had a ton to do with this idea that plants have a kind of nerves and if they're being touched and they know that they're being touched frequently.
44:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like, oh, that you know, something's messing with us.
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: We better like, like, we better harden.
45:02
[SPEAKER_00]: We better get like four to five.
45:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and go into getting birthday and then, uh, but yeah, it takes a lifetime to prove.
45:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it takes a lifetime to prove.
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the way that I'm being obnoxious and snickering about it, this guy had to put up with that shit for 20 years.
45:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I reviewed this melon, new challenger book, how to be animal for book form years ago.
45:38
[SPEAKER_02]: similar discoveries, similar pieces of evidence that suggest human beings are not uniquely intelligent and capable and we don't possess many, if any, abilities or skills that other living things don't have.
45:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And the thing that I always remember was that because these two men who were working
46:06
[SPEAKER_02]: The guys were like, no, they teach each other like here's here's the proof and then everybody's like That's not what teaching means anymore teaching means something And that's the whole history Like these theories that arise and they are just so
46:28
[SPEAKER_02]: profoundly challenging to people.
46:29
[SPEAKER_02]: They have to be rejected by any means possible.
46:32
[SPEAKER_02]: If that means we change the definition of what teaching is, we change the definition of what communication is.
46:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't matter as long as human beings get to preserve this exceptional position.
46:43
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to believe we have in the entire universe of living things.
46:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah, I've got to talk to such an awareness.
46:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, it's so trying to find the words to to describe what it is actually saying.
46:59
[SPEAKER_00]: These plants are intelligent.
47:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're like the all the ramifications of of what an intelligent
47:06
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, being might do was it's sort of shocking if they're, if the plants all around a certain television, that, that, that, yeah, exactly as you said, Charlie, that people were immediately like, that's not, that's not, that's not what, that's not what intelligence means anymore.
47:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not, then they're like, I think the plants are communicating, they're like, wait, wait, did something pop back to the plants because the plants are talking one way or it's not communication and they're like, yeah, and we found somebody talking back to
47:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like they have to get into it and say this and this is I feel like there's a there's a like a sort of raft of books coming out that are dealing with this and the other one that I wanted to sort of talk about to you to about with this was
47:51
[SPEAKER_00]: is the is a river alive while we're farland came out and and basically it's the same thing it's basically there are some like countries or states and various places that are now conferring personhood on rivers.
48:06
[SPEAKER_00]: according to like different ways of thinking about what a being might be.
48:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's so alarming to very many people to be like this river might be alive and also like what might a dead river look like, what might a, because if a river is alive, it must also be able to die.
48:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a revering outside Mumbai, I think that is an example of a dead river that looks far and then goes to.
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, if you think of that river as alive, it's so different than what you can do to that river if it's just a resource.
48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially the way that interacts with our metaphors that end up being enshrined in law.
48:55
[SPEAKER_00]: due to it because the law is also a series of metaphors, like ultimately, changes and we like grant a liveness to a river our way of like totally changes.
49:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Legally, it's it's really fascinating.
49:11
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a
49:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Buddhist position that they're, well, I don't want to make any, any Buddhist listeners frustrated with me, but one proposition is that there are no nouns in the world.
49:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They're only verbs, self is an illusion, right?
49:28
[SPEAKER_02]: You're like a process more than a distinct thing.
49:32
[SPEAKER_02]: and that that same perspective should extend to rivers, mountains, plants, but rocks as well, and that part of the process of internalizing that worldview is to is to see a river as an action rather than as an entity, and same thing with a mountain instead of seeing things as ever really being kind of still or in art that there's always something taking place
50:00
[SPEAKER_02]: create the circumstances within which that thing you're looking at.
50:05
[SPEAKER_02]: That isn't really a thing excess if and often on.
50:09
[SPEAKER_04]: In many ways, a lot of this will connect to Lerson Cotari in the theory of the Ryzo, as opposed to the tree, as a better metaphor for describing how everything is interconnected, which I think is obviously pre-existing ideas out there in theology, and the way you just described as a kind of like paradigm of existence is really, really beautiful.
50:32
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm just kind of moving.
50:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And I was just
50:36
[SPEAKER_04]: interventions into scientific language to try to explain things.
50:39
[SPEAKER_04]: We used speed for a while, you know, like some changes very, very slow.
50:43
[SPEAKER_04]: And then, you know, everybody learned the word Anthropocene and we thought it's thinking of that way.
50:49
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, it just struck me that, you know, that it is nice sometimes realizing that all of this work or this stupid work in critical theory does actually open our minds up at like a little.
50:59
[SPEAKER_04]: to be a bit more elastic over time, to be receptive to new ideas.
51:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
51:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the, it's, and I think it's also that all these books are actually aware of queer theory, whether or not the author is queer, you know, different ways that, that,
51:18
[SPEAKER_00]: entities come together and they're using sort of queer theory as a metaphor to understand or you know, they're not like these are gay plants, what they're real thick kind of.
51:29
[SPEAKER_04]: I bet some are, if you have personalities, that's not what gay means anymore.
51:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like it's their informed by like the McFarland uses, in fact, revering as a verb in the book, you know, so like it is a, this is informed by five Buddhist thought or in North America, there's kind of like an indigenous, I don't remember the name of the tribe, or tribe in Canada, that some of their
52:09
[SPEAKER_00]: thought practices are how he approaches the river.
52:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really cool.
52:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know.
52:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess for myself, I mean, I wanted to talk to you, but I feel like you both did.
52:20
[SPEAKER_00]: What I was hoping, like Charlotte, you know, some religious and some critical things down.
52:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, I'll say a little bit like why I think I've been ending up reading so many of these books, but I'm curious like also how these ideas maybe, um,
52:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Inter interact with your like your veganism or some of the thoughts that you have about about that Charlotte.
52:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Does it does anything through there or you just kind of doesn't matter the plants alive or an animal sent to enter like that's not why I do it.
52:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I just, and this is maybe like, I don't care if a plant's alive.
52:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry.
52:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't care if it feels pain.
52:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I know what I'm saying.
53:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't like a guy.
53:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
53:16
[SPEAKER_02]: In these books, I don't know if it is explicitly cited, but I wonder if disability studies informs them at all because the definitely comes up in like the Melanie Challenger book, which of those, um,
53:30
[SPEAKER_02]: The exclusionary, you know, like the really limiting and limited definitions of what intelligence is, what, you know, communication is like all these things that they always inevitably become weapons against other human beings as well, you know, if it can't actually
53:57
[SPEAKER_02]: animals and disability studies, and it was really formative for me.
54:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like one of the books I think got all the time.
54:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And she starts with this story of a, of like a farmer or somebody seeing this fox with a disability that's actually a painless disability.
54:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember what it is, but it's like, it impairs its movement so that when you see it, you can tell it's, it's got got something.
54:18
[SPEAKER_02]: and the farmer kills it and I think about that all the time because I follow a lot of sanctuaries that rescue disabled animals and people in the comments are always like could it out of its misery?
54:29
[SPEAKER_02]: The cooler thing is to allow this being to live and of course the caretakers are always like this being wants to live experiences joy experiences happiness.
54:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry you make sure you uncomfortable to look at it but like it loves its life you know
54:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I am a vegan and I have a bunch of cats and my cats are not vegan.
54:53
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's not like I'm like a morally pure, but I can't, I just, yeah, every day I want to be better at like living a life that kind of acknowledges other, other living entities.
55:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's this is like interesting actually also having just like reviewed the spoke before I came on because also the plants are like full of like horrible things that they do to each other.
55:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The plants are actually pretty awful through each other and pretty awful to our private to their predators like they they are
55:27
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a one that makes uh, so like just from like just kind of like funny stuff like there's one plant that makes a thing that looks like a little bee that's not an actual bee and it gets other bees to then like
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: and as spreading pollen, by basically, he would be sexually frustrated.
56:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's like, cool in a way that you really don't think of a plant being cruel, but like all the other things where I'll do it where there's tomato plants, like just the basic tomato plant has figured out a way to release a chemical that, if a caterpillar is attacking it, it does something in its brain and the caterpillars will then turn on each other and start eating each other, like just cannibalizing each other,
56:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And this goes back to the mushroom thing about the the special mushroom.
56:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I forgot what it is, but it's a one that colonizes an ants brain and makes the ants brain explode and spreads and sends spores.
56:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're like mushrooms are nice and then it's like an insects are nice and like one of the mushrooms going to explode the brain.
56:46
[SPEAKER_00]: My favorite fact in the Tangled Life book is that almost nothing can break down a cigarette but because a cigarette but is so full of toxins, like a cigarette filter, I mean not about the filter.
56:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That filter is plastic and the plastic is filled with like deadly, deadly poisons that we, you know.
57:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And so cigarette butts just can't be broken down by anything except there's two mushrooms like a break it break down.
57:12
[SPEAKER_00]: One is a turkey tail, which you know, it was pretty common, but the other mushroom that can break down a cigarette butt is the most psychoactive mushroom possible.
57:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That little brown mushroom that like was only recently discovered is the only one that's like, yeah, give me those cigarettes and then you need it.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess I also wanted to talk about these books because I did have a thing for the authors ago last weekend where mostly people were talking about like fascism and which you know should be talked about and the past sign and and and just basically how horrible everything
57:56
[SPEAKER_00]: what do you hope for about?
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like, you know, it's like one of those questions you like can't come on, like, you know, don't have some hope is for suckers, you know, like, um, but then I realized I'm reading these, I've been this year just attracted over and over to these books, and I feel like actually that maybe this is like an incredible,
58:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Renaissance and not just how like very careful scientists can think about these things, but like this is now trickling down to like, you know, a repopular science, but I don't read difficult ones.
58:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And that in popular science books like the like the Lighted Earth, I have like the information and the ways of thinking that are like backed up by a kind of
58:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So that I can like go to, yeah, go to a garden and not just be like blown away by like, oh, it's pretty, and it looks nice and all this stuff, but like I was like met a physically blown away by what is happening the life and the awareness and like.
59:00
[SPEAKER_00]: the network of things all around me that then connects the river, it connects all this stuff.
59:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It connects to like what can be sensed and known in like the immense world by adjong, the way that like the borders of me because like if I touch you, I give you my my bacteria and that we're like kind of just like microbiome clouds constantly running into each other and training genetic material and like there's no borders and like we just all this.
59:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And like it all just like a lot of scouts and like boom.
59:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, this is the greatest time to be alive.
59:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I get to know this stuff, and I can point to it.
59:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so fucking cool.
59:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And these books have affected me in the way that I walk around and experience things in ways that I think I used to think of great literature in terms of fiction, literature, where I'll read a book, and it changes how I see the world.
59:53
[SPEAKER_00]: These books have changed me, I think, the last year.
59:58
[SPEAKER_04]: that's lovely.
59:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I have that cabin for a month that I spent a long time with and I cut down trees you know, for the solenoid for firewood and all the stuff and I got super weirded out by cutting down trees after I read the late New Year's
1:00:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, number one, I need it for the, the cabin is down in the woods.
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no access by car, so, and that's my heat source, and so I have to cut down my trees, and why don't have to, I guess I could just burn propane, but, you know, I'm not sure that's any better or whatever, but so then I, um,
1:00:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and then I got had this weird thing happen one time where I was going to cut down this maple tree and this little And Chris my way was that this little bird came and started tweeting it like tweeting at me like wildly Wider was going to cut down the maple tree and Chris was like, I don't know the birds tweeting at you and I was like, come on come on.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's birds tweet, they land in the tweet, who cares?
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And I kind of said that like hardens myself.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I hardened myself to any is like possibility that the bird was saying something to me.
1:01:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um,
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then I hired myself to, and then I cut the maple tree, but when you cut a maple tree like you you make one wedge cut and then you do like a back cut with a chainsaw and the tree kind of like sell backwards and pinch the, the, it felt opposite to how it was going to fall and it pinched the, the bar of the chainsaw so it was stuck it was like clearly like the lightest wind could like knock it over, but it's also sucks with like really dangerous.
1:01:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And I went in like got some rope because I was like, okay, there's a way to like pull this tree down with rope or whatever and I was like standing there with the rope and I heard this noise like just like this like woosh noise and by the time I like looked up the tree was already down and it had a split in the fork of the trunk and it fell with me in the in the center of the fork and the branches and I've been like one foot to the right one foot to the left that it would have like brain to me.
1:02:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true, and like, you know, it's like
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it was exactly like that.
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like, and like the thing is like, it was too many things all in a row for me to be like, you know, it had been a coincidence.
1:02:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bit like, but people pick up since like Chris was like sensing something.
1:02:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, like, I don't know what was going on, but so this is like, I still cut down trees.
1:02:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I didn't, I wasn't like, I was weirded out by forgetting down trees for about like,
1:02:47
[SPEAKER_00]: high four months.
1:02:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But I still do, you know, and, um, but I'm like very, very conscientious now.
1:02:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I like we'll talk to the trees before I cut them down.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very conscientious about like, if this trees here, like am I taking out too many of the species, just each tree, like I make sure that each tree has like another tree on three sides when I take
1:03:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's like, you know, I think somebody else would see me out there talking to trees.
1:03:23
[SPEAKER_00]: and being like, I'm sorry, you know, I've left two other made red maples over there and they can regenerate and, you know, the stump, perhaps, you will grow new shoots and, you know, the center center, like, and some version myself not too much younger than me now.
1:03:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we're talking like three years, four years younger than me.
1:03:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But we like, that is a crazy person.
1:03:49
[SPEAKER_00]: that's a crazy person with chainsaw in the woods who is like going through some process of trying to navigate the fact that her presence requires herding things and and is never going to come to grips with it and so is like come up with my own personal matrix of things that has
1:04:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have like, you know, it's easiest, I think, with a tree.
1:04:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I can say that the tree is like easiest for me to do that with.
1:04:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And the, the like, contortions, I put myself through, you know, I think at some point the level of contortions, I put myself through, will just have me vegan, but at the moment, like, it's a series of things that I got through.
1:04:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I believe that stuff has to take times, you know, when people decide intellectually and then try to force themselves, it's normally like short lived and then I think it's better to just let it be like we all have that experience of like all in all sorts of ways where intellectually we know something and we're just kind of like not there yet, you know, and and it actually can't be rushed.
1:05:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I mean, it's like it's like, it's like, yeah.
1:05:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The Michael Pollan book, the Botany of Desire were like on one end, if you like extrapolate from apples, like some of his ideas that like, you know, chickens are either like the most suffering creature in the world or the most successful creature in the world, you know, and like.
1:05:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen enough factory farming that's that latter argument is not working for me anymore, but you know, you encounter all these different ideas in also all these different, I would say like nature books by writers trying to like incorporate all these different things and cross reference amongst each other, you know.
1:05:48
[SPEAKER_02]: you talking to the tree and apologizing to the tree, it is beautiful.
1:05:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's something I think you're doing for the tree, but then my impression is you do it for yourself too.
1:05:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not like, oh, being vegan is the most selfless thing I do.
1:06:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, it's a selfish thing.
1:06:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's really important to me.
1:06:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I like all of these different things that kind of happen as a result of it.
1:06:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I don't know that it's really corny, but there's that grab-and-drop-to-core poem.
1:06:18
[SPEAKER_02]: that life was joy, I'm sorry, I'll play start crying.
1:06:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really short.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, I don't want to console that life was service.
1:06:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I served in low services joy.
1:06:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And just like, yeah, like, it's a privilege to have a relationship with the world.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:06:34
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true, that I was truly beautiful on life.
1:06:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think the light leaders are to bring it back to the world, I think that this is that.
1:06:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it's like deep in my relationship with the world.
1:06:48
[SPEAKER_04]: and service, right conceptualizing research as service to the world.
1:06:52
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:06:53
[SPEAKER_04]: Just digs actually the way that Charlotte just said it in that poem.
1:06:56
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:06:56
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a beautiful thing about the book I hadn't really appreciated.
1:06:59
[SPEAKER_04]: So thank you so much.
1:07:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you so much.
1:07:01
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you, boss.
1:07:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:07:03
[SPEAKER_02]: All the book changes you and then you change us.
1:07:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:08
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:11
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
1:07:28
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:28
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
1:07:31
[UNKNOWN]: It's true.
1:07:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Reading Raiders is hosted and produced by Joe Livingstone and Charlotte Sheen, and released in partnership with Book 4 and Vaccine.
1:08:05
[SPEAKER_02]: You can learn more about us and support the show at www.patreon.com slash reading Raiders.
1:08:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also write to us at reading Raiders' pod at gmail.com with questions, comments, and freezes.
1:08:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Or leave a review for us.
1:08:19
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1:08:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Found that it's also too remote diesel car, and your value can post a beautiful music you always need to know.