Thinking about greedy bodies. Each one of us is a greedy body, willing to do what to be fed?

This work has a few influences. One is Val Plumwood’s essay, Being Prey, which I read for the first time decades ago. In it, she relates her sudden awareness of being watched, as she complacently steered her canoe along a flooding river in Arnhem Land. What watched her – a crocodile – had been watching her for some time before it grabbed her and took her into the river for three – yes, three – death rolls, which she escaped, grasping at saplings and digging her fingers into the muddy sides of the river. It was a kind of revelation (one that only a white woman could have had, one not accessible to a man). Like all genuine revelations it was nearly the death of her.

Revelations must be reported, and this is what Plumwood did. What she wrote is the nucleus of a narrative of being here – one for the white settlers, I mean. It’s a narrative of here, which demands (of white settlers) humility, imagination and realism.

Another provocation for me is this long burning up, which is our contemporary moment. Thinking chemically, what goes on in our bodies is the same as this long event outside: the oxidation of whatever counts as fuel for a body. Whether it’s the crocodile that didn’t incorporate Val into its immense body, or the mountain that eventually did, we are all grabbing what is outside, grinding it up, gulping it down, and burning it up inside. Outside our bodies, this combustion appears as a flame that flickers.

I am an artist, so I’m interested in what we do with our bodies, sustained, as they are, in a form and way of life. Out of the mouth comes our vocalisations, verbalisations, utterances and the speech acts that create and destroy worlds. Between, under, from our hands come things that are new. I wish art to be seen in this serious way.

There is a kind of necessity to a body, whatever forms they take, whereas these institutions that dig out more and more fuel for the fire could be otherwise.

https://kurungabaa.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/being-prey-by-val-plumwood/

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