Chelsea

Teju Cole: Golden Apple of the Sun and the Impact of the Everyday

What is something that you would classify as neither ‘interesting’ nor ‘boring’?

When do you experience it?

This is a question I asked myself and the class after reading about Teju Cole and his book, Golden Apple of the Sun, to present in this year’s seminar. Perhaps this is a question that Cole has asked himself many times, as he writes:

“As I photograph, I’m looking for the moment when one kind of interest becomes something else, where the words I want are neither ‘interesting’ nor ‘boring’.”

This passage intrigues me because “the moment” is something I look for, maybe even unconsciously, throughout my practice. Looking is the key here. For me, I experience it as watching. For example, I often sit at the wooden island in my kitchen and stare out the window above the sink. Sometimes we leave the window open. The wind seeping through the window moves the delicate white curtains I hung there. The sun enters the kitchen and creates a fog between me and the window that faces directly into the neighbour’s house across from me. Can they see me washing dishes? Do they ever see me sitting here? Do they know that the plant on their windowsill has been dead for a while?

I hadn’t been exposed to Teju Cole before this year’s seminar. Still, I was immediately captivated by the images and the story behind this book as he details moments from his kitchen amidst the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if beautifully framed, the little things help me appreciate what I’m tasked with daily – living. This task was especially relevant to people during the pandemic.

To introduce the artist, Teju Cole was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents and was raised in Lagos. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA. He is a novelist, photographer, critic, curator, and author of several books. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019 and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. 

The photographs in this book were taken in the five weeks leading up to the 2020 Presidential election in the USA and were published during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cole discusses historical and personal experiences of hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography.

Terms and concepts that are commonly mentioned in the Golden Apple of the Sun:

In articles describing Cole’s practice, they categorize his work as a “diaristic” practice, which is commonly associated with photography and “the everyday.” In the essay at the end of Golden Apple of the Sun, Cole mentions intransigence and care as part of his practice, specifically when he talks about how he makes his decisions about which photographs to take and how to frame them. This also extends to the care he takes in telling his story, and the stories of those who have been enslaved.

One of the most significant components of the book, and one that I researched in detail, is Cole’s inclusion of the Cookbook of Anonymous, which is seen on almost every double-page spread in the book. Through his research, Cole writes that this cookbook is a years-long compilation written by three different hands, potentially of enslaved house maidens, and possibly handed down through generations. This is captivating because it touches on the concept that the everyday experience is singular but also shared. He’s looking beyond himself standing in his kitchen. He’s thinking about people who may have experienced a sense of being in a lockdown before, standing in the same rooms every day, developing some expert knowledge or awareness of what happens in those spaces. He’s looking at a piece of history made by the people before him in oppressive situations through their cookbooks, which now exist as a handmade archive. What does this archive say about them? What will ours say about us?

I moved into my house in Guelph a few months ago. The house was built in the 1960s. After reading this book, I was prompted to think about who stood in my kitchen before me. The cupboards are ridiculously tall, and so are the closets. I think about how they reached items up there. I am short, so I resent them just a little. I digress.

As a painter turned video-sound-writing artist, I’m intrigued by the comparative analyses of paintings to other mediums. Cole describes that he looked at traditional still-life paintings while creating still-life photographs in his kitchen:

“… I compare that (the paintings) to one of my photographs which, to adopt a deliberately narrow account, took a tenth of a second sometime between 12:48 and 12:49 p.m. on October 2020.”

“Events came and went, and I realized how evanescent life was. If only the tumbler on my kitchen counter were the sum of all tumblers, the essence of the species. Alas, it’s not even the essence itself, just a fleeting appearance of one-tenth of a second on one afternoon in the long life of the cheap IKEA glass.” 

Pg. 118

What interested me about the quotes above is the acknowledgement that capturing the everyday is a speedy activity for us now. My phone takes a picture in a second, and I’ll store it in the Cloud (a non-literal cloud of storage on the internet), and I may never see it again until years later when my phone gives me an “on this day” notification from the photo app.

In the analysis of still life paintings, I consider how we live faster lives than those who spent hours or days painting still lives of glasses and jugs in 1614. It’s not that we have more hours in a day, but with increasing globalization, it feels like there’s so much happening around us. Would my day slow down, or at least feel slower, if I took time to paint a still-life of a vase? Maybe.

When I used to work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I would avoid walking around the first floor because I was not too fond of still-life paintings like the one above. Boring! I thought. However, one afternoon I attended an educational tour and learned that some still-life paintings included fruits, vegetables, and flowers when they didn’t grow anywhere near where the artist lived. Then, it became suspicious to me. And not in a boring way. Did these painters curate their paintings like we curate our Instagram accounts?

Second, what intrigues me is that these objects, indifferent to me, have lives of their own. And some people, like me, can get lost thinking about their lives. Or how these objects are archives of our lives.

This reminds me of the writing, The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf.

The narrator of this story reflects on a small hole in the wall above the fireplace’s mantel. While studying it and trying to understand how it got there, she gets lost in a psychological, reflective, pensive headspace where recounting the unimportant, unseen, or trivial of the everyday is given more consideration – a life within itself.

A small excerpt of the writing from the digital library of the University of Pennslyvania gives some insight into the work:

"The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature–the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way–an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were–very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. "

When I first read this work, it was almost a relief to think someone could get lost in a tiny hole in the wall, the same way I do with stripes on the carpet. It’s a mindset that is fuelled by curiosity. And imagination. Perhaps it’s a mindset that Cole inhabited while making Golden Apple of the Sun, as he observed and noticed the short lives of objects in his kitchen.

Woolf’s writing allowed me another moment to reflect on women’s perspectives in domestic spaces. If a woman was a homemaker most of her life, how does this influence the attention she pays to these domestic spaces?

I ended my presentation with a passage from the written article on Cole’s book published in the British Journal of Photography:

“While making the work, Cole became ill, and records it here. It reminds us that these words and images come from a mind within a human body, one susceptible to the same illnesses and fears of illness as the person reading; that the essay and the photographs represent not an abstract instant, but an aliveness within a period of time.”

Alice Zoo on Teju Cole

This aliveness encapsulated in a mere moment keeps me looking and watching. This aliveness exists in the everyday, sometimes passing us by so quickly that we miss it. It is the life that exists within the ordinary, the story behind the fruit on Cole’s table, the mark on Woolf’s wall, and the plants dying in my neighbours’ window. These things, and the attention we give them, make up the archives of our lives.

You can download my presentation below.

Shit is Always Happening: Chelsea’s Notes on Shit Happens: Amy Sillman’s Notes on Awkwardness in Frieze Magazine

Chelsea’s note:

I want to preface this blog post by contextualizing my understanding of “awkwardness”. As someone with an anxiety disorder, I used to feel “awkward” all the time. Through therapy and self-development, I no longer feel this way and do not think “awkward” is an appropriate word to use in most situations. My personal experiences will directly inform my writing in this post, and therefore be appropriately biased.

Shit Happens: Amy Sillman’s Notes on Awkwardness begins with a painting by George Grosz, The Painter of the Hole I, 1948. My first thought was that the painting wasn’t too awkward at all. If it was, it appears that the awkwardness is fabricated. With such illustrative concepts, paintings like these are almost too well-planned to be awkward. The best awkwardness is unanticipated, takes you by surprise, and evokes some uncomfortableness that can only be truly harnessed by being in the present moment and confronting it – it’s not a moment frozen in time – like in a painting. You can look away from a painting and forget about it a few moments later. True awkwardness you have to endure.

Although I just described what I think awkwardness is about, I want to be clear that I think that awkward is a lazy word. When people say something is awkward, there’s usually a better word to describe it. What is important, regardless of the word used, is that it is used to describe a feeling.

On the article’s second page, Sillman says “I know that we are no longer making things for Beaux Arts, for truth, beauty, elevation or virtuosity.” I don’t know if I agree with this. Although artists’ main inclination to work may not be to uncover beauty and truth, perhaps something more provocative (whatever that is), there is still beautiful artwork – or so we like to describe it.

Sillman describes a feeling of endless discontent when it comes to searching for something in her work or trying to surprise herself.

“Awkwardness is the name I would give this quality, this thing that is both familiar and unfamiliar.”  

I ask myself: Does awkwardness happen naturally? Is awkwardness unavoidable?

The effort that Sillman describes that aims to surprise oneself sets up an expectation for what the art-making process is supposed to be like and what the work is supposed to be like before it’s even done. There’s a deep connection between awkwardness and expectations – when an interaction doesn’t meet expectations, people feel “awkwardness.” 

This may be why I gravitate towards intentionally self-referential, self-limiting, or process-determinant work. It may also be why I often work with materials unfamiliar to me. This way of working helps reduce the number of choices I have to make as an artist and provides me with an element of chance. Balancing control and chance in my work allows me to manage my expectations. Shit is always going to happen. Shit is always happening. That’s my expectation.

Below is an example of a self-referential work by Lois Andison. As described on her website, the work references its own material existence by the following:

“Positioned in daylight, light passes through the glass surface and projects the moving shadow of the text onto the wall. The text moves by virtue of the shadow (time) while the glass remains unchanged.”

I wonder if a work like this, so meticulously crafted and calculated, yet relying on an ultimately uncontrollable force – daylight (to alter the position of the words on the wall) allows the opportunity for awkwardness.

Continuing into the article, Sillman talks about how as a painter and a feminist, people assume she is interested in beauty. Perhaps out of spite, she says she looks for hatred – or punk – but instead settles on awkwardness to describe her works’ in-between state. I felt slightly disappointed when I read this. Is she trying too hard? It seems that in this alienation of beauty, there cannot be both beauty and awkwardness in Sillman’s work. I know those are two polarizing things, but they can co-exist.

I still am unsure if awkwardness is the right word, but I understand that she wants to oppose traditional beauty ideals. It seems that she sees this as a challenge to how she understands and looks at the world. I can relate to this, as I often try to articulate what I am attempting to do aesthetically when people ask me if I want my videos, often a bit abstract, to appear “beautiful.” My initial answer is no. But sometimes the videos are beautiful anyway. Is it our own trap that we cannot escape creating an aesthetic experience, and therefore we must acknowledge beauty’s importance?

“It’s not an accident that people use ‘awkward!’ after a faux pas, a moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what’s supposed to happen goes awry.”

Amy Sillman, Notes on Awkwardness

First of all, anyone who says ‘awkward!’ in an unexpected situation makes things way more ‘awkward’ than they initially were. This, again, points back to managing expectations. What if we don’t expect things to go a certain way? What would the expectations for our daily lives be then? Happenings would just be happenings. I’m happy with this motto.

For example, someone shakes my hand and notices how moist and sticky their hands are. Embarrassing! For them. For me? Not really. I’m like – “Oh, sticky hand. Next.” So what if we don’t treat these things as ‘awkward’ – just as things that happen to be? An acceptance of the human state.

But is this what Sillman’s work is aiming for?

One of my last notes on this article is another quote from Sillman describing the awkwardness as bodily, intimate, and discomforting:

“The awkwardness I’m trying to describe is not a style, but could be one result of a dialectic. I would rather call it a metabolism: the intimate and discomforting process of things changing as they awry, look uncomfortable, have to be confronted, repaired, or risked, i.e, the process of trying to figure something out while doing it.”

Amy Sillman, Notes on Awkwardness

I’m interested in this description because it describes “awkwardness” as something more than an icky feeling. I’m intrigued by how she describes awkwardness as a sort of “metabolism” and an experience. Although I am one for embracing the feeling, with or without transformation, the acceptance of a thing rather than analyzing and repairing, I can understand that awkwardness is a conversation and a process that can be fruitful for one’s practice when learning how to navigate unexpected situations.

Nothing is Always Something, a reflection on How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

This blog post reflects on the first chapter of How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

I first read portions of How to Do Nothing in my first year of the MFA program while in Pedagogy I. Sandra Rechico introduced the book to us while we were discussing alternative forms of teaching, learning, and working. I was interested in re-reading the chapters for our seminar because some of the writing is more relevant to me now and connects to my slow-looking research. It also connects to other slow philosophies, such as the slow-eating and the slow journalism movement, which are essentially anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist ways of spending time. This aligns with the topics Odell explores in this book.

Beginning on page 22, I appreciate that she notes how politics and social movements deeply impact artists. Specifically, the U.S. election and how artists found it difficult to do work during that time. Teju Cole also noted this in his work, Golden Apple of the Sun.

Speaking for myself and other emerging artists, I know that the rising cost of living, the decline of artist-run spaces, affordable studio spaces, and diverse commercial galleries in the Toronto area have impacted artists. I think artists are particularly sensitive to politics not just because we are sensitive to changes in the world, but because late capitalism doesn’t provide ideal circumstances for artists to create while being able to have basic needs fulfilled. It’s good that artists are innovative, but even innovation has limits.

While reading about Odell’s struggles during the pandemic, I envied her access to the rose garden she often visited. She described it as a part of her non-art life that was just as essential to her art-making:

“This wasn’t exactly a conscious decision; it was more of an innate movement, like a deer going to salt lick or a goat going to the top of a hill.”

During the pandemic, I lost all three of my jobs. I also lost my residency, which was run by a city property, so it closed down very quickly. I lost my studio. Several exhibitions I was selected for never happened. I’m trying to remember what my innate movement was. I remember trying to reimagine my life as an artist without all of these art things.

Like many others, I spent a lot of time in my house. I often studied my bedroom window while doing “nothing.” This “nothing” was incredibly useful to me, as I was burnt out, and having time to do “nothing” allowed me to do things that often escaped me – such as learning new recipes, cuddling my dog, reading new books, and spending time in parks and gardens.

“Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought or speech.”

Page 23

I gathered from this reading that Odell’s main point is that “nothing” is never really nothing. Nothing is always something. And that doing nothing is useful. It’s just not useful in how capitalism would like it to be. But capitalism creeps in everywhere. Increasingly you see companies and influencers finding ways to monetize relaxation and rest, which I see happening with the “treat yourself” mindset that finds itself prominent in self-care and mental health conversations these days. There are problems with this, but they aren’t ones I task myself to solve.

Odell writes that she often thinks about Eleanor Coppola’s window project in San Franciso and attention-holding architecture while at the Rose Garden. The more she describes the space, it seems to me that the Rose Garden is where Odell goes to contemplate her place in the world, and where she lets her attention roam. Here, she escapes the attention economy she is describing in her book.

Is the house my rose garden? I think it is.

The activities that allow one to challenge the attention economy that Odell describes in this chapter interest me most because of their connection to slow-looking practices and activities that are involved in my artistic practice. Primarily, she describes “deep listening,” which is giving attention to what is available to your perception both “acoustically and psychologically.”

I do this when exercising slow looking, as I try to become highly attuned to my environment. Giving this type of attention is fruitful in non-monetary ways, as it allows me to learn more about my environment and myself. Giving this attention, as you would with anything else, is a choice. It’s a choice I make as I go about my everyday life.

I empathized with Odell when she described how this deep listening became a part of her everyday life. She writes:              

In the middle of this postelection heartbreak and anxiety, I was still looking at birds. Without really thinking about it, I modified my path home from the bus to pass by the night herons whenever I could, just to be reassured by their presence.

Page 36

I leave my bedroom window open all year round to listen to the birds. My neighbour’s backyard is full of bird feeders, so I hear their song every morning around 5 am. Without fail, they always chirp. Sometimes a bird would rest momentarily on my windowsill.

During the pandemic, I took my dog for a walk around my block (the same block) almost daily. I was reassured by the same trees and bushes on my walk, and the sunrise and sunset outside my bedroom window. It intrigues me how we look for reassurance both inside and outside of ourselves during times of change, and look for something as reliable as night herons, in an ever-changing world. For this, I believe we owe a lot to nature.

The concepts I’ve pulled from Odell’s first chapter exist in the realm of the personal, and it is not without sensitivity and reflection that one can deeply listen and reflect on changes in their everyday life. Toward the end of the chapter, Odell speaks about this sensitivity:

“Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in.”

What I have learned this term, through these readings and in conversations with others, is that I am an advocate for sensitivity. The type of sensitivity that requires deep listening and sensing. This type of sensitivity allows me to look from inside my house through the windows and make sense of the two different spaces – or bodies – I am in, either physically or psychologically. Before recording Solar Breath, Michael Snow watched the wind and his curtain at his summer cottage interact for several years before capturing the moment on video. This process required him to wait, watch, and be sensitive to how things were moving and changing. As Odell mentions, sensitivity takes time. In my own practice, time is something I’m willing to spend.

Performative Writing in Practice, a reflection on Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier 

This reading was listed as optional on the syllabus. It sparked my interest because I have little knowledge of autotheory, but as described by Fournier, it is a type of knowledge that we can generate through writing and performance. Specifically, she references female-identified artists in her book and profiles the experiences of MFA students in a studio art program in Toronto. As a female developing a writing practice based on personal experiences, I wanted to learn more about autotheory and how it is presented in feminist art.

In this blog post, I will be reflecting on excerpts from Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, specifically Chapter 1: Autotheory as Feminist Practice, Defining Autotheory (pages 18 – 45) and Chapter 2: No Theory, No Cry – Studio Versus Theory (pages 121- 133.)

Beginning on page 18, Fournier defines “autotheory” and its historical usage:

“The term “autotheory” emerged in the early part of the twenty-first century to describe works of literature, writing, and criticism that integrate autobiography with theory and philosophy in ways that are direct and self aware.

The “memoir with footnotes” would be one example. Most simply, the term refers to the integration of theory and philosophy with autobiography, the body, and other so-called personal and explicitly subjective modes. It is a term that describes a self-conscious way of engaging with theory—as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice—alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment, something very much in the Zeitgeist of cultural production today—especially in feminist, queer, and BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, and people of color—spaces that live on the edges of art and academia.”

Reading Fournier’s definition of autotheory provokes me to think about what types of knowledge are accepted in educational institutions. At the University level, my personal experience has shown me that the integration of theory with autobiography as research is rarely considered valid knowledge, because of it’s subjectivity. Instinctually, I challenge this, because who am I to reject the truth of one’s own lived experience?

There is so much we can learn from the experiences and knowledge of the other individuals Fournier mentions – BIPOC, Indigenous, feminist, and queer communities. However, I haven’t yet seen educational institutions succeed at integrating these knowledges into their academic discourses.

On page 20, Fournier looks at a video work, A Very Personal Story (1974) by Lisa Steele.

I watched A Very Personal Story three times in a row while at Oakville Galleries last year during one of their exhibitions, Two Truths and a Lie. The work presents Steele, for the first time, telling the story about finding her mother deceased and the aftermath of dealing with the trauma of the event. I watched it three times in a row because I had suspended belief. Her vulnerability made me question her honesty. The monologue made me feel as if she was speaking directly to me, and as sensitive as I am, I was trying to separate myself from the feeling of shame and the memory of the tragedy. I still think about the work today, so perhaps I didn’t succeed.

Reading Fournier’s writing about the history of feminist art practices and contextualizing accepted forms of theorizing, I present myself with two questions:

1. How do I conceptualize my work, such as my observational writings and videos, through the lens of autotheory?
2. How valid are my experiences and knowledge considered?

The presence of the personal in my artwork has been challenged. I hope to consider these questions next semester and while writing my thesis.

“In 1985, the American literary critic Barbara Johnson wrote, ‘Not only has personal experience tended to be excluded from the discourse of knowledge, but the realm of the personal itself has been coded as female and devalued for that reason.'”

Page 26

When I reflect on this passage in Fournier’s book, I think about the times when my personal experiences and knowledge-sharing have been devalued in my personal and professional life. The moments I recall have a commonality – those who devalued my experiences were male-identified.

Fournier goes into a lot of detail to contextualize autotheory. I only mention a small portion here to highlight two other terms she discusses in this chapter.

Two terms of interest:

• “Life-thinking” is described as not a memoir but focuses on literary form and the “knotty problematics of memory”
• Performative writing, which is described as the writer’s memory of their own lived experience and is used as reference material, along with theory, literary texts, and other artworks

I’ve been using a combination of life-thinking and performative writing in a series of works I debuted at the Boarding House Gallery in Guelph in September. The collection of works is titled writings dedicated to the nothing special and the everything worthwhile. The writing began as something I called “image inventories” which I wrote to as observational practices, with a vague interest in poetic structure.

Here’s one I wrote a few nights ago, which I haven’t edited yet:

writings dedicated to the nothing special and the everything worthwhile, paper and ink, 2022

Fournier initiates the conversation around access to the production of theory and re-examines what we, within an educational institution, consider “acceptable knowledge.” Extending beyond myself and my own experiences, I am thinking about what types of knowledge and learning experiences I want to provide for my students.

How will I integrate diverse knowledge into lesson plans? Will I consider autotheory as a more significant part of my practice? My answer to these questions haven’t been solidified at this point in the program, but they are things I will explore in the next few months as I continue to write, read, and make work.

Braiding Sweetgrass: What is meant to find us?

A reflection on Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass as part of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, pages 156-164.

After researching sweetgrass and how it is cultivated and used, I came across these pictures of braided sweetgrass in British Columbia. They are beautiful stems. I can only imagine what it would be like to stand in a field of sweetgrass, catching the scent of it in the air, seeing it sway in the wind, and listening to it move.

In the introduction, Lena, an indigenous woman and one of the sweetgrass braiders, talks about how shiny the grass is:

“See how glossy it is? It can hide from you among the others, but it wants to be found. That’s why it shines like this.” But she passes this patch by, letting it slide through her fingers. She obeys the teachings of her ancestors to never take the first plant that you see.”

Page 156

Lena’s dialogue intrigues me because she describes the grass as if it “wants to be found” or that, perhaps, it was meant to find us. There’s an indication of a reciprocal relationship here. But there’s also a level of restraint shown that I find endearing.

I think about flowers the same way Lena thinks about the sweetgrass. Whenever I want to pick flowers (which is always), I remind myself that if I take them, I kill them. I kill them, and then I selfishly keep their beauty for myself. There’s something sentimental about letting something be beautiful and not taking it, even if you can. There is respect for adoring it and letting it be, even if it can’t be yours. This may not be exactly what Lena is describing here, but it’s a mentality I think about often.

Lena and other indigenous women in the book talk about language, science, and the understanding of traditional knowledge. Specifically, the part that I picked through explained that knowledge, the type you get from lived experience or that comes from an understanding of your immediate environment, needs to be communicated in a way that best serves it’s unique purpose. It is a common critique that many educational systems have prioritized certain ways of learning over others. These ways of learning may not be the most effective in cultivating true understanding. This critique of a knowledge-hierarchy connects back to Lauren Fournier’s writing about autotheory.

“There is a barrier of language and meaning between science and traditional knowledge, different ways of know­ing, different ways of communicating.”

Page 158

When Robin began working with Laurie to design experiments for sweetgrass harvesting, I realized that I had asked inanimate objects similar questions that were being asked of the sweetgrass.

“To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly, and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviours.”

Page 158

When examining my environment, usually inside or outside of my new home in Guelph, I ask many questions about myself or objects, about how and why things are. The way the door is ajar, we hold it open with a clay pot. The space in between my door before it meets the floor that lets light in. The cracks in the concrete steps. The overgrown grape bush.

As reframed in Braiding Sweetgrass, it’s not that I am “discovering” these things. These things have been here before me and may well be here long after.

“It was here all along; it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”

Page 158

It is a goal of my practice to keep experimenting. Doing so would mean acknowledging that experimentation would not necessarily be about discovery. It would be about listening, like how Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing describes “deep listening” to the herons on the way home. I am currently tasking myself to translate the knowledge of other things, like the flag hanging on a line outside the construction site down the road.

What does it know? What has it seen?