Francesca Forrest > Recent Status Updates

<spoiler>It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien--one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways...Imagine these expeditions, and then recognized that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came back ... layered over one another, communicating in whatever way is left to them.</spoiler>

"When I finally picked up my husband's journal and started to read, the brightness washed over me in unending waves and connected me to the earth, the water, the trees, the air, as I opened up and kept on opening."

--AMEN AMEN, high fives, biologist.

"There were thousands of 'dead' spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw... Anything could inhabit them fora time without anyone noticing. We had come to think of the border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn't other things have already gotten through?"

"In that moat vast sea creatures swam, oblivious to me watching them; I could fee the absence of their regard like a kind of terrible bereavement."

The husband's dreams:
"Some nights he swam through the marsh canals. Others, he became a tree or a drop of water. Everything he experienced refreshed him.Everything he experienced made him want to go to Area X."

Her, musing on this memory "I still blamed him fiercely for his decision...and yet even so, somewhere in the heart of me I had begun to believe there was no place I would rather be than Area X"

"You were a flame," she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. "You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, though the ruined village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o'-the-wisp." --the psychologist to the biologist-narrator. She then proceeds to call the narrator "Little Flame." Narrator's husband called her "Ghost Bird." Interesting.

"That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

--That's the second time she's thought in terms of being colonized.

"Words had been written on these walls, but nothing like the words in the Tower ... Confessions, too, which I won't document here but that had the sincerity and weight of having been written immediately before, or during, moments when the individuals must have thought death was upon them. So many needing so much to communicate what amounted to so little."

--I'm sensing a communication theme, for sure.

Musing on the narrator's fascination with the words in the tower "An ... organism ... was writing living words along the interior walls of the tower ... What was the purpose of the physical 'recitation' of the words? Did the actual words mater, or would any words do?"

--She doesn't think at all the formation of the words (at least as she perceives them), in English, in the Roman alphabet. To me that would be key...

And he could not stay awake.

He wanted an answer to the question about the pie and the things that made a pie, because it seemed important to know how to take many things that aren't so good and make one good thing with them.

But the small sounds of the song toook him and he could not think any longer.

Not two whiskers from the boy's fingers the chipmunk stopped and sat up again, looking directly into the boy's eyes, watching him, waiting for him to move.

And when the boy didn't move, when he held as still as a piece of wood, the chipmunk leaned carefully forward, rested on one tiny paw, and used his mouth to pluck the piece of pie-crust dough out of the boy's fingers

[The men] sat roughly to the tables, all of them big as houses, the boy thought. They sat to the tables and his grandmother brought heaping platters of pancakes ... Then she brought the huge enamel pot of coffee from the stove and sure enough each man turned his cup over--his hands so big the cup looked like a baby cup--and blew in it and held it up for coffee ... They made [the boy] think of big, polite bears.

“Sometimes, a bird would hide in a branch near the top of the tree, and a second bird would flit near it. Partners, they seemed. The first bird would take off again, and the second bird, after a moment or two, would take off with its mate, or its nonmate, or whatever one calls a creature that pulls your gravity until you succumb.”

“The tree was beloved by birds. None of the beautiful variety; these birds did not flutter and sing. They lived unknowing they weren’t of the most startling plumage and uncaring that it was so.” (+)

The gods stared at her in astonishment.
It was somewhat like standing in the glare of four self-aware suns. The only reason Lanie didn't burn to ash on the instant wsa because they all wanted to stare at her a little while longer.

"The damp earth bent around their bodies like a table burdened by too great a feast.

Chapter 15 and 16 were absolute tours de force. The situations shook me right up, the surprises completely surprised--and yet they felt completely well set up and justified. I haven't been so enthralled in a long, long time.

A quote from p. 30: “The market economy story has spread like wildfire … but it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.”

"Here, on the other side of the river, there is a mountain tha tguards our village ... looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain. Life moves through everything, through rock, the ozone layer, glaciers. Ilfe goses from the oceans to solid ground; it crosses from north to south in all directions."

"[Recently there are] billionaires who have the crazy idea of creating a biosphere, a copy of the Earth. That copy will be as mediocre as they are. If a part of us thinks we can colonize another planet, it means we still haven't learned anything from our experience here on Earth. I wonder how many Earths these people need to consume before they understand they are on the wrong path."

"The agents of micropolitics are people planting vegetable gardens in their backyards, opening up space in the pavement to let sprout whatever may be."

"Those who already heard the voice of the mountains, the rivers, and the forests do not need a theory about this."

"We should have the experience of being alive beyond the technological apparatuses that we can invent."

“Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth ... We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears ... Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened."

"Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth."

From the intro (which is more than a quarter of the book, clearly):

Indigenous peoples do not have "oral traditions" but rather "mnemonic traditions." ...Western modernity ... always sees the oral as preceding the written.. but...the practice and activation of memories--through dreaming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and various other activities--are ways of belonging to and sustaining the cosmic sense of life.

Evrim's insight about the symbols is exactly what I thought the moment I first laid eyes on them on the book. LOL.