User Profile

We're accustomed to thinking that while our future is a mystery, the past is something that we can explain. It either happened or it didn't... For me, everything came into question... what if none of it had ever really happened? Like it was all just a film reel turning and then it stopped... I can pinpoint the moments in my life that feel like they never happened.

— Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Aleksievich (Page 559)

The axe will survive the master... I never forgot those words...

— Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Aleksievich (Page 423)

Territory is a place where everything becomes rhythm, melodic landscape, motifs and counterpoints, matters of expression. Territory is the result of art. Territory creates and therefore insists that our thinking be guided by new relationships.

— Living As a Bird by Vinciane Despret, Helen Morrison (Page 94)

On the contrary in fact, from start to finish, this book [A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari] sets out to make us think. And it was precisely for that reason that I needed to learn how to read it, letting myself be guided not by the words, but by its gestures, its rhythms, its pauses, by its stammering, its spluttering, its emotions. I needed to abandon my customary way of approaching the reading of scientific articles, which consisted in gleaning information, identifying facts and knowledge. I had almost forgotten that the task ~~ of philosophy is not to inform but, instead, to slow down, to slip out of tune, to hesitate.

— Living As a Bird by Vinciane Despret, Helen Morrison (Page 91)

You should know thay the birds helped us too... When a magpie hears a stranger coming it will always squawk. Give out a warning signal. They'd gotten used to us; the Germans smelled different: they wore cologne, washed with scented soap, smoked cigarettes [...] We'd strip their dead down to their underwear! Our dogs would eat their hands and faces. Even the animals got sucked into the war.

— Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Aleksievich (Page 304)

I was fourteen... I didn't understand a thing... All I could do was try to remember it. And now, I told you the story... I don't like the word 'hero'. There are no heroes in war... As soon as someone picks up a weapon they can no longer be good. They won't be able to.

— Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Aleksievich (Page 303)

Competition as a way of thinking also becomes all the more imperative given that territory is defined by the quality of its food resources. The calculation is therefore almost sown up in advance: if population density increases, the food supply diminishes – or, in other words, animals have no choice but to compete with one another. And that rules out an observation which, given the potential for distancing that territories primarily seem to provide, had at a very early stage left some researchers somewhat puzzled: the fact that, paradoxically, territorial animals seem to seek out the presence of others.

— Living As a Bird by Vinciane Despret, Helen Morrison (Page 68)

It is, for example, much easier to count the number of fights in which a bird gets involved than to measure the effects neighbours might have on the capacity of that same bird to detect or eject an intruder who might represent a threat.

— Living As a Bird by Vinciane Despret, Helen Morrison (Page 67)

If there are territories that are bound by song, or, more precisely, territories which insist on being sung, if there are territories which are bound by the power of a simulacrum of presence, territories which become bodies and bodies which expand to become living spaces, if there are living spaces which become songs or songs which create a space, if there are forces of sound and forces of smell, there are undoubtedly many other ways of being, many other ways of inhabiting a territory, all of which may give rise to many different worlds. What verbs could we find to evoke these forces? Might there be danced territories (the power of dance to bring together)? Loved territories (territories bound by love? The power of love), disputed territories (bound by contention), shared, conquered, marked, known, recognized, appropriated, familiar territories? How many verbs might there be and which verbs constitute a territory? And what practices will enable these verbs to proliferate? I am convinced, along with Haraway and many others, that this multiplication of worlds can make our own world a better place to live in. Creating such worlds means learning how to respect different ways of inhabiting a given space, identifying and itemizing what animals do and ~~ how each of them has developed its own way of being.

— Living As a Bird by Vinciane Despret, Helen Morrison (Page 28)