man & nature # 108 ~ it's not spinning anymore
Friday, March 13, 2009 at 08:49AM 
Pinwheel • click to embiggenI really like this passage by Russell Banks from his book, Continental Drift:
Systems and sets, subsystems and subsets, patterns and aggregates of water, earth, fire and air - naming and mapping them, learning the intricate interdependence of the forces that move and convert them into one another, this process gradually provides us with a vision of the planet as an organic cell, a mindless, spherical creature whose only purpose is to be born as rapidly as it dies and whose general principle informing that purpose, as if it were a moral imperative, is to keep moving. Revolve around points and rotate on axes, whirl and twirl and loop in circles, ellipses, spirals and long curves that soar across the universe and disappear at last at the farthest horizons of our human imagination only to reappear here behind us in the daily life of our body, in our food, shit and piss, our newborn babies and falling-down dead - just keep on moving, keep breeding and pissing and shitting, keep on eating the planet we live on, keep on moving, alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species; it's the only argument we have against entropy. And it's not truly an argument, it's a vision. It's a denial in the form of an assertion, a rebuttal in the form of an anecdote, which means that it is not a recounting, it's an accounting, not a representation, a presentation.
The universe moves, and everything in it moves, and by transferring its parts, it and everything in it down to the smallest cell are transformed and continue. Water, earth, fire and air. To continue, just to go on, with entropy lurking out there, takes an old-fashioned Biblical kind of heroism. ... [W]e are the planet, fully as much as its water, earth fire and air are the planet, and if the survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.
If I were into plagiarism, I'd use that as the backbone of my Artist Statement.
FYI, Russell Banks is the beneficiary of growing up in the Adirondacks and he can still be found roaming around these here parts.
Reader Comments (3)
Funny you should mention Continental Drift. I just picked it up in a used book shop a couple of weeks ago and it's on my pile of books to read. I read the book Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks several years ago and liked it a great deal. Doesn't he live in the same town that John Brown (the subject of Cloudsplitter) was from in upstate New York?
Mary - John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave on his farm in Lake Placid (right behind the Olympic ski jump towers). Russell Banks lies his lving and breathing head elsewhere in the Adirondacks.
Russell is only 8 miles from Brown's grave. So Mary was close enough.