Gabriel Gudding's Blog, page 14

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PA mts spent night w three screech owlsSent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

In tent in woods outside Ohiopyle Pennsylvania at end of ...

In tent in woods outside Ohiopyle Pennsylvania at end of a cold sunny October day whitewater boating on the Lower Youghiogheny River and getting worked in a retentive hydraulic refusing to swim until it finally released me at the limit of my breath and felt "what I would call thing-power" (Jane Bennett) and "inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined" (Manuel De

My political strategy is indirect because its target is n...

My political strategy is indirect because its target is not the macro-level politics of laws, policy, institutional change but the micro-politics of sensibility-formation.
In the book, I also suggest that a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages could translate into a national politics that was not so focused around a juridical model of moral responsibility, blame, and punishment.

how to approach and contemplate corpses

Visiting cemeteries is for the sake of seeing human death. Cemeteries in the past weren't like they are today. Unburied bodies were scattered all over the place — old bodies and new, scattered around like logs. When you saw them, you'd see clear evidence with your own eyes.
The Buddha gave instructions on how to visit a cemetery. Go from the upwind side, he said, not from the downwind side. Don't

These findings bolster my long-standing conviction that t...

These findings bolster my long-standing conviction that the theory of therapeutic catharsis—which dates back to Aristotle and was a cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis—is wrong. If anything, expressing aggression, anger, fear, hatred—whether with a psychotherapist, spouse, friend, office-mate, neighbor, stranger—makes you more aggressive, angry, fearful, hateful, not less.
- John Horgan, Sept

Apādakehi me mettaṃ,mettaṃ dvipādakehi me;catuppadehi m...

Apādakehi me mettaṃ,
mettaṃ dvipādakehi me;
catuppadehi me mettaṃ,
mettaṃ bahuppadehi me.

I have love for the footlessfor the bipeds too I have loveI have love for those with four feetfor the many-footed I have love
Aṅguttara Nikāya 4.67

Jeremy Bentham on the Rights of Animals

The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the

the exploration of suffering as the first science

Those who invented neither powder nor compass
those who could harness neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the seas nor the sky
but who know in its most minute corners the land of suffering
....[who:] yield, captivated, to the essence of things


-- Aimé Césaire
fr. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (trans Eshleman & Smith)

the actual practice of ethical behaviors

"...to move selves from the endorsement of ethical principles to the actual practice of ethical behaviors. ...Some in political theory, perhaps most notably Nancy Fraser in _Justice Interruptus_, criticized this turn as a retreat to soft, psych-cultural issues of identity at the expense of the hard, political issues of economic justice, environmental sustainability, human rights, or democratic

never loved one like you

never loved one like you