Screen Shot 2020-12-16 at 15.01.46.jpg
Screen Shot 2020-12-16 at 15.01.51.jpg
Screen Shot 2020-12-16 at 15.57.40.jpg
Screen Shot 2020-12-16 at 17.58.02.jpg
15:00:45	 From Sophie Lewis : Good morning from Philadelphia everyone
15:01:15	 From Cassandra Troyan : good morning sophie! welcome everyone! we’re waiting a little bit until everyone arrives
15:01:54	 From Fred Carter : Tobias's dog!
15:02:52	 From Cassandra Troyan to Fred Carter (Direct Message) : can you hear the music?
15:02:59	 From Fred Carter to Cassandra Troyan (Direct Message) : yep!
15:03:55	 From Sophie Lewis : Loving the welcome music.
15:04:01	 From Cassandra Troyan : I have made an oceanic/aquatic playlist for today to list to at different moments, so that’s we’re listening to
15:04:06	 From helen.v.pritchard@plymouth.ac.uk : hello
15:04:14	 From helen.v.pritchard@plymouth.ac.uk : Hello yishuai!
15:04:28	 From helen.v.pritchard@plymouth.ac.uk : hello Duncan!
15:04:29	 From yishuai : Hi Helen, thanks for inviting me
15:04:33	 From helen.v.pritchard@plymouth.ac.uk : Hello everyone tooo :)
15:04:40	 From duncan paterson : Hello!
15:05:33	 From Sophie Lewis : I don't recall who posted the YouTube link to the Nicki Minaj video "Freedom" during yesterday's lecture, but having clicked on it now I have discovered that she is wearing something - while escaping with ungainly grace across unlikely spaces - that makes her look like a (fugitive... wily) octopus!!
15:06:01	 From jara rocha : hi :)
15:06:08	 From Cassandra Troyan : hello jara!
15:06:33	 From Cassandra Troyan : wow, yes sophie! like ursula?
15:06:38	 From Sophie Lewis : https://www.rap-up.com/app/uploads/2012/11/minaj-freedom-video.jpg
15:06:48	 From helen she/her : i believe it was gillian who posted it !
15:06:50	 From Fred Carter : Oh wow this video. Cass what's that Megan Thee Stallion video with the cat?
15:07:00	 From g.wylde : H e l l o Ｃ:。ミ
15:07:34	 From Cassandra Troyan : here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iuwBio5EUA
15:08:18	 From Sophie Lewis : yes Cass like Ursula. By the way, I don't know if people can see this image? https://scontent-lga3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/120245049_10164061752370401_9098122322462654922_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&ccb=2&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=fSxhHCrWHUEAX-nCzyR&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-2.xx&oh=deed623c01d0813d3a2845cbf38486be&oe=5FFF3456
15:08:45	 From Cassandra Troyan : Extremely relevant Sophie! Yes, thank you for sharing
15:08:55	 From Sophie Lewis : (In my talk yesterday I read that prose poem about Ursula and said "Fiona Glen I want to show you my Halloween costume from last year" - only fair I should show you too)
15:09:01	 From helen she/her : Lovely sounds Cassandra
15:09:40	 From Fred Carter : watching all these videos / images with sound off and this aquatic playlist on is a real mood
15:09:49	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Yes!
15:14:37	 From yishuai : yes
15:18:10	 From helen she/her : We can all take shared notes here
15:18:11	 From helen she/her : https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/multispecies.sophielewis.sharednotes
15:24:21	 From Sophie Lewis : I am LOVING this pad - I didn't get a chance to look yesterday
15:31:29	 From Fred Carter : academic hustler / husk really hit deep
15:34:51	 From Sophie Lewis : Loved that Fred
15:35:31	 From helen she/her : Last time for some algorithmic reason Zeenath was to the right of everyone !
15:35:44	 From Sophie Lewis : ha!
15:37:49	 From Sophie Lewis : Re (a small piece of) Fred's remarks, it's important I think to recognize the limit of one's erotophilia… my partner laughed her ass off at me for recoiling in discomfort at a (famous in some circles apparently) scene in the movie "Tampopo" in which two "straight" lovers pass the wet contents of an egg back and forth from one mouth into the other, only breaking the yolk to coincide with the woman's orgasm. My partner was like "THIS is too far for you, you the octopus fucker?!!"
15:38:21	 From Fred Carter : been thinking about tampopo! and the dancing shrimp scene
15:39:09	 From Fred Carter to Cassandra Troyan (Direct Message) : i thought you were writing 'diads innit'
15:39:21	 From Cassandra Troyan : wow, Fred and I were just talking about Tampopo. Can we put that amazing note in the pad?
15:39:22	 From Sophie Lewis : What a reveal Marcy! I greatly dig the way you performed that "dyad" by standing up
15:39:35	 From Sophie Lewis : Yes anything I say here can go in the pad 100%
15:39:40	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Tampopo is great
15:40:37	 From Sophie Lewis : Ah yes the Portuguese warperson
15:40:45	 From Sophie Lewis : (jk)
15:43:01	 From jara rocha : https://img.favpng.com/1/9/8/nicotiana-tabacum-tobacco-plant-cigar-png-favpng-ZwHz47TLCTEaxwcHrfbFWP6e9.jpg
15:45:06	 From Sophie Lewis : Thank you Jara
15:46:32	 From Sophie Lewis : your hand yes - if you're lucky
15:47:33	 From Fred Carter : just found this: 'Cute as a bug (Giant Microbes®). Giardia lamblia plush microbe.  A mean germ.' https://www.brevis.com/products/966418/gmgiardia-giardia-giant-microbe
15:49:26	 From Sophie Lewis : @Fred "SAFETY PRECAUTION: Remove plastic hangtags and ribbons before giving to a child under three years of age." lmao. In Philadelphia there is, as you may know, a former medical-curiosity-cabinet, now museum, called The Mütter Museum, which sells in its gift shop all kinds of disgusting organisms in the form of plushies
15:50:44	 From Sophie Lewis : "as a baby they decide whether they want to mature" omg
15:50:51	 From Sophie Lewis : wow Yishuai
15:50:54	 From Sophie Lewis : talk about family abolition
15:51:21	 From Fred Carter : obsessed that this is called the Mütter Museum
15:51:51	 From Sophie Lewis : plural-mothers museum - polymaternal polyp collection
15:52:14	 From Fred Carter : 'some people believe that only "Goths or steampunks" would be interested in visiting the Mutter'
15:52:24	 From Fred Carter : *Mutter museum'
15:52:33	 From Sophie Lewis : Thank you Duncan
15:53:02	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Tbf I first encountered Mutter museum as a teenage goth
15:57:14	 From Sophie Lewis : This is Barnacle by the way (on my body)
15:57:22	 From Cassandra Troyan : Perfect Barnacle apearance
16:02:51	 From helen she/her : This is the berlant quote I was referencing - The critical object is unbearable much like the object of love is: too present, distant, enigmatic, banal, sublime, alluring and aversive; too much and too little to take in, and yet, one discovers all this only after it’s been taken in, however partially, always partially, and yet overwhelmingly even at the smallest points of genuine contact (Berlant and Luciano 2013).
16:03:21	 From Sophie Lewis : So great to meet everyone and hear these intros
16:03:50	 From Sophie Lewis : Helen - woof, that quote slaps. Very much my relation to that cursed documentary!
16:04:00	 From Fred Carter : beautiful, Dana Luciano also amazing
16:04:02	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Interestingly hedgehog conservation was/ is the major political project of my (former) horrible Plymouth Tory MP in an invocation of a British nationalist idea of the countryside
16:04:13	 From Cassandra Troyan : 16.09
16:04:24	 From Fred Carter : Is that Anne Widdecombe?
16:04:27	 From Sophie Lewis : hahaha
16:04:52	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Oliver Colville!
16:04:57	 From Cassandra Troyan : Marcy, but yes!
16:05:10	 From Fred Carter : oh there's multiple tories involved then!
16:05:21	 From Sophie Lewis : Cassandra was also telling me after the talk last night about how morally unacceptable "drug use" is to many people in Sweden.
16:05:22	 From Cassandra Troyan : That’s totally a part of it for me
16:05:50	 From Sophie Lewis : Tories love red squirrels and hedgehogs as fantasies of British indigeneity
16:08:21	 From Fred Carter : been trying to explain the red squirrel situation to Cass, the way it encodes this idea of North American cultural hegemony and Britain as this like plucky underdog
16:10:35	 From Cassandra Troyan : but we can’t let the Tories own a particular idea of what “biodiversity” means outside of capital
16:10:36	 From Sophie Lewis : YES
16:10:50	 From Sophie Lewis : (to both of you)
16:10:50	 From Sophie Lewis : I forgot to properly intro my Siamese dickhead oddkin. As anyone even passingly on twitter will be aware, Barnacle's gestator abandoned her a few days after birthing her, but I perversely reversed that cat's decision and have been raising this little rotter up, initially massaging the feces and piss out of her, syringing cream into her, and holding her purring and luxuriating and biting form to my skin, for the past 2 months. Now the world contains an extra cat (dickhead) because of my labors: oh dear.
16:12:46	 From Sophie Lewis : Ok so is it time now to hear about all the species that people have gotten wet for :-D
16:13:48	 From helen she/her : https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/multispecies.sophielewis.sharednotes
16:13:57	 From helen she/her : Line 128
16:17:07	 From Sophie Lewis : '76 yes
16:19:30	 From Fred Carter : thinking about what Helen said earlier about kingdom dysmorphia re: crossing in this context
16:19:41	 From Fred Carter : Gumbs says: 'The fact that we are always crossing, even though so much of the structure of our lives is designed to convince us that we are in a stable situation and to sacrifice everything and everyone for that fictional stability. But we are in the borderlands, in the sense that Gloria Anzaldua—a major influence on Jacqui Alexander, by the way, and on me too—talks about it. We are crucially crossing between the many different oceans between us. And not necessarily by choice. Even once we reach each other, the crossing isn’t over.'
16:20:09	 From jara rocha : nepantlas
16:20:38	 From jara rocha : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepantla
16:22:00	 From helen she/her : https://www.dukeupress.edu/pedagogies-of-crossing
16:22:54	 From Fred Carter : ty Jara I haven't read Anzaldua in ages !
16:23:19	 From Sophie Lewis : Thanks so much for that quote Fred. I was lucky to get an advanced reader copy of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, in which Alexis Pauline Gumbs models her (very refined/advanced/goals) practice of tuning, sensing, and transspecies ancestor-homage
16:23:46	 From Cassandra Troyan : We’re coming back at 16.00 / 17.00
16:59:47	 From Fred Carter : Dean Blunt!
17:00:34	 From Cassandra Troyan : The algorithm knows me too well :(
17:01:28	 From Cassandra Troyan : The playlist came to an end
17:06:22	 From jara rocha : yes
17:06:27	 From Sophie Lewis : I am reading the pad and it is beautiful
17:10:40	 From Cassandra Troyan : Wow, so beautiful!
17:11:10	 From jara rocha : indeed <3
17:12:34	 From Fred Carter : ty Yishuai!
17:13:14	 From Fred Carter : 100% makes sense!
17:13:27	 From duncan paterson : It’s beautifully written Yishuai
17:13:39	 From yishuai : Thanks :)
17:14:37	 From Sophie Lewis : Yishuai, you might enjoy Abbey Mei Otis's "My Octopus Slashfic" in its entirety https://twitter.com/abbeyangry/status/1308921652806389767 // https://www.patreon.com/posts/41990447
17:14:58	 From yishuai : Thanks Sophie
17:15:15	 From Sophie Lewis : Exactly!
17:15:45	 From Sophie Lewis : I also love that you said "umbrageously"
17:15:59	 From Tobias : presence as inescapable interference
17:16:26	 From yishuai : I learnt “umbrageous” from your writing
17:16:51	 From Sophie Lewis : n+1 editors wanted me to up the flamboyancy of certain adjectives so I lit upon "umbrageous" and justified it because it is literally what octopuses do -- recently documented, their "cloud passing" chromatophore display!
Quoting from a study of this display:
"Skin displays are used more specifically in the ‘passing cloud’ display of cuttlefish and octopuses. Chromatophores are sequentially expanded and contracted in an area moving along the animal’s dorsal body surface, mimicking the shadow of a cloud passing along a landscape below and producing apparent motion."
17:25:39	 From Tobias : Is there a species specific ‘mirror stage’?
17:27:51	 From Stephanie Moran : Well an octopus ‘mirror stage’ would be based on chemoreception, a sense of all-over taste-smell-touch that humans would fail
17:29:46	 From Sophie Lewis : wow
17:32:08	 From Fred Carter : yes we couldn't stop thinking about who's doing the social repro while watching it!
17:33:26	 From yishuai : I love the useless pleasure of body!!!
17:33:41	 From Laura Ho Ho Hopes she/her : Superb Marcy
17:33:53	 From Cassandra Troyan : Really incredible
17:36:23	 From Cassandra Troyan : thicc woods
17:40:21	 From Fred Carter : https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
17:42:57	 From helen she/her : This is mazen’s paper I was mentioning https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045608.2014.892360?journalCode=raag20
17:43:16	 From helen she/her : if anyone needs any liberated copied of any of these papers let me know
17:43:22	 From Zeenath Hasan to Cassandra Troyan (Direct Message) : Sure
17:44:36	 From Fred Carter : Marcy your point about mindfulness etc being folded back into productivity makes me think of students who've told me they microdose acid while working on essays
17:44:55	 From Fred Carter : (I have no idea why they'd admit this to me)
17:45:03	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Fred that is sooooo bleak!
17:45:23	 From Sophie Lewis : I've been mulling the phrase someone put forward yesterday "non-sexual erotic". I think it is really important to distinguish (not fully separate, perhaps) the sexual and the erotic in some contexts. But I am not sure it fully holds together as a concept e.g. the sexual is already not necessarily genital?
17:46:19	 From Sophie Lewis : microdosing acid to fulfill work assignments makes me so sad @Fred but it is a super reminder that there is nothing *intrinsically* communist about any technology (including LSD)
17:47:04	 From Sophie Lewis : "Degenerate" is - people might have seen - what the NYT columnist Elizabeth Bruenig called me, because of my octopus tweets
17:47:17	 From helen she/her : Ah!
17:47:36	 From helen she/her : I was thinking about how Mel Chen was saying we need to referal queer theory
17:47:41	 From helen she/her : and I think we need to degenerate it too
17:48:10	 From Sophie Lewis : ooh "re-feral" as a verb "de-generate" as a verb yeah
17:48:53	 From Laura Ho Ho Hopes she/her : Nice - love “de-generate”, along with last week’s “con-spire”
17:49:22	 From Fred Carter : amazing Zeenath, ty!
17:49:31	 From Sophie Lewis : Agreed
17:49:38	 From helen she/her : Yes we need to note this shared grammar :)
17:49:44	 From yishuai : Zeenath, I really enjoyed your rhetorical writing. thanks
17:50:56	 From Sophie Lewis : There was a great and necessary move to substitute "regenerative" for "reproductive" - but/and the messiness of care, the mix of productivity and destructivity in it, makes me think "degenerative" is perhaps even more preferable. Queer feminist worlding as degenerative disease?!
17:52:12	 From jara :  sour dough in Spanish/Castillian is called "mother dough" (!)
17:52:38	 From Sophie Lewis : also humour! "homo toasties"!
17:53:29	 From jara : Ostrom
17:53:31	 From jara : ?
17:53:40	 From Sophie Lewis : I think Zeenath's piece here is better than Haraway's strange (misanthropic in places I thought?) riff in Staying with the Trouble about chopped and composted human-as-humus
17:54:36	 From helen she/her : fred I was trying to make a note of your point on stories but I missed it in the pad :)
17:56:25	 From Fred Carter : https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fparasites%2Fgiardia%2Fillness.html&psig=AOvVaw3vMKYpoXNASIvuT7PthM9C&ust=1608220130978000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCNj6iYDt0u0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAc
17:57:04	 From Sophie Lewis : Giardia trophozoites stained with trichrome - they're so pretty
17:57:12	 From Fred Carter : https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/giardia/illness.html
17:57:16	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : I am gonna go ahead and share your article critiquing recent Haraway Sophie as I thought it was really useful https://viewpointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me/
17:57:21	 From Stephanie Moran : I’m sorry, I have to go I’ve got another meeting at 5, but thank you all I’ve learned lots this afternoon.
17:57:22	 From Sophie Lewis : gorgeous little rotters
17:57:38	 From Sophie Lewis : Thanks Marcy!
17:59:17	 From helen she/her : Thanks for being here Stephanie and nice to meet you finally :)
17:59:24	 From yishuai : Look a bit like the face of the screamer in Edward’s painting
17:59:44	 From Sophie Lewis : sorry for disappearing during a reading - feline sisters started a war against each other in the hall
18:00:30	 From yishuai : Sorry— Edvard
18:00:39	 From Sophie Lewis : I think this is a really wonderful poem.
18:01:48	 From Laura Ho Ho Hopes she/her : Sorry I have to disappear for another meeting - thanks Sophie, Helen and Cassandra
18:01:57	 From Fred Carter : https://effects-journal.com/archive/language-is-for-fucking-idiots
18:01:59	 From helen she/her : Thanks Laura for being here
18:02:44	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Bye Laura!
18:06:17	 From Fred Carter : ty Sophie and everyone!
18:06:28	 From Marcy Da Silva Saude : Thanks Sophie!
18:08:16	 From helen she/her : https://www.alexispauline.com/
18:12:22	 From Tobias : Thanks to all…
18:12:28	 From Zeenath Hasan : Thank you Cassandra and Helen for arranging!
18:12:28	 From yishuai : Thanks!!!
18:12:29	 From duncan paterson : Thank you!
18:12:36	 From Helga Steppan : Thank you
18:12:37	 From jara : thank you all, learned so much!
18:12:42	 From Fred Carter : thanks Helen and Cass!
18:12:52	 From Fred Carter : and thanks everyone I'm going to spend so long with these notes!
18:12:56	 From Cassandra Troyan : thank you everyone!
18:13:03	 From jara : super generous two days
18:13:09	 From helen she/her : jara
18:13:11	 From helen she/her : Say hi
meeting_saved_chat_final_sophie ws.txt
multispecies.sophielewis.sharednotes __NOPUBLISH__ 16/12, Workshop w/ Sophie Lewis

schedule for day:
-welcome :)
-sophie intros/shares some thoughts
-everyone goes around to introduce themselves + species/event they brought along
-intro prompt for workshop
-writing workshop (30 minutes)
-share, respond, continue

-------

-Methodological // octopussing the mind
-Not a benevolent optimism of multispecies practices at mind
-Against instrumentality of the animal, specifically because of the ways that colonialism and capitalism has alienated ourselves from our bodies, desires, nature, etc. 

-- not assuming 
-- non beneovlance
-- violence hostlie
-- hostility within the space of care
-- useful dickeheads for the species we might deserve
-- not getting to euphoric
-- not presuming too know 
-- not fucking as a liberatory practice


emergent solidarities rather than subjects of study - what forms of relationality emerge from struggle, rather than study? 

Adrienne Maree Brown - https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html

How does Brown's work on 'pleasure activism' relate to the forms of eros, pleasure, and aesthetics we've been talking about

Thinking also about 'Joyful Militancy' - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joyful-militancy-bergman-montgomery

- not that octopus is going to solve .. 
-Drawing on Audre Lorde, what might be this moment of different when we think of "octopussing the mind"

-Discourse on authority on Jill Biden's "Dr." title; WSJ, sharing it was terrible for it include this
-Many feminisms battling against each other, Girl-Boss TM, sex workers including their credentials
-The fake review of the shook of crossing the student-pupil boundary 
-The gloss on something real, the real inequality, a class role or differential; adjunct as hustling husk vs. The Professor
-To think about the authority of the octopus, and the idea that she actually is an erotic teacher, what she teaches us
-Dr. Octopus 

-------  
 
-Fred he/him : viral parasite, Giardia
  Jardia? Giardia, terrible
 cute beautiful ...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/giardia-infection/symptoms-causes/syc-20372786#:~:text=Giardia%20infection%20is%20an%20intestinal,poor%20sanitation%20and%20unsafe%20water .

'Cute as a bug (Giant Microbes®). Giardia lamblia plush microbe.  A mean germ.' https://www.brevis.com/products/966418/gmgiardia-giardia-giant-microbe

"In Philadelphia there is, as you may know, a former medical-curiosity-cabinet, now museum, called The Mütter Museum, which sells in its gift shop all kinds of disgusting organisms in the form of plushies"

Sophie: Re (a small piece of) Fred's remarks, it's important I think to recognize the limit of one's erotophilia… my partner laughed her ass off at me for recoiling in discomfort at a (famous in some circles apparently) scene in the movie "Tampopo" in which two "straight" lovers pass the wet contents of an egg back and forth from one mouth into the other, only breaking the yolk to coincide with the woman's orgasm. My partner was like "THIS is too far for you, you the octopus fucker?!!"


Zeenath: thinking with my sourdough starter sitting in the kitchen
-the erotic, helps to create textual analogies, otherwise in the practice of design it has been th e realm of the instrumental. 
-the conversation between the individual and the environment
- how does someone relate - how to operationalise /play/describe...
the transversal as a tool against narrative / ontological dualism
- what the erotic can do to build narratives


Marcy she/they
film - plymouth university 
obselete imaging technollogies - anti - capitalist 
communism - family abolition 
redwood trees
squids
diads

Tobias + hazelnut + The Portuguese Man-o-war:
-Post-human medical practice.
- colony org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war
 - function as a community
 - interdependence // away from instrumentality vs. solidarity, we have to do one in order to get to the other. 
 - can't think of in the singular 
 
Jara: Nicotiana, tabacum
-In relation to other research with Helen, also there thinking of kingdom dysphoria
- partial reparations <-> instrumental conditions of possibility?
https://img.favpng.com/1/9/8/nicotiana-tabacum-tobacco-plant-cigar-png-favpng-ZwHz47TLCTEaxwcHrfbFWP6e9.jpg

Sophie: submit to doctor octopus (??) without however having optimism that we can ever succeed at learning octopus epistemology or transcending the capitalist settler colonial rift??

Helga: Silverfish
-Solitary, yet what happens when we share a world, share a space and to acknowledge that  
when one species moves..
-They always a right to be there 

Yishuai: Jellyfish
-jellyfish caring for their predators // carrying a baby turtle across a river 
"as a baby they decide whether they want to mature"

Duncan: Crow
- multispecies cyborg assemblages
- can't be arrogant enough to believe that we can communicate with other intelligent species, (the octopus), trying to create/find the intermediate 
corvids!

Stephanie: molluscs in Sci-fi, in space

https://twitter.com/alien_ontology

Laura: Eric, the rescue dog
- sublime in the anthropocene as inadequate
- more than human knowledge systems, the Anthropocene 
- mile long swim along the coast of Spain 

Helen: Algae
- Kin of other microbes in labs
- queer kinship, synthetic bacteria
- imaginary is about what job they can do, what service can they provide
- the machine, the algae, the lens
- enduring half life/non-life state in this labour and work that they're doing
- eros & love, Berlant's idea of the unbearable 
This is the berlant quote I was referencing - The critical object is unbearable much like the object of love is: too present, distant, enigmatic, banal, sublime, alluring and aversive; too much and too little to take in, and yet, one discovers all this only after it’s been taken in, however partially, always partially, and yet overwhelmingly even at the smallest points of genuine contact (Berlant and Luciano 2013).

Cassandra: European hedgehog , Erinaceus
- figuring in triangulations: narrative, exploration, association
- violence of enclosure of the commons - hedges
- now endangered species because of disciplining false nature, by park landscapers
- violence of border to all species

Sophie: I forgot to properly intro my Siamese dickhead oddkin. As anyone even passingly on twitter will be aware, Barnacle's gestator abandoned her a few days after birthing her, but I perversely reversed that cat's decision and have been raising this little rotter up, initially massaging the feces and piss out of her, syringing cream into her, and holding her purring and luxuriating and biting form to my skin, for the past 2 months. Now the world contains an extra cat (dickhead) because of my labors: oh dear.



-----

- Octopus Our Minds:
- Work with writing an encounter through the workshop - starting by taking 30 minutes to write-as a way to learn the octopus epistemology
- Writing to take on the practice of octopusing together, - getting hot with species - with the companion species you "brought" or have in mind. 
- For example, Marian Engel's novel Bear might be a good reference-point. "What nonhuman animal has - pleasurably - threatened your boundaries?" might be a possible prompt
- Writing with the encounter / through the encounter (if it is about an existing encounter, then use this as a space to further speculate and explore.)
- To speculate, to write with, to challenge erotophobia with wider understandings of the erotic to generate alterities. (a thunderstorm, a hot shower, a reservoir, a cat curling up around your neck, the fondling of a Karl Johan mushroom as you tease it from the mycellium, the feeling a cute feral parrot gripping your shoulder in the park.)


- The interdependecy of practices 
- who is doing the octopusing
- Types of undoing, types of 

thinking about what Helen said earlier about kingdom dysmorphia re: crossing in this context


Gumbs says: 'The fact that we are always crossing, even though so much of the structure of our lives is designed to convince us that we are in a stable situation and to sacrifice everything and everyone for that fictional stability. But we are in the borderlands, in the sense that Gloria Anzaldua—a major influence on Jacqui Alexander, by the way, and on me too—talks about it. We are crucially crossing between the many different oceans between us. And not necessarily by choice. Even once we reach each other, the crossing isn’t over.'


---

Helen + jara

two masses disobeying through one another.
meaning: i think the encounter of massive masses implies an erotic?
one has particular implications for life
take it this way: all life has evolved to depend on salt's chemical properties to survive, through a multiplicity of forms and processes

what does this all life dependency on the cut of salt look like without the figure/ground?
are you still here?
and the other as well
salt salty geo
salty geobiomytho 

the mass of bios
encounters the mass of myths:
saltings of imaginaries

she said we want a Labour-in-reciprocity
they say let's please not get this bland
she said is this cosmological ?
we said sure why not,
its mutual.

the median lethal dose of table salt is roughly 3,000 mg per kg of human body weight, they said.

see? it's mutual.

so: extraction started by letting dry
and then
grab
or grab-for
a grabbing back
of matters and co-dependent life-forms
filtering through the orifices of the queer moulsucs 
a molusc-salt-grass tounging of classificatory violences and gender panics

now, let's consider kingdom dysphoria:
it's not the case, that we can separate salt from moluscs
nor moluscs from background
so

try a scale leap:
to Velma's kitchen 
to Toni Cade Bambara's page
to the basket on her arms
to the edition room of a promotion video for landscape incursions
to softening of thames barriers
to an iced road in front of someone, through the world of someone else
to the salty crystal guide
maybe this isn't the scale jump you needed?
try again, then:

but I have a question: if we jump in timescales, will we be able to write the multispecies convergence of differenciated modes of existence that as a positive, negative or neutral externality ended up providing with the mineral stuff these mundane diamonds are made of?
some made of these diamond stuffs 
for all the fresh water pouring into it 
survival salt levels
breakers, gulls, muffled voices, a lonely foghorn, that sort of thing

oh my god, it's so amazingly beautiful, its geometry
calcifications - cosmological calcifications
a thousand exploded views or none


she said we need to think how to not change
because of whats coming
lattice holds
picture a delta -- shit, always so damaging alphabetic, in the tongue
it's too much to dissolve in one go
reverse flows
but picture an estuary
the massive encounter of masses
with specific mellecular equilibriums
what should I use for an optical refractometer?
bladderwort and calmus singing .. 
historical presents of imperial classifications 
salty tastes for colonial impulses of collecting and notating
meaning: naming: seizing
the imperial feeling of the mud in the toes 
lodged in the mouths of cordbraid and callus

ionic compounds, or not
meaning: what degree of freshness now that the meeting took place
calficiations
it dissociates in water, so
extraction implied a utilitarian re-association? can that be the case?
global carbon burial
yet another form of division of, at and despite the underground
despite the reachings through the muds

The sodium and chlorine atoms 
are present in equal amounts (1:1 ratio), 
arranged to form a cubic crystal lattice
held together
holding together through cordgrass
 a lattice of cordgrass
extracted topos of data points
cordgrass strength lurk underneath 
a lidar of solutions
salty dissolves solutions of dissolving 
salt metering

under static conditions, if the fresh water has a specific gravity of 1 and the sea water has a specific gravity of 1.025, the interface between the heavier sea water and the overlying fresh water in the area is pushed 40 feet below sea level for every foot that the water table stands above sea level.

this is precisely why we learned to not trust the figure-background cut
or at least not as an axiomatic cut.

now, check this out:  you can measure salt content following the direct method with the help of the optical refractometer, or determine salt content following the indirect method by means of a conductivity meter. The salt meter is suitable for measuring salt contents in aqueous solutions or viscous media.

Too much salt intake in adults can also occur from the drinking of seawater 
in survival situations.

two masses disobeying through one another.

---

Zeenath
Dissuading the epistemic violence of breadmaking with my sourdough starter

Mingling with wild dust of millenia. Watch me grow. 
Bulbous, airy, buoyant. Feed me more. 
Plump, supple, slow. Tease me just so. 
Wading in grains of civilisation, my diversifying granularity transgresses your exponential economy. 
Diversifying in multiple colonies, I confound your gastronomic imperialism of the gut microbiome. 
Resting, cool, nonchalant. I can wait it out. 
I have seen it all from the frivolity of homo toasties to the austerity of homo humus. 

Fred -the difficulty of jumping across scale 
- the multiple granularity as economic model 


The velvet liquid seemed to seal the edges of my body that day, as if someone was drawing a line along me. Any vision above the surface appeared in stuttering shuttered glimpses, splattered with light, water clinging to lashes in globules that prismed and glitched my sight. Looking down my shadow soared above the seabed. That view was eclipsed slowly but inexorably with my uneven strokes into midnight sky blue depths, and dust-motes of seabodies disco-balled through shafts of sunlight. The swelling surges, breaths of the sea, darkened the cliffs to my right, frothed at the base.
 
Alone with my thoughts, alone with everybody in my head, alone with all the seabodies; limned in cold, parting the curtain of water and admiring the direction of my palms, and the hexagonal partitions of light upon my hands, swimming pool-tiled, distracting myself with counting breaths. One, two, breathe. One, two, breathe. Thoughts creeping, scuttling and then a nudge, to the goosepimpled underside of my left, seaward arm. Above the elbow, below the armpit, away from joins, fleshy, plump. Dis-embodies contact, cold, rounded.
 
The unspooling of strokes, my legs catching up with my progress, my body shifting vertical, my head above water. Bobbing. Head swivelling, legs whisking. Cold water trickling through my veins. The drawn line smudged. Rushing awkwardly, inefficiently, windmilling limbs, gasps. Fingertips shredding on geometrically faced granite. Leaking flood of cold whoosh as hot rock rasps. Black rushing mirror seesawing at my toes, snapping and yawning towards me. Embracing the warm wall, starfish-spread.


I can sense that the world that I am moving in and around does not correspond to the one’s in which my ancestors where born into, as I use my tentacles to move across the different landscapes. Most of the time my home is wet and dark, but as I venture out into my world exploring new territories I discover new worlds within my world and other living creatures that both reveal a pleasure and a danger. There seems to be another species sharing my world and although the chere existens of the monstrosity of this species intimidates me yet seem to provide a variety of foods. As my excitement grows with my exploration of this new territory I start to explore the the big white mountain that has long felt like a dangerous zone to enter. But together with my fellow comrades we explore it together. It is dark and cold and offers endless possibilities of hiding spots across its soft surface. On one of these explorations I move across, along, around and with the monstrous other species. My tentacles are moving and touching the strands of something growing out from the________ 
I playfully move my body and lightfully use all my senses to discover what is underneath me.

The monster moves in a series of clumsy playful attempts to push me away, but I see it as game.
Suddenly all is bright and I shy away back into darkness of my hiding places in between the white mountain and my home. The darkness resist the lightness with the possibility of entering and existing this dual existens to encounter the monster again when my day is night




Duncan

Encounters with crows

What started as an assignment for a performance art course ended up in a Multispecies encounter that profoundly changed how I understood my immediate environment and put me in touch with the ancestral affinities of a river and the feral and verminous creatures of London.

Octopuses are Other Minds in many senses - other sentient beings, differently evolved, distributed consciousness, camouflagers, hunters, boundary-less in their cold water world.

However, my relation to the Octopus was/is speculative. Although I yearn to commune with a suckered arm that tastes/feels/explores, I have only encountered one either captive in a commercial aquarium or murdered on a dinner plate.

But there are (of course) other Other Minds. From the beginning of the first lockdown, as my contact with human society became more distant, I became entangled with another society, the crow communities of Hackney Marshes. I would walk through the marshes each morning (the weather for lockdown was generously great), through what was clearly a thriving, ever-communicating communal species. I started to read about them, and there is. a lot to know: Corvids are exceptionally intelligent, using tools (although this is an irritatingly anthropocentric place to start), complex behaviours (Crows have funerals!! Something heavily restricted for humans at the time); they recognise people up to five years after meeting them - and can warn other crow communities about threats, ie humans, to their kind.

I always wore a blue running jacket, as their vision is uv/blue end of the spectrum. Sometimes I sat with them, I never fed them as I don’t want a reward/treat kind of scenario. I just wanted to be together. Up close they are weird, reptilian, alien in uncanny ways. At first at least. Now, after 8 months their beauty, the super-data-rich calls (they have to be I propose, to carry all that information), the blackest-black plumage with flashes of blue, the feeling/knowledge that they’re looking at me and thinking. What? “what’s that idiot doing here again?” “will he ever bring food?”. A research paper published two weeks ago proves that they have Theory of Mind, ie they’re aware and they’re aware that they’re aware. This was long thought unlikely, as under dissection their brain structure was different: they were not like human brains, but in fact (like the octopus) they have evolve different neural structures to perform higher function, different to ours. Other Minds again. They’re are different ways of being alive.


My trips to the marshes involved, as the weather got hotter, dips in the River Lea. I told my mum, who said that my grandfather use to dive into the river to retrieve bottles to take back to get a small deposit - essential income for his family at the time. During the winter he was renowned for breaking icicles off the bottom of the bridge, in the days when the river used to freeze. It’s warmer now. We then spoke of my grandmother, who was a fortune-teller. She kept a lifelong secret: her father used to sell rats on Brick Lane Market. ‘Albert Dyer’s Fancy Rats and Racing Pigeons’ was a well-known stall in late Victorian times, both were Companion Species in those days (only the fancy ones mind). She never spoke of it though, as retailing rats was seen as not quite respectable.

One day recently, on turning the corner into my street I heard a racous cacophony of crow caws, the tree opposite my house was full of them for the first time. Had they followed me? To reciprocally check out where I live? I hope so.


Marcy
I am thinking about the degree to which my body has felt open and radically sensually alive when walking through the redwood forest- specifically, the redwood forest when trees are the only companions and other human animals are absent, as has happened in some of the lesser-visited state parks on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area (Forest of Nisene Marks, Portola Redwoods, Pescadero), a cumulative experience increasing in intensity the longer I spent alone with the trees. It’s on my mind in conjunction with the experience of kelp forest in My Octopus Teacher, and my wondering about what, precisely, the nature filmmaker was doing “for a living” while delving deeply into the living space of the octopus, because survival under capitalism is always on my mind (money related trauma does that), but, perhaps, wasn’t there for a rare few hours in the forest. Also gone was reproductive labour that constantly confronts me at “home.” Instead, satisfying the type of “primitive” concerns evinced by the octopus- food, shelter, safety- left enough time to be open to the companionship of trees and the feelings of bodily awareness that I find generally inaccessible, including/ especially via practices such as “mindfulness” and yoga that are deployed only in order to make us more functional and “productive” members of society. Being in trees liberated me from the constant reminder of needing to be useful and in that capacity maybe to rediscover the useless pleasure of the body.

One of the main pursuits of humans in Iain M. Banks’ Culture anarcho-communist space operas, their basic needs provided by benevolent AI “minds” in a society freed from wage labour, is imaginative and extensive exploration of the erotic.  

In My Octopus Teacher the encounters must ultimately fuel WORK (filmmaking, editing, charitable foundation building) in order to be justified.

This tendency I am engaging in, to narrate straightforwardly- to describe a past experience with words and without metaphor- is one I can’t help engage in, and one that mars all the images we see in MOT (the inability to let an encounter enfold without prioritising language). 

Yishuai
“The danger of crossing the line” or the fear of interference. Zero-interference is already impossible after the universe matter combined with antimatter, generating our consciousness— a tendency of unconditional love to probe outwards, yet being organised inwards. The pseudo-organised entity tends to eradicate its fear of chaos through all forms of erotic rituals, physical and metaphysical. For us human being, the inhibited and concealed sexually evinced verbalisation and textual manifestation historically fostered the straight power game in our governance. Those long-time observed, analysed, experimented critters could bear to offer us their flesh and bone, yet umbrageously embracing the nature of their organised chaos or so we called “degenerating”. The automatisation of their existential causality thrives to retrieve life and love. As brutal life it is, octopus’s aesthetically pleasing chromatophore pleases no one but sustains her life. As permeable love it is, octopus’s tentacles gently adhere on one’s chest or tentatively evoke one’s titillation to reach the vibrating climax rippling in the salty water. There is no line to cross and hence no entity to interfere. Nevertheless, there is an oriented objectivity to love, around love and so to fear. There is no -phobia but a backwards emotional rejection to your organised chaos, which is endurably beautiful. Why not just swim in the organised chaos? Becoming the aesthetic automatisation to your organised chaos. 

[copying from chat:] Yishuai, you might enjoy Abbey Mei Otis's "My Octopus Slashfic" in its entirety https://twitter.com/abbeyangry/status/1308921652806389767 // https://www.patreon.com/posts/41990447

Stephanie
https://twitter.com/alien_ontology

#alienemptyshellsand¯oodmortalitiesweremeasuredinthesamewayandlaterstoredinlargeplasticbags.

n+1 editors wanted me to up the flamboyancy of certain adjectives so I lit upon "umbrageous" and justified it because it is literally what octopuses do -- recently documented, their "cloud passing" chromatophore display!
Quoting from a study of this display:
"Skin displays are used more specifically in the ‘passing cloud’ display of cuttlefish and octopuses. Chromatophores are sequentially expanded and contracted in an area moving along the animal’s dorsal body surface, mimicking the shadow of a cloud passing along a landscape below and producing apparent motion."

Fred - 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fparasites%2Fgiardia%2Fillness.html&psig=AOvVaw3vMKYpoXNASIvuT7PthM9C&ust=1608220130978000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCNj6iYDt0u0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAc

lush flagella, form unreels                it proper fucked me 
up. countercommensal, co                  contaminant, we meet 
under the lens, we meet                 by day in anxious para
tactic moods but here, i kind of        see it, all your basal      
all your parabasal              bodies, all dendritic headrush
the inverse of ‘tired’                  immersed in artificial     
‘pink, like the inside of your’                        reified 
in parasitic plush, ‘PRECAUTION                  please remove 
plastic & hangtags,’ all            containers lamblia or self
shattered again        evasive species, fail the host relation

**how we think of a fascist aesthetic, how that also influences an octopusgate
-family abolition 
-alt. right types furious that a jew had made a scando-fascism horror film
-xeno/alien phobic, repudiation of the soft, the prehensile, the watery; Gumb's Black feminism is so attuned to the deep, to those in the bellies of slave ships; octopusses stand for the racialized other, to stand for the disgust towards polymorphous perversity, etc. 
-How not to change, the soften, loopy, gloopy, difference.
-Other 

Cassandra
”In love, or on acid”
I thought I understood the erotic
but what is anhedonic
pleasure-less             or the disgust of boundaries, possibilities
swirling around
 
I saw you at the gate
I got on my knees            I crawled under the tree
I was so still to see and to hear
            against
respectability or responsibility
I’ve never known a time that took itself
                                    from me             onto me            into me
            really in a way I’d say flouresecent capture
a spiraled free-form             abberation
 
To be so heavy
at the bottom of the ocean floor
            dirt oceanic tenderness  waves upon waves
present-less presence
inside of this feeling
                        I have known other machines
                        who claimed to know my name
                                    who said they spoke for you
                                    yet killed you too in the end
 
When I held you I held myself
yet I kept myself from me
and I wouldn’t let myself admit otherwise
 
”I’ve been searching for the dolphins
in the sea
and I wonder if
you sometimes
ever think of me”
 
Protection, or a threat
you can be both and still fail to acknowledge
the tool             at your side
might be an appendage
a frequent delinquent wayfarer
            a loaded lung
            returning out of injury
            coughing up
                        or what’s caught between
                        you make a lunch of it
make a place             from me
hold tight
make space outside of yourself             for me
and I promise             to return




------

"there is always already intereference " the impossibility of that position, that is demonstrated by Craig's position to assume he musn't interefere with her world 

-"Will they ever bring food?"
-Corvid theory of mind, Eduordo Kohn, "How Forests Think?" 
-The moment of mirror recognition being the normative approach to teh judgment of intelligence, the different ways that structures and consciousnesses are embodied otherwise. 
-Massive flocks of parakeets, more recent arrivals to the UK; face-off between the crow and parakeet community. 
-Being immersed in bodies of water recalls a whole body of memory, ancestors 

-Water is for pleasure, water is for fun 
-"Fancy rats"
-Looking to be with each other, strong temporal elements 

-Not a benevolent joyfulness, but what is a possibiliy for other encounters
-Documentary; not innocent, not "good", "hot or not"
-The erotic is obviously much more complicated than that.
-Communication, reciprocity, sensuousness; being reduced to sex acts. 
-Medicine shouldn't be erotic, many people upset. Sensual, vs. something pseudo objective 
-Degenerate

-Yeast could be accessed through commodified means
-Who's in my sourdough that I ingest? The gastronomic
-The oppression of gluten 
-Resisting scalability // storied matter 
-



15/12 share notes from lecture - 

-underwater tracking 
-Alexis Pauline Gumb, "Undrowned" 

-"love fosters responsibility"

"in love, or on acid?"

octopus their minds -- tinkling mineral embrace -- polymorphic 
sexual interludes by resevoir

"are octopuses floods, or are they resevoirs?"


octopuses look like our own viscera // the octopus' body 


Peter Godfrey + Sy Montgomery 

Hokusai's 'Octopus and the Shell Diver'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife

"THIS IS A QUEER SLUT FROM OUTER SPACE! BE A BETTER LOVER!"


whimsical riffing into the Twittersphere 

'an object lesson in scientific masculinity' cf Haraway 


More tree flirting 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3397576.pdf Douglas Crimp, 'How to Have Promiscuity in a Pandemic' 


I do believe in queer utopias.

me too 


----


NOPUBLISH

Welcome to Constant Etherpad!

These pads are public. To prevent them from appearing in the archive and the RSS feed on Constant, put the word __NOPUBLISH__ (including surrounding double underscores) anywhere in your pad.
  Pads are archived every night around 04:00 CET at http://etherdump.constantvzw.org

  To stay informed about Constant infrastructures, please subscribe to this mailinglist: https://tumulte.domainepublic.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/infrastructures
  More about the way pads work: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/etherpads
octopus.jpg
⇜ BACK