" Is it possible to grow a worthy cosmology by attending closely to our encounters with other creatures, and with the elemental textures and contours of our locale? We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things...of insects and wooden floors, of broken down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil...seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing. According to assumptions long held by the civilization in which I've been raised, the deepest truth of things is concealed behind the appearances , in dimensions inaccessible to our senses. A thousand years ago these dimensions were viewed in spiritual terms: the sensuous world was a fallen, derivative reality that could be understood only by reference to heavenly realms hidden beyond the stars. Since the powers residing in such realms were concealed from common perception, they had to be mediated for the general populace by priests, who might intercede with those celestial agencies on our behalf.
In recent centuries an abundance of discoveries and remarkable inventions have transformed this culture's general conception of things...and yet the basic disparagement of sensuous reality remains. Like an old, collective habit very difficult to kick, the directly sensed world is still explained by reference to realms hidden beyond our immediate experience. Such a realm, for example, is the microscopic domain of axons and dendrites, and neurotransmitters washing across neuronal synapses...a dimension entirely concealed from direct apprehension, yet which presumably precipitates, or gives rise to every aspect of our experience. Another such dimension is the redondite realm hidden within the nuclei of our cells, wherein reside the intricately folding strands of DNA and RNA the ostensible code and perhaps even "cause" the behavior of living things. Alternatively, the deepest source and truth of the apparent world is sometimes held to exist in the subatomic realm of quarks, mesons, and gluons (or the still more theoretical world of vibrating ten-dimensional strings); or perhaps in the initial breaking of symmetries in the cosmological "big bang" an event almost inconceivably distant in time and space.
Every one of these arcane dimensions radically transcends the reach of our unaided senses. Since we have no ordinary experience of these realms, the essential truths to be found there must be mediated for us by experts, by those who have access to the highpowered instruments and the inordinately expensive technologies (the electron micropscopes, functional MRI scanners, radio telescopes, and supercolliders) that might offer a momentary glimpse into these dimensions. Here, as before, the sensuous world....the creaturely world directly encountered by our animal senses ...is commonly assumed to be a secondary, derivative reality understood only by reference to more primary domains that exist elsewhere, behind the scenes."
David Abram in Becoming Animal An Earthly Cosmology
Beginning this book again. Watching over and over the BBC and Nat Geo documentaries of the Wild Dogs of Africa on U Tube. Watching these Wild ones. Now, looking at Dogs and Goats.
and this morning, beginning to ready the cloth to ship out, i am caught by this "solar flair, flare" and see how it is WEAVE. Considering Jude Hill's Considering Weave, i look and am taken by it. I did not weave anything, but this small fragment of a piece of Deb Lacativa's dyed recycled damask is really, maybe the central point of this Cloth? it and the small black and white wisp that to me is Animal. All Animal, including me. Animal, looking UP... Continuing...in it's own small but singular way....
So...a Delay in the sending. I need to look for a while more. Need to understand the place this small weave has in this Big Picture. Need to really take that in and understand what i can of the beingness of cloth, how it is woven into what we just take for granted as cloth, but is really,
Weave.
