mirror

More from the Editor’s Statement. (Eventually, I will get past the Editor’s Statement.)

Perhaps we will begin to revalue the “nature walk,” and to venerate the humble, empirical tasks of “natural history,” in ways that were lost to the technological hubris of the last century; but with radically different senses of “nature” and of “history,” from those with which the Victorian era charged this discipline.

This is intriguing. What would radically different senses of nature and history look like? When I imagine renovating natural history, I can only think of applying imagination. The details of scientific classification, collection, observation, and study seem so done.

I remember reading “Little Men” by Louisa May Alcott and being fascinated by the homemade museum of natural history. Little trail museums – “interpretive centers” – who is doing this interpretation? Is this familiar oldstyle natural history a way of separating from the environment – an environment that needs interpretation to be part of it?

In any case, transparent narratives of self-discovery, or solipsistic, self-expressive displays, seem ill-suited to the current crisis; art alive to the differentiating nature of its own materials may be better equipped.

I read this sentence over and over, but it doesn’t come clean. What are its own materials? How can the self be exempt?

It seems like you have to take an anti-solipsism oath to join this club. My philosophy – solipsism will take care of itself, we don’t need to worry. When the wind ripples the surface, the reflection is disturbed. Also, I am suspicious that these narratives or self-expressive displays are 1) always there and 2) undervalued. If you seek to examine the natural history of the human, there is probably no better place to look.

To be continued, looking for these themes in the work.