Seeing with new eyes,

in planet house

“Once, when the grandchildren were barely seven and still interested, we counted three hundred and six rabbits between the stretch of head of neck to home.”

Me and the adobe house I built for the dogs...circa 1959.

Seeing with new eyes

I got a new pair of prescription glasses yesterday. It’s been a couple years since I have been able to afford them, in what I am told is an upgrade for the perceptions of the lenses inside my eyes.¹

And I have been thinking about the sentencing - the seeing with new eyes – a sentiment expressed, over and over again, from decades ago to now, from most of my writing workshops and encounters, from classes, from the sentient ones with oracles towards other people’s lives, or from the science ones who know about the pleasures of micro and macro lenses. The insistence that there was something faulty about my ways to see, and that I needed training and technology to see with new eyes…

The movements in poetry where words were to shimmer above the page, where the new was finally revealed. I don’t want to be here, I want to be elsewhere, writing poems about the waters…, enamorating with drownings and revelations. Purer, clearer, cleverer.

Hitting the bottom was of not ever of much interest to me, but I continued to want to catch the silver linings in palm frond, the fury of storm in maple leaf turned. I was a seeker of fleeting souls and that was my profession? The telescope, the lens?

Is depth what I wanted to gain? No, not only. I wanted touch, gentle touch. And kindness. I wanted to gain knowledge of depth too, though, from very early on.

Searching for home

I thought I was still philosophically searching for home, in my desires and in my writings, as a geographic shift, as an elsewhere. The life of a nomad.

Bit by bit, time, the obscenities of living in today’s political shifts, word and image intrude and grant me acceptance to the happiness that comes with the rain, after the absurdity of heat felt around 110F. The one young squirrel comes back, looking at me, looking for food.

And I reconnect with Ciclo Selvagem, now conversing about Planeta Casa – The planet of house and home. These are delightfully brief and airy talks surrounding Emanuele Coccia’s book about the philosophy of home. Click here for the entire Planet home cycle. These encounters bring in Emanuele Coccia, Ailton Krenak and other amazing new people to my world. It is all in Portuguese and in Spanish, so if these are not your languages, I suggest to watch the videos for the music, for the colors and for the joyful mood of it all. ²Believe me, this is not a project for the West, this is a project of the South, forever in the making…

Music opens the first video, with a woman playing a very old instrument and singing an invitation for us to come and partake in the birth of a brand new morning.

FILOSOFIA DA CASA E OUTROS PARANGOLÉS - Planeta Casa

Philosophy of the house/home and other parangolés.

"We are beginning to contemplate the possibility that the planet is the house, the home - but not the individual address of each one of us.” “Nós estamos atinando com a possibilidade de o planeta ser essa casa, não o endereço de cada um." Ailton Krenak

In this episode, philosopher Emanuele Coccia, writer and activist Ailton Krenak, artist Luiz Zerbini and sociologist Muniz Sodré reflect upon the notions of home beyond the physical space and boundaries of a house, beyond architectural walls. They take Emanuele Coccia’s book “The philosophy of home” as a basis for their notions about inhabitating the world, as homes can mean protection and shelter, but can also be spaces for friendship, exchanges, movement and transformation.

It is a cooperative of emerging notions, search for words and answers to, for instance, did you know about how many millions (billions?) of people are displaced today from their ancestral homes? Did you know that refugees pushed out from their homelands are now a major relatively mute voice in the world? Did you know that you were, at least once, lost in your journey? and that a person, a book, a flower or some food helped you to stay still or to move on?

Emanuele Coccia reminds us to consider that home is not made of walls, necessarily. It is the setting where we feel well. His thinking is so profound and open ended - I feel like paying attention and trying it out. He also invites me to consider and accept that home is not always linked to genealogy, or to family, as mother and father and child, as ancestry through blood lines. We live in direct contact with entire diverse universes, we no longer live inside caves. “Home is a moral machine that produces a better life”, he says. Home is everything including the dog, the cat, the cell phone that makes your life better and creates your family.

Luis Zerbini, who illustrated the book in its Portuguese translation, talks about his surprise at the autobiographical mode that Coccia brings to the book. He had so many ideas for the illustrations and ended up using his interpretive notes. He does amazingly vibrant art.

Muniz Sodré, live on camera, tells us he did not read the book, Coccia’s book! Delightful as a video graphed informal fact that one of the main actors had not yet read the book! … He invokes housing as a protection for the lower classes…, the submerged classes ( “as classes subalternas”). (The endless but not timeless boxed architectural housing projects for the poor, for the homeless.)

Maybe you have not been close enough to one of those well-meaning projects – old as history and repeated, endlessly, all over the world. I know a writer who could tell you much about the New York City housing projects… I also heard there is hope in a new mayor in the making.

Sodre also invokes the houses of Pai and Mae de Santo (territories for worship, led by the sacred Father and Mother of the Saints ), the house of birth (casa natal) and the house of dream (casa de sonho). And he returns to the house of affections (afetos), linking his talk to Ailton Krenak and to a philosophy that sprouts spontaneously, without even once mentioning Greece !!!

Ailton Krenak talks about “construir um espaco de estar em casa, em qualquer lugar.” “Building a space of being at home, anywhere”... His people inhabit and live by the waters of a once mighty river, the Rio Doce, polluted and killed by corporate ore mining. Fascinating how he describes Coccia’s notion of history, all the way from Greece, where philosophers actually imagined us, as projects in the future (the linearity of project West). He talks about climate change, the end of the world previewed, the end of the caverns where we are all hiding, as separate individuals, afraid. How Coccia imagines other ways to inhabit the world, a mode of thinking that is basically from the South. Instead of imagining that we are doomed by all the crisis surrounding us, we can imagine instead, like Coccia does, that as we leave our selves we still exist in metamorphosis, in everything. Escaping from the cocoon, to inhabit the world consciously.

In the third episode of the series, released this week, Casa Cosmos Cozinha/ House, Cosmos and Kitchen, Emanuele Coccia restates the central role of the kitchen in the traditional architecture of a home, where everything is again mixed and transformed… from chickens to pigs, peasants to farmers, fused in tasteful bites.

Júlia de Carvalho Hansen, poet and astrologer, talks about the astrology of houses in a planetary chart (Astrologia das casas). She wonders about how each astrological house, from 1 to 12, territorializes sectors in our life experiences, as humans. "Cada uma dessas casas astrológicas, de 1 a 12, territorializa setores das nossas experiências de vida. ” She tells us, for example, that in house 3, we are dealing with our capacity of hearing, with writing and with neighbors. How then do we build neighborhoods?

Home is where you feel at home

Still looking for solace, I find Hospitality as the third tenet that philosopher Tom Cheetham offers us, as a possibility to continue living here in wellness. The other two are humor and humility.

In an email exchange where we were talking about what is happening now, I said to him: “the three h's work, of course, gracefully. most times. in my case, i have to add a severe case of sheer raw anger at what is happening now and what might still happen soon. the dictatorship in brasil started when i was fifteen, dancing a waltz with a gay man i had a crush on, to the tune of dave brubeck, to the surprise of my mother who would have preferred something more properly european... censorship and violence lasted for 21 years. after eight years i moved up here.”

Strange to be given a chance to readdress the essential question that underlined (framed) my entire life - how do you counterbalance violence? internal and external violence? Not as an exercise in rhetoric, in writing or poetry, but as a reality in daily life. Taking selfies at protests and posting them does not seem very effective. For one, it would be nice if you all had hats, masks and sunglasses... There the resistance took many forms, but it did not happen without human sacrifice, including many, many lives. I tend to think that today is not much different from then.”

I imagine my displacement, at 76, when home is here, yet the absurd forces of evil want to disrupt this home. And yes, this is evil, disguised as golden toilets, wealth and endless progress… fueled by war… Then I find the amazing works of Richard Greaves and that also helps immensely.

Anarchitecture of home

https://spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-collection/richard-greaves-anarchitect/

“Greaves once said: “My houses aren’t twisted, they are deliberately asymmetrical. They are strong because they have angles that you can’t make with nails… A nail is fixed, it stops the evolution, but a rope is patient, it can contort itself… Rope makes it possible to structure a building without hurting it, without assaulting it… With rope, it’s great because it still moves. Artworks have to continue. I hate things that are too stable.” [3]”

https://rawvision.com/blogs/articles/articles-richard-greaves-anarchitect

The Philosophy of Home, as seen by Emanuele Coccia, appeared about a year ago for me, and prompted this other writing…

1. In a money exchange, industry tells me I am now industrious enough to qualify for better vision. My quality in the herd is rewarded… People do not notice me in my new fancy frames, though…succumbing to stylish fame framing is of not much avail. I am still old, woman, immigrant but I can still be happily contrary…

2. English and subtitles in other languages available in Settings.