Tag Archives: Time and Space

New series of science-themed podcast episodes! First up, AEWCH 260: How can a cosmic perspective help us meet the challenges of our time? with Marjolijn van Heemstra!

16 Apr

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Friends,

A new journey. This is the  first episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways: through the healing and connective powers of the void of space, terrifying encounters with predators, the development of the concept of nature, our own animalistic violence, the truth and complications of the scientific method itself, and connection at the tiniest layers of existence.

Just as the connections are surprising, so, I hope, will be the picture of science. I don’t mean science in the dull and deadened way science is spoken about, mostly today; that is, a science drained of its vitality through economic and political struggle. Because right now, science primarily finds our way into our consciousness through confrontations: whether they’re about pharmaceuticals or AI or climate change, science lives most squarely in tensions and the low hums of everyday anxiety.

Instead, this is a science that is completed by our engagement with it. A science that connects its offerings with our moral impulses, with love, and with enthusiasms.

When I was in grad school, I studied science primarily in small in organismic and evolutionary biology seminars with the great and groundbreaking scientist Lynn Margulis. The most important thing my science education gave me was the ability to be critical of science. But the second most important thing was the inspiration of loving it.

So these episodes will not be “scientific” episodes, exactly, but they will be about science without falling into the merely scientistic.

To kick off the series, I’m joined by the poet laureate of Amsterdam, novelist and nonfiction writer Marjolijn van Heemstra, whose newly translated book, In Light-Years There’s No Hurry: Cosmic Perspectives on Everyday Life, gives a portrait of the vital necessity of seeing space and the sky differently, offering an illuminating and helpful darkness.

Marjolijn and I talk about the ways in which the overview effect – that is viewing earth from space – can be brought into our lives. We discuss the power of walking in the night – in fact Marjolijn runs night walks in the Netherlands – and the way it connects those with disparate political beliefs  We talk about the fragmentation and the whole of existence, the Hubble telescope, and the need to be expansive, not just contracted or even only “mindful” in our moment to confront and live along with the challenges facing us.

Marolijn also reads from her book and also a poem, “The Middle”.

I’m so happy to share this first episode on how the sciences find their ways into our lives.

CH

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The Mystery of Money on AEWCH 242 with Pilar Lesko.

31 Oct

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Friends,
In times of obvious schisms between human beings and their structures can stir up the opportunities that only frenetic and urgent intensity can reveal. In these times, we can see that there have always been many pathways available to us, that we were stuck, that we can be there for each other and dissolve obstruction.

One of our major obstructions: money. Especially since we say money drives so many conflict and power struggles. But is it money that is the problem? Or the economy? Or the form of economics we use? Isn’t it all just numbers moving from one place to another? Oh, and by the way, what are numbers?

These are just a few questions, radical and fundamental, that must be asked to confront the economic realm and one of its main attendants, money.

It is with this sense of investigation that I turn to the occult and esotericism for direction.

And, again, I turn to my favorite money-carer, PILAR LESKO. Pilar leads explorations into money last appeared on the show on AEWCH 210, talking about going beyond money magic to money medicine. We do more of that on this episode, but we also talk about the fixity of numbers, the spiritual reality of geometry, the power of shape (like, square, circle, star… shape!) in economics, and more. This is a deep and – as always with Pilar, hilarious – episode. I know you’ll love it as much as I did recoding it.

Thrive!

CH

MORE ON PILAR Pilar’s hub is her website. Sign up for her excellent (at times hilarious and strange) newsletter. And to truly level up your life, you can consider working with her. She’s incredible.

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Why we need a new concept of time & space to create political change. Listen to me & Srećko Horvat on AEWCH 107!

21 Apr

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 107: SREĆKO HORVAT or DEMYTHOLOGIZING (AND RE-MYTHOLOGIZING) THE CRISIS

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Friends,

We’re surrounded by terms that sound new, but that aren’t new. “Social distancing.” “The new normal.” And actions that seem new but are not new. Elevated police presence. Government overreach. Pandemic.

But these are old narratives that have been changed slightly to seem new. They’re mythic. So I invited one of the most important thinkers of our time to sort through what is new, what is old, and what is needed in our moment.

Srećko Horvat is an author, political organizer, and philosopher. Of his many profound and politically potent books, my favorite (and the one you should start with) is Poetry From The Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilisation‘s Last Chance. It’s a hopeful but evenhanded book about the possibility of interconnected movements in a world where neoliberal capitalism has won
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He’s one of the cofounders of the Democracy In Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM2025 – a broad-based coalition of thinkers, rebels, and political theorists committed to creating a true leftist alternative in European politics, particularly in response to the disintegration of the EU.

Srećko is also currently giving live mini lectures, Q&As through the DiEM25 channel, and hosting conversations with luminaries as diverse as Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, and Seinfeld co-creator Larry Charles. (And on the 24th, he’ll be speaking with Franco Bifo Berardi!)

I’m so excited to share this conversation with you. It’s one that combines the political, the spiritual, and the philosophical, with activism. It identifies and creates new directions for us to move in during this crisis, and after.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • How and why we were dreaming about the global pandemic before it happened, and how we assisted it in happening
  • Why the esoteric, the occult, and border science matter now; and how the right seizes on them because the left is ignorant
  • the “libidinal” economy and why the left needs to take it up instead of opting for class reductionism
  • Why a leftist project needs to include a reappraisal of time and space (and why it matters now more than ever)
  • The fundamental fantasies of the left, the right, and the center
  • The generation of political will through meditation, poetry, reading, creating, gardening, and more
  • Why people are turning to plants in the global crisis
  • The possibility of money losing value over time
  • How to think about the value of laziness
  • The difference between mythic art and occult art
  • Why we should and should not applaud healthcare workers
  • The importance of using your own language
  • The necessity of new and strange directions for our activism
  • Meeting the stranger and loving the Other (and dating the Other, too)
  • Why lust matters, and how it’s connected to love

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Srećko, here’s his lecture, “The Virus Mythologies,” where he breaks down the signs and signifiers And for a quick summary of his other work, you can read Subversion!. Here’s Srećko in conversation with Brian Eno about his book, Poetry From The Future.

• I start off with a nod to the eruption of Mount Tamboura – to learn more about that catastrophic time, read The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History by William Klingman.

• I deeply appreciate Slavoj Žižek’s book, about the values of religion, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.
• Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Eric Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters, which is filled with misinformation and (willful?) misinterpretation. The main issue is that Kurlander, like many “historians” of the occult, although Kurlander certainly knows exoteric history, he does not understand the occult. That said, I can recommend a better book on the same subject, Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster. Suster’s book also has some mistakes, but he at least takes the occult seriously as something other than just religious mind-control and stupidity. That said, it’s a very difficult book to get! At the very least, read them both.

• If you’d like to hear more about psychologist and border science inventor Wilhelm Reich, and his challenging relationship with the left, check out AEWCH 59, where I talk with Reich scholar James Strick. And if you do want to hear about me talking Wilhelm Reich, here you go.

• Here’s a bit on Subcomadante Galeono (known to many as Subcomadante Marcos, but who changed his name to honor the dead) and the Zapatistas.

• Marx uses the vampire metaphor a few times in his work, but none more famously than, ““Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” (In Capital)

• Here’s Walter Benjamin’s Theses On A Philosophy Of History. It’s, for me, one of the most influential theoretical works. From the essay: “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”

• And Srećko mentions Carlo Rovelli, whose work I have yet to read. But I think I’ll start with the one he suggests, The Order Of Time.

• To hear more about the problem with doomsday preppers, check out AEWCH 105 with Mark O’Connell.

Barthes-216x300• So much about the theorist Roland Barthes on this show. Including, here, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. Also, his classic, Mythologies. His book Sade/Loyola/Fourier is difficult to find, but here’s my essay on Fourier, and you can find excerpts of his book in A Barthes Reader (which was edited by Susan Sontag!).

• Here’s Michel Foucault’s essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.”

• The prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy;  O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love.  

For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

• Here’s my short essay on Russian lust mystic, Vladimir Solovyov.

See you in the future, friends.
CH
WB

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Time, space, and our pandemic.

5 Apr

shelfHi friends,

Thought I’d link you to my essay on how the pandemic has changed our experience of time and space, and what that offers us. “The air is filled with birdsong now. It was always there, we just couldn’t hear it.” appeared n The Irish Times Magazine print edition, and is also now online. Here’s an excerpt:

“Suddenly apart, together. We’ve gone indoors, we’ve changed the dimensions of our lives, we’ve slowed down the weeks and agitated the days. It isn’t only the economy or the work day that’s changed since the virus: space feels different, time feels different.

Time inside and time outside aren’t lined up. Time might drag on indoors, and yet the landscape and news beyond the threshold could change, the way it does in winter, when you look out the window to discover the ground covered in white, the snow still coming down, surprising us in the quiet.

‘When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction,’ wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Now that our visions of the future have gone crooked, we can sympathise with him. He lived for time on the curve of Killary Harbour, and probably could not have predicted that we’d one day treat lines and curves, to chart and flatten, as the fortune tellers of the world. Like the creases on our palms, we stare into them to understand what’s next. Old ways of knowing the world overlap aesthetically with new ones. We say, ‘It’s in our hands.'”

Would you like to read the entire article? Well, here you go.

XO
CH

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How did love change time and space? My conversation with historian and literary theorist Stephen Kern on the latest Against Everyone with Conner Habib!

25 Sep

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Friends,

If you don’t yet know historian, literary theorist, and interdisciplinary intellectual, Stephen Kern, I’m so excited to introduce you to him.

Stephen teaches at Ohio State University, and his books, including The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 ,  A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought  and The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns, are wide-ranging explorations of history, especially in how it relates to concepts of time and space.

In this episode, we talk about psychology and phenomenology of time, how love has become more authentic and changed the experience of time, the vulgarity and beauty of Joyce and Ulysses, what Christianity has made available and closed off when it comes to intimacy, the struggles of the Victorian era, just how real the concepts of “modernist” and “romantic” and “Victorian” periods are, how pain and time are interconnected, why a reevaluation of time and space needs to be part of labor activism, and more!

I was alarmed to find that there weren’t many podcasts or interviews with Stephen available online (although he is known and respected in literary and historian and other academic communities) so I was determined to bring his work to a broader audience.

For show notes (this time there are LOTS of links to books!), click here.

XO
CH

SK

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