This beautiful edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” found me just before leaving back for the Tronix wedding; the preface, introduction, and essay, in relation to one another, create a being and a becoming, which is truly worlding my world in ways I cannot refuse. Here is the reading, as promised to those of you there.
The words of Donna Haraway recall to me the power and grace of Dawn at DWebCamp, and that of her family, with us there and then, sharing their stories of resistance and courage in the face of corporate brutality destroying their lives, diverting and desecrating the waters so many generations of wisdom keepers had sought to protect. Now, more than ever, we must learn and hold space for stories of the dispossessed.
I had the joy of weaving with Ben Vickers of ignota.org at the first Glitch residency at Fey, shortly before COP26 in Glasgow; deep dives into Dugongs, among many threads, embroidered beautifully around our emerging work on Biodiversity NFTs: A future memory of the need to redefine technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination – patterned then on this, their earlier weaving, the first portal to terra ignota.
Weaving further back at Fey, the reference to Le Guin’s unique translation of the Tao Te Ching, which Primavera, Jess, Ed, and I had been collectively enbulbing in the summer of the first lockdown, as a memory palace nestled amidst the grounds, like a slack line of flight lets me find these planes of consistency for the awakenings we will yet set ablaze.
The things of this world
exist, they are;
you can’t refuse them.
To bear and not to own;
to act and not lay claim;
to do the work and let it go:
for just letting it go
is what makes it stay.
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin