March 2010
-
Monthly
Newsletter
TRIANGLE AREA GAY SCIENTISTS
PO Box 1137, Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Are you new to TAGS? Need directions to the
potluck?
Drop us a note at: tags@uberfowler.com.
We'd love to meet you!
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"Animal life refuses the immobility of the plant. Animals, including human animals, are not only able to change their paces, they must do so if they are to survive. No given place suffices indefinitely. Human beings are among the most mobile of animals. We are beings of the between always on the move between places...Getting out of place is therefore a basic action of all animal, including human, life. But with the freedom to change places...comes the danger of getting lost. A plant, having no place to go, is never lost. A mobile animal, however, continually confronts the unhappy prospect of disorientation of not knowing its way between places...the home territory embodies the plenitude that being placeless so painfully lacks" - Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed understanding of the Place-World, by Edward S. Casey (1993, 2009).
Spellbound A-Z...
"...to learn to spell was...to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spelll upon our own senses. It was to exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written word."
- The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1993)
Casey does a great job showing how finding place and losing place matters for animal life. Plants grow and disperse so they're not really "immobile," but they do stay put compared to animals. But should mobile animals be described as risking lostness and disorientation with every change of place? Sounds more like existential nausea than how animals migrate, hunt, or build nests. Something's missing from this scientific picture of place. No particular place confers final...what? Animals, including humans, stake out territory not to imitate the fixity of plants, but because animals crave...what? I think the answer is not "place," but "belonging." Humans want to belong where they live in the world - even more than a place - instead of pretending to be interlopers and tourists. But, as ecologist David Abram notes, we're self-exiled. Enchanted by language, we care more about spelling "nature" than the spell seducing us to believe that we don't belong with nature, never did, and never will. Time to snap the spell. Belonging with nature may seem strange and surprising at first. But, deep inside, we never really doubted it, and that's why we never gave up yearning for it. Our homecoming dance can then be the first of many instead of the last one.
On that scientific note, we did some real belonging-density at our February celebration of Chinese New Year. Barry's home was packed nametag-to-nametag with TAGSters, members of the Gay Christian Network, and all their friends. Miraculously, no one was trampled in the Golden Tiger's casserole feeding frenzy. We hope that Barry will invite us back!
George welcomes us to Raleigh for our March potluck on Saturday, March 13, 2010. Arrive by 7:00 p.m. and we'll dine around 7:30 p.m. The map on the back of this newsletter will show you the way to 4821 Rembert Drive. In April, our veteran TAGS hosts Dean and Danny welcome us to Raleigh for our potluck. Martin and Clyde usually host the March potluck, but their daffodils are plowed under and currently unavailable. We're visiting the Max Planck Institut for the History of Science in Berlin this month...and the Zoo Berlin. We'll find out where science belongs.
Meanwhile, you
definitely belong at George's home this March, so follow the directions until
you're emplaced, embedded, implanted, and empotlucked at TAGS in Raleigh
on Saturday, March 13th! - Martin
TAGS Editor
PO Box 1137
Chapel Hill, NC 2751
e-mail: tags@zuberfowler.com
Web Site: http://tags.zuberfowler.com/