The Wild of Consciousness/ the Consciousness of the Wild, Autonomy/ Agency/ Emergence of the Wild

“Unlike the term ‘wasteland’ - which predominates in the Anglo-American literature- the use of the [French] term friche [fallow or unused land] denotes a sense of connection between past use and possible productive use in the future: as land lies fallow it may recuperate and rebuild its soil structure, nutrient base and other features.  This is significant because the presence of so-called ‘weeds’ may, in fact, be reinterpreted as a specific ecological assemblage that performs tasks such as nitrogen-fixing so that the agency of nature is subtly highlighted through the choice of vocabulary.”  - Matthew Gandy (2012)

 "My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmosphere unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.  The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.  I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,- a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy."  -Henry David Thoreau

"It is a certainty that consciousness evolved from primordial sensate materiality to awareness to consciousness to self-consciousness, to critical self-consciousness and beyond."  -Jeffrey Kipnis (1999)

"Consciousness itself is an emergent property not of an organ or an individual or a species or a community or a society, but of a complex ecology."  -Jeffrey Kipnis

after the Big Bang..."What there was and all that there was, i.e., what there is and all that there is, was and is lots of matter, always conscious of itself, always organizing itself into increasingly complex, intelligent arrangements, always performing new behaviors."  -Jeffrey Kipnis

"If we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us- an autonomy our culture has taught us to label with the word "wild"- then we will at least think carefully about the uses to which we put them, and even ask if we should use them at all....”  -William Cronon

"Habitual modes of knowing and speaking, when hardened and blinkered, simply exclude the otherness that is internal to things, denying them the possibility of becoming, of further emerging and fulfilling their potential."  -James Corner

“Incompletion, along with distortion and excess are defining characteristics of the concept of monstrosity.  According to Canguilhem: ‘monstrosity is the accidental and conditional threat of incompletion or distortion in the formations of form’. In medieval and early Renaissance teratology, monsters generally appear as omens or portents, signs of forthcoming misfortune.” -Luke Morgan

“In his [Ambroise Pare (16th century Italy)] work, the monster becomes a sign of nature’s copiousness and variety, albeit not without a lingering sense of the monster as portentous.”  -Luke Morgan

According to today's ecologists... "Nature should be regarded as a landscape of patches, big and little, patches of all textures and colors, a patchwork quilt of living things, changing continually through time and space, responding to an unceasing barrage of perturbations.  The stitches in the quilt never hold for long."  -Donald Worster

"matter is the deposit of life, the static residues of actions done, choices made in the past.  Living memory is the past felt in the actualities of realities, of change."  -Henri Bergson (1944, from Corner)

.....Beth Meyer on contemporary sublime, change and imagination
.....Anita Berrezbeitia on unfolding