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baldingape 's review for:
Common Ground
by Rob Cowen
Rob Cowen weaves non-fiction in with fiction like a bramble bush left to its own devices. No, I hate that I said that, 'it's own devices' isn't that another way of keeping 'humans' in the bubble of being 'other?' No I mean, a bramble left without the touch of too many human hands and tools.
'Everything changes continuously, of course, nature is perpetual flux, but we are good at suppressing uncomfortable reminders of the greater cycles.'
Yea, and sometimes this is why I hold a visceral hatred that completely contradicts my main interests. I'm having one of those days today as a matter of fact, yet just yesterday and the day before I was sitting comfortable and reasonably happy with the thing we call 'nature' and therefore happy with my own existence and lack of existence into the future. And boy am I pissed that my brain dares change its state, yet I being nature too, this is just a natural change in whatever is going on inside my body hormones, less dopamine, whatever it is causing the 'meh I can't be bothered' mood of today. It's a season inside my own body, which is in sync with the weather of the day. My thoughts and moods a tangle of brambles I'm always crawling my way through.
I loved this quote when I first read it, today I'm grumpy, so I will go with what I thought when I first read this, 'Clocks are wound to the rhythms of modern anthropocentric existence: The nine to five grind, career trajectories, the working week..........pension plans, retirement.' and here is the best bit, 'It's how the adverts metronome our lives.' pg4 Yea. And how fake are those fucking adverts. Sometimes hearing and seeing adverts makes me feel nausea. It's a metronome in sync with our emptiness, trying to fulfil something that cant be fulfilled.
'Nature isn't just some remote mountain or protected park. It is all around us. It is in us. It is us.' pg 12
'Birds camp by feeders like refugees around cooking fires, hunched and hungry,' pg 33
At first I found this line comical because of the image it provoked in my head, and I enjoyed it. Then I thought about it some more and...' refugees' is an apt word. We've taken up so much space aren't they a bit like refugees?
Speaking of a predator vs prey scenario, he writes,
'The moment of the strike is lost in the dwarf wheat but I watch as he immediately bobs his head in a series of flinging violent blows. My heart is in my throat. Then after a minute, the owl looks around nonchalantly and rises, carrying off the crumpled grey ball of a baby rabbit. A life ended before it has begun; A stomach fed. All while the pheasant and the Robins continue with their idle chit-chatting. Nothing sees; nothing cares. The hunt, the death, all of it seems so shockingly routine.' pg 74.
And that is the ultimate thing we shield ourselves away from, the routine of death. It's the price of our 'humanness' too aware for our own good. Or maybe it's the other way around, maybe non-human animals know something we don't. Come to think of it, they do. They know exactly what is stated here, death is as routine as life is.
'The problem with 'nature': it is ambivalent to what makes humans tick. And yet it is what makes us tick. The two can be hard to reconcile sometimes' pg 78 Sometimes? I'd say all the time.
On pg 80 he talks about being in the waiting room of a hospital with his wife, noting the daily modern comforts contrasting with the world outside. And notes 'we forget, but this is nature too.'
Yes, even all our modern reassurances of comfort are nature too, the hands that made those things belonged to a type of ape, the thing we all are, humans. If the human hand makes a thing why do we not also call it natural? Now there is a tangled bush we could wrestle with all day!
This book serves as a reminder of our 'common ground' with the rest of the wildlife out there. We're not as different as we like to make out, but we are a damned force to reckoned with, and we need to acknowledge that and for our own sakes as well as the wildlife we need to remember our common ground with all those other parts of nature that aren't 'human centric' in fact it would be very anti human-centric to continue to deny our commonalities for we depend on all those others forms of life!
'Everything changes continuously, of course, nature is perpetual flux, but we are good at suppressing uncomfortable reminders of the greater cycles.'
Yea, and sometimes this is why I hold a visceral hatred that completely contradicts my main interests. I'm having one of those days today as a matter of fact, yet just yesterday and the day before I was sitting comfortable and reasonably happy with the thing we call 'nature' and therefore happy with my own existence and lack of existence into the future. And boy am I pissed that my brain dares change its state, yet I being nature too, this is just a natural change in whatever is going on inside my body hormones, less dopamine, whatever it is causing the 'meh I can't be bothered' mood of today. It's a season inside my own body, which is in sync with the weather of the day. My thoughts and moods a tangle of brambles I'm always crawling my way through.
I loved this quote when I first read it, today I'm grumpy, so I will go with what I thought when I first read this, 'Clocks are wound to the rhythms of modern anthropocentric existence: The nine to five grind, career trajectories, the working week..........pension plans, retirement.' and here is the best bit, 'It's how the adverts metronome our lives.' pg4 Yea. And how fake are those fucking adverts. Sometimes hearing and seeing adverts makes me feel nausea. It's a metronome in sync with our emptiness, trying to fulfil something that cant be fulfilled.
'Nature isn't just some remote mountain or protected park. It is all around us. It is in us. It is us.' pg 12
'Birds camp by feeders like refugees around cooking fires, hunched and hungry,' pg 33
At first I found this line comical because of the image it provoked in my head, and I enjoyed it. Then I thought about it some more and...' refugees' is an apt word. We've taken up so much space aren't they a bit like refugees?
Speaking of a predator vs prey scenario, he writes,
'The moment of the strike is lost in the dwarf wheat but I watch as he immediately bobs his head in a series of flinging violent blows. My heart is in my throat. Then after a minute, the owl looks around nonchalantly and rises, carrying off the crumpled grey ball of a baby rabbit. A life ended before it has begun; A stomach fed. All while the pheasant and the Robins continue with their idle chit-chatting. Nothing sees; nothing cares. The hunt, the death, all of it seems so shockingly routine.' pg 74.
And that is the ultimate thing we shield ourselves away from, the routine of death. It's the price of our 'humanness' too aware for our own good. Or maybe it's the other way around, maybe non-human animals know something we don't. Come to think of it, they do. They know exactly what is stated here, death is as routine as life is.
'The problem with 'nature': it is ambivalent to what makes humans tick. And yet it is what makes us tick. The two can be hard to reconcile sometimes' pg 78 Sometimes? I'd say all the time.
On pg 80 he talks about being in the waiting room of a hospital with his wife, noting the daily modern comforts contrasting with the world outside. And notes 'we forget, but this is nature too.'
Yes, even all our modern reassurances of comfort are nature too, the hands that made those things belonged to a type of ape, the thing we all are, humans. If the human hand makes a thing why do we not also call it natural? Now there is a tangled bush we could wrestle with all day!
This book serves as a reminder of our 'common ground' with the rest of the wildlife out there. We're not as different as we like to make out, but we are a damned force to reckoned with, and we need to acknowledge that and for our own sakes as well as the wildlife we need to remember our common ground with all those other parts of nature that aren't 'human centric' in fact it would be very anti human-centric to continue to deny our commonalities for we depend on all those others forms of life!