The Quarantine Tapes

“I miss the sanity and the kind of routineness of the world, the world in which the news is just something that happens faraway and is very predictable. The news has been way too present.”

“We are not in debt because we live beyond our means. We are indebted because we are denied the means to live.”

“I always bridle a little against it because [the anthropocene] means “the age of man” or “the age of humans” and there’s sort of this flattening in that terminology that sort of ascribes the marks that we’ve left on this planet to humanness, as opposed to a certain way of being human that is not the way most people have been humans throughout history. In fact, it’s not the way most people are humans even now. It’s a particular kind of dominance-based, extractive-based capitalist way of being that sees the earth as a machine that has left its mark in such a damaging way, and that is now called the anthropocene.”

“How is it that a corporation has taken over the prosecutorial power of our government to go after the lawyer who held it accountable for the worst environmental disaster in world history? We need to wake up to this.”

“An ideal for me, as an artist, is to sort of be able to identify with points of view without espousing them myself.”

“I’m in a negotiation against my grief a lot of the time...and sometimes the grief will back off and other times it will say, “Oh no, we’re doing this right now” and I’ve learned [to] pull the car over and now you just have to let it have its way with you.”

“I don't know what the plants say, because we have not yet managed to decode the reverse dialogue, but I know that each of them, when they have been there attending that concert, will have undergone a change in their vital strategy in some way, by being at that concert.”

“No sé lo que dicen las plantas, porque todavía el diálogo inverso no lo hemos conseguido decodificar, pero sé que cada una de ellas, cuando han estado allí asistiendo a ese concierto, habrá sufrido un cambio en su estrategia vital de alguna forma, al estar en ese concierto.”

“We’re all called in our human being-ness to embody what a warrior embodies, and that’s someone who’s awake and is listening and is moving through the world listening.”

“I think embarrassment is human. We, as Americans, need to come to terms with the fact that we’re always going to have something to be embarrassed for. We have leaders who do embarrass us, even when we like them.”

“Don’t you ever forget that love made you. That’s a really important fact for me as a poet of my time in this world today.”