Voicecraft Dispatch: Three Creations
A dialogue with Tyson Yunkaporta, tickets to Voicecraft Live III, and a recommendation for a book authored by Cadell Last.
Wishing you well on the journey. It sure is a thing.
As you receive this letter I’ll be somewhere on the way to a scorched spot in the dust for a big Aussie doof: Esoteric 2023.
Last year I filmed a talk there, and if all goes to plan I’ll be doing the same on Sunday evening. Psychedelic philosophy round 2. I’m looking forward to it. A few doorways before then though.
This is a letter to share three main things: an event, a conversation, and a recommendation.
The event.
First up is a signal to Voicecraft Live III: The Future of Psychedelics in Australia. Tickets are available here. It takes place on Friday evening 31st Match.
The conversation.
Next up is a unique conversation, filmed in Melbourne with author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World, with Tyson Yunkaporta. I hope more will follow. For anyone with a sincere interest in the cultivation of culture-making networks, and the predicament of sharing voice across a number of increasingly alien membranes, this is worth a watch (likely only released on YouTube).
I think the majority of those who do listen will walk away with a mixed and different sense of the various patterns in play — different from each other, from me, from Tyson. It reminds me a bit of an interaction I had with Gabor Maté in 2018 for the particular reason that the dynamical charge in play is ripe to animate perceptual structures differently. It’s more about context than content.
I’m sharing it in the spirit I touch on at the beginning of the convo — the spirit this project has always endeavoured to honour: known once as a calling forth and invitation to participate in transformative conversations, with a dedication to the deep integrity of that process. It’s a piece I was tempted to share only privately, and as the deep theme in play itself is the relation between culture-making and membranes, with a good bit of boundary checking, it’s no wonder. For what it’s worth, and it may be worth little to very little in the context of public internet, I suggest keeping in liminal mind.
The book.
Finally, and happily, I’d like to share the release of a powerful piece of writing by Cadell Last in the form of his new book Systems & Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science and Philosophy.
You can read a free preview of the book to sense if it’s right for you (it continues with similar tenor, energy, and quality), and find links to purchase here.
Cadell invited me to read the book and share some words by way of endorsement. I did share a much shorter one too.. but the longer one made it in.
So here it is:
“I see here a brilliant book. I am attracted to its boldness and breadth of clarity, and find in it a depth of metabolisation that speaks to an intensity of will, and a hope without ignorance of tragedy or historical-systemic conditionality.
It reads to me like a friend speaking well on something I care about—something of a pattern I see too. It’s a pattern shared from many angles, illuminated by living dyads of historical tension, and a through-line of argument that remains in touch even as vast domains of canonical thought forms are brought into focus and contextualised in ways that are vital and fresh. As I read I find myself affirming, learning, and crucially: returning in address to wondering tensions and absences that stir active thought toward further participation in mystery.
As a philosopher who navigates similar wave-sets of contemplation as the author, reading this work sometimes feels as if we’ve each lived fragments of the same memory. But given unique knowings of the lifeworld—steeped in difference alongside a breadth and depth of historical as well as just so phenomenal sameness, even that ‘shared same’ memory would be independently perceived and interpreted by each of us. The living prisms (or re-animate prisons) of our perceptions coloured and pulled, in tension this way and that, by logics and narratives and significances as dispositions-to-awareness which cannot but combine to know the knowing just some bit uniquely. A song played once but heard differently, begetting different repetitions in response. Or if you prefer: a note tuned to a pitch that never quite the same beckons for two.
For this is a book about living and dying, struggling and overcoming, departing and returning, from the finite-absolute through the infinite-conditioned. Or perhaps, from the infinite relativity through finite point of no return as always-already departed: the nowhere of now and here, grappling with the real of systems which subject the subject. And that matters because this book — despite giving so much to the reader, sharing with so much boldness of clarity — does not do all the work for you.
For of course how could it? It’s a book meant to be well met. And it shares liberally nutrient-rich food, in friendship. So I recommend you meet it with openness to such: as a two way process. And thereby value the worth of your own transformative undergoing. Lest, that is, this book becomes mere system for your subject. The reality is the work is more, if its text be known and fulfilled as invitation to real address. For when a friend speaks well on something you care about, it’s a good idea to accept its gift like a bridge to the future. One that carries you like a current: opening to, and inviting thereby, fresh discernment on the way beyond..”
With gratitude for your time.
Discernment on the Way