Timothy Morton

Yet such a future, the open future, has become taboo.

Because it is real, yet beyond concept.

Because it is weird.

Art is thought from the future. Thought we cannot explicitly think at present. Thought we may not think or speak at all

I take present to mean for the last twelve thousand years. A butterfly kiss of geological time

The women] were the most interesting of this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature…. A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin…and assimilated herself with it

appears as if she were a piece of a gigantic device, yet she also as a human individual, exemplifying a weird contradiction between being and appearing

A twelve-thousand-year structure, a structure that seems so real we call it Nature. The slowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devise

What is dark ecology?4 It is ecological awareness, dark-depressing. Yet ecological awareness is also dark-uncanny

Dark Ecology is going to argue that appearance is always strange. We discern yet another pathway, a route between the term weird and the term faerie.10 Faerie also comes from a word for fate and suggests a “supernatural” illusion-like magical appearance as well as a kind of “unearthly” realm:

weird << urth (Norse) = Norn = twisting fate = fatum (Latin) >> fay >> faerie

Such unintended consequences are weirdly weird in the sense that they are uncanny, unexpected fallout from the myth of progress: for every seeming forward motion of the drill bit there is a backward gyration, an asymmetrical contrary motion

Ecological awareness is weird: it has a twisted, looping form. Since there is no limit to the scope of ecological beings (biosphere, solar system), we can infer that all things have a loop form. Ecological awareness is a loop because human interference has a loop form, because ecological and biological systems are loops. And ultimately this is because to exist at all is to assume the form of a loop. The loop form of beings means we live in a universe of finitude and fragility, a world in which objects are suffused with and surrounded by mysterious hermeneutical clouds of unknowing.

Ecognostic jigsaws are never complete