Absence has the flavor of meaning
but not the force
a quiet wind speaks
a clear draught of unspoken frequencies
reverberating in chambers and rivulets
of undiluted soul
the undeniable something
with no name and no braking
On Friday, October 11, 2013, I had the privilege of organizing and participating in Citizens Climate Lobby’s first hosted panel at the World Bank Civil Society Forum. We were there to deliver the message of CCL’s humanizing and consequential work, and the particular mode of stakeholder-centered carbon pricing legislation that is most likely to allow us to solve the climate crisis.
Continue reading “Living the Paradigm Shift”
From the opening chapter of Global Academe: Engaging Intellectual Discourse, published January 31, 2012, by Palgrave Macmillan:
In the Marketplace of Illusion: The Public Intellectual in a Landscape of Mediated Humanness.
The question of what role the intellectual should play in society has evolved into an automatic controversy that summons the simplest answers and the most entrenched prejudices. The passion for showing off democratic tendencies while not devoting adequate energies to their exercise has led to an ingrained hostility toward successful thinkers who work to channel their energies into the production of analyses that might make evident the subtle truths the rest of us are living, that—by extension—means they issue to us an ethical summons, a call, a reminder of the commonness and the humanness of our special human frailties, of our obligations and of what would constitute a better social expression of our selfhood. […]
The full and integrated self must be successfully concrete and also successfully intangible, an abstract potential actualization, filtration, flirtation or implementation matrix, a complex of complexes, a visionary accomplice capable of honest self-seeing and authentic self-propagation. “Conscious reflection is the doubling over of this dynamic abstraction on itself. The order of connection of such dynamic abstractions among themselves, on a level specific to them, is called mind” (Massumi 32). But how can one live the details, the would-be facts of the everyday, and also face the haunting existential crisis of coming to grips with the self as an insubstantial substance, the mind as a groundless ground? […]
Continue reading “In the Marketplace of Illusion (book chapter)”
Recuerdo, o quisiera recordar, como te fuiste con la inocencia volando a tu alrededor en trapos medio rotos y quemados por la duda. No viene claro. No se resuelve en la vitrina de mi añoranza. Ese momento no era momento, sino milenio comprimido, catedral andina y cómplice de no sé que actor indescifrable. Cifra y … Continue reading Cifra y motor
The Economics of Carbon Pricing & the Transition to Clean, Renewable Fuels (A Report for Citizens Climate Lobby) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Putting a price on carbon creates a contextual incentive for diversification and innovation in the energy economy. When Germany shifted its tax-base from income to energy, it spurred a decade of aggressive public and private … Continue reading Building a Green Economy
“The boat’s slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious.” — Joseph Brodsky
& you were with me
strong evanescent
looming up from dreamplay
with solid destination
nesting sable in your gaze
your voice alone in the humid sphere of competing midnights ancient unswerving clarion ready to unravel the monsoon or burn away its floods with a whisper Continue reading Your Voice Alone
As a blue-fire sun came up over the sea, milky and iridescent, there was no sound, there were no motorized noises, the world was sleeping and nothing moved but the water and the sun. The time was not important, but the thick of atmosphere and the damp of unknowing was. Jitters at the cold of morning. Trembling at what could not be said. Lydia moved to make something fluid of her anxiety. Always.
She wanted to be known as someone who knew herself well and was comfortable with that, because she did and she was, but she was never comfortable with the capacity of other people to see these aspects of herself clearly. Too much at stake, she would say. One came to think: too much at stake to take a chance on being misunderstood. But why? Why at every moment was so much at stake? I loved this way of concentrating universal truths and global risk into the idea of what another might hear.
Una colección de fotos, de ambiente, de textura, de la materia prima sensual de la vida de cada día, Contraluz explora el potencial de acercarse a los significados escondidos a través del proceso de mirar. Este libro es una antología de las obras fotográficas del autor Joseph Robertson, plasmadas en cálidos matices dúo-tonales, buscando el momento del gesto, el reflejo de la luz, la forma de las varias nadas que se juntan para hacer un tejido de pedagogía espiritual y complejidad animal, en el foro de lo cotidiano. La diversidad de la geografía, ante los procesos minúsculos de pasar de un instante a otro, de un mundo a otro, de un sueño a otro, convencido de que tiene que haber detrás algunas verdades incorruptas…
Dejeuner sur l’herbe : Hampstead Heath, London
Continue reading “Contraluz : un estudio en luz, sombra, forma y metáfora”
The Poet Economist 