{"id":6981,"date":"2024-03-28T13:48:49","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T17:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/an-ecology-of-intimacies-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-03-28T13:48:49","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T17:48:49","slug":"an-ecology-of-intimacies-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/an-ecology-of-intimacies-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ecology of Intimacies \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment \u2014 a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself as projections give way to presence and complexes are composted into candid relation. <\/p>\n

In his slender and splendid book Twice Alive<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), poet, geologist, and translator Forrest Gander draws from the natural world a poetic \u201cecology of intimacies,\u201d reverencing lichens\u2019 \u201csupreme parsimony in drought\u201d and the \u201clong soft sarongs of moss\u201d as a way \u201cto recover the play of life itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

An epoch after Beatrix Potter uncovered how lichens reproduce<\/a> \u2014 asexually, scattering living matter from both partners to colonize a new habitat \u2014 Gander considers the \u201ctheoretical immortality\u201d of such propagation and reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn\u2019t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think of Einstein, who considered \u201ccombinatory play\u201d<\/a> the essence of creativity; I think of how love may be the supreme creative act, the way it remakes the self and the world between selves. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art from The Missing Piece Meets the Big O<\/em><\/a> by Shel Silverstein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In one of the love poems anchoring the books, Gander considers how in such combinatorics of intimacy the partners are \u201cnot fused, not bonded, but nested.\u201d Echoing the defiant question Mary McCarthy posed to Hannah Arendt<\/a> \u2014 What\u2019s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?<\/em> \u2014 he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

The reconfiguration is instantaneous
experience. It is being
itself<\/em>. But whose being now? Was I
endowed with some special pliability so
that becoming part of you I didn\u2019t pass
through my own nihilation? And what
does the death of who-you-were mean to me
except that now you are present, constantly.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Without you I survived and with you
I live again in a radical augmentation
of identity because we have
effaced our outer limits, because
we summoned each other. In you,
I cast my life beyond itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This radical augmentation of the self is indeed the great recompense of intimacy, not only interpersonal but ecological \u2014 how organisms entwine with one another to become a system of interdependence greater and more fully alive than its parts, how grasping this new way of being requires a new way of seeing. Gander writes in another poem:<\/p>\n

\n

To see what\u2019s there and not already
patterned by familiarity \u2014 for an unpredicted
whole is there, casting a pair of shadows, manipulating
its material, advancing, assembling enough
kinship that we call it life<\/em>, our life, what
is already many lives, the dimensions of
its magnitude veiled to us as we live it \u2014<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s poem \u201cKinship\u201d<\/a> and Shel Silverstein\u2019s timeless illustrated parable about the secret to nurturing relationships<\/a>, then revisit this meditation on lichens and the meaning of life<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment \u2014 a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}