W E L C O M E T O H E L L
They say you’re the way, the light, The light so blinding, Am I not to question . . . Your followers condemn me, your words are used to enslave me
Have you forsaken me. Hear my prayer.
—Me’shell Ndegeocello, “The Way”
BRITISH RAIL once announced that what was delaying their trains was the wrong kind of leaves. What is delaying a lovely marriage of “religion” with the biosphere is the wrong kind of Satanism. Christianity is all too often the wrong kind of Satanism. But before we get started on that, we need to talk about racism. And abortions. And Hell. While I’m remarking on getting started, if you haven’t read the exordium, please do so at once.
I knew it was going to be my last interview on Houston’s local radio station. It was early 2022 and I was going to say a Thing, and I would never be invited back. I was going to say a Thing about racism on a morning current-affairs show, and in particular I was going to say a Thing about the academic discipline called critical race theory. Critical race theory is a humanistic discipline, born as a branch of critical legal studies in the 1980s. The right now uses the phrase “critical race theory” (“CRT,” secret sauce: the word theory) to stand for teaching children anything they don’t like about racism and the history of slavery: any of it, lest it upset the delicate
sensibilities of white people. The right appropriated and repurposed the idea that certain terms and concepts are “offensive.” On the show, I ended by saying, “Look. The only truly offensive thing is five hundred years of slavery and its aftermath.” As a white person, and as a man, I am formally responsible for such things, whether or not I have myself ever said or done anything racist or patriarchal, which I’m sure I have. One of the antiracism trainings I’ve been to set me straight on that. The brilliant psychologist who ran it said, “Do you have a brain? And do you live in society? You have unconscious biases.” And then he proved it with an unforgettable exercise, “The Surgeon’s Dilemma”:
A father and his son are involved in a horrific car crash and the man died at the scene. But when the child arrived at the hospital and was rushed into the operating theater, the surgeon pulled away and said: “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.”
How can this be?1
(Read the endnote after you’ve wondered about it.)
One of the reasons no one likes it when someone mentions the unconscious is, they’re talking about something one can’t see, something invisible that affects behavior. That’s what structural racism does. So Reader, I do apologize: I said a bad word already, “unconscious.” I am naturally sure, Dear Reader, that you are totally transparent to yourself and it’s those other fools who aren’t reading this who need to watch out. I am accustomed to being shut down when mentioning an unconscious thing. The radio show invited me to talk about “teaching things that make us feel uncomfortable.” They mentioned critical race theory in the invitation; yet during the show the host insisted that the topic was definitely not critical race theory.
I want to say a thing that’s true about structural racism, misogyny, global warming, ecocide: It’s not your fault. Not personally. It’s not your fault. You’re not guilty. A few years ago I made some art about global warming. I made it with Justin Brice Guariglia: a road sign. I wanted to convey the right level of panic I deemed appropriate for an age in which gigantic Hellish “heat domes” appear over hundreds of miles of land, so novel and so disturbing that several days ago the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped predicting the one I’m in as I write this sentence would be going away in “One day and ten hours,” a phrase they used about ten times in a row before retiring it. For the road sign art, I could employ just eight characters per line. It was like composing a tiny haiku, and this is what I came up with:
WE ARE THE ASTEROID
That became the title of the artwork. The phrase makes me experience the kind of disorienting scale jump that is part of ecological awareness: here I am, writing this sentence in this cafe; here we are, humans hurtling toward Earth at twenty thousand miles per hour, impacting it like nuclear bombs. We Are the Asteroid appeared in the background of a lot of photos of the first Extinction Rebellion actions in London: Justin exhibited it behind Somerset House near Waterloo Bridge, ground zero of Extinction Rebellion’s action. Yet the second phrase on the sign was just as important:
YOU’RE NOT GUILTY
When it comes to structural things you’re not guilty: you are responsible. The fun thing about responsibility, rather than guilt, is that you can scale it. Responsibility is modal: there can be amounts of it. Think about global warming. Pacific Islanders: 0.00000001 percent responsible for global warming, if that. American white men: 99.9999999 percent responsible. Another fun thing about responsibility is that all it requires is for one to understand something. I understand someone is going to get hit by a car: I am responsible for getting them out of the way. I understand racism: I am responsible for fighting it.
It would be silly and arrogant to think one can end racism all by oneself, but one ought to behave in an antiracist way. How the right talks about race and the environment in terms of guilt and shame is religiose in the sense that it is scaled to individuals But structural racism isn’t about individuals. It’s about things like America’s Electoral College, a way of funneling votes so that slave owners could get a huge block vote based on how many slaves they owned. The old Constitution defined a slave for this purpose as “three fifths of a person,” one of the ghastliest concepts ever. This hardwired slavery artifact very nearly allowed Donald Trump to win the 2020 election. How come America is so rich? Because it accumulated a huge pile of money by forcing millions of humans to work for nothing. I have a really well-paid job because of that: William Marsh Rice, who founded Rice University, owned slaves. A statue of Rice in the front quad has been removed. It’s horrible to have to walk past compulsory art, otherwise known as architecture and statuary: put it in a museum or just destroy it; we have Google Images.
One of the most hopeful things that has happened on planet Earth in the last few years has been the rise of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are Earth-magnitude arousals of anger and love to fight two titanic forces that divide
humans from one another. And how we treat each other is how we treat the biosphere. Speciesism is keyed to racism and patriarchy. It’s huge. It’s the hugest thing. It is weirdly both daunting, and as easy as pie. It’s a time of shuddering panic and soul-collapsing grief, and yet it’s a time when one can see what is true and what is required without much effort.
Since I was twelve I have realized Blake could help me in many ways. I have taught him a lot, but hardly ever written on him; now I have drafted him as my guide to our hellish times. There are good reasons for this in the work of Blake himself. Blake is a very “dialogical” writer. He wrote a book “with” the Christian visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). I love The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . Who’s getting married? Why, Hell is getting married to Heaven: it’s in the title. Hell marrying Heaven is the inverse of ancient Greek drama. Greek drama was a kind of sacred yoga: yoga is Sanskrit for the “yoking” of the body and the divine. In Greek dramatic yoga, humans yoke themselves to the divine, hitting reset on civilization . . . maybe it’ll work this time. In Blake’s Hell, the sacred comes down off a high horse, a “horse of instruction,” Blake would say, saddlebags full of chalk and lesson plans (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 9). After a very messy divorce, the sacred is getting hitched again to the biosphere it comes out of. Hell isn’t really evil and punishment— that’s a demonic angel’s idea of Hell. Hell is the physical world. The human form grew out of the biosphere: a beauteous, disturbing, blissful thing made of lifeforms messily and incompletely glued together without rhyme or reason, without a telos, without the kind of watchmaking design that theories of evolution before Darwin insisted upon, turning God into a psychopath who was really good at making watches. Ironically, reducing the divine to the physical as Feuerbach might want means retaining the sense that the world
is a mere mechanism: the indifferent view of that psychopath persists. What we need to sense is how the divine suffuses the physical, as the weird presence of the footprints of its absence.
If the metaphysics of presence is an atomic bomb of an idea, the second most dangerous is the concept of telos, “end,” “point” or “final cause.” This is the idea that allowed the white supremacist Louis Agassiz to develop charming terms such as Caucasian that still appear on forms. If one puts a teleological system to work on a system that does not have a telos, the teleological system will go about erasing the other one. Capitalism, which has the telos of getting bigger and faster, intersects with the biosphere, which has no telos at all. The biosphere is a world in the sense of what I am “into,” without end in the sense of without a telos. Being in the world doesn’t mean being physically located by some kind of cosmic GPS. We have GPS because we are “into” the world. Being in the world means being into things. The worm is into the soil. The lily of the valley is into the morning sun. I agree with Blake: we do live in Hell, the demonic angel version of Hell. So how do we start to live in Hell, instead? How do we get the demonic angels off our backs? How do we start to live in a Hell of angelic demons? Of good people whose goodness is exactly a feel of demonic, of incomplete, of sin?
They used to call the ecological world “the economy of nature.”2 Both the economy of nature and the human economy are paper thin. People have begun to flee terrible conditions including global warming, so some demonic angels are building walls and ranting about “shithole countries.” 3 As I write this paragraph, the Supreme Court of the country that exported its KKK values to Hitler’s Germany is busy banning abortion, enforcing prayer in public and stopping the regulation of carbon dioxide. So how do we respond to global warming in opposition to fascism? Fasces (Latin) are bunches: in fascism one acquires meaning by belonging to a bunch, a gang. Fascism is a
bunch of demonic angels imposing their horrible morality in the form of terrible violence. Their motto is, “Be the evil that you see in the world”: they call this “salvation”; many call it Christianity. If the demonic angel Lucifer had fantasized about a religion that would fuck up Earth the most, he couldn’t have done better.4 Demonic angels think Earth ought to burn to a cinder so that Jesus Christ can return and execute numerous enemies. Jesus was not hostile to the physical realm. He gave his disciples bread and wine, which last time I checked were made from things one can find in a biosphere such as water and grapes and wheat and bacteria. He said these things from the biosphere were his body and blood. How much more ecology do you want in a savior of humankind?
Buddha touched the Earth when he realized he was enlightened. Buddha spent a week thanking the tree in whose shade he had been sitting; then he preached what he had discovered to some deer who crossed his path. It started when an old woman gave him a bowl of rice pudding: an elderly woman, a wonderful symbol of the biosphere. After prolonged yogic starving and burning, it must have been incredible to eat that sweet milky sticky stuff. I blame Buddhism on cholesterol. For six months in 2011, I ate as little cholesterol as I could, as I had a high amount of “bad” cholesterol. Cholesterol is an essential substance: it binds one’s cell walls together; it goes in deep. After a few months, I felt sick and vomited stuff that looked like coffee grounds. So, one day, I ate some fish soup. I had driven to Bodega Bay where Hitchcock filmed The Birds. I will never forget that soup, full of molten fats. I swallowed a spoonful and glimpsed what Prince Siddhartha might have felt when he ate that rice pudding: “Oh my God: the physical world! Pleasure! This is the pathway!”
In Tantric Buddhism, one finds the “subtle body” where the enlightenment lives via the gross body. The gross body which is the
miracle. Christianity has a strong Tantric flavor: consider the doctrine about the resurrection of the body, not the rebooting of the soul, but the resurrection of the actual physical body. Why would that doctrine hold if the point was to burn the biosphere to a cinder? Why else would Jesus have been so keen for Mary Magdalene (perhaps) to anoint him and perhaps to have been his consort, (perhaps) the disciple “he loved” in a sexual way (John 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20)?5 Why else would Jesus have been doodling with a stick on the sand while a group of people were about to stone Mary Magdalene? They told him about it. “What,” he probably said. “What the fuck is it now?”
“Well, we’re going to stone this woman for adultery, and rightly so, don’t you think—I mean we want to look as good as possible to the bearded heavenly psychopath.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. OK, then, go right ahead. Knock yourselves out. Just make sure that he who is without sin is the first one to chuck a rock at her” (John 8:1–11, heavily paraphrased). What Jesus says is right up there, and for the same reasons, with Gandhi talking to the journalist when he got off the boat:
“What do you think of Western civilization, Mister Gandhi?”
“I think it would be a very good idea.”
I bet Jesus and Gandhi both spoke those lines really quietly, with threatening gentleness: the quietness that allows the physicality of the physical to be audible. The quietness of the universe is the loudest thing about it. “Gnostic” scriptures (Gnostic is a pejorative term, like anarchist) often call God the Silence. I love that. Silence is an - ence, a feel, not nothing at all. James Strachey was aiming for it when he used the word quiescence to describe “the inorganic world” in his translation of Freud.6 What is best about the sacred is its immanence to the physical world, and what is worst about religion are its horrified and violent attempts to achieve escape velocity from
this immanence. If Christianity was not about the physical world, why would the marriage liturgy contain the vow With my body I thee worship? Worshipping my beloved with my body means not with words considered as things that transcend that body, or some abstract idea of “action,” or with pious feelings, but with my actual “nasty” beautiful body, “dirty” as in made of dirt, the stuff of the Earth that God makes humans from.
When I was seven years old, my dad put a huge print of Blake’s The Ancient of Days on the beautiful marble fireplace he had installed in my childhood home in Raynes Park, London. I took that print to Oxford, solid as a rock, printed on a slab of stiff wood. I wondered what it meant, this titanic being measuring the Universe with a pair of compasses, painted in a Hellish fiery chiaroscuro, befitting Dad’s tyrannically dramatic flair. Was he God? Was he some kind of demon? I visited the Tate Gallery, room seven, a smoked glass paradise in the middle of the ground floor, where the Blake paintings were. I visited almost every week from the ages of thirteen to eighteen. I loved Blake so much I wouldn’t let myself write about him for my doctoral dissertation. Whenever I thought to try, I would formulate a list of amazing quotations prefaced by a “Check this out!” My inhibition around talking intellectually about this sacred, blazing artist of liberation was immense. There was no way I was going to slime this guy with my analytical mind. I’ve been carrying these feelings around for almost all my life, from age seven.
Sacred Blake feelings, activate! This is not a book “about” Blake, but a book “with” Blake. Blake is a companion for our age: a little person in the Regency England scheme of things, full of huge feelings and thoughts about the terrible slavery and oppression and paranoia and threat that marked his time. It was the first ever “war on Terror,” “terrorist” being someone who supported the French terror. Bail was suspended; meeting in groups of three or more people
in the street was considered a potentially treasonous political meeting. William Wordsworth and Coleridge got spied on for putting profound thoughts and feelings into the mouths of people with learning disabilities and impoverished women, and Percy Shelley got spied on for floating bottles full of anti-imperialist propaganda down the Thames. Blake nearly got into big trouble for muttering “Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves” within earshot of a soldier. Blake was precarious, a genius jobbing illustrator straining to infuse it all with burning visions of a better world, without the privilege and power of class and education.
Dad resembled Blake: a jobbing violinist who had become the go-to session player for the psychedelic and progressive rock bands of the late sixties and seventies. I used to hear him downstairs while waking on a Saturday morning, noodling around next to that Blake print. Little did I know that he was practicing the violin solo for King Crimson’s “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 1.” 7 As he rolled another of the infinite cigarettes he smoked in front of me and I choked with incipient asthma, the way Dad furrowed his brow reminded me of The Ancient of Days. When I was twelve, Dad got me a Walkman (well, a Sanyo version); the first cassette he gave me was André Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra playing Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony. On the cover was a drawing called Early Morning by Samuel Palmer, a dear friend of William Blake. I listened to it over and over and over, including on the District Line to Victoria, the Victoria Line to Pimlico, up that slope, around the corner, there’s Battersea Power Station opposite the Tate, here’s what a security guard helpfully called “Blake’s Seven” (a sci-fi show I loved), room seven, the Blake room, the hushed smoked glass quiet, the burning visions, that Samuel Palmer. I’m writing this and listening to something over and over. It’s by Laura Mvula, my very favorite musician of these days, and it’s called
“Before the Dawn.” Imagine Afrofuturist Vaughan Williams from space singing in a church as large as the Andromeda Galaxy in a choir made of flames of joy to an Earth in pain:
All I wanted was to feel love
Something I never knew the meaning of Wasn’t ready to go on alone
I looked up and everything around me was gone
I’ve been praying on the inside
For a sign on the outside
I’ve been praying on the inside
For a sign on the outside
Don’t doubt for too long
It’s the darkest before the dawn
Remember the night comes before the dawn
Remember the night comes before the dawn
Remember the night comes before the dawn.8
I want this book to feel how Mvula sounds. This is a moment at which even privileged white men can have the fun of experiencing the fiery furnace they have been tossing everyone else into for hundreds of years. An awful lot of ecological writing by white guys is really just that. How many seconds do we have for self-pity? At a guess, none. How we treat each other as human beings is how we treat nonhuman beings.
I cannot put it better than Denise Ferreira da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race: any subject-object duality implies a master-slave duality. As da Silva puts it most succinctly: “that which falls prey to Reason by becoming its object has no place in the realm of
Freedom.” 9 This is why class categorically does not trump race. I say trump for a reason. Right after Trump was elected president of the USA in 2016, all of American media seemed to band together in a neofascist chorus of “forget feminism and antiracism and listen to disaffected workers” who by implication were disgruntled in part because of feminism and antiracism and . . . Class doesn’t eat race up like Pac Man. “Stop doing identity politics” is a terrible idea, terribly phrased. “A worker who happens to be Black” is not right at all, because slavery is the template for being a worker as such, and slavery defines the racist concept of Blackness. Even when I think I have gotten rid of the transparent “Man” underneath appearances, “Man” as concocted by the colonial European Enlightenment, the way I have done so might be in the key of this very transparency. The master-slave duality is foundational to the age that ended up developing industrial capitalism and fossil fuels. Net conclusion: race and gender are what split the left. Do not forget about them: act in such a way that race and gender issues are front and center. Do not listen to anyone on the left who says that “woke” is the problem. Trump seized power with divide-andconquer tactics, enabled by Russian agents and Cambridge Analytica, who had beta tested their algorithms on Jamaica. All that had to happen was for enough people not to vote for Hillary Clinton. We’re never going to be allies of spiders and mountains if we’re not allies of one another. Blake was all about forming alliances: his image of the future world is of greater human creativity and love. Blake calls it Jerusalem , a sacred city, and declares it a “fourfold” world, unlike the threefold world of sexual love, the twofold world of breeding, or the onefold world of being a tyrant. There are more complex possibilities for more complex relationships in a world where there are four things rather than three. Imagine how many ways one can connect four dots together as opposed to three.
Moreover, the number four might be a starter solution for groups of beings that aren’t bound together because they’re the “same.” Imagine four things, quite random things, and one of them may well seem “out of place.” It might be easier to picture relationships between three things, and definitely easier with two— and unnecessary with one. Four randomly placed dots might not make a square, or even a rhomboid. Four, at least in a figurative sense, might be a starter solution for diversity. The future world is a diverse world, says Blake, a city with inhabitants who are by definition citizens. Diversity here could include biodiversity. Thinking of other lifeforms as citizens would be much better then thinking of them as inhabiting a separate world where love and mercy do not apply, which we can spectate on the Nature Channel. And talking of allies, there’s that issue of scalability again. Antiracism is scalable because racism is planet scale.
We know what to do— stop burning carbon—but we aren’t really doing it. One reason is, we can’t imagine living on a planet very well. We’ve all seen Earth from space, the “Blue Marble” photographs. But evidently that didn’t do the trick, as good an idea as that was of Stewart Brand’s. “What is now proved was once, only imagin’d,” as Blake said (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , plate 8), and my job as a humanities scholar is to “only imagine” things. If we can’t “imagine” Earth very well, ecological politics won’t be “proved.” One can imagine acting on many scales and one can imagine actions at planet scale not stepping all over actions at smaller scales. Some ways of imagining Earth such as the Blue Marble flatly negate my neighborhood, my hometown, my country . . . One gang gets rid of another, in accord with the logic of fascism.
The USA exports a lot—jeans, eugenics, T-shirts, jazz, the notion of “cool” as opposed to the European royalist idea of “great.” Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are some of the best American exports,
in every sense. These movements are the most encouraging signs of something progressive in the world today, and both movements connect the dots between individual, local, national, and planetary scales. Far from simply modeling how to act at Earth magnitude in a good way, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are key to producing an ecologically just world: as Carla Lonzi puts it, talking of feminism, “the women’s movement is not only international, but planetary.”10
Or one can form ecological movements that are racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic . . . The Nazi party passed animal rights and forest protection laws in Germany. It makes perfect sense: seeing oneself as the ultimate subject, the Ubermensch, means to be in charge of all those objects, the trees and the “animals.” Nazi Germany wanted to be Germany at planet scale, but only at the expense of other humans. Hitler’s dog Blondi looked nonhuman enough for Hitler to care, at the expense of everyone whom Nazi ideology deemed subhuman, inhuman, to be treated worse than an “animal.”
“Animal” is one of those dangerous Aristotelian words, a record-store label for the telos of some lifeforms: tragedies make one cry, animals move, vegetables just sit there, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” “is not country music” (so they said) . . .11 Telos, destiny, point, meaning: telos is a brutal sorting algorithm. It is quite amazing how meaning can erase meaningfulness in its pursuit of destiny.
“Animals” and forests are things the ultra-right can care about in an intrinsically racist way. There is a long history of associations between environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and white supremacy. Many fascist groups in the USA have roots in conspiracytheory-laden hostility to “world government” (anti-Semitic code), which can in turn be traced to hostility to “Agenda 21.” That is a paragraph in the document that the United Nations Earth Summit produced in 1991. The Earth Summit was the first of its kind.12 The
USA refused to sign: the Bush administration objected to Agenda 21, which states that nations should cooperate to help biodiversity to flourish; Pope Francis directly cites it in his ecological encyclical Laudato Si’ (paragraph 167). Fascist hostility overlaps with mainstream American hostility. Spiritual issues are often distorted and alienated biological issues. Spiritual issues have to do with our physical being as lifeforms who live in a biosphere. Kindness, mercy, compassion—these are qualities that evolved, not things that make us different from other lifeforms.13 Evolution is by no means a realm of merciless competition: that’s called capitalism, and it gets projected onto the biosphere to justify capitalism’s “natural” continuance. Evolution is a realm of symbiosis, biodiversity, cooperation . . . and a wonderfully creative realm too, a realm where random genetic mutation, free-floating beauty, and accidental symbiosis drive evolution. New things can happen. We don’t live in a mechanical world with a purpose but in a gorgeously pointless world, as pointless as all the reasons one can think of to be happy. As my Buddhist meditation teacher likes to say, Be happy for no reason 14 Love is an unreasonable thing; so is beauty. When Blake talked about the oppressive powers of “nature” he was talking about the oppressive powers of human ideology, including religion, which includes scientism, a religion of science that reduces things to their parts and so cannot explain what it likes to call altruism. Altruism was born to die in the game space of selfishness. How can one possibly be other-oriented, since even DNA is selfish? “Altruism” must be selfishness at a species or population or longer-term scale, DNA’s way of maintaining itself in the longer run and in the bigger picture. But genetic mutation is random; sexual display has no goal other than sheer beauty; symbiosis is a matter of pure contingency. These are the truly sacred aspects of our Earth.
Blake lived during the French and Haitian and American (and so on) revolutions, a time of immense political oppression in England. This is very much how it feels to live right now. Paranoia and despair hang heavy on one, if one has a pulse. Or as Blake put it, “Hungry clouds swag on the deep” (Marriage, “The Argument,” plate 2, line 2). It is weird how Trump looks exactly like Blake’s king, George III. Living on Trump time was what Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time,” a slow awful drag, a thick fog that gets into one’s house and into one’s brain.15 When one is on someone else’s time, it’s called oppression. How to smile in Hell, rather than scream: not a sardonic grin, but a real smile . . . that is the question.
“What a massive relief to have another book about the biggest disasters of our age from the hilarious, wise, and brilliant Timothy Morton. Wild and free, Tim’s ideas give me hope.”
— —Laauriie A Anddersson n
“Timothy Morton journeys with the restless and radical spirit of William Blake through Hell, seeking synthesis and reconciliation between the methods of science and the spirit of religion. Signaling to us through the flames of their own personal hell, Morton shapes a space where we—freed from Cartesian subjectivity and the demands of old, vengeful gods—may glimpse the prospect of a new Jerusalem, one built on love.”
—DDavvid Dorrelll, w writter, curratoor, c coffounndeer o of LOOVEE, m memmber o of M/A//R/R/S
“Hell is an ecstatic sermon beamed in from another dimension, one far stranger and more human than our own. I often think that dimension is where Timothy Morton’s consciousness resides, and we are so very lucky for it.”
— —Laurra H Huddsonn, joourrnallist, , edditoor, w writter
“Reading Timothy Morton is something between watching a gifted comedian and experiencing a religious conversion. This book is classic Morton, and it’s more. It’s William Blake’s ‘mental fight’ reimagined for our contemporary world. It’s religion reloaded after a major born-again experience (yep), British colonialism, ecological catastrophe, and the efflorescence of diversity on every racial, sexual, and gender level one can imagine (and then some). Hell is a trip, and a flip. Get ready. You probably already are.”
—
—Jeffreey J J. K Kripal, autthor of f Hoow to T Thinnk I Impposssibbly: Aboout Souuls, UFFOss, Tiimee, B Belieef, a and d Evveryythhing g Else
TIMOOTHHY M MORRTOON is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, and Olafur Eliasson.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky