Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush”) is a novel-poem hybrid that resists traditional Western storytelling and brings forth Anishinaabe perspectives, language, and relational worldviews. Rather than following a conventional format, the book unfolds through poetic fragments and interconnected voices that together become a meditation on identity, land, community, and colonial/ Western and patriarchal encounter.  

At the heart of the book is Mashkawaji — a narrator who lies frozen in ice and reflects on memory, disconnection, and transformation. From this suspended place, Mashkawaji introduces a chorus of seven characters, each of whom embodies a different part of themself:

• Akiwenzii (their will)

• Ninaatig (their lungs, embodied as a maple tree)

• Mindimooyenh (their conscience)

• Sabe (their marrow)

• Adik (their nervous system, a caribou)

• Asin (their eyes and ears)

• Lucy (their brain)  

These beings — part human, part nonhuman — strive to engage with both the unnatural settler world (full of things like branded coffee mugs and disposable consumer goods) and the natural world that is increasingly constrained by hierarchical property systems. 

One theme is how separation from land and relational ways of knowing alienates us from deep parts of ourselves.  

The narrative responds to and challenges settler literature, especially Susanna Moodie’s 19th-century memoir Roughing It in the Bush. The author, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, reclaims the term Noopiming and in this book expresses what it means to be in the bush from an Indigenous standpoint — alive with spirits, ancestors, kin, land, and reciprocal relations rather than wilderness to be conquered.  

This book is a mosaic of moments — humorous, lyrical, political, and reflective — a relational field of healing, resistance, and reimagined futures grounded in Anishinaabe cosmologies and lived experience.  

Excerpts from Noopiming, the cure for white ladies.

…..trust replaces critique, examination and interrogation.

even though their truths are their own, not mine. 

The tenderness is gone, only relentless irritation remains, and staying becomes another word for love. 

Mindimooyenh says: “We live in an ecosystem of hurt.”

There are two parts to Asin. The defence and the heart: don’t get tripped up by the defence.

“If it is a performance, the spirits refuse to show up. You guys are so full of shit you don’t even notice.”

….pretty fucked for the humans, to be honest. The white ones who think they are the only ones have really structured the fucked-up-ed-ness in a seemingly impenetrable way this time. A few good ones get their footing, and then without continual cheerleading, succumb to the shit talk. It is difficult to know where to intervene or how to start. There are embers, but the wood is always wet and the flames go out so damn easy.

Akiwenzii is tired. Tired of acting like they are too old to be scared. Tired of acting like they are too old to care what they look like. Tired of acting like life experience has made them wise. Tired of being positive and having faith in the young people. Tired of the way what is most dear to them gets deployed and misused and performed. Tired of putting a happy goddamn spin on the end of the world.

Contemporary Lady of Se, based on an archaeological artifact dating to c.5000 BCE, Hungary (Marina Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess, p. 34)

These ancient forms are not fetishized mindless idol worship or kitsch but rather a thoughtful memory of something that was repressed—feminine and earth-centered values. There have been many attempts to destroy any evidence of this female-centered/Mother Earth-centered/nature-centered world from the pre-patriarchal eras. 

My attempt is to bring forward these works, in order to show us the brokenness of history—what was lost when patriarchal domination replaced the female and Mother Earth centered world.

Contemporary Fish Goddess

For me, these goddess figures function as aesthetic negations: they call into question the patriarchal religions and economic systems with too many bought politicians that have reduced the sacred and feminine to commodity and instrument in order to dominate. These contemporary sculptures are based on an archaic semblance, not for consolation but interruption—an insistence that what has been buried still exerts a claim on us.

I am not simply affirming the past, but critically pointing out what has been lost and devalued.  I exhibit them as a critique of current institutional attempts at modern domination of females and Mother Earth, found in our legal, religious, economic and political structures.  

Bird Goddess Vessel

These art objects become ciphers—objects that hold the contradictions between 

• Mimesis (the drive to connect with nature in a non-controlling way) and 

• Rational mastery (the modern drive to dominate and control).

These works do not show a reconciliation—they don’t smooth out this tension into something comfortable.

Their truth comes from this unresolved tension which includes 1) a protest against patriarchy and a petrified market that alienates and 2) a memorial, remembering what has been destroyed.

While meditating on the wetlands, my work very quickly morphed into something older and larger—a dialogue between earth processes, psychic processes, and the cosmic unfolding itself.

My practice is rooted in the modernist tradition—Expressionism, Surrealist automatism, where the unconscious is a generative force—reaching back into the ancient Goddess cultures that honors the female and Mother-Earth as the origin of life, transformation, and meaning. This recognition of the goddess is where my work breathes.

These paintings live at the intersection of Adorno’s aesthetics, Ch’an cosmology as interpreted by David Hinton, and the feminine divine.

Adorno: Revoking the Separation of Feeling and Understanding

Adorno argues that modern art attempts to undo what he calls the “fatal separation” between feeling and understanding—a division philosophy imposed for centuries. Modernism resists this split by making meaning and emotion inseparable in the very form of the artwork.

These paintings embody that principle:

—The layers of pigment aren’t decorative for quick consumption, they are the thinking.

—The gestural marks create forms from the tensions embedded in material.

—The swamp’s shifting ground becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of rigid categories and non-identity.

In This series,  immersion rather than detached contemplation, will give clarity.

These paintings and works are not solely based on observations of the swamp; rather they are offered as an immersive experience, to pull us into the cosmos. 

That’s the crux of Adorno’s aesthetic truth: meaning arises only when you allow yourself to be absorbed by the artwork’s internal contradictions and energies.

David Hinton: Ch’an Cosmology and the Breath of the World

In contrast to Adorno’s philosophy of aesthetics, which emphasizes the tensions of the society and the art, David Hinton speaks of the cosmos as a continuous unfolding—a single breath expanding and contracting across time.

Through his understanding of Ch’an Buddhism, the universe is not a collection of objects but a field of transformations. Everything arises from emptiness, manifests briefly, and dissolves back.

In these paintings:

—heat rises as qi,

—water opens into sky,

—pigments drift like cosmic breath,

—and figural hints appear like fleeting articulations of the Tao and the generative.

The swamp becomes a metaphor for the world; nothing fixed, everything in process, every boundary porous.

Feminine Divine and MotherEarth

The Goddess cultures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic period, from approximately 40,000 BCE to 1200 BCE, honored earth as a living presence.  The clay sculptures engage that tradition directly, as do the paintings in more elemental ways.

Here the feminine divine is not represented but it is embodied:

—in the curves of heat rising like breath from the original womb of earth;

—in the never ending cycles of decay and renewal;

—in the swamp as sacred matrix of the cosmos;

—in the archetypal figures that emerge and dissolve like memory from the collective unconscious.

This work is part of my ongoing reclamation of pre-patriarchal values: collaboration, reciprocity, and reverence for the Earth that sustains us.

Jung: Coniunctio, or the Merging of Opposites

These paintings enact what Jung called coniunctio: the merging of opposites into a higher unity.

• The conscious and unconscious,

• the cosmic and the earthly,

• the abstract and the figurative,

• the personal and the collective,

The forms that appear—sometimes only a shadow or gesture—are patterns surfacing from the psychic depths, from the generative. This is the soul speaking through the material.

Ecology, Earth Justice, and the Swamp

The swamp is not a picturesque landscape; it is a tell, an excavation of a political and ecological site.

It resists domestication.

It escapes the categories of “productivity” and “profit.”

It frustrates the extractive logic of patriarchy, ownership, and market values.

In honoring its processes, I am honoring an ecological ethic: nature not as resource, but as relationship.

CONCLUSION

In this series, form, breath, earth, and psyche converge.

If there is a single thread running through these works, it is this:

the Earth is still breathing, and we can learn to breathe with her.

Adorno is naming the aesthetic trace of Ein Sof (Jewish mystical reference to G-d as infinity, non-identity) — but his Philosophy of Aesthetics is emptied of theology and grounded in history, economics, and art.

For Adorno this is not mysticism. It is a political metaphysics of non-identity.

Art transports not by elevating us out of the world, but by opening within the world a space that cannot be fully controlled, categorized, exploited, or owned.

This is why it is dangerous.

And why it is necessary.

The enigmaticalness of art is in its non-identity (Adorno, 1997, p. 132.)

Each viewer makes meaning. Each meaning is partial, contingent, situated. The viewer makes and gives meaning to art based on their particular experiences and knowledge. But none of those meanings is THE meaning.

There is always something: unspoken, unresolved, unfinalizable.

This is the infinite that cannot be enclosed in identity.

The openness of art is not relativism.

It is non-identity — meaning can never be fully captured.

This is not “anything goes.”

This is: meaning remains in motion, because the world remains unfinished.

From The Guardian 11/07/25

The justice department’s pardon attorney, who was recently fired, has claimed on social media that Donald Trump’s recent wave of pardoning white-collar criminals has erased more than “$1bn in debts owed by wealthy Americans” to the public purse.

Also from the GUARDIAN 11/07/25

CORPORATE CAPTURE OF THE GLOBAL CLIMATE CONTROL PROCESS

More than 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to the UN climate summits over the past four years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, inadequate climate action and record oil and gas expansion, new research reveals.

Lobbyists representing the interests of the oil, gas and coal industries – which are mostly responsible for climate breakdown – have been allowed to participate in the annual climate negotiations where states are meant to come in good faith and commit to ambitious policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The roughly 5,350 lobbyists mingling with world leaders and climate negotiators in recent years worked for at least 859 fossil fuel organizations including trade groups, foundations and 180 oil, gas and coal companies involved in every part of the supply chain from exploration and production to distribution and equipment, research shared exclusively with the Guardian has found.

Just 90 of the fossil fuel corporations that sent lobbyists to climate talks between 2021 and 2024 accounted for more than half (57%) of all the oil and gas produced last year, according to the analysis by Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO), a coalition of 450 organizations campaigning to stop the fossil fuel industry blocking and delaying global climate action.

This information clearly exposes corporate capture of the global climate process … the space that should be about science and the people has been transformed into a large carbon business hall,” said Adilson Vieira, spokesperson for the Amazonian Work Group. “While forest communities fight for survival, the same companies that cause climate collapse buy credentials and political influence to continue expanding their fossil empires.”

“Not only are Indigenous peoples on the frontlines of their extractive sites suffering human rights violations, but we also face the brunt of climate chaos on our lands with worsening floods, wildfires, and extreme heat waves. We need to take down the ‘for sale’ sign on Mother Earth and bar entry to Cop for oil and gas lobbyists,” said Brenna Yellowthunder, lead coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network, a member of KBPO.

A surface trembling with something more—not to be seized, not to be named, only met.

Adorno tells us that the artwork is an enigma,

a presence that leans toward us with a certain need—

inviting interpretation, but never allowing us to claim it.

To interpret is to approach, not to possess.

In this way, the artwork lives the same life as the world itself.

David Hinton, in his writings on the Tao, calls it emptiness as generativity—

the open, ever-unfolding field in which all things arise,

take shape, shimmer briefly in their becoming,

and return again to the vast, breathing silence.

Nothing is fixed.

Everything is emergence.

And so the truth of the artwork is not contained within it

like a jewel hidden in stone.

Its truth opens in the space between:

between the seen and the seer,

the brushstroke and the gaze,

the world and the self that beholds it.

In this work, form and material breathe together. The gesture unfolds through resistance, the brushstroke revealing the enigmas of creation. Spirit is not imposed but arises in tension, the universal made singular, the particular carrying the weight of history. Like Qi, energy flows through matter and consciousness alike, shaping without domination. Like the Shekinah, light, breath, and life-force dwell within, luminous and relational, guiding without command. Here, creation is co-arising: intellect, matter, and spirit intertwined. Each mark, each surface, a moment of becoming—alive, enigmatic, and irreducibly unique.

Poetic Rapture

From the silence before the first breath, the field begins to stir.  An energy moves the brush, it dips into the ink….

Color rises through the paper’s skin—ochre, ash, copper—

the world whispering itself into being.

Creases in the handmade surface open like the memory of steely mountains with the summit in clouds

and a sun of molten grace hovering between birth and return.

This is not depiction but emergence.

Emptiness dreams, and in its dreaming, form awakens.

Each brushstroke is a threshold, each shimmer of ink, a pulse

where the invisible crosses into visibility.

Here dwells the Shekinah—

the indwelling radiance of light—the breath of the divine—

moving between imagination and implementation,

the liminal force that joins what is becoming to what has not yet been.

She is energy made visible: the tremor of light within matter,

the energy between pigment and hand,

the silent grammar through which the cosmos utters itself anew.

Ch’an Buddhism would name it emptiness as generativity—

the earth’s own consciousness folding and unfolding through breath.

Jung would see the psyche dreaming its symbols into matter.

And Adorno, standing in this stillness, would hear

the truth that refuses identity:

art as the reconciliation of world and spirit,

matter and meaning,

where we, too, are momentarily restored—

breathed into being by the same luminous silence

that moves through Shekinah’s infinite return.

This essay explores the possible mechanisms through which leaders mobilize popular support for domination and violence. It shares the insights of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt on fascism and the Nazi rise to power, while drawing on current analyses that reveal how similar patterns continue to emerge in modern political life.

Arendt: Mass Loyalty and Institutional Hollowing

Hannah Arendt emphasized that authoritarian leaders endure so long as they mobilize the loyalty of the masses, who allow them to dismantle institutions from within. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1973), she describes how the authoritarian movements subordinate law and institutions to the will of the leader. Institutions collapse when their authority is undermined: “Institutions are destroyed when the authority of the people who inhabit them is destroyed” (Arendt, 1963, p. 140). Norm-breaking by leaders is not punished but admired, since it demonstrates fidelity to the movement rather than to democratic procedure (Arendt, 1951/1973, p. 382).

Adorno: Authoritarian Dispositions and Cultural Conditioning

Theodor Adorno complements this picture by explaining why the masses support authoritarianism in the first place. In The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), he identified personality structures marked by submission to authority, hostility to out-groups, and rigid conventionalism. Such predispositions make citizens receptive to authoritarian appeals.

Further, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/2002), Adorno argued that the culture industry conditions individuals to conformity and passivity, fostering acceptance of domination. As summarized above, Adorno identifies the psychological and cultural mechanisms that render mass complicity possible.

Levitsky & Ziblatt: Backsliding from Within

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018) brings these insights into a contemporary analysis. They show how democracies most often erode not through coups, but through elected leaders incrementally undermining institutions. Leaders exploit polarization and mass loyalty to break democratic norms. They do this by:

• rejecting the legitimacy of opponents,

• tolerating violence,

• curtailing civil liberties, and

• weakening independent institutions (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 106–115).

Like Arendt, they stress that institutions only endure if people respect and uphold them. Like Adorno, they note that citizens can be conditioned—through polarization, media, and culture—to accept domination as legitimate.

Convergence: A Multi-Level Theory of Authoritarian Endurance

Bringing these perspectives together highlights the possibility of three dimensions of authoritarian endurance:

• Political-institutional (Arendt): Leaders stay in power by hollowing out institutions and mobilizing mass loyalty.

• Psychological-cultural (Adorno): Masses support authoritarianism because authoritarian dispositions and cultural industries condition them to accept domination.

• Contemporary political movements (Levitsky & Ziblatt): Democratic erosion unfolds gradually, from within, as leaders exploit polarization and weaken guardrails.

Together, these frameworks underscore that authoritarianism persists not simply through coercion, but through the active complicity of citizens, enabled by psychological conditioning, cultural manipulation, and political mobilization. Democratic backsliding is therefore a multidimensional process, linking the inner lives of citizens (Adorno), the fragility of institutions (Arendt), and the strategies of contemporary autocrats (Levitsky & Ziblatt).

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Row.

• Arendt, H. (1963). On revolution. Viking Press.

• Arendt, H. (1973). The origins of totalitarianism (New ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Original work published 1951)

• Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1944)

• Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.

Fragmented Swamp Pulse emerged from a quiet rhythm —an interplay of shadowed branches weaving through pools of warm light and cool depths. The textured, pebble-like forms gather and shift like scattered reflections on moving water, inviting the eye to linger within their subtle fractures. Dark lines trace a network both fragile and enduring, suggesting a forest’s pulse that is at once fractured and whole.

For Adorno, there is no such thing as a purely immediate experience of art (or of nature, for that matter).

He uses the word, Immediate, to mean something given in its raw, untouched form, as though we could encounter “the thing itself” without interpretation, history, or framing. Romantic aesthetics often longed for this kind of immediacy — a direct communion with beauty, nature, or G-d.

But Adorno insists this is an illusion as what we see, feel, and represent is always mediated by concepts, history, social structures, and the materials of the artwork. Even when art seems “natural,” it carries with it layers of technique, culture, and tradition.

In Aesthetic Theory, he puts it this way:

“Nothing in art is immediate; every aesthetic element is mediated through the totality of the work and through history.” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 1997, p. 120)

So, in Adorno’s thought—Nature itself is mediated: our view of a tree, for example, is shaped by cultural categories, memory, language (“tree”), and the history of landscape painting.

He claims, Art reveals this mediation because it is not simply a copy of the natural world but a constructed object that makes us aware of how representation itself works. Rosalind Krauss argues this point as well.

In these few paintings, there is not an attempt to deceive the eye into believing we are looking at literal trees (as, say, in hyper-realism). That would lean toward an illusion of immediacy. Instead, the visible brushstrokes, textured surface, and shimmering pigments constantly remind the viewer that this is a painting — a human construction. This is the artifice of the work.

Adorno claims the painting manifests as a mediation: it acknowledges that our experience of “trees” here is filtered through pigment, paper, and artistic decision.

Thus, the work resists collapsing into “pure nature.” It allows us to sense both the natural subject (trees, light, leaves) and the fact that it is always refracted through an artistic and cultural medium.