(photo of Kenneth Newby by Linda Ofshe)
I first met Kenneth Newby in 2023 at the infamous Lunch Lady Vietnamese street food restaurant on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.
We mostly talked about a book he recommended to me, Learning to Die : Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky, which was transformative for me.
Kenneth is a fellow new music composer and sound artist with whom I shared many ecological concerns including aspirations for the role of art in this era of environmental decline.
So, I invited him to have a conversation, my second last of this 5th season, where we have been exploring how to 'prepare for the end of the world as we know it and creating the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge’.
Kenneth now lives in Victoria. We recorded our conversation in his backyard on September 23rd, 2024. We talked about his journey as a composer and musician, from childhood lessons, experiences in blues bands through to interactive music systems, Indonesian gamelan music and psychedelic experiences, among others.
During our exchange, I was thankful that he shared examples of some of his creative projects that integrate storytelling, ecological awareness, and collaborative solutions about societal and environmental issues. It’s good to hear about both theory and practice.
For example, I was interested in Kenneth's work on the harmonic series as a fractal structure and how he connects it to ecological concepts and ways of being.
You’ll also hear some of Kenneth’s music in between 3 sections of our conversation.
First is Aria - Ocean of Storms, an excerpt from his ‘Seasonal Round’ project created in collaboration with poet Robert Anthony, which is composed of raw, time-stretched, transposed birdsong.
You’ll also hear Howe Sound, a composition featuring birdsong, a frog chorus and transformed excerpts from Maurice Ravel’s Sirènes movement of his Trois Nocturnes as well as excerpts from Crépuscule for Barbara written for harpist Barbara Imhoff.
Kenneth recommends the following books and film:
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Sections of the episode (generated by AI and reviewed by Claude Schryer)
Introduction
Claude introduces Kenneth and reflects on their previous meeting. They discuss their shared backgrounds in music and philosophy, setting the stage for a deeper conversation about art and the ecological crisis.
Kenneth’s Musical Journey
Kenneth shares his early experiences with music, starting with piano lessons and moving through various musical influences. He recounts pivotal moments in his life, including his time at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, which ignited his passion for electronic music.
Cultural Exploration and Learning
Kenneth discusses his fascination with Indonesian music, particularly the gamelan traditions, and how immersing himself in different cultures has shaped his understanding of music and postmodernism. He emphasizes the importance of cultural relativism in appreciating diverse artistic practices.
The Ecology of Sound
The conversation shifts to the relationship between music and ecological issues, exploring how sound can reflect and address the ecological crisis. Kenneth introduces the idea of the harmonic series as a fractal structure, connecting it to ecological concepts.
Art and Environmental Awareness
Kenneth reflects on the impact of his music and the broader role of artists in raising environmental awareness. He discusses the challenges of making a significant impact through art while acknowledging the importance of collective efforts in the artistic community.
Community Engagement in Art
The discussion turns to the importance of local community engagement in artistic practices. Kenneth shares insights from his projects that focus on situating art within the community, emphasizing the need for relevance and connection in contemporary art.
Facing Complexity and Change
Kenneth addresses the complexities of the current ecological crisis and the fear associated with change. He discusses the role of psychedelic experiences in fostering a deeper connection to nature and how they can help individuals navigate the uncertainties of the future.
Literary Inspirations and Recommendations
As the conversation nears its end, Kenneth shares his favorite books and films that explore ecological philosophy and the interconnectedness of life. He highlights the importance of literature in shaping our understanding of nature and our place within it.
Transcription of e207 kenneth newby - living with grace
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
Claude Schryer
Kenneth Newby, welcome to conscient podcast.
Kenneth Newby
Thank you, Claude. Nice to be here.
Claude Schryer
Now, we only met once. We had lunch in Vancouver, and I had known about you, but we don't know each other that well. So that's interesting because we're both composers working in the new music world, interested in philosophy and this and that. And so I thought it'd be fun to talk with a peer composer, new music person about art and the ecological crisis, but more specifically about this world of new music. We were just talking about Takemitsu and John Cage and Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerhamp. There's lots to talk about. But this podcast is about art and the ecological crisis.
And so any connections that you've had, I'm interested in, in your work and the things that you have done and you're thinking about. And I just wanted to acknowledge that you put me onto a book that's become very important in my life called Learning to wisdom in the age of climate crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky. I just wanted to thank you for that because I had on Facebook, I said, hey, if anybody has any recommended books, and you, you recommended this one. So I'm going to get back to this book in a separate episode. But why don't we start with a sort of self-introduction and I'll learn things because I don't know that much about you. So background and who you are and.
Kenneth Newby
What you, and probably the reason why we don't know each other as well as we could is because of my innate hermit like character, where I tend to keep to myself alone. Have done, right? Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm a musician since I knew myself and my parents gave me the piano and voice lessons starting when I was five, before I entered elementary school. So music was always there and played in little blues bands in high school, moved to Vancouver from the village up the Fraser Valley and got involved with the new orchestra workshop, the group of improvisers there, which was a huge opening for me. This man named Carl Berger came to do an improvisation workshop.
He recommended that I come to his school in Woodstock, New York, the creative music studio you may have heard of a man named George Lewis, was the trombonist. Yes, the trombonist, an interactive computer musician, was running a piece on composition and electronic music that summer in 1979. And I had just finished taking a year of electronics listening to my parents. They said, this art music thing is okay, but you need to have something to fall back on. And so I had gone to a vocational school to become accredited as an electronic technician, electronics technician, and didn't know what I was going to do with it. But meeting George in Woodstock at the creative music studio, he was just beginning his work with little interactive music systems using a little computer and a home brew synthesizer. I remember, and it was remarkable because I could understand what he was talking about because of this training that I just had.
And he was excited because there was someone there who wasn't just interested in jazz but could understand what he was up to, which was his edge work at that time. That was where he was stretching out his practice. So we spent a lot of time over those six weeks chatting about that. And I came back to Vancouver with my creative mind on fire, going, huh?
I have skills that I didn't know I had. I'm going to pursue this. And so that really was a compass setting moment around the use of computers, computation and music. And over the years, that extended out into other media, which we can talk about later. But in the meantime, I also fell in love with the music of Indonesia, in particular, Java and Bali, the gamelan traditions. Barry Truax was teaching an acoustic communications course at SFU, and I was a student there. And he played a recording of the gamelan group from the Pakoalaman palace in Yogyakarta as an example of how music sits in a context, because in that recording by Robert Brown. You could hear the birds in the rafters and the traffic. If you listen towards the beginning in the tale of the piece. I, however, was just amazed at the music. It sounded like the kind of music that might be played in heaven if one believed in such a place. And I made a decision at that point. I want to go there and find out what kind of culture creates that kind of music.
So I ended up traveling there in 1984 and went back a few times over the next few years, studied the music in Bali, in particular, the shadowplay music. Came back to do some graduate work for a year in 1990 in Java, in that case, and found, well, I used to tell my students at the university, if you want to learn about postmodernism, don't read Derrida, don't read Foucault. I mean, they're just obfuscating, in my humble opinion. Go to another culture that's very different from your own. I went to Indonesia. It was very different. And there you will discover this notion that there is cultural relativism.
It is a true thing. That culture, as we understand it, is just something that we make up. We decide and you'll learn more about yourself than you ever dreamed you could by encountering another culture, particularly if you dig in and learn a practice, learn the language as I did. So then I came back, ended up working as a professor, several universities in British Columbia, and branched out into. Because computation. They used to talk about convergence, this notion that everything becomes digital in the same way. And it's true, I found that the techniques and approaches that I had evolved in computer music were applicable to video, to visual art.
And I ended up doing a number of installation works and some, you know, interactive sound works and so on. In my practice. That's a thumbnail sketch.
Claude Schryer
Sure. And how do you feel about the end of the world as we know it?
Kenneth Newby
Well, I feel fine, to quote the song, and it's the end of the world and we know it. Yes, and I feel fine. Well, I don't. But, you know, one keeps going, you know, I don't get too depressed about it. I feel that. Well, I mean, is this the time we can talk about Jan and Robert?
Claude Schryer
Yeah, sure. It's a good connection, because that's about learning to die. Yeah, unfortunately, is dying.
Kenneth Newby
And, you know, that's a beautiful little book, and, you know, the things I take away from it, probably. I haven't read it for a while. I don't have a copy of it, so I wasn't able to review it before our conversation. But Jan's notion, we want to try and live with grace in the face of accepting that the end of the world as we know it, things are going to change whether we disappear or not, we don't know. But this lifestyle that we have, it's clear, is unsustainable. And the changes are coming on us, whether we like it or not. How do we deal with that now? We can panic. We can become morose.
As she suggests, let's try to live with grace. Let's try to live with a deep respect of what we have. Robert's take is try to learn from nature, try to learn from the wild. All of those things, I think, are valuable. I'm more interested, actually, in what Jan Zwicky brings in her philosophy, which is this notion of the lyric, the lyric expression, lyric meaning, lyric thinking, which is, as she expresses it, profoundly ecological. And so let's follow that for a minute, because when we come to music, it's like, you know, it really is an interesting question. How do you make music address these issues that are facing us?
The collapse of an ecological system, which seems to be well underway now, music isn't good at expressing those things. It becomes much more philosophical and metaphysical. But I think that Jan's thinking helps us here. She says that the lyric is ecological, and it's ecological in the sense that the parts relate to the whole, that the parts carry an image. If they are to be related, they will be related to the whole as an image of the whole. Now, that sounds like a fractal structure, which we see throughout nature, especially plantlike structures, grow with. They repeat the same patterns at different levels of scale.
The classic example is a fern, for instance. You can see that five or six levels down, it repeats the same pattern. And then if we move to music or sound, the harmonic series is a perfect example of that kind of coherent fractal structure, because each harmonic above the fundamental is itself a fundamental of a harmonic series within the same pattern. So you take the second harmonic. It's a harmonic series on harmonics two, four, 6810, et cetera. The third harmonic, 3912, 15, et cetera. That's another harmonic series.
You can just keep going and going. And so it's intensely coherent, the harmonic series. And of course, this leads to one of my favorite issues around music, which is the spectral approach to composition, which is we look, which I've been doing ever since I've been interested in composition, which is exploring the inner structure of sound to look at, in a way, the ecology of sound itself, by making external, the internal structures of sounds. Now, is that a statement on our ecological crisis? Hard to say, but it's certainly been fascinating to me to explore that deep relationship with the inner structures of sound. Of course, we might bring in John Cage and R. Murray Schaeffer into the conversation. Yeah. And then things start to become maybe a little more related to the conscient approach, which is we start talking about soundscape and the world of sound, that all.
There is no such thing as silence, that all of the soundscapes can be used as materials for a composition and so on. So my approach has been typically to look at the inner life of a sound, try and tease it out and create some kind of soundscape, a composition that's made out of those inner materials. And so I was hugely influenced early on by Cage's notion of silence and sound and Schaeffer's notion of the soundscape and an acoustic ecology.
Claude Schryer
Yeah. I've talked to Hildi and a whole bunch of people about acoustic ecology and its relationship to ecology. And the thing that I think about artists is that they're dealing with all kinds of issues all the time, you know, awareness and injustice. And that's always been like that. But the times in which we live are the end of the world as we know it is an understatement because there might not be a world at all because nuclear proliferation and biodiversity loss and those things that are literally the.
Kenneth Newby
Great extinction that's underway.
Claude Schryer
Yeah. So, but being a composer and a new music person, I've always been interested in environmental music, but what impact has it had other than my own expression and a few people listening and maybe being touched by my... So, you know, I don't think it's a waste of time, but I don't think it's a high impact art practice in terms of environmental awareness. But if you accumulate all those composers and audio artists all around the world doing their thing, and 2030, 50 people come, then they can be critical mass through just commitment, through the love of sound and the love of art. And so when you talk about your music and spectral composition and it makes sense that you do what you're passionate about.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah.
Claude Schryer
Now you're well read, so you're also very well aware of the context. So, I guess my question is, how do you see what artists need to be or to do now?
Kenneth Newby
Well, I'm not going to prescribe for anyone else, but what I've done is I've picked up on something that I learned from Glenn Gould and his radio work. He made a series of radio works beginning the first one called the idea of Norse. And in it he developed this technique he referred to as polyphonic radio. So what he did is he reintroduced the word and therefore language and meaning into a musical structure which suddenly makes music something that we can use to make a statement. Again, it isn't just an abstraction. And so, just in brief, his notion of the polyphonic radio was that he would have a series of voices of speakers talking about a common idea. In the first radio play, it was the idea of people living up in the far north of Canada and what their experience was.
And he plays them, many, many of them simultaneously, five, six, seven layers at the same time. So in a way, it sounds like you're at a cocktail party hearing a lot of people talking, except the interesting thing is people are talking about the same thing. And he would allow one or two voices to rise above the other ones into the foreground and almost like a salmon leaping out of the river. And they would suddenly become apparent. You would hear a thread, and you'd hear it. Well, sometimes you'd hear two of them going off of each other. And I loved that idea and decided that we would, with my collaborators, would make some installation works where we would record.
Well, the first one was called one river. It was presented at the Surrey art gallery, and it was meant to celebrate the communities along the Fraser River. And what we did is we recorded a series of interviews with local people in the Surrey area where the gallery took place. This was, you know, really the big idea. There was the notion of a situated media that we. Something we learned from the shadow plays. In Indonesia, when the shadow play takes place, it's commissioned by the shadow puppeteer.
The puppeteer goes to the community, the village where the shadow play will take place, and starts asking questions and finds out, okay, what's going on, who's sleeping with who, what's happening with the political situation, what's your beefs, what's good, what's bad? And we'll weave that into the story so that the story is situated in the community that's being told. This is something that our electronic, automated cinema can't do. And this was a real inspiration around what new media could do, is that we could record a series of statements from people about their experience of living with the river. And we broke it up into a series of questions, maybe ten questions, twelve questions. And then we would edit their. Their interview responses so that we would make collections of answers to specific questions and play them out in the same way that Gould played out his series and make some of the statements jump out like fish jumping out of the water, and converse with each other.
So we were able to make conversations that might never have happened by juxtaposing statements about what it was like to live there. So another example of that work was a few years ago, we did a piece in the Kelowna museum, Heritage Museum, called the. The social life of water. And it was focused on water issues. As you know, the Okanagan is a fairly arid area. It didn't used to be that way. It was the cattle ranching that kind of destroyed or modified that environment by destroying the biodiversity there.
The ranchers cut down all of the cottonwood trees that lined the rivers and the creeks feeding into the lake, and the land dried out largely, and the biodiversity dropped radically. A lot of animals that lived there didn't live there anymore.
So water's a big issue. So what we did in that case is we recorded people from the community, just people who lived there, the water manager, several elders from the silk community, the elders of the First nations, who've lived there for a long time, before the settlers moved in about water. And I took the same approach. We edited it into categories, topics, and played them out in an eight-channel surround sound system. So you'd hear eight conversations going on about a particular topic around water. And there would be highlights, ones that would come into the foreground, one or two of them. And we would create those conversations in chucks to positions.
Now, it was done computationally. So there were possibly, you know, millions, if not billions of possible combinations, because there was a great deal of material to work with. It was on. Things happened that we had never anticipated, because we were able to collage them together in that way, just by drawing from them with a random number and just putting them together. So it was constantly creating new combinations, new conversations. And so there was an approach to create a kind of vocal soundscape and a series of conversations. We called them images of community.
Claude Schryer
Well, thanks for giving an example. I find stories about artworks useful because I might never hear that piece, but I heard you tell the story about it.
Kenneth Newby
Indeed.
Claude Schryer
And I get an experience of your telling. And so it makes me want to hear something like that, because it's true that when you have an unworldly experience, because that's, I guess you could hear that in a cafe or, like you say, in a bar or something. But the composer the artist creates has an intention, his he she, they, of creating an experience. And what I. When I hear climate art, a lot of it is doomist or, you know, dystopian, warning us of the terrible things that are coming, which has value. But after a while, people tune out.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah.
Claude Schryer
So how can we combine work that has a dystopian flavor? Because there are things that we do need to confront that we're a little bit in denial of. In fact, that's not my question so much, because I think artists always. I think artists are always right because they're following their heart. They might not have the best quality information, might not have enough resources to do it at a certain caliber. But, you know, artists go in a direction, and they do.
Kenneth Newby
It's the project.
Claude Schryer
But we live in a. We're living in a society in decline and in the beginnings of collapse. And what I'm not seeing around me is that sense of recognition, of that you talk to people individually, they will say, yes, of course I'm aware, but I'm not an environmentalist. I'm an artist. What's the difference, really? What's the difference between an environmentalist and artiste? What do you want to do as a citizen, as an artist, as a community of professionals, about the issues that we face?
Not just the climate emergency, because it's actually a symptom of the larger disconnect with nature and all that. But I'd love to go back in history and see that artists have always pointed the finger to these different things. So I'm wondering if there are repertoire pieces or things that maybe we should be listening back to or works that we need to commission. I just wonder how we can be more proactive in a positive way and more engaged in this moment as opposed to going through the routine of, you know, we're just doing our season, we just do what we do and which to me is not useful.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah, that's a hard one, Claude, really?
Claude Schryer
I didn't ask you if that was a hard one.
Kenneth Newby
It's, how do we deal with that? Well, again, just to bring it back to this work that I just described, you know, it was really one of the most useful things I learned from John Cage's approach was this notion of take yourself out of the work, take your intention out of the work. Right. So the thing about those images of community that we made was that we largely did that through.
Through that process. We allowed the voices of the community to be heard and we made very little decisions about. We didn't say, we want you to. This is what.
Sorry, back up. I didn't say, this is what I think is the solution to the problem. I didn't put myself in there at all. All I did was curate the conversations on a certain theme. Said, okay, they're all talking about the animals that have disappeared. Right? That's the topic.
So when we have eight or ten people who are talking about that from their own perspectives and we're just going to put them together and so there's not. My intention was absent and we actually created something that had not happened before, was that those voices were juxtaposed and made new meaning. Right. Because someone said, oh, you know, the beavers. The beavers are a real hassle because they're chopping down the tree and one of them fell on my power line and our power went out. We don't like the beavers. And then Jeanette Armstrong, the silk elder, she says, you know, the beavers are the best engineers. They're amazing.
You get two beaver dams down the river. The first one creates a big pool. The fish grow bigger in a pool of water. By the time the water comes out of the second dam, it's as clean as you could possibly want it. So there's benefits to come from managing the water. Our job is just to encourage the beavers to make the dam, to have an impact on the land. So there were these two juxtaposing views.
That's just one example. There were many, many of those kinds of opportunities to think, because when you hear those juxtapositions, it makes you go, aha, right, the beavers. How can we live with the beavers? We should perhaps find a way to think about allowing them their space. Don't exterminate them, don't get rid of them. They're not a problem. Maybe we need to adapt the way that we're thinking about living with the animals instead of thinking about what we want to keep them out and make a human area that's absent of them. So that's one way.
Claude Schryer
Yeah. Well, the term more than human or kin is becoming more used now because people, to understand that we have the anthropocene and the anthropo…, whatever you want to call it, world, is this dominance of the human. And I'm going beyond that in the sense that it seems obvious to me what the problems are. The disconnect with nature, the very short bubble of time when energy allowed us to do all kinds of wonderful things, including this conversation and putting it on the Internet. Who knows how long it will last on the Internet? So how do you transition in a positive way, out of a period of exceptional abundance into other kinds of abundance or sufficient resources to live well, to live very well, to be very happy? So I spoke recently with Arno Kopecky, who wrote a book called the environmentalist dilemma, and he was saying, the modernity is actually really great, except for everything that's wrong with that.
Kenneth Newby
Well, yes, the Enlightenment project gave us.
Claude Schryer
A lot, and now I did a.
Kenneth Newby
But colonialism came along with it.
Claude Schryer
Colonialism and then modernism and then capitalism and all of these essentially destructive forces, even though some of them are well intended, you know? But anyway, so as a composer, I remember in 92, I did a festival in Montreal called Le 7e Printemps electroacoustique, and Murray Schafer came and we played all kinds of music. And I remember at the time, we were talking about. We were using reel to reel tapes, and what do we do with the excess tapes? What happens? We can't recycle. We shouldn't put them in the ground. There was a debate about that, which I think was prescient, because now, in the digital world, we don't talk enough about the footprint. The digital footprint. You're a digital artist. And so I asked the question, where's the measurement? Where is. Well, our footprint? Is so small, it doesn't matter. Oh, you think that it's how you.
Kenneth Newby
Don't know server farms, for one thing.
Claude Schryer
Yeah.
Kenneth Newby
Energy.
Claude Schryer
Honestly, I try, but I don't really know fully. So I think those are the kinds of things that can be ancillary to any kind of artistic production is that measurement. And there's a tool called the creative green tools that a lot of organizations in Canada. So things are changing. But I'm, you know, today's September 23, 2024. I'm in a few weeks, I'm going to write a letter to the arts community with the observations, the things that I've learned from these. I've done about 60 conversations in the last few months, all kinds of people, artists and cultural workers. And there is a, there are themes that come back. So it's not me speaking. It's like the community speaking to the community through, through my work. And one of the themes is regional. So working locally, being engaged in your local community, this idea of global everything is the same is not true. The regions are very different, and each.
Kenneth Newby
Community has its own needs.
Claude Schryer
And this idea that we are a little bit in denial because we don't know what to do, it's like we're feeling disempowered. So what are your thoughts on that?
Kenneth Newby
Well, I mean, I'll go back to just, this was the notion of the situated media, the thing that I learned from the shadow play in Bali and Java, that we should really try to make the work relevant to our community and stop worrying about becoming a global superstar. Not that that's ever going to happen in the world of contemporary music anyway.
Claude Schryer
But it could, in spite of you.
Kenneth Newby
Yes, it could. It could, yes. But no. I think just really focusing on community and local community is the thing to do. And, you know, one of the things, you know, here, things get interesting for me. We're heading into a time of great complexity. The changes are complex. The things that are going on are beyond our understanding in many ways.
We don't know what's coming next. The predictions that have been made around the pace of climate change, the changes have exceeded that in many cases. So the models don't really fit. So there's a sense of the unknown. And as you mentioned earlier, there's a sense of people are afraid. They're afraid, and in the same way that you're afraid of facing death.
And this is what Jan and Roberts.
Claude Schryer
We’re learning to die.
Kenneth Newby
Book was trying to teach us how to learn to die. Well, one of the best ways I've learned how to die over my life was through the psychedelic experience. And that's a practice that I've engaged in my whole adult life on and off. You know, not there's been a couple.
Claude Schryer
But also psychedelic experiences of one kind or another.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah, yeah, the plant teachers, the mushrooms. LSD was an old friend of mine since I was in my thirties. And I mean, teenage stuff, you know, I'm child of the sixties. Of course that was there. But my partner, Lorraine Thompson and I developed what we called a psychedelic yoga in the 1980s and nineties where we sat for each other when we did deep experiences. We did our graduate work about it. Our Master of Fine Arts degrees were focused on shamanism, the psychedelic experience, how they ground themselves in what you might call echo-delic experiences.
Delia or delos being the manifestation, echo being the environment. So through those experiences, we consistently know we're really fortunate to be living through the psychedelic renaissance, as it's called now, where serious research is being done which demonstrates demonstrably that people have those experiences. They come out, for one thing with a much more measured view of what their death experience will be. And then even more importantly in terms of what we're talking about here, is that people feel connected to everything around them, to nature, which is where this notion of an echo-delic experience comes in, that you feel you come out with a care for nature that you didn't have before. So I think that these are really, really important experiences. Not everybody is fit for them because we're in a state of such high anxiety. Depression is rampant.
Those are the kind of people who shouldn't go there. But there are a lot of people who are ready, who could potentially become leaders in thinking about how we might face the changes and how we might manage complexity. Because one of the things about those experiences, those deep experiences, is that if you manage to do it well, if you learn how to navigate them, you're navigating complexity. They're immensely complex experiences which frighten a lot of people off. But if you manage to learn how to surrender to the process, then you get all the insights that are so important and from which you can learn so much. So I think there's a great, great place for learning and having those kind of experiences for people here, for nurturing an ecological, a deeper ecological relationship. Well, and of course that influences the art, of course.
Claude Schryer
And there's a cycle and a circle there. But how then does that experience?
How does it come? What does it project about your potential death? Is it like cosmic experience? I don't know what words we use.
Kenneth Newby
The fear goes away, for one thing. One of the early experiences back in the 1990s for me was I found myself realizing that I wasn't afraid of death anymore. It wasn't frightening to me.
Claude Schryer
I could be a huge barrier.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah. I could accept it.
And I think that that's, in a way, what Jan is talking about when she says, the world as we know it is going away. It's still going to be a beautiful world, she writes. In another essay, she said, it's going to be beautiful.
Things will be extraordinary. The planet's not dying. Our place and our version of it may be dying. So how do we deal with that? How do we accept and live with the knowledge that, yes, our version of it is dying. So it's not something to panic about in the sense that the whole thing's going away, hopefully. I mean, again, we don't know.
But I think that notion of living with grace, living without fear, trying to live without anxiety, because those are just places where we're flounder and shut off, develop toxic escapes. People will drink themselves and take whatever drugs they want to take to escape. Rather, let's accept what the changes are and honor what it is now, because it is still incredibly beautiful. What we have now is so extraordinarily beautiful. It's still here. It's still beautiful. So let's, you know, honor and celebrate that as much as we can.
Claude Schryer
And protect it.
Kenneth Newby
And protect it.
Claude Schryer
Future generations for exact life will be.
Kenneth Newby
Yes. And document it, too. Yeah, document it.
Claude Schryer
Well, Kenneth, we've been speaking for 33 minutes, and dinner is awaiting us.
Kenneth Newby
Okay.
Claude Schryer
I always end, and I haven't prepared you for this very much, but I always end with what you're reading or listening to. Is there anything that comes to mine that you would recommend that's on your bedside or that is.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah. Well, what's on the bookshelf? Let's say that because the books that are on my bookshelf are the ones that I value the most, because I used to have walls to wall books and thousands of books, and I've whittled it down to the most important ones. David Abram, the spell of the Sensuous, a beautiful book of ecological philosophy. Largely, he's thinking through or with Maurice Merleau Ponty's thinking about the reciprocal relations between ourselves as minded beings and the things in our environment. And Merleau Ponty, later in his life, had a remarkably radical notion, that they are perceiving back at us, even not just the living things, but that the glass of wine beckons you because it presents its face to you. But there's a behind that we don't know about.
So everything in the world is constantly reaching back to us. We reach out to it to perceive it. It reaches back to us. It's a profoundly ecological relationship that can be developed. And there's much more to his book than that. That's just the core idea. It's a beautiful book, beautifully well written.
Another one, an old one, is Susan Griffin's book Woman in Nature, which is a beautiful book. It's so poetic. She critiques the development of scientism from the 17th, 18th century, the rise of science, and, well, even further back, she starts with Frances Bacon, and from a feminist perspective, which I think is so important to reinstate the feminine in nature. That book is very beautiful, and as I say, it's very poetic, very musical. The chapter on listening in the ear is really, really worth looking at just for itself. And then one film I could think of which is related to the plant teachers ideas. Fantastic fungi, which is a beautiful book about how film or book, it's a film.
It's a beautiful film about the remarkable relationships which we're just now starting to realize, that fungi, the mycelium and their relationship with trees, there's all this symbiosis going on, and it's an essential aspect how fungus and mushrooms are so important to our environment. And of course, it has a little piece about the magic mushrooms and about Paul Stamets, who's a remarkable person who's been exploring mushrooms, and about one of his early experience he had eating the sacred mushroom God Tiananaka, as it's called, in southern Mexico. So that's a beautiful film. I think people would find it inspiring.
Claude Schryer
Well, I'll put those in the episode notes. And I mentioned to you earlier the great Simplification podcast, which I recommend to people. Not that it's my turn to recommend, but what the heck is my podcast?
Kenneth Newby
I took a note earlier.
Claude Schryer
Well, and then there's always the struggle with hope, because naive hope is maybe fun, but it's actually not that useful. But there are many types of hope that are quite grounded in reality. It reminded me, I did an interview with Asma Khan, who was a visual artist in Montreal, and she said, we only know one or 2% of what's out there, right? And there's so much more for us to, if we kind of behave and live sustainably on the planet, which isn't that hard because there are a lot of us now, but we can figure that out, you know, and it's not going to be a techno fix, it's going to be a cultural fix.
Kenneth Newby
It's going to be a stepping back in many ways and a voluntary simplicity into a form of voluntary simplicity, which is hard because it's like an addiction that we have now with this lifestyle and all the energy that we use to support it and resources and material. And this is what I learned when I was living on main island for four years. Just recently. Lived in a very small 500 square foot cabin, two levels, 250 sqft on each floor. Very small. And it was a simple, simple life. I rode my bicycle everywhere.
I didn't need to use the car. So my energy footprint and the material footprint was small. And it made me realize that, yes, we could do that. There was even. There's under development now on main island a little community which is going to be try to be ecologically sustainable, that will be made out of small, small built dwellings and working together on a community level. Could I read you one little piece of poetry just to kind of bring this full circle? John Cage, in his book M, which is one of his book of writings, has a lot of misostics in it, but it has a poem in it which caught my attention many years ago and related to the psychedelic yoga idea.
Mushrooms teaching machines, therapy machines, aiding people to form their brain waves, shifting waves shape from that of anxiety to that of poise invention. John Cage was a friend of Gordon Wasens, of course, who was the man who introduced the magic mushrooms to our culture back in the 1950s. Cage himself always disavowed the idea that he knew anything about magic mushrooms. That poem puts the lie to it.
Claude Schryer
Good to end with the poem. Thank you so much, Kenneth.
Kenneth Newby
Yeah, you're very welcome. Thanks for the invitation, Claude.