This comment was written by Anastasia Kim on 20 Nov 2022.
River-worlds, Sea-worlds, Ocean-worlds
“A river-world can be defined as a physical, social, or virtual network consisting of many links between key nodes such as plants, animals, or humans which multiply geometrically in number with each new added node. The combined effect of these links on a node is enough to pull other nodes in and to reinforce current connections to the river-world to such an extent that it is often difficult to change or escape it – or even to realise that other river-worlds exist in parallel.”
Although phenomena instructs us to exist inside human temporality, perspective, narrative, and worlds, I agree with Eliot and explore the possibility of living outside the human world through the lens of water – and in particular rivers – as an agency, an ontopower, a network effect enabling us to transcend the human. Rivers, seas, and oceans all have the power of flow and moving the human from one place to another – the power to displace the human from significance into the insiginificant. In light of Eliot’s deification of the river as a “monotheistic “strong brown God” and the sea in polyphonic plurality as embodying “many gods and many voices””, one can extend the idea of the river as the emergence of a bigger cluster of tighter connections between entities, the sea as the composition of 2 of more of such clusters in close proximity, and the ocean as the entire totality of all rivers and seas merging. In this way one can describe the universe not in terms of matter or phenomena, but in terms of the flow of connections, perspectives, consciousness, agents, and ontpowers.
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