Listen. Inhale the wild music of the Earth into your body. You are not alone. Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music David Rothenberg once asked me what unheard sound, regardless of its origin, I would most like to record. The question, I admit, caught me off guard and I had to think about it for a while. After a long (already slightly…
Category: Texts
Luděk Čertík: In the Landscape
“I once asked a man at Anaktuvuk Pass what he did when he visited a new, unknown place. ‘I listen,’ he replied. And that is all: listening to what the land is telling us. Wandering through the landscape, with my senses alert to what it has to say to me—long before I have uttered a single word myself. If one enters with such respect, one can believe that…
Luděk Čertík: Just listen
Unless we suffer from a congenital or genetic defect, or have suffered a serious injury in our lives that would have taken away our hearing, we all hear – albeit with different levels of sensitivity, of course – all the time. Unlike our eyes, we cannot close our ears. And in truth, sound cannot be escaped even if our hearing aids are not working for us: we can, because…
Luděk Čertík: Don't let the monkey and the tiger die
Your whole life, whales have been racing around somewhere every second Are you still afraid? Ondřej Tuček, Waterfowl were chirping very loudly all night At the end of 2022, on the recommendation of the American writer Rebecca Solnit, who shared it on her Facebook account, I came across the book The Nutmeg's Curse (Kletba muškátového oříšku, 2021) by Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh.…
David G. Haskell: In Community
A tone as bright and warm as sunlight rings from a giant bronze bell. There is no hint of tinkling or rattling, just a single, overtone-rich frequency a few notes below middle C, right in the middle of the human speech range. Even though I stand two meters from the bell, the sound seems to come from within me, soothing,…
Joshua Jaffa: The Great Thaw / Letter from Siberia
Permafrost contains microbes, mammoths, and twice as much carbon as the Earth's atmosphere. What happens when it starts to thaw? Published under the title “The Great Thaw” in The New Yorker on January 17, 2022 (Czech translation: Jiří Zemánek); https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-siberian-thaw / Joshua Yaffa is a contributor to The New Yorker and the author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia.”…
Amitav Ghosh: The Curse of Nutmeg (book excerpt)
The following excerpt from the book The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) by the English-language Bengali author Amitav Ghosh offers a witty critique of "official modernity" with its tendency to deprive everything non-human of voice and intentionality, of historicity. According to Ghosh, we face a great task today, which is to restore voice to the non-human in the sphere of human imagination, as well as to recognize (rediscover) that not only…
Luděk Čertík: Distant and near
The following text was created as an accompaniment to the exhibition LIFE(T) IN STILL LIFE, the culmination of the project of the same name, which, through field trips and participatory events, seeks to revive the long-neglected site of Zátiší in Vodňany, South Bohemia. We are publishing the text here due to its more general validity – the ideas contained in it can be applied to any place on Earth. Over the years of studying birds, I have learned a lot, but the…
Barry Lopez: Children in the Woods
Growing up as a child in California’s San Fernando Valley, a trip to Los Angeles was something special. The move from rural to urban felt like a leap. On one of these exciting occasions, as I walked down the sidewalk with my mother, I suddenly stopped, captivated by the pattern of sunlight caught in the spiraling imperfection of a window pane. An unknown elderly woman in a linen coat and…
Barry Lopez: Landscape and Story
American naturalist, writer and traveler Barry Lopez (1945-2020), from whom we have previously brought the impressive text Invitation, in the following essay from the book Crossing Open Ground (1978) reflects on the interweaving of inner and outer landscapes, the role of traditional storytelling in the search for a harmonious relationship with the surrounding world, but also on various forms of knowing the truth. Translated by Luděk Čertík. One summer evening…