The themes of When We Lost Our Heads felt very heavy handed and almost every character is unlikeable, but that is the point!!!!

O’Neill relies heavily on similes and often uses passive voice, which gives the novel a dreamy quality that I actually liked quite a bit, but the style is definitely one that you notice while reading so I could see it being a turn off.

I think I admired the book more than I enjoyed it but I am glad I read it! 🧁🧁

I love Kimmerer, and I enjoyed Gathering Moss, but as I become more radical in my politics, and find nature writing that reflects a more radical relationship with nature, the limitations of Kimmerer’s liberal politics stand out more strongly to me. So while I enjoyed this book immensely, some parts were truly profound, I also found this to be a more mixed experience for me than I was expecting.

Let’s start with my criticisms:

First off, throughout Gathering Moss, Kimmerer replies on so much military metaphor it felt jarring. Every being in nature was “under attack” or "in the crossfire”. There was even one strange metaphor comparing a stratification between two mosses as segregation, going so far as to reference “tetraphis only signs”. What does it do to use violent oppression as a metaphor for the living world? Does it trivialize real world segregation? Does it normalize segregation? Either way, hated this.
 The other thing that stood out to me was how, throughout the book, even when Kimmerer is trying to reframe the idea of competition in nature, competition is always the core concept that she hinges her discussion around. "Competition in a family decreases everyone's potential success. So evolution favors specialization, avoiding competition, and thus increasing the survival of the species.” Competition is seen as the norm that species must act to avoid through specialization. What does it do to see competition as the only core mechanism of the natural world? As our framework through which we interpret every action? We assume beings avoid competition through specialization, but what if, instead they specialize to collaborate within ecosystems? (I hate to always be recommending Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, but it feels relevant to note that even as early as the 19th century that were loud voices that recognized that collaboration was at least as important as competition in nature.)

Finally, I really struggled with the ending of the book. The long anecdote about an unnamed rich guy tearing apart ancient ecosystems to decorate his golf course. This felt… strange. An anecdote whose purpose was just to say rich guys wreck the world sometimes, I guess, with little insight into Kimmerer’s own participation in providing consulting work (several times) to facilitate his project except to say that she felt guilty. This anecdote felt more like a strange non-sequitur than a grounded part of the narrative. It could have been a great moment for a critique of the relationships between extreme wealth and environmental degradation, but Kimmerer just moves on, failing to examine the situation in any way aside from her personal shame. This was the case with so many of the anecdotes that attempted to reckon with our relationships to and complicity with harm within Gathering Moss. Typical of liberalist non-fiction, Kimmerer continually stops short of saying anything truly radical, or examining the actual causes of what is happening. In the section examining the logging industry, Kimmerer ends with “someday we will find the courage of self restraint”, failing to engage with the systems of harm, or feel any agency over our role within those systems. I once again propose my perpetual question for liberalist non-fiction, who is we? Kimmerer demonstrates more rage towards the poor people make subsistence wages to harvest moss than she has for the corporations selling it. It’s all very frustrating.

But this book was not all bad. Kimmerer still has a singular way of dancing between stories of her personal life and profound metaphors that will never cease to recalibrate my whole brain.

In particular I LOVE LOVE LOVED the exploration of the boundary layer, and how it relates to mosses and their habitats. I find myself seeking out moss now, and examining the spaces around it, how it thrives in spaces other beings cannot, and what I can take from that metaphor to apply to my own life as an artist and a human bean.

There’s also an extended section on an artist’s moss rock in NYC that has really stayed with me. In this section I loved the subtle call out of the “scientific method” as a monopolistic approach to understanding our world that disregards all other ways of knowing. The description of how our breathing is like moss, how the environment lives inside use, separated only by a single cell, the close proximity of our environments and our blood within our lungs, our own boundary layer. It’s making me tear up, just to think about it. This deep connection between us and the world. That is Kimmerer’s magic most of all. I can’t stop noticing all the moss in my neighbourhood now.

Which is all to say, I loved this book, I’m glad I read it, it was beautiful in all the ways that Kimmerer’s work is always beautiful, but it was also a bit complicated for me. I recommend it, but might invite folks to bring a critical eye to the parts that we take for granted, like environmental destruction, the assumption that nature operates on competition and the metaphors we use to engage with the natural world.

thank you, jolkien rolkien rolkien tolkien, but could we mayyybe do less of singing and talking and more of actually doing something? (i am thankful for samwise gamgee and aragorn, i have to admit that)

oh i’m no stranger to hating the sun, that overstimulating bitch