susan sontag on photography pp. 19-20

"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised--partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One's first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen--in photographs or in real life--ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs--of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and no only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying."

a consciousness older than you

Plants develop molecular companions that reach out from the abyss of time to be with us. The deep symbolic rests upon these molecular affinities as a requisite from being spun from the fabric of the universe. What plants provide and that humans require are specific molecules that prolong living processes. That's the molecular speech of the world. Our spiritual journey through the molecules that plants provide is a reminder of an older world where simply molecules, without shells, self-organized from the peculiar stuff of their surroundings, freely associated, and passed back into the material to become yet another self-organizing, freely associating, and transforming molecular arrangement in a different time.