'It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems. All the thousand names are too big and too small; all the stories are too big and too small. As Jim Clifford taught me, we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.'

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: 101

the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools
there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning

Derek Walcott, The Sea is History

Water is an element of creation and destruction. It shapes shores, eroding rock and depositing sediment. Narratives work like water, in shaping and depositing elements of history to construct a certain perspective, eroding and displacing others.

"History” is both a human storytelling practice and that set of remainders from the past that we turn into stories. Conventionally, historians look only at human remainders, such as archives and diaries, but there is no reason not to spread our attention to the tracks and traces of nonhumans, as these contribute to our common landscapes. Such tracks and traces speak to cross-species entanglements in contingency and conjuncture, the components of “historical” time. To participate in such entanglement, one does not have to make history in just one way.’ Whether or not other organisms “tell stories,” they contribute to the overlapping tracks and traces that we grasp as history. History, then, is the record of many trajectories of world making, human and not human.

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: 168

The folding, unfolding and refolding of his stories

Calling on Latour, Haraway writes that, 'Searching for compositionist practices capable of building effective new collectives, Latour argues that we must learn to tell “Gaïa stories.” If that word is too hard, then we can call our narrations “geostories,” in which “all the former props and passive agents have become active without, for that, being part of a giant plot written by some overseeing entity.” Those who tell Gaia stories or geostories are the “Earthbound,” those who eschew the dubious pleasures of transcendent plots of modernity and the purifying division of society and nature.'

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: 40

us and you and me and we

holding folding moulding into sea

two bodies transforming

adoring and storming

dissolving and dying